What you call politics, we call Torah

Editor’s note: This post first appeared at ikar-la.org. It has been reprinted here with permission.

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Twelve leaders were sent to spy the land. Ten returned reporting fortified cities and giants. They warned that entering the land would be dangerous, even deadly. They spoke the truth, but they were punished severely, leading generations of Rabbis to try to determine where exactly they went wrong. Commentators claim they were tasked only with reporting, not editorializing, that their fault was in worrying how they were perceived by the inhabitants, that they should not have included any negative perceptions in their report, since the land was promised to the people as in inheritance by God. That they were driven by fear.

But Rabbi Jonathan Sacks brings a compelling read from the Lubavitcher Rebbe: The spies’ mistake was not that they were “afraid of failure. They were afraid of success.”

Very little time had passed since they left Egypt. These men held the immediate and recent memory of the plagues, of the miraculous split sea. God’s cloud of Glory protected them by day and they were guided by a pillar of fire at night. They ate manna from heaven. They embodied spiritual intimacy with God.

The spies knew what would happen if they entered the land. They’d be forced to fight battles, to sustain an army, to establish an economy and build out agricultural systems and establish rule of law. In Sacks’s words, they were afraid of what would happen were they confronted with the challenge of “mundane and material pursuits.” In the desert, “they could spend their entire lives learning Torah, lit by the radiance of the Divine. There they would be one more nation in a world of nations with the same kind of economic, social and political problems that every nation has to deal with” (Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Numbers, 150).

This, then, is their crime: fear of success. They were holy men who didn’t want to get caught up in the affairs of marketplace.

I recall the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who equates the Israelites’ kvetch for water just days after the majestic miracle of the split sea with the black community’s insistence on housing without vermin, adequate schools and decent jobs in the aftermath of the great achievements of the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act: “[Those] prosaic demands… seem so trite, so drab, so banal, so devoid of magnificence.”

And yet:

The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life. The great challenge does not lie in organizing solemn demonstrations, but in how we manage the commonplace. The prophet’s field of concern is not the mysteries of heaven, the glories of eternity, but the blights of society, the affairs of the marketplace.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, from The White Man on Trial, February 1964

Throughout the Torah and the Prophets, God’s central preoccupation is the treatment of the poor and most vulnerable; it is honesty in business transactions and fairness in judgment. “The predominant feature of the biblical pattern of life,” according to Heschel, “is unassuming, unheroic, inconspicuous piety, the sanctification of trifles, attentiveness to details.”

This past week, a dispute erupted in the rabbinic community when a colleague of mine, a brilliant and respected friend, issued a public call for keeping politics from the pulpit: “All we hear all day long is politics. Can we not come to shul for something different, something deeper? I want to know what my rabbi thinks of Jacob and Rachel, not of Pence and Pelosi” (Rabbi David Wolpe, Why I Keep Politics Off the Pulpit, June, 2017).

Tell me this: can one really claim that Torah is not an inherently political document? This sacred scroll recounts the story of a band of slaves rising up before the most powerful and iconic ruler of the ancient world and demanding freedom and dignity. Is that not a political message? Four of the five books of Torah tell the story of the journey our people took from slavery to freedom, from degradation to dignity. And lest we think that is an abstract, theoretical or one-time journey, along the way, they are commanded to establish a society that would be the antithesis in social policy and political reality of Egypt. We are charged to build, in the Promised Land, what Michael Waltzer calls a counter Egypt. A place in which human beings are free and tasked to honor their neighbor’s dignity through impartial laws, fair judgment, and acts of compassion and love that reach above the letter of the law.

Why do we unroll the sefer Torah and parade around the sanctuary every week, reciting these words and repeating these stories? For nostalgia sake? To recall old family tales?

We read these sacred narratives to discern what it means to be Moses, Aaron and Miriam in a world of Pharaohs. What it means to be Tamar, when you are invisibilized by a misogynistic legal system that undermines your very humanity. How to hold grief and anguish, like Hannah; how to fight back against injustice like Abraham, even when you are but dust and ashes.

I understand why we might be supremely suspicious of religion on the public stage. For many years in this country and around the world, public discourse has been tainted by the most extreme and regressive version of religion. Religious leaders have used sacred texts and their understanding of the will of God to justify racism and white supremacy, environmental destruction, attacks on women’s bodies, women’s health, women’s rights and discrimination against LGBT people. The public face of religion has too often been hypocritical, exclusive and oppressive.

