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Back to the Future with Jonathan Sarna

August 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In beliefs, culture, dating and marriage, economics, education, israel, orthodox, politics | Leave a Comment

The more I read of Jonathan Sarna, the more impressed I am with him personally, but the more I fear for institutional Judaism. Sarna is intelligent, considered, insightful and articulate, but he’s also an historian, and my feeling is that movements led by historians and sociologists rather than activists and entrepreneurs are already moving into their exhibit space at the museum.

I bring this up to comment on Sarna’s recent article in Reform Judaism Online, published by the URJ. Sarna has some thoughts to share looking backwards, and a few predictions for the future Judaism, inlcuding:

In the past, economic crises have caused American Judaism to turn inward and away from Israel and its troubles. It has also gutted educational spending, with terrible consequence.
Jewish institutional life tends to benefit from expansions in government services and social safety nets, as these free up significant funds and manpower for Jewish charities and social service organizations.
Expect to see lots of Jewish organizations go under, particularly in the hard-hit Orthodox sector, as we finally learn whose been swimming naked as the tide goes out. Mergers between Jewish instutions will increase, as will mergers between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

He’s got quite a few others, but I particularly want to focus on Dr. Sarna’s prediction that, as in the 1930s, American Judaism will turn inwards, and disengage to some extent with Israel. As evidence, Sarna cites the fact that fewer Jews are attending summer-long or semester-long programs in Israel.

My main objection to that piece of evidence is that it discounts Birthright Israel, which has sent over 200,000 Jews to Israel over the last decade. Much of the decline in summer and semester programs in Israel can be attributed to the fact that participants in those trips are ineligible for a Birthright tour, and many high-school students in particular have declined to go to Israel with their youth movements, synagogues, or schools precisely because they prefer to go on Birthright for free.

In any case, Sarna also points out that entirely endogamous Jewish couples are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by intermarried couples. If roughly 50 out of 100 Jews marry other Jews, you get 25 endogamous couples. That leaves another 50 Jews marrying 50 non-Jews, and thus you get that 2-to-1 ratio that is simply astonishing. Judaism in America has already been redefined on the ground, and we’re still left sorting out exactly what that might mean.

Aliyah Update

August 12, 2009 at 6:47 pm | In culture, israel | 6 Comments

Great article in the Jerusalem Post about the insignificantly small numbers of Americans making Aliyah – only about 3,000 per year. The article is interesting throughout. Heres a good bit:

To Israelis, “aliya” refers to waves of refugees fleeing a cruel world to take control of their destiny in a place where Jews are an indigenous nation. The vision of Israel as a free Jewish political space, a refuge and a voice for a people that had neither, informs Israeli Jewish identity in deep ways.

But Americans have no parallel memory of destruction, and no experience of sacrifice. They are five generations removed from the Czarist pogroms that drove so many Eastern European Jews to America’s shores in the 19th century. Their Jewishness is a personal choice, as valid as many other chosen identities, and their national experience one of prosperity, freedom and social acceptance.

“Aliya” cannot mean the same thing in such radically different cultures.
Indeed, it doesn’t.

Aliyah Guilt

August 6, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In beliefs, culture, israel, politics | 12 Comments

On a recent trip to Israel I met up with an Israeli couple for dinner in Jerusalem. They are old family friends who raised three boys in Efrat, one of the early settlements around Jerusalem, east of the Green Line. As always, conversation was lively and interesting, but one topic stays with me still. The husband turned to me at one point and asked “ How do American Jews deal with their guilt over not living in Israel?”

The question took me by surprise. At first, I thought that maybe it was just because my friend is, well, a settler, a right-wing religious Zionist who believes that a Jew’s place is in the Biblical land of Israel. Nonetheless, the expectation that American Jews actually feel guilty about not living in Israel seemed a bit extreme, even for someone the media might characterize as an extremist.

I realized quickly that my friend was not alone, and his opinion was not extreme, it was in the mainstream. The ideology of Zionism had no room for a Diaspora, because Zionism redefined Jewish identity as a national identity, bound to a land. Early Zionists, and even not-so-early Zionists fully expected that the Jews of the Diaspora would flock, en masse, to the Jewish State. It took at least two decades after the birth of Israel for the realization to set in that the Diaspora was likely a permanent feature of the Jewish community.

In recent years, the Jewish Agency has come under criticism for not doing its job well, for being inefficient and bureaucratic, and for losing its way now that the mass immigrations of Russian and Ethiopian Jews are complete. My criticism cuts even deeper. Why should the Jewish Agency be encouraging and incentivizing Aliyah at all? There’s a huge difference between rescuing Jewish communities under threat and trying to convince Jews who are comfortable and secure in their Diaspora communities to move to Israel. It’s not like Aliyah attracts enough people to have any real impact on the demographic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, Aliyah as currently structured gives incentive to those who have the least to contribute to the State and the most to take from it. Still, most Israelis remain enthusiastic about supporting Aliyah, even as most Americans are unmoved by the prospect.

