Israel Should Allow Freedom of Jewish
Faith to All
Is
Israel Jewish Enough?
Freedom to Choose: Israel won’t be truly
Jewish until it allows all its citizens to practice religion as they see fit.
Last
June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the
Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity.
What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the
Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world
while holding onto ancient tradition. This is the continuation of that
discussion.
Jewish
life in Israel is often measured in quantities: How many Talmud pages did we
conquer? How many mitzvot did we perform? How many times did we say “Baruch
Hashem” in one sentence? How many Jewish children did we bring into the world?
How wonderful is it that here in the State of Israel we have more yeshivas and
rabbis than we ever had before, and more Jewish state laws than we ever dreamed
of?
We live
in a state of quantity, as if Jewish civilization is solely a matter of how
much we do, as if quantities are a guarantee against the extermination of our
ancient heritage. Is this true?
The
accumulation of quantity, a known human weakness, is also an inevitable
consequence of a miracle called Israel, where for the first time in Jewish
history we exercise our heritage in the modern bureaucratic state, dealing with
everything through the lens of the mass. Yet, essentially, to be truly Jewish
is to engage in a higher quest: the religious quest to be personally called, to
choose carefully one’s quality of life and then commit and practice it in
community with others.
In order
to make this choice of a religious life, one needs a will. A will that enables
a person to choose to live rather than survive. In order to grow that will, one
needs freedom. Freedom to question, to answer, to exercise different approaches
to Torah and life, to find a place within the ancient covenant and commit, to
add one’s voice to a nation ever-standing at the foot of Sinai and to hearing a
voice.
The State
of Israel might be full of people who were born Jewish, but as long as it
doesn’t provide freedom to grow such a will, it is not yet a Jewish state.
I dread
the thought that this magnificent moment in Jewish history might turn out to be
a tragedy for the Jewish condition and its calling in the world. I dread the
thought that Jews in Israel and around the world will count on the strength of
what seems like an everlasting state, physically built, while neglecting,
abandoning, an ancient trust in the transparent realm of theruach, the
spirit, the deepest power in human life. The built State of Israel entered the
delicate void of thousands of years yearning, and the task of this generation
is to ask how we make way for the challenges of embodying ruach in
Jerusalem. This is our task.
What we
really need is to recuperate the natural instinct of freedom here in Zion. We
can’t wait for the status quo to be changed; it will not be changed easily, and
we are losing precious time, precious generations. In a world in which the new
Jew is the Haredi Jew, what we need is to deepen the grassroots movement of
Jewish freedom — individuals and communities exercising a Jewish life of their
choice: marrying, celebrating, mourning, learning to translate modern autonomy
of the individual into a life of shared values and deeds. We need more Jewish
thinkers leading such a life; declaring that they do so; sharing their
thoughts, practices; making way for others by their own quest to weave their
unique personality into that of a community in its state.
“If
Ben-Gurion, in the peak of his leadership days, would choose to go to a Reform
community on Yom Kippur instead of sitting home, reading Spinoza or Aristotle,
he could have given with his great authority legitimacy to another possibility
of religious authority,” A.B. Yehoshua wrote in 1984. “There is no hope for
real normalization of the Jewish people without deeply treating questions of
our heritage. If we want to see a significant change in 100 years, we need to
plan it now. We need to make sure that secular Jews are deeply involved in
these questions…. Orthodoxy (as an ideology) does not want the change; the
change will come only by creating new centers of Jewish authority.” And I, too,
think to myself, if Shimon Peres, in the peak of his presidential days, would
have asked for a blessing or prayer of six different Jewish (and non-Jewish, of
course) leaders from different schools of thought in one evening, what a gate
he would have opened to our people.
What I
write here is a plea, that we demand every Jewish leader we know exercise and
speak words of freedom, and continue to fight for state laws that enshrine that
freedom. The coming 65 years should be dedicated to this pursuit of pluralism,
and the more Jews involved, Israelis and partners from all around the world to
whom this place belongs, the more of a chance we will have to live in a truly
Jewish state.
