I wanted to follow up on my note about the recent decision to host a certain speaker in our synagogue. She framed abortion rights, unqualified, as an absolute form of justice. Regardless of feminist theory, I thought it was wrong Jewishly and an inappropriate use of the Bimah.

Yet I still strongly support feminism, incorporate its principles into my life, and genuinely enjoy going to this shul for a lot of reasons. Conservative, in my experience, is better than Orthodox when it comes to making different types of people feel genuinely welcomed and included while also staying true to the core principles of Orthodoxy.

Nevertheless it’s a dilemma, and one which perfectly highlights the difficult balance we face: how to engage with secular movements without letting them override our own values.

For those of us who believe in God and the Torah, our faith isn’t just a set of rules—it’s our compass. When we look at movements like feminism, we can see that they have done important work in pointing out inequality and fighting for dignity.

But these movements are still human creations, which means they can be messy, biased, or sometimes flat-out wrong.

When we platform a speaker in a synagogue, we have to be careful. We aren’t just listening to a new idea; we are deciding what our space stands for.

In this case, I felt uncomfortable because a specific, secular agenda was being presented as if it were the final word on justice, even when it directly clashed with the sanctity of life as we understand it through the Torah.

I don’t think the answer is to shut the door on every external idea or to hide from the world.

Instead, I think we should be more discerning. We can treat these ideologies like a library of human experience—taking the parts that help us fix what is broken in society and leaving behind the parts that don’t align with our truth.

To me, this isn’t about being rigid; it’s about being an active steward of our own tradition.

We should be the ones doing the filtering, using the Torah as our guide to decide what is worth keeping and what isn’t.

By doing this, we can honor the parts of these movements that actually help heal the world, without letting them pull us away from the core of who we are.