I think that both Israeli and American Jews have lost their sense of purpose. In the Zionist narrative, Israel was a solution the problem of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora. The vision for the state itself was to be a nation like any other. American Jews are not so attracted to that narrative because they already live in a place where they feel safe from oppression, and where they are able to fully participate politically and culturally in the life of the nation. What’s the point of Israel? Sure, the land is important, but there are nearly 6 million Jews living in it already. What kind of personal responsibility should an American Jew feel in such a case?

Israel, in turn, looks to America and expects Americans to feel a sense of guilt for not living in Israel,, because such feelings of guilt would validate the Israeli national project. But even among Israelis, the certainty about why Israel exists and what purpose it is meant to serve has faded. Many Israelis emigrate, seeking a safer, easier, less tense life. Why live in existential crisis every moment, says this new breed of Israelis? What’s so important about Israel that it is worth all that sacrifice?

I believe that the state of Judaism and Jewish identity is at a moment of great uncertainty. The Zionist narrative is threatened and confused, and its ideological power is waning. But in America, assimilation threatens Jewish identity in lockstep with fading support for and relationship to Israel. The American vision of Tikun Olam and ethical monotheism had strongly influenced American culture, but at the cost, perhaps, of its power as a Jewish identity. I believe that Israel and America need each other, and that they need a shared narrative that dignifies both communities. Both America and Israel need flourishing and vibrant communities, seized with vision and creativity. We need a shared sense of purpose, a shared language, and a shared future. To get there, we will need to step back from all the old expectations and assumptions and open new dialogues, but most importantly, we’ll need to ask ourselves the hardest questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the next chapter of the Jewish story that we’d like to tell?

Why?

July 30, 2009 at 12:10 pm | In beliefs, culture, holidays, israel, jewish denominations, politics, tisha b'av | 2 Comments

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? All around the Jewish Internet, and around the Jewish world, we are asking “Why?” I asked “Why?” last year too. Why do we mourn on Tisha B’Av? What relevance does it have today? Who wants a Third Temple anyway?

Traditionally, we believe that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’av, hundreds of years apart, the First for idolatry, and the Second for baseless hatred among Jews.

Though we typically say that the First Temple was destroyed because of our sin of idolatry, the idolatry of the day was not a matter of private worship. Religion was an organizing principle of government, social interaction, law, and ritual practice. To worship Molech meant to immolate young children. To worship Ashera meant to participate in orgiastic rape rituals with temple slaves. Idolatry was really a matter of competing lifestyles and ideologies, of competing sects seeking to define Israelite life, culture, and worship.

The same is true of life in the Second Temple. Hellenists, Jewish Christians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, Zealots, Essenes, and other sects were characteristic of a highly fragmented social, political and religious milieu. These groups fought between and among themselves, to devastating consequences. But the question remains, why do we call this baseless hatred (Sina’at Hinam) ? The ideological differences between these groups were massive! Issues at stake including how many gods were to be worshipped, whether god was corporeal, what was the role of written text of Torah versus oral traditions of Torah, was religious leadership hereditary or earned, what was the appropriate practice of the Sabbath, and who controlled the Jewish calendar. There’s nothing baseless about the bitter rivalries and conflicts that played out over these issues!

A further question. On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of the Temple because the Temple was supposedly the symbol of Jewish unity. Yet the Temple was the very site of the political and religious power struggles described above. The Talmud is replete with stories about violent confrontations and devious machinations occurring in the Temple itself. The building that was destroyed, Herod’s Temple, was an enormously controversial project when Herod, considered and Edomite non-Jew and Roman puppet by many of his subjects, built it only a few decades prior to its destruction. I can mourn over Jewish hatred, but why mourn the destruction of the very forum in which they played out? It took the destruction of the Temple for Jews to consolidate and unite around Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained it for 2000 years!

In the last 2000 years, Tisha B’av has become a catch-all day of mourning. Kinot (mournful poems) are recited for the Crusades, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust. The last, in particular, has become an important part of the modern Tisha B’av, because it is both so enormous in scale and so recent as to be quite relevant and relatable. People can still find tears for the Holocaust that they cannot find for a 2000-year old Temple ruin. But the problem with Tisha B’av as a Holocaust memorial is that first question I asked, “Why?”. We have reasons for the destruction of our Temples, but what reason do we have for the Holocaust? Last year, I wrote:

We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don’t change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B’Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence.

This year, I will try to formulate the beginning of a response.

The Temple is understood as a symbol of unity, even if in practical terms that unity proved elusive. Yet that unity is expressed in some contradictory ways.

