Today, May 14, 60 years since the founding of the State of Israel, Rabbis for Human Rights – North America (RHR-NA), placed an ad on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in support of the rights of Israelis and Palestinian and launching a year long campaign, In Pursuit of Justice, to support the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel .
The ad begins, “On this day, 60 years ago, the founders of Israel declared the State of Israel …will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel “, a quote from Israel ’s Declaration of Independence . More »
I find the coverage of recent conversion matters pretty interesting since most other impacts of church-state in-separation over there are also heavy-handedly controlled by orthodoxy. I mean, this isn’t new. Maybe it’s new that the orthodoxy is fighting itself, and that the Modern Orthodox are beginning to feel it’s impact also.
NIF just sent out notice of a Sunday webcast featuring Naomi Chazan, Gershom Gorenberg, and others to discuss varying opinions on what should be done, titled “Fundamentalism or Freedom?”
Personally I think the promo video is a bit tame — and much prefer the flash version:
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner has ruled that it is forbidden for girls to enlist in the army. “It is forbidden! Forbidden like kashrut! Forbidden like Shabbat! And especially forbidden like modesty!”
And while you’re at it, go get me a coffee, purity girl.
You can follow our co-blogger Chorus of Apes and go all Nakba on us. You can go all “neo-Zionist” instead and lose yourself in congratulatory paroxysms of pride and militaristic extremism. See here for example. Or finally, you can waffle and prevaricate between the other two alternatives, watching any tribal joy you once felt drain out through myriad cuts of national guilt and historical revision.
The last option seems most popular in progressive Jewish circles these days. My roommates objected to my proposal for a Yom Ha-Atzma’ut House Party by saying they wanted to avoid propaganda or the appearance of it. “Maybe we should have something about the nakba too.” “We don’t want to look right wing.” “How about we go to a Brit Tzedek talk instead.” Something about Independence Day made us uncomfortable.
Yom Ha-atzma’ut looks a little funny these days. Between the alliance of Electronic Intifada and Kahane Chai to forever tarnish the word “Zionism,” and the casual abuse of patriotism by fear-mongering Republicans in the US, the idea of “national pride” has become suspect. Every 60th Birthday congratulation needs a “but..”, and every praise of the Jewish State re-born in the Jewish Homeland comes with a “however..” We’re cynical and jaded, and don’t want to buy into anything that smacks of conservative forces or creeping 21st century totalitarianism.
So we want to kill the myth of the Third Comonwealth, scuff the shine on the Zionist dream, give us nothing-but-the-facts-ma’am and add another social justice cause to the bottom of the list.
But I’m thinking that Yom Ha-atzma’ut is not something to do half-assed. Righteous foundation myths and tribal pride aren’t just kids’ stories: they’re the moral stories that give us our ideals.
Remember (if you’re American) when you first learned what really happened when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth rock. When that cartoon fantasy of harmony and shared wealth dissolved into the broken treaties of the colonists, and the cold hard earth they dug into to rob Native graves. I think that a large part of that sting, that rage, (that righteous indignation, if you will) was the disappointment that the reality did not live up to the myth.
People we’d been taught to honor had let us down. The founding parents of institutions we’d be taught to respect and identify with had behaved in despicable ways. Which is sort of ironic, I guess. Or at least depressing.
But the real, glorious irony is that the myths never did let us down. These lies are the tales that taught us what to believe in. The myths are the prosecutor’s finger. When we hear about Israeli crimes and mistakes, whether during the War of Indepedence or today, it’s the myths that shout loudest “this was wrong. This must be remedied.” It’s the Declaration of Indepedence which was never fulfilled which kicks us in the gut and demands more effort on our part.
Our myths are our moral foundation, and I believe, something to celebrate whole-heartedly. So this is a (slightly belated) Yom Ha-Atzma’ut Same’ach from me to you, with no ifs, ands, or buts. Happy Independence Day. Make the dream a reality.
