Engaging : Foundations for a New Relationship The Video Lecture Series

Lecture 8: Background Reading 19

David Hartman, "Israel's Responsibility for World Jewry: Reflections on Debate about the Conversion Law," A Heart of Many Rooms, pp. 205-215 (1999)

As a diaspora Jew who has taken up residence in Israel, I am deeply struck by the lack of understanding in Israel and abroad of the hok hamara (conversion law) issue —one of the more important issues confronting Israel since its inception.

Neither diaspora nor (and especially) seem to grasp what is really going on. ("How many converts are there anyway?" said one member of Knesset—as if expecting someone to answer: "No problem! We Israelis can easily smuggle them in illegally!") The Israeli government sets up commissions, and everybody is in on the "secret" that when the proposed legislation comes to a vote, there will be a delay and then a further delay (the best way for the Knesset to deal with a very deep spiritual crisis!).

The fact is that this issue has serious implications for the future of Israel and the diaspora. The underlying question is not "Who is a Jew?" or "Who is a rabbi?" but "How should Israel respond to the presence of religious diversity within the Jewish world?" or "Why is having an official Orthodox Chief Rabbinate that defines and controls what counts as legitimate Jewish spirituality such a mistaken religious approach for the Jewish people?"

MODERN HISTORY AND THE CRISIS OF DISCONTINUITY

The Six-Day War was one of those rare moments in Jewish history when Jews were united. The thought of another possible hurban (destruction) brought Jewish life to a complete standstill. One concern, one fear, gripped the whole Jewish world, which held its breath as one in anxious anticipation. This unique moment of solidarity and existential oneness with the Israeli reality brought home the idea to many people like myself that Israel was not just another Jewish community.

The significance of Israel for world Jewry can be understood in terms of two features of modernity that could have threatened Jewish continuity: (1) radical individualism and (2) radical evil.

1 Modern consciousness reflects the overriding influence of a liberal ideology committed intellectually, culturally, and socially to the values of autonomy and individualism. In addition to this distinctively modern preoccupation with individual self-realization independent of and apart from community and peoplehood, Jewish existence was placed in jeopardy by the profound cynicism and despair that could have shaped Jewish consciousness following the Holocaust.

As a result of the Holocaust, Jews as a people could have chosen "invisibility": living a life of hiding, of being faceless, of avoiding public exposure. The stereotypical picture of galut (diaspora) Jews walking in public is of a person moving quickly, quietly, and on the side of the street where you were least noticed. There is safety in not being noticed. Visibility means danger. As one of my older congregants in Montreal used to tell me: "Why do Jews need to build big homes in Jews then history, in hides God If יי.pogroms future of victims first the be will They Hampstead? must also hide in history.

This desire to be invisible, to leave history as an identifiable community, was reinforced by the bitter disappointment of Jews in the one country they had revered as the best and most perfect expression of Western culture and humanism. If the homeland of Lessing, Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven could produce such barbarism and hate, then Western culture and humanism were bankrupt and fraudulent. There was nothing to learn from Western civilization. There was nothing to trust or believe in.

The pervasive cultural influence of radical individualism and the traumatic impact of the Holocaust in the modern world threatened the very foundations of Jewish existence. The Jewish people could have succumbed to a national ethos of cynicism and withdrawal, of giving up their public Jewish identity, of choosing to become invisible in history.

ISRAEL AND THE CHOICE OF VISIBILITY

Israel represents the alternative response, of a people returning to history and community without necessarily being fully conscious of or able to articulate the significance of Israel from this perspective. When someone once asked me, "Why did you come on ?" I answered half- jokingly, "Because Israel is too important to be left to the Israelis." What I meant was that the importance of this reality often eludes the immediate awareness of those most responsible for its existence.

The people who created this reality—the pioneers, the kibbutznikim, the farmers, the soldiers— set in motion a momentous historical process by restoring Jewish visibility in history. Israel said, "No more hiding." Israel restored our sense of community, of "we," of our sense of the distinctive Jewish integration of personal identity within the larger context of community.

Against the background of despair and cynicism following the Holocaust and the modern Zeitgeist of radical self-realization, it said: "We will not choose invisibility. We will 'go public' despite the vulnerability of such exposure." Israel thus became the most important visible, public framework in which the collective life of the Jewish people is acted out in world history.

2 VISIBILITY AS A JEWISH IMPERATIVE

The theological and human significance of covenantal election can be interpreted in terms of the burden of being visible in history. One of the distinctive features of biblical theology is God's presence in the life of community. Aristotle's God had no such ambitions. Israel's God wanted to be mirrored within the collective life of human nations, to "be sanctified in the midst of the children of Israel."

