National Scholar Updates

Poet Robert Bly speaks of two periods of “opening” in human life, roughly between 18 and 23 years of age, and then again sometime in one’s mid-40s. The first of these coincides with our college years, a time of notable openness to new ideas, new ways. It was as a freshman at Yeshiva College that I was introduced to serious religion, and I became an enthusiastic participant. My engagement lasted only five years. I was very much in love with the Orthodox life, the practices, and the learning. But for better or worse I had a philosophical conscience.

I entered Yeshiva in 1960. Having no substantial Jewish education--I don’t count the horrors of pre-bar mitzvah Hebrew School--entered (what was then called) JSP, the Jewish Studies Program. The program was led and inspired by Rabbi Morris Besdin, a wonderful human being, gifted educator, and incisive interpreter of the Ramban. Rabbi Besdin was strikingly undogmatic; he loved good, even impossible, questions, so long as they were the product of honest probing. That Orthodox religion could be a source of such intellectual richness was something I never expected—and equally so, the deep spirituality in the air. I felt as if I had come home and to something I had not known to exist.

At the same time I was troubled by the ambitious truth claims of Orthodoxy. Beginning with belief in God and continuing from there, I was less than sure about any of it. Philosophy¾something equally new, equally wonderful ¾was of great help here. My introduction was provided by a visiting student from the University of Toronto, Sydney Goldenberg. There were lots of wonderful late nights in Ruben dorm talking through the thorny questions of faith.

As my engagement with traditional Jewish life intensified, and especially as I was introduced to the joys of Talmud, my theological worries fell into the background. I simply loved the life, the learning, and the community. I spent three years in JSP, and then moved to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein’s shiur in the regular yeshiva program. Rav Lichtenstein modeled what I took to be a very advanced form of religious engagement: intellectual rigor combined with an almost breathtaking humility. I felt a sense of privilege learning in his presence, not to speak of under his guidance. Religion, for Rav Lichtenstein, enhanced the human project; serious religion and serious humanism—a dream.

The Orthodox world to which I was exposed suited my political and social instincts pretty much perfectly. This was in the early 1960s, before many of us were awakened to issues about the engagement of women. But the atmosphere I lived in¾others at YU lived in different worlds¾exuded a sense of fairness and decency, a sense that serious human concerns would never be dismissed in the name of religion. Looking back, it was a world of the 1960s (minus the excesses of that period), and Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik was its inspiration and spokesperson, a golden age of Modern Orthodoxy.

After five years of college¾I had extended college to devote time to Talmud¾I entered the semikha program and the Kollel. But for reasons or causes that I only partly understand, my theological concerns were again becoming prominent. The summer after college and before semikha I was teaching Talmud at YU’s Camp Morasha by day and obsessing by night about theology. By the end of the summer, I knew that I had to leave the semikha program. I had thought through (and under and over) my belief in God to the extent that, as I would have put it, (and this is only a little embarrassing) a just God would understand why I could not believe.

I started dating Barbara Lipner during my Yeshiva College days. Our families were next-door neighbors in Spring Valley, NY; we had met when I was 13 and she was eight. The Lipners were the only Orthodox people in the neighborhood and I spent many Shabbat meals with them. When I left religious life Barbara and I parted ways but then unparted them a short time later. Our marriage¾now 44 years old--was respectful of our religious differences and mutually supporting. Still, our differences, and especially raising children in the light or shadow of such differences, required discussion, work, attention.

And then, in my 40s--Bly’s second opening--religion exercised its magic a second time and I became a real ba’al t’shuvah. (I refer here not to fervor but quite literally to a return to something I had left.) Not that I had resolved my philosophic issues. But life was taking me in new directions that were not to be denied, and I took on the project, personally and academically, of making sense of my religious life. [1] In writing this I am struck by the energy it must have taken, the sort of stress that is part and parcel of such life changes. But that’s not how I experienced it; it was a time of new beginnings.

My wife reports that there was a day she was walking past the dining room, saw me with tefillin in place and actually did a double take. And I can imagine what it seemed like to my philosophy colleagues: One day I was thinking about the philosophy of language--exploring concepts of reference and meaning¾the next day about God. Perhaps this is why God created tenure.

What sorts of things, what sorts of life changes, might move a 40-something atheist academic toward Orthodox life? I’ve addressed the question more fully in an essay, “Man Thinks, God Laughs,” in my book, The Significance of Religious Experience.[2] There I spoke about various life events that contributed to my change in religious orientation. Here I provide only a sense of the new direction of my thinking and feeling.

As a young man, taken with philosophy, Talmud, and such things, the life of intellect was very much a first love. So much so that while there was a place in my life for music, poetry was beyond the pale. I remember trying to read A. J. Heschel, the twentieth-century poet/philosopher of Jewish religious life; the work was inaccessible, far too poetic, too mushy. By my mid-40s, though, my Jungian shadow had begun to emerge: I found myself reading poetry, amazed that I could, stunned by its power. Heschel became available and with his help, religion in a new key. Rationality seemed to pale a bit; Heschel’s emphasis on awe seemed to capture something essential to the life of the spirit.

My atheism, if that’s what it was, did not involve any sort of disdain for religion. I remember arguing with a friend at Notre Dame about the matter. My practice was to use the adjective, “religious,” as a sort of honorific; he, with Marxist sensibilities, the opposite. My atheism was a metaphysical position; I couldn’t wrap my mind around the supernatural. But my finding spiritual power, meaning, solace in religious life didn’t feel like it had anything to do with belief in another realm, removed from the natural world. It’s true that God remained a puzzle; the central idea of religion was what I found the most difficult. But as I gained more than a foothold, it seemed more and more natural for the idea of God to be elusive. After all, I mused, there is a substantial religious intuition that when we try to think about God we are over our heads, out of our depth. Lots of people supposed that God has to come first, then some form of religious life. I was increasingly at home in religious life, even prayer; but lost about what it was I was talking about. Buber comments that it is one thing to talk to God, and quite another to talk about Him. One who attempts the latter reaches beyond his competence.[3]

And so my thinking about religion, about religious life, about God, began to take on a direction. I met Charles Taylor, a traditional Catholic, at a conference in which we both presented material. I asked him about the more theoretical aspects of his religious commitments. “I’m an orthodox Catholic,” he said. “I believe every bit of it, but I have not much of an idea what it means.” And this was not, I believed, an evasion. Overstated perhaps, under-explained, but not an evasion.

My first sojourn in Orthodoxy was a gift of hessed. I showed up in Washington Heights (of all places) and there it was, almost waiting for me. The second time around it was very different. The world had moved to the right in politics and religion. A kind of yeshivish Orthodoxy had become something of the norm, for which the black hat is not a bad symbol. A moment of confusion: early in this period my family was away at a Pessah hotel. I was walking through the corridor, to the shul, walking behind a group of men of various ages, all wearing large black hats. But their conversation was not that of b’nei Torah. I was learning my way around the new world.

The world seemed to have shrunk spiritually and ethically in the intervening period. In America, and noticeably among my students (largely Christian), religion grew stronger but seemed less open, more evangelical (or in our vocabulary, more eager for outreach). The religious humanism with which I had so strongly identified seemed less in evidence. Religion seemed both on the move and more identified with right wing political and social attitudes.

When I was at YU, the learning was at the core of my religious life. And returning to the life, I was eager to return to the learning. I never forgot how to learn; the mode of thinking was deeply inscribed. But Aramaic and the text of the Gemara was another thing; I had only been involved for a few years. And trying to find a havrutah was now a serious challenge.

Learning opportunities were in a way abundant; daf yomi, for example, had become widely available. But the learning that I knew and loved was very different. (Rabbi Moshe Chait, z”l, my former JSP teacher and mentor who had become the Dean of Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Chaftetz Chaim, later told me¾we were discussing daf yomi¾that he was once encouraged to take a speed reading class…and he failed.) Where was I to find a learning partner? I tried a Kollel of Lakewood mushmakhim in Los Angeles. Their offer¾if I wanted a one-on-one havrutah¾was for 20 minutes a week. Twenty minutes! A local rabbi in Los Angeles told me that he could arrange a havrutah. My excitement was short-lived¾seconds¾he immediately added that I would have to pay for it. Not only that but I had the sense that he was thinking about doing it himself. I felt quite confused by all this and seriously considered paying. But Rabbi Chait advised against it.

Rav Chait once told me that the boys in YU were nowadays “not like you fellows were.” I asked what he meant. “They don’t know how to challenge stubbornly, to fight their way to clarity.”[4] I said, “They are frum.” I was thinking about a conversation I had with my brother, about my son who was then about 10 years old and in Little League baseball. I was lamenting my son’s lack of aggressivness. “Of course he’s not so aggressive,” my brother said. “He’s so sweet. You can’t have it both ways.”

During our travels Barbara maintained her observance. Shabbat was a family holiday. But strange things happened in our super-galut world. If we ever make the movie, it will feature prominently a scene of me flagging down a bus in western Minnesota during the winter. It had a shipment of kosher meat from Minneapolis. Among our memorable Sukkot stories: My father-in-law built us a heavy wood sukkah in Minnesota. It protected us from the wind, but we still needed down parkas and a camping heater. The first year we spent there, before the advent our own sukkah, a colleague from biology built a sukkah more or less in Barbara’s honor; he said it was something he always wanted to do. I, severely lacking in the gifts of carpentry, helped him, as it were. A non-Jewish friend looked at the sukkah and commented that he now understood why they didn’t let Jews into the carpentry union. Some of the places we lived lacked anything like a Jewish community. Others lacked Orthodox shuls, or lacked ones in which Barbara felt comfortable.

In 1989, before my return to religious life, I moved from the University of Notre Dame to the University of California, Riverside. I was motivated by a lifelong dream, to help build a first-rate philosophy department and a graduate program that I would have enjoyed as a student. We moved to Redlands, California, a lovely orange-grove town, with more of a Jewish community than anything nearby and a small Conservative shul. My observance grew during this period; as time went on I would sometimes daven for the amud and sometimes give divrei Torah. But I was never at home in the Conservative environment, not even when I was barely observant. It seemed like thin soup with only a taste of the real thing.

After a number of years in Redlands, Barbara wisely saw that we needed a more focused Jewish community, and we moved to Los Angeles. By this time, I had found my way back to observance. We joined a Modern Orthodox synagogue that was halakhically, socially, and politically congenial. But as my engagement intensified, it became difficult to daven there. There was so much talking and the rhythm felt all wrong: rushing through the most important parts of the tefillah, taking enormous amounts of time for more conventionally appreciated aspects of the ritual. Tefillah in a local yeshiva was more satisfying, until it came time for the talk. So I would attend one synagogue and then the other.

For over 15 years, I have been going every summer to Jerusalem. It started with a letter I wrote to David Hartman, z”l, with whom I was acquainted from the old days. I explained my situation and expressed a desire to connect with his institution, especially with its annual philosophy conference. Hartman invited me to the next conference and I have been a regular ever since. Part of what we do at the Hartman conferences is to study talmudic texts; these are mined for their political or social content, but are not studied in depth. And so I sought a more intense learning experience during my visits to Jerusalem. And here a funny story ensues.

The year after my first Hartman conference, I contacted an old YU friend who was teaching at an Israeli yeshiva known to be on the liberal end of the Orthodox spectrum. I asked if I could come the following summer for 10 days to study at the yeshiva. The plan was to go to the Hartman conference and then to the yeshiva. I was told that I could … but a condition was imposed: that I did not speak to the students. It was a bit titillating to feel like a dangerous character. But what were they thinking? Would I use a discussion with students to insert questions in their minds? Why would I do that? A simple question addressed to me would have allayed such concerns. But life is strange, and I moved on.

Subsequently, an old and wonderful friend of mine from YU, Rabbi Yitzhak Frank, mentioned that he had met Rabbi Chait, who asked about me. I told Yitzhak the story of my recent experience. He laughed and volunteered to speak with Rabbi Chait about finding me a havrutah. Rabbi Chait also laughed, and then suggested that he would be happy to help. Strange that a more Hareidi yeshiva was less concerned about the danger I posed.

Thus began my havrutah with Rabbi Menachem Diamond, one that continues to this day. We spend two to three weeks every summer, two to four hours a day depending on his teaching demands. It began as a kind of tutorial. The first day I learned with Menachem was like basic training in the military. I was completely winded after an hour. But over the years, our learning, supplemented by various havrutahs in Los Angeles, has turned into something closer to a real learning partnership. It has become one of the most important highlights of my year.

My summers in Jerusalem, sometimes with Barbara but often alone, were and often are magical. The time often has a monastic quality: solitary and focused on the spiritual. Central has been my relationship with Yakar synagogue, especially with its late Rabbi, Mickey Rosen, z’l. Rosen was or is an unforgettable character, a man of spiritual intensity, so focused on his relationship to God and on the orientation, the stance that this relationship engendered, that he failed to notice many of the things that are prominent for many of us. Davening with him was a privilege and I think he taught me by example how it is to be done. He often davened be-yehidut in the mornings, to minor-keyed, second movements of classical compositions. His religious devotion stood alongside his deep commitment to an ethical stance that was inseparable from his relationship to God.

Twice a year he gave a sermon on unsere; on how our collective self-absorption blinds us to our ethical shortcomings. This would not have been problematic for his Jerusalem congregants, except that his case in point was the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, which he took to be unacceptable. He would lose a lot of people twice a year, but his musical gifts drew them close after a short time. The davening in Yakar was breathtaking, a few hundred people in a small enclosure, singing their hearts out in spontaneous harmony. The music began some years ago, I believe, as the sort of Carlebach minyan that has now become almost normative. But Mickey was not seeking a routine; he was seeking intimacy with God, and so the music was dynamic, alive to the state of his soul.

Here are two illustrative incidents. One Shabbat afternoon during se’udah shelishit (which at Yakar meant very little se’udah, but lots of intense music) an American (without a kippah) wandered into the darkened room. It was as if he were an actor playing the evil son of the Seder. “Why do you folks bother with all these little silly, picky details?” he asked. Rabbi Rosen looked at him, unruffled, “It’s the way we express our intimacy.” The comment took me a year or so to assimilate fully. It seemed to me to suggest a new way to think about the hukim, more generally about mitzvoth and their details the point of which are obscure.

A second incident: I gave a lecture at Yakar on the thought of Wittgenstein, a terribly difficult but profound thinker. Perhaps I should not have volunteered to do so, and I was not happy with the lecture; Wittgenstein is simply too difficult to try to unravel in an hour or so. During the question period, someone asked a penetrating question about which I needed to think. So I paused and thought about it a moment and responded. Several hours later, Mickey and I were visiting a friend in a hospital and the friend asked how my lecture went. I told him that I wasn’t happy with it. Mickey commented that he didn’t know about that, but that when someone asked a good question, I paused for a full 30 seconds before replying. The report was meant as a high compliment.

There is an aspect to my religious attitude, to my religious being, that I hesitate to highlight here. I am not an Israeli and so I speak very hesitantly about Israeli politics and policy. This is not because “if one doesn’t live there and share the risk, one should not offer opinions.” Indeed, when Ehud Barak sought compromise, right-leaning American Jews did not hesitate to criticize in very strong terms. They did so out of care and concern for Israel. My hesitation instead reflects my belief that unless one lives in the country, day by day, one’s perspective is partial and limited. When I am in Israel for even a few days, I feel an intangible sense of an enlarged perspective. So viewing things from a distance, even if it has some advantages, has serious disadvantages. At the same time, Israel is my other home, one that I love and honor, one about which I feel an enormous pride, a place whose history and policies are of great interest and concern. It has always seemed strange in the extreme that criticism of the State’s policies are seen by some as disloyal or as indicating a lack of support. This is not the place for the sort of extended discussion that the matter deserves. But I do feel an obligation to read, to think, to learn, to support policy where that seems right and to criticize forthrightly when that is what is called for.

A final word about the religious life for which I am so grateful, actually about the question of how to describe that life, and how to describe myself as a participant. There are some words, “Impressionism” comes to mind, that are introduced into the language by opponents or critics of the designated movement. “What you are doing is mere impressionism” was originally hardly a compliment. But the term stuck and eventually was adopted by those we call the Impressionists. “Obamacare” is another. And “Orthodoxy” in the context of religious Judaism is a third. The word literally means “correct belief” and its appropriateness to our religious ways seems to me questionable. Perhaps it’s no worse than “Judaism,” which suggests an ideology, an “ism.”

________________
[1] See my book, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collection of essays written over a 15-year period, all aimed at the project mentioned.
[2] Oxford University Press, 2012.
[3] As Larry Wright would put it.
[4] I’m reconstructing our conversation.

I.
Let’s start with “Elohenu she-baShamayim.” It’s a Passover counting song.

Most of the Sephardic songs I know I learned from my father. Until I was twelve we lived in Manhattan, but when we learned to be Americans by moving to the suburbs, we got a new activity in our lives—one that nearly all Americans practice day in and day out—regular bouts of riding in the car. For some reason, whenever my mother was driving with me over the Atlantic Beach Bridge from forays to the supermarket or to the bakery for a Jewish rye, the dashboard of our pea-green stub-nosed 1950 Dodge would smoke. The upward lilting smoke accompanied terribly tense conversations about hairstyles or other deeply painful mother-teenage daughter issues. Driving in general did not suit my mother’s Bronx Turkish temperament, if you’ll forgive a stereotype; it made her anxious; it did not come naturally to her. Within a few years, she rebelled entirely against the suburban life, and we moved back to the city, where she could go to Carnegie Hall or a museum in a civilized way, by subway or cab or on foot, and could get a job as a payroll secretary.

During the suburban interlude, my father, as the provider who had to drive from Long Island to his office in Brooklyn, had the better car, a 1958 two-toned blue Dodge with tailfins (!); he had acclimated far better to this American business of driving because he’d been doing it for years. As a man, he had no gendered driving dysfunction, although I did realize years later that all along he had this habit of putting his foot up and down on the gas pedal, as if he hadn’t really decided yet to go forward body and soul with being a high-fueled American. One summer I took a job at another branch of his company in Brooklyn, and so we had a steady two months of car-rides to Brooklyn and back, he dropping me off on the way to his office and later picking me up. This was a good routine. During these rides, father and daughter in a legitimate business enterprise could reap all the rewards of time together, and it was not surprising that he used the time to sing me songs, or to teach me how to say it’s raining in Italian (piove!), or the nursery rhyme by which he learned the French vowels in Turkey in 1909. The songs he loved to sing while driving were mostly those he learned from his mother. Sephardic songs belonged to women, because men sang the liturgy of prayers and blessings. Singing his mother’s songs called up all the pleasures of being a treasured son. He also loved his father’s blessings, and sang them at the table or at synagogue with conviction in a happy natural way, but those didn’t come up in the car.

We’ll get to the car songs shortly, but “Elohenu she-baShamayim” calls out to me first because, although my father learned it as a child, with all the excitement that followed, a world war in Turkey and the American twentieth century, he forgot the song until about 75 years after he learned it, when I commandeered my family to take a weekly class with me given by Joe Elias, the son of a Monastirli cantor, at the Hebrew Arts School on West 67th Street in Manhattan. My family included my Sephardi-looking Ashkenazi husband, our youngest babe in utero, and then in arms, and my father and mother. Although my mother had disdain for Turkish songs, which she’d grown up with from brittle heavy 78s played with unconscionable frequency by her parents, and rowdy Saturday night Turkish musical gatherings in the Bronx, she rose to join any activity that got the family together and brought social focus to the week. Our oldest son, at ten years old, along with our seven-year-old, managed to elude this weekly gathering. For an hour or so one night a week for two years, a bunch of us sat in a little circle learning songs that Joe remembered from his mother and collected from women informants. He’d been a District Superintendent for the Board of Education, but his passion was the repertoire of songs that his mother knew by heart, hundreds of them, and I gather—I found this out many years later—that Rabbi Marc Angel, descended from the Jews of Turkey and Rhodes, had encouraged him to perform and preserve. My cousin, Elliott Kerman showed up also, Elliott soon founding his well-known barbershop, doo-wop, and pop Rockapella; while his group’s usual fare was great snappy black t-shirt choreographed popular love and zombie songs, he was still drawn to the Zamir Chorale and Sephardic songs. Elliott’s grandmother—did he know this?— my father’s sister Esther, had been a beloved kanoun (zither) player in Turkey as a girl. We sat around Joe’s small classroom, listening to his stories, and singing through his self-published 20-page photocopied song-books, rich with Isaac Levy folk music collection borrowings and with black and white cartoonish covers showing a mustached oud player in a fez and a tall thin festively dressed woman holding high a tambourine. Joe mostly played the guitar, his foot on the chair, his guitar propped up on his knee, and especially after retiring from the Board of Education went on to play concerts here and in Israel, finding especially rapt audiences in Florida. It was a point of pride with him that he was an authentic Sephardic singer, as opposed to many people springing up on the concert circuit. He never said anything like purity of blood, of course, because of the phrase’s provenance in Spain, but the many Johnny-come-latelies who sang Sephardic songs earned a certain dismissal from him. He was the real thing.

And his son Danny played (and still plays) a superb Balkan clarinet. Joe never mentioned that a truly authentic Sephardic singer would be a woman. He had a corner on the market, and while he generously had us share in his glory—we performed at street fairs and at the Sephardic Home for the Aged—my dad and I did one song with my new baby in my arms, written up in, not the Huffington Post, but the Sephardic Homes News; and another day our middle son belted out a song with us on the Lower East Side. But Joe was the professional and a total pleasure, and we were the tag-alongs, and rightly so.

When Joe introduced a variant of Elohenu one evening, what a gift. Although my father’s version was slightly different, here was a cherished counting song thrillingly recovered from my father’s Ottoman era. My father ignored Joe’s wording, more complicated and less appealing than his own, but regained a piece of his Anatolian-peninsula childhood. And once he reclaimed it, there it was for the rest of us, for every Passover thereafter for our sons and, among others, the extended Elliott Kerman clan. I eventually created a brief song sheet for these seders; and as my father passed into his eighties and nineties, his eyebrows ever bushier, we kept up the validation of generations celebrating the same holiday with the same song. “Elohenu” didn’t displace “Dayenu,” or “God of Might,” or the Ashkenazic version of Mah nishtanah ha laila hazeh, but there it was:

Eloheno she-baShamayim, el dio nos yeva a Yerushalaim (the refrain, our God in the heavens will bring us to Jerusalem).
Kualo es el uno? Uno es el Kriador, Barukh Hu uBarukh shemo (bless Him, bless His name).
Kualo son los dos? Dos, Moshe y Aron, Uno es el Kriador, Barukh Hu uBarukh shemo.
Two is Moshe and Aaron. Three is our three fathers, four, the four mothers of Israel, five, the five books of the Law, six, six days of the week, seven, seven days counting Shabbat, eight, eight days for berit milah, nine, nine months of pregnancy, ten, ten commandments of the Law. The Spanish is so easy, the concepts so central to what matters in life, and no small thing too that the mamas numerically beat out the papas.

Kualo son los tres? tres, muestros padres son.
Kualo son los kuatro? kuatro madres de Israel.
Kualo son los sinco? sinco libros de la ley.
Kualo son los sesh? sesh dias de la semana.
Kualo son los siete? siete dias kon Shabbat.
Kualo son los ocho? ocho dias de berit milah.
Kualo son los mueve? mueve meses de la pregnada.
Kualo son los diez? diez komandimientos de la ley.

Going past verse ten has never been of interest; ten verses are enough. And my father never talked about the 50,000 Salonika Ladino-speaking Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He was very focused on the present, and if he read the December 6, 1983 New York Times article Joe handed out about the horror of that decimation, my father never mentioned it. For him, a song reclaimed was a happiness reclaimed. Incidentally, I added to the song sheet the Ladino chant, when you hold up the matzah, which everyone knows in English, but here it is in Ladino: Este el pan de la africion ke komyeron muestros padres en tierra de Ayifto, todo el ke tiene hambre venga i koma, todo lo ke tiene de menester, venga y paskue, este anyo aki, el anyo ke viene en tierra de Yisrael, este anyo siervos, al anyo ke viene en tierra de Yisrael, hijos foros. My father always sang this at Passover, and I finally realized what it was and put it on our Passover song sheet. It’s in Rabbi Angel’s Sephardic Haggadah, be assured.

II
The second song is a one-line lullaby. I think it’s a Turkish song translated into Ladino, and the words say “Ya se va durmir,” and then the child’s name. Lullabies usher a child into the sweet nether world of sleep. Joe Elias didn’t know this one, and I’ve never seen it in a book. But the simple words are so-and-so is falling asleep already; that’s it. The line is repeated three times, and then a fourth time without the child’s name. I think it was my father who sang this to me at bedtime when he happened to be home on time; my mother didn’t go in for this kind of stuff. But over and over again, with a modal twang, the words kept coming, lulling the child to sleep gently and ineluctably, as if someone simply made up the line as an easy way to soothe a child to rest. I in turn sang it to my children. And then when my father was on East 5th Street in Dr. Nichols’s nursing home at the end of his one hundred years of life, and struggling with the inability to be his charming instructive optimistic self, I placed my cool hand on his forehead, to soothe him with Ya se va durmir, Victor, Ya se va durmir ir ir ir , Vi i i i i c tor, Ya se va durmir ir ir ir , Vi—i ictor, Ya se va durmir-ir ir ir ir . It’s possible my father’s mother sang this song to me, but I doubt it. I think it was just my father, whispering like Athena into my ear, and calming me from the uproars of family life.

I don’t know that I actually ever heard my father’s mother sing any of these songs which he told me she’d taught him. Knowing that she’d sung them to him was just a fact of my growing up, but I don’t think I ever experienced it directly. The singing came down to me as a gift from her via my father.

III
And so, did I ever hear my father’s mother actually sing “Ken ve va kerer a mi?” Probably not, but this one was definitely for the car. And soon I was wailing out the chorus along with my father, Who is going to love me, who is going to love me, Sabiendo ke yo te amo y me muero de amor de ti, knowing I love you, your love is the death of me, as if the greatest questions of life were decided in Ladino driving on Flatbush Avenue, famously the longest street in the world, or so said my father. But it was the song she sang most often, he told me. Who is going to love me, you’re abandoning me for another woman. Why such sad lyrics, why such a tragically bitter song when my father’s father was truly a good Jewish man, and my father’s mother such a well-loved joyful woman? Yo me acodro de aquella noche, cuando la luna me enganyo (I remember that night when the moon tricked me!). Why did she take such pleasure in those lines? The song said, She fell in love, and the man abandoned her. And my father’s mother sang it with zest and force of spirit!

Why?

Ethnomusicologist Dr. Judith Cohen tells me this song was not from medieval Spain (people erroneously think most Sephardic songs are from medieval Spain—forget it!). Probably instead, she said, Ken me va kerer a mi was one of many modern songs that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spain and reached Ottoman Sephardic communities “through touring Spanish singers, and perhaps on the ‘new’ phonograph machines. Istanbul,” says Judith, “was a very early center of the recording industry.” We can picture that the song became very popular.

The feisty woman’s complaint emboldened popular singers, who began to make their way across the cultural landscape with aplomb. The very idea of a woman’s song must have lit up women’s lives and made a lament into a complaint, capturing all the intention of a woman’s purpose-driven hectic domestic life to survive in tough times, even with sunny Turkish skies above. Who is going to love me, you tricked me, you abandoned me for another woman, you know well I have a son, he was born from that misery, I was so disgraced even my mother abandoned me, tomorrow night I’m going to make my way with my son to the salty sea, to throw away all my sins, because I know that I am going to die. None of it was true to my father’s mother’s circumstances. It was the very differentness that appealed.

