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.

To Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo:

Dear Rabbi:

Your article the Spring 2010 issue of Conversations on “The Nature and Function of Halakha in Relation to Autonomous Religiosity” has inspired quite a bit of discussion in our family. Your comments have hit squarely home and crystallize the religious anomie of several of our recently married children. You issued a passionate call for responsible rabbinic leadership to meet the challenges of a less-than-dynamic halakhic process. This is vital to the authentic continuity of our traditions. Please grant me a few moments for a layman’s reflections on this matter.

Halakhic decision-making, since the sealing of the Talmud by Ravina and Rav Ashei in the fifth century C.E., has always been the province of local rabbinic authorities. The subtleties required for rendering the decision of complex issues can only be appreciated by the local Rabbi. The local socio-cultural context provides the framework for a proper and relevant understanding of the issues involved. This feature of our halakhic process has kept our oral law perpetually dynamic and eternally relevant. The application of legal principles to changing local circumstance and nuance demands continuous adaptation. What may be right for one local community at a particular time and place may not necessarily be right for another congregation at the same time but in another region or country. How the values and principles of Torah are applied depends on the subtleties of social context.

The convergence of several unique factors in the broad social context of our information age has indeed bred the paralysis of halakhic evolution. To borrow a term from a popular author and journalist, I call these factors “flatteners”—“Halakhic Flatteners”

1. The emergence of the “professional rabbi” in combination with other flatteners detailed below is probably the most important factor. The Sephardic tradition as detailed by Maimonides calls for community rabbis to serve the local community while pursuing their own professional or commercial career goals. Accepting fees for formal positions as “judge” or halakhic decisor was frowned upon. Yes, valid arguments against that position are made for today’s rabbinic leaders, especially in a world that is increasingly specialized. However, Maimonides’ point needs to be understood. The politics of deciding how to apply law need to be removed—decisions have to be rendered with complete INDEPENDENCE. The current legal decisions of the “professional rabbi” are not and cannot be free of political considerations. The dictates of serving synagogue boards as well as of supporting large yeshiva study centers promotes the practice of what we can label “political/commercial rabbinics” rather than practical rabbinics. Halakhic decision making becomes hostage to the necessity of maintaining crowd/communal popularity and raising money for rabbinic institutions to sustain salaried rabbinic positions rather than what may be necessarily “legally correct.”

2. Instant global communication - Any creative or innovative practice of any remote community is now instantly communicated. It is then subject to analysis and critique by the “professional rabbis” whose interest may very likely be the promotion of their own authority, their own ideology and their own local and vocal constituencies. The political and peer pressure of e-mails, blogs and the internet can suffocate innovation and inhibit the correct application of law to circumstances that may demand a different rabbinic approach than the norm. Flat and politicized worlds cannot accommodate the flexibilities needed for dealing with the subtleties of local social context.

3. Mass education—With lifestyles focused on leisure rather than survival, more than ever before, more people are engaging in religious study. This establishes an exciting base for intellectual ferment and the possibility of a true Jewish Renaissance—unseen for centuries. However, there is nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge, especially when politicized in a world of instant communication. When all of these flatteners combine with the next flattener, the results are explosive.

4. The revolt against secularism and the concurrent rise of religious fundamentalism. This is an understandable reaction to the excesses of an indulgent society and an amoral culture. The constant bombardment of the individual with anti-traditional messages through every media portal can provide a justifiable basis for isolationism in ghettos. It is a rather natural reaction to the excesses of the age of greed and materialism (the 1980s and 1990s) and our new, in the words of President Obama, “culture of irresponsibility.”

5. The rate of change of the social condition has quickened. Women are now, for the most part, treated as equal in ability and opportunity to men. The nuclear family is under siege. Revolutions in the fields of medical and life sciences pose serious ethical and halakhic dilemmas. The major institutions that dominated society for millennia are withering. Indeed, the very premises of traditional cultural values are seriously challenged. Before the twentieth century, history was defined mostly by political and religious institutions. In the past century, this paradigm has changed. Technology, more than ever, is rapidly changing the institutional landscape. (an example: The Mideast revolutions and social media). In order to remain relevant, halakha must address these major and continuously changing social dynamics.