But we must not abdicate religion to religious extremists.

The answer is not to decouple religion and politics. To claim that the affairs of the market, the cost and nature of healthcare for the poor, the heartless treatment of the immigrant and refugee, the fact that yet another police officer who shot black man (this time Philando Castile) was found not guilty, the reality that thousands of mostly people of color are stuck in jail because of a broken and discriminatory cash-bail system, the fact that after a mass shooting, like the two this past week, gun laws are more likely to be loosened than tightened… to suggest that all of that is outside the scope of religion is to strip religion of its essence.

Instead, we must reclaim religious leadership as moral leadership. It is faith leaders who can bring inclusion, forgiveness, equity and equality, justice and love to the forefront of the national conversation.

A living wage? That is the business of the faith community. Mass incarceration? That’s our business too. State Legislatures disenfranchising black voters with “surgical precision?” That, too, is our business. The promise to strip twenty-four million people of their healthcare? Yes. That, too, is the business of people of faith.

Religion means nothing if not a response to the greatest moral crises and challenges of our day. As my friend, Rabbi Shai Held, wrote this week: “Demanding that politics be kept out of shul is like demanding that Torah be kept out of shul.”

Remember Dr. King’s piercing critique of the God-fearing ministers among whom he expected to find support for the civil rights struggle? Instead, he wrote: …Some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

Hear his words:

In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

Rev. MLK, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

King spoke of the church: “archdefenders of the status quo.” We know the same is true of the synagogue– it was then, and it is now. For every rabbi who went down to Selma, hundreds more remained silent behind anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

Perhaps some of us, and our leaders, would prefer the path of the ten spies, who would rather dwell in the desert than dirty our hands with the business of building a just society. Perhaps we’d rather ruminate on Jacob and Rachel than be distracted or burdened by gross abuses of power, systemic racism, misogyny, lies and hypocrisy emanating from the highest offices. Perhaps we’d rather not engage a growing authoritarianism that today threatens to undo our democracy.

But there is another way. Two spies, Caleb and Joshua, defied the majority. They saw exactly what the others saw, but called the Israelites to face the inevitable challenges of a complex society with the spiritual tools of faith, hope, and love. We honor them not by telling their stories as entertainment, but by letting their stories guide and strengthen our own resolve to fight for what is right today.

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And what if it were your son?

In recent years, the Israeli public has again been forced to confront the issue of the price a country should pay to bring home its captive soldiers, including those who have been declared dead. The debate has become particularly heated because of the claims made by the families of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, of blessed memory, that the state is not doing enough to recover the bodies of their sons, killed during Operation Protective Edge (launched July 8, 2014), and bring them home for burial.

The questions raised by this issue are many and complex. All of them press on the soft underbelly of Israeli society, whose attitude towards its soldiers, including the price it is willing to pay to bring them home, dead or alive, is nothing short of astonishing. Yet precisely on this account, and precisely because the heart tears whenever we hear a father plead for a grave at which he can mourn his son, or we witness a young man cry out to bring back his twin brother, it is important to address the question from a dispassionate perspective.

One of the claims frequently advanced as part of the discussion on the country’s obligation to citizens who have been taken prisoner is phrased as a question: “And what if it were your son?” The appeal to parental feelings is manifested in campaigns that feature slogans such as “Gilad Shalit—Everyone’s Child.” But it finds its way into the public discourse almost every time one of our soldiers’ fate dangles by a thread, as well as in theoretical debates, such as the obligation to endanger soldiers’ lives to avoid harming enemy civilians. In that instance, too, we frequently encounter the question, “And what if it were your son? Would you be willing to put him in danger?”

We might dismiss the question as cheap populism. But it is preferable to hold a candid discussion of this assertion of national parenthood and point out the danger inherent in society’s collective adoption of every man and woman in uniform.

First, we need to repeat what goes without saying: were all of us the parents of POWs, we would all be paralyzed when it came to making decisions about negotiations for their release. Likewise, were we all the parents of a soldier facing a court-martial, we would be paralyzed and left unable to issue a verdict in the case. Magistrates do not sit in judgment on their own children, and spouses may not be called on to testify against their partner. The absence of preferential treatment is one of the most important aspects required in such situations.

