Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Tzedakah is a duty of justice rather than an act of generosity, and the word does not mean charity.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. A boy becomes obligated at thirteen and reads from the Torah. A girl becomes obligated at twelve, and the manner in which that is publicly marked varies widely across this body and is not a Torah reading.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The groom veils the bride before the ceremony.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The search for leaven is made by candlelight on the night before Passover eve.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Brit Milah is performed by a mohel on the eighth day, and the day is not moved for convenience.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Burial is in the earth, without embalming, ordinarily within a day.
Modern Orthodox synagogues retain the professional hazzan as shaliach tzibbur alongside the rabbi.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Chalitzah is performed where a man dies childless and his brother declines to marry the widow, and it is what releases her to remarry.
Israel's election is affirmed in classical form, read together with this stream's positive engagement with the modern state of Israel and secular society.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The marriage is solemnised under the canopy.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Orthodox practice holds brit milah on the eighth day without exception unless the child's health forbids, performed by a trained mohel with blessings and the naming, and the day is not deferred for the Sabbath or a festival.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Coming of age is a matter of obligation taking effect at a fixed age rather than of a ceremony conferring it.
The covenant is held as binding in full, alongside a positive engagement with secular learning and the modern state that this stream does not read as a compromise of it.
Creation from nothing is held, and the relation between that account and the findings of natural science is treated as a question to be worked at rather than a choice to be made.
The judge of a rabbinical court sits under the law of the Shulchan Aruch's Choshen Mishpat, which governs the constitution of a beit din, the competence required of those who sit on it and the procedure it follows.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The public fasts of the calendar are kept, the two full fasts from sunset to nightfall and the four minor fasts from dawn.
Modern Orthodox synagogues use a gabbai to run Torah service logistics on the same model as Orthodox practice generally.
Acts of loving kindness are held as a standing obligation and are organised communally as well as individually.
Giyur, Rituals Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Conversion requires acceptance of the commandments before a rabbinic court, circumcision where applicable, and immersion, and conversions performed outside this body are not recognised.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Hakafot are made with the Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah.
Halakha is held divinely given and binding, combined distinctively with full participation in secular society, following the tradition of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Hoshanot are said with the four species on each day of Sukkot.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Kabbalat Shabbat opens the Sabbath on Friday evening.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Orthodox observance keeps the full detail: separate dishes and sinks for meat and dairy, a waiting period after meat before dairy, reliance on recognised rabbinic supervision for processed food, and separate arrangements for Passover.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Visiting the graves of parents and of the righteous is customary before the High Holy Days.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Betrothal and marriage, once separate by a year, are performed together under the canopy.
Kriah, Rituals Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. A garment is torn by the mourners.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Maariv is prayed at night.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Marriage is contracted by the giving of an object of value in the presence of two witnesses, and it is followed by the seven blessings.
Modern Orthodox institutions maintain kashrut supervision and, in yeshiva settings, the mashgiach ruchani.
The Masoretic Text is held as the authoritative Hebrew text of the Tanakh.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The dead are remembered at Yizkor on four days of the year.
A personal Messiah is awaited literally, the shared Orthodox position.
Midrashic literature is held as authoritative rabbinic interpretation of scripture.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Immersion is required for conversion, for family purity, and for vessels bought from a non-Jew.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Mincha is prayed in the afternoon.
The Mishnah is held as authoritative rabbinic tradition reaching back to Sinai.
Maimonides' Mishneh Torah is held as an authoritative code of Jewish law.
The commandments are held as fully binding, and the engagement with the wider world is argued from within that obligation rather than against it.
Circumcision and the fitness of the one who performs it are governed by the Shulchan Aruch's Yoreh De'ah, which fixes the rite, its timing and the conditions under which it may be deferred.
