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Orthodox Judaism is the most religiously stringent of the three main streams of American Judaism. Its adherents believe the Torah was given to the Jewish people in a mass revelation at Mount Sinai and that the rabbinical tradition (known as the Oral Law) is a faithful elucidation of divine rules for Jewish living that are obligatory upon all Jews today.
The Orthodox believe that it comes directly from God and so cannot be changed. All we can do is "understand" (they wouldn't even say interpret) it, and the right to do so has devolved upon rabbis, descendants of the Pharisees who probably began teaching during the Babylonian Exile.
Orthodox Judaism rejects the notion introduced by Reform that, in the light of modern thought and life in Western society, Judaism requires to be ‘reformed’. Granted that the Torah is of divine origin, as the Orthodox affirm, to attempt to reform it is to imply that God can change His mind, to put it somewhat crudely.
Orthodox Judaism seeks to preserve Jewish practice as inherited from the pre-modern period. In the passage before the one reprinted below, the author–a leading advocate of "centrist" or "modern" Orthodoxy–notes three of the intellectual and moral challenges posed by modernity: (1) Adherence to Jewish law is voluntary since Jewish communities lost the power to sanction their members; (2 ...
- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Orthodox Judaism is the more traditional form of Judaism in the modern world. It holds that both the scripture of the Torah and mouth-to-mouth traditions later written down in the Talmud etc., were actually and literally given by God, and that past rabbis handed them over without change and were always faithful in deciding how they applied to reality.
t. e. Modern Orthodox Judaism (also Modern Orthodox or Modern Orthodoxy) is a movement within Orthodox Judaism that attempts to synthesize Jewish values and the observance of Jewish law with the modern world . Modern Orthodoxy draws on several teachings and philosophies, and thus assumes various forms. In the United States, and generally in the ...