As such, decision makers must address the complex issues on their agenda based on their responsibility for the wellbeing of the collective—not as the parents of children who have grown up to be soldiers. Mothers and fathers will free as many terrorists as required for the chance to embrace their children again. The question of the possible repercussions of setting them free may penetrate their thoughts, but they will stifle them and continue to see only their children’s welfare in front of them. That is human nature, that is how parents behave—and perhaps how they should behave.

But do we want that to be the perspective of our decision makers? Do we want the considerations that guide them to be the same as those that guide parents, whose sole concern is the welfare of their children? Do we really want a judge to rule on a case as if it were his own son sitting on trial?

Let’s be frank: soldiers have a duty to defend civilians, not the other way around. Even if tens of thousands of civilians turn out for a demonstration in favor of having soldiers returned home, no matter the price, it does not mean that the decision makers should opt for a deal that would threaten those very same civilians. Social solidarity and sympathy for the families are worthy sentiments; the nation’s love for its soldiers is not illegitimate and is in fact quite moving. But we must not allow ourselves to be confused. Even when the tragedy is immense, the ways to resolve it must be considered in an intelligent and responsible manner and must not be motivated by parental emotion that is blind to anything that stands in its way.

So, the answer to the question “What would you say if it were your son?” may be unpleasant, but must be stated clearly all the same: Were it my son, it would be better for people not to ask me what the country should do to bring him home.

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Dr. Idit Shafran Gittleman is a researcher in the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Security and Democracy.

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When the dream of Israel clashes with reality

“I had rocks thrown at me.”

This is what my sister remembers most from her 2007 visit to Israel.

She was 23 years old, just out of college, visiting her nice Jewish boyfriend at the time, a student at the Sackler School of Medicine. She had done nothing wrong that day or said anything untoward to anyone. She was just walking. And not through a French banlieue with a big Star of David around her neck, where you might expect this sort of thing, or through the center of Ramallah, waving an Israeli flag.

She was in Jerusalem, making her way through the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim, when a woman standing on a sidewalk saw her, cursed at her in hysterical Hebrew and started lobbing rocks at her.

This punishment-by-stoning was biblical penalty for the indefensible crime of wearing pants.

When I first heard this, I was upset but not surprised. Mea Shearim is famous for its strict halachic observance and the community’s insistence that even visitors adhere to Jewish law. Ominous street signs warn: “TO WOMEN AND GIRLS, PLEASE DO NOT PASS THROUGH OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN IMMODEST CLOTHES.” To do so is to risk menacing stares, Hebrew profanity, projectile spittle — and rocks launched at your body. I’m not aware of any men being stoned for ripped jeans.

Did my sister make a mistake? Or is it crazy that a woman can be pelted with stones for her choice of clothing on a public street in a state that claims to be a bastion of liberal values?

I remember how upset she was, how ashamed. That her shame was the product of her gender, no more than a random trick of nature, was astonishing. I remember telling her, “Just don’t go there anymore. There is plenty of Israel to love and plenty of Israel that loves you back.” Let the ultra-Orthodox have their tiny slice of 20 B.C.E.

A decade later, though, that fringe cluster has metastasized. Today, it isn’t only some small neighborhood where secular, liberal Jews must tolerate retrograde gender rules for an hour in order to buy Judaica, but an expanding religious mandate that chokes the Israeli government and inhibits democracy. Today, the rock throwers get their way at the Kotel, Judaism’s holiest site, where if women dare don tallit or tefillin or pray aloud — God forbid men hear their voices and succumb to sexual mania — they are harassed, spat on or beaten. Perhaps even more disturbing, the secular police that serve as the enforcers of Israeli law might arrest them and drag them away.

This is a strange reality for a country that aspires to be Jewish and democratic. But there is precedent for this: Ever since David Ben-Gurion signed a 1947 deal ceding control of Israel’s Jewish character to the ultra-Orthodox, they have maintained sovereignty over Jewish life there.

“Despite the fact that the vast majority of Jews in Israel and around the world are not Orthodox, in Israel, Orthodoxy has a monopoly on Judaism,” Women of the Wall Executive Director Lesley Sachs wrote in a July 1 op-ed for The New York Times. “The Chief Rabbinate (all male and all Orthodox) controls all religious aspects of a person’s life, cradle to grave.” 

That control extends over marriage laws, circumcision, burial and conversion. Just last week, a controversial bill granting the Chief Rabbinate complete authority over conversion in Israel was delayed after a public outcry. In addition to life events, the rabbinate also controls Israel’s holy sites.

The internecine tension over who has the right to worship according to their custom at the Western Wall is part of a long-running saga. It reached fever pitch June 25 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu capitulated to the most conservative elements in his governing coalition and reneged on his commitment to establish a contiguous, egalitarian prayer space at the Kotel in which liberal Jews, and women in particular, can worship as they please.

His about-face has caused much of American Jewry to convulse with rage, igniting what some have termed “a civil war.” Because what is under assault in Israel today is not only immodest dress, but the values of religious freedom, egalitarianism and pluralism.

The stakes in this battle are enormous. Beyond the politics is a larger theological struggle over how much traditional Judaism should tolerate change in order to adapt to the
modern world. And let us be clear: The link between religious freedom, egalitarianism and pluralism in their threat to the religious establishment is that all three represent the emancipation of women.

So let us not pretend that the Kotel controversy is about “Diaspora Jewry” or “liberal Jewry” or “American Jewry.” Rather, it is a clash between an ancient, traditional way of life, in which women function primarily as child-bearers and challah-braiders, and 21st-century Western liberalism, in which women can run companies, run for office and read Torah — as rabbis.

Every earthly society grapples with issues of inclusion. In America, the legal barriers to equality have, for the most part, been torn down, so while our egalitarianism is hardly perfect, separation is seen for what it is: inequality.

For the Israeli government to withdraw its support for this symbolic measure represents to American Jews a regression of democracy and an injustice. President Donald Trump’s tweets and behavior notwithstanding, Americans have, for the most part, removed the major obstacles to gender equality in public life. So the decision about the Kotel is a stark reminder that in the Israel so many of us adore, elements of fundamentalist religion stand in the way of a just and fair society.

The Jewish world is quick to criticize religious extremism in other religions, but how many of us are honest about the way it poisons our own? The biblical literalism that defines decorum at the Western Wall is the same malaise that has, in part, corrupted Israel’s ability to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Too many ultra-Orthodox leaders don’t believe there is a conflict: When land is given to you by God, it is neither your prerogative nor your right to compromise about it. And so 2.7 million Palestinians and the future of Israeli democracy languish in limbo. 

Criticism isn’t betrayal, and it beats abandonment.

The ultimate status of liberal Jews at the Kotel depends on how the State of Israel wants to define itself for the future: Will it be a semi-“Sharia” state, where Jewish law is indistinguishable from national law? A hybrid of democracy and theocracy, where citizens vote but civil rights emanate from an ancient religious text?

These choices would constitute an irrevocable breach with liberal Jews and compromise global Jewish solidarity.

Zionism has never been a question for me. For as long as I can remember, I have loved and supported Israel. There was never any complicated calculus: I was born a Jew and Israel is the Jewish homeland; therefore, Israel is mine, and I will be faithful to her.

But by now, I’ve suffered such a series of insults to my standing as a Jew, a woman and a person of conscience that I sometimes wonder if there is a limit to that support. I wonder what would happen if, for example, Israel went the way of far right-wing leader Naftali Bennett and annexed the West Bank without vesting the Palestinians with full voting and civil rights. Would that stop me from traveling there? Would it silence my defense of Israel before her detractors? Where, exactly, is my red line?

American Jews have been wrestling with questions about hard limits on their support for decades. This isn’t new. But it is getting more intense, more divisive, more intractable. Some of us are reaching a point of no return; others are clinging tighter than ever to unconditional, uncritical acceptance, no matter the policies of Israel’s government. But when a staunch defender of Israel such as Rabbi Daniel Gordis proposes a boycott of El Al Israel Airlines, can other gestures of mainstream protest be far behind?

The other day, I asked a politically progressive, gay friend of mine if Israel could do anything to end her support. “No,” she said, without hesitating.

Not even if it does things that contravene your values?

“Oh, it crossed that line a loooong time ago,” she said. “I don’t love the Israeli government. I love the Israeli people. If the government does things I don’t like, I’ll protest.”

