Taking On Israel’s Chief Rabbinate

Taking On Israel’s Chief Rabbinate
A reluctant rebel’s challenge to the haredi establishment could make or break Israel’s Religious Zionist movement.

by Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher

Rabbi Benjamin (Benny) Lau does not look the part of a revolutionary.


At 47, his youthful appearance, warm smile and engaging personality have helped him become a popular Orthodox rabbinic figure in Jerusalem, where he has revitalized the Ramban community synagogue in Katamon and heads the beit midrash program at Beit Morasha, a communal and educational leadership institute for observant men and women.

He also lectures at Bar-Ilan University (where he received a Ph.D.) and teaches at both a boys’ and girls’ yeshiva high school in Jerusalem.

The rabbi is soft-spoken, but his message of late — in sermons, lectures, newspaper columns and interviews — is blunt and compelling, offering up sharp criticism of the Chief Rabbinate and its role in the deteriorating relationship between religion and state in Israel.

Rabbi Lau, himself the nephew of former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, is leading a campaign among like-minded, more tolerant Orthodox rabbis to wrest control of the Chief Rabbinate from the influence of a group of elderly ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist haredi religious leaders whose dictates often are followed by the two state-appointed chief rabbis.

Rabbi Lau says he and his colleagues, primarily from the rabbinic group, Tzohar (Hebrew for window), seek to restore a sense of compassion toward all Israeli Jews, no matter their level of observance.

“We can’t accept it,” Rabbi Lau says of the haredi style, which demands the strictest levels of adherence to Jewish law. “We are the Zionists and we should be the ones with the power. It’s not normal for the state to be the captive of the haredim,” who don’t acknowledge the authority of the state.

He says he would prefer that more senior rabbis in his camp take the lead in this campaign, “but I look around and see that the responsibility is on our shoulders, and it cannot wait. We are very close to the end of the relationship” between religion and the state, he says, as Israelis become increasingly disenfranchised with the Judaism they see practiced and adjudicated by the Chief Rabbinate.

“As a strong Zionist, I want to be part of the Jewish state,” he says. “I need to serve the needs of the people,” regardless of their level of observance.

Listening to what the rabbi has to say these days calls to mind Howard Beale, the fictional character in the classic 1976 movie “Network,” who as anchor of a major television network urged viewers to stick their heads out of their windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Israelis who care about the state of Judaism in the country don’t need much prompting — especially now.

The association between Israeli society and the Orthodox-controlled Chief Rabbinate has always been problematic, with many secular and less observant Jews resenting the control the rabbinate has over their personal lives in matters of marriage, divorce, conversion and burial.

What has changed dramatically in recent months is that more and more Orthodox Jews as well are adding their voices to those who have long expressed frustration and anger with a Chief Rabbinate that appears increasingly rigid and narrow in its outlook and rulings, to the detriment of Israeli society.

The two recent episodes that have become “the last straw” for many, particularly in the Religious Zionist/Modern Orthodox camp, were the Chief Rabbinate’s strict rulings regarding the current sabbatical (or, shmitta) year, and especially its rulings over conversion.

Shmitta, which falls every seven years, is the commandment that calls for Jewish-owned land in Israel to lie fallow. In the past, a halachic loophole was followed, allowing Jewish farmers to maintain their income by having their land symbolically sold to a non-Jew. But under pressure from haredi leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger gave rabbinic councils the option to disallow the loophole, in effect having people purchase produce from Arabs rather than Jews.

Even more upsetting was the rabbinic ruling that led to nullifying conversions permitted over the last 15 years by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a Religious Zionist leader and head of the government’s special conversion administration.

Not only does such a move show the haredi leadership’s disdain for the Religious Zionist camp, but also for a society with an estimated 300,000 Russian immigrants who are not Jewish. Many of them probably would be willing to convert if the procedure was not onerous, but the haredi standard is for the convert to adhere to all 613 commandments.

Rabbi Lau says such actions by the haredim underscore their indifference, if not hostility, toward a modern Jewish state, and he says the time to act against them is now.

