Inside the Knesset

I am just back from an exceptional trip to Israel as part of the European Masorti Rabbinic Assembly. Aside from the chance to reconnect with colleagues from across Europe (France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Czech Republic ...), our trip was timed to coincide with the 40^th Anniversary Celebrations of the Masorti Movement in Israel. And so we, and a bunch of other international Masorti types, found ourselves at the Knesset.

Over the course of several hours we met with Yesh Atid Chairman, and poll-leading candidate to be the next Prime Minister, Yair Lapid MK, head of the opposition Boojy Herzog MK, Chair of HaTnuah Tzipi Livni MK and Speaker of the Knesset, and senior Likkud politician, Yuli Edelstein MK. It was a tremendous privilege to be able to put matters of Masorti concern to such high ranking Israeli politicians.

Whether the presenting question was conversion recognition, government funding of ultra-orthodoxy to the exclusion of other branches of our faith or access to the Kottel, the real issue underlying so many of our questions was the relationship between Israel and her Diaspora. Leaders of the American Masorti Foundation - also represented - shared that it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain traditionally hugely supportive Jews for Israel - indeed the same issue arose in the context of a question on the deportation of ‘infiltrators’ or ‘refugees’ from war-torn African States.

Yair Lapid talked about the importance of fighting religious coercion without fighting religion. He talked of the importance of not handing religion over to the ultraorthodox (“defrosting it for the holidays”). Boojy Herzog talked about the absence of values in a political world driven by the need for power to achieve anything and insisted that there is no conflict between being worldly and religious. Tzipi Livni talked about the importance of a Jewish State that allowed “each of us to express our Judaism in different ways.” Yuli Edelstein rejected any notion of a split between the Diaspora and Israel - citing data drawn from Birthright returnees - and the atmosphere in the room grew heated.

But the highlight was a meeting with newly elected MK Yael Cohen-Paran, a woman who came into politics through environmental activism and was invited onto Tzipi Livni’s HaTnuah list. Cohen-Paran is a proud Masorti Jew, a founder member of the Masorti Kehillah of Pardes Hannah. She came into our meeting room directly from a testy meeting of parliament on the deportation of refugees furious at the proposal tabled, ‘this isn’t the Israel I want to be part of, this isn’t the Israel I want for my children. What about “And you shall love the stranger”? It’s not moral, it’s not Jewish to forget our past.’

It was an extraordinary insight into the Israeli democratic process. There is so much more I could share, and will on another occasion. Anyone interested in these issues is warmly encouraged to sign up to a monthly bulletin from the Masorti Movement’s Pluralism Rights Watch - mail jpw@masorti.org.il to go on their mailing list.

What I would like to share, on Shabbat, after the service is a look at some of the signs I saw around Jerusalem on my short trip. There are stories and insights I hope will prove interesting. I take a Rabbi’s version of holiday snaps, you are welcome to view them, during Kiddush.

Good to be back, Shabbat Shalom

On Anat Hoffman, David Rotem and a Jewish Life Lived Behind Blinkers

 

I spent Shavuot, 9 years ago, in Jerusalem.

Having stayed up studying all night I wandered down to the Kottel to daven shacharit at dawn.

It’s a well known tradition in Jerusalem.

The whole area was packed.

There must have been 8-10,000 people who had been up all night and were now getting ready to daven as the sun rose, a recreation of the moment of revelation.

 

I was planning on davenning with a group of other Masorti Jews. And arrangements had been made for us.

We were shepherded into a fenced off-pen.

Around that row of fencing, was a sort of moat and then another fence – we were doubly penned in.

All for our own protection.

By half way through the services it became clear why we needed the protection.

Bottles – plastic bottles, but bottles none the less – were being thrown at us, principally by Haredi kids perched high above the plaza.

And the occasional nappy.

All because we were davenning on what they perceived to be their Kottel plaza.

How dare we seek to address God, in the language and prayers of our shared ancestors, without accepting every dictate of Haredi or Ultra-orthodox Judaism.

