Eliezer Berkovits (8 September 1908, Nagyvárad, Austria-Hungary – 20 August 1992, Jerusalem) was a rabbi, theologian, and educator in the tradition of Orthodox Judaism.

Standing at the mountain of Sinai, the children of Israel trembled with fear at the voice of God, which yet was conferring on them their greatest distinction...

A man wilts in the heat of the midday sun, or dies of exhaustion if he is exposed too long to cold weather.

Man, who is "dust and ashes" and is yet "crowned with glory and honor' is the corollary to God, whose throne is the heaven and footstool is the earth and who yet looks on him who is "poor and of a contrite spirit"...

In the mystical union, however, there are no words and no law, no search and no recognition, because there is no separateness.After the Holocaust, Berkovits asserted that God's "absence" in Nazi Germany should be explained through the classical concept of hester panim, "the hiding of the divine face."

This Oral Torah includes both explicit interpretations of certain Pentateuchal laws, as well as the general methods of Rabbinic exegesis.

In Berkovits's view,[3] the Oral Law was oral in order to allow maximum flexibility, by giving the rabbis of each generation the ability to decide questions of new situations and circumstances and even re-decide anew the questions of previous generations.

[4] When the Oral Law was written (chiefly in the Mishna and Talmud), the rabbis viewed this as so catastrophic and unprecedented and controversial because this killed much of the Oral Law's flexibility that was so inherent to its nature; by writing it down, decisions were set in stone and could not be redecided.

In addition, Rabbi Berkovits saw Zionism as a means to revitalize in the Jewish people what was lost with the Oral Law's writing.

[citation needed] Berkovits was critical of the lack of rights a married Jewish woman has in relation to her husband in issues of marriage and divorce.

Berkovits called for the ethical courage on the part of Jewish legal authorities to put what already exists in principle into practice.