6. The paranoia in the Orthodox world created by Conservative and Reform Judaism (as well as the overwhelming success of assimilation.) The success of alternate forms of Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe and later in America has created a charged atmosphere among Orthodox Rabbinic circles that promotes instant overreaction to any creative or lenient halakhic decision. The defense of “tradition,” is paramount, whether the suggested practice or halakhic ruling even defies Torah law itself.

These six convergent forces have contributed to the paralysis of the world of halakha. Set within this petrifying framework, the current method of rabbinic decision making cannot address rapidly changing general and local needs. It cannot address subtleties and shies away from confronting the serious moral dilemmas that accompany a world changing faster than ever. It loses elasticity as well as its dynamic capability. As we have stated, it is subject to the many political/commercial dictates of a centralized and remote Ivory Tower of rabbinic authority, most of whose leaders have retreated into the world of Fundamentalism, where change is anathema. And those Rabbis who do attempt to resolve burning issues or deal with local needs are themselves burned in the process. Just look at the reactions to Rabbi Rackman, a”h,” on the aguna issue or Rabbi Avi Weiss on just about any issue.

Hence, Rabbi Cardozo, halakhic paralysis.

I would like to suggest that the solution to halakhic paralysis has to be halakhic. I propose that we respect the legal process set in place after the Talmud was sealed in the fifth century. The Rabbis determined that halakha must be locally applied; kal vaHomer (how much more so) in a world where the rates of change vary in its different social and local contexts, However, the current definition of a “local community” must be understood in terms of new 21st century understandings. Communities are no longer merely small towns, shtetls or even local city neighborhoods. Communities are today defined as groups of individuals with common interest. Mention the word “community” today and most people think of the concept of virtual community, social media, Facebook, and web blogs. In an age of leisure and mass transportation, mass education and global communication, I suggest that this definition be broadened.

The traditional physical neighborhoods of major urban centers and suburban enclaves can no longer be considered exclusively as local communities. Communities are now defined by activity or interest rather than exclusively by geography. There are gym and health club communities, golf clubs, dance clubs, and political clubs. Communal life itself previously was characterized by long hours of work, the nuclear non-working mother family, and a local house of worship. This image of a local community is history.

Therefore, the concept of halakhic rulings being rendered by LOCAL community rabbis must now respect the need for this expansion of the term “local community.”

Let me provide a concrete example:

Several years back I attended an unusual Saturday minyan on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was presented as an Orthodox service, where men and women sat separated by a mehitsah, in accordance with Orthodox custom. Otherwise, women were equal participants with men as Cantors, Torah readers and Torah olim. It felt funny to me at first, since my background is Sephardic Orthodox. I approached the young, bearded Orthodox Rabbi at the end of the service and inquired how he could halakhically justify this type of service. He answered that for this group, the egalitarian activity of the women is halakhically acceptable. He explained that the traditional reason of not allowing women to participate in the services is due to the concept of “kavod tsibbur,” or the fact that male congregants would not respect women as they would men, and that involving a woman in any part of the service would detract from the majesty of the service. This particular community of individuals defined their attendance at that minyan by their commitment to egalitarian principles. Therefore, the issue of kavod tsibbur, preventing women from participation alongside men in their minyan, just did not apply.

Here we have the halakhic process totally respected with complete authenticity but non-traditional practice.

Perhaps the evolution of halakha, which eternalizes our Torah and its values, has to respect the new expanded definition of “community” and allow the time honored practice of having “local” rabbis properly posek for their new communities.

Consider the results of an exposure of our new young Jewish “activity/interest” communities to halakhic principles and their new “local” and contemporary application (as to why they might differ from other halakhic communities). This would not only inspire active inter and intra community debate, but stimulate new understandings of halakha and a new appreciation for committing and living our sacred halakha directed lifestyle.

