By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Except for theology, Israel is doing great work for its people and for humanitarian advancement. People routinely order pizza online but they often have to travel to Cyprus to get married–due to rabbinic restrictions. Women are expected to deliver babies but they frequently have to stand in the back of the bus.
Israel gave us many of the components of the cellular phone, mind-boggling innovations in cardiology, stem-cell therapy, cancer treatment, and it is a pioneer in the process of desalination. It’s a vibrantly modern country with glistening skyscrapers, a state-of-the-art national railway system, and it maintains futuristic pharmacal and solar energy technologies.
Israel enjoys being the exemplar of democracy in the Middle East. Vividly contemporary, yet the nation is socially choked by its own form of tyranny: the control of people’s personal lives by the wildly outdated Chief Rabbinate and its considerable fangs.
An enlightened and bold Israeli government would finally undo the stranglehold conceded in 1948 to the ultra-Orthodox tribunals that would dictate how people should eat, live, marry, dress, die, and be buried in a postmodern state that is cosmically secular. The imposition of the religious parties upon Israel’s federal system is altogether out-of-proportion, inappropriate, unseemly, and a burden to Israel’s ability to operate in the areas of education, infrastructure, and foreign policy.
Israel is a dazzling modern country being co-opted by a medieval theological mindset that contradicts everything progressive that characterizes this phenomenal republic.
The meddling of local rabbis, working for the Chief Rabbinate, in Israeli elementary and high school curricula, effectively muddling Israel’s avant-gardism and scientific creativity, is more than troubling. It is stifling and self-defeating for a daring young nation that needs peace more than it needs God.
An irony: Israelis themselves—the regular, real people that work, play, struggle, and serve in the military—are 80% not religious or observant. They are increasingly vocal and indignant about the restrictions imposed on their lives—such as when public transportation cannot run, how they should dress on the beaches, or the constraint of kosher laws, or what kind of rabbi can exclusively perform their weddings, and even who is a Jew. Resentment is beginning to boil over that Israelis are taxed to compensate self-styled sages for studying Torah incessantly while not sharing equally in national service to the Army.
Of particular sensitivity is the knowledge that so much of the impetus of Israel’s painfully overextended and morally corrosive occupation of the West Bank is a function of radical right wing theology and to the attendant racist views held by these fundamentalists not only about Palestinians, but of Jews who are not “Torah-true.” In fairness, there are economic and strategic aspects tethered to Israel’s building of the settlements. But this is ultimately ecclesiastic poison that prolongs the stalemate and many young Israelis just want to be world citizens, not police soldiers.
The fact is that Israel is less a Jewish state and more a state of Jews. The vernacular is Hebrew and every time a person speaks, sings, or even curses there in the language of Elijah and Deborah, the death clatter of the Nazi is further drowned out. Israel remains the singular and most stirring response to genocide in contemporary history. It has everything to be proud of—except the intolerable and degenerative interference upon its own maturation and success by these old men and their acolytes who are frozen in a dangerous antiquity.
Israel needs to abolish the chief rabbinate so that its future will at last be as promising as its past has been inspirational.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
A bold if immodest proposal. Although I am in total sympathy with the author, I think his argument would be more credible with less hyperbole. Having witnessed the cruelty exercised on the Ethiopian Jews by not only the Chief Rabbinute, but by Israeli citizens who followed the religious right lead to exercise their own racism, I have no favorable impression of that institution. However, despite all the cell phone and technological wonders of the modern Israeli state, the Jews also need a moral compass. Israeli society is hardly restrained. The initial carpe diem attitudes that made sense when survival of the state was in question has flourished far more than the antiquated Rabbinute ha Reshit. Corruption runs rampant in all levels up to the top and religion as racism is readily at hand. So although I agree with the author I also think Israel is badly in need of a moral standard. The religious institutions rather than concentrating on exclusion and old testaments ritual should be teaching the moral lessons of biblical history, not the 613 mitzvot. If Jews could only begin to follow the ten that would be hard enough and a big improvement.
–Catherine Hand, Alpine, California