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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on the failure of the IDF rabbinate is up at Ha’aretz in Hebrew and in English translation:

The news in brief: A woman soldier asked to say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, in an army synagogue. The rabbi of the base refused to let her. Again the army rabbinate showed narrow-mindedness that offended its legitimate target audience – soldiers with religious needs.

And for the news in full: In mid-May, a woman soldier serving at a Nahal base learned that her grandmother had died and received the standard one-week furlough to be with her family. The next day, her parents flew to America, where the funeral and shiva were to be held. The soldier – a member of a Nahal group from Noam, the youth movement of the Masorti (Conservative) Movement – returned to her base. There she got a call from her father, who said that he was unable to say kaddish where he was, for lack of a minyan. He asked her to say kaddish in his place.

The soldier spoke with the rabbi of her base and suggested that she organize a minyan of women in the synagogue at the base. At first, the rabbi agreed. But another religious woman soldier objected to such openness. Her own rabbi, she told the rabbi of the base, forbade such a practice. The army rabbi consulted his commanders in the Israel Defense Forces rabbinate. Then he informed the soldier from Noam that if she liked, she could organize a minyan in a classroom on the base. But she could not say kaddish in the IDF synagogue. The soldier was deeply offended. A representative of the Masorti Movement contacted the office of IDF Chief Rabbi Avihai Ronski – who supported the base rabbi’s “solution.”

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Gershom Gorenberg

More suggestions for Seder discussion:

We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand of peanut butter to buy); we can believe what we want (even if few people believe anything with a passion that grips their lives, and those few, we know, are eccentrics).

“In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt,” says the Haggadah, “as is written, ‘for the sake of this, the Lord acted for me when I went out from Egypt.'” It’s easy to read on quickly, thinking of the historical Egypt and even of a metaphorical one, a country or a time in which our parents or grandparents did not have our freedoms.

Read more slowly:

In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself… To find yourself in the retold story, to relive it, you have first to see yourself. In the grand metaphors Egypt as the Pale of Settlement, Egypt as the days of Jew-badge and ghetto we see history, but can forget ourselves. “Where are you?” God asked Adam (Genesis 3:9), knowing well the answer, knowing well that Adam did not; the Haggadah repeats the question.

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