In addition to a re-definition of “local community,” perhaps our leading rabbis should consider the use of twenty-first century technology to mitigate or “unflatten” some of our previously detailed “flatteners.” Perhaps our leading rabbis can develop a “Virtual Sanhedrin.” By that I suggest the development of a secure blog site where rabbis who share a common philosophy and respect for each other, can debate issues honestly, openly and in the cool, calm medium of a confidential and secure blog site, with controlled access only by this Rabbinic group . Furthermore, i suggest that the debates conducted over this web blog be done anonymously, with specific reference numbers assigned to each rabbi who would present their issues by numerical code. For important issues, this medium can provide the time to flesh out complications and develop more authentic legal rulings. The flatteners of rabbinic commercial/political issues, of larger than life personalities, and of instant publicity would be much more controlled. Real issues can be thoughtfully addressed and more honestly debated. This healthier debate process will result in more meaningful halakhic consensus and decision making. The fact that decisions are arrived at anonymously by group consensus will also provide political cover for any specific congregational or professional rabbi. I think the Rabbis of the Babylonian Academies, would have loved these incredible modern tools of communication for enhanced debate.

Perhaps this very same communication technology can be used to promote learning and to stimulate debate amongst active and involved community laymen. The e-mailing of “halakhic issue alerts” from the local community rabbi can become:
1. a terrific teaching tool
2. a confidential polling tool for the Rabbi to feel out public opinion prior to issuing local decisions.
(a halakhic ruling should not be openly promoted if the community would not respect it :
ex. A young adult singles mixed dancing in Orthodox synagogues during the 1950s and 1960s)
3. a community energizer on large, common and serious issues.

Imagine the ferment and excitement generated by exploring an issue like “organ donation.”
(Fragile—handle with care)

Indeed, in a rapidly evolving, technologically developed world, certain halakhic questions require specific technical expertise. Here, perhaps, rabbis of like philosophy and mutual respect should consider establishing virtual panels of specialists to deal with technical issues. Let us call this “the specialist blog.”

The panels can debate internally (a la the previous “virtual Sanhedrin” model) and, in turn, e-mail the rabbi who faces the difficult question.

I am sure this type of process currently functions in an informal manner. Why not formalize it and publicize its structure to the group of rabbis of like philosophy. I can suggest panels on:
1. Medically Assisted Conception and Birth
2. Living Wills and the Ethics of Artificial Life Support
3. The Digital Home on Shabbat

Lastly, and rather simply, why not utilize the medium of large flat screen streaming video and or DVD to present the positions and/or debates of rabbinic Superstars. Imagine a remote far flung community gathering in a synagogue to hear a presentation of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Pluralism and its impact on halakha.

We have here several 21st century platforms that can truly energize local synagogue life as well as stimulate adult learning and commitment to a relevant halakhic process.
If I may summarize some of these ideas:
a. an expansion of the term “local community”
b. the “Virtual Sanhedrin”
c. the “specialist” blog
c. “Halakhic Issue Alerts”
d. the “Streaming Superstar”

These simple ideas can be part of an overall process to liberate halakha from its paralyzing flatteners. Rabbi Riskin offers a wonderful spin to the classic Talmudic episode of “the Tanur of Achnai.” This story deals with halakhic authority and ends with God chuckling as His support for the minority opinion on a halakhic issue is overturned by a rabbinic court. The classic Divine response is “Nitzhuni Banai”—“My children have defeated my argument.” Rabbi Riskin answers that perhaps we should read the text as “Netzahuni Banai “—as God saying “You have eternalized me”—that by making law subject to rabbinic decision making “You have kept my law eternally relevant.”

Rabbi Cardozo, we salute your inspired call to restore halakhic dynamism. As you have pleaded so forcefully, our rabbinic leadership must respond now with new methods of decision making to keep our Torah eternally relevant.

Response to Eli Haddad:

Dear Eli,
I read your observations with great interest. While I fully agree with your thesis that halakha has been flattened for all the reasons you give, and while I admire the solutions you suggest, I believe there is another, much more fundamental problem we need to deal with. Unless we do, your solutions will not have the result you so desperately seek.