 

Standing there, hiding under my tallis while the bottles were flying, I developed a whole different understanding of the importance of asking this question - who owns Judaism in Israel.

 

The famous story is that Israel’s first Prime Minister – the avowedly secular – David Ben Gurion met with Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, the Chazon Ish, one of the great idealogues of early C20 Haredi Judaism.

Karelitz cited a passage from the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin.^[1]

 

The Talmud demands that when two camels meet on a narrow mountain pass the camel bearing goods has the right of way. The camel without goods is expected to defer. Karelitz said that since religious Jewry was bearing the tradition, secular Jewry would have to defer to religious Judaism – to him.

Ben-Gurion refused to accept that secular Judaism was ‘empty,’ but it’s hard to read the history of Ben-Gurion’s relationship with the Haredim without thinking that he did accept Karelitz’s premise.

 

In the years that followed Ben Gurion agreed that the right to register all Jewish weddings in Israel should be given to the Haredim. He also allowed Yeshivah Students to be exempted from military service and gave Haredi religious girls the right to be exempted from Sherut Leumi – a programme of non-military civic service which was already an exemption from full military service designed specifically for the religious.

 

It’s widely acknowledged that Ben Gurion made one mistake, but I think he made another.

The mistake he definitely made is that he thought Haredi Judaism would melt away in Israel. He couldn’t understand who would want to cling on to the ways of the Shettl and Ghetto when the option was the Zionist Dream. He got that wrong.

The original exemption for Yeshivah students, in the early 1950s, applied to 400 individuals.

Today there are 60,000 exemptions from military service claimed by Yeshivah students.

Today 25% of all Jewish primary school-age children are enrolled in Haredi institutions which discourage their students from serving in the IDF. In ten years the number of Haredi exemptions is expected to double.

And in 20 years from now it’s estimated that 40% of Jewish children will attend Haredi schools all of which discourage their students from serving in the IDF.

 

It turns out that Haredi Judaism is more attractive than Ben Gurion thought.

It certainly turns out that Haredi Jews procreate at a far faster rate than Ben-Gurion expected.

 

But it’s the second mistake Ben Gurion made that interests me most.

This is the mistake of believing that another group, usually Haredi or Chasidic, can be trusted to look after Judaism properly.

I’ve encountered, particularly in American Conservative communities or British United Synagogue ones, members of a Shul like this one who nonetheless give significant amounts of charitable support to the Ultra-orthodox as a kind of insurance policy.

It’s a terrible mistake.

 

I think this is what Ben Gurion must have felt in discussion with Karelitz.

In that argument about whether the Zionists or the Ultra-Orthodox were carrying the hopes, dreams and aspirations of Judaism on their backs as, like two camels on a mountain pass, he must have consciously or sub-consciously, accepted Karelitz’s premise.

It’s easy to be impressed by the beard.

It’s easy to be impressed by the Yiddishisms and affect of authenticity many ultra-orthodox speakers specialise in.

It’s easy to think that just because so many Ultra-orthodox Jews spend day and night with their nose to a page of Talmud, they must care about Jews like us and Judaism like ours.

And that would be an error; historically, philosophically and theologically.

 

I don’t want to over-generalise.

There are certainly long-bearded, Yiddish-speaking, Talmud studying moderates, but the history of ultra-orthodox Judaism in the last 150 years has been a history of the Ultra-orthodox pursuing entirely isolationist and selfish agendas that not only take no notice of the needs of liberal Jews, but actively and passionately ride roughshod over any claim that anyone other than a Haredi could possibly speak with authenticity about a faith they claim belongs to them uniquely.

 

I think contemporary Judaism is finally waking up to the dangers of handing over to the Haredim our faith.

 

In 2002, some two years after my experience at the Kottel the Supreme Court of Israel decreed who could and couldn’t pray on the Kottel Plaza. The Haredim got the front of the Plaza, the bit directly facing the Western Wall.