This is a healthy position. And probably not far from the attitude of most Israelis. As American intellectual Leon Wieseltier says, “Self-criticism is the hallmark of a mature community.”

Criticism isn’t betrayal, and it beats abandonment. After all, half of Americans consider the current U.S. leadership a stain on the democratic system but have not absconded to Canada in protest. We all have our hypocrisies.

But as Jews, we also are fortunate that there are great leaders throughout the world who can show us a better way. A month ago, during an interfaith panel I moderated on the Six-Day War for the Shalom Hartman Institute, I asked Orthodox Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David Judea if Jews fetishize the Western Wall.

He said something shocking and profound: He admitted — in public, before a room full of Jews — that he avoids visiting the Kotel when in Jerusalem. “The reality of it is never quite as sublime as it is in my head,” he said.

Imagine: Here was an Orthodox rabbi, who keeps the Sabbath, who keeps kosher, who davens with a mechitzah, but who also understands that no single sect of Jewry can claim dominion over a historic relic meaningful to all. He’d rather protest the reality and revel in the dream.

Kanefsky’s attitude is instructive. Although she disappoints me, and disappoints me often, I continue to love and support Israel because she is sublime in my head. To help her realize her potential requires my dissent when she falls short.

Yes, Israel is a nation-state with a flawed government that has caused innocent people suffering and heartache. But Israel also is the people Israel — a dysfunctional tribe, a community of myriad colors, all of whom are bound together by history and destiny. This Israel has produced philosophers and scientists and artists and visionaries whose contributions extend far beyond Israel’s borders. Israelis have the resources to resolve the issues of their day, and Diaspora Jews have an obligation to aid them in their struggle for improvement.

If world Jewry means anything at all, it means working together for the success and viability of our mutual interests and to ensure that we actually have some. An Israel that serves as the guardian of all Jewish traditions sounds like a good place to start.

Because of all her various expressions, Israel is, above all, a dream. She is the expression of a religious aspiration for a better world, a world redeemed.

So while we cling to a vision of justice, freedom, dignity and peace for all her inhabitants and guests, let us avoid the complacency that favors the current reality.

There is much to be proud of when it comes to Israel’s existence and her gifts. But when the symbolism of a state — and her holy sites — becomes more meaningful than her people, what follows isn’t love but idol worship. 

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The summer our rainbow flag became a red flag

The Jan. 31,1969, cover of Time magazine bore the headline “Black vs. Jew: A Tragic Confrontation.” Our rabbi brought a copy to our class of high school juniors and seniors, and used it as an opportunity to teach us a Latin expression.

“Cui bono?” he asked. “ ‘Who benefits’ from a cover and a story like this?”

I walked away from our discussion that night with an understanding that has served me all these years. Of course there will be disagreements among friends and those with shared values and passions, but can we avoid letting those disagreements distract us from the causes and people most deserving of our attention?  

The disputes we’re encountering this summer stop us from working together and, more importantly, from sitting together and making a deliberate effort to understand where we are coming from and where we might go together.

My brother, Larry Edwards, is rabbi emeritus of the LGBT synagogue Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago. Long a participant in the Chicago queer Jewish community, he has been reflecting on the recent conflicts, especially the one that originated in Chicago last month.

He writes: “By now many are familiar with the controversy surrounding Chicago’s Dyke March on June 24. (And I want to clarify up front — because there does seem to be some confusion out there — that the event was not the Chicago Pride Parade. The Pride Parade, held the next day, has always been open to wide and diverse participation.) My friend Laurie Grauer, a longtime member of my former congregation and a long-time participant in Chicago Dyke Marches, was asked to leave because of a flag. Or perhaps not just because of the flag, but because she was closely questioned about her Zionist affiliation, and told that there was no space for a Zionist in this Dyke March.

“The flag in question was designed and produced by members of Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago during the time that I served as its rabbi. As far as I know, this was the first version of this flag, a Star of David on a Rainbow flag, though similar versions may have been produced elsewhere. It was a fundraiser, as well as a way to express — both playfully and seriously — queer Jewish identity. It was carried by us in numerous Pride Parades, typically to cheers from many in the crowd. So it was a bit surprising to hear that Laurie was harassed for carrying our flag, or that it was perceived by some in the crowd as a ‘trigger’ which made them feel threatened.”