We are confronted with a terrible misunderstanding of what halakha is really all about and what it wants to accomplish.
It is not just on the practical level that halakha is flattened, but also on the ideological, religious level. We have separated halakha from a conscious awareness of God. Our halakhic living has ignored Him. We are more concerned about the specifics of halakha than we are about our existential relationship with God. No doubt this is partially the fault of the halakhic process itself. Even the Sages, when discussing these issues, rarely mention God in their conversation, making it very legal and often dry in a religious sense. The reason for this is obvious. There was no need to mention God in all these debates because they were thoroughly touched by His presence, just as water touches every part of our body while we are swimming. One does not have to mention water when completely immersed in it. God was the great background music to anything the Sages felt and said. In their view God was a challenge, not a mere notion. They had a trembling sense of the “hereness” of God. They realized that they were more known by God than God could ever be known by them.

In modern times, this religious experience has been lost on us. We study Talmud and halakha in ways that have been deeply affected by the secular environment in which we live. God-consciousness has left us. The majority of us are no longer God-intoxicated. Most if not all of our halakhic authorities have also fallen victim to this sad situation without even being aware of it. They decide on halakhic matters while God is not actively present. This does not mean that they do not believe in God or that they have no yirath shamayim, but it does mean that they are not stirred by His presence while dealing with halakhic issues. How often is God mentioned in sheeloth u-teshuvoth?

One needs to have a religious experience while deciding the halakha. Rabbis do not realize that one can only render a halakhic decision while simultaneously experiencing the wonder of life, the astonishment of existence and the marvel of Judaism. halakha can only be decided on and lived when we ask the question: How are we able to, even dare to, live in His presence? Halakha is a protest against taking life for granted. One of its aims is to make us aware that there is no commonplace, no moment of insignificance, and no deed of triviality. Halakha is the attempt to undo the attitude of “everydayness,” but it can only work when we are fully conscious of this impediment and realize that there is no way to understand the meaning of halakha unless we make this goal our most important concern. If the posek (halakhic arbiter) does not realize that this is the function of the halakha and that this should be his ultimate goal when making a decision, his attempt to lay down the halakha is futile.

The problem we face is not realizing that halakhic living may become, if it hasn’t already, a form of avodah zarah (idol-worship). When we think that by following halakhic demands we will automatically draw closer to God, we are guilty of self-deception. We do not realize that we often use halakha as a way to escape Him. We believe that as long as we are living a halakhic life we do not have to make a supreme effort to draw closer to Him through the development of our God-consciousness. But this cannot be done by halakha. It needs to come from awe, from radical amazement, as Abraham Joshua Heschel called it. Only then is the halakha able to develop and deepen these notions.

This, however, is no longer part of Jewish Education. We have allowed the spirit of halakha to be flattened and have incorporated this dullness into the way we teach our children Judaism. We have made Judaism common instead of an astonishing experience. No wonder many of our young people drop their Judaism!

Only after we have cultivated this God-awareness can we start speaking about proper halakhic observance. Its goal is to take this cognizance and introduce it into every level of our lives. The fact that we see an unhealthy emphasis on rituals, but a disregard for matters that relate to ethical standards, proves my point. Violence, a severe dislike for non-Jews, and financial corruption within the Orthodox community, all of which are not even properly and fiercely condemned by our rabbinical authorities, are the obvious result of this escape from God in the name of halakha. If Orthodox Jews would really experience the awesome presence of God, how would it be possible for them to engage in these practices? (Is it not most remarkable that rabbis who suggest slight changes in Jewish rituals for the sake of greater religious devotion are condemned as heretics and as non-Orthodox, while those so-called Orthodox Jews who violate major tenets on the ethical side of Judaism are still considered to be Orthodox?)

