The Torah Will Never Change
Two Religious Zionist Readings of Maimonides’ Ninth Principle
How does Torah remain eternal in a changing world? For Modern Orthodox Jews, this is not an abstract theological puzzle. It is the practical question at the heart of their lives. Maimonides’ ninth principle of faith declares that “the Torah will never be changed,” but what does that mean when Jews govern a state, run laboratories, and navigate political systems that did not exist at Sinai? The tension between permanence and change has generated competing visions of what halakhic continuity requires.
R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Two Religious Zionist thinkers, both deeply committed to halakha and to the possibility of Jewish public life shaped by Torah, invoke that same ninth principle and yet arrive at strikingly different emphases. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) argues that the ninth principle is often affirmed in theory while being quietly denied in practice, and he responds by formulating what he presents as a “fourteenth Ani Ma’amin”—to be declared as a creed of Religious Zionism. Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn (1857–1935), by contrast, insists that the ninth principle already contains within it what is needed, so long as it is understood correctly. The divergence matters because each frames the challenge to the eternity of Torah differently.
R. Soloveitchik’s fourteenth principle appears in his 1962 sermon “Of the Dew of the Heavens and of the Fat Places of the Earth” (in The Rav Speaks [2002 ed.], 173–176). He introduces it explicitly as a foundation of the Mizrachi worldview, stating that the principle asserts: Torah “is given to be observed, realized, and fully carried out in every place and at all times, within every social, economic and cultural framework; in every technological circumstance and every political condition.” The claim is not only that Torah is eternally true, but that Torah is eternally livable under the full range of conditions in which Jews live. He applies this directly to sovereignty: Torah is given for realization both in exile and “in the Jewish State where it must deal with new problems and embrace forms of public life.”
Only after establishing this fourteenth principle in its own right does the Rav link it back to Maimonides’ ninth. “Actually,” he says, “this ani ma’amin is intimated in the ninth of the thirteen principles of the faith: ‘That this Torah will never be changed’.” Yet he insists that the implication has to be made explicit and turned into a daily declaration: “Every Jew must unequivocally declare this fourteenth ani ma’amin, every morning after reciting the thirteen principles.” And he presses the point: “What use is it even to repeat the thirteen principles if one does not believe in the possibility that Torah can be realized in every place and at all times.”
What worries the Rav, in other words, is not only theological denial but practical concession. A person can affirm the ninth principle and still concede—explicitly or implicitly—that comprehensive Torah life cannot really be sustained within modern conditions. That concession can lead in two opposite directions, and he rejects both. One is reformist, claiming that halakha “in its totality is unsuitable for our social, scientific, industrial framework and that we must trim the branches in order to save the trunk”; the other is isolationist, seeking withdrawal from modernity, which the Rav treats as a tacit admission that Torah cannot, in fact, be lived within the “modern cultural, historical constellation.” Against both, he declares that the “principle of the eternity of Torah” includes a promise that Torah can be studied and observed “not only at home and in the ghetto, but everywhere in the world… the modern home, the laboratory, the campus or the industrial plant; in public as well as in private life.”
R. Chaim Hirschensohn approaches the ninth principle from a different angle. Writing in 1928—earlier in the Zionist project, when Jewish collective life was being imagined in institutional and political terms long before statehood—he argues that Torah’s permanence is threatened not only by those who would discard halakha, but also by those who would protect it by turning it into rigid dogma. In the introduction to the fifth volume of Malki BaKodesh, he writes:
The laws of the Torah will never change, because its halakhot and the contingencies of the commandments always accord with life. One who makes the laws of the Torah into rigid, fixed dogmas impairs the ninth of the thirteen principles.… For any dogma without [such] contingencies is necessarily compelled to change, and [that] is a trace of idolatry, and they will not know wherein they stumble.
R. Chaim Hirschensohn
The contrast in emphasis is clear. R. Soloveitchik turns the ninth principle into a declaration of Torah’s universal realizability: Torah can be fully lived everywhere, including within modern public life and modern institutions. R. Hirschensohn turns the ninth principle into a warning against rigidity: dogmatizing Torah is what undermines the very permanence it claims to protect.
R. Hirschensohn’s logic is paradoxical but coherent: for him, rigidity does not secure permanence; it undermines it. “Any dogma without contingencies is necessarily compelled to change.” By “dogma,” he means a specific posture toward halakha: treating its formulations as fixed and context-blind, detached from the halakhic system’s own ways of applying norms under changing circumstances. If halakha is presented as though it lacks those internal resources, then the claim that it “will never be changed” becomes self-defeating. A system framed as inflexible will eventually meet cases it cannot address on its own terms, and that is when change becomes unavoidable.
