In a recently published collection of essays, Shlomo Riskin—a leading American-born Israeli rabbi—tackles many of the thorniest issues confronting Modern Orthodoxy. David Berger, who has much praise for the book and its author in his review, nevertheless takes issue with Riskin’s attempt to define away the talmudic category of the apikoros, or heretic:
Riskin poses the question “who’s an apikoros?” and essentially responds, “no one.” The argument is that it is wrong to identify anyone as a heretic because it is difficult to define what one is: Maimonides himself was accused of heresy; the Talmud defines heresy by such actions as scorning a scholar, but not by the criterion of unacceptable beliefs; [the early-20th-century sage Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz] said that no one today should be subject to the treatment inflicted on a heretic; and contemporary theological deviationists are generally the product of their education and environment. It is also pragmatically self-defeating to condemn rather than build.
Much of this is, no doubt, correct, but some of it is misleading. The position that heresy should be defined by actions and not beliefs sidesteps the [talmudic passage] (quoted in full by Riskin) which lists a number of beliefs that exclude the one who holds them from the World to Come. While there is much to be said for a tolerant attitude toward contemporary adherents of heretical beliefs, there is great danger in blurring or erasing the category of heresy itself. This essay does not quite do this, but it comes perilously close. The issue is of acute importance nowadays, when we are witness to an assault on the position that beliefs matter at all, and when adherents of positions that are heretical by any historical measure are welcomed—especially in the religious-Zionist community in Israel—as respected Orthodox figures. A religion, certainly an Orthodox version of a religion, requires boundaries.
Read more on Jewish Action: https://www.ou.org/jewish_action/03/2016/review-essay-the-living-tree-studies-in-modern-orthodoxy/