When conversing with yeshiva students I often ask them how many years they have spent learning in yeshiva and how many masekhtot (talmudic tractates) they have studied. Once they tell me that they have mastered a good portion of the Talmud, I ask them what they would answer if a secular Jew, or a non-Jew, would ask them why they are religious. Nearly all of the students respond in total indignation and are completely taken back by this question. They have no answer. When I ask them how is it possible that after so many years of intensive study of religious texts they are still incapable of responding, the usual answer I receive is they have never thought about these questions, nor have their teachers ever discussed these matters with them. Topics such as religion, God and the meaning of life are taboo in many yeshivoth. The half hour spent on mussar literature is, for the most part, nothing but lip service. These topics are treated as hukath hagoyim, meant for religious non-Jews, and too inferior for Jews to discuss. On several occasions I have challenged their teachers or rashei yeshivoth about this. Most of them, although not all, avoided my questions by telling me that more gemara learning or “another tosafoth” would do the trick. They were sincerely convinced that this was the solution to the problem. When I showed them the inadequacy of such an answer and kept pressuring them, it became crystal clear that they themselves were deadly scared of these topics. The policy was to ignore these issues and bury one’s head in the sand. When their students abandon yeshiva and, in today’s parlance, “go off the derekh,” they are totally surprised. But is this not obvious? What else should we expect?

God’s voice needs to be heard rising from the text, but we have long stopped teaching our students to hear it. It has been replaced with ceremonies, “observance” and humroth (stringencies), but not with holy deeds. God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance, said Heschel.

In fact, many yeshivoth will skip—and not without pride—all non-halakhic texts, such as the aggadoth, which in fact deal with the most important dimension of halakhic living—the religious transformational purpose of the halakha. By ignoring these texts, they are sending a message to their students, not only that this part of the Talmud is inferior but that authentic religiosity is of little value. Teachers do not seem to realize that although halakha may be able to inform a man how to act in any given situation, it cannot provide insight into the quality of a given act, nor can it provide a sense of spiritual change that is the result of the performance of, or adherence to, a specific dictate. The power of aggadic and other non-halakhic material is in preventing mechanical observance and freeing man’s spirit, as well as in suggesting what one’s religious aspirations should be all about. Halakha is only the minimum of these religious aspirations. Religious non-halakhic material allows the unseen to enter the visible world and was formulated to give man the ability to go beyond the realms of the definable, perceivable and demonstrable.

Methods such as the Brisker approach to Talmud learning—today immensely popular in many yeshivoth—have in fact made this experience nearly impossible. While “hakiroth” and even “pilpul” may give spice to the discussion, they are unable to draw the student’s attention to the existential meaning of what religiously needs to be accomplished through the engagement with these texts. This is a tragedy of the first order, for which Orthodoxy pays a heavy price.
Precisely that which needs to be its most important goal has been totally dismissed and buried under the sand of halakhic discourse.

Another most important issue, which should be central to halakhic conversation, is the Jews’ obligation to be “a light unto the nations.” The Jewish people have been called upon by God to be the instrument through which He enters into the lives of all people. The universal purpose of Am Yisrael is to inspire and to transform. This has serious consequences for how halakha should be applied and, above all, how it should be taught. Nearly no halakhic authority seems to make this a central point when dealing with halakhic issues. Most halakha is decided by focusing solely on the exclusive needs of the Jewish people. Universalistic issues are ignored. While some profound Hassidic thinkers and people like Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook dealt with these issues when writing non-halakhic works, I can think of only Hakham Benzion Uziel, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who incorporated the universalistic mission as expressed by the prophets in his way of halakhic decision making. (See also Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel’s book: Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel, Jason Aronson, Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, Jerusalem, 1999)

Most present-day halakha is self-centered and often under the pressures of our galuth experience and defensiveness. (See Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits’s Hahalakha, Koha V’Tafkida.) What is urgently needed is prophetic halakha.

One of the most serious complaints by young searching Jews, when studying halakha, is the absence of the notion of mission and concern for the rest of mankind. This flattens the halakha in ways that do great damage to its very image.
All that is mentioned in this letter is only the tip of the iceberg. Mainstream halakhic Judaism will become more and more irrelevant in the years to come, except for a small but growing community of religious Jews. But the more they will dedicate their lives to halakha, the more the rest of our people will be detached from it, for the very reasons the religious Jews get more involved: the stabilization of and self-satisfaction with halakhic living. halakha has become a platitude instead of being a great spiritual challenge. Our thinking is behind the times.

