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Is Israel’s Chief Rabbinate Beyond Repair?

June 30 2015

The Israeli chief rabbinate has backed down from its effort to force Shlomo Riskin—a popular Modern Orthodox rabbi—into retirement as retaliation for his dissenting views on certain key issues. Elli Fischer argues that the most desirable outcome would be for Riskin and his congregants to reject the chief rabbinate altogether:

Part of the larger religion-state issue in Israel is that most citizens, even those calling for the “abolition” of the chief rabbinate, have a hard time envisioning what life would look like without it. The centralization of religious services in Israel was a key part of David Ben-Gurion’s particular brand of statism and his desire to replace community consciousness with state consciousness. Though this state consciousness . . . has begun to fail, Israelis have not yet relearned how to build religious communities. They have become dependent on the state to allocate land and funds for synagogues, . . . to fund and staff burial societies, and to dictate what foods are and are not kosher. Abolishing the chief rabbinate would create a vacuum of instability, temporarily at least. It is hard to predict the long-term ramifications of such instability. . . .

The chief rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Services are obviously well-funded, but they draw their real authority from the people. If people stopped caring whether the chief rabbinate thinks they are Jewish or married, or whether it deems a particular product kosher, it would become a paper tiger.

Read more at Mida

More about: David Ben-Gurion, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Chief Rabbinate, Modern Orthodoxy, Religion and politics

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic