Would Religious Pluralism Bring Peace to Israel?

There's a great article in Yediot on the demands being brought to the Israeli Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff: Progressive (Reform) and Masorti (Conservative) Jews want a Reform or Conservative military rabbi.

To any American, it would seem like a bizarre and even unnecessary request.  But, for Israelis who do not enjoy the same Amendment rights when it comes to synagogue and State, the request for pluralistic religious representation is big news that could have a major impact on both the Israeli and the Jewish diaspora's way of viewing and living Jewish life.

Currently the rabbinic services within the IDF are strictly Orthodox.  This means that non-Orthodox Jewish soldiers are required to observe an Orthodox way of life including traditions that limit women's prayer on base and denying the families of fallen soldiers the ability to hold non-Orthodox funeral services.  The argument being put forth by the Progressive and Conservative movements is that "Every soldier who dedicates his time, and sometimes risks his life for the State, is entitled to religious services in accordance to his faith."

In some ways, the argument could be seen as a slippery-slope.  While Muslims are not required to join the IDF, there are a few dozen volunteers who join the ranks every year.  Opening the door to non-Orthodox religious representation could pave the way for Muslim soldiers to call for an Imam in the ranks.  Given the gross politicization of Islam in the Middle East, and the bureaucratic undertaking the IDF would have to conquer in appointing an Islamic cleric to their staff, more than one headache could ensue.  Still, should the risks outweight the worth of religious freedom?   

Should the change take place, it would send a variety of equally important messages to Israel and the Jewish world, as well as to Israel's critics.  Firstly, the acceptance of religious pluralism within the ranks of the IDF would testify to Israel's reputation as the strongest democracy in the Middle East.  Secondly, this action of religious pluralism would send a much-needed message to Jews the world-over:  We all worship the same God and read the same Torah; we can have unity despite our different religious points of view.  Thirdly, the introduction of Jewish religious pluralism within the ranks of the IDF would sound the death-knell for the stranglehold the Orthodox Rabbinate has over the otherwise secular Israeli government.  This is, perhaps, the most politically threatening aspect of the request--and the strongest reason why it should be honored. 

To reach its full potential, Judaism needs to be de-politicized from the Right in Israel as much as the Left in America.  Judaism is, first and foremost, a faith of morals and values that simultaenously informs and transcends political outlook.  When religion itself (any religion, for that matter) crosses the line into the political sphere, human beings feel free to justify their political beliefs and actions in the name of God; division ensues when unity should be the goal.  There's a reason the only leader who ever brought us truly together sang, "Oh how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity." 

Americans pay special attention to religious freedom for a variety of reasons, all of which boil down to the simple fact that developing a relationship with God and expressing that relationship publicly is a personal choice.  For too long, the Jewish world has been pushed in a variety of directions and made to worry whether we are too Jewish or not Jewish enough.  As the national representative of Jews across the globe, Israel has taken the brunt of this burden.  For all the directions in which Israelis (the majority of whom are in the midst of some level of military service) are being pushed, they should feel the freedom to walk in the direction of faith, and reassured with the knowledge that they will be received with open arms.

Progressive Tikkun Olam: Repair or Destruction?

“You are a bad Jew!  You are a bad Jew!  Have you ever heard of Tikkun Olam?  …This, what you are doing, is NOT healing the world.” 

This finger-pointed accusation made by one left-wing Jew to a right-wing Jew outside the D.C. offices of FreedomWorks went viral last week.  Along with illustrating the over-the-top anger leftists have regarding right wing politics, this brief exchange highlighted the schism that increasingly pervades political dialogue.  Today, it seems that when it comes to politics, two people may disagree and still get along, unless they are radical leftists.  To radical leftists, those who hold an opposing viewpoint are simply accused of destroying the world. 

But can the accusation of “not healing the world” really hold water?

The politic of “Tikkun Olam” can be traced back to the Mishnah, which was codified around 200 C.E.  Mipnei tikkun ha-olam (for the sake of the repair of the world) is commentary relating to what was, essentially, discombobulated bureaucratic procedure; courts would convene, and then cancel; people would randomly change their names; divorces would not be finalized.  The idea behind the Mishnah’s version of “repairing the world” was simply to establish order on the part of governing bodies with the goal of avoiding chaos among the population at large.

