The Sephardi Chief Rabbi Who Sought to End the Sephardi-Ashkenazi Divide

Throughout his life, Ben-Zion Meir Hai Ouziel (1880-1953), the first Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, held fast to a vision of breaking down the divisions among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Jews from other lands. Daniel Bouskila writes:

[D]espite holding an official title and position that seems to have ethnic and particularistic overtones, Ouziel was an outspoken proponent of Jewish unity. He passionately sought to abolish the traditional ethnic divisions among Jews, especially in Israel. His push for Jewish unity was persistent and thorough, and he articulated his vision of Jewish unity in many forums, including public addresses, written position papers, and halakhic rulings. . . .

Fully aware of the 1,900-year history in which Jews lived as separate and distinct communities throughout the Diaspora—with different rabbis, customs, languages, prayer rituals, and halakhic rulings—Ouziel nonetheless believed that unifying the Jewish people “should not be a difficult task” because the divisions born in the Diaspora were alien to the essence of the Jewish people. He did not consider his desire to abolish the Diaspora’s divisions into Sephardim and Ashkenazim to be a new or radical idea, but a return to [the Jews’] true nature.

Read more at Sephardi Ideas Monthly

More about: Ashkenazi Jewry, Halakhah, Israeli Chief Rabbinate, Mizrahi Jewry, Religion & Holidays, Sephardim

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