Although he was one of the leading figures of Modern Orthodoxy in our times, the late Rabbi Norman Lamm declared in 1969 that he was “uncomfortable” with the term, but could not find a better one. And although three years later he would say of Modern Orthodoxy, “I write about it, I advocate it, I defend it, I preach it,” he would in the same breath express his “worries” about its health. Lamm, as Jeffrey Saks explains, criticized the movement both for its lack of religious zeal, on the one hand, and its insularity, on the other.

The problem, of course, identified early on by Rabbi Lamm, was that too many would-be devotees of Modern Orthodoxy gave the impression that it is a pareve form of [religious piety] instead of an ennobling synthesis. He earnestly countered, this “is not a case of ideological wimpishness.” “The main idea is that Torah must be embraced together with that which is noblest and most compatible in the prevalent culture, and that the Jew, totally committed to Torah, must utilize his spiritual powers to inhere in Torah in order to fructify and sanctify all the rest of human endeavor. . . . Whereas we in fact accept this ideology, . . . we have been too apologetic in explaining and interpreting ourselves to the outside world.”

Lamm eventually came to hold up as his ideal the Maimonidean (and Aristotelian) virtue of moderation and the pursuit of the Golden Mean, but he saw this virtue as anything but wimpish:

For Maimonides, and by extension Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Lamm, “the key to character . . . is not the mean as such, but the weighing and measuring and directing, the conscious use of reason rather than passively following nature blindly and supinely. In other words, the process of arriving at a determination of one’s own life and character is more important than the results.” . . . [Lamm] saw the ability to navigate the Maimonidean path as “the halakhic implementation of moderationism.” . . . While Rabbi Lamm reminded us that moderation is not a “mindless application of arithmetic averages,” he understood why some were tempted by that easier path of an imagined calculator crunching the numbers and pointing toward a position.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.