Above all, this was entertainment—and entertainment before technology took over and made women singing while cooking a thing of the past. But the feeling of heroism in the angry singer made this song a live rebuttal to whatever might face her on the horizon, whether a great war at home, or transporting herself and her husband and six children across the seas to a new land.

IV
The fourth song is famous, “Arboles”—Trees Cry for Rain. This was a great car song. Readers probably know it. Arboles yoran por luvyas, montanyas por ayres (trees cry for rain, mountains for wind). Then my father and I sang it at my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party. We sang it at the microphone to the gathered guests. I was newly pregnant with my third child and we sang in Ladino, Trees cry for rain, so do I cry for you, my beloved. Come hither, my beloved, come, come see me; I want to speak but cannot, my heart sighs. Come hither, my beloved, and we’ll unite—aunaremos! See that word una in the middle of the Spanish word a-una-remos—let’s become one.

Now here’s the thing about this song. It’s so famous that there are books named after it, and videos. The internet and YouTube have many versions of it. But there’s a chorus that my father never sang. It’s a key part of the song, but my father never sang it, and neither do we: Penso y digo, ke va ser de mi? En tieras ajenas no puedo bivir (I think—I ask—what will become of me?—I cannot live in foreign lands).

It’s easy to imagine the song is about the expulsion from Spain, or about leaving beautiful Turkey when there was no way to make a living there. How can we sing in foreign lands? My father never wanted that lament—or maybe his mother simply never sang it, and he’d never heard it. Arboles for him was simply a love song. There was something poignant about my father wanting to sing that song, when his relationship with my mother was stormy and vexing. But, as always, joy was uppermost, celebrating a fifty-year marriage and children and grandchildren represented the best happiness. My husband and I and three sons sang Arboles at our eldest son’s wedding this August at a state park in Oregon. Enfrente de me, ay un angelo, con dos ojos me mira. Avlar kero i non puedo, mi korazon suspira (an angel stands before me looking at me with her beautiful eyes, I want to speak and cannot, my heart sighs). Hello and welcome to our new daughter-in-law.

V
At many weddings, a famous song that gets many women onto the dance floor is the Misirlu. Women, and often men too, get up to join this Greek dance, a single line winding in and around the dance floor. I get up with them, but for me, the Misirlu is first of all a song. My father’s mother was quiet and soft-spoken in her old age, while my mother’s mother could be brash and mean, although always interesting, and excited about being in the world. My brash mother’s mother used to sing the famous Greek song about the alluring Egyptian girl, Misirlu. It would be bedtime and my sister and I would be in bed, and I’d call her and say, Grandma, sing us Ach ya habibi (that’s the refrain, but also the title we used for the song). She’d come in, a big woman with stature and a Turkish hauteur, she’d sit down in my room on the edge of my bed with all her many bangle bracelets on her arm. She’d get a diva-ish Turkish puckering of her lips, and start with a low mysterious sweetness,
O polimo I gli casu imay ya (my little bird, you’re sweet),
O polimo I gli casu imay ya
Ach ya habibi, ah ya haleli, ah (my dear, my beloved, o my love),
Mono no si klepso (I will steal her away)
Mam aptin ara pia (from Arabic lands).
Aah, a-ah ah, ah ah ah, a a Ah, Misirlu.

This grandmother in front of the house once when she didn’t realize that I, a little bit of a thing, was right behind her, stepped back landing hard on my foot. Grandma, I piped up bravely, you stepped on my foot. Don’t you say you’re sorry? From the perch of her grand height, she glanced around and down at me, and pronounced magisterially, You’re lucky I didn’t press. I was. But at bedtime, I’d say, grandma, do the head thing. She’d sing a little, put her arms up over her head, her arms with her twenty bangle bracelets, as her head slid forward and back like a belly dancer’s, awing her grand-daughters in pajamas. It’s clear most people are cheated and unaware that Misirlu is a song, one of the richest in the world’s repertory. Its haunting sensual melody has long been famous, used in many movies, like Pulp Fiction. Let’s not get this wrong. This is not a Ladino song, but a Greek song. Sephardic songs include French, Greek, Turkish, and Hebrew songs. What they reflect is a predilection to make the entertainment of singing a part of daily life, in whatever guises or languages or occasions present themselves.

VI
As I said, my mother didn’t hold much truck with Turkish or Ladino music. She decided early that the patriarchal unfairness inflicted upon her by her father was attributable to Judaism itself. She certainly didn’t want to buy into that worldview at a time when American culture was sweeping women into the future. She found the Metropolitan Opera elevating, a key to the future somehow of the savvy woman. She went with her brother and sister-in-law and took my father along to all the operas, and bought the librettos, those soft gray-clad somber treatises on women’s tragedies and comedies sung into high-class art.

But there was one song that made her laugh. It would pop out of her without her thinking about it, because it represented a salty rebelliousness that fit her refusal to be brought up a second-class citizen as a girl. The song was “La Vida Do Por El Raki.” That means I’d give my life for raki, a potent licorice-flavored brandy, and my mother was all too happy to sing its pleasures and the raffishness it liberated in her from the tight constraints she felt her father represented, for instance: no college, you’re a girl. So she could sing it and feel Free! Rakish and raffish, she’d sing La vida do por el raki, no puedo yo desharlo, de bever nunca me arti de tanto amarlo (I give my life to raki, I can’t stop drinking it because I love it madly.) Of course, it didn’t matter that her father loved the song as well, her mother too. It threw everyone in together to a great need for singing, for the wish to be free of impossible constraints. Kuando esta en el baril, el no avla del todo, kuando me ago yo kandil, ago bayuos de lodo (when it’s in the barrel, it doesn’t say a thing to me, but when I’m drunk, I go down in infamy). Me siento yo ijo varon, me siento yo primario, sin tener liras en el kashon, me siento milionario (I feel myself a young man, I feel myself top dog, without liras in the cashbox, I’m a millionaire). La vida do por el raki.

VII
Here’s the seventh song, “Oseh shalom bimromav.” At our youngest son’s bar mitzvah, after my mother and I did the hamotzi (this was unusual, but fine), my father asked me to remain at the front of the gathering. So there he and I stood, and when he began singing “Oseh shalom,” I joined in and everyone joined in. It’s that way with the important songs. We know them. We know them well, from our whole lives. “Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleynu, ve’al kol Yisrael ve’imru amen.” The song is simple and short. No one has to think, do I know the words? It’s right there. Here’s how Rabbi David de Sola Pool translates it, “May He who creates the harmony of the spheres, create peace for us and for all Israel: and say ye, Amen.”

Coda
My mother’s name was Estelle or Stella, like the word Estrella pronounced Streya, meaning star, and although she was a difficult impetuous woman, no one could help loving her force of spirit. So another song reminded us of what she was about, “Streya Biva,” which ends very differently from the songs in which the lover throws herself tragically into the sea. “Streya Biva” is a new addition to our family songbook. My middle son took it up from our reconstructed Ladino song sheets this year and sang it at a little dinner for my husband and me and his friends, as a surprise for us on a special occasion. When he was a child, I said, I’ll tell you what I want for Hanukkah. Work with grandpa and learn the long blessing that he sings on the first night of Hanukkah. What scarf or book or even jug of honey could compare with that most perfect gift? He got it just right, and, many Hanukahs since my father died, my son has launched into it quietly, bringing light unto the nations, bringing a sense of calm and connectedness. This night at dinner, he sang “Streya Biva.”
Tu sos una streya biva, abaxada de ariva, si venites a tomarme, en tus brasos abrasarme, en tus brasos abrasarme. (You’re a living star, descended from above, if you come to take me, you’ll take me in your arms to embrace me).

Las tus karas koloradas, la dulsura ke me dates, komo ti ya no ay otra, ni aki ni en Evropa, ni aki ni en Evropa (your cheeks are rosy, ah the sweetness you bring me, there’s no one like you, not here or in Europe).

Las tus ojos son brilyantes, parecen dos diamantes, arelumbras korazones, de donzeyas y barones, de donzeyas i barones (your eyes are like diamonds, lighting up the hearts of young girls and young men).

Sos yena de ermozura, venida de la natura, en tus brazos me tomates, a la kama me yevates, a la kama me yevates (you are beautiful, your beauty is natural, you took me in your arms to bed, in your arms you carried me to bed).

In an interesting footnote to Jewish History, we find the triumph of the human spirit.

Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk (1680-1756) was born in Krakow, the scion of a rabbinic family. Newly married and working as the inspector of the local school, Rabbi Falk became a respected community leader in Lemberg, Poland. But in 1702, the trajectory of his life was irrevocably altered. A powder keg explosion took the life of his wife, daughter, mother-in-law and her father. Trapped under debris, Rabbi Falk narrowly escaped himself. While still threatened by the specter of death, he vowed to compose an original commentary on the Talmud. He swore to find meaning and purpose in this tragedy.

Rabbi Falk published his novellae on the Talmud as P’nei Yehoshua, a title that bears the same name as a work of responsa by his illustrious grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel, for whom he was named. In Meginei Shlomo, Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel defends Rashi against the challenges posed by the Ba’alei HaTosafot. His grandson, Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk, would continue the tradition, and do the same in his own work.
P’nei Yehoshua was first published in Amsterdam in 1739. In his Introduction, Rabbi Falk writes:

Behold, I accepted upon myself an obligation and vowed this vow at the moment of my anguish, on the day of Hashem’s wrath – 3 Kislev, 5463 - in the holy community of Levov [Lemberg]. ‘I was tranquil in my home and invigorated in my sanctuary,’ together with my friends and students who were listening to my voice, when suddenly the city was turned into a heap: ‘Overturned in a moment, though no hands were laid on her.’ The sound of a cry was not heard. But the sound of a blaze was singled out, together with the appearance of a great flame that rose through our palace and windows, due to some large and frightful kegs filled with gunpowder. They were the cause of a fire that destroyed the homes, making them uninhabitable. A number of large and very tall, walled homes were lowered to the dust, razed to their very foundations, and thirty-six holy souls of Israel were killed. Among the casualties were also members of my household – my first wife (her soul in Eden), her mother, and her mother’s father. The tragedy reached my young daughter, her mother’s only child. She was beloved to me - ‘foremost in rank.’ I too was among the fallen of this ‘lofty place into a deep pit.’ I came to the deepest depths of the ground underneath, just like under a press, because of the heavy burden of the heaps and heaps that fell upon me – pillars of our home – more than the pillars in a mill. ‘He did not allow me to refresh my spirit.’ My hands and limbs were not under my control. ‘I said, I am doomed,’ ‘with my days cut short… deprived of the rest of my years… I will not again behold a man with the inhabitants of the earth.’

...Therefore, I said, when I was still under the heap, ‘if the Lord be with me and take me out from this place to peace, and build for me a faithful house to increase its boundaries with students – then I will not remove myself from the walls of the Beit Midrash and I will be diligent in the doors of study of topics in Shas and Poskim, and I will lodge in the depths of Halakha, even spending many nights on one issue.’

At the tender age of twenty-two, Rabbi Falk’s life was forever changed. Yet he possessed the strength and courage to execute what would be his life’s mission: To carry on in the tradition of his grandfather and commit himself completely to Torah study. In doing so, he created one of the most original and important commentaries to the Talmud of the Modern Era.

Rabbi Falk became renown for his great diligence and piety. It is told that before he began writing his P’nei Yehoshua, Rabbi Falk studied the entire Talmud thirty-six times, corresponding to the thirty-six lives that were lost in the explosion. Describing an encounter with Rabbi Falk, Rabbi Hayyim Yosef Dovid Azulai wrote, “I, the youth, merited to receive the face of the Shekhina in those days. And his appearance was that of an Angel of the Lord.”

But Rabbi Falk was also famous for his stubbornness. His unwillingness to compromise forced him to move from community to community. He served as rabbi in Lemberg, Tarlow, Kurow, Lesko, Berlin, Metz and, at the height of his career, was appointed Chief Rabbi of Frankfurt am Main. There he would become embroiled in the famous Emden-Eybeschutz controversy. Due to his vociferous support of Rabbi Yaakov Emden, Rabbi Falk was forced to leave Frankfurt in 1751. When he was invited back to Frankfurt several years later, his opponents prevented him from teaching publicly, causing him to flee once again. Rabbi Falk lived in Worms and Offenbach until his death in 1756. And although he requested no eulogy, Rabbi Falk was eulogized by Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, the famed Noda B’Yehudah. Rabbi Falk was buried in Frankfurt, where his grave remains until today.

Since time immemorial, man has tried to comprehend suffering. One may never find an answer to the question of theodicy, but he may find meaning in his pain. As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote:

Suffering comes to elevate man, to purify his spirit and sanctify him, to cleanse his mind and purify it from the chaff of superficiality and the dross of crudeness; to sensitize his soul and expand his horizons.

By transcending his personal tragedy and authoring P’nei Yehoshua, Rabbi Ya’akov Yehoshua Falk would expand his horizons and ours too, as students of the Talmud.

During the last decade, the State of Israel has struggled to refine policies related to conversion to Judaism on multiple levels. There have been a number of conversion annulments, even more attempted annulments, some of which were rejected in Israel’s rabbinical courts. Others were dealt with by Israel’s Supreme Court. There have been hundreds of cases of converts who were unrecognized by local rabbinates, hundreds more who converted overseas and were denied entry into Israel under the Law of Return, and finally, thousands who sought conversion in Israel but were unable to convert through the national system, either because the process was too burdensome, or alternatively, because they were rejected out of hand by the Ministry of Interior.

Is the State of Israel, the Israeli rabbinate, or the Ministry of Israel anti-conversion? If one were to perform a cursory reading of media stories related to conversion in Israel, one might get that impression. As a friend wrote to me recently after reading an article about conversion, “Is Israel simply a banana republic? … Here you have a woman who has converted through two different Batei Din; she is Jewish by any definition (even for the most extreme Haredim); and Israel won't let her live in the country? … I don't know who is worse when it comes to converts, the Batei Din or the Israeli government?”

This article seeks to address these issues from the ideational perspective. It highlights the tension that is latent in the emended law of return from 1971, which enables converts to make aliya and receive Israeli citizenship automatically. It also discusses the role of the rabbinate in overseeing conversion in Israel. Ultimately, it argues that even though there is significant unnecessary anguish inflicted upon converts and those seeking conversion, the issues that motivate the seemingly (and often deliberate) arbitrariness of the Israeli establishment need to be addressed on a more comprehensive level.

Conversions Performed Outside of Israel

One of the great debates of the last 30 years relates to the responsibility of the State of Israel to recognize conversions performed outside of Israel. This issue has a double aspect, since Israel’s political establishment has divided the “recognition” into two areas. For purposes of aliya, it is the Ministry of Interior that recognizes conversions. For purposes of marriage, it is the rabbinical courts who are empowered to certify the conversions.

Regarding the Ministry of Interior, it should be noted from the outset that from the perspective of emigration, the Law of Return’s relevance to conversion is even more problematic than the law’s acceptance of those born Jewish. It is one thing to accept someone based on ethnicity for emigration purposes. It is another thing to accept a Jew by choice. This was made clear to me once by the State Attorney General who asked me, “Why should someone in New Square who has never visited Israel, and might not even believe in Israel’s right to exist, be able to determine who can emigrate to Israel?”

In one sense, this is a compelling argument. On the other, if the thrust of Jewish tradition is to accept converts as full members of the people, and moreover, if Israel’s law (as it currently does) anchors the rights of converts, then the Ministry has no choice but to accept converts.

Thus, the question becomes not “Should the State civil authorities accept converts?” but rather “Who is considered a convert?” This may be relevant to the question of “who is considered a rabbi,” but given the fact that the halakha makes it clear that a Bet Din may be composed of non-rabbis (in addition to qualifying that there is no real semikha today), it seems to me that we need not identify our criteria for rabbis today. Instead, we need to speak of Jewish communities.

During the last decade, the Ministry of Justice has sought to limit the civil rights of those who completed conversions overseas, by denying them the status of a “convert.” Rather than rely on the local Jewish community’s definition of conversion, the ministry has adopted an objective definition of convert: one who immerses in the mikvah; who, if male, undergoes circumcision; who studies a particular curriculum for a particular amount of time; and who lives in the community prior to and following the conversion for a particular amount of time.

These requirements were challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court and in a repercussive decision penned by then Chief Justice, Aaron Barak, they were summarily rejected. Justice Barak wrote:

Regarding the Law of Return, we should recognize conversions performed in recognized communities based on their self-determined principles. For this purpose it is immaterial whether the convert joins the same community following his conversion, if he transfers to another Jewish community outside Israel, and then goes to Israel, or if he comes to Israel soon after the conversion. Regarding this last point it is immaterial, whether before immigrating to Israel, he resided in Israel or came to Israel for the first time after the conversion. In all cases, conversions conducted abroad should be recognized by the Law of Return….

We are aware of the need the State to maintain control of recognized conversions in the context of the Law of Return. This prompted a state's natural need to monitor the process of becoming a citizen in person. Conversion is not just a private act with a religious dimension. Conversion also has a national-civil aspect. This second dimension demands governmental oversight. This should be manifest in our conception that conversions performed abroad be effected in the framework of a recognized Jewish community. These will meet the demands of the Law of Return. With this the State maintains its oversight, while maintaining the connection between people in Zion and the people in the Diaspora. [1]

Chief Justice Barak, who clearly was seeking to empower the autonomy of the local Jewish communities, demanded from the Ministry of Interior to retract their policy and establish new criteria for allowing converts to be eligible for aliya.

Although two attempts at new criteria have been proposed since 2005, this issue has yet to be resolved, and a number of lawsuits have challenged the ministry on this issue, most recently, in 2011. [2]

The issue of recognizing conversions for purposes of aliya has nothing, prima facie, to do with halakha or Jewish tradition. In fact, based on an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 1988, the State must recognize conversions from all of the denominations, Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative. And yet, even this decision is repercussive given the new landscape of the Diaspora Jewish community. Consider for a moment whether Israel ought to accept as a candidate for aliya someone who converted to Judaism in a post-denominational community, or someone who has converted through the internet, or, perhaps, through a Jews-for-Jesus community. My sense is that in the first case, there would be some deliberation, in the second, less so, and there would be general consensus that in the latter case, the individual shouldn’t be able to emigrate as a Jew under the Law of Return.

The confusing (or “banana-republic”) approach of the Ministry of Interior regarding converts is partly due to inefficiency and naiveté on the part of clerks who are unaware of the nuances of the Diaspora communities. But it is connected to the diverse landscape of the Jewish community as well. I have participated in a number of meetings where I found myself as an Orthodox rabbi advocating on behalf of a convert and found the Conservative or Reform movements fighting against me.

Given these complexities, it is not surprising, even as it is disturbing, that the Ministry of Interior has significantly raised the bar on who it perceives as a legitimate convert, and its clerks resort to seemingly absurd tactics to certify a conversion. The most extreme measure of this began in late 2010, when the Ministry began consulting with the Chief Rabbi of Israel regarding the recognition of Orthodox conversions from abroad for purposes of aliya. As stated above, the Supreme Court had already ruled that non-Orthodox conversions were accepted, and because of this, there could be little hope that the Chief Rabbi would certify most conversions. And yet, in response to a query regarding who determines a “recognized Orthodox community abroad,” the spokesman for the Israel population registry wrote that Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi is the leader of Orthodox communities around the world—a statement that I would imagine would cause alarm in the Diaspora.

In the end, the issue has been joined by the Ministry agreeing that the Israeli Chief Rabbi has no authority to determine the legitimacy of conversions. Instead, the ministry committed to consult with the Jewish Agency on matters of “recognized” Jewish communities.

Still, the attempt to introduce the Chief Rabbi into the picture stems from a bind that highlights the problematic nature of the Law of Return, on one hand, and the desire to be inclusive when it comes to converts on the other. Even after the agreement was reached in July 2011, the Ministry of Interior continued to consult with the rabbinate on foreign Orthodox conversions, and the new directives continue to be monitored.

The Role of the Rabbinate

If the responsibility over certifying conversions performed outside of Israel is problematic, the legal status of conversions performed in Israel is equally fraught with tension. In Israel, there are national conversion courts that operate under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s office and employ some 30 rabbinical court judges. For our purposes, the conversions performed in the Israel Defense Forces (army conversions) also fall into this category. These conversions are all performed by Orthodox rabbis chosen by the Chief Rabbi. Then there are private conversion courts, which exist in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform communities in Israel.

The national conversion system is grounded in a pre-mandatory law which enables those completing the course of study and passing the rabbinical court’s test (and mikvah) to receive a teudat hamara, or conversion certificate, which for non-citizens allows for aliya, and for citizens, allows for marriage through the rabbinate. [3]

The following chart illustrates the number of individuals who have converted in the national system in the past four years.

Year FSU Ethiopia Other Total
2007 1864 5538 606 8008
2008 1804 3614 803 6221
2009 1849 3710 672 6231
2010 2159 1813 673 4645
2011 1936 1647 710 4293

During the same period, the Reform and Conservative communities have effected together approximately 100 conversions in Israel each year, while private Orthodox rabbinical courts such as that of Rabbi Nissim Karelitz in Benei B’rak, have moved from converting 20 to 25 people a year to converting more than 400 a year.

The remarkable growth of the Orthodox private conversion “industry” raises two questions: first, why is there such growth, and second, what are the implications of the conversions in the legal sphere?

There are two essential factors that would lead someone to a private Orthodox conversion in Israel: Either the national system won’t accept them as a candidate, or the national conversion won’t meet their own standards of Jewishness. It is this first area that I would like to address in our context to demonstrate that there is a real tension latent in conversion in Israel, even when it borders on the absurd.

The Israeli conversion system is built for citizens of Israel, and addressing non-citizens who seek conversion isn’t exclusively a halakhic area. And still, Israeli halakhists and particularly the head of the conversion courts must address this issue frontally.

According to directives of the Prime Minister’s office, if a student, foreign worker, or even non-Jewish spouse of a Jewish Israeli seeks conversion in Israel, he or she cannot open a file with the conversion courts. First they have to prove to a “committee on exceptions” that they are not trying to convert only to receive citizenship.The committee (or vaadat harigim) is made up of representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, the Legal Department of the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

The committee automatically rejects any application from foreign nationals in one of the following categories:

1. Illegal residents
2. Infiltrators
3. Local residents or a resident of neighboring countries
4. A foreign citizen holding a B-1 visa
5. A temporary resident holding an A-5 visa who has lived in Israel for less than one year

Now this may seem technical, but even if someone is completely committed to halakha, or is married to a Jewish Israeli, he or she cannot even approach the rabbinical court, since he/she is stopped by the committee. If someone does meet the basic threshold, he/she must still demonstrate to a non-rabbinic body that his/her intentions to convert are genuine. This can sometimes take months, and sometimes years, and ultimately is arbitrary. I should note that at present, the functioning of this committee as the arbiter of the future of people’s lives has been broached in the Knesset and is now being investigated by the State Ombudsman’s office. But in the meantime, this issue is still a challenge.
Just to provide an example to illustrate the challenges: I am presently trying to help a woman to convert. She is completely committed to halakhic observance. She was married civilly to an Israeli man more than four years ago. She began the process of converting, and was approved to convert by the State authorities. The rabbinical court demanded that both she and her husband begin a process of study. However, as she became more observant, her husband refused to adopt her full halakhic lifestyle, and recently she divorced him. As soon as the conversion authority heard that she was divorced, the rabbi in charge of the committee said that she was ineligible to convert, and she is now in limbo, unable to convert, but equally unable to turn the clock back on her commitment to the Jewish people.

The director of the committee who has rejected this young woman is the representative of the Chief Rabbi of Israel. As the committee’s regulations have become more draconian, more and more individuals seeking conversion have sought private conversions, in order to join the religious community, if not the national one.

There is an ironic twist to the legal aspect of private conversions. In 2002, the Reform and Conservative denominations convinced the high court in Israel that their local converts should be registered as Jews in the population registry, even if they didn’t receive a teudat hamara. However, today, with the increase of private Orthodox conversions, no such arrangement exists and the Orthodox conversions are not recognized by anyone official in the State of Israel.

In short, the rabbinate—both by trying to play a role in the criteria of aliya of Orthodox converts, and by trying to raise the threshold of eligibility for those seeking to convert in Israel—is actually downgrading halakhic conversions. Because the Reform and Conservative denominations have stronger legal representation in Israel, their converts are actually being treated better than Orthodox ones.

Moreover, even though the issues of emigration of converts or eligibility for conversion are not purely halakhic issues, halakhic authorities are being asked to make decisions on these issues that are relevant to the policies of the State of Israel, something that in the end may undermine both the halakha and the policies of the State.

Future Directions

As I articulated at the outset, the policy issues facing the State are complex. I don’t believe that Israel is a banana republic, but I do believe that a lot more critical thinking must be done to determine how conversion functions in Israel, and how the State of Israel can ensure—in the spirit of Jewish tradition—that those genuinely seeking conversion and those who have completed conversion can be full members of the Jewish people.

Israel is not a halakhic State, and given the needs of the Jewish people today, that is a good thing. However, to allow State institutions, and particularly the rabbinate, to function counter to Jewish tradition when it comes to a vulnerable population such as the community of converts is
irresponsible. Much more advocacy needs to be done on behalf of Orthodox converts so that the rabbinate will not be able to maltreat this group in the name of “halakha.”
Over the coming years, hundreds of thousands of individuals will consider conversion to Judaism and tens of thousands will convert in an Orthodox manner in Israel. How the State relates to them both during the process and beyond will, to a large extent, determine the very fabric of Israeli Jewish society in the coming generation.

[1] Supreme Court decision 2597/99 Makarena vs. Interior Ministry.
[2] Supreme Court case 9411/11 Lidia Bicos vs. Interior Ministry.
[3] This seems to be the perspective of the court although the actual law simply states that someone with a teudat hamara can be judged in the religious court system rather than in the civil system.

Vision from the Prophet and Counsel from the Elders
By Rabbi Hayyim Angel
OU Press, 2013, 368 pages
Reviewed by Rabbi Israel Drazin

This scholarly, very readable, and informative book by a teacher of rabbinical students and advanced undergraduates at Yeshiva University is a superb book for anyone of any religion who wants to learn what the Bible is actually saying. Rabbi Angel examines the nineteen books of the Hebrew Bible that follow the five books of Moses, from Joshua through Chronicles, the prophets and writings. He exposes the plain meaning of the texts, not the homiletical, sermonic, lessons that others draw from them. He also offers some guidelines how to read the plain meaning of Scripture. Readers will discover that many of the books do not say what they think they say and will be enjoyably surprised to learn what they are saying.

For example: Angel explains why Joshua was a perfect candidate to succeed Moses. Both the books of Joshua and Judges report incidences out of chronological order, and the second century CE Rabbi Ishmael said that the five books of Moses also sometimes do so. Many of the biblical heroes had sons who did not follow their ways, even turning to idols. Some Bible commentators understood biblical statements literally that others insisted are allegories; thus Nachmanides believed Isaiah’s prophecy about a wolf and lamb lying together (11:6-9), that animals would become non-carnivorous in the messianic age. Similarly, while many people understood biblical prophecies as predictions of what will occur, others, such as Tosaphot Yevamot 50a, s.v. teda, and Malbim on Isaiah 11, took the prophecies as predictions of what should happen. In fact, they note that many famous prophecies never occurred.

