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Jewish World Review Jan. 20, 1999 / 3 Shevat, 5759
Rabbi Avi Shafran
LET ME CONFESS AT THE OUTSET: I'm an Orthodox Jewish
fundamentalist.
That seems to be the term these days for those of us who
believe in the Divine origin and eternally binding nature of the
Torah and who endeavor to comply with the requirements of Jewish
religious law (halacha) --- as Jews have done for millennia.
In the eyes and words of some contemporary non-Orthodox
leaders, that conviction makes me and Jews like me bad guys.
Admittedly, the men among us tend to favor black hats. All
the same, though, we are innocent of the pending charges: That we
see non-Orthodox Jews as something other than our brothers and
sisters, that we bear them ill will, that we disparage the ideal
of Jewish unity.
Those accusations stem largely from our opposition to
changes in Israel's "religious status quo," the compromise that
Israel's early leaders instituted in order to allow a secular,
socialist/democratic system of government to simultaneously exist
as a Jewish State.
That modus vivendi has always provided Israelis total
freedom of religion, but at the same time accommodated the Jewish
religious tradition in limited areas. For examples: A Jewish
school system is provided for those opting for it (with secular
schools for the rest); the Jewish dietary laws are respected at
government-sponsored gatherings and in the military; and
traditional Halacha, through the medium of an official rabbinate,
is the arbiter of Jewish "personal status" issues -- like
marriage, divorce and conversion to Judaism.
That latter
accommodation, by virtue of the single standard it maintains for
accepting non-Jews into the Jewish people in Israel, has helped
prevent the emergence of multiple "Jewish peoples" in the Jewish
State for the past half-century.
Israel's need to embrace the Jewish religious tradition's
standards for personal status issues is no fundamentalist plot to
ensure Orthodox hegemony. It was originally laid out, in fact,
in a letter signed by, among other non-black hatters, the Jewish
State's "founding father" David Ben-Gurion the secularist who
would become Israel's first Prime Minister. He realized that,
without a single standard for conversion, the Jewish people
"would, G-d forbid, become split into two."
Ben-Gurion's common sense insight -- that Jewish unity is
enhanced, not degraded, through the embrace of a single standard
acceptable to all -- is no less relevant today than it was when
Israel was founded 50 years ago. What has changed is that the
leaders of the American-based Reform and Conservative movements
have in recent years decided to aggressively attack the single-standard common denominator approach. Their attack has proceeded
on two separate fronts: in the Israeli courts, where they have
enlisted an activist judiciary in exploiting the absence of
express statutory authority for the religious status quo; and in
the court of public opinion, where they have attempted to portray
Israel as a theocracy controlled by religious fanatics who treat
non-Orthodox Jews as second-class citizens.
Bad guys that we "Ultra-Orthodox" are, the Israelis among us
dared respond to the court rulings by... well, by doing pretty
much what we Americans would do were the U.S. Supreme Court to
suddenly determine a lack of adequate statutory basis for a legal
protection that had always been assumed to exist. They asked
their representatives in the Knesset -- the counterparts of ours
in the Congress -- to legislate it back into existence.
An uproar among Reform and Conservative leaders ensued ---
and has since intensified. Israeli legislators have been
threatened with persona non grata status in American temples, and
the Israeli government is being warned of a "break in relations
with" (read: "cessation of donations from") American non-Orthodox
Jews.
And, just to remind everybody who the enemy was, an
advertisement on the op-ed page of The New York Times, not only
referred to Orthodox Jews as "fundamentalists," but included
words like "hijack" and "madness" to ensure that readers would
visualize crazed eyes, kaffiyas and Kalishnikovs instead of
citizens appealing to their democratically elected
representatives. For good measure, and to ensure the vitality of
the old canard about Orthodox Jews rejecting the Jewishness of
non-Orthodox Jews, the New Israel Fund, in the large headline of
a full-page ad it placed in the same paper (and others),
challenged American Jews to "tell the Israeli government exactly
what we are. Jews."
Most amazing of all, in the very same breath that they issue
calls for multiple conversion standards in Israel -- the surest
path to multiple "Jewish peoples" -- the non-Orthodox leaders
declare "Jewish unity" their goal.
And, of course, declare us black-hatted bad guys The Enemy,
implying that we would deprive Jews of their freedom of belief
when all we seek is to have the Jewish State continue to
officially respect the standard for conversion that has kept the
Jewish people one nation for over 3000 years.
We hope, of course, that the Reform and Conservative laities
will neither swallow their leaders' rhetoric nor assume their ill
will, that our non-Orthodox brothers and sisters will achieve
objectivity and discern the long-term dangers in their leaders'
quest for immediate gratification in Israel.
Our prayer is that our fellow Jews will come to understand
that true Jewish unity comes not from feel-good diatribes but
from foresight; not from hysterical name-calling but from
rational stock-taking; not from disparaging the past but from
respecting
it.
Black Hats, Bad Guys
Rabbi Avi Shafran is Director of Public Affairs for Agudath Israel of America,
the largest grass-roots Orthodox Jewish group in America.
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