The Temple is meant to be a house of worship for all people and nations, but its precincts are restricted. Non-Jews could not enter the main sanctuary at all, and increasing levels of restricted access governed the courtyard, sanctum and inner sanctum.
The pillar of smoke rising to Heaven from the altar symbolized the intimate connection between Man and God, but the smoke itself was produced in the basest way, by burning slaughtered animals.
Priests were to wear gleaming white difficult-to-clean linen garments, symbolizing purity, but would soon be spattered in impossible-to-remove bloodstains shortly after they started their sacrificial work.
The Temple was a site of pilgrimage, where you would gather to see and be seen by God, but when you got there, the closest you could come was the front lawn.
Though the Temple is the site of worship for every Jew, nowhere are the status distinctions between Jews more pronounced. Priests, Levites, and Israelites played very different roles. Wealthy Jews brought different sacrifices than poor Jews. Judges and scholars played official roles. Though all belonged at the Temple site, none were created equal there.
The courtyard of the Temple housed the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, which sat in between a bazaar and a slaughterhouse.
Although the greatest prohibition in Judaism is idolatry, sitting in the Holy of Holies, on top of the Ark of the Covenant that had held the Ten Commandments, was an idol! The center of all Jewish worship and intention was a statue of two cherubs facing one another.

The Temple’s lesson about unity one of the greatest lessons of Jewish wisdom. Unity is not about universal adherence to one idea or ideal. Judaism proposes that unity is about being able to hold many contradictory ideas in our minds at once, and to be able to express them in our lives. The point to aim at, the point where God’s presence could be said to rest, is between the two cherubs. The universe, and our relationship to God, is fundamentally complex. Life is not a morality play or kabuki theater, where obedience to the form defines right and wrong. But life is also not a solipsistic play, where our own egos and intellects determine morality for the entire universe.

To hold contradiction together requires diversity. One person, alone, cannot, contra Walt Whitman, contain all the multitudes. Judaism requires many sects, many tribes, many schools of Halacha, Hashkafah, and Haskalah. We’ve always had them, and together, as a milling and teeming mass of intellect, spirituality, zealotry, piety, and artistry we’ve expressed our love, awe, fear, passion and intimacy for our Father, Master, Teacher, King, and Beloved, the Breath of Life, the Universal, the Unmoved Mover, the Unknown and Unknowable, and all the other seventy names for God.

Last year, I talked about how the Satmar Rebbe blamed the Holocaust on Zionism, while the Zionists blamed the Holocaust on the Jew of Exile, who could not shake himself out of his existential misery, shake off the shackles of his religious tradition, stand up, declare himself a nation and not a faith, and redeem himself. Both are wrong, but both are right. The answer is not to unify around one pole or the other. Had all Jews abandoned Judaism to move to Palestine, we would have lost the very soul of Judaism in exchange for a piece of dirt and a UN membership. Had Jews not taken to the Zionist dream and built what was to be the State of Israel, the Holocaust might well have ended the Jewish project entirely. And they are not the only ones who are right and wrong. The Reform, who cast away law in favor of ethics, and the Orthodox, who cast away ethics in favor of law, and the Conservative, who cast away principles in favor of compromise, and secular who cast away history in favor of culture, and all the other sects, groups and denominations of Modern Judaism, they are all wrong, and all right, and all need to learn not just to tolerate, but to dignify the other as necessary, as valid, as honored.

Diversity ensures our survival. Without it, we have no mechanism for finding new ideas, for defining new ways to express our core values in a changing world, or for striving for our own improvement and drawing closer to our ideals and our vision of the Divine. Tisha B’av teaches us that baseless hatred is baseless not because there are no core issues at stake between groups, but because each group is striving for a common goal. Each group is working ‘lishma’ for a pure purpose, even as differences abound about how to pursue it or even what it is. Our challenge is to wrap our arms around all of this stiff-necked people with its squabbling and bickering, to love it, to nurture it, and to lead it it to achieve its promise as a light unto the world. So long as we have not achieved that, I’ll have reason to fast on Tisha B’av.

The Gap Between Hareidim and Modern Orthodox

July 24, 2009 at 8:40 am | In beliefs, ethics, halacha, israel, jewish denominations, orthodox | 3 Comments

In XGH’s most recent post, How to stop Chareidim breaking the law, the suggestion was to emphasize Kiddush Hashem/Chillul Hasehm (sanctification/desecration of God’s name, usually through public conduct) and its implications for practical conduct in the public square.

While I agree with the sentiment of the post, I think it misses a fundamental point.

There is a 3,000-year old debate in Judaism as to whether human initiative and human judgment is of value.

One position is that God has laid out for us the manner in which we should act, and that the human challenge is to submit to that, to yoke ourselves to that path, and to blind ourselves from anything that might lead us astray. This is the path adopted by Hareidim today.