Rabbi Angel reveals that frequently we need to read biblical narratives both forward and backward. For example: “When one reads the narrative from beginning to end, it appears that (King) Solomon failed spiritually only toward the end of his life…. Once we know the tragic end of Solomon, however, it is possible to look back through the narrative and trace the roots of Solomon’s failure to the beginning of his reign.” Angel also uses this reading-back technique to understand other biblical figures. He shows that Bible readers need to pay close attention to the text. Thus, he discloses that some biblical stories, such as Ruth “initially appear clear (but) are more elusive after further scrutiny.” This scrutiny, which many fail to make, but which Angel does, reveals that the “short narrative (of Ruth) captures so many subtleties in so short a space.” Sometimes commentators are able to see problems and need to argue poetic flexibility in their interpretations: Many rabbis explain Psalm 37:25’s “I have been young and am now old, but I have never seen a righteous man abandoned, or his children seeking bread” as “never totally abandoned.”

Readers will find surprising facts in this splendid book. Some examples are: Our current breakdown of biblical books is different than they were in the past. The books of Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah were not divided into two books. Conversely, Psalms 1 and 2 were originally considered by several sages to be one psalm. The order of the Hebrew alphabet was not yet fixed during the ancient biblical period. Some rabbis suggest that some of the Proverbs in chapters 30-31 were composed by non-Jews. Remarkably, the Greek version of Esther, the Septuagint, mentions God’s name over fifty times, but the Hebrew version doesn’t refer to God even once. Additionally, it is possible to read, and Rabbi Angel shows how, that the main character of the book Esther is King Ahasuerus.

Among many other thought-provoking revelations, Angel notes the non-prophetic perspective of the book Ecclesiastes and writes: “Significantly, Ecclesiastes’ inclusion in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and its consideration as a divinely inspired book elevates human perception into the realm of the sacred, joining revelation and received wisdom as aspects of religious truth.”

These are just a very small fraction of the multiple insights that Rabbi Hayyim Angel divulges in this splendid book.

How much legal autonomy—and how much exemption from otherwise applicable laws—ought religious groups to have?
When government grows larger and more ambitious, laying down the law in more and more areas of life, these questions arise more often and more urgently.

It is a common motif that without some “special accommodation” or exemption from various laws, it would be difficult for religious communities or even individuals to live religious lives. If public law forbids employment discrimination on the basis of religion, for example, religious groups have an obvious claim for exemption when choosing their clergy, and a claim for autonomy to decide who qualifies to be rabbi, priest, or pastor.

The controversy in recent months over the Obama Administration’s mandate to Roman Catholic institutions over abortive drugs and contraception is just one example of the almost limitless situations in which the question of special accommodation can arise. Should Native American (or Rastafarian) sects be exempted from drug laws that forbid peyote or marijuana? Should Mormons (or Muslims) be exempted from laws against polygamy? Should Christian Scientists be exempted from laws requiring parents to provide for medical treatment for sick children? Should Sikhs be exempted from laws prohibiting carrying knives in public? Should observant Jewish soldiers or officers be exempted from military uniform rules, which would not permit wearing a kippah? Should religious individuals be exempted from duties that would otherwise be required on the job: a nurse who refuses to assist in an abortion or administration of contraception? A police officer who refuses to arrest anti-war, or anti-abortion, protesters? A postal worker who refuses to deliver mail that he or she considers blasphemous, or (as is now an issue in Israel) who refuses to deliver pamphlets proselytizing for Christianity, or who refuses to process military conscription documents?

In the United States, these questions—as with so many things in American life—can often be framed as Constitutional issues. The first Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So perhaps some or all of the claims for religious exemption must be granted in order to satisfy “free exercise.” On the other hand if they are granted, but people who might want to smoke peyote, marry polygamously, and/or carry ceremonial but sharp knives in public for non-religious reasons are prohibited from doing so, this can be said to be an “establishment of religion”: it would certainly discriminate in favor of religion and against people who might want exemptions from the law for secular (but perhaps for serious or conscientious) reasons. Free exercise and establishment, especially if each is construed broadly, threaten to collide with one another.

The U.S. Supreme Court has followed a notably up-and-down course in recent decades about special religious accommodation. In two famous cases decided in 1963 and 1972, the Court held that the First Amendment requires exemptions from generally applicable federal and state laws unless there is a “compelling state interest” (or something close to it) for enforcing the law—a constitutional standard that usually means the government has to give way to a claim under the Bill of Rights. The first case, Sherbert v. Verner, involved a Seventh Day Adventist who wanted an exemption from a requirement to be available for work on Saturday as a condition of receiving unemployment benefit; the second, Wisconsin v. Yoder, involved an Amish community that wanted its children excused from compulsory school attendance past the eighth grade.1 The Court held that Free Exercise requires a religious exemption in both cases.

But in 1990, in a case called Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court reversed course and said that the Free Exercise Clause does not require religious exceptions from generally applicable laws that are enacted for secular purposes.2 The idea implicit in the decision, clearly, is no official preference for religion over non-religion. The U.S. Congress reacted sharply to the decision by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), seeking to restore the pre-Smith “compelling state interest” standard, which favored religious exemptions. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck back, and struck down RFRA as unconstitutional: Congress has no power to impose this pro-exemption requirement on the states.3 Recently, in yet another turn, the Court tacitly upheld RFRA for religious exemptions from federal laws (although Congress still cannot require such exemptions from state laws).

In practice, there has been less change in public policy toward religious exemptions than a reading of the (somewhat dizzying) Supreme Court decisions might suggest. In the era before Smith, exemptions were by no means granted as readily as Sherbert and Yoder might imply, and after Smith they are still available in various guises. Even in the post-1960s (but pre-Smith) era, the Supreme Court rejected all religious claims for exemption from tax laws; it rejected all claims arising from prisons and the military; it rejected a claim for exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Virtually the only claims the Court accepted were—like Sherbert—for religious exemption from (Sabbath) requirements to be available for work under unemployment benefit laws. And after Smith, religious claimants still sometimes win in the Supreme Court. For example, the Court says that where the government actually considers individual eligibilities—as it does in unemployment cases—it still has to grant religious exemptions. The Court also strikes down laws that it finds to be discriminatory against particular religions or their practices, such as, in a famous case, animal sacrifices by the Santeria sect.4
Perhaps more importantly, federal and state laws—even, or especially, after Smith—have been strongly favorable toward religious exemptions.5 RFRA was enacted by unanimous vote in the House of Representatives (better than the Declaration of War after Pearl Harbor), and by almost unanimous vote in the Senate; it still applies to the federal government, requiring religious exemption unless a “compelling state interest” militates against it. More than half the states have enacted their own RFRA-like laws. Twenty-three states and the federal government allow sacramental use of peyote.

Congress granted the Amish an exemption from social security taxes after the Supreme Court turned it down. Congress granted members of the armed forces the right to wear “religious apparel” after the Supreme Court turned down a claim by an Air Force doctor, an observant Jew, to wear a kippah on duty.

Some of these enactments might actually give cause for second thoughts, even if one supports generous religious exemptions. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, prohibits employment discrimination on account of race, religion, sex, and national origin. But under a 1972 Amendment, religious corporations and institutions may discriminate on the basis of religion.6 (The original 1964 law had allowed such religious discrimination more narrowly, only in relation to “religious activities.”) The Supreme Court upheld the broadened exemption in the case of a gymnasium (open to the paying—not necessarily praying—public) operated by the Church of Latter Day Saints, which fired a janitor for failing to live by Mormon standards of religious practice.7 The exemption from anti-discrimination law is not merely for a few religious groups, under the new law, or for a narrow range of religious employees. Religious organizations employ more than a million Americans, and religious bodies can have large-scale business interests, with a lot of leverage over would-be employees. Churches own (or have owned) a major secular news agency (the United Press International), the largest beef ranch in the United States, and a major life insurance company. With the broad (or over-broad) exemption, there is the potential for enterprises owned by religious bodies to swallow the anti-discrimination law, at least in some localities or in some trades.

Meanwhile, there have been increasing calls in recent years both in the United States and in other Western democracies, not merely for religious exemptions from secular laws, but also for actual power to adjudicate under religious law. There are already steps in this direction with binding arbitration in religious courts: halakhic or sharia tribunals, for example, created by religious groups. An extensive network of Batei Din, or rabbinical arbitration courts, now exists in the United States. More recently, Islamic groups have called for the establishment of comparable Sharia courts. Thus, businesspeople can contract to arbitrate future disputes in a religious court; or a couple might sign a prenuptial agreement to arbitrate family disputes, including divorce, under religious law. Going further, there have been suggestions in the academic literature that “insular” or self-contained religious groups might be given public judicial powers, by analogy to the powers of tribal courts on Indian reservations.8 The Archbishop of Canterbury recently provoked a flurry when he called, in somewhat general terms, for aspects of Islamic Sharia law to be adopted in Britain. The role of religious courts in Israel is sometimes cited as an example of how religious adjudication might function in a democratic society.

In a sense, even “special accommodation” or religious exemption from secular law implies that religious groups must have some autonomy and power to decide, hence in a more or less formal sense, to adjudicate, relevant questions by their own standards: to decide at what age Mennonite children should leave school, for instance, or which day is the Sabbath and what are the rules of Sabbath observance, what apparel is religious apparel, what use of peyote is sacramental, and so on.

The creation of actual state religious courts in the United States, comparable to the Israeli religious court system, is improbable, to put it gently, given “separation of church and state” under the First Amendment. But to the extent that halakhic or Islamic arbitration awards are enforceable in the secular courts, such religious judgments would have binding force under American law. Supporters of religious “multiculturalism” and increased autonomy for religious groups have suggested that the usual rules of arbitration law should be relaxed for religious tribunals. For example, whereas a standard arbitration award is unenforceable if a court finds it to offend “public policy,” it has been suggested that religious adjudication should be enforced by the secular courts unless the judgment is “unconscionable.”9 On the other side, opposition to religious courts—in particular to the spread of Islamic Sharia law—has also grown. Oklahoma adopted a referendum in 2010, subsequently struck down by the federal courts, forbidding state courts to consider Sharia. At least six other states have considered similar measures, which might forbid state courts to enforce the judgments of religious arbitral courts. Along the same lines, after public statements by an Islamic leader in Toronto that only “bad Muslims” would fail to submit their disputes to Sharia arbitration panels, the Canadian province of Ontario now bans the enforceability of religious family law arbitration. In the words of the Premier of the Province: “There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians.” But despite occasional rebuffs, halakhic tribunals and their caseloads—and Muslim interest in Sharia tribunals—have grown in the United States in recent years. It remains an open question to what degree and on what terms the secular courts will accept and enforce their judgments.

The attractive side of increased religious autonomy is fairly obvious. Generous exemption from secular laws and increased availability and enforceability of religious adjudication all provide a framework for people to live more religious lives, under religious law if they choose. These developments empower religion accordingly. They might seem especially well suited to “nomo-centric” or law-intensive religions like Judaism and Islam. After all, Jews are obliged under Jewish law, at least under appropriate circumstances, to adjudicate disputes before halakhic courts and not to turn to secular tribunals.10
When religious autonomy is enshrined in secular law, however, there are potential and actual problems and drawbacks as well.

In the first place, the substance of religious law may be at odds with the values of a liberal society. This arises most obviously on points where both Jewish and Islamic law, for example, are not egalitarian as between men and women. Divergences from liberal norms can arise in religious commercial law and in other areas as well. For example, it may conflict with federal and state antitrust laws in the United States for Batei Din or rabbinic arbitration tribunals to enforce the halakhic principle of hasagat gevul, which restricts competitive business practices that might put an existing business out of business.11

A plausible response to this sort of concern is that a liberal society is pluralist and does not require everyone to live by liberal norms: indeed that it would be illiberal to do so. So long as there are ample choices and full freedom to affiliate and disaffiliate, and so long as the interests of third parties are not compromised, liberal society should not be offended if some people and groups, including religious groups, voluntarily opt for non-liberal ways of life. In the case of hasagat gevul, this runs into the objection that third parties are compromised: that the purpose of antitrust, and of public policy favoring competition, is to promote lower prices and better quality goods and services for everyone, and that the public suffers whenever there is less competition. As for respecting people’s free choice to submit to religious law: the more readily secular courts enforce religious arbitral judgments, the more this implies scrutiny by the courts into just how voluntary, and how fully informed, the parties were when they consented to religious adjudication. Religious communities might feel such scrutiny intrusive, both as to the community pressures which undoubtedly affect whether people agree to religious adjudication, and also as to how much is known in advance about the interpretive or ideological leanings or commitments of particular religious tribunals.

There is also a concern, in terms of social cohesion, about the balkanizing effects of group autonomy, especially where religious groups, identity groups, or other groups inspiring deep passion and commitment are involved. This concern traces back to Hobbes and Locke, who wrote during or just after a period of religious civil war, and it has been a perennial worry in the history of liberal thought.12 The apprehension, of course, is that when such groups are empowered, it tends to diminish their members’ loyalty to, or even involvement in, the broader liberal community. If things go too far, it threatens to begin pulling liberal society apart. This concern has re-emerged sharply in Western European countries in recent years, where Muslim communities have grown, and where Islamic or Islamist leaders have achieved a degree of autonomy under “multicultural” policy. The concern, of course, is that group differences, far from shrinking, are growing more intractable and more threatening as a result of these policies.

If religions are granted exemption and autonomy that others might not be granted, there is also the ever-more-uncertain question of who or what is a religion. When Will Herberg’s famous book Protestant Catholic Jew appeared in the 1950s, it was broadly true that those were the three religious alternatives in America, with subdivisions among each of course, but each with a recognizable identity as well, and broad consensus about what is a religion, such that Americans could feel that they would know it when they saw it. Today it would be fair to say that there is an ever-expanding psychic shopping mall of religious, semi-religious, and quasi-religious beliefs, notions, groups, and ideologies. In American prisons, for example—not an entirely representative subset of the country, to be sure—there has been dramatic growth in adherence to a variety of sects including the Nation of Islam (“Black Muslims”), pagan groups such as Wicca, Odinism, Asatru, and Druidism (often associated with White Supremacists among the prisoners), and Native American spirituality.13 An American court today may confront not only the question of whether an Air Force doctor who is an observant Jew may wear a kippah on duty, but also a case of a Free Exercise claimant who asserts that his religious beliefs require him to dress like a chicken when going to court.14

If religions are granted exemption from otherwise applicable laws, and even a degree of autonomous authority, there is an obvious temptation for all sorts of groups to claim to be religions and to demand special privileges and powers. A well-known but by no means unique example is the Church of Scientology, which began as an entirely secular therapy-marketing enterprise founded by the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, but which went on to claim religious status, partly in hope of a tax exemption. Despite its considerable criminal history by then, Scientology was eventually granted tax exemption in 1993 as a bona fide religion.15

There is a further point, which perhaps deserves more emphasis than it sometimes receives. If the state offers a significant degree of religious autonomy—power over jobs, resources, and decisions that affect people’s lives—it can encourage the take-over of religious communities by authoritarian and factional religious leaders. This may partly be due to the attraction that autonomous power might have for the most enthusiastic people within a religious group or its leadership, who may tend to be the most extreme people.

But autonomy has a perverse logic of its own, which more directly encourages extremism: namely, if autonomous rulings are not going to differ from the rules of secular, liberal society, then why is it important that the religious group should have autonomy? Whereas the more radically the group’s rulings do differ—including the rulings of religious arbitration courts—the more necessary and justified the claim for autonomy. Once there is autonomy, in other words, there is liable to be a “cascade” effect towards more distinctive, which is to say more extreme, positions on the part of the autonomous institutions and those who steer them, if only to justify the idea that autonomy is necessary in the first place.

The religious courts in Israel may be a cautionary example in this context. The State of Israel, as is the case with many Muslim-majority countries, maintains a religious court system within the state framework, with jurisdiction over family law, including marriage and divorce and related questions of “personal status”. The religious courts trace back to the “Millet” system under the Ottoman Empire—where the phenomenon of “Balkanization” originated—and was kept on under the British mandate in Palestine and again after the establishment of the State in 1948. It is common knowledge in Israel that the religious courts have increasingly come under the sway of Haredi rabbinical judges in recent years, and there have been notorious cases of the religious courts refusing to issue marriage licenses where one of the parties is a non-Haredi convert to Judaism; the religious courts have even attempted to revoke Orthodox but non-Haredi conversions retroactively and to render Jewish families abruptly “non-Jewish”.16 The polarization of religious life in Israel, and the growing power of Haredi ultra-Orthodoxy, undoubtedly has complex origins, and can surely not be laid to the existence of state religious courts alone.

But the religious court system, and the autonomous power of the religious “establishment” in Israel, have certainly not stopped the drift towards religious extremism in the Orthodox rabbinic world, nor prevented the estrangement of Jews of various religious tendencies from one another, both in Israel and abroad.

Extensive religious autonomy, in short, can lead to the creation—with state approval—of “islands” of authoritarianism in an otherwise free and democratic society. It can also promote corruption of various kinds, which often accompanies authoritarianism. Corruption, not on a modest scale, has certainly been one of the issues in Israel in the context of religious legal autonomy and political power.

A consideration of these various problems, actual and potential, with religious autonomy is not to suggest that religious exemptions from secular law, and a measure of a religious autonomy, are simply undesirable. On the contrary, they may be indispensable for religious people and groups to be free to live religious lives. Special accommodation of religious needs under secular law, and arbitral “alternate dispute resolution” in religious courts, may actually work reasonably well if there is a degree of moderation on all sides. If the government authorities are basically respectful towards religious concerns—which they generally have been in American history; if a rough consensus about who and what is a “religion” does not break down in a welter of opportunistic or unhinged claims; if religious groups themselves do not seek to abuse either the host society or their own members: then there is the prospect of a reasonable balance of interests. All this presupposes a degree of social cohesion and good faith, of course: that all concerned should be “touched... by the better angels of our nature.”17

Relying on everyone’s being touched by the better angels of our nature, unfortunately, can sometimes be uncertain. It is all the more uncertain in a fractious and polarized society. At root, the question of special accommodation, and of religious adjudicatory independence, arise most urgently when government grows in its reach and ambition. After all, if most areas of life, including those that touch on religious life, are left to people’s private arrangement, then not much special accommodation will be necessary. But when government takes control over more and more areas of life, regulating who shall do what, under what rules and conditions, then clashes with one or another religious way of life are almost inevitable. The dispute over government mandates to provide abortive drugs and contraception, in the framework of increasing government control of health care in America, is merely a well-known recent example.

With a relatively open market in health care and private health insurance, religious institutions needed no special exemptions to adopt their own approaches, on questions of contraception and abortion as on other matters. But greatly increased government regulation implies more uniform standards and rules, and hence more controversy over whether there should be religious exemptions, and if so, for whom, to what degree, and on what terms.

Special accommodation for religion, and special adjudicatory powers, are problematic, for reasons I have tried to suggest. In the long run, especially under less-than-favorable social circumstances, they might not be workable. If not, then society may ultimately have to choose between big government—an ever-growing and ever-more-powerful administrative and redistributive state—on the one hand, and lively religious pluralism and thriving religious life on the other. This, perhaps, is what religious people and groups ought to fix their attention on.

1 Sherbert v. Verner, 374 US 398 (1963); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 205 (1972). Justice William O. Douglas dissented in Yoder, suggesting that a high school child may or may not want to be “harnessed” for life to the Amish community: “[h]e may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so, he will have to break with the Amish tradition… The child, therefore, should be given an opportunity to be heard before the State gives the exemption which we honor today.”
2 Employment Div. Dept of Human Resources v. Smith, 49 US 872 (1990).
3 City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 US 507 (1997).
4 Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 US 520 (1993).
5 The Supreme Court decisions are about whether religious exemptions are required as a matter of Free Exercise by the Constitution. But federal or state statutes are free to grant more “special accommodation” than the Constitution (minimally) requires: so long, of course, as the “special accommodation” isn’t viewed as rising to the level of an Establishment of religion.
6 42 US Code 2000e -1.
7 Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 483 US 327 (1987).
8 E.g. Mark Rosen, “The Radical Possibility of Limited Community-Based Interpretation of the Constitution,” 43 William and Mary Law Review 927 (2002).
9 E.g. Michael A. Helfand, “Religious Arbitration and the New Multiculturalism: Negotiating Conflicting Legal Orders,” 86 NYU Law Review 1231, 1287-8 (2011).
10 Gittin 88b; but see Sanhedrin 23a. See generally J. David Bleich, “Survey of Recent Halakhic Periodical Literature: Litigation and Arbitration Before Non-Jews,” 34:3 Tradition 58 (2000); Michael A. Helfand & Yaacov Feit, “Confirming Piskei Din as Arbitration Awards,” 61 Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 5 (2011). Of course Jewish law does not, because it cannot, prescribe to what extent (if at all) non-Jewish secular courts will enforce halakhic arbitration judgments in cases where the losing party does not submit voluntarily to the judgment.
11 See generally Simcha Krauss, “Hasagath Gvul,” 29 Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 5 (Spring 1995).
12 See Richard Boyd, Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Lexington Books 2004).
13 For the religious situation in the prisons, see the United States Commission on Civil Rights report, Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison, September 2008: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/STAT2008ERFIP.pdf, especially the Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot at p. 118. For a statistical survey of American religion generally, see the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, US Religious Landscape Survey 2010: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. The Pew Survey summarises: “religious affiliation in the US is both very diverse and extremely fluid. More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion—or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation... or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.”
14 Compare Goldman v Weinberger, 475 US 503 (1986) (upholding prohibition of the kippah) with State v Hodges 695 S.W. 2d 171 (Tenn 1985) (quashing a contempt citation and remanding to the trial court for further consideration of the religious claim for the chicken costume). In a nutshell, the kippah lost. The chicken costume, at least tentatively, won.
15 See Hugh B.Urban, The Church of Scientology (Princeton University Press 2011).
16 See Marc D. Angel, “The Conversion Crisis and Challenge” (November 2008): http://www.jewishideas.org/min-hamuvhar/conversion-crisis; Zvi Zohar, “From Periphery to Core,” 10 Conversations 93 (2011). For an account of a case in which the rabbinic court purported to revoke a conversion, see “The Interrogation of the Convert “X” by the Israeli Rabbinic Courts” (February 2011):
http://www.jewishideas.org/susan-weiss/interrogation-convert-x-israeli-rabbinic-courts

The Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem is active in behalf of converts entangled in such cases, and posts about recent developments:
http://cwj.org.il/home/cwj-news/newrabbiniccourtrulingcwjclientsarejewish
17 Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (1861).

The Orthodox-secular rift has threatened the Zionist movement from its outset. To facilitate cooperation despite the deep differences, the "status quo" was established, so that it would not be necessary to deal comprehensively with the place of religion in Zionism and the State of Israel. Piece by piece, various "arrangements" were established in order to avoid making fundamental decisions.

We wish to present a new message: Polar ideologies will be replaced by a wide national consensus. From right and left, from Meretz to the National Religious there will be agreement of a basic principle of intensifying the Jewish identity of the State of Israel out of free choice and not coercion. On many questions of religion and state there is agreement in principle of more than three quarters of the Jews in Israel. The working plan presented below is intended to offer a new agenda for the relationship between religion and the state, rebuilding this relationship on the basis of widespread agreement in principle.

Instead of the tension between loyalty to tradition and reaction to progress, a new plan is presented here. Progress will foster tradition—the Jewish Scriptures encourage progress. The protests for social justice in the summer of 2011 were described in the report of the Trachtenberg Committee—which was constituted in their wake—as encouraging participative democracy. We believe that nurturing participative democracy through communities will make the Israeli society more Jewish and more faithful to tradition. Social pluralism will lead to a flourishing Jewish tradition, imbued with the value of the dignity of each human being specifically, and democracy in general. These values are essential in reinforcing the base of democracy in Israel.

Renewal of the Jewish character of Israel necessitates changes in all sectors of society. We are not making accusations against any sector of the Jewish people. The Zionist majority in the state must assist the ultra-Orthodox minority to renew the learning of core subjects, the obligation to teach practical skills so that its children will be able to participate in ensuring the physical existence of the Jewish people. The Zionist majority should call for intensified Bible studies in the various educational systems, leading to more meaningful participation in the Jewish heritage.

Introduction

The Zionist movement has been headed by "secular" leaders since Herzl's time. Many ultra-Orthodox were opposed to the movement. The religious Zionist movement, established by "Mizrachi," was a bridge between the Zionist faction and ultra-Orthodox community. The vast majority of the religious Zionists in Israel, during the British Mandate and after the establishment of the State, were active participants in building the country, in its defense, in immigration and in settlement.

The leadership of pre-State Israel and the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel political party did not integrate in the pre-State institutions, and the ultra-Orthodox remained outside the mainstream. In their opposition to the secular leadership, they rejected modernity and progress in ultra-Orthodox education. The boys' educational institutions, from haderim to yeshivas, turned their backs on the basic requirement to teach an occupation and to teach skills that enable one to make a living. On the other hand, study of the Jewish traditions was neglected in the pre-State secular schools. In the words of one of the leaders of a secular party: "We wanted to bring up skeptics, and we brought up ignoramuses."

The Zionist leadership entrusted the National Religious sector, in its various forms, to set up the religious and rabbinical establishments in Israel. The heads of the rabbinical establishment declared its responsibility for all of Israel's citizens, but those carrying out the work were members of political parties. The party administration made its impression on the basic structure of the rabbinical establishment of Israel from the beginning.

The crises of Jewish identity, the ultra-Orthodox isolationism, and the decline of the religious establishment all merged together. The rabbinical establishment that was controlled by the political party bowed to the ultra-Orthodox parties and their functionaries. It was not able to inspire a generation seeking its roots. The growth of the ultra-Orthodox population in recent generations has led to abject poverty among them. The increase in magnitude of an education system which does not prepare its graduates to earn a living and support families has become a threat to Israel's growth and prosperity.

However, this crisis offers an opportunity to take a new direction. The ultra-Orthodox community is ready to recognize, in view of spreading poverty, "that a father should teach his son a livelihood" and progress is essential. The vulnerability of religious Zionism brought about the realization that Jewish tradition cannot be placed in the hands of the political parties. In fact, ignorance of Judaism has led to a thirst for knowledge in secular society. This brought about a demand for books from the traditional Jewish library.

Our basic premise is that the Torah was given to all Jews. We hope it will become the common property of all the people. Moreover, the responsibility of participating in the day-to-day existence of the individual, the family, the people, and the State belongs to all sectors of society. The study of the Torah should be the right of everyone and learning an occupation should be expected of all sectors.

From a Political Institution to a Civil Society

The Jewish nation consists of many ethnic groups, with no single religious leader of them all. Diversity and pluralism are its most outstanding characteristics. The religious leadership draws its strength from Jewish communities everywhere. Historically, each community appointed a rabbi spiritually suited to its members. The democratic and pluralistic character of the Jewish people was expressed in its rabbis.

However, after the founding of the State of Israel, the rabbinical establishment was based on a central authority. The Minister of Religion became the main factor in choosing the rabbis of towns and settlements in Israel. However, a religious leadership drawing its strength from politicians and political party sectors cannot be a source of inspiration for general society. The main democratic principle, according to which the leadership draws its authority from society, was neglected.

