There are many ways in which a Jew can express Jewish identity. One of these is, by living according to the guidelines of halakha-the normative aspect of Torah as explicated by scholarly rabbis. Different understandings of halakha will... more
There are many ways in which a Jew can express Jewish identity. One of these is, by living according to the guidelines of halakha-the normative aspect of Torah as explicated by scholarly rabbis. Different understandings of halakha will generate different modes of Jewish halakhic identity. In this article, I seek to illustrate this thesis by consideration of halakhic dynamic in modern times in Northern European vrs. Muslim countries. Subsequently I argue, that the cadre of the Shas movement in contemporary Israel reflects an interesting case in which Jews of Sephardic extraction have internalized central aspects of a non-Sephardic halakhic identity. It is hard to imagine a human society in which change and development do not occur over time. This is true not only of modern societies; even in ancient times and pre-modern societies, change was omnipresent. Sometimes change was sharp and acute; a clear example of this in the history of the Jewish people is the destruction of the Second Temple. But during most of human history social norms evolved at a moderate pace enabling people to imagine, along with Ecclesiastes, that "there is nothing new under the sun". 1 The above held true for the world of halakha as well. Indeed, even bracketing the effects of historical-social change, some dynamic is bound to characterize halakha simply as a result of the intellectual activity of Torah sages: "A beit midrash [hall of study] is never totally without 1 I:9.