The other position is that we have been granted a Divine gift of judgment and decision-making, and that we must use those faculties to choose a proper path through an ever-changing world. This is the Modern Orthodox (MO) position.

When the MO look at the Hareidi world, they level a critique based on observed facts. How can it be, they say, that you are following the Divine path, if your real-world outcomes are so poor? Your institutions are built on corruption and theft, your youth are delinquent, uneducated, and filthy, and your communities rally behind th emsot odious villains and act out violently as thier only means of expression. Surely this can’t be God’s will!

In turn, when Hareidim look at the MO, they don’t look so much on the facts on the ground as much as the influences. If you, the MO, want to believe your judgment is sanctified and in line with the Divine will, you must purify yourselves. If you were influenced only by Torah and expressed excellent character traits, perhaps we could believe in your judgment. But instead, your homes have televisions and internet showing obscene images and abhorrent culture. Your children grow up knowing more rock songs by heart than mishnayot, idolizing movie stars instead of Gedolim, and wasting their time on Harry Potter instead of Halacha.

I’m not sure how to bridge this gap, but I do know that the first step towards bridging it is understanding it. This is an ancient Machloket. It’s the same as the argument over whether the world was created in Tishrei or in Nisan. It’s the same as the argument over whether God performing miracles on your behalf is a good reflection on your or a bad reflection on you. It’s the same as the argument over whether we should start the Haggadah with the story of our slavery in Egypt or our idolatrous roots in Mesopotamia. And this isn’t something we’re going to easily resolve.

Land, People, and God (pt 1)

June 8, 2009 at 9:57 am | In beliefs, culture, israel, jewish denominations, politics | Leave a Comment

What is Judaism It’s not a race, nor is it just a religion. Ethnicity doesn’t capture the religious elements, nor does nation. The Mordechai Kaplan idea that Judaism is a civilization is sufficiently expansive, but not really specific enough.

The best paradigm for defining Judaism to date is the three-pronged approach. Judaism is a civilization that expresses commitments to the land of Israel, the Jewish people and their culture, and the God of Israel as worshipped through Jewish religion.

Speaking broadly, we can say that throughout history, strong expression of any two of these three prongs has been sufficient to create a Jewish society. Expressing all three, however, requires an intetgrative vision that has proven elusive.

We can divide Judaism, with exceptions, into three time periods. Ancient Judaism, from the Exodus through the destruction of the Second Temple, can largely be seen as Judaism built on Land and God, but not on the people of Israel. The people lived in the Land of Israel and defined themselves around that reality. They also worshipped the Jewish God. What they lacked was a sense of cohesive identity. Tribal identities, local loyalties, and ethnic differences all stood in the way of a sense of united peoplehood.

Over many hundreds of years, Jewish identity emerged, but it took the volution of many new institutions and new ideas. The move from tribal judges to a monarchy, and from decentralized worship to Temple worship were important steps, but progress did not happen in a straight line. The split of the monarchy into Judah and Israel, the establishment of alternate sites of worship , and the evolution of separate holy texts rmained significant obstacles to unity.

The Babylonian exlie and the reforms of Ezra helped create a single sacred text and a shared sense of identity, but Jewish sectarianism of a non-tribal nature replaced the previous tribal splits. Hellenists, Essenes, Baithusians, Samaraitans, Sadduccess, Pharisees, and Christians were only some of the sects that divided Judaism and defeated any sense of common purpose or identity.

The destruction of the Second Temple and the seconf Exile posed an enormous challenge to Judaism, forcing it to reorganize. The Land of Israel was gone, and Judaism reformed around Nation and God. Over the next few hundred years, Judaism would shed most of its sects, divorce decisively from Christianity, abandon Jewish Europe and its Greek coonnections, and recenter itself around a new set of leaders whose authority flowed from their mastery of religious matters. The central institutions of synagogue and study hall brought regular religious practice into a communal space; so different from the Temple in Jerusalem. The cohesiveness of these new communities was such that the lack of a land or polity could be overcome through a strong sense of peoplehood.

This strong sense of peoplehood was reinforced throughout the Middle Ages by the outside. It was very difficult for a Jew to be anything other than a Jew. Full conversion to Christianity was possible, but it carried with it the cost of leaving your entire old life behind. Similarly, there was little social or economic mobility for most of the period.

The Enlightenment changed all that. Among its revolutionary ideas was the notion of history as a tale of human progress. Economic and social mobility, along with a borad redefinition of human rights and a rejection of class and caste systems, birthed the possibility of a person selecting an idenitity rather than being born into one. Religious ideas like predestination were rejected, religious institutions were subject to withering attacks, and the concept of national identity was forwarded to replace religion as a means of uniting people and creating common cause.