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.

In what was probably the greatest Yom Kippur sermon ever preached, the prophet Isaiah enjoins us to “make a path,” to “clear the way,” to “remove all obstacles” from the path of the Lord’s people. We read Isaiah’s searing words today because we believe they speak not just to the inhabitants of ancient Israel but to us as well. The prophet’s urgent call to the Jews of his day, and to us, to observe Yom Kippur by clearing away all obstacles to our “fasting” in the way the Lord has chosen – to take decisive action ourselves – is consistent with the emphasis that Judaism has traditionally placed on human agency, an emphasis we will see affirmed later this afternoon when we once again recall the trials of Jonah.

Isaiah’s injunction that we remove all obstacles raises two immediate questions. First, what are the obstacles to be removed? And second, who should take responsibility for removing them? Yes, we should, of course; but we need to explore just who, and what, are “we” for this purpose. Both questions – the what and the who – turn out to be central to the issues we are confronting now, in our own place and time.

At one level, the prophet is quite specific about the obstacles he has in mind. His sermon is, in the first instance, an attack on the Israelite aristocracy of that day, for its narrow conception of its moral and religious responsibilities. To the contrary, Isaiah’s sweep is broad. Our charge is “to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.” We are to share our bread with the hungry, take the homeless into our homes, clothe the naked, and not turn away from people in need. The word our prayer book translates as “obstacle” – mikhshol – is the same word that we normally translate as “stumbling block” when parashat Kedoshim commands us, “You shall not … place a stumbling block before the blind.” But there as well, the commentaries interpret both what is a stumbling block, and who are the blind, expansively. Blindness, for this purpose, is not just a physical condition of the optic system but any inherent impediment to one’s living a productive and moral life. In parallel, an obstacle is any spiritual or moral hazard.

The overarching theme is again consistent with the entirety of our tradition. The Hebrew Bible, whether in discussing Sabbath observance, or sexual relations, or the treatment of slaves, or remission of debts, or any of a hundred other specific subjects, prioritizes the dignity of the human condition – and the need to maintain it. Our laws make clear that we are to lead our lives consistently with this precept, and we are to enable others to do so as well. Jewish law and practice are replete with injunctions to insure that every household has the material makings of a dignified Jewish life. The Mishna, in tractate Pesahim, commands that “On the eve of Passover … even the poorest in Israel must not eat unless he sits down to table,” and he must receive “not … less than four cups of wine to drink” – even if they must be bought by the public fund.

This role of specific elements of physical consumption, in a specific context, as an essential ingredient of human dignity has been familiar ever since. Adam Smith, ever the insightful moral philosopher, observed that in “the greater part of Europe” of his day even the poorest day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt.

The reason, he explained, was not foolish vanity but moral dignity. “The want of” a linen shirt, he wrote, “would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can fall into without extreme bad conduct.” But what provides for moral dignity is clearly a matter of context. There is no reason to presume that “no less than four cups of wine” would be essential to the dignity of a non-Jew, or, for that matter, to a Jew on any evening other than the Passover seder. Smith likewise observed that wearing leather shoes was essential to a person’s dignity in England, while in Scotland leather shoes were essential in this way only for men; and in France, for neither men nor women.

If the obstacles that we are to clear away are those that prevent our fellow men and women from living a life consistent with human dignity, we therefore must address our attention to two groups: those who in principle could be productive and support themselves, but currently cannot – largely, the young and the unemployed; and those who even in principle will not be able to be productive on their own – for the most part, the old and the disabled. Our charge is to enable the former to become productive so that they will be able to achieve dignified lives on their own; and to provide, ourselves, for the dignified lives of the latter.

Our tradition is clear on both. It is the obligation of every Jewish father to teach his son a trade, and today we would of course extend the obligation to our daughters and include the role of mothers in likewise educating their children. It is the obligation of every Jewish community to establish a school to instruct their young, not only in religious education but literacy. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, in the Laws Concerning Gifts to the Needy, tells us that “The highest degree, exceeded by none, is that of a person who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or loan or by accepting him into a business partnership, or by helping him find employment.”