My brother recommends a recent article in response to the Dyke March controversy by historian Judith Rosenbaum of the Jewish Women’s Archive, who offers some nuanced and historically informed insights into the current dilemma.

“Intersectionality,” she explains, “is not about enforcing alignment of identities and politics. In fact, by definition, ‘intersectionality’ is the opposite of alignment! Intersecting lines touch at only one point; everywhere else, they are heading in different directions. The purpose of intersectionality is to help us all realize that identities are complex and diverse and multi-faceted; that we can’t create simple equations to explain, describe, or prescribe them. …

“As a historian, I am keenly aware that social movements have often come undone over the attempt to enforce rigid ideological alignments. … In this historical moment, we do not have the luxury of splintering in pursuit of ideological purity.”

Rosenbaum, my brother and I join a growing number calling for real dialogue rather than absolutes, in the hopes, as my brother says, “such dialogue will lead to a stronger (if less pure) coalition — something sorely needed in a time when powerful forces are seeking to reverse the gains of recent decades.”

Indeed, in a decades-long struggle for queer rights, and in this time of angst, of threats real and perceived, none of us is lacking for examples of the way dismissals, quick judgments, assumptions and demands for apologies serve to alienate us from one another.

Cui bono?

Not our aching hearts nor our anxious minds, and not our community nor the people and causes we seek to support. We know it is easier asked for than accomplished, but we have some walls of our own to dismantle. Let’s talk.  

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Rabbi Lisa Edwards is senior rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim (bcc-la.org), an inclusive Los Angeles congregation founded in 1972 as the world’s first lesbian and gay
synagogue. This article was written in conversation with Rabbi Larry Edwards, rabbi emeritus of the LGBTQ synagogue Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago.

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Charles Bronfman to Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Do What’s Right”

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Like many in the Diaspora I have been dismayed, then shocked, then angry, then sorrowful, concerning the events of this past week.

Both the delay of the agreement concerning  non-Orthodox praying at the Western Wall, and the confirmation, if it passes, enabling only the Chief Rabbi and those designated by him, to rule in conversions, are, as you know by now, anathema to Diaspora Jewry.

Prime Minister, as Israel is the spiritual and emotional home of the Jewish People, these two insults confirm that only a certain denomination or Jew is welcome. To my knowledge, no other country in the world denies any Jew based on denomination.

We who love Israel and the Jewish People are left to ponder our relationship with Israel – and particularly with the coalition you lead. Significant damage has been done to our relationship in the last years because of reasons to which I need not allude. These two new issues will ensure that our youth will be more and more estranged from the great Nation that we adore..

Yes, a Birthright trip, which your Government generously funds, helps. But I foresee a decline in registration that will affect the future of our younger Jews. And polls among our youth who have. It experience Birthright demonstrate forcibly that their majority now feel estranged from Israel. What a shame!

And what a shame for all those fighting BDS throughout the world!

Prime Minister, I believe that it is your duty to do what’s right, rather than what’s politically expedient.

Please immediately instigate the Agreement spearheaded by Natan Sharansky. And please withdraw your support of the Conversion Bill.

Yours,

Charles Bronfman

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Divided at the Wall

In January 2016 the Israeli government, and the Rabbi of the Western Wall, agreed to legally cordon off a section of the Wall for egalitarian prayer services — a sort of miniature Kotel that would entail official government management and funding. Last week Netanyahu’s cabinet passed a motion formally freezing all plans for the site until further notice.

Before we explore the reaction to this move a few critical facts should be established. Firstly, women as individuals can pray as they wish at the regular section of the Western Wall. If they prefer to wear a prayer shawl and tefillin, noone prevents them. All they are not allowed to do is read from the Torah scroll. Secondly, they can read from the Torah scroll by the Southern side of the Western Wall, where any and all prayer services have been permitted for nearly twenty years. All the cabinet freeze means for egalitarian Jews is that for the time being the Southern Wall won’t be officially cordoned off for their exclusive use.