But an excavated area of the Southern Wall of the Temple, known as Robinson’s Arch, was made available to Masorti, Reform – more progressive groups.

We were to be allowed to pray, our way, just around the corner.

Not ideal, but a workable compromise.

Among the groups who use Robinsons Arch are the Women of the Wall. Women who want to be given the chance to take hold of their Judaism at the most important site in Judaism.

One of their leaders I’ve known for 20 years – Anat Hoffman.

Anat is a former Jerusalem Municipal Councillor, a native born Israeli, a wonderful and passionate voice for decency in so many different forums.

And this week Anat was arrested, for carrying a sefer Torah across the Kottel plaza on her way to Robinsons Arch.

 

Police surrounded Hoffman and tried to take the Torah off her. She was arrested, fined 5,000NIS and banned from the Kottel for 30 days.

She’s a seasoned campaigner and knows how to put a soundbite together, but there is truth in what she told reporters –

 

The police, Hoffman said, took it upon themselves to reinterpret the Supreme Court ruling — and that is a very dangerous development. It’s a slippery slope. Today they say women cannot hold the Torah. Tomorrow it will be, women cannot look at the Torah. Then it will be women cannot be at the Kotel at all. Before you know it, all of Jerusalem will be segregated. That is where we are headed.

 

I think what she meant is that the police, sub-consciously or otherwise just assumed that the Haredim represent the more laden camel – that they must be right when it comes to interpreting Judaism, that they must ‘own’ the most holy places in our faith.

But I reject the notion that the Kottel belongs to the Hareidim.

I reject the notion that the Hareidim are the laden camel.

Norman Solomon, in his Jacobs Memorial Lecture a couple of weeks ago is absolutely right.

When the Haredim read the Talmud they see nothing other than pure pristine Judaism.

They don’t understand how the whole apparatus of rabbinic law and lore only makes sense as a meditation on our relationship with the surrounding non-Jewish world.

The language of the Talmud is the vernacular.

The technical terms and rhetorical structures are borrowed from the Greeks.

The structures of commerce are massively influenced by the surrounding Sassanian culture – actually that’s a truth that Rabbi Jacobs explored and charted in his PhD.

The Talmud doesn’t want us to live our Jewish lives in black and white, ignoring anything that smacks of the challenges of modernity.

They Talmud is suffused with shades, with nuance.

The Talmud is pre-eminently concerned with how we live our Jewish lives while engaging with the challenges of the modern and the contemporary.

The aim is not to cut ourselves off, seal ourselves in and draw up a drawbridge.

 

It’s not just the Talmud.

How could a person possibly read Moses Maimonides, the greatest Rabbi – the tradition jests – since Moses of Biblical fame - and not understand how important it is to engage with the contemporary culture in all its scientific, academic, philosophic and sociological splendor.

Judaism is not about keeping our head down and paying attention only to internal voice of Talmudic dialectics.

It is about keeping our head up, reading everything seeking to understand again and again as time passes and natures shift, how to keep the tradition we have received fresh, relevant and vital.

Karlevitz was wrong when he claimed that the Haredi represents the most heavily laden camel. It is the Masorti Jew, us, who are most heavily laden camel.

We carry our tradition, but we also carry an understanding of genetics and evolution, quantum mechanics and astral physics, Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant, Feminism and Freud, Mozart and Beethoven.

It’s the Haredi Jew, carrying only the Talmud, who should be making way.

 

And there is one other terribly worrying development in Israel this week that shares its origin with Ben Gurion’s second mistake about Haredi Judaism – the mistake that thought Judaism is safest when entrusted with the extremists. The Orthodox MK David Rotem is advocating a Bill that restricts the way in which Jews may convert. And this week the Bill passed through committee and will now go to the full Kenesset.

 

At present a Jew can go and live in Israel under the Law of Return if they have an ethnic connection to Judaism (a Jewish grandparent, parent or spouse) or if they have converted under the auspices of a legitimate Bet Din, such as ours.