60 years ago this week, the State of Israel declared independence. Here is the full text of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It contains many ideals that Israel can work towards as it enters its next 60 years. Some of those ideals are going to get Jewschool labeled as anti-Israel for publishing them. So be it.
ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. More »
As Israel prepares to celebrate 60 years of ambiguity in this department, it’s been a bigweek for issues of religion and state. And here’s the latest news:
Israel’s Reform Jews dedicated the first non-Orthodox synagogue to receive state funding on Monday, after a long court battle that accented the rift among streams of Judaism in Israel.
The Reform Yozma congregation fought for the better part of a decade for state funding equivalent to what Orthodox congregations receive. After arguing their case twice before the Supreme Court, they got what they wanted: a prefabricated, two-room building on a plot of land in the center of Modiin, a new town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“This is a substantial step in recognizing different streams of Judaism in the state of Israel,” said Rabbi Kinneret Shiryon, who leads the 240-family congregation. The government has long funded Orthodox synagogues, even paying rabbi’s salaries.
The Reform movement is trumpeting this as a huge victory. And I can see why it would feel good to finally get a piece of the pie. But I’m not feeling so great about it. I want to see a thriving liberal Jewish culture in Israel, but I fear that this development, insofar as it sets a precedent, is dangerous for liberal Judaism in the long run. (And if it doesn’t set a precedent, then it’s an insignificant anomaly.) More »
I originally was going to blog this as a “wow, some good news for a change” post, but as I realized exactly where this all was taking place, that pretty quickly slid away. Ynet reports about a new green(er) energy production site for Jerusalem. Using methane produced by a local garbage dump, electricity will be produced for Jerusalem municipality. And this is good news, of course; it’s a far greener process than coal produced electricity.
But I can’t help but sigh over the whole thing anyway. The Abu Dis dump is actually one of the first places where i was involved with Israeli activism because of the Jahalin Bedouin living there.
Why, you may ask are the Jahalin living in a garbage dump?
As one can read at the Bustan website, “The Jahalin were settled by the Israeli government on lands of Abu Dis, after their dispossession from the Negev in the 1950s. This land was later declared ‘state land,’ and in 1975, the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the West Bank was founded on the expropriated Palestinian lands of Abu Dis, Azzariya, Issawiya, A-tur and Anata.”
Although it was due to government forcible relocation that the Bedouin were living in Abu Dis to begin with, it took many years of a court case to get the government to even being to live up to its responsibilities. Well, all right, at least to recognize them, even if not to follow through. YOu know, little things, like providing water and electricity.
In the meantime, Maale Adumim continues to expand so that the Bedouin can see just over the hill beautiful houses with great city services, clean streets, and the other accoutrements of Jewish life in Israel.
I can’t begin to say how sad it was for me to see people living in shipping containers and struggling to maintain their way of life and their dignity under some very trying circumstances.
Due to the encroachment of Ma’ale Adumim, the Jahalin were forcefully evicted from their homes a second time. In addition to losing their homes, they lost their land, their animals, and their ability to farm or graze the lands. Subsequently the Jahalin were uprooted from their traditional sustenance and forced to find work without benefits as day laborers in low-income fields, often in one of the neighboring Jewish settlements. They are living in corrugated tin shacks without basic amenities, without health care, without electricity.
Ma’ale Adumim begins on the neighboring hill, replete with beautiful villas to house 35,000 settlers that receive tax breaks and other government subsidies to live there. There are new educational and cultural institutions; widely paved, fine-landscaped roads and traffic lights in and around the settlement; public gardens; swimming pools, restaurants; shops; and even a Meretz chapter. Juxtaposed with this suburban expanse, the Jahalin have been transplanted into a cramped corner of Azzariya, sandwiched between settlements and living next to Jerusalem’s municipal waste dump.
Well, I’m just so glad the residents of Jerusalem can be greener in their use of electricity. Maybe they can share some of it with the Bedouin now.