The central leadership, the government, the Knesset and the law courts, made decisions on religion: the best conversion methods, the most suitable kashruth certificates, the suitability—or unsuitability—of rabbis to serve communities. The political system's decisions were reached, as usual, by distasteful bargaining and not by persuasion, influence, and discussion. Shamefully, the discussions on the content of religion too often led to a distancing between the Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel. The damage to Israel, the Jewish people and religion as a result of the political influence on the religious system was obvious.

We recommend reversing the system and turning over control to the community: leadership and Jewish culture, financial resources, and authority should all be turned over to the general public. Each community will receive a budget according to the number of registered members who pay a voluntary religious levy (as done in some European countries). The community will plan its activities and the level of Jewish practice consistent with its members and its chosen leadership. The rabbis will be employees of the community, as has been the practice in the Diaspora for generations, and not government or local authority employees.

Matters requiring a broader forum than the community, such as kashruth, marriage, and conversion, will be carried out by voluntary community associations. The public and not the government will determine kashruth standards and conversion principles. The state will grant a number of communal associations (the larger ones) licenses for kashruth, marriage, and conversion. The general public will supervise, resolve, and authorize the various bodies to implement whatever necessary.

The range of tasks to be carried out by the communities are described below.

Community

1. A minimum number of people who are interested may be registered as a community and receive budgets according to the number of members.
2. The conditions to becoming a community are holding at least a weekly meeting and promoting mutual activities according to the Jewish tradition, such as prayer, Torah study, and Kabbalat Shabbat. Each community will decide on its character, and there will be no limitations regarding the religious, the ultra-Orthodox, or secular, ethnic groups, or other streams. Each community will decide on its character as it chooses.
3. Communities may become associations. Licenses to grant kashruth certificates, marriage ceremonies, and conversions will be granted to the largest communities.
4. The state will finance the community activities, but not control them. A regulator, and not a director, will prevent exploitation of the communities.

Rabbinical Authority

1. Every community can decide whether to employ a rabbi and the scope of that rabbi’s position.
2. The rabbi will be employed by the community, in accordance with an agreement between them.

Spreading of the Torah

1. Budgets for Yeshivas and Kollels will be transferred, in the main, to the various communities.
2. The communities will decide on the best ways, according to their understanding, to spread Torah among their members and the general public.

Kashruth

1. The state will grant licenses to issue kashruth certificates to a number of the larger communal associations.
2. The communal associations will select a "Kashruth Committee," which will decide on the kashruth policy of the association and will supervise its activities. [1]
3. The kashruth certificates will be issued by the various associations throughout the country.
4. Profits from the kashruth certification will be transferred to the communities, to develop and expand their activities.

Marriage and Divorce

1. The state will issue permits to grant marriage licenses to a number of the larger community associations.
2. Each couple may choose under which association's auspices to hold its wedding, not limited to the couple's place of residence.

Conversion

1. The state will issue licenses to grant conversion certificates to the largest community associations.
2. Each community association will establish a national conversion system.
3. These conversion systems will set up learning institutions and religious law courts which will carry out conversions according to their own policies.

Immediate reforms

Since the Mandate period, the religious establishment was developed with disregard for the local communities. Restoring authority to the communities will require a period of transition. Listed below are changes regarding religion and the state which should be carried out immediately. We believe that within a year it is feasible and essential to improve the religious establishment in Israel. These changes will increase the respect for the Torah and its followers.

Rabbinate

Before the transition to communities a number of outstanding distortions in the Israeli rabbinical establishment should be annulled.

Termination of the ethnic duplication

1. The Israel law calls for ethnic duplication in the rabbinical positions as well as in the various rabbinical bodies (the Chief Rabbis' Council, the body that elects the chief rabbis). All ethnic considerations in rabbinical positions should be cancelled immediately.
2. Only one Chief Rabbi should be in office, regardless of ethnic origin.
3. The president of the rabbinical court will be elected by a committee for the appointment of rabbinical judges.

Time limits in appointing rabbis

1. The appointment of rabbis will be limited to seven-year terms.
2. At the end of the term, the election committee will decide (by a majority of two-thirds) whether the rabbi should continue in the position. If the rabbi's term is not extended, the position will be open to other candidates.
3. Term limitations will apply to all categories of rabbis: neighborhood rabbis, community rabbis, area council and local council rabbis and municipal rabbis.

Council for Higher Religious Education

1. A council for higher religious education will be established, similar to the Council for Higher Education.
2. The goal of the council will be to extend Torah study to all sectors of the population. A budget for this purpose will be granted for a limited period.
3. The council members will be elected from various bodies—the central and local government, the Council for Higher Education and municipal rabbis. The goal of the selection will be to prevent sectorial control of the council.
4. The council will be in charge of deciding the guidelines for the religious education systems' budget.
5. The budget for Torah education will be granted mainly to those who have served in the army.

Kashruth

The word "kashruth" has regrettably become a synonym for shady deals. At a cost to the majority of Israelis who request kosher food and the rabbis who assist them, the various ultra-Orthodox (Badatz) certifications are raking in a fortune, sometimes assisted by the Israeli rabbinical administration in ways that are certainly not "kosher." We have presented a comprehensive proposal for a kashruth system supervised by the community associations, the profits of which will be directed to their wellbeing. Here we will propose principles which can immediately facilitate the struggle against the corruption existing in the present system.

Transparency

1. Each kashruth entity, official or not, will be required to publish its kashruth regulations on an internet site accessible to the public.
2. Each kashruth entity will be obliged to publish the regulations governing its tariffs and the price charged to each supervised entity.
3. All payments for kashruth certificates will be made directly to the kashruth entity and not to the kashruth supervisor.

Non-profit entities

Private companies will not be allowed to issue kashruth certificates, supervise kashruth etc. An ultra-Orthodox entity which wishes to issue kashruth certificates will be required to register as a non-profit association with full transparency.

The Rabbinical Courts

The political party control of religious services to the public and the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the rabbinical establishment are seen predominantly in the rabbinical courts. To our sorrow, we cannot state that the many complaints directed towards the system are groundless. A number of immediate steps can be taken, which will contribute to the dignity of the religious courts.

General Education for Rabbinical Court Judges

The rabbinical courts deal mainly with disputes between married couples. Very often complaints are made that in these courts women are discriminated against. It is also maintained that some of the rabbinical judges are not anchored in the real world. The concepts and world views of those appearing before them are not understood by the judges, who come from a completely different background. On the other hand, there are complaints that the civil judges are detached from the Jewish sources. The following is therefore proposed:

1. Only rabbinical judges with a certain standard of general education will be appointed.
2. Only rabbinical judges with a certain standard of education in Judaism (such as Hebrew law) will be appointed.

Increased Representation of Women in the Rabbinical Courts

In principle, halakha adjudicators do not allow women to act as rabbinical judges. This causes a feeling of alienation in the women who appear before "a man's world" in the courts. To balance this situation it is proposed to ensure a majority for women in the committee for the appointment of rabbinical judges. Our proposal is based on halakha and is intended to improve the status of women. The integration of women in the system, even if they do not preside as rabbinical judges, will improve the attitude of the women appearing in court and will advance the dignity of the court, the Torah and its implementers. The Committee for the Appointment of Rabbinical Judges will consist of: [2]
a. The Justice Minister
b. The President of the Rabbinical Court and the Chief Rabbi One rabbinical judge
c. A female minister (or deputy minister) chosen by the government.
d. Two female members of the Knesset.
e. Two female rabbinical pleaders.
The rabbinical judges will be elected by a majority of seven of the committee members. A female rabbinical pleader will be chosen as the director of the rabbinical court. Approximately half of the rabbinical courts' area secretaries will be female.

Marriage and Divorce

1. Regional marriage registers will be set up.
2. The possibility of civil marriages will be advanced, based on the proposal of Rabbi Bakshi-Doron.

Conversion

The concentration of the conversion system in the hands of one central entity exposes the system to pressure from the ultra-Orthodox. Therefore the conversion process should be decentralized, as follows:

1. Three rabbis from each local committee will be authorized to sign conversion certificates. The "Tzohar Law"—drawn up by an independent group of the younger generation of advanced thinking rabbis—is more extreme, as it permits all municipality rabbis to convert. We have limited this to three rabbis.
2. A convert, like any other Jew, will be able to register for marriage in any place of his choosing.

[1] Some have observed: who will be responsible for the kashruth of the certificate? Kashruth supervision, like all quality control, requires specific expertise and specialization. The sages, who said "go out and see how the people behave," have already replied to this question. To ensure that the relevant experts will be responsible for kashruth one must trust in the wisdom of the people. A license to confer a kashruth certificate will be granted only to a limited number of kashruth associations, chosen by the members of the communities. It is a given that an expert will head the association. The U.S. OU organization is an example. Not only a bureaucratic system, chosen and controlled by government, local authorities and legislators, which organize and arbitrate, can be responsible for food kashruth.
Moreover, the marketplace today, with its many tens of ultra-orthodox courts, some tiny, each of which grants certificates to its followers, will be replaced by a limited number of associations, controlled by the general public transparently. Not only will respect for the Torah increase, but also observance of the commandments.
[2] The committee members at present are: the Justice Minister and an additional minister chosen by the government, the two chief rabbis and two rabbinical judges, two Knesset members and two members of the Lawyers' Bureau. At the time of writing (April, 2012) there is no woman among the twelve committee members.

Identifying the Problem

…the player directly responsible for Hapoel losing this critical game was the team's goalkeeper, Haim Cohen. His amateurish blunder in letting the ball slip through his hands gave Maccabi their first goal, and the second was the result of Cohen's poor positioning for the free kick. Nor was this the first game this season in which Hapoel has been let down by Cohen. His tendency to make mistakes under pressure has surely eroded his teammates' confidence in him; Hapoel manager Aryeh Rubin is rumored to be looking for a replacement...

…but the star of the game was referee Shimon Levy, who capped a series of strange decisions by ignoring a clear foul in the 43rd minute, when Maccabi defender Shai Golan brought down Hapoel's Yuval Sharabi several meters inside the Maccabi penalty area. Had Levy awarded the penalty to Hapoel it this point, when they were only one goal down, the whole game would have developed quite differently. The foul was plain to see and the TELEVISION replays left no room for doubt—but Levy brushed aside Hapoel's demand for a penalty kick. Hapoel's complaints over this decision are entirely justified and should force the Football Association to reconsider whether Levy is suitable to serve as a referee in Premier Division games…

These are fairly typical, albeit fictitious, excerpts from reports on football games. American readers are invited to translate the terminology into that used for the gladiatorial contests they call "football,” but the essentials will remain valid in any parallel sporting context. Player X played poorly, player Y was outstanding, this one did this and that one failed to do that, and so forth. In short, this is standard fare for followers of sports reports in the papers, radio, and television, or for one who shares impressions with his or her friends in the pub, bar, or wherever.

But is it kosher? Is it halakhically permissible to write, read, speak, or otherwise communicate such sentiments in this way?

Let's skip over any potential halakhic issues that may or may not exist with regard to professional sports per se and focus solely on the seemingly minor aspect of the way a game is reported and analyzed, whether in real time or afterward.

From a halakhic standpoint, material such as that above is riddled with major problems. The main problems stem from the fact that in the commentary, reporting, and “Monday morning quarterbacking” that accompanies and follows every game, the people involved are being publicly vilified—the goalkeeper was “amateurish,” he positioned himself “poorly,” he “let down” his team in a critical game—and not for the first time. As for the referee, he is presented as being totally incompetent.

These are serious charges and they run the gamut of halakhic prohibitions stretching from rekhilut, which is usually translated as “tale-bearing,” to lashon haRa (malicious reports) if the material is factually true, to motsi shem ra (slander) if it is not.

Let me stress immediately that I am not interested, here or anywhere in this article, in entering the halakhic jungle of what does or might constitute an infraction of each of these prohibitions. I am not personally qualified to define what does or might come under each heading, but even if I was, the detailed legal analysis is not the issue. At this stage, the point I wish to make as strongly as possible is that the everyday activity of following the news and keeping up with current affairs—via reading the papers, listening to the radio, and watching television—involves exposure to (and likely infringement of) halakhic prohibitions relating to the complex of topics we commonly lump together under the “lashon haRa” label.

Nor is the lashon haRa complex the only set of halakhic issues involved: urging that someone be fired, as the report does with respect to both the player and the referee, is also problematic—on both moral and legal grounds. Talking the same way with your buddy in the bar seems to be in a different category to writing in a paper or commenting on the radio—because the guys in the bar are just “letting off steam” and have no way to translate their assessments of players into practice. Or so we used to think. But nowadays, when thousands of irate fans can write comments on the team's website or Facebook page, their comments become part of a mass campaign that can and does result in actions—such as dismissing that player or pushing the referee out of top-level football. Taking someone's livelihood away, without compelling cause and due process, is not only morally reprehensible but also proscribed by halakha.

What might constitute “compelling cause” and who has the right to decide that it exists, are legal issues. Once again, I am not concerned here with the practical legalities; rather, I seek to create the awareness that there is a halakhic issue, potentially a serious one, in something as seemingly marginal and “innocent” as talking about a sports game and criticizing the performance of the participants (players, referees, coaches, etc.) involved. Certainly, the fact that in societal terms this is considered normative behavior does not make it halakhically permissible.

I have deliberately chosen to start with the seemingly flippant example of a sports report as a method of highlighting some of the halakhic problems that we all ignore every single day. By “we,” I mean everyone who consumes media of any sort. Anyone who never reads a newspaper, listens to the radio, watches any television, surfs the net, or uses social media, is not included in “we”—but if such a person exists at all, he or she is not going to be reading this publication either.

Having made that admission, let me now broaden the scope and, in so doing, deepen the problem. All the issues pertaining to the football game cross over from the sports pages/programs to the culture pages. The book/movie/theatre review is an even bigger halakhic minefield. Cohen's new novel is silly—and downright childish in parts; Levy's performance as Macbeth was shrill, unconvincing, and generally over-the-top—he really isn’t capable of taking on Shakespearean tragedy. As for Sharabi's latest album, it's nowhere near the quality of his earlier ones.

Turning to the business pages, we find Cohen Manufacturing Ltd. reported lower sales and profits last year. The company's most recent acquisition has contributed nothing to earnings so far, while its costs are higher than those of its peers—yet it paid larger bonuses to senior management than last year. The paper's business columnist summarizes the company's performance as follows: the CEO's vision is flawed; management is doing a lousy job; and the board is stuffed with pals of the CEO, who have no compunction in awarding outsize remuneration packages to the CEO and other senior managers. Not only is the recent fall in Cohen Manufacturing's share price justified, it says, but further falls can be expected. There is no good reason to hold these shares at current prices, certainly not to buy them.

Finally reaching the front page, we find that the mayor of a small town, one Shimon Levy, is under investigation for molesting and, in some cases, raping women who sought his help to obtain welfare support. The Trade Minister, Haim Cohen, is being accused of receiving kickbacks on trade deals he was instrumental in negotiating with some foreign countries. And the main headline is that the Prime Minister, Aryeh Rubin, secretly met Arab leaders to discuss a proposed peace treaty in which Israel would cede control of territories it holds.

Back in the pub—or perhaps outside the shul—where you and your friend usually meet and shoot the breeze, you both express disgust and revulsion about Levy's purported crimes. You suggest he should be locked up for 20 years, but your friend says that people like him should be forcibly sterilized—a comment that is overheard by some other people and generates a spirited debate, because one of them is a friend of Shimon Levy and another is his wife's cousin. However, everyone agrees that Cohen, the minister who took bribes (reportedly…) should “do the honorable thing” and resign immediately, thereby cutting short his promising political career.

As for the Prime Minister, the usual split develops between those willing to give peace a chance and those who believe you can’t trust any Arab leader and should not offer them anything. One young fellow mutters that if Aryeh Rubin agrees to an Israeli withdrawal, he should be “eliminated.”…

The Solution—Part 1: Getting Real about the Problem

So it's not just Monday-morning quarterbacking about the sports game over the weekend. It's certainly not just about what constitutes rekhilut, or lashon haRa, or whatever. It is actually far more fundamental than legal definitions regarding specific halakhic prohibitions.

The real problem, I venture to suggest, is this: One of the most important areas in modern life with which halakha has yet to confront, in the most basic sense, is the one we call “mass media.”

The interaction between technological progress and sociological and political development has driven—and is continuing to drive—huge changes in the way people communicate with and about each other. Mass media began in the eighteenth century with the development of pamphlets and newssheets, moved into newspapers in the nineteenth century and then—in the last 100 years—exploded into radio, television, internet, and now, the newest stage, social media.

Yet while all this has been happening, halakha has fallen ever further behind. The primary focus of halakhic concern with regard to the media, at least in recent decades, has been in the area of immorality in the sexual context. Thus attention has been centered on offensive content in the various media, with “offensive” referring largely to the gamut of sex-related issues, from modesty (and lack thereof) to outright pornography, and their impact and influence on individuals—especially children—and on society as a whole.

This is, of course, entirely justified. Indeed, the severity of the moral and legal problems posed by the internet in general and now by social media, is such that it has long transcended religious/conservative groups and is now widely recognized by all parts of society. In the halakhic context, it is obvious that not only overtly pornographic material, but also the use of scantily-clad models in advertisements, involves transgressions of various laws, as well as being morally offensive.

Unfortunately, the focus on sex-related problems has become obsessive and all-encompassing—and this may be the reason why other halakhic problems stemming from the production and consumption of mass-media materials are downplayed, overlooked, and even ignored. I was personally made very aware of the dichotomous and distorted view that religious (from Hareidi to Modern Orthodox) people took of the media when I worked as a journalist. It can be summed up in the reaction of "Oh, you cover economics and finance—that's OK,” which I heard umpteen times, from rabbis, rebbes, and laypeople alike.

That statement is not merely completely wrong and utterly fatuous. It also betrays stunning ignorance of the problems posed by the media. It is, in fact, a far-reaching admission by the person making the statement that Judaism as he or she understands it and halakha as he or she observes it are totally disconnected from modern media and communications—which is to say, from modern life.

For some reason, Orthodoxy has decided to draw the line between it and the modern world on the sex front, but not on other key fronts—such as communications. This is a convenient state of affairs, but it doesn’t stand up to any kind of rigorous scrutiny.

The comparison between the ongoing intensive struggle against sexual license on the one hand versus the lack of struggle over the production and consumption of regular media content, is the starting–point for any serious discussion of “media and halakha.”

Probably the most fundamental question that needs to be raised and to which answers need at least to be sought is philosophical: Does Judaism accept modern notions of free speech? If this strikes you as far-fetched, perhaps you should think again and try not to react from the gut.

It's pretty clear that Judaism is opposed to free sex, free love, or whatever other slogan is used to legitimize sexual license. It is also clear that there are major restrictions on what you can say about people in the context of normal inter-personal discourse—the lashon haRa complex of laws referred to above. But what about free speech as a basic element of democracy, in politics and society? What can you say, in the public arena, about people who are public persona, in whatever sphere?

The question, in other words, is whether it is possible to construct a theoretical framework relating the halakhic concepts defining permitted and forbidden topics of discussion and methods of expression to the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of democratic societies? If such a construct can be developed, then it should be possible to derive practical guidelines as to how to report, comment, and discuss matters ranging from sports games to national security in the various media, with these guidelines covering everyone from participants in chat rooms on the internet to editorial writers in the leading newspapers. On the other hand, maybe the gulf between the demands of halakha and the reality of modern mass media is too wide to be bridged?
If—and only if—such a theoretical construct can be put in place, then it is possible to advance to the more practical, but no less fascinating, question of whether there can be “kosher media.” That phrase currently relates to media that are “clean” in the context of adhering to laws and mores regarding modesty and avoiding content and material that is sexually provocative or otherwise immoral. It does NOT relate to the substantive content of the material appearing in the media or to its implications in a wider societal context, as will be discussed below.

First, however, some comments with regard to the theoretical/philosophical issues. I have not conducted an extensive, let alone exhaustive, search of all likely or possible sources, even those accessible on the internet. Nevertheless, on the basis of the search I have made myself, or indirectly through others, I strongly suspect that there is very little discussion of these issues. However, there certainly has been some analysis, in articles published in both rabbinic and general publications, mostly in Hebrew, mostly written by Modern Orthodox rabbis. Hareidi material on this topic, if it exists, is more difficult to locate because it is not published on the internet.

Based on the material that I have seen and read, the following tentative conclusions emerge:

• There is very little attempt to address the underlying philosophical questions. The thrust of the discussion tends to be practically halakhic—may one do this or that, is specific behavior permissible (in the public arena, e.g. criticizing incumbent office-holders or candidates for office). The deeper issues are largely ignored or glossed over.
• There is a corpus of halakhic material relating to the issues under discussion, notably the works of the Hafetz Haim in the area of lashon haRa and allied prohibitions—although both the Hafetz Haim himself and contemporary scholars use other sources, including the main codes (Shulhan Arukh, etc.) and other important works (such as Rabbi Yonah of Gerondi, in medieval Spain). Although all the halakhic literature, going back to the Talmud, relates to publication or dissemination of information, facts and rumors, innuendo, and so forth in the public sphere, none of it takes into account a culture in which a) the public's “right to know”—and to comment—is a central value and feature of social and political life; b) holders of virtually all public positions are required—and hence expect—to be criticized and held accountable for their actions; and c) proactive dissemination of (partial and one-sided) information is the norm (press releases and press conferences), and/or is obligatory (corporate and other disclosure mechanisms) and hence taken for granted.

• Within this practically-oriented approach, the analysis—even of authors sympathetic to democratic society as we know it—points strongly in the direction of a negative conclusion. That is to say, the halakhic framework makes it very difficult in theory, and virtually impossible in practice, to permissibly produce and even to consume most of the news and current affairs (in the widest sense) material presented in the various mass media. I realize that that is a rather sweeping statement, but that's my assessment of the material I have seen.

• That conclusion is not usually overtly stated, for whatever reason. But the result is that the entire discussion then moves from leKhathila (a priori) to bediavad (a posteriori), which is probably one of the reasons that the analysis is then one of practical halakha: the starting point is, "in the existing circumstances, what can one do or not do.”

• Since the issue is presented as a practical halakhic one, it is perhaps unsurprising that the direction or approach adopted as a general solution is to establish an entity (e.g. a newspaper, or a political party or faction) that is separate and distinct from those already existing in the public arena and to place this entity under direct, ongoing rabbinic supervision. This mechanism, it is assumed and proposed, will enable specific problems to be dealt with in an authoritative and timely manner.

• However, the analyses themselves disclose several flaws in the way the authors approach the problem. The first flaw, as already noted, is the avoidance of an overall theoretical structure. The construction of such a structure is relegated to a vague and utopian future with quasi-messianic undertones—meaning that it's not something achievable in the here-and-now, so let's not relate to it in detail.

• Other flaws stem from a tendency to confuse the problem with the solution or from the unintended consequences of proposed solutions. Both of these subjects need to be considered in greater depth.

The Solution—Part 2: Don't Confuse the Problem with the Solution, and Don’t Make the Solution into a New Problem

In any attempt to define and analyze the problems posed to halakha by modern mass media, it is essential to realize—and accept—that many of the attempts to “solve” aspects of these problems have proven to be unhelpful. That is because either their premise is flawed from the outset—they are unaware of the real problems or they ignore them—or, worse, they become part of the problem rather than comprising part of the solution.

The most obvious and most widespread “solution” to the problem posed by mass media is to categorize the problem as being part of the wider phenomenon of secularization. Since this is, by definition, a negative phenomenon from the perspective of religious Jews, the solution has been to apply the standard response toward aspects of secularization, namely to proscribe it—to make it assur, illegal. However, this negativity is a very blunt weapon and is very hard to live with. The second part of the solution, therefore, is to replace the offensive mass media with acceptable or “kosher'” ones.

In practice, since at least the late nineteenth century, this has been the main response of Orthodox Judaism to the rise of mass media. The main battleground was—and to a great extent still is—print media, primarily newspapers and magazines, but it has extended to radio and, after largely skipping television, is now focused on electronic media, i.e., the internet and its derivatives.

Reviewing this prolonged struggle and how it has played out and is still being waged, it seems to me that it has been a strategic failure, although it may be argued that in tactical terms—meaning the specific cultural battles fought between Orthodox and non-Orthodox in various countries and cultures over the last 150 years—the existence of separate Orthodox media outlets was helpful and perhaps even essential. Nevertheless, over the long run, the attempt to create and maintain so-called kosher media has generated negative consequences that, I would argue, have ultimately outweighed the positive achievements.

The negative consequences fall into three categories:

1. "kosher pigs"
2. "echo chambers"
3. unintended consequences

"Kosher Pigs"

The most common problem resulting from the establishment of "kosher media" is that these are only kosher in some respects, while in others they are as flawed as the regular media. This is reminiscent of the midrashic comment on the difference between pigs and other ritually unacceptable animals. Of the two criteria for "kosherness" laid down in the Torah, namely chewing the cud and cloven hoofs, the pig falls down only on the former. Because its hoofs are cloven, it proudly presents its paws and hoofs to onlookers—whereas its digestive system, of course, remains hidden.

Orthodox media are obviously "kosher" with regard to lewd and sexually provocative content, and this can be ascertained immediately. However, the way they present news, information, and, especially, commentary and criticism, requires much more careful examination. The examination should encompass two elements: what they do report, and in what terms, prominence, and tone? Similarly, what do they not report, or relegate to relative obscurity, or adopt a negative tone in their reporting? Whom and what do they criticize, with what degree of vehemence—and with what motives?

This topic is obviously extremely sensitive, although it is quite amenable to analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Almost all Orthodox media were ideological in origin and were established to serve an agenda, whether overtly religious and/or ideological, or political/religious. Therefore each media form had, from inception, its clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys.”

Furthermore, within the framework of the lashon haRa halakhic complex, there are categories of people—such as "evil-doers,” "heretics," and so forth—whom it is permissible or even desirable to present in a negative light, to criticize, and even to vilify in public. Once a media outlet is established by a religious group with a clearly defined agenda that identifies "them" as "bad guys"—and obviously "us" as "good guys"—then the ground rules are clear-cut. "They" must be either ignored or, if mentioned, then in a negative tone or undertone.

All Hareidi and, over time, almost all dati-leumi media (I relate to those in Israel; I assume the American scene is similar, if not identical), have been sucked into this self-righteous mode of self-censorship, which is usually accompanied by "rabbinic oversight" to make sure the relevant rules are being obeyed. A simple, relatively innocent but nonetheless telling example of this mindset is the following story:

In the mid-1990s, the then Satmarer Rebbe visited Israel and, naturally, conducted large gatherings such as tischen during his visit. The Shabbat he spent in Jerusalem was a major event in Hareidi circles, not just for his direct followers but for many "unaffiliated" Hareidi youngsters. Despite these objective facts—or, more likely, because of them—Hamodia, the party newspaper of Agudat Yisrael and hence a bitter ideological foe of Satmar, totally ignored the visit and the events held during it, although its readership was fully aware of them and many participated in or were directly impacted by them.

This level of reality-denial is increasingly impossible in the modern world, as information permeates all but the most hermetically sealed societies. Even in the mid-1990s it was a pathetic attempt, but it spoke volumes about the theory and practice of Hareidi media.