“Many secular Jews in Israel would respond positively to a rabbinate that shows openness and compassion,” he told me over the course of several conversations. “But the people have become alienated.”

He likens the haredi view to Noah on the ark, protecting his own family while the rest of the world drowns. Rabbi Lau prefers the model of Abraham, who even argued with God in an effort to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“We can’t just live on the ark,” he said, noting that Israel is a vibrant society, not just an enclosed religious community.

That’s why the rabbi says he is leading an effort to try to gain control of the Chief Rabbinate, consulting with the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his son, Yitzchak, who Rabbi Lau sees as open to a more tolerant kind of Jewish authority.

If the cooperative effort fails, there is the option of appealing to the Supreme Court to appoint a Chief Rabbinate more reflective of Israeli society and Zionist values. Rabbi Lau says he knows that could “open up the process” to include non-Orthodox representation, but he finds that healthy, and notes that he often cooperates in programs with Conservative and Reform rabbis.

A final option is for Rabbi Lau and his allies from Tzohar — a group of about 300 rabbis who seek to be more accessible and welcoming to non-Orthodox Israelis — to compete directly with the Chief Rabbinate, creating their own religious courts to deal more sympathetically with Israelis on issues like marriage, conversion, agunot and divorce.

Such a confrontation would be messy, Rabbi Lau acknowledges, but no worse than the current sorry state of affairs, he says.

Does he have a chance at effecting change? Not in the short-term, according to Israelis knowledgeable about the situation.

Prime Minister Olmert “needs the haredim in his coalition and he will not struggle with them,” notes Yair Sheleg, a reporter for Ha'aretz who covers the religious world. But he adds that “the feeling of crisis that Rabbi Lau, and others, express” may have a long-term positive impact.

Sheleg suggests that in the future, haredi parties may be more sensitive to public criticism, for fear of losing political clout, and/or the Religious Zionist camp may come to soften its stand on settlements so as not to weaken its support for change on social issues, like calling for a more tolerant Chief Rabbinate.

The outcome of this conflict could decide the fate of Religious Zionism in Israel — whether it will take on the mantle of leadership or bow to the clout of the haredim. And this brewing dispute may well determine whether the growing gap between religious and secular Jews in the country can be narrowed.

In the meantime, Rabbi Lau is ready to lead, though not sure how many rabbis will be with him.

“I feel I am doing the right thing,” he says. “The halachic tradition has always been about meeting the needs of the people. That’s all we’re trying to do. And we’re ready to take a stand.”

Think Again: The enduring legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch

Think Again: The enduring legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch

Jun. 26, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum , THE JERUSALEM POST
Today marks the bicentennial of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, whose vision dominated German Orthodoxy from the early 19th century until its destruction by the Nazis.

When Rabbi Hirsch first burst on the scene, as the 27-year-old author of The Nineteen Letters, German Orthodoxy was in full flight. In the first decades of the 19th century, for instance, nearly 90% of Berlin's Jews made their way to the baptismal font. The Nineteen Letters was the first work to address the modern age from the perspective of Torah. That work and its successor Horeb arrested in mid-flight thousands who had all but turned their back on traditional Judaism.

One rabbinical contemporary wrote, "Anybody who reads The Nineteen Letters will find that until now he did not know Judaism as he knows it now, and literally becomes a new being." Rabbi Hirsch's writings provided the initial inspiration for Sarah Schenirer, the founder of the Bais Yaakov network of schools for women, and the lay leaders of the original Agudath Israel movement were almost all drawn from the ranks of his disciples.

Because of his openness to secular studies, Rabbi Hirsch is sometimes described as the founder of modern Orthodoxy. That is a mistake. In the context of German Orthodoxy of his day, Rabbi Hirsch was considered a zealot. His insistence on a complete separation from the government-recognized communal bodies, on the grounds that they bore the taint of institutionalized heresy, divided the Orthodox community of Frankfurt that he had almost single-handedly built. Every page of the voluminous Hirsch corpus cries out his intense fear of Heaven.