According to ynet, a Petach Tikvah rabbinical court, after hiring a woman as secretary, sent her away in tears after humiliating her and threatening to curse her (seriously!) because … well, because she was female.
Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann heard about it and decided to intervene, ordering,
that the worker should be returned to work on Monday, and instructed the director-general of the rabbinical courts, Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, to escort the woman during her first day at work in order to make sure she was being greeted appropriately.
Friedmann also sent a harsh letter to the Petah Tikva court’s presiding judge, Rabbi Baruch Shimon Salomon, stressing that the rabbinical court was obligated to follow the laws of the State of Israel, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Law that prohibits discrimination based on gender.
The minister warned that should the court fail to accept the worker, sanctions would be taken against it.
What I want to know is how they hired her without figuring to that she was a woman? Or did they hire her and then decided that women were sin-bearing D6 monsters? What?
Well, but OTOH, the rest of the Hareidi world is working on other important measures. Like banning snacks with pictures of the Israeli flag on them. And boycotting Independence day celebrations because they might lead to mixed dancing. Who wrote this punchline?
Finally, more on the Drukman case: “National Religious Party Chairman MK Zevulun Orlev announced Sunday he plans to propose a bill calling for stripping the rabbinical courts of all authority pertaining to conversions.”
Haaretz offers an interesting response by Asher Maoz to the ridiculous attempt by the High Rabbinical Court to invalidate, retroactively, all of the conversions performed by (Orthodox) Rabbi Chaim Druckman, posted here by Josh Frankel a few days ago.
Will this finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
Well, I doubt it. Although as Maoz -correctly- points out, such retroactive annulments are contrary to halakha, this is by no means the first ruling contrary to (or at the very least, irrelevant to) halakha made by those leading the charge to make (Ultra-) Orthodox Judaism more stringent, more separate, and more isolated. As a matter of fact, aside from a number of “halakhic” rulings which are simply stringent for their own sake, or the retroactive post-mortem re-ruling of those gedolei hador who ruled more leniently to make their actual rulings seem like they weren’t practices that the gedolim themselves actually followed or to at least try to hide the fact that they made such rulings at all, or out and out questionable practices (many of these have been covered in the Jewschool archives, but I won’t list them here) in general this tendency is in itself problematic as a matter of “al tifrosh” -do not separate yourselves - which is, in fact, the entire point, not simply a side effect, of many of the rulings of these types.
Just for one example of many, several of the halakhic solutions established by the Conservative/ Masorti movement in order to free agunot had actually been under consideration -or being used- by the Orthodox mainstream - until the Conservativim started using them, which them made them treif by association, with the current preferred mode to be to say that all weddings not performed by an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi are not valid, completely in contradiction to Jewish law, and running a real and actual risk of make mamzerut more common, because people are then “free” to remarry when in fact their first marriages are halakhically legitimate (all it takes are a Jewish man, an unmarried Jewish woman and two Jewish witnesses, rabbi not required), making their remarriages halakhically invalid. Oy, what a mess. The only humor to be had being that if it became common for women to get unchained by going to the Ultra-Orthodox and having their first marriage declared void, Masorti rabbis would almost certainly have to start insisting that anyone who had been remarried by the ultra-orthodox get a get retroactively… the entanglements could be legion…okay, not really that funny.
So what’s going to change now? Well, almost certainly nothing. At least not until the Orthodox who aren’t complete loons (most of them, but unfortunately, not speaking up) start saying that it’s not okay to trash moderation, that halakhah isn’t a means to make yourself politically powerful or to control your community’s every move, to oppress certain segments of your population, or to drive your neighbors nuts; when the normal majority start telling their leaders that they won’t follow them when they make stringencies for stringency’s sake, well, then, maybe then something will change.