Zionism was born in this era. It represents a Judaism of People and Land, wiith no God. The Zionist concept was the Jews were a people like any other, and needed to redeem themselves, retake their land, and live their national destiny on the soil of their ancestors. Religious opposition to Zionism as a forbidden hastening of the Messianic era was deemed archaic – an expression of a Jew so imprinted by the ghetto that he no longer wanted to be free.

Conceptually, Zionism was very attractive,and following the Holocaust, it was seen as proven correct and desparately necessary. So long as the Jewish people felt an existential crisis, Zionism represented an ideology of survival that encompassed and sheltered all that was destroyed in Europe, from the cosmopolitan Jewery of Berlin to the Jews of the shtetls.

Each of the above representations of Judaism is missing something, and is therefor uniquely vulnerable. Thought the State of Israel has been through trying times, by 1973 it was clear that Israel did not face an existential threat to its existence from its Arab neighbors, and its nuclear deterrent capabilities drew the period of widescale, open conflict in Israel to a close.

With survival no longer the only issue, but with Israelis continuing to pay a high cost to live in Israel, it was inevitable that the question would arise – why? Why live in Israel? America had a thriving, secure, robust Diaspora community. Life was easy, there was no army service, or violent neighbors, or random acts of terror. Zionism had not really considered any ongoing role of Diaspora Jewish communities, even as it depended on their ongoing financial and political support. Suddenly though, many young Israelis began to abandon the Zionist dream in favor of personal salvation from the burdens of being an Israeli, and of living in Israel. Theodore Herzl said ‘Im Tirtzu, Ein zo Agadah’ – if you will it/desire it, it is not a dream. Modern Israeli graffiti today attributes a different statement to Herzl – ‘Lo Rotztim? Lo Tazrich!’ – You don’t want it? Fine, we don’t need to have it.’

Some might say that this view is short-sighted, and that the American Jewish experience is unique in history, or unlikely to last. One day, America will become hostile to Jews, and Israel will be needed as a refuge. While this analysis may prove true, its power as an ideology is waning. Israel cannot just be a place to run to, not for those who live there and often feel they’d raather run somewhere else, or those who live elsewhere and will not excuse Israel’s conduct in exchange for a promise of haven that they will likely never need.

And that leaves us where we are today. We need a new vision for Judaism, that can integrate, to some extent, our land, our people and our faith. It must give purpose to our presence in Israel as well as in the Diaspora. It must cast a broad net over all of us, a Sukkah under which we can all shelter, that gives us a sense of commonality and peoplehood. And it must mediate our varied relationships to God and faith. We can’t pick two out of three – we have to integrate all three.

In the next post, I’ll look at the rise of denominationalism as a response to Enlightenment, and the ways in which denominations responded to the Zionist rejection of God by attempting to articulate Godly philosophies of Zionism.

Changes Coming in Orthodox Education Options?

May 2, 2009 at 9:02 pm | In economics, education, israel, orthodox | Leave a Comment

An interesting article in the Jewish Standard suggests that parents are ready to explore new options for what a Modern Orthodox school could look like. As the tuition crisis overshadows the shidduch crisis, I’m finding myself more and more irritated by the total lack of vision and perspective displayed by both parents and leadership.

I attended Netiv Meir, a premiere yeshiva high school in Jerusalem, where most students dormed. The school was widely acknowledged as perhaps the best religious high schools, and one of the best high schools, period, in Israel.

Let me tell you a bit about my school. Our day began with davening at 7 am, and we finished our last class at about 6pm. Following davening and dinner we had night seder and study hall. We didn’t free up until 9pm Sunday through Thursday. Fridays were a half-day, and we stayed in every other Shabbat too. The school had about 500 students in four grades, and served three meals a day and maintained four dormitory buildings.

The key difference between this excellent school and American MO schools was the student-to-teacher ratio, and the approach to extracurriculars. In Netiv Meir, there were forty students to a class. That’s right, forty. In the article above, they talk about going from an 18:1 ratio at the expensive schools to a 25:1 ratio at a proposed cheaper school. Yet my school achieved academic excellence with a 40:1 ratio.

As for extracurriculars, there basically weren’t any. There were no athletic teams or choirs or anything of the sort. Anyway, who had the time? We spent as many as six hours a day learning Torah. Night seder was the extracurricular activity! Physical education was not neglected by any means – this school was training future soldiers in the IDF, and our gym classes involved reaching certain requirements for distance running, pushups, situps, and pullups.

We played sports in our free time, but not in organized leagues. There were no debate teams, but we did study three languages (Hebrew, English and Arabic – and Aramaic, I suppose), and everyone learned biology, chemisty, physics, algebra, geomety, trigonometry and calculus. We learned computer programming (on old computers perhaps, but we gained real knowledge), history, Tanach, literature and so on.

