The Incompetence of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate Makes It Seem More Malicious Than It Is

Israel’s chief rabbinate has been criticized from many quarters for its recent action delegitimizing conversions to Judaism performed by rabbis it deems too moderate. The problem, Elli Fischer writes, is not—or not just—malice against other Jews, it’s the rabbinate’s organizational dysfunction and incompetence, rooted in a vast bureaucracy never before seen in the Jewish world:

The chief rabbinate, the Ministry of Religious Services, and other expressions of religion-state entanglement, are responsible for providing religious services—certify food as kosher, build synagogues and eruvin [ritual enclosures], marry, divorce, construct and staff ritual baths, bury the dead, administer holy sites, and more—for over six million people. This entails a rabbinic bureaucracy whose scope outstrips, by several orders of magnitude, any historical precedent.

It is here, in the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy, where jobs are given out to nephews (Latin: nepos) and as political favors. It is here where real pain can be inflicted before the matter arrives at the desk of someone with a moral pulse. The monster lives in the cellar; it hardly matters who occupies the upper stories, or what sort of hat they wear. The problem with the rabbinate is not that it is too Orthodox or insufficiently Orthodox, but that through it the government confers power on those unfit to wield it.

As long as religious services remain an arm of government, control of them will remain the spoils of coalition politics. As long as Israel remains in a precarious geopolitical situation, Israelis will continue to consider control of religious service an acceptable price to pay for a few years of domestic stability. And so, the average encounter with the official arms of the Jewish religion will remain impersonal and alienating, and sometimes downright nightmarish.

Read more at The Lehrhaus

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli Chief Rabbinate, Religion & Holidays

Why South Africa Has Led the Legal War against Israel

South Africa filed suit with the International Court of Justice in December accusing Israel of genocide. More recently, it requested that the court order the Jewish state to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip—something which, of course, Israel has been doing since the war began. Indeed, the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) has had a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, but Orde Kittrie suggests that the current government, which is plagued by massive corruption, has more sinister motives for its fixation on accusing Israel of imagined crimes:

ANC-led South Africa has . . . repeatedly supported Hamas. In 2015 and 2018, the ANC and Hamas signed memoranda of understanding pledging cooperation against Israel. The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper that previously won an international award for exposing ANC corruption, has reported claims that Iran “essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.”

The ANC-led government says it is motivated by humanitarian principle. That’s contradicted by its support for Russia, and by [President Cyril] Ramaphosa’s warmly welcoming a visit in January by Mohamed Dagalo, the leader of the Sudanese-Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Ramaphosa’s smiling, hand-holding welcome of Dagalo occurred two months after the RSF’s systematic massacre of hundreds of non-Arab Sudanese refugees in Darfur.

While the ANC has looted its own country and aided America’s enemies, the U.S. is insulating the party from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

In Kittrie’s view, it is “time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold Ramaphosa accountable.”

Read more at The Hill

More about: International Law, Iran, South Africa