Move ahead to the 16^th century and Tikkun Olam is taken to a newer, more spiritual level by Kabbalistic Rabbi Isaac Luria.  His interpretation (in a nutshell) involved human beings repairing the world by divorcing the holy from the physical world through deep, contemplative spiritual acts.  In fact, Luria’s Tikkun Olam didn’t require the repair of the world so much as the ending of it through the transcendence into a completely holy, spiritual realm.

Fast-forward to the 1950s when Tikkun Olam was re-fashioned again, this time by Jewish progressive causes looking to spur on social change.  Applying the idea of repairing the world to the Marxist ideology of oppressor versus oppressed (boss v. worker; majority v. minority, etc.), progressive Jews took an idea meant to de-bureaucratize government and used it as an excuse to establish a huge bureaucracy in the form of a social welfare state:   Repairing the world, one government program at a time.

Even more interestingly, Tikkun Olam took on the concept of collectivity at the sacrifice of individuality.  Like the Protestant Social Gospelists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, today’s progressive Jews take Biblical teachings on communal responsibility (i.e. Cain and Abel) and, through their socialist lens, re-interpret these teachings to mean that the individual has no right over the collective.  (This, despite the fact that the bureaucracy of social justice calls for varying groups—defined in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, race, and even religion—to receive entitlements over other groups.) Using a twisted form of Jewish teaching to justify their political beliefs, this progressive version of collectivist Tikkun Olam became the justification for telling any non-progressive that their politics were destroying the world.

 

One look at Biblical history, however, proves the exact opposite to be true:  Time and time again, Israel’s narrative is one of the individual attempting to lead the nation out of collective misery.  The most notable example, Moses, was a total loner.  Born a Hebrew but raised in an Egyptian household, he spent most of his life living among desert tribesman before returning to lead his people Israel out of bondage.  Five minutes into their journey, the Hebrews begged for a return to slavery and spent most of their 40 years in the desert whining about how much better it was to stomp straw into bricks than be free and on their way to their own Mediterranean beach front real estate.

A few generations later, the young nation of Israel begged their prophet Samuel, “Give us a king to judge us like all the other nations.”  This collective desire to be lorded over by another human being translated into a series of largely corrupt lunatics (with one glowing exception) who weakened the kingdom and left it vulnerable to eventual attack and destruction by surrounding tribes and nations who drove the people of Israel into exile.

Of course, a series of prophets repeatedly arose to warn Israel of impending disaster.  These individuals, like the Judges before them, ranged from members of guilds and Temple service to average farmers, but they shared a few common traits.  They each stood out as a lone voice of warning in the crowd, they were pretty much all thought of as lunatics, and the majority of them suffered horrible fates at the hands of the collective population of Israel who just wanted them to shut up.   

In fact, Biblically speaking, Jewish collectivism has clamored for a return to slavery, sought to empower kings, was cool with being governed by corruption, and slandered, ostracized, evicted, and even stoned the only individuals who tried to get them out of their own collective mess.  (So much for trying to be your brother’s keeper.)

The situation didn’t get much better after the Tanakh ended, either.  More corruption in the priesthood led to Israel’s own Vichy of sorts—a Roman rule mediated by a crooked Jewish priesthood that led to a series of Zionist revolts, ending in the destruction of yet another Temple and a 2,000-year long Diaspora.

Interestingly, the Rabbinic reason for why the Jewish nation came upon such a horrible fate is sinat chinam, “baseless hatred”.  In the period leading up to the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE, Jews in Judea were split into varying factions, many of which turned on each other in the midst of the revolt.   Instead of being one unified force in the face of Roman occupation, these groups drew sides and formed alliances for varying religious and political reasons.  This factional attitude put Israel on a path of self-destruction. 

One Rabbinic teaching likens the nation of Israel to a unified body having distinct parts with their own unique purposes that work in harmony for the greater good of the nation.  “Therefore, when we as individuals actualize our potential, every other individual is uplifted, as well as Jewish people as a whole.”   Compare this to the attitude behind baseless hatred:  “But a person who acts according to his inner conviction that he is correct will never admit his mistake. He believes that the other person or the government is wrong. What mistake is there to admit? He thinks that you are wrong, not him!”   As a result, both “God and our fellow man” are stripped “of their singular importance in the world.” 

In the midst of the Temple’s destruction, Israel’s factions put more faith in themselves than in God, and as a result, put their own religious and political priorities above the needs of the very people they claimed to be fighting for.  (Sound familiar?)  Consequentially, many individual lives were sacrificed in the name of collective callings. 

