The Religious Roots of an American Rabbi’s Disregard for Reality

Six years ago, Allan Arkush wrote an essay in Mosaic about Abba Hillel Silver, a prominent American Reform rabbi who did much to rally U.S. Jewry behind the state of Israel. Arkush there compared Silver favorably with Judah Magnes, one of his most important colleagues. Reviewing a recent book on Magnes by the Israeli scholar David Barak-Gorodetsky, which delves into the same comparison, Arkush returns to the subject:

Barak-Gorodetsky, who has considerable respect for Magnes, left me thinking somewhat more highly of Magnes but did not disabuse me of my previous, rather unfriendly opinion. I had portrayed Magnes as a man who, like Silver, had been for a long time a nonpolitical and cultural Zionist but who, unlike Silver—who had become a fiery advocate of Jewish statehood —had failed to grasp, despite the Holocaust and intractable Arab hostility, that Zionism’s cultural and spiritual aims were unattainable without Jewish political independence. Indeed, he fought tooth and nail up to the very end (May 1948) to prevent the creation of the state of Israel.

An eclectic thinker indebted to the founders of classical Reform Judaism, Ahad Ha’am, the leaders of the American Social Gospel movement, William James, and Karl Barth, among others, Magnes was a rabbi whose connection with God was by no means as strong as his moral beliefs. This is not to say that his religiosity was anything less than genuine. One of Barak-Gorodetsky’s main aims in this book is to correct what he sees as the failure . . . to understand the deeply religious roots of Magnes’s political thought. He succeeds in doing so, but he elucidates at the same time the precariousness of his faith. “Magnes’s religious experience,” he writes, “was one of inability to communicate with God, and of God’s hiding of His face from him.”

Seen in this light, Magnes’s futile efforts on behalf of a binational state [of Arabs and Jews]—especially in the aftermath of World War II, when it was unmistakably apparent that there was no Arab interest at all in anything of the sort—look very different. Magnes was not blind; he was doing what he felt he had to do, regardless of the outcome. Nevertheless, it is precisely this righteous disregard for the likely impact of his actions and the prospects for their success that prevents me from seeing Magnes as my kind of Zionist—or, for that matter, my kind of man.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Abba Hillel Silver, American Jewish History, American Jewry, Zionism

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