From Netzarim to Torah-Observant

A personal essay on returning to the necessity of Oral Torah

I was raised in a mixed Netzarim and Reform environment. That’s not a confession of guilt, it’s simply the soil I grew up in. Reform Judaism gave me a love for Jewish identity, a sense of ethical purpose, and the basic rhythms of Jewish life as my family understood them. It also gave me something else, subtler and more formative than I realized at the time: the assumption that the individual stands above the system. That if you’re sincere, thoughtful, and morally serious, you can assemble “your Judaism” from the pieces that resonate, and set aside what does not.

It was in that same type of atmosphere that Netzarim Judaism developed, I learned it there. I practiced it there. And eventually I taught it there. Netzarim, in my mind, was a kind of return: a rejection of what felt like drift and dilution, and an attempt to anchor ourselves in Torah again—more text, more obedience, more clarity. We borrowed instinctively from Karaite sensibilities: a distrust of later layers, a desire to “go back” to what is written, a preference for plain meaning, a resistance to inherited authority that could not justify itself directly from Scripture.

Looking back now, I can describe Netzarim Judaism as either a Reform version of Karaite Judaism, or a Karaite form of Reform Judaism. The phrasing almost doesn’t matter, because the core tension is the same. The Karaite instinct says: “Let’s bind ourselves to Scripture.” The Reform instinct says: “Let the individual determine what binds.” When you fuse those together, you often end up with a Judaism that feels strict because it leans on Torah language and commandments—yet is structurally modern, because it still treats communal authority as optional and ultimately subordinate to personal conscience.

For a long time, that synthesis felt not only workable, but righteous. It felt clean. It felt brave. It felt like I was stripping away noise and returning to the voice of God.

And then something changed.

What Netzarim was trying to solve

Netzarim, at its best, was not a rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was, in many ways, a symptom of a deeper Jewish disconnect in modern life: the widening gap between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. As Orthodox communities became more insular and more “my way or the highway,” many Reform Jews who wanted more observance found themselves ostracized or quietly discouraged. They felt as though the only way to live more Torah was to uproot their entire lives, move into a traditional neighborhood, and plug into a tight communal ecosystem.

For many people, that simply is not possible. Even today, the cost of living in established Orthodox areas, and the practical need for walkability and an eruv for many forms of communal Shabbat life, puts “traditional community” out of reach for average families. Conservative Judaism tried to bridge this gap and solve some of these pressures, but for many seekers it never fully delivered a stable, compelling middle path.

In that vacuum, Netzarim emerged as an attempt to answer real problems that many sincere Jews feel but don’t always have words for. But I also believe the founders of Netzarim made a critical mistake in the route they chose: they took the Karaite road and treated the Oral Torah as the problem, instead of treating the social and economic barriers to observance as the problem.

I think the reasoning went something like this: if the oral law and the bulk of halakhic life felt so difficult to follow in the modern world, then it must be that it was wrong—or at least that it had become so burdensome that it could not truly be what God intended. God would not want a path where becoming more observant required tearing apart your life, uprooting your family, risking destitution, or paying a price that only the wealthy could afford. And so, in an attempt to make Torah accessible again, they concluded that the solution was to throw out the Oral Law.

I understand why that felt compelling at the time. But I no longer believe that conclusion was true—or that it was the only faithful option.

It was trying to solve the ache of disconnection—Jews who felt Jewish but did not feel commanded. Jews who wanted the seriousness of Torah without the feeling that they had to accept a whole world of authority claims they could not yet understand. It was trying to solve the fear of human invention—the worry that religious systems can drift, that institutions can harden, that leaders can mistake their own preferences for divine demand. It was trying to solve the modern crisis of trust: if I can’t trust the chain, how do I know what I’m obeying?

Netzarim offered a simple, emotionally powerful answer: return to the written text. Keep the Torah. Strip away what you can’t verify. And build from what you can see.

For people raised in Reform culture, especially, this is compelling. It feels like moving from “Judaism as identity” to “Judaism as covenant.” It feels like upgrading from vibes to commandments. It feels like reclaiming God.

