During the past decade, I’ve davened with all sorts of Minyanim: Chabad, Yeshivish, egal/conservative, reform rock n’ roll Kabalat Shabat, English-intensive, new-age-hippie… You name it.

In whatever sort of congregation I find myself, I always follow the rabbinic dictum of Al Tifrosh Min Hatzibur; or “When in Rome…”

What strikes me most about some of the comments coming from the farfrumpteh here, is the utter ignorance, the arrogance, the attitude of “our way is the right way, and everyone else are a bunch of stupid liberals who are bad Jews because they want to have a healthy individual relationship with the divine.”

Apparently, we’ve forgotten why 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died.

Best answer I can give you is “teiku”.

Ultimately, there is only one truth. The world was either round or flat, Colombus was right, others were wrong.

Same goes for halacha. Hillel and Shammai were great scholars, yet the talmud has them arguing constantly. Though Shammai’s followers did like Shammai, the rest of us are forbidden to follow Beit Shammai, halacha is always like Beit Hillel.

How much more so when it comes to movements such as conservative and reform, that are relative newcomers to the scene and were clearly created to clear the consciences of those charlatans who did not want to follow mainstream, yet didn’t want to consider themselves as transgressing.

Anyway, I think we’ve been through all this before in a previous post about reformed temples, no sense in going over the whole thing again.

The reason it matters that the Rambam was controversial is not because anyone thinks “it was controversial, therefore it’s wrong.” Rather, look at how this evolved. In the time of the Rambam, there are a variety of approaches, all more or less in the category of “Torah approaches.” The proponents of these positions argued amongst themselves. One was absorbed as “the mainstream” the other was not. I’m not talking about ‘heretical’ streams now, but streams which were fully seen at the time as being within the halacha. So today we assign no value to the Torah position that did not become the mainstream the way the Rambam did.

It’s interesting that you argue that no one today can argue with the greats of the past. Certainly there are greats from the past whose opinions you think have no validity – such as those who disagreed with the Rambam or rejected the Shulchan Aruch. How about the sages who called Caro a destroyer of the world?