Judaism and Religion

Beware the Military-Religious Complex

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi stood at a lectern last week wearing the kind of size XXL skullcap that is the social marker of Orthodox settlers, praising an army program that is the pride of Israel’s religious right. He looked slightly bashful. Ashkenazi, Israel’s military chief of staff, lives in a rather boring suburb of Tel Aviv, not a West Bank settlement. He’s not an Orthodox Jew, so he usually doesn’t wear a hat or skullcap, except for formal occasions when he puts on his military beret. As a military man, he’s officially not a politician. Then again, you don’t get appointed to head the Israel Defense Forces without a sharp sense of which way the political winds are blowing.

Before I get into the details, let me note several implications of this incident. It demonstrates, yet again, that when politicians create an alliance between the state and a religious movement, the outcome is lose-lose for both. In the strictly Israeli context, it shows the growing dependence of the army on soldiers and officers from the Orthodox right, whose commitment to implementing democratic decisions is a touch iffy. And a major reason for that dependency (I know this is a terrible surprise) is the ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

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Journey to Beit Jala: Border Crossing to Hope

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Dalal rested in her father’s lap. She smiled but only said one word, ana, “I” in Arabic — her entire vocabulary at the age of three and a half. My friend Dr. Eliezer Be’eri, carefully felt her feet and ran his hand over her back. “Can she hold things?” Be’eri asked.

“She just started to with her right hand,” answered her father, Osama Rusrus.

“Does she pass things from hand to hand?”

“No. The other hand doesn’t function.”

The examination continued. A cool evening breeze blew across the patio of the Everest Hotel, a mountaintop pensione on the outskirts of Beit Jala in the West Bank. Beit Jala itself is in Area A, the part of the West Bank that is under full Palestinian Authority control and that is off-limits to Israelis by Israeli military order. Alyn Hospital, the Middle East’s only pediatric rehabilitation hospital, where Be’eri is a department head — is in Jerusalem, which is off-limits to West Bank Palestinians unless they procure Israeli permits. Our lives are fragmented by many borders in very little space.

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With a Little Help From My Friends (or: Judaism as Justice)

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Gershom Gorenberg

I know that today is Tu Be’Av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, an obscure holiday from the Second Temple period that has been secularized in Israel as the Day of Love – and that, according to Chana Pinchasi, should really be understood as an assertion of women’s freedom and a rejection of violence against them.

But there are things left to said about Tisha Be’Av, and if I wait to the eve of the fast next year, I’ll forget the poetry of protest that my friends and mentors – meaning the same people, my friends who are my teachers – have woven around that day, making it even more relevant than I thought it was.

Let’s start at Frost and Clouds, where Joshua Gutoff writes an essential reminder: The rabbis who created post-Temple Judaism weren’t philosophers (or engineers); their words were poetry and the calendar they designed was choreography. So if you think they were talking about the stones in Jerusalem when they talked about “destruction of the Temple,” please rethink:

…“The Temple” is their way of speaking about a world in which God was experienced as directly and even intimately present, and “Destruction” is the language for the loss of that experience. …

But poetry can sometimes be badly, dangerously misread. The standard religious Zionist reading of Tisha Be’Av quotes Rav Kook as saying that the destruction took place because of “baseless hatred” and that the Temple will be rebuilt out of “baseless love” – a term that is quickly transformed into condemnation of dissent, disagreement and disunity, so that Judaism becomes an introduction to fascism. (Yes, I know what the word means. I use it deliberately, in its historical sense, to describe the disgrace of religious Zionism today and the constant effort of its mainstream spokespeople to label any criticism “baseless hatred.”)

Yehudah Mirsky sticks a pin in this large, hollow idea:

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City of Thieves, Day of Mourning (and the Scent of Hope)

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Anshel Pfeffer’s article last week against fasting on Tisha Be’Av seemed written for me. I hate to fast. An old friend once told me that on Yom Kippur, he looks at my face in shul to get a real sense of suffering. Enough chastising the flesh. It makes you feel bad.

'There is no sanctity in an occupied city':
‘There is no sanctity in an occupied city’: Demonstrator in Sheikh Jarrah

Pfeffer argued that Tisha Be’Av “has lost any relevance beyond the historical.”