Rabbi Hirsch is more accurately described as the architect of Torah Judaism for the modern world (the subtitle of the definitive biography by Eliyahu Meir Klugman.) He wrote for a modern world lacking the protective insularity of the ghetto, one in which every Jew simultaneously lives in a broader non-Jewish society. Though he recognized the dangers of Emancipation and repeatedly stressed that participation in the larger society could never justify the slightest deviation from one's duties as a Jew, Rabbi Hirsch saw Emancipation as allowing for a fuller Jewish life.

The narrow constraint of Jewish life in the ghetto had, in Rabbi Hirsch's opinion, robbed Jewish learning of its intended vitality, through actual application to life situations. "The goal of study," he lamented, "has not been practical life, to understand the world and our duty in it."

Rather than approaching the broader society in an exclusively defensive posture, Hirsch viewed it with optimism. He saw the historical circumstances of any period as the raw material upon which the ideals of the Torah must be impressed to the extent that the larger society provides the opportunity to do so. His writings are filled with an enormous confidence in the power of Torah to uplift and transform every period of history. Accordingly, he addressed the entirety of German Jewry on a monthly basis on the major issues of the day. No Torah scholar of comparable stature fills that role today.

THE LAND OF ISRAEL has not provided fertile soil for the Hirschian tradition. Orthodox refugees from Germany, or at least their children, have virtually all gravitated either toward Mizrachi or to the mainstream yeshiva world. It is often pointed out by the latter that the past 150 years of German Orthodox life have produced no more than two or three Talmudists or poskim (legal decisors) of the first rank, compared to hundreds in Eastern Europe. For that reason, the Hirschian tradition will never become the dominant one within the Israeli haredi world.

Nevertheless, Rabbi Hirsch's writings still have much to offer both to the haredi world itself and the broader Jewish society. Indeed it is hard to think of any 19th-century Jewish thinker who speaks with such astonishing contemporaneity. More than 100 years after his passing, new translations of his work, particularly his commentary on Humash [the Pentateuch], continue to appear regularly. On any issue to which he set his pen, his word continues to be not just the first word but the last.

As more haredim enter the marketplace and, as a consequence, seek some form of advanced secular education, Rabbi Hirsch's writings on the confrontation between modernity and Torah will gain many new readers. His corpus is already standard reading for ba'alei teshuva drawing closer to the world of Torah study and observance.

Rabbi Hirsch described the prevailing religious observance of his day as preserving outward forms without the animating inner spirit. His life task was to reverse that "uncomprehended Judaism." For Hirsch, the Torah is "Divine anthropology" - an account of man from the vantage point of the Divine. The mitzvot must be understood not as arbitrary rules that demand only obedience but as the tools through which God seeks to shape the ideal human being, whose self-perfection is the goal of Creation.

In his commentary on Humash, Rabbi Hirsch demonstrated the meaning and life lessons that each detail of observance, including that of the Temple service, seeks to inculcate. Even those who find themselves unmoved by a particular explanation will never again doubt, after reading Hirsch, the relevance of each word of Torah to daily life.

The awareness of mitzvot as educational tools for the formation of the ideal human being is closely linked to another key Hirschian concept: the imperative of sanctifying God's Name through one's every action. One of the miracles of the Tablets of the Law was that they read the same from whichever direction one looked. And so, Rabbi Hirsch taught, must it be with every Jew. From whichever direction he is perceived - whether at home, in the study hall, or in the marketplace - he must bear the stamp of a Jew shaped by Torah.

The glory of German Jews raised in the Hirschian tradition was their emphasis that one must not only be "glatt kosher but glatt yosher (straight)." A member of the Hirschian community of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan told me this past Shabbat that he has never experienced the temptation to cut a corner on his taxes or in business dealings.

I have no doubt that an exposure both to Rabbi Hirsch's writings and to Orthodox Jews raised in his tradition would go a long way toward drawing non-observant Israeli Jews nearer to their traditions.

But there is another aspect of Rabbi Hirsch that is crucial to the entirety of Jewish society in Israel today. Absent some understanding of why the continued collective of the Jewish people is a matter of universal significance, those with the talents and wherewithal to go elsewhere will do so. Indeed the statistics on Israel's brain drain make clear that many already have.