Yet this is the way Hareidi groups relate to each other—either by ignoring rival groups' existence and viewpoints or, worse, by virulent criticism that is either overt or, in more sophisticated cases, implied through the use of biblical, midrashic, talmudic, or other metaphors, code-names, and 'role-models.’ Obviously, with regard to non-Hareidi, secular, or non-Jewish persons, groups, and organizations, there is even greater leeway, and this license is commonly used, whether to deny or distort, ignore or misinform, criticize, or vilify.

"Kosher pigs,” in short, are those many (probably most) Orthodox or Hareidi media outlets that proclaim that they are clean in terms of smutty, lewd, and sexually provocative content, and that their overall operations are under rabbinic guidance—all of which is true. However, by closely defining their ideology and mission, they effectively award themselves licenses to say what they please about—or ignore—all those persons, entities, and organizations that oppose their ideology, or that have been categorized (by the rabbinic authorities exercising guidance) as opponents.

"Echo Chambers"

The "kosher pigs" phenomenon inevitably leads to a phenomenon known in the media world as "echo chambers"—in which a paper, radio, or television station, or blog adopts a very clear line and thereby comes to attract people who largely agree with that line and to repel those who largely disagree. As the degree of interactivity in media has grown, the responders (in radio chat shows, or internet chat rooms) become ideologically and politically homogenous in a self-reinforcing process.

The result is that readers of a specific paper, listeners to a specific radio station, or viewers of a specific television channel tend not merely to hold shared views, but also to become increasingly convinced of the validity of their views—in favor of this and opposed to that—and increasingly negative toward opposing views.

This is a widespread phenomenon, symbolized in the United States by media such as the New York Times and Fox News, but it is a particular blessing for religious and especially fundamentalist groups and their media. It permits the pretense of in-depth analysis and serious discussion, although the content is seriously—and often entirely—skewed in the direction suited to the ideology of the specific medium. The essence of classic journalism, namely the presentation of different views in a fairly objective and dispassionate manner, is avoided or abused.

Religious media have always been echo chambers. As noted earlier, that is their raison d'etre. They have no truck with alternative views—even of other religious groups. In the Hareidi sector this is taken for granted: if Hamodia would not report the very fact of the Satmarer Rebbe's visit, what chance is there that he would be granted an in-depth interview to present his ideas? Or that Yated Ne'eman would run a feature on a major yeshivat hesder? The very suggestion is ludicrous—let alone that one of the leaders of a secular political party be allowed to write an op-ed explaining why he thinks Hareidi young men should serve in the army.
Although it is taken for granted that secular media should give Hareidi spokesmen space or air-time, the opposite is a non-starter.

Yet Hareidi newspapers claim to have upgraded themselves and become serious media organs—because, after all, they carry AP stories about the French presidential elections and Bloomberg analyses of Federal Reserve monetary policy. Yes, there is a problem with Germany, because the current Chancellor is of the female gender—ditto for stories on U.S. foreign policy. But at least there is coverage of world news and the larger Hareidi papers providing their readers critical information about what's happening outside the local or global Hareidi ghetto.

The underlying rationale behind this is that all the members of “our” group—however defined—should be exposed to or excluded from the same set of views and even news and, presumably, be influenced accordingly. The inevitable result is the creation and proliferation of intellectual and social echo chambers, in which group members absorb and exchange stilted perspectives that are reinforced by repetition among themselves.

This pattern is now prevalent in dati-leumi society in Israel, thanks to the proliferation of media catering to this group—which, like Hareidi society, is obsessively engaged in splitting into ever more self-defined sub-groups, but when viewed from without is actually highly homogenous. The media in question include daily and weekly publications, radio channels and a growing range of blogs and other sites. In these media spaces, datiim-leumiim talk to each other, about each other—and to the virtual exclusion of others.
Thus all the problems identified above with respect to Hareidi media have resurfaced in the dati-leumi sector—with one major difference: Whereas the trend in the Hareidi sector is of movement from a totalitarian structure, imposed rigidly from above, that is gradually opening up as the envelope is being pushed by many people in many directions, the datiim-leumiim are moving in the opposite direction.
They are coming from an open structure, in which they consumed primarily secular media, with their own as a side dish or dessert, to a structure in which they are choosing to “diet,” cutting down or eliminating secular media consumption, and increasingly preferring “their” media.

The driving force behind the change in the media consumption patterns of dati-leumi households is probably a growing backlash against the crudity (in the sexual and other contexts) of the main secular media. However, another factor is the desire to create an ideological echo chamber, especially in the area of primary interest and concern to the dati-leumi sector, namely Eretz Yisrael—meaning settlement, primarily in “the territories”/Yesha.

Unintended Consequences

The overall motivation behind the efforts to create religious media, now and in the past, can be summed up under the heading "veHaya mahanekha kadosh" (Deuteronomy 23:15)—"your camp should be holy.” This verse is interpreted so that “camp” means every social unit from household to sector of society, and “holy” means separate, as per Rashi's comment to Kedoshim tihyu (Leviticus 19:2). In other words, the goal was positive, at least in the value framework of the religious leadership, and the end justified the means, flawed as they may be.

However, as in most human endeavors, numerous unintended consequences resulted from the way this goal was pursued and how the means themselves evolved over time. Many of these unintended consequences have been negative, some profoundly so. All assessments are necessarily subjective, but the consequences that seem to me the most unfortunate are these:

1. Commercialization trumps ideology

The last 25 to 30 years have witnessed enormous changes in Israeli society, which can be summed up under the headlines of “the demise of ideology” and, in tandem, “the rise of the individual/privatization.” This process has seen a decline in the strength of all political and ideological groupings, one facet of which has been the loss of funding, whether from state sources or from the group's own membership. In the context of media activities—publishing newspapers, running a radio station, etc.—this has meant that the owners and managers of the medium have been obliged to seek funding from commercial sources, primarily advertising, but also sponsorship or co-ownership.

The inevitable result has been a process of commercialization, with all its attendant ills. Analyzing the range of halakhic issues connected directly to advertising could fill an issue of Conversations, but the general point to be made here is that the introduction of commercial considerations affects every aspect of a media enterprise, including and perhaps especially its ideological soul. Indeed, whether a so-called religious newspaper or radio station can exist in a commercial framework, and if so to what extent, is an open question.

2. The systematic desecration of synagogues and Shabbat

The most specific—and most severe—damage wrought by commercialization has been on the sanctity of the synagogue and prayer services held therein, and on the sanctity of Shabbat.

A broad spectrum of publications has developed that seek to provide material for religious Jews to read on Shabbat. Let us assume that their declared goal is to detach their target audience from the reading of secular newspapers on Shabbat—a very widespread practice in dati-leumi households in Israel and Modern Orthodox households in the Diaspora. In other words, their motivation is positive—or was, originally.

However, in order to survive in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, these publications have been obliged to do some or all of the following: a) expand in size; b) broaden their range of content; and c) upgrade their visual presentation (glossy format, colored photographs, etc). This costs money, which comes mainly from advertising. The result is that publications that originally presented 2 to 4 pages of divrei torah, and perhaps some “news” such as publications of new books dealing with Jewish learning, history, and similar topics, began branching out into features relating to rabbis or other personalities, historic or living, events or developments presumed to be of interest to the publication's leadership, and so on. All this is accompanied by a large and growing proportion of the space available being given over to advertising—of everything from apartments to appliances, as well as specifically religious items, from books to tefillin.

In short, the divrei torah publications metamorphosed over the years from sheets and pamphlets to newsletters and even magazines that could effectively compete for the interest of the religious household against the secular and even religious newspapers and weeklies. However, these “divrei torah publications” are distributed via synagogues, with the result that today, in the vast majority of dati-leumi synagogues in Israel, there is a large selection of these newsletters and magazines available on Friday night and usually throughout Shabbat.

Many, if not most, members of the congregation now spend some, most or all of the service reading this material—including during keriat shema, the amida, hazarat hashat"z, and the Torah reading. Furthermore, despite the unquestionable violation of umpteen halakhot regarding prayer in general, prayer in synagogue and behavior in synagogue even not during prayer, very few rabbis or wardens have taken a stand against this plague, which is intensifying steadily, in scope and scale.

As an aside, I would add that Hareidi synagogues suffer from the same syndrome, but in different forms. Interestingly, in many Hareidi synagogues the problem of extraneous literature distributed during prayer services is worse on weekdays, but is by no means absent on Shabbat. Once again, I have rarely if ever seen or heard of attempts by rabbis or wardens to prevent this practice.

In sum, what has happened in this sphere is reminiscent of the U.S. army lieutenant in Vietnam, who was instructed to "pacify" a village suspected of having been infiltrated by the Vietcong. He reported back to his commanders that "in order to pacify the village, we destroyed it.” Similarly, in order to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath from the depredations of the secular papers, the so-called religious papers have destroyed the sanctity of the Sabbath, the synagogue, and religious services as a whole.

3. Poisoning minds and hearts

In tandem with the process of the infiltration and pollution of the synagogue with material that is increasingly a-religious, even when it isn’t overtly commercial (a recent headline I saw in one publication was "events in Beer-Sheva this week"), is the politicization and radicalization of the divrei torah themselves.

In this sphere, the process has seen the Torah material move from being a discussion of items or topics in the weekly parasha or related to festivals, fasts, etc., drawn from classic sources and presented by contemporary rabbis with their own thoughts, to the parasha or festival becoming a springboard from which the rabbi or other writer launches into his (or, only in left-wing publications, her) ideas. In many cases, the correct term for what is being presented, by specific writers and by the publication as a whole, is an agenda that, whatever its inherent merits, has subverted the purported purpose of the publication, namely to disseminate divrei torah.

Of course, the writers and publishers will claim that what they are writing and publishing ARE divrei torah. That is precisely the problem: They are so convinced of the validity and value of their ideas, ideology, or approach to issues on the local, national, or global agenda that they conflate their opinions with divrei torah. When the writers or publishers are themselves rabbis, as is more often than not the case, this identity between subjective personal opinions and so-called divrei torah is quickly and easily achieved.

Unfortunately, in many cases this attitude is not merely negative but actually dangerous. As the dati-leumi camp veers steadily toward extremist and simplistic views on a broad range of religious, political, and social issues, the echo-chamber effect of the opinionated and highly politicized pseudo-religion pumped out by many of the pamphleteers generates growing damage. The tendencies toward ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, and general intolerance, which are becoming hallmarks of dati-leumi youth, are thereby intensified and exacerbated. By extension, the effort of religious liberals to break out of the extremist mold pushes them, in turn, to “extremist liberal” approaches in their divrei torah, which are as skewed and opinionated as those of their counterparts.

4. The dilution of rabbinic authority

But the ultimate unintended consequence, if perhaps the most predictable one, is that the attempt of the rabbinic establishment (of any specific group and of the religious sector as a whole) to control the religious media has backfired and resulted in an erosion of its own authority. More correctly, it has made a major contribution to the general process of the erosion of rabbinic authority that is underway.

The erosion process takes two forms. One is what one might term the "Canute syndrome,” exemplified by King Canute, an English king in the era of the Viking invasions, who reportedly parked his throne at the seashore and commanded the tide to turn back. The rulings and even curses pumped out by a broad swathe of Hareidi rabbis and rebbes over the last generation, against the use of computers, cellular phones, MP3s and then MP4s, internet, and so on, have been of comparable effectiveness.

If anything, the fact that the rulings had some temporary influence on at least some people has made the problem worse—because the person who obeyed the rulings for some time and then found that “everyone” was using the machine in question felt that he was being made a fool of. And if he didn’t feel that way, his kids did—and drew the relevant conclusions, so that the next prohibition landed on largely deaf ears, and the one after that merely made its author look ridiculous.

But the more dangerous form of erosion of rabbinic authority stems from situations of perceived conflict of interest. The source of rabbinic authority is the perception that the rabbis in question are defending what they sincerely believe to be the demands and dictates of the Torah, as the practical expression of God's will. Thus even when the rabbinic decree seems pointless, as in the Canute syndrome, it is not considered baseless. Like much else in Jewish life, it is a clash between what looks to be a hopeless cause, even if a just one, and a seemingly inexorable force, although a negative one. It is a declaration of faith and, in Hareidi theology, it expresses the idea that we can only—but must—do whatever is in our power, and the rest is in the hands of the Almighty.

However, if the sincerity of the rabbinic motivation comes under suspicion, then the entire theological and ideological underpinning collapses. Unfortunately, the trends noted above, such as commercialization on the one hand and the swing toward extremism on the other, have cast shadows over the involvement of rabbis in the religious media (and much else besides).

Rabbis, no less than laypeople, now tend to be pigeon-holed in terms of their stance, attitudes, views, and orientation. However, to make matters worse, most rabbis do not merely have ideological agendas, as in the past. Prominent rabbis are involved in politics, directly or indirectly, at local and national levels. They seek to disseminate their ideas, dispute rival ideas, and critically gain and solidify support for themselves, their ideas, the institutions they head, and the movements or parties with which they are associated. In all of this, they are no different from any other leadership group in that they need the media—and, if they provide “good, juicy copy,” by saying or doing things that attract attention and, yes, sell newspapers, then the media needs them, too. Of course, “their” media organs will champion them in any event, while rival organs will denounce them—but from a business and even from a leadership perspective, everyone benefits.

This process means that rabbis, as public figures, have become sucked into the celeb society. Indeed, in their own circles, rabbis and rebbes are THE celebs. Hareidi kids collect rabbi cards and pictures like other kids collect athletes or rock stars. In this environment, you would have to be superhuman not to have an ego issue—and although there are a few rabbis of exceptional humility, most are merely human, not superhuman.

In short, we have a situation in which rabbis who are prominent personalities, who have institutional interests to promote, and who have a political or ideological agenda, have been granted influence or even control over media outlets that have enormous power within these rabbis' communities. Even if the rabbis themselves are capable of avoiding the conflicts of interest created by this situation—and there are some—their coterie of advisers and executives often are not. They will abuse and exploit their power, because the dictum that “all power corrupts” does not have a caveat “except when wielded by religious people”; a more plausible addendum might be “especially when wielded by self-righteous people.”

The result is a growing cynicism regarding religious leadership that is inherently no different from the widespread cynicism toward leadership generally. The cynicism stems from a lack of conviction that the leadership is motivated solely, or even mainly, by the desire to advance the cause which it proclaims. If Moshe Rabbeinu faced that problem (repeatedly), it's hardly surprising that contemporary leaders do, too. But because the media tend to exaggerate and amplify these doubts, and religious media do so with relish vis-à-vis people they identify as their opponents, in the end everyone is tarred with the same brush. In the incisive talmudic phrase: "Kol haposel, beMoomo posel"—anyone who seeks to disqualify others tends to label them with his own faults.

The Solution—Part 3: Elements of Correction

"Religious media" are not the solution to the halakhic and moral problems presented by modern mass media. They have resolved some of the existing problems but have themselves become part of the overall problem, while creating entirely new ones. What, then, can be done?

The first essential step is to recognize, on the one hand, the scale of the problem and, on the other, the unsatisfactory nature of the solutions currently being employed. The problem is not a technical one, of how to edit the front page of tomorrow's paper without violating halakha, but rather how to address the mega-issue of applying halakha in the public arena in a modern society—and, especially, in a Jewish state in which there are large religious and Hareidi minorities, along with an irreligious majority, a large number of non-Jewish citizens (Muslim, Christian and a-religious) and many foreigners, from tourists to refugees.
How is public discourse to be conducted in these circumstances? What may be said about individuals, groups, and institutions and what is forbidden or unacceptable (not necessarily the same thing)? What is the relationship between democratic concepts such as free speech, the public's right to know, accountability to voters, etc., and halakhic concepts such as rekhilut and lashon haRa?

The second step is to begin to grapple with these big issues. Ideally this would be done in a large virtual tent, in which would be gathered, from the outset, all the various viewpoints. In practice, it is more likely that individual scholars or specific institutions will begin the process on their own initiative, and that their efforts will spur responses, debate and further discussion, moving the process forward from within, rather than it being prodded forward by exogenous forces. As it moves forward, it should also broaden to encompass a wider range of approaches.
There would be no agreement on fundamental issues, at least not for a long time—but the initial object is not to achieve agreement or even consensus, rather to define what the disagreements are. That would open the way to the third critical step—and the first practical one. Once the larger debate is underway and the issues are being publicly aired, then the worst excesses of the current situation would be fully exposed.

There would then be an opportunity for developing consensual positions over ground rules—not for matters of principle, but of practice. These would be akin to ceasefires and confidence-building measures, rather than peace treaties. Religious and Hareidi groups could surely come together around a set of guidelines for how to relate to each other and their respective leaderships and, by extension, how to relate to non-religious and non-Jewish persons and groups. That would involve accepting that the halakhic permit to vilify and besmirch 'heretics,’ 'evil-doers' and others may be best left unused, in favor of the more basic axiom of not doing unto others what you would not like them to do to you. Lambasting the secular leadership while denouncing anti-religious or anti-Hareidi rhetoric is not a persuasive approach, apart from being hypocritical and self-serving.

Having thus seized the moral high ground in the debate over the role of media in society, religious thinkers could then plausibly propose ways in which various media could be made less anti-social, less raucous, and more responsible. An obvious place to start would be with talkbacks and other forms of response by the general public. Here there could be actual halakhic rulings for religious people—and perhaps non-halakhic but moral guidelines for all people—defining how they could participate in a constructive discussion with their peers, instead of abusing the anonymity granted by the internet to spew venom against other individuals and to indulge in the coarsest forms of expression.

These religious thinkers could and should include rabbis of various stripes, who would desist from their pointless and self-defeating attempts to impose their will and views on their narrow groups of followers, instead seeking to guide and influence the general public.

The one thing that is certain is that the communications revolution will continue. Personally, I believe that the mass media cannot maintain their present nihilist and socially destructive trajectory for much longer and that a major change for the better will occur. Wouldn’t it be nice if, after generations of having being dragged along by the forces of change, Jewish religious leaders became part of those forces, helping shape a change for the better?

I would not presume to present a bibliography on this topic, nor even to identify seminal articles. However, the following articles, one in English and one in Hebrew, serve admirably as an introduction to the halakhic issues involved in journalism. Even in that context, they are in no way encyclopedic, nor do they attempt to address wider issues. Fascinatingly, although they date from 2001 and 1995 respectively, they are already obsolete, in the sense that they do not relate to the internet and its impact. But they certainly succeed in providing an entrée into the halakhic source material and the legal and moral complexities of the reporting of news from an halakhic perspective.

Sources:

“Journalism, Controversy, and Responsibility: Halachic Analysis”
Steven Oppenheimer, D.D.S
Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society XLI; Spring 2001– From 5761
http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/english/journal/oppenheimer-1.htm

Rabbi Ari Shvat
Newspapers and news – mitzvah or prohibition
Appeared originally in “Talelei Orot” and now on the Yeshivot Bnei Akiva website
http://yba.org.il/show.asp?id=33936&big_cat=1590

Our Rabbis taught: A certain Heathen once came before Shammai and asked him, “How many Toroth have you?” “Two,” he replied: “the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.” “I believe you with respect to the Written, but not with respect to the Oral Torah; make me a proselyte on condition that you teach me the Written Torah [only].” He scolded and repulsed him in anger. When he went before Hillel, he accepted him as a proselyte. On the first day he taught him, Alef, beth, gimmel, daleth; the following day he reversed [them] to him. “But yesterday you did not teach me thus,” he protested. “Must you then not rely upon me? Then rely upon me with respect to the Oral Torah too.”

On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he repulsed him with the builder’s cubit which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereof; go and learn it.”

On another occasion, a certain heathen…went before Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte on condition that you appoint me a High Priest.” But he repulsed him with a builder’s cubit which was in his hand. He then went before Hillel who made him a proselyte. Said he to him, “Can any man be made a king but he knows the arts of government? Do you go and study the arts of government. When he came to, and the stranger that cometh nigh be put to death, he asked him, “to whom does this verse apply?” “Even to King David of Israel,” was the answer. Thereupon the proselyte reasoned within himself a fortiori: if Israel, who are called sons of the Omnipresent…yet it is written of them “and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death,” how much more so a mere proselyte, who comes with his staff and wallet! Then he went before Shammai and said to him. “Am I then eligible to be a High Priest; is it not written, and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death?” He went before Hillel and said to him, “O gentle Hillel; blessings rest on thy head for bringing me under the wings of the Shechinah!”

Some time later the three met in one place; said they, Shammai’s impatience sought to drive us from the world, but Hillel’s gentleness brought us under the wings of the Shechinah.”

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a; Soncino translation

When there is no acceptance of the Mitzvoth on the part of the convert the conversion is not valid even after the fact; and the convert remains a non-Jew.

Supreme Rabbinical Court for Appeals, Case (4 Adar 5768/2008) #5489064-1, page 2.

In early 2007, a Danish-born female convert and her Israeli husband appeared before the Ashdod Beit Din (Rabbinical Court) to process a get (Jewish divorce). There were no outstanding issues as the couple had already agreed to the terms of the divorce. During the course of their appearance, Rabbi Avraham Attiya, a Dayan (Judge) of the Ashdod Beit Din, queried the woman about her religious observance and, on determining that she was not observant, ruled on February 22, 2007 that she was not Jewish because her conversion had not been valid. He therefore concluded that no get was necessary. In so doing he also determined that, by extension, the couple’s children either, and that, therefore, in order to marry a Jewish spouse, they would have to undergo conversion. In the course of his ruling retroactively nullifying the conversion, Dayan Attiya strongly criticized Rabbi Haim Druckman, under whose authority the conversion had taken place over a decade earlier.

Two months later, on April 22, the couple appealed the ruling to the Beit Din Harabani Hagadol, the Supreme Rabbinical Court for Appeals. The couple’s advocate argued that Rabbi Attiya had exceeded his authority, by nullifying the conversion when the only issue before him was that of the get. Moreover, in so doing, he had, as a single Dayan, overturned the ruling of the three Dayanim of the Rabbinical Court that had converted the woman. Initially, the Beit Din Harabani Hagadol granted the divorce without prejudice to the question of the propriety of the conversion. In February 2008, however, during a rabbinical conference, Rabbi Avraham Sherman, the presiding Dayan in the appeal of the Ashdod case, distributed a draft of a 50 page ruling, subsequently released to the public in April, that upheld Dayan Attiya’s position. [1] Rabbi Sherman wrote that the Jewishness of the woman and her children was uncertain and needed to be verified; that the family should be added to a list maintained by the Rabbinical Courts of people who could not marry a Jew until their status as Jews was finally determined; that all of Rabbi Druckman's conversions since 1999 should be retroactively invalidated; and that marriage registrars not register a convert whose external appearance, for example, a woman wearing pants, did not appear to be observant.

Rabbi Sherman’s ruling caused an outcry in Israel, because it invalidated some 40,000 conversions that Rabbi Druckman had supervised as head of a special rabbinical court for conversions under the aegis of the Chief Rabbinate—the same Chief Rabbinate in whose name Rabbi Sherman purportedly acted. Moreover, since the converts had married Jews, and, like the Ashdod petitioners, had started families, the ruling potentially affected several hundred thousand people.

The ruling also brought to a head an issue that had simmered for decades, the role of the Chief Rabbinate in the Jewish State of Israel. That issue remains very much unresolved, and the Chief Rabbinate remains the focus of anger, lawsuits, and calls for its reform, if not outright abolition. This paper will review some of the more recent issues that have confronted the Chief Rabbinate and will offer a preliminary approach to modifying its role and authority in contemporary Israeli society.

ORIGINS OF THE CHIEF RABBINATE: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

The institution of the Chief Rabbinate is far older than many people realize, dating back to medieval times. Although Jewish Law, the Halakha, does not prescribe the creation of such an office,[2] it proved to be a useful vehicle for kings seeking to maintain control, and raise revenues, from Jewish communities living in their lands. It was often the kings, or more regional rulers, who appointed the Chief Rabbis. The latter were then responsible for the management of the Jewish community, and for tax farming on behalf of the non-Jewish rulers.

Some Chief Rabbis were noted scholars, such as Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, who was appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor in the 13th century. Others were far lesser known figures. Chief Rabbis held office in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic lands, and even did so when Christians conquered Muslim territories and vice versa.[3]

Chief Rabbis functioned in Palestine after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Levi ibn Habib ruled from Jerusalem during the early part of the sixteenth century, though his authority did not really extend to the rabbinate in Safed, where great scholars like Rabbi Yosef Caro, author of the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) , and mystics like Rabbi Isaac Luria (popularly known as the Ari) held sway. The modern Israeli Chief Rabbinate derives its origins from the position created under the Ottoman Empire, that of Rishon LeTzion (“First (or Leader) in Zion”). That office was held by the leader of the Sephardic community, and dated back, in the Palestine, to 1665, when Rabbi Moshe Galante, who resided in Jerusalem, was named chief rabbi of Palestine.
There was no equivalent chief rabbi of the Ashkenazic community, which became more numerous in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when students of the Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, migrated to Palestine. It was only after the United Kingdom assumed mandatory control of Palestine in the aftermath of World War I that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who had served as Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Jaffa under the Ottomans, was appointed first as chief rabbi of Jerusalem and in 1921 assumed official authority over the Ashkenazic communities of Palestine as their first chief rabbi. The term, “official” is used advisedly, since the long-time ultra-Orthodox community, the so-called “old Yishuv,” never accepted his authority, following leaders of their own, notably Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld. Nor did the Sephardim view Rabbi Kook as their Chief Rabbi, instead following Yaakov Meir, who took on the role of Sephardi Chief Rabbi in addition to the long-standing title of Rishon LeTzion. On the other hand, to the extent they paid attention to rabbis at all, the secular Zionist Jewish community recognized the authority of Rabbi Kook, who had made a point of reaching out to Jews of all levels of religious belief and practice.[4] For virtually all secular Jews, Judaism was synonymous with Orthodoxy; to the extent that any of them wished to partake in Jewish ceremonies or rituals, they did so within the Orthodox context. As a result, other streams of Judaism, notably German-based Reform, Hungarian-based Neologue, and the growing American Conservative movement, made virtually no headway in Palestine at all.

EARLY YEARS OF THE STATE: RABBIS HERZOG AND UZIEL

Rabbi Isaac Herzog, who succeeded Rabbi Kook as Chief Rabbi upon the passing of the latter in 1936, had a very different background from that of his predecessor. Rabbi Kook had reached maturity in his native Poland, receiving a classical Yeshiva education with no formal secular education before entering the rabbinate in Lithuania and then emigrating to become rabbi of Jaffa in 1904. On the other hand, as a ten year old boy Rabbi Herzog had moved to with his family from his native Lomza in Poland to the English provincial town of Leeds, Yorkshire, had studied at the Sorbonne and had earned his doctorate from the University of London. Prior to his emigration to Israel he had held rabbinical positions in Belfast and then Dublin, where he was Chief Rabbi of Ireland, a far cry from the environment with which Rabbi Kook was most familiar. Rabbi Herzog’s world was one of Anglo-Jewish mores—which meant congregations loyal to the Orthodox tradition but often lax in its practice—as well as involvement in the politics of the wider community, namely the turbulent period of the post World War I Irish civil war and the creation of the Irish Free State and then the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, Rabbi Herzog was more than a bystander; among his friends was Eamon De Valera, whom he reportedly hid in his home when the Sinn Fein leader, and Ireland’s first President, was being hunted by the British authorities.

