 Highway to justice
When I drove to Modi'in last week on Route 443 I wasn't thinking too much about the two dangers it symbolizes. My father and I were on our way to a meeting of Maram, the Israel Council of Progressive Rabbis, where we had a chance to hear about the extraordinary progress of our community in Israel's fastest growing city. We also had an opportunity to study with a woman who has been teaching Reform rabbinical students in Israel for twenty years, and who defies the usual stereotype: she is an Orthodox resident of a West Bank settlement. And we listened to a presentation from one of our Ukrainian-born colleagues who discussed dilemmas he encounters every day in the field of conversion and personal status. All in all, a fascinating and important day. Upon our return I hardly gave any thought to the road connecting Modi'in and Jerusalem. This week that road rose to great prominence in Israel's public life. Our Supreme Court has decided that it will no longer be possible to bar Palestinian residents of the West Bank from using the route. This policy has been employed over the last few years for reasons of security, but now our Supreme Court has ruled that such an approach is not proportionate. It disadvantages thousands of Palestinians and limits their ease of movement and, so our judges have ruled, this has to stop. Evil in modern Israel
I stayed at home this morning. There were three reasons why I didn't join my wife as she made her way to the Women of the Wall services for the new month. Firstly, it was raining cats and dogs. Secondly, as readers of previous blogs will know, I have a great deal of ambivalence toward the Western Wall as a symbol and holy site. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, there is a clue in the organization's name as to who gets to be invited to the monthly service - and I failed the medical. The rain by itself would not have deterred me, nor even the ambivalence. Coming from England, I'm used to both. Sarah (my newly-recruited Woman of the Wall) reports that, despite her own ambivalence, she is pleased that she attended the service. She also tells me that she and the other women were subjected to a barrage of abuse from a number of gentlemen who felt impelled to share their views in the best spirit of pluralism and cooperation. Of the various enthusiastic calls of encouragement and support, the repeated call of "Die, you Nazis!!" was particularly resonant. I've been reading Susan Neiman's extraordinary work, Evil in Modern Thought, in which she presents an understanding of philosophical thought since the Enlightenment as an extended conversation about evil - what it means, where it comes from, how we effect it and are affected by it. I would hazard a guess that few of the gentlemen out in the rain calling these Jewish worshippers Nazis, have so far had an opportunity to read Susan Neiman's book. They may feel they don't need to. Just as their hats are insulated from the rain by the judicious employment of plastic bags, so they may feel impervious to anything a non-Orthodox woman may have to teach them. Rather than building a Fence around the Law, some have settled for a plastic bag of oblivion. The perils of exclusion
The Justice Minister has come out of the closet as a purveyor of pan-halachic prophesies. The Defense Minister has displayed a renewed interest in relations with the Phillipines. Buses are being segregated, and women busted for aggravated use of the Torah with intent to menace. Thousands are demonstrating in the heart of Jerusalem against the infringement of their God-given right to occupy territory, and complaining that any attempt to limit their activities is racist and unacceptable. In short, it's another regular week in Israel. In the spirit of the settler's voluble protests in defense of their right to live throughout the length and breadth of Eretz Yisrael, I want to draw your attention to a story which received much less press this week. The first reading of a new bill was passed in the Knesset, according to which the right to live in small communities in the Galilee and the Negev will be made conditional on the approval of the local Residents' Committee. On the face of it, this looks like a blow for local democracy. Just like in swanky apartment buildings in Manhattan, the neighbors will get to decide on who moves in. One has the mental image of blue-rinsed ladies sniffing out smokers and poodle-owners. The reality is much less harmless. In fact, this law if passed will have the effect of keeping Arabs out of even more towns and villages throughout Israel. This legislation is bigoted, exclusionary and simply wrong. Did we Jews dream of Israel for two millennia so that we could turn it into a precinct of prejudice and a Xanadu of xenophobia? Do we really want our state to sanction discrimination ever more shamelessly? The shawl and the hood
We should all be relieved - a great disaster has been averted in the heart of Jerusalem. A woman was arrested yesterday for causing a heinous threat to public order. She was carrying a document so subversive that it has been suppressed and vilified for thousands of years. She also donned an item of ritual wear so provocative that if she had not been stopped by the authorities there might have been cataclysmic results. The criminal in question was a highly suspicious type, and she arrived in Jerusalem with the premeditated intention of engaging in Jewish prayer at the site of the Western Wall. As is well known, such intentions are roughly equivalent to obtaining uranium on the black market or releasing poisonous chemicals on the subway. The subversive book she was carrying was the Torah, and the offensive ritual item a prayer shawl. If the water level of the Sea of Galilee had risen as high as the tide of intolerance and extremism sweeping over contemporary Israel, all our water problems would be solved. The law under which Nofrat Frankel (the woman caught wearing a tallit with intention to deprave) was detained is intended to protect society from inflammatory or insulting religious activities, and we now seem to have reached the point where for a woman to wrap herself in a prayer shawl is considered an outrage. The real outrage, of course, is that anyone thinks this is an outrage. Take my advice: don't take my advice