Modern Orthodox communities use certified mohelim on the same halakhic basis as Orthodox practice generally.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Musaf is prayed on Sabbaths, new moons and festivals, and it asks in plain words for the restoration of the Temple and its offerings.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Mussar, the disciplined work on character, entered the yeshiva world in the nineteenth century and is taught in many of them.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. A boy is named at his circumcision, a girl at a Torah reading.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Hands are washed with a vessel on rising and before eating bread.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The laws of family purity are kept, with immersion in a mikveh at their conclusion, and they are among the observances that most distinguish this body in practice.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Nusach Ashkenaz is used in the congregations of this body descended from the communities of the Rhineland and eastern Europe.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Nusach Edot HaMizrach is used in the Sephardi and Mizrahi congregations of this body.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Nusach Sefard is used in the Hasidic congregations of this body.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Orthodox observance keeps the full thirty-nine categories of forbidden work, so no writing, cooking, carrying outside an eruv, or use of electricity, with timers set beforehand, and the day given to synagogue, meals, study and rest.
God is addressed as almighty in the received liturgy, which this stream retains in full.
The Oral Torah in its entirety is held as revealed at Sinai and equally binding with the Written Torah.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The Seder is conducted from the Haggadah in full, with the four cups and the four questions.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Pesukei Dezimra opens the morning service.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. A firstborn son of a mother is redeemed from a kohen on the thirty-first day, unless the father is a kohen or a levi.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Pilgrimage to the Western Wall and to the graves of the righteous stands in place of the three pilgrim festivals that required attendance at a Temple that no longer stands.
Modern Orthodox Judaism follows the same individual-posek model as Orthodox practice generally, often looking to poskim engaged with contemporary questions.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Prayer is obligatory, fixed in text and in time, and the obligation falls on men three times daily.
Prophecy is held as real and closed, and the prophetic books are read as scripture rather than as historical literature.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The Purim play is a licensed annual reversal, and in the yeshivot it is turned on the institution itself.
Modern Orthodox Judaism ordains rabbis through the same semicha process as Orthodox Judaism generally; some Modern Orthodox institutions train women as communal scholars under other titles, a contested development, but the mainstream movement does not ordain women as rabbis.
Modern Orthodox communities recognize the rebbetzin's informal communal role alongside her husband's pulpit.
Redemption is held as a future divine act, and in this stream the modern return to the land is often read as its beginning.
Religious Zionism, reading the State of Israel in positive religious terms, has been the characteristic Modern Orthodox posture since Samson Raphael Hirsch and, in America, Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Bodily resurrection of the dead is affirmed literally.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The Omer is counted aloud, with a blessing, on each of the forty-nine nights.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Selichot are said in the penitential season and on the fast days.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The Sabbath as a day of prescribed rest, prayer and meals is the frame the whole week is built on.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Shacharit is prayed daily, ordinarily with a quorum of ten, with tefillin on weekdays.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The body is watched continuously from death until burial.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The seven blessings are said under the canopy and repeated at meals through the following week.
Shiva, Rituals Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Seven days of mourning are kept at home, the mourners seated low and not going out.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Thirty days of lesser mourning follow the seven.
The slaughterer's qualification and practice are governed in detail by the Shulchan Aruch's Yoreh De'ah, which sets both the law of shechitah and the requirement that a shochet be examined and licensed before he may act for a community.
The Shulchan Aruch is held as the standard authoritative code of practical halakha.
The scribe's work is governed by the Shulchan Aruch's Yoreh De'ah, which sets the law for the writing of Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot, down to the forming of the letters and the intention required while writing the divine name.
Modern Orthodox communities hold Torah scrolls and tefillin to the same sofer-written halakhic standard as Orthodox practice generally.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Scribal work on Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot is done to the received halakhic standards, and a scroll that fails them is not used.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The body is washed and purified by the burial society before dressing.
The Talmud is held as authoritative and binding alongside this stream's engagement with secular scholarship.
The Tanakh is held as divinely revealed scripture.
Repentance is held as the traditional sources set it out, and is central to the liturgical year of this stream.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. Maaser, the tenth, is given from income, and the practice survived the loss of the agricultural tithes it began as.
The Torah is held as verbatim divine revelation given at Sinai.
Affirmed per Maimonides' eighth and ninth principles of faith, held together with this stream's engagement with secular education and civic life.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. A boy's first haircut is delayed to his third birthday.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The Yahrzeit is kept with Kaddish and a lamp on the anniversary of a death.
Kept in Modern Orthodox Judaism, alongside full engagement with secular study and with the state. The couple withdraw alone after the ceremony, which completes the marriage in halakhah.