No class had a teacher’s aid. Most classes didn’t use fancy textbooks. Yet the graduates of this school knew more math, science, and Torah in 10th grade than any graduate of the MO instutions in New York like HAFTR, DRS, Flatbush, Ramaz, TABC, Frisch, and SAR.

We need to recalibrate our expectations and our sense of what is possible if we are going to create an exceptional and sustainable edcuational model for our communities. We need to questions orthodoxies like the idea that student-to-teacher ratios are critical, or that extracurriculars are required if our children arte going to get into good colleges, or that it’s ok for our kids to graduate high school without being fluent in Hebrew, and without being capable of learning a daf of Gemara on their own. We might also do well to acknowledge that day care, school, and summer camp are all related to the same need to educate our kids, socialize them, and free Mom and Dad to earn a living and maintain a household.

I’ve written a bit about possible alternative models for Jewish education on this blog. I fear I might not have been bold enough myself in proposing solutions but perhaps I was succesful in laying out some tradeoffs. What other fresh ideas are out there?

Election Without Direction

February 10, 2009 at 1:23 pm | In beliefs, israel, politics | Leave a Comment

Today is Election Day in Israel, though it’s hard to tell if you’re not actually in Israel. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, even published a story about how foreign journalists are having a tough time selling their stories to their hometown papers.

My theory is that it’s because the elections in Israel are about nothing at all. Israeli society has reached a consensus that there is simply no partner for peace among the Palestinians. Fatah may be willing, but they aer unable to make peace, while Hamas is able, but unwilling. This critical issue that resists characterization as either foreign or domestic policy has collapsed the political space that normally divides right from left in Israel. Instead, we have three centrist parties that have run listless, issueless, and rudderless campaigns. All of these parties are out of ideas, and one of them will find themselves governing without any leadership or goal.

Perhaps now is the time to offer a different idea, and a new coalition for advancing it. Many have previously observed that the project we call Israel is comprised of three pillars: a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state situated on the ancient Biblical land of Israel. So far, nobody has managed to do better than to encompass two of these three pillars at a time.

Right now, for example, we have a Jewish state, whose fundamental character is enshrined, most powerfully, in the Law of Return, that guarantees citizenship to any Jew. We also have a state that wields authority over nearly all of the Biblical land of Israel. What we do not have is a democratic state. Over one third of the people governed by Israel do not have full civil rights, to say nothing of rights of citizenship or even a path to normalization.

The alternative vision is to have a Jewish state and a democratic state, but to release the third pillar by ceding the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians – a two-state solution. While many Israelis are prepared to cede the land in exchange for peace and security, few Israelis believe that giving up the land to the current crop of Palestinian leaders will in fact lead to peace and security. There is also opposition to ceding land under any circumstances not only from Religious Zionists, but also, perhaps surprisingly, from many Russian immigrants.

But what if we chose to give up on that other pillar, the one that guarantees a Jewish state? What might that look like? I think we’d be talking about the bi-national state, or one-state solution.

The one-state solution is not new, but it has a troubled history for supporters of Israel. It has primarily been forwarded by the most vituperative and hateful voices in the far-left, anti-Zionist community. Most recently, the ‘reformed’ Muammar Qaddafi wrote about “Isratine” in the New York Times. But let’s pull away for a moment from the dubious provenance of the idea, and examine it on its merits.

Critics of the one-state solution see it as a ruse – a demographic act of terrorism against the Jewish state. The argument, as forwarded by Alan Dershowitz and others, is that as soon as the Palestinians represent an electoral majority, they will vote to replace the binational state with an Islamic state.

Personally, I find the argument ludicrous and unrealistic. The key assumptions that the argument rests upon are that all Palestinians will vote as a bloc, that they all want to be governed by Islamic law, and that no counterbalance can exist to prevent this kind of parliamentary coup de etat.

None of these assumptions stand up to scrutiny. Palestinians today are already divided between Hamas and Fatah, and would likely be further divided if other options existed. Arabs as an ethnicity are as internally divided as Jews as an ethnicity – the joke that where there are two Jews there are three opinions can be said about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular with nothing lost in translation.

There’s also no indication that Palestinians desire a religious government. Hamas today stands for Islamic rule, but it used to receive its support from Saddam Hussein, rather than from Syria and Iran, and was a largely secular movement. The shift towards Islam has to do with the will of its Iranian backers, not the will of the people. Fatah, the other elected representative of the Palestinian people, is a secular movement. Why would the opportunity to participate as equal citizens in a binational state suddenly turn the Palestinians into Islamic fundamentalists?

Finally, there’s no reason to believe that Palestinians could vote in a brand new government on the basis of an electoral majority. The barriers to such a path are constitutional institutional, and military.

A binational state would need a constitution that protects human, civil, political, and religious rights for all citizens. Such a constitution would also have to enshrine a power-sharing agreement that would allow all the sectors of Israeli society to have their voices heard.