If Tisha Be’Av is meant to mark the exile of the Jewish people, then it’s no longer relevant. For a decade now, there has not been one Jew around the world who was not free to return to Zion. Ever since the quiet exodus of the last Jews of Syria, in the late 1990s, there has not been a country anywhere that has forbidden its Jewish citizens to leave…

As for mourning the Temple,

The only reason that the third temple has not been built is that a majority of Israelis simply are not interested. Secular Jews have no affinity to a priestly caste sacrificing heifers and goats, while the great majority of religious Jews are not very eager themselves.

To which I might add, we should thank God that most religious Jews aren’t interested in slaughtering animals as a means of communicating with the Creator.

Nonetheless, I’m fasting today, and not just out of habit. An email I got just after I read Pfeffers’ article reminded me of why he was mistaken.  From the group Sheikh Jarrah: A Just Struggle for a Just Jerusalem, it was an invitation to a discussion on Tisha Be’Av about the destruction of the Temple and the demolition of Palestinian homes. The process of refuting Pfeffer was completed the haftarah on Shabbat morning, by a midrash that I studied with my son, and by the actual discussion of Sheikh Jarrah last night.

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Advice to Dissent

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Haim Watzman

Israelis often wail that the country lacks unity. But when most Israelis say “We need more unity,” what they really mean is “More people should agree with me.” Dissent can be a pain, but it’s essential—as is recognized by the Sages of the Talmud in the Horayot Tractate (4b). The Beit Midrash run for the last two years by Kehilat Yedidya last week finished its study of this tractate with just this insight.

Horayot deals with the issue of what happens when a court—a rabbinic court, which served as the chief legislative and moral authority of Jewish communities in Talmudic times—makes a ruling mistakenly. To do this, it reads Torah passages in Leviticus 4 and Numbers 16. These passages deal with a sacrifice called the korban shogeg, to be offered by a person or group of people who has violated a Torah precept without intention. While the Sages of the Talmud lived long after the Temple was destroyed and the sacrificial service ceased, they continue to use this language. Assignment of responsibility for the error is designated by the assignment of the requirement to bring this sacrifice.

The question is: if a court makes a ruling that violates the Torah, does the ultimate responsibility fall on the court, or on the individual who obeyed the court’s instruction?

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Beinart Sees the Light

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Gershom Gorenberg

Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic, former Iraq hawk, has made a splash by noticing that

the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

and, moreover, by noticing it on the pages of the New York Review of Books. Some of his critics – Jeffrey Goldberg, for instance – latched onto that venue as reason to find fault. This is even sillier than an ad hominem argument: If Beinart’s argument is correct, who printed the pages is relevant onlyfor people who make up their minds about what an article is going to say purely on the basis of where it appears, and then get confused when it doesn’t say that. (JTA provides a short guide to other responses here.)

As  Ron Kampeas points out, for once the defenders of the hawkish U.S. Jewish establishment can’t use the ad hominem argument itself; they can’t dismiss Beinart as some raving anti-Zionist or reflexive peacenik.

But that misses the point: Beinart’s article is news only and precisely for ad hominem reasons.

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Appraising God: Reading Psalm 146

by

Haim Watzman

A preview of a conversation I’ll be leading at an all-night Shavu’ot study session this evening—happy holiday to all.

Ostensibly simple, theologically maddening, Psalm 146 is one of my favorite biblical poems—precisely, perhaps, because its ostensible simplicity is so maddening. And since it gets recited each day in the morning service, where it appears just after “Ashrei” and as the beginning of the hymns of praise that precede the prayer service proper, it’s hard to avoid.

The problem at the heart of this poem, and its daily recitation, is that it isn’t true. But before I get to that, let’s look at the structure.

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Rabbi Lau’s Religion Problem

by

Haim Watzman

When Rabbi Benny Lau began his Shabbat HaGadol talk at south Jerusalem’s Ramban synagogue last Saturday afternoon, he said his lesson originated in anger and frustration. The climax came when he said, “If I were a young person today, I would abandon religion.”

Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath that precedes Pesach, is traditionally a time for community rabbis to teach their congregations the fine points of the laws of Pesach and to offer some pointers for the coming Seder ceremony. Rabbi Lau barely spoke about Pesach; instead he offered—in traditional Jewish fashion, via a discussion of Talmudic passages—a call for greater openness and tolerance within the religious community. His particular target was the abrogation of personal responsibility religious Jews. Blind obedience to rabbinical authority used to be a defining trait of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, one of the things that divided it from the modern Orthodox community. But over the last couple decades more and more Jews brought up and educated in Zionist religious institutions have increasingly sought to avoid thinking for themselves, on halachic, political, and social matters. The result has been a desecration of God’s name, as rabbis claiming to speak for Israel’s religious Jews have revoked conversions, demanded the relocation of a hospital emergency room, and committed a series of other political and religious acts that are an embarrassment to their heritage and a real danger to Israeli society as a whole.

This sort of religious community can only repel thinking young people who are unwilling to abandon their freedom to think for themselves, he declared.

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Alla fiera dell’est

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Why sing Had Gadya at Seder tonight in pseudo-Aramaic when the version in real Italian is so gorgeous?

I first heard it my first time from an Italian-speaking Swiss guest at a Seder at a teacher’s home 30 years ago, and have bringing the lyrics to Seder ever since.

You can learn the melody from Angelo Branduardi’s  video clip below, but you don’t need the violin and drums to sing it at your table.

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Here are the lyrics (posted purely for personal, non-commercial use):

Alla fiera dell’est

Alla fiera dell’est, per due soldi, un topolino mio padre comprò
Alla fiera dell’est, per due soldi, un topolino mio padre comprò

E venne il gatto, che si mangiò il topo, che al mercato mio padre comprò
E venne il gatto, che si mangiò il topo, che al mercato mio padre comprò

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Forward-Looking Faith II

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My own South Jerusalem congregation, Yedidya, is on the progressive end of Orthodoxy, and that’s where I’m comfortable. During some synagogue-hopping in New York, though, I came across the egalitarian community of Kehilat Hadar, part of the growing movement of independent minyanim, and it inspired some unexpected, unconventional optimism about the next generation of American Judaism. My latest American Prospect article explains:

Halfway through the Saturday morning service, it struck me: A transcript of the service would be no different from that of a standard Orthodox Jewish service. We were faithfully adhering to the unamended, centuries-old traditional Hebrew liturgy. A transcript, however, would not show that men and women were sitting together, without the physical divider that separates them at an Orthodox synagogue, or that women were leading parts of the service — another blatant egalitarian break with Orthodoxy.

For that matter, a transcript wouldn’t show the fervor of the singing — by the congregation, not just the leader — in the rented church basement on New York’s Upper West Side. It wouldn’t indicate that nearly everyone there was between 20 and 35 — precisely the demographic that professional leaders of established denominations of American Judaism ritually complain they have trouble getting into synagogues. But this congregation, known as Kehilat Hadar (“community of splendor”) doesn’t belong to an established denomination and quite deliberately doesn’t have professional clergy. Lay members of the loose-knit community lead the services.

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Forward-Looking Faith I

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My friend Aryeh Cohen has written a fascinating piece at Religion Dispatches on a convergence of traditional-leaning Jews and progressives. On the one hand,

…what really stands out is the new, though cautious, embrace of social justice goals by the institutions of the Conservative and (to a much smaller extent) the Orthodox movements. Spurred on by the exposure of the unjust treatment of workers and the abuse of animals at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, the Conservative movement launched the so-called heksher tzedek. This is a kosher seal of approval which guaranteed that the product under supervision was manufactured ethically—that workers’ rights were being respected and that animals were not being abused.

An Orthodox group called Uri L’tzedek (“Awaken to Justice”) organized shortly afterward to the same end. …

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Ultra-Orthodoxy, Made in Israel

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Gershom Gorenberg

I have a new piece in Hadassah magazine describing how Israel created the ultra-Orthodox community as we see it today, with its life-time students, large families and poverty:

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone building where Amos Oz, Israel’s most famous novelist, grew up in a small apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticketsellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—candles on Friday night, services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of Zionist ideology.

When it was time for Amos to start school, his father faced a dilemma. Party-linked school systems educated the Jewish children of Manda­tory Palestine. One school within walk­ing distance belonged to the socialists of Labor Zionism, the other to the Orthodox Zionists of the Mizrahi movement. Oz’s father, however, was a right-wing secularist. He chose the Mizrahi school because the “red tide was on the upsurge in our land” and the socialist school might turn the boy into a Bolshevik. He felt the religious school posed no parallel risk because “religious Jews…with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years.”

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