Good news or bad? Hard to say. Methodists overwhelmingly defeated measures calling for divestment from companies that allegedly enable Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Divestment doesn’t strike me in this case as the most precise tool, especially given the supersessionist theology background grumbling that goes along with this movement, apparently. But OTOH, we don’t seem to hold the evangelicals to such a measurement when they say they will “support” Israel in any action they take.
SO when we have allies who disagree with Israel’s policies, what can they do to show it without being labelled as haters?
Well, There’s always J-street, now!
Day 13, week two, day six
Yesod of Gevurah
Ynet reports on the lastest mishegas:
Rabbi Shlomi Aviner has ruled that God disapproves of pants on women even when women are alone(!) Apparently the fact that God is not male and does not lust after women has been lost sight of somewhere. You should not even sleep in pajama pants since sleeping is a grand opportunity to show off your filthy, sinful bodies, ladies. Cover them up!!!
Aviner, Beit El’s rabbi and one of Religious Zionism’s most prominent leaders, was asked in a cellular Q&A session published in the “Small World” bulletin, “When a girl goes to relieve herself at night, is she allowed to say the ‘Asher Yatzar’ (’he who formed’) prayer while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers?”
The rabbi replied that it is permitted to say the prayer in such a case, but added that “in general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark, because the Holy one blessed be he is everywhere. And yes, trousers are a self-prohibition even when a woman is alone.”
However, Tsomet seems to have gotten the point that was made a few months ago when it came out that Hareidi women had begun taking upon themselves the modesty wrappings as seriously as Rabbi Aviner does and wrapping themselves in Burqas and more.
Rabbi Israel Rosen, head of the Tsomet Institute, has claimed an article published in synagogues over the weekend that “too much modesty leads women to the opposite direction, from abstinence to immorality.”
Rabbi Rosen also slammed the haredi norm to omit names of women from newspapers and from invitations, comparing it to the veil phenomenon in Muslim countries.
“For so-called modesty reasons, the woman is only presented as ‘his wife’, nameless, veiled, and my heart twitches,” he wrote in a weekly column published in synagogues over the weekend. “Is there no psychological connection between the hypocrisy of concealing the name and hiding the face under the ‘Taliban-style’ veil?”
Just when you thought the conversion mess couldn’t get any worse - the good folk in Israel drop another bomb. The Jerusalem Post reports that the High Rabbinical Court has ruled to invalidate, retroactively, all of the conversions performed by Rabbi Chaim Druckman since 1999.
Get this straight, Rabbi Chaim Druckman isn’t a reform, conservative, or heck even some strange liberal YCT guy. Rabbi Chaim Druckman is a major Rosh Yeshiva, a recognized halakhic scholar, and at times has been in charge of the national religious education system in Israel. His only offense apparently - he wears a knitted yarmulke.
This isn’t a little thing. Rabbi Druckman isn’t just a private rabbi in a little synagogue. He was the head of the official, government conversion authority. This means that thousands of people’s conversions have been effectively invalidated. Also, this isn’t just a question of whether your local synagogue will let you enroll your kids in day school. This means that thousands of people are no longer Jewish, their kids are no longer Jewish, they are no longer married, they can not get married, they can no longer be buried in ordinary cemetaries, and can no longer go to religious schools. They have been placed as second class citizens. All apparently because one woman, more than fifteen years after she converted was no longer shomeret shabbat - according to the ideals of this rabbinic court. Do you understand how inane that is? This ruling basically says, that if one day, decades, marriages, and children after you convert, you happen to tear a piece of toilet paper on shabbat once not only are you no longer Jewish, but everyone your rabbi ever converted is no longer Jewish!
This is beyond absurd. Such a position threatens every conversion. Hey, why stop there? Perhaps your misbehavior could undermine your mother’s or your grandmother’s conversion. That fundamental principle of, “A Jew, even if he sins, is still a Jew” - gone. Hey, Moshe got angry and hit that rock. He sinned. Guess he never converted at Mount Sinai either. And if he didn’t, well I’ll let you figure that one out.