Our obligation is clear, although in today’s context the practical rendering of it is less so. The subject is a particular challenge in America today. Our public education system is increasingly failing us. But we may – and as an economist I say this especially reluctantly – we may be coming to the end of the era in which we can look to education, as we know it, as the all-purpose corrective to the lack of individual economic opportunity. If so, whether the answer is radical reform of what we now know as education, or some yet more ambitious undertaking, remains to be seen.

Our tradition is also straightforward about our responsibilities to those who are unable to be productive. In parashat Re’eh, the Torah assures us that “there shall be no needy among you” (if, that is, “you only heed the Lord your God and take care to keep all his instruction”). But just three verses later, the parasha goes on, “If, however, there is a needy person among you, … you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for what he needs.” And the tradition takes a broad interpretation of what he needs for this purpose. Maimonides, again in the Laws Concerning Gifts to the Needy, explains the phrase “sufficient for what he needs”: “You are commanded to give to the needy person according to that which he lacks. If he has no raiment, one clothes him. If he has no wife, one finds him a wife, and if the needy person be a woman, one finds her a husband. Even if the particular person, before falling from his wealth, had formerly been accustomed to ride out upon a horse with a servant running before him, and then became impoverished and lost his wealth, one acquires for him a horse to ride upon and a servant to run before him – as it is written, ‘sufficient for his need’.”

In our approach toward the needy, especially including those who have fallen on hard times, Judaism presents a sharp contrast with some forms of Christianity, including some that have historically played a particular role in shaping American attitudes on such matters. Calvin concluded that “Adversity is a sign of God’s absence, prosperity of his presence.” Russell Conwell, one of America’s leading Protestant clergymen in the latter half of the 19th century and on into the 20th, repeatedly preached that “There is not a poor person in the United States who has not been made poor by his own shortcomings or by the shortcomings of someone else. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it.” Echoes of these views, especially in discussions of our public policy toward the disadvantaged in America, are entirely familiar today. Our tradition points us in a very different direction. The Talmud, in tractate Yebamoth, addresses King David’s puzzlement that the Lord has simultaneously told him that King Saul was guilty of a grievous crime and chastised him for not having cared for Saul in death as he ought to have done, with the proper rites of mourning. “Where the Lord’s judgment is,” says the Talmud, “there you must act.”

If we accept that our charge is to enable those who are not now productive but could be, as well as to provide for those who cannot be, who, then, is to take up these responsibilities? Each of us, to be sure, must shoulder our individual private obligations. But here as well, our tradition is far more expansive. For example, Isaiah tells us we are not to “pursue business as usual.” The prophet’s point is not simply a matter of how we should spend our time on the day of Yom Kippur. Rather, we are to reconsider what our “business as usual” comprises. In the alternative Torah reading for this afternoon, again from Kedoshim, we are commanded not to reap our fields “all the way to the edges, or gather the gleanings” of the harvest, nor to pick our vineyard bare or gather its fallen fruit. “You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger,” the Torah says. In other words, it is not adequate for us to conduct our business as sharply as possible – maximizing profit, as my profession puts it – and then give to the needy out of what we earn from it. The Torah is clear that our making provision for the needy in the course of carrying out our economic affairs themselves is also part of our responsibility.

Importantly, both Isaiah and our other texts are also clear that we bear these responsibilities not just individually but collectively. The point is especially apt today. When we confess our sins – ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu – we do so in the first person plural. We then say to the Lord, together, “We have ignored your commandments and statutes.” Shortly after, in the Al Het, we repeatedly use first person plural verbs to describe the many ways we, as a community, have transgressed. And we say to Aveinue Malkeinu, “we have sinned against you.” Isaiah drives home the point as well. When he commands us to make a path and clear the way, to remove all the obstacles, the verbs are plural imperatives.