Under this new proposed law, the only people who will be able to make aliyah through conversion alone will be people who convert under the supervision of the Haredi Municipal Rabbinates in Israel.

 

The Bill hands over the right to determine who can become a Jew to the Haredim.

It’s a disastrous Bill.

At the peak of the Russian Aliyah, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to set up a more moderate conversion system to normalise the legal status of tens of thousands of these Russian Jews.

As most of us know those conversions have now been retroactively annulled by the Haredim.

David Rotem seems to think that putting yet more power into the hands of the Haredim will help.

He seems to think that taking the diverse range of access points into different streams of Jewish life and placing them all into the hands of the Haredim will result in a more benign and open-hearted form of Judaism.

It’s hard to know whether he is being foolish or disingenuous.

It’s impossible for me to see how giving the Haredim yet more power will result in a more open form of Judaism.

It’s impossible for me to support this mistake of Ben Gurion – a mistake predicated on the notion that the Haredim would ever be looking after the best interest of Jews like me, Jews like us, Judaism like ours.

 

L’Havdil, we hear this language in the context of decisions to engage, or not engage with Hamas.

The argument goes that we have to empower the moderates, we can’t allow the extremists to be the representative voice of what we understand to be the people in the street.

It should be the same thing with Judaism. We can’t empower the Haredim. We have to do everything we can to empower the moderates.

Not least because we represent the more industrious camel in this mountain stand-off.

Not least because if we do leave the Haredim in charge we should expect our kind of Judaism to be penned behind fences and pelted with bottles and nappies.

And that’s not what the Jewish State is meant to be all about.

 

I’ve nothing against fervent Judaism. Indeed we could do with more of it in this community and many others.

The problem is the blinkers. The problem is the belief that Judaism should be lived in a self imposed Ghetto in which contemporary values and contemporary challenges have no place.

Eizeh hu hacham

Who is wise, said the Rabbis,

Mishelomed mi kol adam - one who learns from every person – Jew or non-Jew, frum or secular, iconoclast or non-conformist.

 

We protect the future of Judaism by opening up, embracing, engaging.

Not by sheltering ourselves away and penning ourselves in

And any development which suggests that Judaism is safer in the hands of those who view the Jewish world through blinkered eyes needs to be opposed.

 

