Comments (2)Reform Boos
October 30, 2009Neil Rubin
Editor
Eli Yishai, Israel’s Interior Minister, is the most recent recipient of the Jewish People’s Hoof In Mouth Award.
The Sephardi Orthodox Party (Shas) leader won the dubious honor for his Friday, Oct. 23, comments at the Israeli Presidential Conference, which is mostly attended by Diaspora Jewish leaders.
Panel moderator and Israeli journalist Attila Somfalvi asked, “Should Reform and Conservative Judaism receive equal rights in Israel?”
Yishai apparently decided to put on a show for his home crowd instead of promoting the hallowed concept of the Jewish people. “Look what is happening with the Reform Jews because of the assimilation. They are disappearing,” he responded to the boos of some present.
When asked if there should be a Reform or Conservative chief rabbi in the Jewish state, he said, “What I am hearing here is incitement. … This will only double the assimilation.”
Rather than cavalierly bash him as a destroyer of Jewish unity — which he is, or label him Exhibit A as to why mixing religion and state is toxic, which it is — one must acknowledge that on the surface he’s right.
Demographic surveys in this country continually show the average Reform Jew to be less Jewishly informed than the average Conservative Jew, who is less knowledgeable than the average Orthodox Jew.
And one cannot deny that all across the country, the Orthodox hold their numbers as non-Orthodoxy slips. It’s a very slow process — actually slower than many Orthodox Jews think. But it’s happening nonetheless.
The primary reason behind this is the related notions of assimilation and intermarriage, which these surveys show to be higher in the Reform camp than elsewhere. Meanwhile, the offspring of such marriages are even less likely to marry Jews than their Jewish parent was.
But what Yishai does not realize is that Reform Judaism —the largest affiliated group of Jews in the country and thus for many reasons dangerous to simply write off — is keenly aware of the issue. That’s why it has pioneered outreach to interfaith families while simultaneously engaging in an egalitarian embrace of Jewish tradition that includes Hebrew, summer camps, day schools and cultivating a personal relationship with God. (Ironically, the most common place to hear Chasidic stories with moralistic messages these days seems to be in Reform temples.)
One would think that Yishai would simply praise the process and urge a speeding-up of it before more Jews are lost. Instead, he opted to put even more distance between Orthodoxy and everyone else. That, of course, damages the minority Orthodoxy more than anything else.
Mind you, Yishai’s problems are not just with Jews overseas. He’s doing this in a country where 300,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union are not considered Jewish under a strict interpretation of Jewish law.
On this, he’s fighting yet another powerful adversary. Listen to what Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, said at the conference: “A person willing to sacrifice his life and defend the State of Israel is worthy of being Jewish, even if his grandmother wasn’t exactly on our chain.”
It’s a new twist to the old chat about being part of the Jewish people vs. being a halachically,-defined Jew. Indeed, exploring the requirements for being a card-carrying member of the modern tribe is a pursuit that should avoid the tired and predictable arguments rolled out by all sides.
Meanwhile, Yishai does not understand American Judaism, flawed as it is, to be a complex and evolving organism. Yes, in numerical terms American Jewry’s vast majority — 85 percent not being Orthodox — is in trouble. However, they are not dying on a vine. They are going through convulsions while figuring out how to re-energize their community, knowing well that along the way they keep losing precious souls to the overwhelming popular culture.
The community here is emerging smaller, but more intense than before. And that is a base from which to rebuild — just as Orthodoxy did after communist repression and World War II literally torched the cradle of traditional Jewish life.
Eli Yishai does not top the list of major challenges facing the Jewish people. He is, however, a strong representative of the ignorance one must battle along the way.