The collective, as opposed to the individual, nature of biblical election means that despite the radical evil present in the world, you don’t leave history And the call to Israel to bear witness to the Spirit means that a successful export economy and high-tech industries are not the long- awaited answer to Jewish prayers. Human beings will never be fully satisfied by economics alone. They need to be touched by a vision that nurtures their souls.

Israel must bear witness to the human spiritual need for something larger, for a larger dream, for a larger purpose in life. As a historical people, Israel must continue to believe in and bear witness to the idea of possibility—the possibilities of what human communities can become.

"I will be" is the name of God. Idolatry is the fixation of God into one form, one moment. The imageless God of the Bible, the God whose name is ehyeh ("I will be") is the basis of the hope of what human history can become—and of the pain of the nonrealization of this dream.

The rebirth of Israel has kept this dream alive by serving as an antidote to individualism, to the loss of community, to the loss of memory and of history, and to the cynicism that could have paralyzed us as a result of the radical evil of the Holocaust. Israel thus speaks to the very soul of the Jewish people. It is a living testimony to the Jewish people's loyalty to their foundational covenantal memory.

ISRAEL: A FAILURE OF SELF-UNDERSTANDING

When Israeli government officials expressed surprise and bewilderment at the uproar created in the diaspora by the proposed conversion law, I said to the Prime Minister: "You must realize that as the Prime Minister of this people you have two constituencies, one that relates to you politically—that votes in the elections, that expects social and economic leadership, that forces you to compromise, to form coalitions, etc.—and another that relates to you out of spiritual need and concern. The latter feel connected to the government of Israel because their lives as Jews are nurtured by this reality. Their war of survival as Jews is with assimilation. They don't know whether Jewish life will continue, whether their grandchildren will be Jewish."

I wonder whether Israeli politicians understand the implications of saying to half of the Jewish world that their synagogues and their rabbis are not authentic because they do not reflect "" and that therefore theirs is a fraudulent Jewish reality. All too many Knesset members do not understand that Israel is needed by the Jewish people not as a political haven but as the most important expression of Jewish memory, history, and visibility. To tell the majority of

3 diaspora Jewry that their Jewish way of life does not count in Israel betrays a total lack of understanding of the important meaning of Israel in their lives.

The Israeli politicians' defensive excuse regarding the trivial and inconsequential nature of the proposed legislation suggests either deep naiveté or deep cynicism. How can delegitimizing Conservative and Reform rabbis in Israel imply nothing about these forms of Judaism in the diaspora? "If you believe I am treif in , how can you believe I am kosher in New York or Chicago?" (Unless, of course, you believe that treif is affected by the presence of UJA support!) What naiveté! What cynicism!

If you say Conservative and Reform rabbis are treif here, then you are saying that Conservative and Reform rabbis are treif anywhere. And the number of Jews affected is irrelevant. Is there no appreciation of the soul of this country or of the Jewish people? Shouldn't the government feel responsibility for the whole Jewish people? Do we Israelis cynically measure the significance of Israel for world Jewry solely in terms of financial and political support, or do we want them to feel that Israel is vital to their spiritual identities?

And how can Israel be vital for them when they are told that their Judaic way of life is not welcome in this, their spiritual home? How can Israel remain important to them if their only leverage is the threat of withholding contributions? Israeli newspapers and "enlightened" politicians say: "We are going to lose American support!" But no one says: "What are we doing to the Jewish people's yiddishkeit? What are we doing to their sense of history and memory and hope and the dream of 'Next Year in Jerusalem'?" Israel cannot sever itself from responsibility for the moral and spiritual renaissance of the Jewish people without losing its raison d'etre for much of the Jewish world.

The core of the issue is not conversion per se but the consigning of religious ownership of Israel to the Orthodox establishment. As my teacher, Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, feared, the possibility of Orthodox Judaism's becoming a sect within the Jewish people is gaining ground as the centrality of klal yisrael gradually recedes from consciousness. When the Jewish people worshipped the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai, God said to Moses: "Go down," which the midrash interprets metaphorically as meaning, "Go down from the heights of your spiritual greatness, because all that I have given you was only for the sake of Israel. Now that they have sinned, I have no need for you."

You don't stand at Sinai as a singular person before God. Your spiritual consciousness is historical and collective. To be a Jew requires a leap of solidarity with a people even if they worship pagan gods. Making the State of Israel the spiritual possession of one segment of the Jewish people undermines the most important instrument for building Jewish collective consciousness today.