Despite their differences, which extended to Rabbi Herzog’s top hat in contrast to the fur- trimmed streiml that Rabbi Kook wore, Rabbi Herzog’s tenure as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi first of Palestine and then of the new State of Israel, was marked by the same broad tolerance that characterized Rabbi Kook’s term. In Rabbi Herzog’s case, his understanding of the character of secular Israelis was buttressed by years of interaction with Jews of indifferent Jewish practice. At the same time, his ability to work with the authorities of the new State of Israel drew upon his experience of life in the fledgling Irish state.

In his role as Chief Rabbi of the first independent Jewish state in Israel in nearly eighteen hundred years,[5] Rabbi Herzog had to address issues that over the centuries were essentially of no relevance to rabbinic decisors. These included the relationship of Halakha to the management of the state, most notably on Sabbath and holidays, issues arising from Biblical and rabbinic commandments relating to the land and its produce, the religious and legal rights of non-Jewish minorities,[6] and questions regarding the Jewish law and the military. In the latter case, while strongly supporting the Israel Defense Forces, Rabbi Herzog was emphatic about the need to exempt yeshiva students from military service.[7] In addition, Rabbi Herzog, like virtually all of his Orthodox colleagues, was a staunch opponent of Reform. He opposed the construction of Reform synagogues in Israel, arguing that their introduction would destroy “the peace and unity of the nation.” [8]

Rabbi Herzog devoted considerable energy to questions regarding conversion, both those that were dealt with in Palestine and then Israel, as well as questions addressed to him from abroad, particularly Latin America. While he tended to take a strict line on the requirements for conversion, he was more lenient with respect to both the invalidating of conversions that had already taken place, and the right of local rabbis to preside over conversions—two issues that would enflame Israeli and Diaspora society decades after his passing. [9]

In contrast to Rabbi Herzog, Rabbi Ben Zion Uziel was a native of Jerusalem and scion of a prominent rabbinical family. Like Rabbi Kook, with whom he became close while serving as Sephardi Hakham Bashi (chief rabbi) of Jaffa at the same time as the latter was the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, he had no formal secular education. But early on he exhibited the classical Sephardi tolerance for those whose practice was less than perfect, but whose respect for the rabbinate and the Torah it taught was second to none.

When Rabbi Uziel succeeded Rabbi Meir as the Sephardi Rishon LeTzion of mandatory Palestine, he found himself working alongside Rabbi Herzog, whom he respected as a valued scholarly colleague. Like Rabbi Herzog, he presided over his community during the turbulent years of World War II, and the creation of the new State of Israel. And like his Ashkenazi counterpart, he demonstrated a a unique ability to work with secular Jews. Indeed, his community-wide activities, included his participation in the creation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Nevertheless, Rabbi Uziel’s greatest legacy to the modern Jewish State may not have been his organizational activities, but rather his attitude toward those outside the mainstream of Judaism. He was a strong advocate on behalf of the Bene Israel of India, who claimed that they were Jews, but had long been discriminated against by the “white” Indian Jews who had migrated from Baghdad.[10] He also was exceedingly lenient toward those seeking to convert to Judaism, and, particularly, the children of mixed marriages. (To the Orthodox, included in the category of such marriages were those between a Jewish male and a female converted by non-Orthodox rabbis.) In this regard Rabbi Uziel was even more lenient than Rabbi Herzog. Rabbi Uziel ruled that that the acceptance of all the mitzvot (commandment) was not a necessary condition for conversion. In addition, he argued that a non-Jewish woman already married to a man in a secular ceremony could be accepted as a convert and continue to live with her husband, although historically, the rabbis had frowned upon such arrangements. Finally, he ruled that any children from the marriage, even those preceding the conversion, should be treated as Jewish. [11]

POLITICS AND THE STRUGGLE TO SUCCEED RABBI HERZOG
Rabbi Uziel passed away in 1954, and was succeeded the following year by Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim, a highly respected scion of a leading Baghdad Rabbinical family that had emigrated to Palestine in the early 1900s. Rabbi Nissim, whose prior post was that of Chief Sephardi Rabbi of Jerusalem, was well known as an advocate of outreach to left-wing kibbutzim. He did so, however, from a position of religious conservatism and he was especially outspoken in his condemnation of intermarriage.[12] Nevertheless, like his predecessor, he advocated the acceptance of the Bene Israel of India as Jews and their right to emigrate to Israel; their provenance had been challenged by many rabbinical authorities;[13] indeed, Rabbi Herzog was somewhat ambivalent about their status. [14]

The process of choosing a successor to Rabbi Herzog differed markedly from that obtaining for his Sephardi counterpart. Rabbi Herzog had long been closely associated with the Orthodox Zionist Mizrachi movement, whose political arms was the National Religious Party (consisting of the Mizrachi and Hapoel HaMizrachi movements), and which was part of the governing coalition from the founding of the State. Upon Rabbi Herzog’s passing in July 1959, the NRP became embroiled in a succession crisis, with some of its leading members supporting the candidacy of the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, others supporting Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and still others that of the leader of the American Modern Orthodox Movement, Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik. Of the three, Rabbi Soloveichik was probably the hardest line on matters of personal status,[15] Rabbi Goren was probably the most lenient, and Rabbi Unterman was somewhere in between.

Throughout the remainder of the year, the succession turned into a series of increasingly bitter disputes within and between both the secular and religious parties. [16] In part because of a bout with cancer, in part because he had no stomach for internecine communal politics, which had turned especially nasty as the succession issue dragged on into 1960, Rabbi Soloveichik withdrew his name from consideration on February 15.[17] Even after his withdrawal, however, as the issue remained unresolved, and the infighting grew steadily worse, Rabbi Soloveichik’s supporters implored him to reconsider his decision. He refused, however, arguing that he was uncomfortable with the entire approach of the Chief Rabbinate, and asserting that “the fate of the character and nature of the State will not be decided as a result of religious legislation by the Knesset…it is impossible to impose religion on secularists through the channels of the state.” [18]

The crisis continued for several more years, as the collection of rabbinical, lay and government officials responsible for naming the new Chief Rabbi could not reach any agreement on who should succeed Rabbi Herzog. Rabbi Unterman was finally elected in 1964. Like his predecessor, Rabbi Unterman had served Anglo-Jewry for many years, in his case as Rabbi of the flourishing Liverpool Jewish community. In addition, like Rabbi Herzog, he was active in Zionist affairs and had helped resettle refugees after World War II. And like Rabbi Herzog, he served as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv prior to his being elected as Chief Rabbi. Finally, and importantly, like his predecessor Rabbi Unterman pursued a moderate course in matters of personal religious status.

In responding to the first major wave of immigrants from the Soviet Union, many of whom were intermarried, Rabbi Unterman advocated a lenient approach toward the conversion of non-Jewish spouses. Though he fully recognized that a convert’s sincere intention to accept mitzvot was a necessary condition for conversion, he nevertheless argued that even “when the immigrants had not intended fully to live according to the mitzvoth, one should not condemn such conversions.” lest the public conclude that the rabbis are intransigent when it comes to dealing with conversions.”[19] It was a precedent that his immediate successors continued to follow but then was abandoned under Haredi pressure.

RABBI YOSEF, RABBI GOREN, THE LANGER CASE AND THE RISE OF RABBI ELIASHIV

Whereas Rabbi Nissim succeeded to the Chief Rabbinate after the death of his predecessor, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef assumed the position after challenging, and defeating, the then-seventy-six year old Rabbi Nissim in an election held in 1973. The election was bitterly fought and highly controversial, as many felt it improper to challenge a sitting Chief Rabbi. But Rabbi Yosef, who had been born in Baghdad but moved with his family to Israel when he was still a young child, was no stranger to controversy. During his brief tenure as Chief Rabbi in Cairo, Egypt, from 1947-49, he clashed with the local community and rabbinate over standards of kashrut. Soon after his return to Israel, while serving on the Rabbinical Court of Petah Tikva, he permitted a levirate marriage (yibum) in defiance of a ruling by the Chief Rabbinate against such marriages.

Rabbi Yosef was acknowledged halakhic decisor well before he was forty years old; he served on the Supreme Rabbinical Court—the same Court from which Rabbi Sherman would later issue his controversial ruling—until his election in 1973. His tenure as Chief Rabbi was also marked by controversy, especially his bitter relations with Rabbi Goren, who was elected Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi the same year. An unabashed political actor, whose resentment of Ashkenazi dominance manifested itself in both the public square and in many of his halakhic decisions, Rabbi Yosef was instrumental in the founding of the Shas Party, which arose in reaction to the dominance of the so-called Lithuanian Haredim in the Agudah party and its successor, Degel Hatorah.

Though often perceived as a hard-liner on religious matters, Rabbi Yosef’s approach to Halakha has tended to be marked by leniency on many occasions. Moreover, while hostile to non-Orthodox movements, he has been exceedingly tolerant of the lifestyles of those who do not practice Judaism rigorously but do not challenge its Orthodox tenets. In this regard, and despite personal animosity with Rabbi Goren, his halakhic orientation was not dissimilar from that of his Ashkenazi counterpart.

Rabbi Yosef issued several lenient rulings with respect to conversions. For example, while still serving in Cairo, in 1948, he ruled that if potential young converts demonstrated that they did not intend to keep the mitzvoth when they were grown men, but nevertheless had been converted by a Bet Din, the conversion remained valid.[20] Decades later, in 1974, he ruled that despite a long-standing ban on conversions in Buenos Aires, Argentina by that country’s rabbinate if a local rabbi defied the ban and presided over a conversion, the conversion could not be invalidated retroactively.[21] In yet another ruling in the 1970s, he supported the petition of a non-Jewish woman who had married a Jew, had borne children with him and subsequently wished to convert. Indeed, Rabbi Yosef not only permitted her to marry the man according to “the laws of Moses and Israel,” he supported the conversion that even if it were suspected that she were doing so under pressure, which in theory should have been an invalidating factor.[22]

Equally, if not more significant, perhaps, were his landmark rulings affecting entire communities. The first addressed the status of Jews who had emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Their arrival had prompted questions about the authenticity of their Jewishness. It was alleged that many non-Jews had immigrated to Israel for economic reasons and then sought to register as Jews. Rabbi Yosef pondered the question of whether “one who comes to register as a Jew is to be trusted, even if he has no tangible evidence to that effect, and it is enough that he declares himself to be Jewish, or whether he needs to prove his case with reliable witnesses.” After reviewing all possible halakhic precedents, Rabbi Yosef concluded that “the essence of the law indicates that those who make aliyah from Russia and declare that they are Jewish are credible, though if there are indications that a declaration is incorrect, there is a need for a thorough investigation into the case at hand.” [23]

Similarly, much as his predecessors had done with respect to the Bene Israel, in 1975 Rabbi Yosef championed the Jewishness of the Ethiopian Falashas, in contradistinction to the position taken by leading Ashkenazic authorities. In 1975 he ruled that they were Jews, descendants of the biblical tribe of Dan. In 1984, in the wake of the massive airlift of Jews from Ethiopia, he issued a second ruling in the same vein.[24]

Having been denied the Chief Rabbinate of Israel in the early 1960s, and subsequently become a major figure as a result of his role in the Six Day War, Rabbi Goren easily was elected Chief Rabbi shortly after Rabbi Unterman’s death. Like his two most recent predecessors, Rabbi Goren was a committed Zionist. An immigrant from Poland, Rabbi Goren had served in the pre-independence Haganah and then founded and led the IDF military rabbinate. He had also served as a paratrooper during the War of Independence.

By the time of his appointment in 1972, Rabbi Goren had risen to the rank of Brigadier General in the IDF. With his intimate knowledge of things military, and their interplay with Halakha, and his constant interaction with secular Israelis who comprised the vast majority of Israel’s soldiers, especially during the early days of the State, Rabbi Goren was especially sensitive to the need to minimize the divide between his secular and religious compatriots.

Rabbi Goren was a highly controversial and polarizing figure, in part because of his increasingly militant Zionist stance after the Six Day War, and in part because of his attitude toward conversions, which were bitterly criticized by the Haredi establishment as being far too lax. While still Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Goren converted an American Unitarian woman named Helen Seidman, who had fallen in love with Israel, moved to a non-religious kibbutz, married a Jew by proxy in Mexico, and then was converted by a Reform rabbi when the Orthodox authorities refused to do so. She then turned to Rabbi Goren who convened a bet din of three Rabbis and converted her, reportedly arguing that conversion in Israel differed from that in the Diaspora, since it involved both a religious and national commitment.[25]

In what was an even more controversial case, Rabbi Goren, newly installed as Chief Rabbi of Israel, overruled a decision of a rabbinical court in Petach Tikva that forbade siblings named Langer to marry Jews on the grounds that their mother, who had married a convert in Poland, had never properly divorced him. As a result, she had rendered them mamzerim (bastards) when she bore them to her second husband; mamzerim are forbidden to marry into the Jewish community. Rabbi Goren convened a special Beit Din of nine rabbis, none of whom he would name publicly, who joined him in ruling that retroactively invalidated the original conversion and that, therefore, when the woman re-married she had not been in need of a get. As a result, the Langer siblings were not mamzerim and could marry Jews. Among those opposing Rabbi Goren’s decision was a veteran member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court named Rabbi Yosef Sholom Eliashiv, son of a famous kabbalist. Rabbi Eliashiv resigned from the court and was welcomed with open arms by the Ashkenazi Haredi community. He soon became a rising force in the community, even as the Haredim became increasingly numerous, militant and politically powerful. In 1989, Rabbi Elazar Shach, leader of the Ashkenazi Haredim, asked Rabbi Eliashiv to play a major leadership role in the new Degel Hatorah party. In 2001 he succeeded Rabbi Menachem Shach as leader of the Ashkenazi Haredim; at the time he was 91 years old.

It was during Rabbi Goren’s tenure as Chief Rabbi that the validity of non-Orthodox conversions became a major issue for the State of Israel as a result of the 1977 elections that brought Menachem Begin to power. As part of what proved to be his successful attempt garner Orthodox votes, Begin, a traditionalist despite not being personally religious, agreed to support legislation that would mandate recognition only of conversions undertaken according to Halakha. The legislation, which was introduced with government support in 1981, provoked a major outcry in the Diaspora, particularly in the United States, where the Orthodox constituted less than 10 per cent. of the American Jewish community. Faced with this onslaught of opposition, Begin retreated, and the legislation went nowhere. Neither Rabbi Goren, nor, for that matter, Rabbi Yosef, protested too loudly when the government backed away from the issue.

THE HAREDI TAKEOVER OF THE CHIEF RABBINATE

With the conquest of the West Bank in 1967, and particularly after the 1973 War, the Religious Zionist movement moved further to the right politically, under the influence of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of the former Chief Rabbi. As noted above, Rabbi Goren very much reflected this view as did his successor upon his retirement in 1983, Rabbi Avraham Shapira, who had succeeded Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook as head of the Yeshiva Mercaz Harav, the hotbed of the religious settler movement, upon the latter’s death in 1982. Rabbi Shapira was not particularly noted for his outreach to the secular Israeli world, which was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Religious Zionists’ support and leadership of the settler movement. On the other hand, Rabbi Shapira maintained close ties with Haredi leaders, though they did not accept his halakhic dictat. His tenure marked the emergence of an increasingly religious trend among the formely Mizrachi Zionists. It was dubbed HarDaL, an acronym for Haredi Dati Leumi, or Haredi National Zionists, and came into vogue in the early 1990s as more and more West Bank settlers could, in many respects other than their Zionism, hardly be differentiated from Haredim.

Rabbi Shapira was succeeded in 1993 by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, after yet another bruising succession battle. Rabbi Lau in many ways was a throwback to Rabbis Herzog and Unterman, not merely because, like them, he was serving as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv when elected to the Chief Rabbinate. Though a major halakhic decisor with close ties to the Haredi community, Rabbi Lau was far more open to the wider Jewish community, indeed the non-Jewish community as well, than his predecessor had been. Perhaps it was because as a child he had been protected in the camps by a non-Jewish Polish boy, and then rescued by Polish Gentiles—at the behest of the a young priest who later became Pope John Paul II—who made every effort to ensure that he remained true to his Jewish origins. Perhaps it was because his sole surviving sibling, Naftali, with whom he remained close, led a very different life as a senior official in Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Whatever the reason, Rabbi Lau was seen as a conciliator and was a leader in inter-faith dialogue, reaching out to Christians shortly after he took office.[26] Moreover, he took a relatively moderate line on conversions, ruling that each local Bet Din had the authority to authorize a conversion, and to determine the sincerity of a convert who claimed that he or she would keep kashrut, Shabbat and family purity.[27]

Rabbi Shapira, who had been an outspoken opponent of the Oslo Accords while still Chief Rabbi, remained active in religious and national politics during Rabbi Lau’s tenure. As he had done when Oslo was signed, Rabbi Shapira ruled in 2005 that religious IDF soldiers should disobey their commanders if ordered to participate in the dismantling of the Gaza settlements. The ruling infuriated not only secular Israelis, but also more moderate religious Jews, as well as Orthodox Jews serving in the IDF. As such, it further deepend the growing divide between Israel’s more extreme Orthodox Jews, whether Haredi or HarDaL, and the rest of Israeli society.

Rabbi Yosef likewise remained very active both as an halakhic decisor and as the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, upon his retirement from the Chief Rabbinate. He came increasingly to be seen as Haredi, in no small part due to his Shas connection, but also as a controversial political figure because of his incendiary statements about Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. Nevertheless, his rulings did not reflect his progressively radicalized politics, and he still was a moderating influence on the Sephardi community, frequently asserting its independence from the rulings of Ashkenazi rabbis, no matter how prominent or learned they might be.

Rabbi Yosef’s successor, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, was born in Jerusalem to a family whose roots were in Baghdad. As a young man he was associated with an underground organization that fought the secularization of the new State of Israel by burning cars that drove on Shabbat and butcher shops that sold non-kosher meat. For his activities he was sentenced to ten months in prison in 1951. Rabbi Eliyahu was considered a prodigy and in 1960, at the age of 31, he was elected a Dayan, the youngest man ever to hold that position in Israel. After serving as Chief Rabbi of Beersheba for four years he was elected to the Supreme Rabbinical Court, and continued to serve on the court when he succeeded Rabbi Yosef in 1983. Although Rabbi Yosef was the acknowledged leader of the Sephardim in Israel, Rabbi Eliyahu did not hesitate to challenge his predecessor on the issue of a uniform Spehardi rite, which Rabbi Yosef sought to impose on that community. Instead, Rabbi Eliyahu stressed the importance of preserving the Iraqi traditions, especially those set down by the nineteenth century sage, the Ben Ish Chai.

Rabbi Eliyahu tended to adopt a strict halakhic line on issues relating to individuals, but was rather lenient on matters relating to the State as a whole. Despite his stated preference that disputes be judged in rabbinic courts rather than the secular Israeli system, he identified areas where “the law of the land is the law,” and where he acknowledged that secular courts had rightful jurisdiction.[28] Similarly, he recommended that rabbis grant certificates of kashrut to restaurants frequented by tourists, even if the restaurants were open on Shabbat. He reasoned that this approach would actually minimize Sabbath violations.[29] More generally, he emphasized the importance of outreach to secular Jews.

One area where he took a hard line even with respect to national issues was that of the leadership roles available to women. While accepting that women could be named to managerial posts in small communities organizations, he was opposed to their taking on national leadership roles, arguing that to do so was a violation of the Biblical commandment that restricted rulership to men. In this regard he reflected long-standing Sephardi tradition the stretched as far back as Maimonides’ code.

Rabbi Eliyahu was identified with the HaRdaL branch of religious Zionists. His politics were right-wing and he was closely associated with Rabbi Meir Kahane and his son. In addition, like his Ashkenazi counterpart, Rabbi Abraham Shapira, he was an outspoken opponent of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, though he insisted that he did not encourage soldiers to disobey their orders.

Like Rabbi Eliyahu, his successor, Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, was Jerusalem born. He assumed the Chief Rabbinate in 1993 after holding the post of Chief Rabbi of Haifa, a city long notorious for its secular leanings.[30] Like Rabbi Lau, he reached out beyond the Jewish community, seeking a dialogue with Muslim religious leaders and travelling to Arab states to do so. [31]

Rabbi Bakshi-Doron adopted what might be termed a “realistic” attitude to the conversion issue that continued to roil Israeli society during his tenure. In an article composed shortly after he left the Chief Rabbinate, Rabbi Bakshi-Doron argued that the Israeli law recognizing only Orthodox marriage and divorce had outlived its usefulness. He pointed out that secular couples were either flouting the law by marrying outside Israel, or worse still, if they married according to Orthodox ritual they did not obtain an Orthodox divorce, rending their children mamzerim. He further pointed out that the efforts by some rabbis to validate dubious conversions (he did not provide any examples, though the Seidman and Langer cases surely sprang to the minds of his readers) simply made a mockery of what was a serious religious matter. He therefore suggested that the time may have come to separate the processes of civil and religious marriage. Those who married in a civil ceremony would avoid any issue of mamzerut since Orthodox Judaism did not recognize the marriage ab initio. Another alternative was for the State to recognize co-habitation, with the same consequences for Jewish law as civil marriage. A third alternative was simply to abolish the Marriage and Divorce Law and have only those interested in a Jewish religious marriage approach the Chief Rabbinate for approval, who would inform them of their subsequent marital obligations, particularly that of granting a get in the event of divorce.[32]

The retirement of Rabbis Bakshi-Doron and Lau in 2003 led to the appointment of Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yonah Metzger respectively as Sephardi and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbis of Israel. Both men have taken a very different approach to personal status issues than did their predecessors. In some respects, the Moroccan-born Rabbi Amar, who previously had been the first sole Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv (he was succeeded by Rabbi Lau), has reflected the general outlook of his predecessors. While a strict interpreter of Jewish law, and a strong opponent of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism,[33] like his mentor Rabbi Yosef, and indeed Rabbis Nissim and Uziel, like them as well he has had expansive view of how to relate to the Jewish population at large. And like Rabbis Uziel and Yosef, he too, has broadened the base of the family of Jewry. In 2005, he ruled that the Burmese/Northeast Indian Kuki-Mizo sub-tribe of the Shanlung people, called the Bnei Menashe, were fully fledged Jews requiring only immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath). As a result, several thousand of these people emigrated to Israel.[34]

On the other hand, Rabbi Amar has adopted a very different approach on the question of civil marriage from that of his immediate predecessor. In contrast to Rabbi Bakshi-Doron’s proposal to permit civil marriage for Jews, Rabbi Amar would restrict civil marriage to non-Jews, among whom he includes a large proportion of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.[35]

In addition, Rabbi Amar sought to restrict the applicability of the Law of Return to Jews born of a Jewish mother, in accordance with Orthodox practice. In November 2006 he submitted a legislative proposal to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that would also ban any converts, from any stream of Judaism, from automatic eligibility under the Law of Return. Arguing that his proposal sought to prevent the creation of “two peoples ” within the State of Israel, Rabbi Amar also called for the Chief Rabbinate to have sole authority over conversions, thereby negating the traditional power of local rabbis, including Orthodox Rabbis, to preside over conversions, and upending the Law of Return’s provision that recognizes non-Orthodox conversions that have taken place outside Israel. [36]

Rabbi Amar’s proposal was not fully implemented, and had no impact on non-Orthodox conversions performed outside the United States; non-Orthodox converts continued to be recognized as Jews for the purposes of the Law of Return. On the other hand, Rabbi Amar announced that the Chief Rabbinate would no longer accept conversions of Diaspora Jews by Orthodox rabbis, unless those rabbis were on an “approved” list. Rabbi Amar justified his ruling, which violated the historic halakhic principle that “a judge can only see what is before his eyes,” on the grounds that he wanted to have “uniform standards” for conversion; in essence, he was ruling that those “uniform standards” were meant to be in line with Haredi practices. In what can be only termed a lack of backbone, the leadership of the Rabbinical Council of America acceded to Rabbi Amar’s demand and identified an “approved” list of rabbis, thereby denying all other Orthodox rabbis, including the vast majority of their own members, the right to convert non-Jews to Orthodox Judaism. [37]

If Rabbi Amar has represented a turn to the “Right” among traditionally more tolerant Sephardi Jews, Rabbi Metzger’s elevation to the Chief Rabbinate, and his subsequent actions, have taken on an even more extreme hue. Rabbi Metzger’s background actually is that of a classical religious Zionist. He was born in Haifa, was educated in the hesder Yeshiva of Kerem B’Yavneh, which provides for religious study and service in the IDF. He served in the IDF as a chaplain, though he only achieved the relatively low rank of Captain. He authored numerous books, two of which won major Israeli prizes.

As Chief Rabbi, he has been notable in his outreach to non-Jewish faiths, including Buddhists and Hindus, in addition to Muslims and Christians, notably the Armenian community. Yet Rabbi Metzger’s career has been marked both by controversy and by his exceedingly close ties to the Haredi community, and Rabbi Eliashiv in particular. Rabbi Metzger did not have a reputation as a leading scholar, nor had he ever served as a Dayan on a Rabbinical Court. He had also previously withdrawn his candidacy for Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv after an outcry arose over allegations of his personal misconduct.[38]

It was widely believed that Rabbi Metzger’s appointment as Chief Rabbi was orchestrated by Rabbi Eliashiv on behalf of the Haredi community. In some respects, that belief was a reflection of the increasing prominence of that community within the State-run rabbinate, which had long been dominated by religious Zionists. It was ironic that rabbis who did not recognize the authority of the State should be on its payroll. More exasperating to many Israelsi was the fact that local Haredi rabbis were taking a rigid stand on matters of personal status, notably conversion, which was becoming increasingly difficult for non-Jews to obtain. For his part, Rabbi Metzger did nothing to arrest these developments; to the contrary, he was seen as supporter of the Haredi line. And when Rabbi Sherman issued his controversial ruling regarding the conversion of Russian Jews, Chief Rabbi Meztger publicly supported him (though he was at pains to say his support was not addressed to the ruling per se.)[39]

RABBI SHERMAN’S RULING AND ITS AFTERMATH

Rabbi Avraham Sherman’s ruling, which drew upon numerous precedents in halakhic literature, reflected a number of strongly held presumptions on the part of the Haredi community. First and foremost was the deep distrust of converts, coupled with an intense dislike of non-Jews. As Rabbi Sherman told an international rabbinic conference a year after his controversial ruling, “There is no logic to telling tens of thousands of goyim [non-Jews] who grew up on heresy, hate of religion, liberalism, communism, socialism, that suddenly they can undergo a revolution deep in their souls. There is no such reality." [40]

Coupled to the uneasiness with which Haredim view conversion is the belief that such conversions can be overturned retroactively if its appears that the convert is not following all the mitzvot—as the Haredim themselves would define them. Thus, for example, a female convert who wears pants, or is seen in public with her hair uncovered, would be deemed to have fraudulently converted, despite the fact that both activities have long been tolerated, if not fully accepted, in Modern Orthodox communities. While there is some halakhic basis for retroactive invalidation of a conversion, Rabbi Sherman’s ruling was revolutionary in that he invalidated conversions that had taken place decades before, despite the fact that the converts in question had long considered themselves Jewish, and raised their families as Jews.

Finally, Rabbi Sherman’s ruling also reflected his highly controversial view that a beit din (rabbinical court) could overturn the ruling of another rabbinical court. Rabbi Sherman based his case on two separate grounds. First, he argued that the Supreme Rabbinical Court had the same authority to overturn rulings of lower courts in matters of personal status as in other matters. He made no distinction between legal decisions by a lower court where litigants were involved, and conversions, which were clearly not a matter of litigation.

