Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik of Blessed Memory taught the following syllogism:

• Humanity is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of G-d. 
  • Therefore the purpose of man is imitatio dei, l’hidamot lo k’mah she’efshar – to imitate G-d’s ways.
• The Torah introduces G-d to humanity as the borei, the Creator.
  • Therefore the purpose of humanity is to be creative.
• But Jews were specifically instructed to center their lives around Torah!
  • Therefore the ultimate Jewish purpose is creativity within Torah, chiddushei Torah.

Ironically, this argument of the Rav is often used, exactly so, as someone else’s speech.  I think myself more in accord with its spirit in offering a perhaps creative extension of the Rav’s thought.

For those who spend much of their time laboring in the intellectual fields of Torah and who are privileged to experience the joy of chiddush, of Torah creativity, the Rav’s focus is obviously attractive.  But it seems by implication to cut the majority of the Jewish population off from the central Jewish religious act – not that many of us are capable, whether for reasons of economy, temperament, or ability, of making genuinely original contributions to the study of Torah.  And I submit, pace Maimonides, that Jewish philosophy ought not to so privilege the intellectual elite.

Let me therefore offer the following extension of the argument.

• Most values are universal.  People generally agree, for instance, that courage and generosity are good, cowardice and miserliness bad.
  • Therefore the uniqueness of Torah – and any other moral system – lies largely in the relative weight it assigns universal values, in the way it instructs us to choose when those values compete or conflict.
  • Therefore the content of a chiddush Torah is its rebalancing of values.
• R. Chananyah ben Akashya famously teaches that G-d gave us many commandments in order to increase our merit.  Maimonides explains that this means that each of us can focus on the commandment or commandments that most resonate with our souls.  In other words, every soul among us legitimately balances the values of Torah differently.
  • Therefore each of us, if we live a life genuinely devoted to Torah, simultaneously offers a creative interpretation of Torah, albeit not one consciously bound to a specific textual rereading.

To sum up:  The Torah can be interpreted both through study and through practice.  There is a Torah of thought, and a Torah of life.

But creativity must be treated with caution as well as celebrated.  If we create within Torah, that means that we change Torah, and some of our changes may be for the worse.  Creativity carries with it the probability of error.  R. Zevulun Charlop, then Dean of RIETS, once told me that m’chadshim, creative scholars, should be evaluated like baseball batters – getting it right once in three tries is excellent for the less adventurous, and once in four sufficient for those with real power.  How does our system control the impact of these errors?

I submit that one method is by coordinating the Torah of Thought with the Torah of Life.  Academic study with no real-world accountability leads to an impractical and/or unfeeling Torah; life with no textual accountability leads to an incoherent and/or self-indulgent Torah.  Only when they go hand in hand – when the creative energy of one is checked and balanced by the inertia of the other, and vice versa – does Torah develop properly. 

In other words – the Torah of Thought and the Torah of Life meet in the realms of p’sak halakhah and Torah leadership, where intellectual Torah must be translated into practical rulings.  A community’s healthy relationship with p’sak – and its production of robust p’sak – are signs that it is effectively coordinating its Torahs.  Anemic and mistrusted p’sak, of course, are danger signs.I submit that Modern Orthodoxy has neither robust p’sak nor a healthy relationship with p’sak, and that the cause of this is that the Torah of Life and the Torah of Thought – both in the admirable process of creativity – have grown apart from one another. 

More concretely – the academy and the community do not trust one another’s religious and moral intuitions, and therefore each feels itself unaccountable to the other.  This must change, and it can, and here’s how.

We need to produce talmidei chakhamim - poskim – leaders - who share the positive moral vision of the Modern Orthodox community, including

• commitment to the full religious development of women,
• to the ultimate significance of every human being as a tzelem Elokim,
• to the religious significance of Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Yisroel,
• to unintimidated intellectual openness, and
• to profound cultural responsibility.

These leaders will test their learning and decisions against that vision - but they must also be unafraid to subject the practices of the Modern Orthodox community to strict Torah scrutiny.  Mutual respect will lead to a flowering of profound and beautiful Torah creativity and the creation of a society embodying that Torah. 
          
The Center for Modern Torah Leadership was founded to produce those leaders.