The Divisive Legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Goren

Shlomo Goren, who was the first chief rabbi of the IDF and later served as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, did much to shape the contemporary balance between religion and state in Israel; he also left an enduring mark on religious Zionism. Examining Goren’s legacy, Elli Fischer argues that his approach created many of the problems that haunt the Israeli rabbinate today:

In the unending tug-of-war between religion and state in Israel, [Goren] did the most to re-imagine Jewish law (halakhah) to be compatible with the governing of a modern democratic state, and to implement halakhah as state law. . . .

Goren’s vision was programmatic, consisting of distinct elements necessary to making it a reality. For one thing, religious Jews would have to see themselves not as a separate group but as an integral part of the whole Jewish people. . . . Next, halakhah would have to be substantially revised in order to integrate seamlessly with the governing of the Jewish state. To that end, Goren would offer unprecedented halakhic rulings, arguing that the Jewish state is a sui generis situation in which prior accepted rulings do not apply. . . .

Finally, in order to implement his vision, Rabbi Goren would need power—not merely the rabbinic authority accumulated by great rabbis in every generation, but the enforcing power of the state.

The problem, writes Fischer, is that Goren’s efforts discredited the chief rabbinate in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox while simultaneously investing it with an undue amount of power. The secular public, for its part, resents the rabbinate and its control over matters of marriage and divorce. Goren’s very idealism created a broken system that breeds only cynicism.

Read more at Mida

More about: Halakhah, Israeli Chief Rabbinate, Rabbis, Religion & Holidays, Religion and politics, Ultra-Orthodox

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society