There were certainly some Israelis who shunned the move, but not all that many. Protests in the wake of the decision drew only a few hundred participants. In Israel, a country that has more politically-driven demonstrations than any other on earth,^[1] that isn’t much. To put it into perspective, two thousand Israelis recently protested the kidnapping of Yemeni Children nearly seventy years ago, with another 7,000 Israelis taking to a Tel Aviv square in 2015 to protest a gas deal. A year before that, over 300,000 protesters gathered to the streets in Israel to decry Israel’s planned draft plan, and three years before that 450,000 took to the streets to push for improvements in social justice. So, a few hundred people holding placards outside the Prime Minister’s home doesn’t indicate any exceptional outrage. At least, not in Israel.

And, it’s also fairly easy to understand why. Israelis have proven remarkably indifferent to the Reform and Conservative movements, with less than 3% and 2% of Israelis identifying themselves with each of those movements, respectively. Moreover, the Chairman of the Union of Synagogues and Communities in Israel, Eliezer Sheffer, has reported that there are over 10,500 synagogues in the State of Israel. Of that number, only about forty identify with Reform Judaism — less than 0.4%.

Thus, it was largely the American Jewish community that would form the brunt of the backlash, with leading Jewish-American organizations swiftly condemning the move.

In an Op-Ed published in the New York Times, Lesley Sachs, the Executive Director of Women of the Wall, took a harsher approach. Resorting to unfortunate orthodox-bashing tropes, Sachs described efforts of the Western Wall Foundation to provide shawls to immodestly dressed women as “medieval.” Guards, she went on to claim, forced women to pray silently lest they send the men into a “sexual frenzy.”

Most surprising, however, was the decision by real estate tycoon Isaac Fisher, himself a leading fundraiser in the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and member of the board of AIPAC, to freeze his philanthropic activities for the Jewish state unless the government reversed its decisions.

But Israel is a sovereign democracy and its decisions must reflect the will of its citizens rather than that of foreign Jewish donors. As for Lesley Sachs’ claims of the “medieval” practice of “enforcing” modest-dress, women are offered scarves at the Kotel but cannot be forced to take them. If the mere suggestion seems intrusive, one should consider that there are plenty of memorials throughout the United States that enforce a dress code, such as wearing shoes. They do so not to oppress but to accord respect to hallowed ground. If that level of respect can be demanded at a memorial going back just a hundred years, the holiest site of the Jewish Nation should be granted similar latitude.

With regard to Sachs’ claims that female singing is not allowed, any visit to the Western Wall on any Friday night this summer will bear witness to hundreds of Jewish women singing and dancing to their heart’s content. 

When my son and I visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, we had to take off our shoes and rinse our hands regardless of what our own religious beliefs were because that was the custom the local orthodoxy upheld. No modernist interpretations of Islam, however popular, would expect to exert its customs in the mosque either. The same can be said of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem — protestant services cannot be held there, though it is considered a holy site to Protestants as well. The Western Wall should not be faulted, in a similar vein, for preserving the customs of those who administer it — namely, Israel’s orthodox Rabbinate.

I have seen some ultra-orthodox Jews behave disgracefully at the Kotel, including toward my own family this past Shavuot when I was teaching a Torah class in middle of the night to approximately 60 young men and women gathered in a circle. My children were pushed by extremists who were offended by even the idea of men and women merely sitting together in the very back of the Kotel plaza. These fundamentalists disgraced themselves. But they are no more representative of Judaism than Sachs’ tirade against the State of Israel is representative of egalitarian Jews.

The lesson, as always in the Middle East, is that the real danger to peace is not from people of good will but from extremists and fundamentalists who only know how to disagree with their opponents by demonizing them.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international bestselling author of 30 books including his most recent “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

 ^[1] Alan Dowty, in Politics and Society in the Contemporary Middle East, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Penner Angrist, (Boulder, CO: Rienner Publishers, 2017), p. 309. 

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Roget’s Trumpasaurus

“What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?”

That’s the open-ended question a Quinnipiac poll asked Americans in May. The No. 1 answer: “idiot.”

Have you seen anything since then that would move the needle away from “idiot”? Or from “ignorant” (the ninth most frequent answer), or “stupid” (12th )? He doesn’t know what’s in the Senate’s health care bill. He’s not reading his intelligence briefings. He’s watching more Fox News than your cranky uncle. His behavior seems engineered to provoke responses like, “Can you believe what an idiot/ignoramus/stupid person Trump is?”