Whether it meant fleeing from Egypt, foregoing pagan behaviors, or seeking to overthrow occupying forces, for the collective of ancient Israel, enslavement to an oppressor or oppressing ideology continually trumped the freedom of individual choice.  Contrary to today’s progressive spin on Tikkun Olam, the result of favoring the collective was not repair, but repeated self-destruction. 

Thomas Jefferson once said, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”  When the collective is distributing justice, who is there to ensure that the collective is being just?

 

This article also appeared at NewsRealBlog and Our Last Stand.

Laboring for Zion

As a political junkie, I find the identity crisis on the Jewish/Israeli Left absolutely fascinating.  As a Zionist and a history buff, I find it heartbreaking.

Earlier this year, my radar went up when I read Jo Ellen Green Kaiser's article "Charting Israel's Role in Progressive Jewish Identity" @ ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture.  An off-shoot of the socialist Forward, I knew to expect a left-wing bias going into the relatively new venture, something I have no problem with as long as it is stated outright.  (Whereas delivering your own version of truth while claiming to be unbiased is, quite frankly, the bull of a media era gone by, IMHO.)  What shocked me about this article was not the fact that it was written from a leftist standpoint, but what the author actually articulated to be, in their own words, the proper "progressive" point of view, namely that Israel had no place in a "Progressive Jewish Identity."  

If anything should shake a Jew to the core, it is the idea that Israel has no place in their identity.  

Argued strictly semantically, the term "Jew" comes from the Hebrew Yehudah, referencing one of the 12 sons of Israel and one of the 12 territories in the nation of Israel, later known as the southern kingdom after the Israel-Judah split.  After Roman occupation, the territory became known as "Judea" and the inhabitants as "Jews".  The term has since taken on a series of negative connotations to the point where some Jewish people do not like even being called "Jews", instead preferring the term "Jewish". 

Bottom line: Israel is not only a family name, it is a national name, whereas "Jewish" and its associated term "Jew" are terms created out of division and diaspora.  Before there were Jews, there were Israelis.  You cannot be Jewish without having an ancestral tie to Israel.  Moreover, to try and distance yourself from such an identity is equivalent to giving yourself an identity grounded in oppression.

Green Kaiser argued that choosing a Jewish versus an Israeli identity was a choice that "disowned the concept of diaspora."  How?  Very simply put, the author argues that because aliyah is a viable option, "diaspora" doesn't exist.  Instead of living in exile, Jews choose not to move to Israel.  It is an argument as equally semantic as the one I reasoned above.  In the mind of the author, in order for the diaspora not to exist, Israel must exist.  Progressive Jews, then, intentionally choose not to become a part of Israel, but still need it as a safety blanket in order to make free choices about where to live in the world.

Somehow, I can't help but read into this argument a metaphor of a teenager who complains endlessly about their parents before asking them for 20 bucks and a ride to the movies.  Most parents blow off the heat they take from their kids because they remember what it was like to be a teenager and to live through that awkward period where you don't know who you are or where you belong in the world.  

That is the identity crisis I see going on in the Left.  It is an identity crisis echoed by the author in ZEEK who wrote, 

"Jewish Voice for Peace got it right when they yelled, 'Not in My Name.' They understood on a visceral level that U.S. Jewry and the values and actions of the Jewish State cannot be separated. When Israel acts, it acts in the name of the Jewish homeland. How can one be Jewish and not be named in that way? Israel defines the space against which U.S. Jews construct their own identity."

This argument illustrates the two primary problems with the Left's viewpoint.  Firstly, it assumes that all American Jews identify themselves in contrast to Israel, that is to say if we take the author's viewpoint, against Israel.  Secondly, and more importantly, the author assumes we must naturally be opposed to the entire government, and therefore the entire national identity, of Israel if we disagree with one or some of its actions.


Truth be told very few, even on the Left, are that radical as to take an "all or nothing" approach to Israeli politics.  Politics is a game of bargaining; no one should know that better than the party of Ben Gurion, who had his own struggles with the "radical periphery" of his Labor Zionist party.  Unfortunately for the Left, the radical voices have captured the attention of the politicians and the media, leaving Labor with an entire generation to re-shape if they even hope to maintain any Zionist identity into the future.


