Back in the 1960s, when I was in grade school, men wore ties to Major League Baseball games, and my public school elementary school teachers wore dresses so long that today they would be considered positively Amish.

In other words, the gap between secular society and religious Jewish life was relatively small.

Not anymore.

Secular society today is unimaginable by mid-20th-century standards, in terms of everything from how we think about gender and race to how we dress, how we entertain ourselves, and the images to which we and our children are exposed.

Which begs this question: Had secular society been like this a century ago, would the rabbis have tried to synthesize it with Torah Judaism?

And would Yeshiva University have been built around the concept of Torah Umada, or Torah and secular wisdom?

Maybe not.

Nevuah, prophecy, disappeared with the destruction of the Second Temple. So not even those extraordinary rabbis could have predicted a world like ours. But we, and our children, have to live in it. Which begs a second question: Can Modern Orthodoxy, with its attempt to bridge the unbridgeable, survive?

Of course, there will always be Modern Orthodox institutions. But one wonders about the level of allegiance to those institutions and their leaders that will exist just a few decades from now.

I went to an elite secular college in the late 1970s. It was truly a time of open-mindedness. Our education was built around a desire to develop tools for critical thinking and deep curiosity about how others lived and thought.

You won’t find any of that on a secular college campus today. And yet, we send our children to these institutions and expose them not just to rampant antisemitism but to the worst aspects of secular culture. And somehow we expect their Orthodoxy to survive.

In the mid-1980s, I attended Columbia Law School and would typically have lunch at the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary. I remember JTS as a bustling institution, with its leadership engaged in critical issues of Jewish survival.

While the Conservative movement is still a huge force in American Judaism, the gulf between lay members and leadership is enormous. I am not convinced that most Conservative Jews have any interest in or much awareness of the Conservative approach to Halacha. What’s debated within the walls of JTS is all but irrelevant to the rank and file.

This may well be the unfortunate path down which Modern Orthodoxy will tumble—an increasing gap between a dedicated leadership and an unmotivated laity. That’s because Modern Orthodoxy has the impossible burden of blending an increasingly bizarre secular worldview with traditional Torah values.

It’s holy versus hefker, and something’s got to give.

For the most part, all forms of non-Orthodox Judaism have turned into something you are, as opposed to something you do. In other words, it’s an ethnicity and not a legal or behavioral code.

What’s to stop Modox from becoming the same thing?

You can check all the boxes in terms of Jewish education, synagogue attendance, and so on, but otherwise, your influences are more about what’s online than what we received at Sinai.

I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to stick around and discover, decades from now, that Modern Orthodoxy continues to offer a vibrant, healthy and workable fusion of Torah and modern wisdom and culture.

How we’ll get there, and how Modern Orthodoxy remains something you do instead of becoming something you are… Sorry to say that I have no idea.

New York Times bestselling author Michael Levin runs www.JewishLeadersBooks.com.