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 on Mida: http://mida.org.il/2015/06/25/the-riskin-opportunity-for-religious-privatization/