Hirsch's writings provide perhaps the fullest account of the Jewish national mission. "To reestablish peace and harmony on earth... and to bring the glory of God back to earth," he writes in his Commentary to Humash, "is proclaimed on every page of the Word of God as the result and aim of Torah."

Elsewhere he described Emancipation as a step toward "our goal - that every Jew and Jewess, through the example they provide in their own lives, should be priests of God and genuine humanity."

Why men are running away from Judaism

View from the booth:

Perhaps if Reform Judaism (the one I grew up in, anyway)offered more of a spiritual dimension that is based on halacha, none of this men/women stuff would be of much pertinence, as men would presumably then have an outlet for faith. Having spent the first 17 years of life in Reform Judaism, I am grateful for the start: I learned Buber and Heschel but not Halacha. Fortunately, Buber and Heschel led me back to where they started - in Hasidism and Jewish mysticism.

If you go behind the major German Reform thinkers, you find a desire to assimilate into the main Protestant culture so much so that services were patterned after classic Protestant liturgy, complete with pipe organ and choir. There was a mad delusion that a Jew could be a German. That delusion was answered starting in 1933. I was a member of "The Church on the Lake" -- as Temple Sholom in Chicago was formerly known by. The reverence of and the reliance on "reason" -- that is, to bend halacha so out of shape as to be unrecognizable -- instead of using reason to use halacha in every day life (or at least try) was the undoing of Reform Judaism for me. The only thing that Jews have to call our own is halacha. The rest of our history as a people is connected to the countries and the history of those countries where we have found ourselves over the course of past 2000 years. The moves within Reform Judaism to cleave a tad closer to Halacha over the course of the past 10-15 years bear this out. The same is true of Conservative Judaism. What is Conservative Judaism conserving? We are not preserves. We are Jews. That the JTS in New York is running a $2 million deficit and the recent intra-movement controversy tells me that Conservative Judaism is by definition a movement without the possibility of a firm foundation. What and who decides which halacha will be followed and which not? Or is this simply Orthodox-lite? What is the single defining factor of all of Jewry? In my mind, it's halacha. And that's whether you agree with the Halacha or not. The important part is its pre-eminence in Jewish life on a daily basis. So let's argue about it, disagree and grow it. That's Judaism to me. It's why you can't put two Jews in a room and not come out with at least three opinions. The culture, the nation, the everything, is or should be based on the Halacha. Without Halacha, we are nothing, and end up worshipping ourselves. That is a narcissism that I cannot personally abide.

Randy Shiner



Why men are running away from Judaism

Rabbi Brackman contemplates reasons why Jewish men, boys are less and less attracted to Jewish activities

Rabbi Levi Brackman

According to a study just released by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies in the Reform Movement, today's women are far more connected to Judaism than their male counterparts are. “When it comes to gender equality or gender balance, contemporary American Jewish life is caught between a rock and a hard place,” says the study’s co-author Daniel Parmer. “Boys and men as a group are not attracted to feminized Jewish activities and environments” the study found.

Commenting on this, in a just published article, Professor of American Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary Dr. Jack Wertheimer concludes that “Reform today resembles liberal Protestantism, where men form a dwindling minority in the pews, in congregational leadership, and in the seminaries. Even within Reform few count this fact as a sign of success.”

What we really have here is the law of unintended consequences. As Wertheimer notes the Reform Movement wanted to include those who were perceived to have been marginalized by traditional Judaism. They therefore gave women the same roles as men within synagogue services. This strategy has now backfired terribly and as women became more involved, men started to move away. Ironically we have now come full circle with the Reform Movement experimenting with all men synagogue services to attract the men back.

'Inflicting more damage than good'

The problem the Reform Movement is facing is simple. They dismissed the possibility of there being deep wisdom within traditional practices. This lack of respect caused them to do away with many of them. In doing so, however, they ended up inflicting more damage than good. In fact there is wisdom in having men run synagogue services.

It is now almost universally accepted that whilst men and women are equal they are different. There are always exceptions, but, one can safely say that for men public recognition and a feeling of being needed is a great motivator especially when it involves doing something voluntarily.