And it’s not hard to see why it attracted people—and why I invested myself in it. It gave clarity. It gave structure. It gave meaning. It gave a kind of moral spine.

But there is a difference between a structure that looks strong and a foundation that truly holds weight.

The cracks that appeared over time

Over the past several years, cracks began appearing—not because I suddenly became less committed to Torah, but because I became more committed to honesty.

The first crack was practical: the Torah is not a self-operating manual. You can quote commandments all day, but sooner or later you have to live them. Living Torah means definitions, procedures, boundaries, applications, precedents. It means deciding real cases. It means answering questions that Scripture does not spell out in detail. And the moment you start doing that—really doing it—you are no longer living “Bible-only.” You are building an interpretive tradition. Which means, in essence, you are creating your own oral tradition.

The second crack was communal: Judaism is not a lone-wolf project. From the beginning, Israel is commanded not only to obey God privately, but to build public holiness—courts, judges, communal norms, shared time, shared law. If everyone becomes their own authority, you do not get a people under Torah. You get isolated spiritual consumers who happen to share a book.

The third crack was historical: the Judaism I was trying to practice was already filled with inheritance. The calendar, the synagogue life, the way we read Torah, the texts we treat as canon, the very fact that we have a Torah scroll and know what counts as Torah, or a Bible that was assembled and approved by a people—none of that exists in a vacuum. It exists because of a living chain. A tradition. A people who preserved and transmitted.

The fourth crack was spiritual: I started to recognize an old reflex in myself—one I had inherited more from modernity than from Sinai. The reflex was this: “If I cannot personally verify a thing from the written text alone, I am not obligated.” That sounds like integrity, but it often masks something else: the modern allergy to authority. A refusal to be bound except on my own terms.

And once that reflex becomes your operating system, Torah-observance slowly turns into Torah-themed autonomy. You can still use religious language, still quote verses, still feel devout—but you have quietly placed yourself above the covenantal structure the Torah itself describes.

The turning-point realizations

There was one realization that reorganized everything for me. It hit me with the kind of simplicity that is impossible to unsee once seen:

You cannot really have Judaism without the Oral Law.

At first, that sounds like a slogan. Then it becomes an obvious description of reality.

Because “Bible-only” collapses under its own weight the moment you ask what “Bible” even means in Jewish life. The Tanakh does not exist as a neatly packaged object independent of the people Israel. It exists because it was received, preserved, transmitted, and affirmed through the life of the community. Even the act of saying, “These are the books,” is not a verse; it’s inheritance. The Bible only exists, as a functioning canon within a living people, because there was a living process that safeguarded it. Call that process tradition, call it communal authority, call it transmission—however you label it, it is not a solitary reading project.

Then there is practice. Torah commands. But Torah also assumes teaching. Torah assumes that Israel is not merely given a text, but given a way—handed down, trained, embodied. And if you are honest, so much of what makes Torah livable is not simply “readable off the page.” We learn how to do things because we were taught how to do things. That is Oral Torah in the most basic sense: instruction, not just inscription.

And then there is the matter of authority—the part that, I think, modern Jews like me resist the most.

The Torah does not only command individuals. It commands Israel to establish courts, judges, officers, and to uphold a functioning legal order. In Deuteronomy, Israel is told to appoint judges and officials in their gates and to judge the people with righteous judgment. And when hard cases arise, the Torah describes an appeal to a higher authority—and commands the people to follow the ruling and not turn aside from it “right or left.” That is not “do whatever seems right to you.” That is covenantal submission to a legitimate interpretive system.

I won’t pretend that this solves every historical and theological question. It doesn’t. But it does destroy the illusion that Judaism can exist as “me, my Bible, and my sincerity.” The Torah itself pushes Israel toward communal authority and binding legal process. Once I accepted that, I could no longer keep using the old categories. I could no longer treat “oral law” as an optional add-on, or as a later corruption, or as something I could politely ignore while still claiming to live a complete Judaism. I might still have questions. I might still have to learn. But I could no longer deny the basic truth: without Oral Torah, you don’t get Judaism—you get fragments.