A friend in North America has invited me to address a group of friends committed to Israel and also to a Liberal worldview. They are concerned about what they see as the disconnect between the pro-Israel stance offered by most in the Jewish establishment and the daily reality of alienation, frustration and growing apathy which they see around them. At the end of the letter he asks: should we establish a local J-Street (if any of my readers don't know what this organization is, you can Google them), put pressure on our government to work for the policies we support, renew our membership to Israeli peace organizations? Gaza and Goldstone, settlement activity, attitudes to the Other in Israeli society, the bizarre relationship between Religion and State - all these persuade my friend and his circle that they have to do something other than just mouth the usual platitudes. For the sake of variety, they want me to come and share my platitudes What should I say to such a group? And what's the idea behind having me and mixing my angst with theirs? There is in part a vestige here of the old authenticity dilemma: since you don't live in Israel, the old line goes, you don't really have the right to make a noise in the way you would really like to. Meanwhile many Israelis seem to have no problem decrying the excesses and stupidities of their government, so why not bask in their irreverence? There is something wrong with this picture. Jews in the Diaspora do not need to ask permission from anyone to express their views. It's a remnant of a moribund guilt complex, an urge to defer to those who realized Zionist nirvana and now pay their taxes to the Jewish State. Israelis have no right to tell Jews in the Diaspora what to do, who to marry, how to behave, just as my sister has no right to order me to clean my room. But if my sister stays in touch, shares in my triumphs and disasters, then she does indeed have the right to tell me that if I ever want to get on in life, I should clean up my room. There is a condition of mutuality - I have to be able to tell my sibling about her interior design disasters, and she has to be able to listen as well. A message to Ahmedinejad
Dear President Ahmedinejad, You don't know me, and the chances of us meeting are not great. I live in Jerusalem, a Jewish citizen of the State of Israel. I was born in Britain, which I understand figures pretty high on your list of Satanic nations. I am also a Reform rabbi, an exponent of a religious philosophy which espouses moderation and modernization. So it's fair to say that you and I mix in different circles, or perhaps that should be centrifuges. Mahmoud (you can call me Michael if you choose to reply), I get the feeling we need to talk. Apart from the unpromising start (British-born Zionist liberal Jew Beelzebub), you ought to know that there are many things against the State of Israel you could say which I would agree with. In our regime here such opposition is allowed, indeed it's even encouraged. I am profoundly concerned about the way in which we distribute our resources here, and I fear that our approach to the Palestinian people has been tragically in error. I also think it's time to wrest authority from the hands of religious politicians who have done a disservice both to politics and to religion. (Come to think of it, we may not have so much in common on that last point.) We've just had a big day here in Israel and around the Jewish world (I think you call it the international industrial-financial insidious cabal). I am sure you have received satellite imagery of sudden and intensive cycling and skateboard activity, and before you misinterpret this as a military maneuver or sinister escalation, I ought to explain. In some ways, you would have approved of the scene - millions of Jews reflecting on what they have done wrong and resolving to do better. I'm sure you would have been happy to offer many suggestions in this regard. It was quite a scene here - religious and secular (I'll explain that another time) spending a day removed from their workaday lives trying to think through the meaning of life and the nature of their relations with others. Some exploited the almost complete absence of cars on the road to set loose their children on self-propelled wheeled conveyances of every imaginable kind. I spent a good part of the day thinking about my personal pitfalls and shortcomings, and also about the challenges facing my people and my country. I won't bore you with the personal stuff - I guess much of it would sound familiar to many of your countrymen, since the human condition transcends political and ideological boundaries. On the wider social level, I have been increasingly alarmed about the increasing chauvinism and insensitivity on display here. I also pray fervently that we will have the courage to face up to those in our nation who combine messianic fervor with political fanaticism. We have a lot of work to do. Why am I telling you all this? If you read any of our newspapers (it's a shame there's no Persian language edition of the major titles, but I am sure you have assistants with good Ulpan Hebrew) you'll know that my views are shared by many in Israel. The point of all this, then, is not to leak you information you would not otherwise have received. Instead, I want you to know that by your utterances and actions you have made all the differences between moderates and extremists in my country dissolve into irrelevance. By choosing to repeat the old Big Lie, and by raising the specter of our annihilation, you may have done more for Jewish unity than anyone else I know. How do you say pluralism in Hebrew?