I’ll grant you those aren’t exact synonyms. As Mrs. Bustard, my honors English teacher at Union High, always said, the reason there are different words for the same thing is that they’re not the exact same thing. “Ignorant” implies a lack of knowledge that can be remedied by education, while “idiot” suggests an irremediable mental deficiency. The difference between “idiot” and “stupid” seems subtler, and involves attitude. I’d also put “moron” in that cluster, which I was surprised not to see on the list of nearly 50 words.

It was Roget’s Thesaurus that encouraged me to differentiate among synonyms. When I first bought it, I hadn’t a clue how to pronounce “Roget” or “thesaurus,” but a note from Mrs. Bustard on a book report — she had beautiful handwriting — persuaded me that the 35-cent pocket Roget’s, though it cost a dime more than Mad Magazine, was worth it.

Early in the 19th century, British physician Peter Mark Roget invented an ingenious system to categorize the meanings of tens of thousands of words and phrases in a hierarchy of classes and sections. His taxonomy, like Carl Linnaeus’s organization of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, revealed distinctions among related items that an alphabetical system didn’t.

Today, with synonyms just a click away, Roget’s project seems sadly antiquarian, unlike the log-log slide rule, also invented by Roget, which Miss Bialecki, my AP physics teacher, made us master, and which fully merits its obsolescence. It’s Roget’s lifelong obsession with word lists that makes me want to organize the Quinnipiac answers.

Second on the Trump list, after “idiot,” comes “incompetent.” “Unqualified” is fifth; below that, “disaster” and “inexperienced” show up. Each of those accurately describes the president. It would not be redundant to use them adjectivally — “incompetent ignoramus,” for example — since technically there’s a difference between being a dummkopf and being a screwup.

“Liar” comes in third in the poll; the related “dishonest” and “con-man” turn up lower down. To me, this trio suggests moral culpability, as do “racist,” “bigot,” “dictator,” “evil” and “greedy.” The effect that those traits cause in us is captured by another cluster: “disgusting,” “despicable” and “embarrassment.”

I would draw a distinction between the 10th place word, “egotistical,” and — lexicological trigger warning — the 11th, “asshole.” “Egotistical” strikes me as a clinical diagnosis, as do “bully,” “narcissist” and “aggressive,” which are also on the list, as do the regrettably stigmatizing “crazy” and “mental.” On the other hand, I’d put “asshole” in the same group as “arrogant” (13th), along with “clown,” “buffoon” and “blowhard,” all of which imply volition or agency; all narcissists are not necessarily assholes. (The absence from the list of “juvenile,” impulsive” and “unstable” puzzles me.)

To be sure, the poll reports positive words, too.  “Leader,” “strong,” “successful,” “great,” “good,” “smart,” “decisive,” “negotiator” and “patriotism” turn up, roughly in proportion to his favorability with his base.  But I don’t know what spin to infer from the answers “president,” “businessman,” “business,” “American,” “money” and “rich” — I can’t tell if they’re meant to be merely factual, like calling him a golfer or a husband, or slyly ironic, like calling him a golfer or a husband.

As the poll makes clear, Americans see Trump as an idiot, a liar and an — um, and a clown. That’s the baseline. There was no fresh news about his character in his tweet assaulting Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”; we already knew he’s irredeemably disgusting. His indifference to Vladimir Putin’s sabotage, his complicity in savaging Medicaid, his vendetta on truth and journalism: nothing new there, either. We already knew his narcissism is sociopathic.

The only thing we don’t know is if he can be pulled down before he pulls us down with him.  Will some behavior of his be so despicable that even his toadies and enablers gag on the shame he makes them swallow? Will some evidence emerge that’s so irrefutably damning that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are compelled to care more for country than for power? On the brink of exposure and ridicule, in the vise of global crisis, in the panic of mental meltdown, will Trump clutch — and quit? The suspense of following those storylines is mesmerizing. But the stress of it is traumatizing our psyches.

Roget knew from trauma. His father and wife died young. His depressed mother dominated him. His sister and daughter were wracked by mental illness. A beloved uncle killed himself in his arms. Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendall, says that as a boy, Roget “stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — that compiling lists of words could provide solace, no matter what misfortunes may befall him.”

Hmmm. “Despicable,” “disgusting,” “buffoon.” Who knows? Maybe lists can soothe us, too.

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