Masorti Australasia
To understand widespread Israeli alienation from the beauty of Jewish tradition, look to Ben-Gurion’s political bargain with the OrthodoxIsraeli soldiers and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the northern West Bank, 2007 (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)The president of Israel remembers Ben-Gurion’s 1948 decision to exempt young Orthodox men from military service
In his book The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodor Herzl in Israel, first published (in French) in 1998, the cosmopolitan Nobel laureate Shimon Peres takes the Viennese visionary on a tour of the modern Jewish state. Along the way, Peres quotes a passage from Der Judenstaat, Herzl’s Zionist blueprint of 1896:
Faith unites us, knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.
Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work out that way, not even from the start. In his new Nextbook Press book, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, co-written with the veteran Israeli journalist David Landau, Peres describes the deal that Ben-Gurion made with ultra-Orthodox rabbi-politicians at the time of Israel’s founding: kashrut in all public institutions, Shabbat as the day of rest, rabbinic control of marriage and divorce, and the exemption of full-time yeshiva students, who at the time numbered only in the hundreds, from army service. This would all seem a violation of Herzl’s vision, but Peres defends Ben-Gurion’s consensus-building move as wise and pragmatic, “because the number of people in Israel who defined themselves as people of faith was large.” In a dialogue between the co-authors, the president of Israel declares:
Israel is a secular state. The Orthodox have bargaining power, so everything has to be done by compromise. But Israel is not under religious control: It’s not a halachic country, it’s not a theocracy. Ben-Gurion opposed religious coercion and opposed anti-religious coercion.
True, Israel is not a theocracy the way, say, Iran is one. But stop any bareheaded Jew on a Tel Aviv beach and ask them if there’s religious coercion in their country, and the knee-jerk response will be yes. For many Israelis, “religious coercion” doesn’t mean forced synagogue attendance, but the evasion of military duty by tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men; the harassment of Reform rabbis and citizens who drive on Shabbat; the overflowing of public money to yeshivas and to ultra-Orthodox families that don’t pay taxes; the premature ending of Daylight Savings Time before the High Holidays to facilitate penitential ritual; and the hurling of dirty diapers at women wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall, a spiritual magnet for all Jews that has been turned, with the complicity of governmental authorities, into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. As for “theocratic tendencies,” we have the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox-dominated, state-funded Chief Rabbinate over marriage, divorce, and conversion, protected by the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians in the Knesset.
How did all this come about? The reasons are over-determined, as the Freudians say. Landau presses Peres, who as a young man was Ben-Gurion’s emissary to the ultra-Orthodox on the conscription issue, on whether they had perhaps miscalculated the staying power of Orthodoxy in Israel. “He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later,” says Peres of his mentor. “Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.” In The Imaginary Voyage, Peres puts it even more frankly: “Whenever I had to make a decision touching upon the relationship between religion and state,” he tells Herzl, “I asked myself whether grandfather would agree with what I’d done.”
Masorti Australasia
Mercaz-Masorti Australasia Inc is the new organisation representing Masorti Jews in Australia and New Zealand
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Contributors
Ben-Gurion and the Orthodox Question – Tablet Magazine
Israel's rabbinate must be stripped of its powers - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
From every vantage point - social, civil and economic - it would be better to transfer the rabbinate’s powers to local authorities that would serve the people based on the community’s needs
For Israel’s entire existence, the secular population has had to unwillingly accommodate the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly on matters relating to personal status. Many people have resented having to wed in a religious ceremony, without which the Interior Ministry will not recognize a marriage. Even Israelis who bypass this burdensome procedure and arrange a civil ceremony abroad find that if they seek a divorce, the state will not recognize it unless it is carried out by that same rabbinical establishment they had tried to avoid.
This outrageous situation has been especially onerous for anyone not considered Jewish under Jewish religious law, halakha, including hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, but also people born here who detest the compulsion. Recent years have seen the rabbinate’s trend toward a more ultra-Orthodox and extreme application of halakha. This creates a great deal of hardship for the population as a whole. It also intensifies the clash between the country’s citizens and the rabbinical establishment, and limits many young people’s ability to exercise their fundamental right to establish a family.
The impression may be that only the silent secular public has been suffering from this poor combination of religion and state and that only this community must resort to steps circumventing the system, such as common-law marriage and a marriage ceremony in Cyprus. But it turns out that much of the national religious community is fed up too. For lack of any other recourse, they resort to steps such as private wedding ceremonies.
Such efforts to bypass the system reflect real distress, which raises a question: If most of the population is suffering from the dictatorship of halakhic bureaucrats who provide services that the ultra-Orthodox community does not use, who outside the religious parties still needs the rabbinate?
The Morality of Redeeming Captives: Gilad Shalit and the Talmud
The Morality of Redeeming Captives: Gilad Shalit and the Talmud - The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/rabbi-bradley-shavit-artson/talmud-and-gilad-shalit-redeeming-captives_b_1027552.html
Marriage petition co-sponsored by the Masorti movement in Israel
Twelve organizations accuse government of violating basic human rights of hundreds of thousands of 'religion-less' Israelis by preventing them from getting married Kobi NahshoniHigh Court petition urges civil marriage
Published:
10.04.11, 09:51 / Israel Jewish Scene
The Forum for Free Marriage in Israel has petitioned the High Court of Justice against the Israeli government, which is preventing hundreds of thousands of "religion-less" Israelis from getting married, allegedly violating their basic human rights.
In the petition, filed Monday morning, the forum's 12 organizations claim that the State is legally obligated to allow civil marriage for those who cannot marry in a religious manner. The petition, filed by Attorneys Ricky Shapira- Rosenberg and Einat Hurvitz, claims that the current situation is "completely unreasonable" and gravely violates constitutional basic rights.