Second, he postulated that “general concerns and uncertainties” were enough to merit judicial review of another rabbinical court’s conversions. He based his opinion on a public reaching (hora’ah) by “the decisors of the generation and yeshiva leaders” (poskei hador ve’roshei yeshiva) [41] that prohibited the acceptance of any converts “unless [rabbinical courts] were convinced that they [the converts] were truly ready to accept the yoke of Torah and mitzvot.[42] In his view this proclamation was binding upon world Jewry as the final word on the matter.

Rabbi Sherman’s ruling reflected the Haredi community’s veneration of its leaders, termed Gedolim (“great ones”), particularly its supreme leader, the Gadol Hador (“Leader of the Generation”) who at the time was Rabbi Eliashiv—who not only was Rabbi Metzger’s mentor but Rabbi Sherman’s as well[43] —and which it endowed with virtually prophetic qualities. Rabbi Sherman explicitly addressed the question of rabbinic leadership in an article that he published some two years after his ruling.[44] In his view, if the majority of rabbinic leaders—by whom is meant Haredi leaders—look to one man for leadership, that person assumes absolute halakhic authority over “all the communities of Israel, Torah scholars, courts and rabbis within them—whether collectively or individually.”[45] In practice this means that if the “Leader of the Generation,” takes a hard line on personal issues and conversion, there is no challenging his authority.[46] Naturally, Rabbi Sherman had Rabbi Eliashiv in mind. [47]

Rabbi Sherman’s views with respect to retroactive nullification of conversions; to the authority of the Supreme Rabbinical Court to review and if, deemed necessary, nullify the conversions of another court, notably the Special Rabbinical Court for Conversions; and to the undisputed (and undisputable) authority of a sole Gadol Hador (Leader of the Generation) has been challenged by other prominent Rabbis and Dayanim. Most notable in this regard is Rabbi Sherman’s colleague on the Supreme Rabbinical Court, Rabbi Shlomo Dichovsky. With respect to retroactive nullification, Rabbi Dichovsky has based his arguments on the halakhic rulings of leading Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis of previous generations, including Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Uziel, Rabbi Haim Ozer Grodzinski and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. The latter was the foremost Haredi decisor of post-war America, who ruled that if convert did not openly state his/her intention purposefully to violate a given set of commandments, the conversion remained regardless of what passed through the convert’s mind at the time.[48]

As for Rabbi Sherman’s “Leader of the Generation” thesis, Rabbi Dichovsky again cites many decisors of past generations, including Maimonides and Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin, the leading student of the great Gaon of Vilna, who oppose the slavish adherence to the rulings of one man.[49] In addition, Rabbi Dichovsky points out that even within the Haredi world, there is no consensus as to who might be the ultimate halakhic decisor. To begin with, Sephardim look to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who in turn follows the guidance of Rabbi Yosef Karo and his classic Code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch. Rabbi Dichovsky cites Rabbi Yosef’s blunt rejection of the contention by the leading post-war Ashkenazi Haredi decisor, Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Karelitz (popularly known as the Chazon Ish) that Haredim need not always follow the Shulchan Aruch if its rulings were questioned by later scholars. In Rabbi Yosef’s words, “it is revealed and well-known that the wise men of Spain and France [i.e. the Sephardim] accepted upon themselves and their descendants to rule in all cases like our teacher Rabbi Yosef Karo, of blessed memory, even if all later decisors disagree with him [my emphasis].” [50]

Moreover, argues Rabbi Dichovsky, “every community and every group of people has their own ‘Leader of the Generation” and they are obligated to follow him.”[51] For that reason, he adds, “the ruling of the Gadol Hador for one or another community is binding only on those who have accepted his authority and leadership, and not on those who have not accepted him.”[52] More particularly, Rabbi Dichovsky argues first, that the each individual community is bound by the rules of its own leaders and second, that each rabbinical court can rule in light of the evidence before it, (“the judge can only rule on the basis of what is before his eyes”). [53] The clear implication is that no rabbinical court can retroactively invalidate the conversion of another Orthodox court, nor can in invalidate the conversion performed by a court in another country. The latter argument goes to the heart of yet another question that has troubled Jewish communities outside Israel, namely, the decision by the Chief Rabbinate to authorize only certain Diaspora rabbis to conduct conversions.

It should be noted that Rabbi Dichovsky has not been a lone voice confronting Rabbi Sherman. Other rabbis have likewise challenged his halakhic rationale. These have included Rabbi David Bass, a member of the special rabbinical conversion court , who rejected an effort to invalidate the conversion of a woman and her daughter when it was discovered that the mother continued to have relations with a non-Jewish male[54] and Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, a judge on the Special Court for Conversions and the head of the Zomet Institute, who agreed in part with Rabbi Bass in the case just noted,[55] but who also both challenged Rabbi Sherman’s “Leader of the Generation” thesis as well as his assertion that the Supreme Rabbinical Court could review and overturn conversions by a lower court and/or the Special Court for Conversions. [56] The latter assertion was also challenged by other rabbis including Rabbi Ya’akov Epstein, a leading decisor who heads a Torah institute in Ashkelon, and Rabbi Moshe Mestbaum of the Sderot Yeshiva.[57]

Another prominent rabbi challenging Rabbi Sherman’s premises is Rabbi Chaim Amsellem, a Member of the Knesset and the author of two scholarly books on conversion. [58] And of course, Rabbi Druckman, whose authority and integrity were both the subject of Rabbi Sherman’s critique, steadfastly has held to his position.[59]

Shortly after Rabbi Sherman’s ruling was made public Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who has ultimate authority over conversions, announced that he would not cancel any conversion but simply return the case to the local rabbinical court.[60] Some fifteen months after his controversial ruling, but before Rabbi Amar had it officially revoked, Rabbi Sherman retroactively voided another conversion.[61] This decision prompted Rabbi Amar to announce that he would personally decide which rabbis on the Rabbinical Court would be authorized to deal with conversions. Rabbi Sherman held steady to his views, however. He continued to assert his position in rebuttals to the critiques of his colleagues.[62]

It was noteworthy that, as Rabbi Amar’s spokesman pointed out, Rabbi Amar’s announcement did not name Rabbi Sherman. Nevertheless, the Haredi community made it clear that it would bitterly resist any attempt to sideline him. A Haredi supporter of Rabbi Eliashiv responded to Rabbi Amar’s ruling by stating that “If reports regarding Amar’s letter are true, our rabbis will come out with a very serious reaction. Rabbi Amar has crossed a red line and he is directly undermining the halakhic validity of conversions in Israel.” [63]

The Haredi reaction was not limited merely to words, however. The Haredim had already achieved a major victory a few months earlier, when in March 2010 when Chief Rabbis Metzger and Amar issued a series of guidelines for determining a person’s status as a Jew. [64] The guidelines, which are several pages long, were aimed at those who immigrated to Israel after 1990 and who wished to marry or divorce within the Jewish tradition utilizing the State’s religious apparatus. The guidelines were meant for use by a Rabbinical Court whose investigator must determine whether the applicant is Jewish beyond a reasonable doubt. Applicants would have to present original documentation of their matrilineal descent from a Jewish woman up to the great-grandmother. The test for Ethiopians was even more rigorous: they would have to provide proof going back seven generations—a near impossibility for many of them.

At about the same time, the Haredi factions, and the parties representing them in the Knesset, were able to derail a major proposal that its proponent, David Rotem, a member of the Yisrael Beiteinu party whose major support derives from Russian-speaking Israelis, had intended as a vehicle for significantly increasing the prospects for converting the approximately 300,000 emigres from the former Soviet Union (FSU). These persons were not being recognized as Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate and thus were unable marry a Jewish spouse in an Orthodox ceremony. Rotem’s plan was to increase the number of local rabbis in Israel’s cities and towns who would be authorized to perform conversions, thus increasing the number and pace at which FSU émigrés could be converted.

Nevertheless, under pressure from the Haredi parties, Rotem accepted a series of amendments to his bill, that the first time granted the Chief Rabbinate authority over all conversions, whether in or outside Israel. The amended draft legislation stipulated that only the Chief Rabbinate could certify rabbis on the expanded “list.” Moreover, non-Jews whose conversions were not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate would no longer be accepted under the Law of Return, as had been the case since a ruling in their favor by the Israeli Supreme Court. The draft bill passed a Knesset committee in July 2010.

The Rotem Bill provoked an uproar in the Diaspora, as well as opposition from the Israeli government, and Rotem quickly began to back away from his own legislation. He insisted that his plan in no way affected conversions in the Diaspora, but was limited to those in the State of Israel. The legislation did not move forward. In addition, the conversion issue again reverted to the Supreme Court, which in April 2012 overturned Rabbi Sherman’s ruling and instead validated all Orthodox conversions. Finally, a new rabbinical group called Tzohar (emerged on the Israeli socio-religious-political scene to oppose the Haredi hammerlock on the Chief Rabbinate and its nationwide apparatus.

WHAT TO DO: TRANSFORMING THE CHIEF RABBINATE

Writing nearly fifty years ago, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, a leading modern Orthodox scholar and halakhic decisor, and a powerful supporter of the Chief Rabbinate, argued that despite the refusal of the Haredi community to recognize its authority, for “the majority of the Yishuv [community] of the Land of Israel, that chose the chief rabbinate and see them as their rabbis, they, as well as the rabbis that serve [individual] communities on the basis of their appointment and approval by the chief rabbinate, certainly qualify as the mara d’atra [local decisor] in the sense that their rulings and decisions are binding.” [65] Yet he also recognized that the Chief Rabbinate was hardly free from external political pressure that ultimately would undermine its authority. Indeed, three years earlier, in May 1960, while the battle over the successor to Rabbi Herzog continued to rage, Rabbi Yisraeli pleaded that the choice of a chief rabbi “should be free of all external influence” and warned that “otherwise the choice will be flawed, otherwise the community will not be able to relate to honor and glorify the authority of the person chosen for that position.”[66]

There can be little doubt that Rabbi Yisraeli’s concerns are paramount today. The Chief Rabbinate has become a political tool of a community that recognizes neither its authority, nor that of the State of Israel. Moreover, the Chief Rabbinate is becoming further and further removed from the Israeli public. Thanks to political machinations aimed at securing the support of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, it has evolved from a modern Orthodox institution with a tolerant, if not all embracing attitude to secular Jews to a Haredi stronghold that displays minimal interest in Jews that do not conform to its increasingly rigorous standards. As Zev Farber, an American-born modern Orthodox rabbi now living in Israel recently wrote, “There is a pervasive feeling that the Chief Rabbinate has failed in its duties and has now become more of a hindrance to the average citizen’s relationship to Judaism as a facilitator of Israeli Jewish life.”[67] Indeed, because of the Chief Rabbinate’s views on conversion, as well as its refusal o recognize non-Orthodox marriages, it has been asserted (by an Orthodox observer, no less) that as many as one-third of secular Israeli couples are married in civil ceremonies outside of Israel.[68] This situation poses a serious threat to the cohesion of the Jewish state; there is an urgent need for the Chief Rabbinate to transform itself it is to retain any relevance to Israeli Jews who are not part of the insular Haredi community that so strongly resents them.

There is a growing clamor both in Israel and the Diaspora that it is time to abolish the Chief Rabbinate. There are even Orthodox rabbis who take this view.[69] Certainly, such a move would gratify Israel’s non-Orthodox streams who feel that the State systematically discriminates against them. Yet despite their efforts, and pressure especially from the American Jewish community, which is overwhelmingly non-Orthodox, there is little indication that the vast majority of secular Israelis would turn to the Masorti (Conservative), Reform or other movements for spiritual direction. Most secular Jewish Israelis have little if any interest in their religion, and, to the extent they do, they appear to prefer traditional Jewish ritual, that is, Orthodox ritual, but without its accompanying strictures and lifestyle.

This is not to say that non-Orthodox streams should not benefit from State support. To the contrary, it is time they were fully recognized and indeed received such support. Nevertheless, just as the reality of popular disenchantment with the rabbinate must be confronted head-on, so too must the reality that non-Orthodox Judaism commands loyalty from a rather small fraction of Israelis.

What is needed, therefore, is not the abolition of the Chief Rabbinate, but rather its transformation into a much more circumscribed, yet relevant and all-inclusive authority. This idea was not unlike that of propagated some years ago by Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron, as noted above. His premise is similar, though not entirely identical, to that of Rabbi Farber: so many Jews have been ignoring the Chief Rabbinate and its role that, in practice, there already is a serious division within Israeli Jewry that belies the notion of “unity” among that community; in Rabbi Amar’s words, there are already “two peoples,” if not more.[70]

A modified version of the Bakshi-Doron plan would assign to the Chief Rabbinate, and the rabbinical courts that are linked to it, a role that would be a variant of that of the United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbinate and Beth Din: it would relinquish control over all matters of personal status and function alongside non-Orthodox Jewish streams, as it does elsewhere in the world. Following another British model, the Chief Rabbinate would, like the Church of England, embody the state religion, whose holidays would be publicly observed.[71] Moreover, the Chief Rabbinate’s status as the “official” state rabbinate would also include other duties, such as managing the “sale” of the land during the seventh shmitta year. Finally, of the utmost importance, and again analogous to the Church of England and its spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi and the Sephardi Rishon LeTzion, would constitute personal role models for all Israeli Jews, whatever their preferred religious stream or degree of personal practice.

Again, following the example of the British Chief Rabbinate and the London Beth Din, the Israeli rabbinical court system, which is linked to the Chief Rabbinate by virtue of the Chief Rabbi’s sway over judicial appointments, would retain authority over kashrut. While there is much grumbling over the nature of kashrut supervision in Israel, as long as this remains a state-supported function, the government could impose far more rigorous auditing and accountability guidelines than is currently the case today. Such rigor would go a long way toward preventing fraud, while the termination of control over personal status would limit the ability of the kashrut authorities to impose rules on personal behavior and dress that go beyond the strict dictates of dietary law.

This hybrid British model would enable Israeli Jews wishing to marry, divorce, and be buried in non-Orthodox ceremonies to do so, without having to endure the confrontation, and at times abuse, that often takes place far too frequently today when dealing with the Chief Rabbinate and its representatives. It would formally accept the status of non-Orthodox rabbis by rendering them eligible to perform life cycle ceremonies. It would enable all conversions to Judaism would be accepted by the State, whether for the purposes of both the Law of Return or, with respect to immigrants, for their recognition by the State as Jews. Finally, as in the UK, all religious institutions, whatever their stream, would be eligible for government funding as long as they met required standards for secular studies.

As the embodiment of the State’s majority religion, the Chief Rabbinate would participate in public ceremonies, such as those associated with Jewish holidays, as well as those secular ceremonies that call for contributions by religious leaders. Its courts would continue to offer the resolution of disputes according to the Halakha, as well as maintain a register of marriages and divorces performed under Orthodox auspices, much as the London Beth Din and other British religious courts have done for many decades. Those who care about such things will turn to the Chief Rabbinate for guidance; those who seek out non-Orthodox rabbis to minister to their life cycle events will be secure in the knowledge that those too will be officially recognized by the State.

Finally, the Chief Rabbinate and its associated rabbinical institutions would also continue to provide kashrut supervision for all government and public establishments, such as museums, as well as for the military. As in the UK, it would provide kashrut supervision services for food and beverages sold both wholesale and retail. In this way it would ensure that all Israeli Jews who accept the authority of the State,[72] including the Orthodox, could maintain their standards of kashrut anywhere in Israel. At the same time, stricter government oversight would underscore the credibility of kashrut certification while restricting the kashrut authorities’ overreach into personal matters.

Needless to say, achieving such changes will be neither easy nor simple. The Israeli Haredi and secular publics both are indifferent to the Chief Rabbinate and will not press for changes. Indeed, as salaried officials of the Chief Rabbinate, many Haredim have a vested interest in its preservation. While the leadership of any effort to transform the institution must come from within Israeli itself, the Diaspora, particularly the American Jewish community, is in a position to make its voice heard far more powerfully than has been the case until now. Israeli relations with the United States are in some ways more brittle than they have been in the not-so-distant past, and the government in Jerusalem needs American Jewish support as much as it ever has.

This last point deserves further elaboration. Israel simply cannot risk losing the support of the overwhelming majority of American Jews, who happen not to be Orthodox. Already there is much concern about the growing indifference of young Jewish Americans, while those entering the non-Orthodox rabbinate are becoming increasingly restive about relations with Israel. Such indifference poses a national security challenge for the State of Israel. America is Israel’s key ally, the source of critical military assistance that enables it to maintain what is called its “Qualitative Military Edge” over its enemies. Absent the active commitment to Israel on the part of the majority of America’s Jewish community, and given the changing ethnic face of America’s population, Israel could find that American long-standing support for its security might begin to wane. Therefore, while on its face the link between the future of the Chief Rabbinate and the future security of Israel might seem remote, it is in fact crucial, because the support of America’s Jewish community is a critical factor for Israel’s long-term security, and the State cannot afford to allow that community to be alienated by the Chief Rabbinate.

Nevertheless, though overwhelmingly non-Orthodox, American Jews must be careful about framing the debate purely in terms of their religious streams, and this for two reasons. First, most Israelis are as, if not more, indifferent to the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism than they are to the Chief Rabbinate. The majority still prefer to celebrate life cycle events according to the Orthodox tradition rather than in line with non-Orthodox practice. Second, not only the Haredim, but the HarDaLim, many of the modern Orthodox, and the traditional Sephardim, all remain to various degrees hostile to the non-Orthodox movements. Moreover, given the political clout of the Orthodox, especially the Haredim, in the Israeli political system, great care will have to be taken not to be viewed as meddling in internal Israeli affairs.

The issue of personal status is nevertheless not solely an internal political matter. It affects Diaspora Jewry, especially American Jewry, and not only its non-Orthodox streams, but some of the modern Orthodox as well. There is therefore no reason for the Diaspora to remain silent, or for that matter, uninvolved. Jewish organizations that are not affiliated with any religious stream, like the American Jewish Committee, should follow the latter’s lead and issue public statements calling for the overhaul of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Delegations visiting Israel call for the same, not only in private meetings with government officials, but in interaction with Israel’s highly vocal media as well. And American and other Diaspora Jewish communities should fund Israeli organizations of all religious streams, and those of purely secular bent, that seek to change the status quo. The Israeli organizations include not only those that are non-Orthodox, but also modern Orthodox rabbinical groups such as Tzohar, and lay groups such as Kolech, the organization that lobbies for change in the religio-legal status of women.

The Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel, the homeland of all the Jewish people, should be the Chief Rabbinate of all the Jewish people. It must be inclusive, not exclusionary. It should provide for all, and to do so, must accommodate all. It means, on the one hand, offering supervised kashrut in all public facilities so that all Israelis can comfortably partake of food with their brothers and sisters. It means, on the other hand, support for the educational institutions of all of Judaism’s streams, so that all parents can bring up their children in the tradition that means most to them.

Finally, it must follow in the footsteps of Chief Rabbi Herzog, who, upon phoning the President of the United States in May 1948 to tell him that, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousands years, ” caused tears to rundown the cheeks of Harry Truman.[73] In other words, like Rabbi Herzog, or for that matter, Lord Jonathan Sacks, whose writings about Torah recently were published in the prestigious journal of the national security elite, Foreign Affairs,[74] the Chief Rabbinate must serve serving as a moral beacon, for Jews as well as non-Jews, winning the respect of all, and in so doing sanctifying the name of Heaven, both in Israel and around the world. Doing anything less will justify the arguments of those who call for its abolition.

IN CONCLUSION: A PERSONAL NOTE
I am proud to call myself an Orthodox Jew. I firmly believe in the divinity of both the written Torah and the Oral Law and in the thirteen principles of Maimonides. I recognize that other streams of Judaism do not share that belief. I am convinced that they are fundamentally wrong. Indeed, three men to whom those streams have continued to look for inspiration--Moses Mendelssohn, Solomon Schechter, and Britain’s Chief Rabbi Hertz (who was the first graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary), all believed in the divinity of the Bible.

Nevertheless, I respect the sincerely held views of those with whom I disagree. I do not see them in any negative light, nor do I consider it appropriate, or indeed, mentschlich, to de-legitimate them, or their rabbis and leaders, in any way. Orthodoxy must make its case on the battleground of ideas, not behind closed political doors—and that observation applies as much to the Diaspora as to Israel.

In this regard, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate faces a crisis of confidence on the part of its multiple constituents: Jewish Israelis, and Jews worldwide. It has been hijacked by a group of intellectually dishonest extremists who deny the legitimacy of the state that signs their paychecks and who scorn those of their fellow Jews who do not see the world as they do. They exploit their power to ruin the lives of hundreds, even thousands of their co-religionists. They bring shame on the religion they profess to uphold, and on the Sacred Name whom they purport to represent.

Unless the Chief Rabbinate is transformed in a manner that enables it to retrieve its moral authority while co-existing with other streams of Judaism, its future and value as an institution will be problematic at best. The current situation simply cannot be permitted to go on. The credibility of Judaism in general and of Orthodoxy in particular, as well as the unity of the Jewish people, both within and outside the State of Israel, are all very much at stake.
_________________
[1] Beit Din Harabani Hagadol, 4 Adar I 5768 (10 February 2008), Case # 5489-64-1 (Hebrew).
[2] See Aharon Lichtenstein, “The Israeli Chief Rabbinate: A Current Halakhic Perspective,” Tradition 26:4 (1992), p.27.

[3] Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 230.
[4] In fact, Rabbi Sonnenfeld, for all his differences with Rabbi Kook, accompanied the latter in some of his outreach efforts in the secular kibbutzim and moshavim of Northern Galilee.
[5] The land of the Khazars was a Jewish state from the eighth to the tenth century CE, and there were shorter lived statelets on the Arabian peninsula and in Babylonia during the sixth century CE, but the State of Israel was the first Jewish state in the Jewish homeland since Bar Kochba’s rebellion of 132-136 CE.
[6] Rabbi Herzog argued for full religious and political rights for Muslims and Christians living in Israel. See Rabbi Yitzchok Isaac Halevi Herzog, “Zechuyot Hami’utimm Lefi Ha’Halakha,” (Minority Rights According to Halakha), Techumin 2 (5741/1980-81), pp. 169-79.
[7] See the exchange of letters between Rabbi Herzog and Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, 16 October (12 Cheshvan) 1958 and 10 November 1958, http://www.archives.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/CA26304C-B980-4921-8E1E-ABF974B07C65/0/herzog01.pdf
[8] Letter to Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, 1 Kislev 5716/1955, reprinted in Techumin 28 (5768/2008-2009), p. 468.
[9] See Rabbi Yitzchok Isaac Halevi Herzog, Pesakim U’Ktavim, vol. 4: Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot BeDinei Yoreh De’ah, nos. 87 and 95.
[10] His 1944 responsum on Bene Israel appears in ibid., vol 8: Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot BeDinei Even Ha’ezer, Appendix #2. The responsum reiterates a similar ruling that he gave seven years earlier in response to a query from the editor of the Bombay “Jewish Platform.”
[11] See Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel, Mishpetei Uziel vol. 2, Yoreh De’ah No. 14. For a brief discussion of Rabbi Uziel’s views on conversion, see Rabbi Marc D, Angel, “Conversion to Judaism: Halakha, Hashkafa, and Historic Challenge,” Hakirah VII (Winter 2009) pp. 42-43. As will be discussed below, Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, the leading Haredi rabbic decisor of the immediate pre-World War II generation, also ruled leniently in the case of a non-Jewish woman already married to a Jew who sought an Orthodox conversion see Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot Ahiezer,vol 3, no. 26, sub-section 6.
[12] See Rabbi Yitchak Nissim, Yain Hatov: Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot, Even Ha’ezer V’Choshen Mishpat, no. 6.
[13] See, for example, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenburg, Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot Tzitz Eliezer vol. 10, 2nd ed., no. 25, sub-section 3.
[14] Pesakim U’Ktavim, vol. 6: Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot BeDinei Even Ha’ezer nos. 15-16.
[15] He was also the hardest line on the question of relations with other faiths, see Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, Community, Covenant and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (New York: Ktav, 2005), pp. 247-68. Rabbi Nissim also took a hard line on this issue: he famously refused to participate in a reception for Pope Paul VI during the latter’s 1964 visit to Israel arguing that the pope had not shown respect to the Chief Rabbinate.
[16] Rabbi Soloveichik to Rabbi Reuven Katz , no date, ibid p. 177.
[17] Rabbi Soloveichik to Moshe Shapiro,February 15, 1960 in ibid., p.174.
[18] Rabbi Soloveichik to Dr. Moshe Unna, April 8, 1960, in ibid.,p. 187.
[19] Cited in Marc D. Angel, “Conversion to Judaism: Halakha, Hashkafa and Historic Challenge,” Hakirah 7 (Winter 2009), p. 44. See also J. David Bleich, Contemporary Halachic Problems Vol. 1 (New York and Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1977), pp. 294-95.
[20] Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot Yabia Omer vol. 2: Even Ha’ezer, no. 4.
[21] Ibid., vol. 9: Yoreh De’ah, no. 16. The case involved a man who was about to marry only to discover that his mother had been converted by a local Buenos Aires rabbi in contravention of the long-standing ban on conversions in that city. Rabbi Yosef did say that while the mother’s conversion remained valid, if “it were not inconvenient” for the man to convert in an Argentine town other than Buenos Aires, it was preferable that he do so.
[22] Ibid., no. 24.
[23] Ibid., vol.7: Even Ha’ezer, no. 1.
[24] Ibid., vol. 8: Even Ha’ezer no. 11.
[25] For a discussion of the case, see Bleich, Contemporary Halachic Problems Vol. 1, pp. 293-294.
[26] Danna Harman, “With Peace Process Stalled, Rabbi Is Promoting Dialogue With Muslims,” Los Angeles Times (May 24,1998) http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/24/news/mn-52936
[27] Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Yachel Yisrael, vol. 1, no. 25. Rabbi Lau cites an impressive array of decisors, both Sephardi and Eastern and Western European Ashkenazi, upon whom he relies. These include, among others, the medieval authors of Tosefot (cf. Talmud Bavli: Yevamot); the Sephardi Rabbis Yosef Karo (Beit Yosef) and Ben Zion Uziel (Mishpetei Uziel: Even Ha’ezer no. 25); the Eastern European Rabbis Shabbetai ben Meir Hacohen (Siftei Cohen, or Sha”ch), Malkiel Zvi Tennnenbaum (Sh’eylot U’teshuvot Divrei Malkiel vol.6, no. 19), Zvi Pesach Frank (Sh’eylot U’teshuvot Har Zvi: Yoreh De’ah no. 218), Ya’akov Breisch (Chelkat Ya’akov vol. 1, nos. 13-14) and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (Da’at Cohen, nos. 154-55); and, from the Western European tradition, Rabbi Dovid Zvi Hoffmann (Sh’eylot U’teshuvot Melamed Le’ho’il: Yoreh De’ah no. 85).
[28] Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, “Yachas Ha’Halakha LeChukei Hamedina,” (The Relationship of Halakha to the Laws of the State), Techumin 3 (5742/1981-82), pp. 241-44.
[29] Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, “Gilui Eliyahu,” (The Revelation of Eliyahu), Techumin 31 (5771/2011-12), p.5.
[30] For many years, Haifa was the only Israeli city where public transportation operates on Shabbat, a result of the determined efforts of its longtime avowedly secular mayor, Abba Hushi.
[31] Harman, “With Peace Process Stalled.” See also Rabbi Bakshi-Doron’s Opening Presentation to the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace, that was held in Morocco, January 3-6 2005. http://www.imamsetrabbins.org/en/publications/detail/3/10/25
[32] Rabbi Eliayahu Bakshi-Doron, “Chok Nisuin V’Geirushin-Hayatza Sechoro B’Hefsedo?,” (The Law of Marriage and Divorce—Have its Liabilities Come to Outweigh its Value?), Techumin 25 (5765/2005), pp. 99-107.
[33] Rabbi Amar has vigorously opposed any official recognition by the State of Israel of Masorti (Conservative) and Reform rabbis. See Jeremy Sharon, “Amar: Stop recognizing of non-Orthodox Rabbis,” Jerusalem Post ( June 19,2012). http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=274359

