Introduction: Engagement: Religious Devotion, Academic Relativism, and Beyond

A philosopher, a rabbi, and a historian walk into a coffee shop in Jerusalem. In an effort to build upon previous and ongoing efforts to address this problem and to better understand the underlying tensions-between what we call here academic relativism and religious devotion-we convened an international working group of academic scholars and rabbis. The yeshiva student who fails to see the contextualized story of how traditions were forged, maintained, and adapted over centuries assumes that an automated understanding is sufficient. However much distance exists between contemporary traditional Jews and the original texts, these Jews do indeed aspire to maintain the significance of texts as originally understood by the rabbis. Relativism, by contrast, connotes a secular remove from religious dogmatism. By the mid-twentieth century, in Mandate Palestine and then Israel, increasing numbers of leading Orthodox rabbis began to employ critical-historical methods of research and analysis, even as they eschewed a relativist framework.