This is also the key to his phrase “a trace of idolatry.” R. Hirschensohn does not equate halakhic rigidity with literal idol worship. He is pointing to a resemblance in religious approach: treating Torah’s laws as fixed dogmas that leave no room for the halakhic “contingencies” through which they are applied and lived. In that sense, rigid dogmatization carries “a trace of idolatry,” because it makes Torah resemble the dogmas he associates with the world of idolatry: something frozen, and therefore something that eventually must be revised.
At this point, a natural objection arises, and it is worth confronting directly. R. Soloveitchik condemns “trimming the branches,” while R. Hirschensohn insists that halakha must account for “contingencies.” From R. Soloveitchik’s perspective, the language of “contingencies” could sound like precisely the sort of adaptation he rejects. If accounting for contingencies means reshaping halakha to fit modern needs, then why is that not “trimming”?
The distinction is this: “trimming,” in the Rav’s polemic, is a program of concession to an external standard—modernity decides what Torah may plausibly demand, and halakha is reshaped accordingly in order to survive. Hirschensohn’s “contingencies,” by contrast, are presented as an internal feature of halakhic application. They are not offered as permission to rewrite Torah according to outside ideologies, but as the way halakha itself remains aligned with life through categories and mechanisms that belong to the halakhic system. In R. Hirschensohn’s telling, ignoring contingencies is what eventually forces revision or abandonment; attending to them is what preserves continuity.
This is not merely a theoretical disagreement: it goes to the heart of what it would mean for halakhic authority to operate within a modern Jewish polity. Even so, that distinction does not fully answer the Rav’s concern. Even if R. Hirschensohn intends “contingencies” as internal halakhic machinery, his language—“always accord with life”—risks sounding like Torah’s stability is justified by its fit with life, rather than by Torah’s autonomous authority. For the Rav, the danger is a modern reflex: letting external frameworks define halakha’s plausibility. For R. Hirschensohn, the danger is rigidity disguised as faithfulness: freezing halakha into rigid dogma and then discovering that it cannot absorb changing conditions. The difference is not merely rhetorical. It reflects two distinct theories of what faithfulness requires when permanence has to survive history.
The shared ground between them remains real and worth stating plainly. Both are committed to halakha. Both affirm Maimonides’ ninth principle. Both refuse to treat Torah as an inheritance meant only for private life in exile. Both see Jewish public life, including Jewish sovereignty, as an arena Torah must be able to govern.
Even on that shared ground, they diagnose the primary threat to the permanence of Torah differently, and the ninth principle therefore yields different demands. For R. Soloveitchik, the threat is concession to modernity’s jurisdiction, whether by revision or by retreat. The fourteenth principle is designed to reject that concession and to restate the ninth principle as a practical assertion: Torah can be “fully carried out” under every technological and political condition, including the conditions created by Jewish statehood. For Hirschensohn, the threat is rigidity disguised as faithfulness. For him, halakhic continuity depends on the system’s capacity to take account of contingencies as halakhic realities, not as external threats to be denied. Freeze Torah into rigid dogma, and the result is not permanence but brittleness.
This helps explain the otherwise puzzling asymmetry. R. Hirschensohn does not “add” a principle; he reads the ninth principle as already containing the practical claim that must be defended. For him, halakha remains continuous through its built-in capacity to address contingencies. The urgent task is therefore to warn against turning Torah into dogma. The Rav adds a fourteenth principle because he thinks the ninth principle can be affirmed while being hollowed out in practice. One can say “the Torah will never be changed” and still proceed as though comprehensive Torah cannot really be sustained under modern conditions except by revision or retreat. The fourteenth principle is his way of making the implication explicit and demanding that it be affirmed and lived.
One can read these two voices not as canceling each other out, but as exposing two distinct ways the permanence of Torah can be undermined in modernity. It can be threatened by embarrassment—by the sense that Torah must either be revised to fit contemporary norms or else relegated to the private sphere to survive modern life. It can also be threatened by brittleness—by a dogmatization that cannot withstand changing conditions. Both thinkers insist that faithfulness requires resisting one of these tendencies. The disagreement is which threat is most dangerous, and therefore what “the Torah will never be changed” must mean when Jews return to history as a sovereign nation.
David Curwin, a technical writer in the software industry, publishes widely on Bible, Jewish thought and philosophy, and the Hebrew language.