Shabbat shalom

---

^[1] 32b

On the Retroactive Annulling of Conversions

The following article appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

The latest conversion row could tear us apart 05/06/2008 Rabbi Jeremy Gordon

Shavuot is a time for reading the book of Ruth: “Wherever you go, I go, your people shall be my people and your God shall be my God …” It is a time when Jews should focus on matters relating to conversions. There is much to consider. In May last year, three rabbis in Ashdod annulled an Orthodox conversion of a woman who only attended the rabbinic court to collect a get, a Jewish divorce decree. Annulling the woman’s conversion did alleviate the need for the get, but only at the cost of stripping the couple’s four children of their Jewish identity. On appeal this year, the High Rabbinical Court backed the rabbis in Ashdod and rescinded every one of her rabbi’s converts over two decades. The ripples have been fanning out ever since. Having swept away one of Israel’s most respected modern-Orthodox luminaries and Israel’s Conversion Authority, these now tsunami-sized waves threaten the very fabric of Orthodox unity. Left in the wake of this ill-tempered spat are an estimated 20,000 Israeli Jews whose conversions have been rendered undone, at least in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox. Recent voices entering the fray include the widely respected Chief Rabbi of Efrat, Shlomo Riskin, who lent his name to a letter accusing the High Rabbinical Court of a “sin of the first magnitude… an abuse of rabbinic power highly detrimental to the well-being of the Jewish people”, and Professor Marc B Shapiro, probably the most influential scholar of modern Orthodoxy, who has called on “the modern-Orthodox/religious-Zionist world [to institute a] complete break with the Charedi halachic authorities”. Writing in 1989, Lord Jakobovits, then Chief Rabbi of British Orthodoxy, asked how to “preserve the oneness of the Jewish people”. His message was that all streams of non-Orthodoxy should back away from conversions, since only the Orthodox could be trusted to save this “essential oneness”. With the High Rabbinical Court unwilling to find a way to save even the oneness of Orthodoxy, that claim now seems mortally flawed. A whole series of legal, not to mention personal and political, issues are at stake. Perhaps the most important from a legal perspective is the issue of the level of commitment to Jewish life a convert should undertake, and how to balance this against principles such as the unity of the Jewish people — achdut Yisrael and the needs of an individual in distress — sha’ah dechak. Judaism mandates the acceptance of converts but only of those who accept the covenantal duties of the Jews, the mitzvot. This raises the question of how “frum” a convert is expected to become. A commitment to “feel Jewish” void of covenantal performance rings hollow, but we do well to remember the words of the funeral liturgy, “There are none who do only good and never sin.” Since the dawn of modernity, two Orthodox approaches to this question have emerged. On the one hand, authorities in worlds of uniform observance incline towards a maximal sense of what should be required; the Lithuanian Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski claimed that “where it is evident that someone will desecrate Shabbat and eat forbidden foods, we may presume he converted only for show” and his conversion may be annulled (Achiezer 3:26). On the other hand, rabbis who engaged with a more pluralist and differentiated Jewish world (and in particular rabbis associated with Zionism) have taken a more liberal approach. The one-time Israeli Chief Rabbi Benzion Uziel stated: “Conversion is not conditional on candidates keeping the commandments … it is permitted, even commanded to accept converts, though we know they will not keep all the commandments. We should open up an opportunity for candidates. If they fail to keep the commandments, they [and no-one else] bear the guilt” (Piskei Uziel 65). Uziel is driven by a desire to heal breaches in the fabric of the people of Israel. He is seeking to bring those on the edge of Jewish life into its centre. In another response, Uziel mandates accepting a conversion for the sake of marriage even though legal codes explicitly exclude such an intention from being considered appropriate. He is no fan of conversion for the sake of marriage but, following a rabbinic doctrine of choosing the lesser of two evils, he argues that it is better to accept the candidate than leave the Jewish partner in an intermarriage. The American modern-Orthodox rabbi, Marc Angel, argues forcefully that, “when an intermarried couple comes to a [court] seeking the conversion of a non-Jewish partner, we must allow such a conversion. We may not take the haughty position that these are wicked people who deserve to suffer the fate of transgressors.” This kind of outreach has not, however, been a marker of contemporary ultra-Orthodox courts in this country or in Israel. Increasingly, the liberal and modern voices that once held sway in Orthodoxy have been driven out, replaced by an ultra-Orthodox, often anti-Zionist, rabbinic leadership; judges whose concept of decency, kindness and a love for all Israel have been shaped not by an engagement in the “real world”, but by a life lived in bastions of self-secluded meticulous observance. It is not that it is wrong to insist that converts meet standards beyond that of the majority of the Jewish community; it is not even wrong to reject a candidate for conversion if their intention seems flawed. But these demands must be balanced against the other voices in the tradition — voices of warmth, gentle welcome and a commitment to Jewish peoplehood. Rabbinic judges must understand how divisive a rejection of a convert can be, especially if such a rejection is performed retrospectively, especially if there are children involved. As a rabbi, I know the tools I can rely upon to save me from acting cruelly. They are among the most important sources I know. In electing to overlook the warm and gentle option, the High Rabbinic Court has abdicated its concern for Jakobovits’s “oneness of the Jewish people”. As a Jew and as a rabbi, I gave up on the ultra-Orthodox as guardians of this “oneness” some time ago: perhaps the time has come to offer any wavering modern-Orthodox friends a warm welcome in the broader and kinder Jewish world my less authoritarian rabbinic colleagues and I inhabit. Jeremy Gordon is rabbi of New London Masorti Synagogue