There are those on the Left who are waking up to the reality of their wing's identity crisis.  Last week Forward's Senior Columnist J.J. Goldberg wrote about rehabilitating Israel's "lost love" for Labor, a move that would require the abandonment of the grossly ineffective party chair Ehud Barak in favor of the pro-education, pro-integration MK Avishay Braverman.  It has been argued that this would be a move back to the roots of a Labor Zionism that managed to be proudly Zionistic while granting Arab Israelis equal rights as citizens of the Jewish state.  Oddly enough, the move would also require reliquishing the West Bank in the name of strategic defense; it is easier to defend a border militarily than try to run a police state with 3 million people who want to kill you.  Arguments, all of which, sound a lot more logical, reasoned, and centrist than the cries of "foul" coming from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, flotilla activists, and "progressive" Rabbis who are turning synagogues into nothing more than minyanim for social justice.


A week later, the Forward published an article written by Ameinu President Kenneth Bob, in which he draws a line in the sand between his self-defined progressive organization and Jewish Voice for Peace's "agnostic" approach to the sovereign Jewish identity of Israel.  Bob writes,

"That is what separates progressive Zionists from JVP. We cannot be “agnostic” about the most central issue in the conflict, the importance of a solution that includes two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine. It is ludicrous to suggest that one can be involved in the Jewish communal discourse about the future of the Middle East without having an opinion on whether Israel should exist. In addition, JVP’s stated support for a complete suspension of American military aid to Israel just emphasizes the organization’s cavalier attitude toward Israel’s survival."

Bob stands firm on his organization's two-state solution platform, encouraging the Jewish community to support "open and frank discussions around controversial issues related to Israel" but admits that, "unfortunately, our communal track record has not always been good in this regard."  Bob's admonishment to progressive Zionists to distance themselves from anti-Zionists like JVP is a positive one that is long overdue and will, no doubt, receive its fair amount of criticism from those who think his organization's stance isn't Left enough.  But it is an argument that needs to be made if Labor Zionism is going to survive on either side of the world.


Perhaps this long-overdue self-examination has been inspired by Peter Beinart who finally put voice to the Left's identity crisis when he published his "groundbreaking" essay "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" last May.  My thoughts then are the same now: "What we need, on the whole, is a sense of communal self-actualization. ...[Jewish Americans] need to take purpose and meaning in their Jewishness as individuals by engaging with the community instead of running away from it."


Call them "progressive" or tag them by organizational names, there is a real segment of the Left wing that is running, fast and furious, from Israel.  And, whether the Left likes it or not, many young Jews in Israel and abroad are following suit.  If the Left wing cannot combat the dissention in their own ranks in this generation the next may know a Labor, but no Zionism will be attached.


In his well-written extensive critique titled "The Decline and Fall of Labor Zionism," former WJC leader Isi Leibler writes:

"The challenge for democratic socialists in Israel is to resurrect a party which has become a haven for defeatists, post-Zionists, former Marxists and other lost souls. ...There are strong grounds to believe that the majority of Labor supporters remain committed Zionists. Most would also probably agree that despite the noble intentions of the architects, the Oslo Accords were flawed because our designated peace partner, Arafat, sought our destruction rather than seeking a peace settlement. For this as well as other reasons, there are grounds for hope that in the wake of a massive electoral defeat the silent majority of Israeli social democrats will rally and try to revitalize Labor Zionism from within.


If not, a new Labor Zionist party must be created to cater for those on the Left who recognize the need to renew the Labor Zionist tradition which played such a noble role in nation building and leading the Jewish state during its formative years."

My husband is a third generation alum of the Labor Zionist camp movement Habonim Dror.  It is a movement his grandfather and great-grandfather helped to establish in America in the 1930's.  In the book Arise and Build: The Story of American Habonim, the introduction to the movement magazine Haboneh is quoted:

"We as Habonim are part and parcel of the great Socialist Zionist movement which has borne the brunt of the burden for laying the foundation of a revived homeland.  We, the Habonim, believe unshakingly that the homeland must be built, and we must build it.  We do our share while yet in America, materially and spiritually; and soon many of us will be personally transplanted to Eretz Israel to be part of the new Jewish society."

One of my husband's favorite things to do around the campfire with his fellow campers was call out various camp chants and slogans as the conversation deems appropriate. One of the more popular ones is, "Hypocritical!  Hypocritical!  Two-face!  Two-face!" 

The alarm has sounded for the Left.  Now it is their turn to look themselves in the face, lest the movement that once labored for Zion is only remembered for laboring against her.