Despite some exceptions, on the whole it can be argued that women simply do not need the same amount of communal acknowledgment to be 'Jewishly' involved and inspired. This assertion is backed up by the abovementioned Hadassah-Brandeis study which found that within Reform families, fathers participate much less than mothers in the Jewish upbringing of the children

In light of this there is tremendous wisdom in having only men lead synagogue services. The Reform experiment of allowing women that position has made men feel that they are no longer really needed in the synagogue – women can take their place as part of a Minyan. In addition the male sense of being uniquely acknowledged by the community has been taken away from them—women can lead the services, read from the Torah instead. Add to this the fact that the Reform movement fails to offer a spiritual dimension and male motivation to be involved with synagogue life and therefore Judaism has been completely removed.

While it is certainly important for women to have leadership roles within the Jewish community – and tradition acknowledges and supports that, room must be given for men to gain religious recognition that is uniquely their own. For centuries leading synagogue services was how they did this.

This study should be yet another wake up call for all of us who care about Judaism and its future. We must initiate a back to basics campaign for Jewish life in the United States and Europe and educate people about the immense wisdom inherent in the wonderfully rich and beautiful practices that are traditional Judaism.

Rabbi Levi Brackman is executive director of Judaism in the Foothills . His upcoming book , "Jewish Wisdom for Business Success", is set to be published in late 2008.

On Ultra-Orthodoxy

The problem is the Israeli Rabbinate who get to define what "Jewishness" is, as though anyone has a monopoly on the truth. I have friends who are living examples of the horror stories that Gershonberg spoke of. The political dominance of the current Israeli rabbinate is the direct result of a political compromise made, of course, in 1948, because Ben Gurion needed them to form a government. It has become a source of divisiveness and controversy and unless they let go, it will ultimately spell the end of Judaism -- look at the levels of secularity in Israel. If I had a choice between the Israeli rabbinate and secular, I'd pick secular. Is there any wonder why the Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox are not strong in Israel? They are not welcome relgiously; if they told me I couldn't get a religious ceremony there, I would gladly raise my middle finger at "official Judaism", too. The reality is as you say it: our commonalities far outweigh our differences, but it is not politically feasible for the Israeli Rabbinate to give it up. What's in a name? A rose by any other name smells as sweet. It's not the fault of the style-book writers that the word "ultra" has been made lingua franca. You have, thankfully, identified the problem, and it stares back at you in the mirror.

A Not So Funny Joke

(c)2008 Randy Shiner All RIghts Reserved.


NOTE TO READERS: READ THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST UP TO UNDERSTAND THE TITLE. RS

Julia, shalom,

I hope you had a peaceful Shabbat. I am watching the second of the four NCAA Basketball games this weekend – this is the biggest college basketball tournament in the country and all my (guy) friends are glued to their TVs. Even the Drunk-Driving lawyers advertise during these shows. That should tell you something about this tournament’s importance here.

Anyway, I am going through some old email, and find that I never answered this one from you. I remember when I first got it, I did not know exactly how to answer it. I do now, after reading some mail and journal articles and speaking with people on the state of the Israeli Rabbinate and its role and impact in Israel and, in too many cases now, ours. That it is so difficult there to have a religious, though non-orthodox, Jewish ceremony is impossible for most citizens who are not already “hechshered” by the “right” rabbi, like our ONE G-d gives a damn, is just a shondeh. The whole thing smells of hypocrisy and politics (sadly, the two are the same, yet different all the same) and believe me, if the Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox population of this country were told that their rabbis were not “Jewish enough”, you would see defections and disaffection en masse not to mention a whole lot of middle fingers. An Israeli would be the same as an American.

I no longer wonder why the Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox movements are not as strong there in Israel as they are here. (I attend a liberal Modern Orthodox shul, by the way, which does not believe that it has a monopoly on the truth, as if any human can claim one.) It’s almost that there is a ban on them there, imposed because, as I understand my Israeli history, Ben Gurion needed the ultra-Orthodox to put together a government in 1948, ensconcing them as the final arbiters, seemingly permanently, of what is and is not Jewish. And perhaps over the years, perhaps, there has been made a silent “deal” to leave the “liberal Jews” in America, and allow the situation in Israel to continue.