Perhaps I should stop here, but one last little fear. Ever since the RCA kowtowed to the Israel establishment, they’ve been promising that everything they do will only affect the future, and past conversions will not be doubted. Good luck with that now. If Rabbi Druckman’s sruggy invalidated his conversions, there are plenty of Orthodox rabbis who don’t wear velvet either.
Update: I found a copy of the original teshuva here. (Hat tip to Rabbi Jeff Fox) I plan on posting some more details soon, but it is important to realize that the original reporters did get one thing wrong. Her husband is not being forbidden to marry. Quite to the contrary, the previous beit din had issued an injunction on his getting married until this mess was settled. But, since the court decided he was never married in the first place, he is now free to do as he wills.
In February, a group of religious gay and lesbian Jews calling themselves HOD ( äåîåàéí ãúééí ), set up a website. According to ynet, the group wanted to set up the website to reach out to their community and show that they exist and that they do not wish to flout halakha. Yneted reported:
Recognition and acceptance are therefore foremost on the site operators’ agenda, “We want to embrace both identities, gay and religious,” explained Itay, noting that “we (religious gays) can be found everywhere in the religious world, and simply want to eliminate the stigma, disgrace and sometimes outright violence that has been leveled against us within the religious community.”
“We are your beloved sons,” site operators made an impassioned plea to the religious community, its rabbis and public leaders, also quoting Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who stated that he would “rather transgress with reckless love to fellow Jews than unwarranted hatred.”
Just about a week later, because of the huge response to the new site, the organizers of the site
sent out a letter to Orthodox community leaders in which the leader of HOD asked their community to recognize them as “a living, viable part of its rank and file.”
The letter was sent to rabbis, religious Knesset members, mayors, community leaders, and organization heads, including Conversion Authority head Rabbi Haim Druckman and Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, and notes that it is only ignorance and lack of awareness that lead to the senseless hatred against homosexuals within the Orthodox community.
Now, the faces behind HOD have met: Last week, 70 people met for the first face to face meeting of HOD. It was attended by representatives from all over (including non-hareidi movement groups, such as Chavruta – the religious section of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance).
The purpose of the meeting was to “receiv[e] legitimization to operate on the religious homosexuals’ behalf and lead the campaign aimed at gaining the religious leaders’ support” and to review a final version of the letter originally sent out in February. It had been amended according to recommendations of various rabbis, professionals and group members. Now they will ask for signatories in the religious community.
According to a JTA “breaking news” story, a recent poll by the ADL ( which, IMO makes it immediately suspect, but for what agenda exactly at this point is unclear) of Israeli teens show that they do not believe that a second Holocaust could happen. However, 30 percent (of 500 teens, not exactly a huge sample) think Israel is “under a serious threat of destruction.” Another 52 percent say “Israel is under a certain threat of destruction.”
And so this means…that the ADL asks leading questions to teens…?
It’s not necessarily funny, but it is a President talking about Israel-Palestine relations to a Jew.
As to Stewart’s question — I’ve always wondered the same thing. It doesn’t get the Palestinians anything to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state (i.e., the occupation won’t end) but why the hell not?
It is fairly well known that, in Israel, many recognize and observe seven days of pesach and a single seder whereas, outside of Israel, many recognize 8 days of pesach and two seders as proper observance.
Where did the extra day come from?
A piece over at my jewish learning does a good job explaining:
The Jewish calendar is lunar. Over 2,000 years ago, a council of rabbis from the Sanhedrin, the ancient legislative and judicial body, held special sessions in Jerusalem at the end of each lunar month to receive witnesses to the first sliver of the new moon. Because a lunar cycle is approximately 29 days long, it was no mystery when the new moon should appear, but the Sanhedrin still declared months and holidays only on the basis of these witnesses. …
Once the sighting was legitimated, the rabbis declared the next day Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of the new month. Originally, beacon fires would be set on mountaintops to spread the word to distant Jewish communities already living in far away places such as Egypt and Babylon. Watchers on faraway hills set their beacon fires as soon as they saw them, continuing the relay “until one could behold the whole of the Diaspora before him like a mass of fire” (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 2:4)… Celebrating festivals for an extra day would ensure that, regardless of whatever confusion reigned about the exact start of the new month, at least one day of their celebration would be on the correct day.