Some fifteen years ago I was a serving as rabbi in the wonderful Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa. The relationship between the City of Haifa and the Jewish community of Boston was just beginning to develop, and a delegation was sent out from the Middle East to the North East to discuss terms and details. I was in my office one day when I received a call from an acquaintance who was part of the Haifa group. I was surprised, since I knew he was in the States and it was the middle of the night over there. When I inquired as to the purpose of his apparently urgent call, he explained: "I have spent the day with representatives of the Boston CJP [the Federation equivalent]. All day long they have talked to me about their commitment to pluralism, and I have nodded furiously and agreed vociferously. "But tomorrow they want me to say something about our commitment to pluralism, and I realize I know nothing at all about the subject. Rabbi, you're both Reform and born in Britain, but you have been in Israel a while and seem OK. So tell me, what are they talking about when they say pluralism?" My nocturnal caller was not alone. Fifteen years ago the term "pluralism" was hardly used in Israeli discourse, and more often than not it emerged when an Anglophone philanthropist mentioned it as an interest or a priority. In Hebrew, our Movement's Israel Religious Action Center is called the Center for Pluralism, and I am informed that to this day they receive calls from would-be clients convinced they are talking to the Center for Floralism (in Hebrew it looks the same without the vowels). They still have to turn away orders for wreaths and bouquets. Jerusalem is a special cityJerusalem is a special city. If you ever doubt this, try staying away for a little while. True, many Israelis have become so practiced in the art of staying away from Jerusalem that this has been elevated from simple aversion to full-blown abhorrence. True, many of us who bring up children in this city know that our offspring are preparing to spring off and leave as soon as the opportunity presents itself. True, increasingly Jewish visitors from abroad are becoming inured to the blandishments of the holy city, and developing a marked preference for the lure of Tel Aviv (The Big Pineapple) or Haifa (The Bahai Chapel) or even Hadera (the Big Falafel), over Jerusalem - the Big Grapple. Reports of 'death' exaggerated
I have been absent from this column for months, working hard to deal with the challenges facing my institution, which is struggling along with just about every other institution in the world in the current economic atmosphere. What might have sparked me back into life in the blogosphere were the reported comments of Rabbi Norman Lamm, predicting the imminent demise of the Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism. I have no idea, incidentally, if the very venerable Rabbi Lamm really said the things attributed to him in the Jerusalem Post article. Whoever did concoct the notion that non-Orthodox Judaism is on its last legs is guilty of an extreme case of wishful thinking. The truth is that there is ample and powerful evidence that a Judaism of meaning aimed at those for whom Orthodoxy is untenable, unpalatable or impossible is more urgently in demand today than ever before. Testing loyalty
"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." In order to avoid any unpleasantness with copyright lawyers I should make clear that these stirring words are not mine. And however germane they may appear to be to these times and this region, their origin (as many of my readers will have identified) is different. It was with these words that Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepted the office of President of the United States of America, a little over 75 years ago. |
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