A debate of unseemly hostility
IFIRST VISITED Israel in the winter of 1972. The Jewish state was then not quite 25 years old. It was vibrant, bustling and growing. From a personal point of view it was an overwhelming experience. But there were moments of great sadness. Jewish beggars roamed the streets of Jerusalem. In Tel Aviv, Jewish prostitutes plied their trade. But what depressed me most of all was the open warfare between religious and non-religious Jews.
To some extent, this was but part of a wider and perfectly legitimate debate about the nature of the state. What shocked me, however, was not merely the unpleasantness of the invective, which all too frequently could descend into actual physical violence: Jew assaulting Jew. What shocked me was that this loathsome dialogue was conducted (on both sides) in the name of Judaism.
After two weeks, I flew back to London quite convinced that Israel was on the verge of civil war. If the Arabs had any sense (I actually told my London University students), they would leave Israel alone to implode upon itself. Fortunately, the Arabs did not have any sense. The following year came the Yom Kippur war, which imposed upon the country a grim though authentic unity. A great deal of water — and blood — has passed under the bridge since then. But the underlying religious tensions remain.
A survey of Israeli Jews, carried out between October 2014 and May 2015 by the prestigious Pew Research Center, revealed that while most Israeli Jews are traditional or religious in outlook and practice, most (63 per cent) nonetheless believe that the laws of the state should not be grounded in halachah. To put this into some kind of demographic perspective, the survey also indicated that fewer than one fifth of Jews in Israel are practising Orthodox, while more than twice that proportion are secular.
It is apparently true that even among secular Jews, some aspects of religious practice remain. For example, well over 80 per cent of them participate in a Passover Seder. But the survey found that “secular Jews in Israel are more uncomfortable with the notion that a child of theirs might someday marry an ultra-Orthodox Jew than they are with the prospect of their child marrying a Christian.”
This is a shocking conclusion. My purely anecdotal impression is that, although it relates only to Jews in Israel, it is probably true of Jews in the USA and the UK: secular Jews would rather their children ‘‘marry out’’ than marry into the ultra-Orthodox fold.
What is to be done? To this question, there are of course many answers. The one I invite all of you to consider now relates simply to the manner in which we conduct dialogue with our fellow Jews. Put simply, the terms and tone of intra-communal debate need to change.
On February 12, in this column, I drew attention to the disgraceful language used by Israel’s deputy minister of education, Rabbi Meir Porush, to describe certain of his fellow Jews who happen not to be practising Orthodox but who wish nonetheless to pray at the Western Wall. Not to be outdone, some days later Rabbi David Yosef, a member of Israel’s self-styled “Council of Torah Sages,” used his weekly synagogue address to announce that adherents of Reform Judaism were “literally idolaters”.
As a matter of fact, I share Rabbi Yosef’s broad critique of the Reform movement — though I regard as little short of miraculous Reform’s rapprochement with Zionism, a rapprochement Yosef seems unaware of. But to publicly call Reformers “idolaters” seems to me beyond the pale. The accusation might indeed be aimed more accurately at certain sections of the Lubavitch movement, but I have been unable to find any statement by Yosef to this effect. Be that as it may, I do have to ask what possible good can come of denouncing as “idolaters” fellow Jews who are, after all, fulfilling the mitzvah of dwelling in the Land of Israel.
In his book One People? (1993) Rabbi Lord Sacks argued for an Orthodoxy that is inclusivist rather than exclusivist. He cautioned against speaking of other Jews “except in the language of love and respect”. Orthodox Jews, he counselled, should attach “positive significance to the fact that liberal Judaisms have played their part in keeping alive for many Jews the values of Jewish identity, faith, and practice.”
Sacks was right. His tragedy was that he himself did not practise what he preached.
Water — and blood — has passed under the bridge but tensions still remain