Whatever institutions are crafted by the new state, there can be no doubt that Jews would still wield tremendous power, that would certainly be sufficient to counterbalance the demographic attack strategy feared by some. Jews will still control most of the wealth of the country at the outset, most of its trade and political connections, and will still make up most of its civil servants. That kind of institutional power is difficult to overthrow simply by winning an election.

Should the worst come to pass, however, and we’ve badly misjudged the intention of the Palestinians, their remains an enormous barrier to their success in converting Israel into a Muslim state. That barrier is the IDF. The Jewish population of Israel is and will still be in control of the jet planes, the tanks, the armaments, and of course the nuclear weapons. Whatever changeover we envision, the reins of military power would be transferred very slowly and very carefully.

I think we can also fairly question the demographic threat to the binational state. Right now, Israelis emigrate at a high rate, while Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing to do but have children. In a binational state we could reasonably expect a few changes to these demographic trends. First, some Palestinians would seek to reunite with their families in other countries. Second, a new national identity and mission could well cut into Israeli emigration. Third, Jews in the Diaspora will flock once more to Israel. Some will come specifically because they want to counter the demographic threat. Others will be attracted to the chance to settle in Biblical Israel, and others will want to return home to be part of the new chapter of national life.

The real issue is what is the Jewish character of the state of Israel? Right now, that character is expressed through the Law of Return, but also through government policies that explicitly favor the rights of Jews, even at the expense of citizen Israeli-Arabs, to say nothing of non-citizen Palestinians.

The religious character of the state is a source of intense dissatisfaction on all side. The secular Jews feel coerced by the religious in every facet of their lives, from how and whom they wed to the availability of public transportation on Saturday. Religious Jews separate themselves more and more from the life of the state by living in their own enclaves and ghettos, stoning outsiders who violate their norms, and refusing to serve in the IDF or other national service, even as their communities rely on government handouts to survive.

The true character of a nation should be expressed by its people. Zionism is a floundering ideology. In the absence of a galvanizing external threat, it loses all shape, direction, and definition. Why must Jews be in their own land and have their own state? The need for refuge is one important reason, but for Jews, perhaps short-sighted Jews, who live in Israel, it is not enough. When Miss Israel said that she’d rather live in New York than put up with all the problems and issues of living in Israel, she was excoriated. But she and her generation are voting with their feet. They don’t see a cause in Israel, they just see heartache and heartbreak.

But there is a reason for Jews to live in the State of Israel, in the land of Israel. It’s the same reason that Jews have always had. It’s to unite opposing ideologies – to go through the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in the world spotlight.

It was Jews who fused the diversity of peoples and faiths born in Mesopotamia with the monistic structure of Egyptian society and religion and emerged with a pluralistic, multi-ethnic monotheism. It was Jews who connected story-telling, law, and writing to produce a document that is the underpinning of Islam and Christianity. It was Jews who harnessed the power of dialectic reasoning that emerged from Greece and created a rationalist religious structure that we know as Talmud and Halacha. And it was Jews who took the parochial teachings of one faith and extended its principles of monotheism, Sabbath, and redemption throughout the world.

The mission that falls to Jews today is to bridge between East and West, and to prove that the Western ideals of democracy can be alloyed with the Eastern ideals of faith and tribe. And the best place to do that is in the land of Israel, with all of its mixed population, holy sites, and ancient stories. That mission will define the character of the land, not its demography.

Reflections on Jewish Transformation

July 2, 2008 at 8:57 am | In beliefs, culture, education, halacha, israel, jewish denominations | Leave a Comment

As you know I’ve been studying at the Hartman Institute for the past week, and I want to thank them publicly for the opportunity to study and reflect with so many notable scholars, teachers and participants. This post is among the fruits of this wonderful retreat.

The greatest transformation of the Jewish religion is usually credited to Rabbi Yochanan Ben-Zakai, who together with his colleagues at Yavneh, reinterpreted and reestablished Judaism as a religion based around law, and the house of study and prayer. But his was not the first transformation of Judaism, nor is it destined to be the last.

In sweeping terms, the great reformulations of Judaism responded to the greatest moments of crisis and redemption in Jewish history. Let’s explore them briefly.

The Judaism of the period of the Judges is really the first historical Judaism – a Judaism not based on the ongoing revelation of God to Moses, or even to Joshua. Instead, it was the religion of a people living in history, day by day and generation by generation.

We need not detain ourselves with precisely which texts and practices these Jews had. It is sufficient to consider that this was a time when Jews did not celebrate Rosh Hashana as we do today – as a day of judgment – nor did they celebrate or commemorate many other moments, including Purim, Chanukah, Tisha B’Av, Simchat Torah, and so forth. They did not pray in a minyan, or celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. They did not gather together in shul on Shabbat, and they did not study the Talmud or draw inspiration from Isaiah. Nobody sat around a Shabbat table and explained what was bothering Rashi, or told over a vort from the Rebbe. Truly these were very different Jews!

