Halakhah has become an object of renewed academic study in recent years. From research centers at law schools, including those of Yeshiva University, New York University, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University to monographs, collections, and anthologies, like Chaim Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, Christine Hayes's Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law, and Leora Batnitzky's and my own Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on Religion, State, and Morality, there has been a shift from historical and philological investigation to an adoption of the perspective of legal studies. Of course, halakhah has been studied previously by legal scholars in the context of Mishpat Ivri (Hebrew Law). But, instead of academic study, the driving force of that project has always been the development of a legal corpus that would be both secular and Jewish enough to be serviceable for the State of Israel. In contrast, these recent institutions and works are focused on scholarly understanding instead of political implementation. As a result, they have been less compelled to fit halakhah into a procrustean bed of state law or overlay a distinction between religious and civil law into indigenous halakhic categories.As a participant in this research program, I recognize its benefits. If not “law” in the way that this term has become understood in the shadow of the modern state with its claim to sovereignty, ability to surveil and to police its citizens’ behavior, and willingness to deploy coercive punishments, halakhah clearly contains norms, and halakhic literature discusses the procedures—real or imagined—of their interpretation and adjudication. Consequently, the critical deployment of contemporary legal theory is a fruitful undertaking. It has the capacity to illuminate the regulative components of halakhah, both when legal theory captures halakhah's features and when it fails to do so. In the latter cases, it also illuminates legal theory by revealing its limitations and contingency—that what is often presented as a theory of law as such is just a theory of the law of the modern state.However, despite this significant tendency to interrogate the categories of legal theory, there is often a residual positivism to this research program. Even as the legal positivism of H. L. A. Hart is compared to the post-positivism of Ronald Dworkin, halakhah is often viewed as a normative system and practice of interpretation and adjudication that are themselves normatively inert. Halakhah, as both a system and a practice, is thought to be antecedently existing and thus simply there to be described by the academic scholar. Accepting or rejecting halakhah takes place outside of the academy on the basis of considerations that are certainly not scholarly and perhaps even arational. The crucial issues of the normative claim and ethical criticism of halakhah are thus left entirely unaddressed by critical reflection: Ought halakhic norms be followed? Are they good? If not, ought they be revised? On what basis? This neglect derives, it seems, from the location of the study of halakhah, as part of Jewish studies, in the academy. Jewish studies, whether independently constituted or housed in departments of religion or history, is anxious to distinguish itself from the normative claims of traditionalist modes of studying Jewish texts. Despite the normative claims that are proposed and evaluated in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, psychology, political science, and theology, Jewish studies remains reticent to engage with normativity even, or perhaps especially, when its object is Jewish norms.In this context, Leon Wiener Dow's recent monograph, The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law, provides a fresh perspective. As a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute who has a PhD in philosophy from Bar Ilan University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, Wiener Dow is well-situated to introduce to the current conversation an attentiveness to the normative claim of halakhah and concern for the ethical assessment of its norms. Both of these elements should be of interest to readers of the Journal of Jewish Ethics. In this work, Weiner Dow “has fashioned a portrait of the halakha and a narrative of what it means to live a life informed by and committed to the halakha” (101). And for him, this means explicating the command that lies behind it in general while also accommodating the potential for critical revision of particular commandments in view of ethical concerns. In this he fully departs from a positivist paradigm, writing, “The Torah is no object out there; it is simultaneously my conversant and the source of my very words—and thus concepts, too—that emerge from my mouth reflecting my consciousness, all the while shaping it” (39). There is no distinction here between subject—scholar—and object—halakhah.Indeed, as the somewhat awkward title suggests, Wiener Dow eschews conceptualizing halakhah as a system. Riffing off the association with the verb lelekh (to go), Weiner Dow describes halakhah as “the Jewish being-on-the-way” (2). This Jewish path is one that oscillates between the private confrontation of the individual with the divine command and the public enactment of the commandment within a community. Matching content to form, Weiner Dow begins the book with an autobiographical account of his journey onto the path that is the halakhah. He richly describes his early efforts to “try on” various forms of ritual practice, including shabbat and kashrut observance as well as prayer. These sorts of norms serve as an anchor for him as he develops a view of halakhah as a mode of connecting to the divine. Citing Heschel, he calls commandments “prayers in the form of action” (12).This spiritualized account of Jewish norms underappreciates their ethical relevance. Halakhah as a constellation of norms certainly claims to originate, in however an attenuated sense, from the divine. But it also serves to regulate interpersonal interaction and to govern society. Citing Deuteronomy 4:6-8, especially as it is interpreted by Moses Maimonides in The Guide of the Perplexed, Weiner Dow rightly claims, “The Torah expects its laws to be intelligible—and therefore meaningful—to those who are not subject to its commands” (65). However, along with imagining that the “other peoples” will be impressed by the commandments because of the presence of the divine (“what great nation is there that has a god so close at hand as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him?”), the Deuteronomist hopes that this is also because of their ethical goodness (“what great nation has laws and rules as perfect [tzadikim] as all this Teaching that I set before you this day”). The ethical telos is as important as the divine origin.Even if Weiner Dow understates the ethical import of halakhah, in the first chapter, he does offer a compelling reflection on the theological significance of the ethical critique of halakhic practice. For him, ethical critique has its basis in “the gap—and tension—between lived experience and reflective moments” (15). One comes to an experience with a bundle of values and norms, but then the concrete experience—of perceived injustice, inequality, or just plain awkwardness—can clash with it; the experience, in some sense, jambs the values and norms. It provides a new “orientation” that must be reflected on and either integrated with or allowed to revise the values and norms. In Weiner Dow's example, the experience of being offered a synagogue honor, while his grandmother and childhood girlfriend were passed over, provided an experiential basis for his commitment to egalitarian halakhic practice. Such an experience is not simply subjective, however. Drawing on the thought of the Izbicer Rebbe, Weiner Dow claims that “in the face of a situation in which the individual feels that the authentic command of the Divine demands a violation of the established halakha … the individual [should] take that voice seriously, subjecting it to a thorough self-probing בירור [beirur], in order to clarify its staying power and its legitimacy” (15).Along with its concern for the normative claim and ethical critique of halakhah, Weiner Dow's focus on individual experience, even revelation, is quite different from contemporary literature on halakhah. And as his invocation of the notion of “orientation” may suggest, it derives from his previous work on Franz Rosenzweig. However, Weiner Dow is here able to adapt Rosenzweig's thought for a new age and audience without being subordinate to him.In its depth and breadth, this work is theologically stunning. The second chapter offers a discussion of the relation between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah that attempts to articulate the movement from the immediacy of the divine command, to the grounding provided by scripture, and on to the determination of communal action. Continuing this arc, the third chapter provides an account of halakhic community, understood as a group of people who are engaged in temporally and spatially shared action in response to the divine command. In the process, it also offers a reflection on the theological significance of the halakhic categories of kiddush hashem (sanctifying the divine name) and mar‘it ayin (socially perceived impermissibility), which returns to the theme of the oscillation between the individual's private confrontation with the divine command and the public communal enactment in practice. Retracing the arc, the fourth chapter offers “a phenomenological theology of command” (71). Here the influence of Rosenzweig is at its fullest with Weiner Dow's joining of divine command and divine love, melding of human obedience and autonomy, as well as insistence on both the significance of Jewish existence and what is beyond it.It is impossible to do full justice to the richness of this, aptly described “meditation on Jewish law” in a review. Its erudition, sophistication, and verve testify that halakhah is neither only an object of study nor a paved highway but, rather, a path that, in its being traveled, is constantly redirected in view of divine command and human experience.