Dovid Bashevkin: A Reform Rabbi Interviews an Orthodox Rabbi [Denominations 2/4]

In a conversation originally recorded for a Reform synagogue audience, Orthodox Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin argues that the Jewish community’s deepest problem is not a disagreement about God or law, but a breakdown in shared language. The episode, which functions as a sustained attempt to articulate what the 18Forty podcast is trying to do differently, proposes that Judaism should be understood not primarily as a legal system or a set of truth claims, but as a language—one whose authority comes from its capacity to connect people across time and difference, not from divine command or institutional decree.

The problem with competing truth claims

Bashevkin begins by describing the pre-modern Jewish story as relatively simple: God gave the Torah at Sinai, it contained commandments, and Jews followed them. That story, he says, was “essential” rather than complex. Modernity changed this. With the rise of historical criticism, scientific inquiry, and denominational fragmentation, it became much harder to justify any one version of Judaism from first principles. “If you talk to a random Jew on the street and you want to make the case for your specific model of Judaism,” Bashevkin says, “that has become much more difficult.” He is careful not to say that the traditional story is false, only that it no longer functions as a self-evident foundation for everyone. The result is that many J