By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM — If Arieh Deri, Israel’s interior minister and the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, gets his way, Israel will become the only country in the free world that discriminates against Jews. The legislation that Shas and its Ashkenazi counterpart are putting before the Knesset – with the help of a few from other right-wing parties, including a notoriously troubling vulgar member of the prime minister’s Likud party – would impose prison sentences on women who read from the Torah at the Western Wall.
This is an effort to thwart the activities of the Women of the Wall who’ve got international attention and support from many Jewish organizations, especially in the United States. It’s also a way of making sure that the government’s earlier commitment to provide adequate and egalitarian space at the Wall for non-Orthodox Jews will come to naught.
Though the activities by Women of the Wall and their supporters in Israel and elsewhere have been politically effective and have alerted many Jews in the Diaspora to the wicked ways in which so-called extreme Orthodoxy is trying to muzzle other Jews, I’ve always had problems with prayer politics. My kind of progressive Judaism has never been fixated on the ancient Temple of which the Western Wall is a relic and a reminder. But when members of the governing coalition in Israel want to criminalize Jews whose religious outlook differs from theirs, all of us have to stand up in support of those who’re about to be outlawed, even by turning up at the Wall.
To paraphrase Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer, though none of us on our own can extinguish the enormous fire lit by prejudice and discrimination, we each have at least a teaspoon with which we can pour water on it. Between us we may be able to do enough to douse the flames.
It’s reasonable to assume that the prime minister himself doesn’t favor the proposed legislation. Not that he’s a supporter of progressive – or, by all accounts, any kind of religious – Judaism but because styling himself as the leader of world Jewry he doesn’t want to antagonize the majority of the five-six million Jews in the United States, even if he may be less interested in other communities around the globe.
In the same way as Netanyahu is trying to manipulate his way out of the proposed bill that would de facto approve of illegal settlements in the West Bank, he’ll probably also try to get out of this one by throwing another bone at unruly coalition members to buy their silence.
But why are these laws coming up just now in the Israeli legislature? The answer in two words is Donald Trump. The settler advocates are banking on the possibility that the next president of the United States won’t lift a finger in support of the Palestinians, and the ultra-Orthodox are assuming that the so-called Jewish lobby will be ineffective after January 20, as it’ll consist only of one man – the president’s son-in-law who’s usually described as Orthodox. When an ever-growing number of Israelis tell us – and the prime minister chimes in – that Trump will be good for Israel it’s probably this kind of thing they’ve in mind.
And there’s no point in turning for support from Trump’s new friend Vladimir Putin, because he too seems to favor very Orthodox Jews; his relationship to the Orthodox “chief rabbi” of Russia is reportedly very close. Totalitarians have a way of finding each other across very unlikely divides.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada. Now living in Israel, he may be contacted via dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com