[34] For a brief discussion see Dov S. Zakheim, “What Happened to the Ten Lost Tribes,” in Yamin Levy ed., Mishpetei Shalom: A Jubilee Volume in Honor of Rabbi Saul (Shalom) Berman (New York: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, n.d.), pp. 607-647-648.
Shahar Ilan, “But Not for Jews,” Haaretz (July 28, 2005). http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/but-not-for-jews-1.165253
[35] Amiram Barkat, “Chief Rabbinate Prepares Bill to Remove Converts from Law of Return,”, Haaretz, November 21, 2006. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/chief-rabbinate-preparing-bill-to-change-law-of-return-converts-won-t-be-recognized-as-jews-1.201905#…
[36] For a discussion see Angel, “Conversion to Judaism,” p. 29.
[37] Baruch Kra, “Bakshi-Doron Slams Metzger appointment as Chief Rabbi,” Haaretz (April 28, 2003) http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/bakshi-doron-slams-metzger-appointment-as-chief-rabbi-1.11663
[38] Yair Ettinger, “Rabbinical Judge: Most Immigrants Seeking Conversion are Misguided,” Haaretz (June 18, 2009). http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/rabbinical-judge-most-immigrants-seeking-conversion-are-misguided-1.278291
Ibid.
[39] These were Rabbis Eliashiv, Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky and Elazar Shach.
[40] See Rabbi Avraham-Chaim Sherman, Bedika Chozeret Shel Giyur B’veit Din Acheir,” (Repeat Investigation of [a] Conversion in another Rabbinical Court), Techumin 31 (5771/2011), pp. 234-35.
[41] See, for example, Rabbi Sherman’s “Yichusam Shel Noladim Me’hapirya Chuitz Gufis Mitrumas Zara: Beirur Shitas Maran HaGaon Rav Yosef Sholom Eliashiv” (The Parentage of Children born in vitro from a Foreign [i.e. non-parental] Donor: Clarification of the Position of our Teacher the Gaon Rabbi Yosef Sholom Eliashiv), Yeshurun 21 (5769/2009), pp. 535-45.
[42] See Rabbi Avraham-Chaim Sherman, “Samchut Gedolei Hador BeNosei Ishut VeGerut,” (Authority of the Great Men of the Generation in Matters of Personal Status and Conversion), Techumin,30 (5770/2009-2010), pp. 163-173.
[43] Ibid., p. 165.
[44] Ibid., pp. 170-71.
[45] It is noteworthy that Rabbi Eliashiv himself, at least in his earlier years, did not always take a hard line on personal status. For example, in 1986 he ruled leniently in favor of two sisters who were about to marry but discovered that their late maternal grandmother was a divorcee, and had their mother by her second husband, but there was only family oral history to substantiate the belief that she had obtained an Orthodox religious divorce from her first husband. Rabbi Eliashiv permitted the weddings to go ahead. See “Eey Amrinan Sfek Sfeika Lehakel Bema’alas Yuchsin,” (Whether We Rule a Compound Uncertainty Is Permissive in Matters of Geneology) Yeshurun 18 (5767/2006), pp. 644-46). He also ruled leniently in a complex 1978 case of a woman seeking to marry who had converted as a child and now sought to marry a Cohen, normally forbidden to a convert. “Giyores LeCohen” (A Convert Marrying a Cohen), ibid., 17 (5766/2006), pp. 451-53.

[46] See Rabbi Shlomo Dichovsky, “Bitul Giyur Le’Mafreya,” (Retroactive Invalidation of Conversion) Techumin 29 (5769/2008-2009), pp. 267-280, who discusses and rebuts Rabbi Sherman’s position at some length. Rabbi Dichovsky could have cited other major twentieth century halakhic decisor—notably Rabbi Dovid Zvi Hoffmann, Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot Melamed Leho’il: Even Ha’ezer Nos 8 and 10, and Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, Sh’eylot U’Teshuvot Sridei Eish: Yoreh Deah no. 66—but he may have chosen not to do so because these rabbis reflected the more liberal German Orthodox tradition that was not fully accepted by the East European rabbis whom contemporary Ashkenazi Haredim venerate.
[47] See Rabbi Shlomo Dichovsky, “’Daat Torah’ Ba’Halakha,” (The Place of “Torah Outlook” in Halakha), Techumin,30 (5770/2009-2010), pp. 174-91.
[48] Ibid., p. 177-78. Rabbi Yosef’s statement appears in Yabia Omer, vol. 1: Orach Chayim, introduction.
[49] Dichovsky, “Da’at Torah,” p. 184.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid., p. 191.
[52] Rabbi David Bass, “Tokfo Shel Giyur Bediavad Eem Hager Ayno Shomer Kol Hamitzvot,” (The Post-Facto Validity of a Conversion When the Convert Does Not Adhere to all the Mitzvot,” Techumin 23 (5763/2002/2003), pp. 186-98).
[53] Rabbi Rozen agreed that the daughter’s conversion remained valid, but that the mother’s behavior clearly indicated that she had never been serious about converting according to Jewish standards.
[54] See ibid.,30, appendix to Rabbi Sherman’s article, p. 173 and ibid. 31 appendix to Rabbi Sherman’s article, p. 236.
[55] Rabbi Ya’akov Epstein, “Lo Nitan Levatel Giyur She’na’ase Kedin” (There is no Provision for Annulling a Conversion Conducted according to the Law), ibid. 32, pp. 332-36; Rabbi Moshe Mestabum, “Giyur Einehul Chizui He’atid” (Conversion is not a Forecast of the Future), ibid., pp. 337-39.
[56] See Chaim Amsellem, “Acceptance of Commandments for Conversion,” Conversations No. 14 (Autumn 2012/5773), pp. 91-113.
[57] The Sherman ruling also prompted discussion among American rabbis. See Rabbi Chaim Jachter, “Nullification of a Conversion,” Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society LXII (Succot 5772/Fall 2011), pp. 5-27.
[58] See also Angel, “Conversion to Judaism.”
[59] Kobi Nahshoni, “Friedmann: Israel Must Allow Marriages for All Citizens,” ynetnews.com (May 19, 2008) http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3544997,00.html
[60] Matthew Wagner, “Amar Moves to Bar Controversial Rabbinic Judge from Conversion Cases,” Jerusalem Post (June 25, 2009) http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=146773
[61] See, for example, “Teshuvat Harav Avraham Chaim Sherman Lehasagat Harav Yisrael Rozen b’Techumin 31 v’Hearot Mechaber Ma’amar Teguva Zeh (Response of Rabbi Avraham Chaim Sherman to the Critique of Rabbi Yisrael Rozen in Techumin 31 and to the Comments of the Author [Rabbi Epstein]of this Response), Appendix to Rabbi Epstein’s article, Techumin 32, p. 336.
[62] Rabbi Nahum Eisenstein quoted in ibid.
[63] Shlomo Moshe Amar and Yonah Yechiel Metzger “Hanchayot Bebirur Yahadut 5770/2010” (Guidelines for Establishing [One’s] Judaism ( 17 Adar 5770/March 3, 2010).
[63] Author’s translation from the Hebrew in Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, Amud Hayemini 3rd. ed. (Jerusalem: Machon Hatorah Vehamedina, 5760/2010), no. 6.
[65] Author’s translation from the Hebrew in Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, Harabanut Vehamedina: Asofet Ma’amarim, Ne’umim, Sichot, U’reshimot al Rabbanut Eretzyisraelit, Hatziyonut Hadatit, Medinat Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Avraham Kohen, 5761/2002), p. 73.
[66] Zev Farber, “Reform, Restore or Rescind: What to do with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel,” The Times of Israel (September 27, 2012) http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/reform-restore-or-rescind-what-to-do-with-the-chief-rabbinate-of-israel/. Rabbi Zev Farber should not be confused with Rabbi Seth Farber, likewise a critic of the Chief Rabbinate, who is the founder of Itim, an organization devoted to helping Israelis navigate the complexities posed by interaction with the religious authorities. See, for example, Seth Farber , “The Challenge: To marry in the Rabbinate,” Jerusalem Post (August 11, 2012) http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=280881
[67] Matti Friedman, “A Battle for the Rabbinate, and for Israel’s Soul,” The Times of Israel (September 11, 2012) http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-battle-for-the-rabbinate-and-for-israels-soul/
[68] Zev Farber, “Reform, Restore or Rescind.”
[69] Bakshi-Doron, “The Law of Marriage and Divorce,” pp.
[70] The British Chief Rabbi does not formally represent the Reform and Liberal Jewish streams that are active in the UK and elsewhere, but he does represent the Jewish community on State occasions as well as on the international stage. The Archbishop of Canterbury has a much more formal role as the leader of England’s established church.
[71] The Haredim do not accept the authority of the State. Even if they do, their determination of what satisfies their standards is often peculiar to Haredi sub-groups (e.g. some Hassidic sects will not accept shechita (ritual slaughter) by anyone other than their own shochtim) and therefore cannot be fully accommodated.
[72] David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)
[73] Jonathan Sacks, “God’s Politics: The Lessons of the Hebrew Bible,” Foreign Affairs 91 (November/December 2012), pp. 124-28.

generic drugs

Why in Megillat Esther is the name of God not mentioned even once, considering that it was the hand of God that altered a near catastrophe for the Jewish people living in Persia?

God’s name, Y-H-W-H, meaning “He [=God] is in a state of continuous and eternal being,” is not mentioned in the Esther Scroll. Since the religious theme of the Scroll is that God watches over the world, the obvious question is: why is God’s name not mentioned even once throughout Megillat Eshter? This question lays the seeds for the Scroll’s deconstruction, and yields for the attentive reader a Biblical theology of Israel. For the religion of the Jews, God appears as a character in the national Book, the Hebrew Bible. The image of God that appears in the national, canonical Book provides a finite, human language description of how God’s presence is perceived by the pious, practicing Jew in everyday life.

Let us first summarize the questions that the narrative raises:

1. What is it in the Hebrew Divine Name that makes its absence notable?
2. How was this absence misunderstood by the Qumranide Dead Sea sectarians?
3. Who are the characters and what are their names?
4. Where does the narrative begin and where does the narrative end?
5. Why does the Scroll’s opening sound so much like Plato’s Symposium?
6. Why is it imperative that God not appear in the narrative by name?

_______________________________________
1.What is it in the Hebrew Divine Name
that makes its absence notable?

The Divine Name in Hebrew, Y-H-W-H, is a third person imperfect form, meaning “He is being.” In the First Temple times this verb form signified an imperfect tense, or continuing action. In later Hebrew, this originally imperfect form assumed the sense of a future tense. By remaining hidden beneath the narrative’s surface and story, God, as a literary character—and statement of Jewish theology, is never present to the secular eye yet is ever present to the pious, inner, introspective eye. The secular or mundane eye is able to notice from a distance the pious actions of the believing, behaving and identifying Jew, but is unable to appreciate, much less decode, the meaning of the strange, foreign, alien and therefore alienating gestures of the Jew whose laws do not conform to the edicts of a human king. The absence of the Divine is therefore ironic; the God Whom the mundane mind is unable to sense is the God Who pulls all the strings, arranges all events, settles every account, and directs history toward its providential telos, or goal.

2. How was this absence misunderstood by the Qumranide Dead Sea sectarians?

The Dead Sea sectarians were religiously very strict, theologically very stark, simple, absolute, and extreme. Deep down, this sect was theologically rather shallow. Their reading of Scripture and their understanding of Torah were not nuanced; the Qumranide reading of both Bible and reality was enchanted and apocalyptic, where the cosmic “forces” of evil are arrayed against the “forces” constructively striving for good. Their commentaries are re-writes of Hebrew Scripture called “mediations,” or pesharim. Since the Esther Scroll did not mention God’s name, this no nonsense, no nuance sect misread the Esther Scroll as a secular tale and thus excluded the Scroll from its community canon; there was not one exemplar or fragment of the Esther Scroll found at Qumran. On the other hand, both the Pharisees and their rabbinic successors composed commentaries called midrashim, highly nuanced and insightful observations regarding the multi-valenced meanings which are sought in Israel’s Divinely inspired, canonical documents. The rabbis, with their nuanced religious—and literary—sophistication, understood that God is hidden in a violent social, hierarchic political world that that cannot tolerate a Divinity that demands that humankind “do the right and the good.” [Deuteronomy 6:18]

3. Who are the main characters and what are their names?

Ahashuerus is the King of Persia and Media, which really was a double monarchy in antiquity. He ruled from India to Ethiopia, the precise range of Aramaic documents, the lingua franca of the Achaenamid empire, for which Persian was used for private, religious purposes. The Hebrew Scripture reports that in this empire, the Jews/Judeans of the 587 BCE exile seem to retain but are in danger of losing their religious and ethnic identity. According to Persian reports, the empire was divided into 20 administrative districts, or satraps. But Scripture reports that Persia possessed one hundred- twenty medinot. The historically aware, linguistically sensitive and theologically attuned reader does not find a contradiction here, as do the secular critics. The Persians thought as tyrant rulers in administrative terms—how to control the masses; the Jews/Judeans believed in an ethical ethnic identity, which is preserved in the city, the original meaning of medina, a place of localized law, or din in Arabic, Aramaic, as well as Hebrew—in order to nurture a sense of autonomous moral agency in every Jew. Ahashuerus rules blindly, almost always influenced by alcohol, women, intrigue and a congenital addiction to physical pleasure, over a vast kingdom. Bigtan and Teresh tried to initiate a coup d’etat, and were foiled by Mordecai, whom the King ineptly forgot or otherwise fails to reward for his efforts. We see a very human king who presents himself to be all powerful yet is unable to manage, much less master, the power that is at his disposal.

The verbs used to describe the king are intransitive, signifying a state of being. This king merely “is.” He drinks, sits on his throne and enjoys the presence of beautiful women. He does almost nothing without wine, and what he does focuses upon gainful winnings and pleasuring himself. If someone wants to advance in this monarchy that Machiavelli could have imagined, one must anticipate the only real rule of the realm, that which pleasures the prince. See Esther 1:19, 3:9, and 5:4-5, ‘im ‘al ha-meleh tov.

Haman is an Agagite. Agag was the Amaleqite king that King Saul, the Benjamin tribe member, was supposed to execute according to God’s explicit command but did not. As a “professional courtesy” to a fellow human monarch, he allowed Agag to live. Like the Amaleqites of Saul’s time and the Amaleqite tribe in Moses’ time, Haman hopes to destroy Israel because Israel is Israel; because there is no reason in reality for baseless hatred, no reason is offered for it. But we may find a hint in the case that Haman makes before Ahashuerus, that ancient Israel, now known as the people of Judea, i.e. the Jews, must be annihilated. Haman claims that “there is a nation scattered and dispersed among the people [of the empire], they have laws that are different from all the nations, and it is not worth it to the king to leave them be.” [Esther 3:8] Realizing that his own hatred of Israel is irrational, Haman appeals to the king’s utilitarian, greedy instincts: the people are not indigenous; this people by habit resists the acculturation needed for administrative order, social cohesion, and most critically, tax collection, and it simply is not worth it to the king to suffer their potentially irredentist presence. And to seal his maniacal deal, Haman pays the King for the right to stage a pogrom. [Esther 3:9] By portraying Israel as “other,” the nation whose Laws demand that one treat others with dignity, Israel is subversive of every hierarchy, tyranny, and aristocracy. Because of its Book- based ethic that enshrines an inalienable human dignity, Israel the nation thinks critically, makes its own choices, and is born to be free. In narrative contrast, Haman is so possessed with himself that his evil plans are thwarted, as we will see below, by his own sick sense of misplaced importance that ends in impotence. Recall that he enters the King’s courtyard for the right to hang Mordecai, not aware that the King could not sleep, was read the account of the Bigtan and Teresh abortive coup d’etat and Mordecai’s unrewarded act of good—and salvific—citizenship. We here see, even before Haman makes his murderous claim, that it is indeed worth it to have citizens who keep the law like Mordecai the Jew. The King, now for the only instant in the narrative sober--a state unnoticed by the egotistical Haman—plays Haman the way the King was hitherto played by Haman. The King, now scared sober, wants to know what’s on Haman’s clearly twisted mind, being invited to the King’s rolling bar by the King’s favorite wife and entering the King’s courtyard in the dead of night. The King asks, with grim sobriety, high anxiety, and remarkably piercing insight, playing on Haman’s ironically hapless hubris, “what shall be done for the man whom the King desires to honor?” [Esther 6:6a] The now scared, sober, and sleepless King is playing the player even as he is being played by the ultimate Player, the unseen King of kings, who providentially keeps the inept human king from slumber. Realizing that Haman does not suffer from modesty, but is obsessed with ambition, the King asks Haman what his wildest wish would be. And Haman’s hubris overtakes his malevolent cunning; he would wear the royal robe, ride the royal steed, don the royal crown, and be so proclaimed as the friend of the Throne in public. The signet ring of administrative power on his finger is not enough for Haman; he who would destroy Israel for no reason now unwittingly tells the king that it is he who cannot be trusted, any more than Bigtan and Teresh, whom Mordecai had thwarted, from assaulting the Kingdom in the dead of night to kill the human king who at that very moment is unable to sleep.

Esther is the Scroll’s round character who undergoes development in the Scroll that bears her name. Her name is cognate to the pagan deity Ishtar; yet, she has a private hidden Hebrew name, Hadassah. Raised by her pious uncle, Mordecai, the Jew or Judean, Esther is on one hand named by her now deceased parents as the pagan “star,” and grows in Judaism, the cult of the Judeans who serve the unseen God Who is King of the Cosmos, the Father in Heaven and its stars, the Redeemer of Israel, and the Player who plays and preys upon those who would prey and play upon His people. If her Indo-European name represents the visible shining star, the very same word in Hebrew, the language of her people [Esther 8:9 and Esther 9:27] means “hidden,” the root str in Hebrew. When God’s presence is hidden and God’s Presence is unseen, the nations hear the decree to destroy the Jews in their vernaculars and scripts [Esther 3: 12]; Esther’s name and God’s now apparent presence appear when Israel, now redeemed, is recognized as a nation.

In Ahashuerus’ empire, people are passive pawns to be exploited and manipulated by power people. In need of a trophy talent to replace his deposed Vashti, who actively and insubordinately refused the royal order to appear before the King in order to display her natural assets, [Esther 1:17] a beauty contest was suggested to pick her appropriate replacement. The notion that Vashi was asked/ordered to appear/come in the nude, with her crown on her head her only attire, reflects the Midrashic suggestion that the king’s drinking assembly’s intentions were not honorable. [Esther Rabba 3:13] Read the end of the verse, and mQeddushin 1:1.

Esther is taken to the the King’s harem, ina passive voice. [Esther 2:18, 16] As a subject of the tyrant, she is subject to that very tyrant. When challenged by Mordecai that she cannot hide in the Harem in order to escape the King’s decree, she is in a bind. Recall two at first seemingly insignificant narrative facts: that edict which is signed and sealed with the King’s seal cannot be rescinded. [Esther 8:8] and that the King’s decree against the recalcitrant Queen Vashti by the de jure omnipotent King could not be overturned, even by the by the King himself. The deliciously caustic irony is that the Law the human King advances, a Law that once given, cannot be changed, is precisely the Law of the Jews given by the God Who does not change and Who in this Scroll does not appear. [Deut. 4:2, 13:1, and the Epilogue to Hammurapi would have that Code, written in stone, not to be effaced or changed.] Ahashurus acts as if he is a god but appears, except when he is scared sober, to be an inept drunkard.

Esther risks her life with an active leap of faith when she appears before the king uninvited and unannounced. [Esther 4:11] The human King is very aware that he sits on a very fragile throne, especially after the Bigtan and Teresh incident. Unless one is called/yiqqarei in the passive, one is subject to the death penalty for the legitimate fear that one who appears before the king without an appointment may indeed be intent upon regicide. The word for scepter, sharvit, is a Babylonian causal form meaning “to cause one to bow down,” i.e. make the requisite gesture of passivity before the King, who alone is authorized to be active. The King of kings predisposed the human king to look favorably upon his nervous first lady of the harem. After all, we, the omniscient readers, realize that Esther was not called to the King’s bedroom for thirty days [4:11] not because she fell out of favor with her royal husband, as Esther at first feared, but because her fearful husband King was in nervous terror for his own life. Note well that Esther “was not called,” she was not deemed worthy of being passive in the presence of the appropriately paranoid impotent potentate.

Esther grows into religious maturity by being active, by being a moral agent, and by taking a dangerous risk. Idolatrous religion makes a man into a god and people into slaves, as in the case of Pharaoh, or into passive subjects, as in the case of Ahashuerus. As noted by the great Henri Frankfort, in Mesopotamia the king is a god while in Israel—and in the Esther Scroll, God is the King.

Mordecai’s family heritage stems from the tribe of Benjamin and Saul. Neither Saul nor Benjamin’s tribe acted honorably, and neither did those who gave Mordecai his non-Hebrew name, a name he shared with the pagan god called Marduk. In pagan Persia, the king is a tyrant. No one speaks independently but the human King; so the real King, God the Creator, speaks silently. See Psalms 19:4. By protecting the politically legitimate King [the narrator is keenly aware of Jeremiah 9 29:23-28], adopting and nurturing Esther, by mourning publically and praying the unmentionable word in Persia, Mordecai’s external acts testify to his internalized politically astute enlightened piety. Throughout the Esther Scroll, the human king regularly gives orders that render his subjects passive. But at Esther 2:22, the matter of insurrection is made known to Mordecai; there is a Commander/King Who talks and makes His will known to Mordecai. And Mordecai acts upon this information! Haman’s “critique” of the Jews, mean-spirited as it is, ironically, is correct. There is a nation that obeys the commands of God before the drunken bumpkin who sits on Persia’s peacock throne, ever true to the Hebrew nationals who answer to an even higher authority.

4.Where does the narrative begin and where does the narrative end?

The actual Esther Scroll narrative begins with Amaleq at Exodus 17:8 with the gratuitous attack on Israel by the Amalaqite enemies of Israel, who attempted to eradicate a society where every citizen is a moral agent who “embodies” the image of God, whose disposition leads to freedom. The narrative ends with Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, when Mordecai goes home, to Judea. Saul was told by Samuel that God does not lie, I Sam. 15:29, and Mordecai told Esther that if she is not willing to be an active player and moral agent, Israel’s aid will come from another place, [Esther 4:14], she and her household will not survive—because as noted above the human King’s commands, including his command to kill all of the Jews, cannot by pagan law be rescinded—but that God’s care for the Judeans will nonetheless not be abandoned. [Psalms 94:14]

5. Why does the Scroll’s opening sound so much like Plato’s Symposium?

Plato’s Symposium tells a story about the best, brightest, and most beautiful people of Athenian antiquity. Plato the narrator recalls that there was a drinking party, where men discussed—and tried to put into practice—love amongst themselves. The Hebrew word for such a party is called a mishteh, an occasion for party drinking. This is where the affairs of state take place in the Esther Scroll. The hero of the Symposium party, Socrates, wins the day by speaking about true agape love, holding down his wine, and rejecting the advances of the knave general, Alcibiades.

The Jews in Esther join the first drinking party in anonymity, as individuals in the mob. Drinking wine at the party of redemption exemplifies the difference between the two cultures: the Greeks, and the
Persians who to our view are the “Greeks” for whom, under Greek rule, it is politically correct to mock and belittle others cleverly and to drink to and for diversion. The Jew drinks with a benediction, praising the Creator for creating the fruit of the vine, and showing how one may be both joyous and pious. The “ethic” and protocol of Plato’s Symposium was limited to invited male aristocrats alone, where we get to see Socrates say “no” to Alcibiades and his advances not because of sexual morality, but because the latter person was not to the former’s taste. In contrast, the Jewish Purim meal requires wine for all, sending of gifts to others, and caring for the poor. When the Passover offering was being observed, only those listed to eat from the offering could legally do so; once the offering became defunct, “all who are hungry may come and eat, all who are in need are invited to join for the solidarity of the seder.” The Greeks, and the Persian characters who portray them, believe in fate, aristocracy, and honor; the Jew, like Mordecai, believes that there is a Judge and there is a judgment, there is a law which promotes an aristocracy of ethics, because everyone is to walk humbly before the silent God Whose acts speak loudly.

The human aristocracy of the Greek or Persian pagans demanded humility from the masses, expressed literarily by the passivity that is imposed by the inept human King upon his chaotic, multi-national empire that appeared from afar to be powerful but upon close look was out of control.

When some men [women do not do this] press others to be humble, they are asking the “other” to nullify her or himself, to defer out of self-disrespect to someone mistaken to be one’s “better,” to accept the truth of others while being passive and denying one’s self-worth. The ideal Jew is a moral agent who acts out of ethics for good. The ideal Jew’s God created the world, gave a Torah, and commissioned the Jew to put God in the world by acting as Divinely commissioned moral agents.

6. Why is it imperative that God not appear in the narrative by name?

Because Esther’s narrative setting, ancient Persia, and historical setting, the Hellenistic cultural challenge, makes no place for God, God only appears to be absent to those who do not possess the insight of God’s immediacy. The monarchical diction honors protocol and one singular person, Ahashuerus the king. In this amoral pagan setting, great men are petty and morally small; Mordecai’s and Esther’s acts of faith do not resonate within these pagan cultures, so pious Jewish gestures are described as meaningless motions at best and as defiant non-conformity at worst. The engaged reader realizes that what the Jews do indeed are in fact profound acts of religious faith, a point lost upon the narratives pagans but obvious to the attentive reader.
\Ezra 1:1-3 reports:

1”Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order that the word of the Lord given by the mouth of Jeremiah might come true, the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, was moved by the Lord, so that he made a public statement through all his kingdom, and put it in writing, saying,
2These are the words of Cyrus, king of Persia: The Lord God of heaven [an Aramaic idiom common to pagans, see Jonah 1:9] has given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he has made me responsible for building a house for him in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
3Whoever there is among you of his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and take in hand the building of the house of the Lord, the God of Israel; he is the God who is in Jerusalem.” [my italics]

The setting of Ezra is filled with the Presence of God, where Cyrus replaced Ahashuerus as King of Persia. It is a world in which God moves people, and people are moved to put God in the world. God appears in the world when humans let God enter the social construction of ethical reality that is humankind’s to make. In the Esther Scroll, paganism does not allow for religious discourse so God’s name is unmentionable in pagan settings. The Esther Scroll is a commission to the Jewish people to allow God-talk to be part of our spiritual conversation and to beware of leaders who demand less than the fulfillment of the moral agency of each person who by dint of humanity, carries God’s’ image.