I predict that at some point, this will become such an intolerable situation – a crisis for the Jewish people’s very existence – that the situation will have to change, lest we cease to exist as Jewish Jews. I realize as I write this that the foregoing is dependent upon the assumption on my part that the basis of all Jews, whatever they call themselves, is the Torah. And no matter how secular you are, because you are Jewish, the existence of that Torah plays a role in your life whether you want it or not. Ultimately, it is definitional for all people who are Jewish. In the end, the ultra-Orthodox regime’s stranglehold on official Judaism – how that Torah gets implemented in everyday life -- has got to end; we are all one people and the schisms that develop between “branches of Judaism” is just ridiculous doublespeak, based on so much distance from reality. (Hitler did not care what Jews looked like or how frequently you attended Schacharit during the week. Or which rebbe you admired most. He made every one of the 6 million dead.) If that religious regime was somehow allowed to exist here, and we had nowhere to go, there would be even more disaffection with the religion and with affiliating than there is now in this country. I am an American Jew and don’t have to live or worship together in the same kind of shul in a state the size of New Jersey whose religious expression I do not feel a part of. So I fully understand the difference between an Israeli and a Jew. Now.

Have a great week. And thank you for opening me to some new thought patterns that feel better, not just about religion, but about Israel, too. When I argue for a new way to deal with the Arabs other than the Likud manner, I know I am not alone in the world. Just here – where if you publicly go against the Likud line, you are “anti-Israel”, “self-hating” “lefty anti-Israel” or something equally as bad and worse. It must stop. The terror must stop. The rockets must stop. There has to be peace. Somehow. As I write too frequently about things and people, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result. I don’t know if I got that from you or not, but it is absolutely correct.

Randy

From: A
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 10:05 PM
To: randy.shiner@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Jewish Joke of the Century

Randy
One short comment
You have conflated Jewish with Israeli.
The joke is about an Israeli soldier, not a Jewish one
Indeed the great majority of Israeli soldiers are Jewish, but there are Druze, some Muslims (a number of Bedouin Muslim men serve in the army as well), and of course Christians (from the immigrants from the former USSR)

Julia

"I Randolph S. Shiner" wrote:
To those not American:

Dan Rather is a famous newscaster here in the States – since the 60s and a former CBS evening news anchor. Katie Couric is the current CBS evening news anchor.

From:
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 8:49 PM
To: I Randolph S Shiner;
Subject: FW: a comment on the media


Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and an Israeli
sergeant were all captured by terrorists in
Iraq. The leader of the terrorists told
them that he would grant them each one
last request before they were beheaded.

Dan Rather said, "Well, I'm a Texan, so I'd
like one last bowlful of hot spicy chili."
The leader nodded to an underling who
left and returned with the chili. Rather ate
it all and said, "Now I can die content."

Katie Couric said, "I'm a reporter to the
end. I want to take out my tape recorder
and describe the scene here and what's
about to happen. Maybe someday someone
will hear it and know that I was on the
job till the end."

The leader directed an aide to hand over
the tape recorder and Couric dictated some
comments. She said, "Now I can die happy."

The leader turned and said, "And now,
Mr. Israeli tough guy, what is your final
wish?"
"Kick me in the ass," said the soldier."

"What?" asked the leader? "Will you mock
us in your last hour?"

"No, I'm not kidding. I want you to kick me
in the ass," insisted the Israeli.

So the leader shoved him into the open
and kicked him in the ass. The soldier went
sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled
a 9 mm pistol from under his flack jacket,
and shot the leader dead. In the resulting
confusion, he jumped to his knapsack,
pulled out his carbine and sprayed the
terrorists with gunfire.
In a flash, all terrorists were either dead
or fleeing for their lives.
As the soldier was untying Rather and
Couric, they asked him, "Why didn't you
just shoot them in the beginning?
Why did you ask them to kick you
in the ass first?"

"What?" replied the Israeli, "And have
you two assholes report that I was the
aggressor?!"