Their religion was not centralized. A tabernacle existed, but Jews continued to worship, through sacrifice, in many places, including their own homes, as the Tanach attests. There were no kings, but there were many prophets, local potentates, and family worship rituals. Whatever texts were possessed were not studied by the general populace, and literacy was limited to a very few people. Religious worship was also closely tied to agrarian and pastoral cycles.

David, Solomon, and the First Temple changed all that. Central governance and worship created a state religion, and an attendant bureaucracy. Sacrificial worship was restricted to the Temple, even if unsuccessfully, and the king and High Priest joined the prophet as the means through which the nation and God advanced their relationship. The construction of the Temple encouraged pilgrimage as a more significant aspect of worship.

The destruction of the First Temple led to even more significant reforms. Ezra the Scribe redacted a Torah text that became standard, and other books, such as those recorded by the prophets, began to appeat. The institution of prayer began to emerge, even as prophecy declined. The notion of a Diaspora community took hold, as most of the exiled community in Babylon did not return with Ezra and Nehemia. In this Diaspora, Jews did not perform sacrificial worship, nor did they make pilgrimage. New modes of organization and communal life began to emerge.

The Second Temple period within the land of Israel was marked by even greater centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and during the Hasmonean dynasty, a merging of the offices of king and High Priest. Judaism had largely shifted from a rural religion to an urban one, complete with a central High Court – the Sanhedrin - but around the edges, the seeds of a backlash began to sprout. Synagogues, houses of gathering, Batei Midrash (houses of study), sectarian communities, prophets in the hinterland and scholars in the villages all flourished outside of the sphere of influence of the Temple.

When the Great Rebellion led to the destruction of the Temple and the second great exile in 70 CE, there already existed the beginnings of institutions that would reshape Judaism for the next two thousand years. They turned Judaism into a religion of text study and interpretation, prayer and community. The primary institutions were the aforementioned synagogue and Beit Midrash, with their attendant practices of prayer and study. Without an investment in schools, this highly literate mode of religious life could not have emerged.

The Holocaust (and the destruction of many other Diaspora communities, especially in the Sephardi world), and the birth of the State of Israel, along with the rise of another great Diaspora community in the United States has reshaped our religion once again – and we’re just at the beginning. Judaism changes in response to challenges, not in some sort of vacuum. Reform Judaism and Zionism were only the first responses to a world changed by the social and political values of the French Revolution and the economic values of the Industrial Revolution. It is impossible to understate the impact of these twin forces, and nobody, including Jews and the entire world, is done responding and adjusting to these changes.

I believe that the most important changes for their impact on Jewish practice are gender and racial equality, the ease and speed of travel and communication, and the transformation of societies away from traditionally mandated groups and associations towards wholly voluntary participation.

We’ve already seen how some of these changes impacted Judaism, but we have not yet reformulated our institutions around them. On any given Shabbat, our synagogues are populated only by whomever is celebrating a lifecycle event. Our students fill prep schools and universities, not Batei Midrash. We deconstruct our texts and often eviscerate them, and our new texts go unread except by a cloistered few.

What we need to do is to reshape Judaism around these realities. The Orthodox will not lead this change, as they feel the need less sharply. Their isolationism buffers them to a greater extent from the new reality, but this too is a matter of time. For the non-Orthodox the time need is hard upon us.

The new Judaism will not be about sacrificial worship, or about the synagogue in its current form. It will be about travel, including pilgrimage to Israel and travel to communities in need. It will be about leadership in non-profit organizations and social change ventures. And it must be about education, including mandatory high-school-level Jewish education and high-level continuing adult education. Not service learning. Not one-off lectures. Not the rabbi’s speech. We need more intensive learning, perhaps structured around our holidays, to connect our ideologically rooted think-tanks and institutes to the laypeople. We must realign our laity and our clergy once again. The task is before us, let’s get to it!

Hartman Institute to Ordain Orthodox Women Rabbis

January 11, 2008 at 12:47 pm | In beliefs, culture, education, halacha, israel, jewish denominations, orthodox, sexuality, torah | 7 Comments

In a move that brings Orthodox Judaism hurtling forward through time to the 1960s, the Shalom Hartman institute will ordain women to be Orthodox rabbis.

More accurately, the institute has opened a 4-year program to prepare people of any Jewish denomination to receive rabbinical ordinate.

More on this later, but I think this marks a major turning point in Jewish history, not so much for the content of the decision, but because the decision emerged from an Israeli institute. Is progressive Orthodoxy now an Israeli phenomenon, surpassing Yeshivat Chovevei Torah?