Okay, that makes sense but we started to switch to a rule-based fixed-arithmetic lunisolar calendar system after the destruction of the second temple. That made the days designed to prevent error obsolete since everyone everywhere in the world used the same system and derived the days similarly. It no longer mattered how close one was to the Sanhedrin so why keep the extra days?
At the end of Beitzah 4b that issue is addressed. “Now that we know the fixed new month, what’s the reason for doing two days?” The answer there is hizaharu b’minhag avoteichem (be careful about your ancestors’ minhag), because in the future there might be a decree preventing us from keeping the calendar…And we can even agree on the value of minhag avoteinu (see Beitzah 4b), and you can follow the minhag of your ancestors who kept 2 days, while I’ll follow the minhag of my ancestors who have been Reform for at least five generations.
The other common answer is given by a Rabbi from Aish here:
So why was a second day Yom Tov added? In order to make a distinction, to add to the Jewish awareness that one is living in the Diaspora and does not claim permanent residence in the Holy Land.
BZ’s answer to Minhag Avoteinu is compelling as is the issue that there has ceased to be a consistent mihag in the diaspora. The Reform, Renewal, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements have all offered decisions permitting the use of a 7-day pesach. Here is some CCAR (Reform) analysis. The Cons and Recon movements both provide flexibility for local congregations but the result is that a majority of American Jews, and nearly all Israeli Jews fall under a 7-day authority. Many have been in such a situation for generations.
Now to respond to the idea that we should have an extra seder to remember we aren’t in Israel…
Was anyone really confused? In case you were here are ten ways to conclude you are in the US rather than in Israel that have nothing to do with extra days of passover.
10:The falafel is overpriced and underspiced.
9: Municipal services are transparent and efficient.
8: Sunday is for football not school.
7: Teacher strikes are generally limited to a few days, max.
6: People talk slowly and get uncomfortable with interruptions (supreme court excepted).
5: Holocaust jokes are rare and usually generate discomfort.
4: People have difficulty making political and religious assumptions based on the type of kippah a person is wearing. Many can’t remember the word and use “beanie” or “skull cap” instead.
3: Though people talk about God non-stop in government there aren’t religious parties associated with single religious approached.
2: Nation’s founders where individual rather than collective farmers.
1: Look around. No occupations and settlements for miles in any direction? You probably aren’t in Israel.*
Police on Monday afternoon arrested a 27-year-old yeshiva student for undressing in a Bat Yam supermarket, wearing only a sock to cover his genitals, to protest a recent controversial court ruling which permitted the sale of chametz in some businesses.
…
Eyewitnesses stated the 27-year-old had the inscription “this is not public” scrawled on his abdomen. He claimed that since chamez was sold on the premises, it could therefore not be legally recognized as a public place, and as such, there were no grounds to press charges against him.
And what’s with the photo that goes with the article? Are we to infer that this is the guy in a trench coat before flashing? Does anyone even wear coats like that in Jerusalem in April?
I got this e-mail from a good fried of mine this morning. Tyson Herberger is a well-travelled, multilingual, Orthodox Jew. He’s married, lives in Jerusalem, and is pretty hard to pin down politically. You must read
Some of you may already now from reading the morning papers, but I am under house arrest for being a journalist.
Earlier this week Israel’s communications ministry and israeli police raided the Jerusalem studios of the radio station I work at. They seized all of the equipment in the studio itself, though left the rest of the offices intact. Everyone present at the time of the raid was taken into police custody for questioning. They released the secreatary after about 7 or 8 hours, and took the other 7 of us to
jail for the night as we were being detained.