That is why I’ve begun describing my present position as “orthodoxy” with a small “o”—or, more naturally for me, Torah-observant.

By that I do not mean I have instantly absorbed every communal marker of a particular Orthodox subculture. I mean something much more foundational than that. I mean I have accepted the seriousness of binding tradition, the necessity of interpretive transmission, and the Torah’s own insistence on courts and authoritative process. I have begun returning to Judaism as a living covenantal civilization—not just a text.

And that single shift changes everything.

It changes how I read.
It changes how I practice.
It changes what I teach.
It changes what I can responsibly claim.

A word to those who feel disoriented

If you have walked with me in Netzarim spaces—if you learned from me, or trusted me, or built your practice around frameworks I helped shape—I want to speak gently and plainly.

First: your hunger was not wrong. If you came seeking Torah, seeking obedience, seeking a life that feels commanded rather than curated, you were reaching for something holy. I honor that. I’m not here to mock where we’ve been. I’m not here to shame the journey. Most of us were doing the best we could with the tools we had.

Second: if this shift feels destabilizing, that is normal. When someone you trusted changes their mind about foundations, it can feel like the floor moves. It can raise anger, grief, betrayal, anxiety. Some of you may feel defensive, and some may feel relieved, and some may feel tired. All of that is human.

Third: you do not have to choose between Torah and humility. In fact, Torah demands humility. The kind of humility that says, “I may be sincere and still wrong.” The kind of humility that says, “I don’t get to reinvent the covenant from scratch.” The kind of humility that says, “I will submit myself to learning, and to process, and to the weight of a people who have carried this longer than I have.”

Fourth: this is not a call to panic-convert your ideology overnight. It is a call to become honest about what Judaism is. If Judaism is a people bound by covenant, guided by courts and tradition, transmitted through teaching—not merely an individual reading a text—then the responsible response is not to cling harder to minimalism. The responsible response is to start learning again, patiently and soberly.

And that leads to the hardest practical consequence: as this shift has become real for me, it has also become real for others who have been traveling with me. This isn’t only a private change. It’s becoming a communal change.

But in all fairness, not everyone within the organization agrees with me or is moving in the same direction. Some of our rabbinical members are returning to the Reform movement. Some are continuing in a more universalist or independent arena. And a few, like me, are returning to—or moving toward—a more observant position.

Because Netzarim’s IANJ was built on a set of foundational commitments—especially the idea that later oral authority is not binding in the way Torah is binding—this divergence means that the organization as it has existed is coming to an end.

I don’t say that as a dramatic threat. I say it as a matter of integrity.

If the foundation has changed, the structure must change. Sometimes that means transformation into something new. Sometimes it means a dignified conclusion. Either way, it must be honest. A community cannot pretend to be what it no longer believes itself to be.

I am still the same Jew. Still hungry. Still devoted. Still committed to obeying God. But I no longer believe Judaism can be sustained by sincere minimalism. I believe it is sustained by a living chain—Written Torah and Oral Torah together—held in a people, expressed in practice, and guided by the courts and teachers the Torah itself commands.

And I cannot pretend otherwise anymore.

I also want to be transparent about what comes next. This essay is not the full organizational announcement, and it is not meant to be. I will be writing a follow-up that explains where we are going as an organization, why we are not simply joining an existing Orthodox group, and what our basic doctrinal stance is as of this time.

For now, I’ll only say this: the aim is not to build a new “brand” of Judaism or to recruit people into a personality-driven project. The aim is to return to Torah in a way that is both faithful and livable, anchored in the reality of Oral Torah and communal responsibility, while also acknowledging the real-world constraints that pushed so many sincere Jews into splinter paths in the first place.

When that follow-up is written, it will serve as a clearer map: what is changing, what is staying, what standards we intend to uphold, and how we plan to move forward with integrity even as different members choose different directions.