How, then should we think, today, about the injunction to leave the corners of our fields, and the fallen grapes, for the needy? In the middle east of nearly three thousand years ago, economic production was almost entirely agricultural, and so in referring to fields and vineyards the prophet was talking about what was then the people’s main form of economic activity. Is there any reason to believe that simply by shifting our production from agriculture to manufacturing and services we have somehow escaped what we have been commanded to do? Similarly, today much of our economic production is carried out not in activities owned by single individuals but under the auspices of corporations deliberately set up to have many owners. Many people today, alas including many in my profession, argue that business corporations have no responsibility other than to maximize profits – or, what amounts to the same thing, maximize their shareholders’ value – while of course obeying the laws of the land. Their argument is that it is not up to the corporation as an entity to act generously, not toward its workers and not toward anyone else; its shareholders can do that, as individuals, if they so choose. Do we really believe that the Torah’s injunction to make our responsibilities to the disadvantaged not just a private matter, but directly a part of how we conduct our economic activity, is vitiated by the mere change in form of business organization?

And what about our collective responsibilities, via our community? And, for that matter, what is our community for this purpose?

Our tradition has always been clear about the communal nature of our obligation toward those who cannot provide a dignified life for themselves. Maimonides, once again in the Laws of Giving to the Needy, writes, “In every city where Jews live, they are obligated to appoint from among them collectors of tzedakah – gabbai tzedakah. They should circulate among the people from erev Shabbat to erev Shabbat, and take from each person what is appropriate for him to give, and the assessment made upon him. They then allocated the money from erev Shabbat to erev Shabbat, giving each poor person sufficient food for seven days.” The function of the gabbai tzedakah is the origin of the communal officials whom we today call the “gabbais” of our congregation. We look to our high holiday gabbaim to organize these services; and they do so superbly. Our regular gabbaim keep our minyan running smoothly throughout the year. But the gabbais’ original function, and the meaning of the word, is as collectors. Moreover, no one is exempt from contributing. The Talmud, in tractate Gittin, even tells us that being poor does not release a person from participation in this public, collective responsibility. Even someone who depends on tzedakah himself is obligated to give tzedakah to sustain others.

Today our broader community for these purposes is the nation. Those of us sitting here this morning have not opted out of the Jewish community, and therefore the reach of the gabbaim; but we could. This choice was not open in former times. For us, today’s equivalent of the community that Isaiah, or Maimonides, had in mind is the United States of America.

One would have to be living in a closet not to know that what provision those who are productive should make for those who currently are not, including those who never again will be, is one of the topmost questions under debate in our country today. The issue is a serious one, and it goes to the heart of who we are as a society. It is altogether right that we should have that debate. We do not advance our consideration of the matter, however, by conducting it in confusing euphemisms that misdirect our attention away from what the real questions are.

Today, at the federal level, our public debate over this issue focuses on what we call “entitlements.” Our government has many programs classified as entitlements, ranging from food stamps to subsidized housing to farm supports to retirement benefits for the government’s own civilian employees. But just two of these programs, Social Security and Medicare, account for two-thirds of the total spending. Adding in the portion of Medicaid that pays for nursing home stays by patients aged 65 or older brings the share of the entitlement budget now devoted to the support and care of America’s retired elderly population to 72 percent. And, for reasons both demographic and technological, over the next decade that share will rise to 77 percent. At what level to provide income and medical care for our retired elderly is a fundamental question for our society. We do not advance our ability to resolve it by pretending that the issue is something other than what it is.

This challenge is an economic one, to be sure, and so is the challenge of enabling the young, and others who are not now economically productive members of our society, to become so. But we should see these challenges in not just economic but moral terms. Both are fundamental to the moral character of who and what we are as a society. Both are squarely in the range of what this morning’s Haftarah, written long ago but addressing eternal issues of the human condition, charges us to see as our particular obligation. Isaiah commands these responsibilities upon us in the same way as we are commanded on this day to abstain from eating and to come together to confess our failures. And, in parallel to the communal way in which, on this day, we together make our confession, both the prophet and our rich tradition tell us that it is in part communally, through collective action undertaken by our community which has now become the state, that we are to meet these challenges.

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.

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