Responding to Noah Feldman's piece in the July 22 Sunday New York Times Magazine, Rabbi Shlom Carmy of Yeshiva University writes:
…An honest understanding of the Halakha about saving a Gentile on Shabbat is grounded in the fact that not all mitsvot can be violated to save life. Idolatry, sexual offenses and murder may not be allowed even to save life, however this flies in the face of our utilitarian mentality. Shabbat has much in common with the so-called “big three.” [Note R. Shimon’s view in Yerushalmi that a bystander may intervene to prevent Shabbat violation even at the cost of the transgressor’s life.] For Jews Shabbat may be violated to save life, but only on the basis of a special limmud (inference)—“desecrate one Shabbat so that he may observe many Shabbatot.” Where this principle does not apply, Shabbat is inviolable.
Where people understand that religion may on occasion make life and death demands, the law that Shabbat is so important that it is overridden only for those who are members of the community that observes it is difficult but not scandalous. In our culture this understanding is lacking; thus the failure to treat Jews and Gentiles identically will be interpreted as indifference to the fate of the non-Jew, and will be perceived as tantamount to connivance in his death. It will provoke hatred, and understandably so. In this case, the theoretical gulf separating secularists from halakhists is not universalism vs. particularism but the recognition that Shabbat is, in principle, worth the sacrifice.…
Right. And in principle, if not in practice, those sacrificed are non-Jews.
Again, all things being equal – which they are not – if there was no risk of provoking hatred, of stirring up antisemitism, Orthodox Jews would be forbidden to save non-Jewish life on the Sabbath. That means even if no other non-Jews were there and able to save that life. Which means that, in this case, the non-Jew would die while the Orthodox Jew sat idly by eating his chulent (Sabbath stew).
And, as for Rabbi Shimon's view brought by Rabbi Carmy, that view is rejected by halakha, Jewish law. If one brought Hillel's Talmudic view (not the Hillel, by the way; this is a much later Rabbi Hillel) that the messiah had already come, to bolster one's contention that the coming of the messiah is not central to Orthodox thought, one would be, at the very least, disingenuous. More accurately, one would be lying.
Rabbi Carmy is the best today's Yeshiva University has to offer. It is no wonder that the Noah Feldmans of Modern Orthodoxy choose to go elsewhere.