THE DIASPORA: HELPING ISRAELIS UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES

The climate of discussion in Israel today has made American Jews bolder in expressing their threats. While their decision to "play hardball" may prove effective politically, the main thrust of American Jewry's case should emphasize their deep desire to be Jews and to safeguard their

4 yiddishkeit. By so doing they would help Israelis understand themselves, for they seem to have little or no understanding of their importance to Jewish spiritual identity throughout the world. In other words, bring your spiritual hungers—not only your economic and political influence— here. Let Israel understand your spiritual bond with this reality. Help Israel understand its Jewish mission. Israelis see the diaspora as a gan eden—a paradise of material affluence and well-being. They do not grasp the needs of the Jewish soul, of the unsatisfied spiritual hungers present in the Jewish world.

They have little appreciation of the problem of Jewish continuity in the diaspora and of the overwhelming problem of assimilation in a modern pluralistic society. We must emphasize the obvious—but often overlooked—point that the Reform and Conservative movements did not invent secularism. They are not responsible for the modern world. (They may have done a lot of good things, but not that!)

The Reform and Conservative movements did not create the alternative family lifestyles that compete with traditional forms. These reflect the sexual revolution of modernity, in which gender identities and sexual preferences are constantly being revised. The abundance of social and cultural options and the ascendance of liberalism and pluralism are what modernity is about. They are not Jewish creations!

Reform and Conservative rabbis are involved with these issues not because they brought them into being but because of the exposure and vulnerability of their congregants to these social and cultural phenomena. It is important for Jews in Israel to understand and appreciate the situation of a Jewish leadership having to compete with the attractions of pluralism, secularism, and whatever else the modern world has to offer. Perhaps then they would be willing to concede that when these religious leaders make mistakes, it is with the intention of saving Jews and not in order to destroy Torah. I understand the pressures these rabbis are under. Here in Israel, I don't have the same pressures. I don't have to decide how to respond to intermarriage so as to salvage something Jewish from an otherwise hopeless situation.

The Israeli response to diaspora leaders should be: How can we help you in your battle with modernism and secularism? Rather than isolate and delegitimize them, we should strengthen and encourage them. But above all, they should be made to feel our understanding and empathic identification with their uphill struggle.

A MISPLACED CONCERN WITH AUTHORITY

Their (and our) problem is not one of authority. As a young rabbi just out of the rabbinical academy, I experienced frustration at realizing that the problem of serving as a rabbi was not that I lacked the knowledge or the status to render halakhic decisions, but that no one had questions to ask me! I had the authority to issue judgments, but no one felt the need for judgments. I soon realized that the main religious issue facing Judaism in the modern world was not the authority of Halakhah. The role of the rabbi in America today is not to be an authority figure or a judge. What

5 are missing are not answers but questions! The rabbi has to instill a desire to ask questions, to be bothered by Judaism, to feel that Judaism is important enough to want to ask about it.

There are no burning halakhic issues today because the Jewish people do not see themselves as a people of Torah. You must first make contact with Torah, with mitzvah, in order to be concerned about Halakhah. First you have to know who you are, that the God of Israel has a stake in your life, that Judaism may have something to say to your life.

The answer is not the dogma of Torah min ha-shamayim—whether you believe that every word of the Torah was divinely given—but whether you find significance in it. Too many people are zealous about saving the dogmatic and halakhic principles of Judaism at the expense of the majority of Jews. They want to guard the purity of traditional Judaism without having the patience to lead people through a spiritual process, to allow people to grow, to fall in love with yiddishkeit through example.

Orthodox Judaism's intensity and passionate concern for Halakhah and Jewish education can serve as important catalysts to other movements in Judaism. Isolating itself from world Jewry by delegitimizing other forms of Judaism only undermines its vital importance and mission as a living example for world Jewry.

I am convinced beyond doubt that the burning issues facing Judaism today are not halakhic authority or even halakhic mistakes. The real issue is pekuah nefesh (saving a life)—whether this people is going to disappear. This is not the time for Israel to issue messages to the world about halakhic authority, about whose conversion is genuinely halakhic. If Israel were to face the issue honestly, it would say: "Israel declares war on the disappearance of Jews, on Jewish alienation from their spiritual heritage."

At this moment in history we must embrace all Jews. We must strengthen all Jews fighting to keep the idea of Torah alive. I say this not because of my commitment to liberalism and pluralism but because of my commitment to Torah and to God, and because I believe that the future of the Jewish people is too important to be left to Israeli politicians or the religious establishment.

No matter what future legislation will be passed in the Knesset, diaspora Jews must never turn their backs on Israel. We are in the early stages of nation building. Thus far, we have reclaimed the land and have built a home for all Jews. The history of the homeless, wandering Jew is over.

We are now in the process of building the moral and spiritual foundations of our society. This is a momentous historical period. All Jews throughout the world must participate in the process. Their spiritual and communal needs must be understood in Israel so that a message of Torah that is inclusive and morally compelling can emanate from Jerusalem to the whole Jewish world.

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