The crisis that seriously threatened U.S. Jewry’s relationship to the state of Israel in the late 1980s is being revived.
A bill about to be introduced to the Knesset by the ultrareligious Shas Party seeks to invalidate Reform and Conservative conversions, whether carried out abroad or here.
U.S. Jewish leadership is up in arms. A broad coalition of Jewish organizations has organized to fight this move. Reform and Conservative rabbis are calling upon their constituents to actively protest this renewed specter of “Who is a Jew?”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote U.S. Jewish leaders pledging that Israel would continue to recognize non-Orthodox conversions performed abroad. In no way does he want a repeat confrontation with U.S. Jews over the legitimacy of their forms of Jewish expression. Still, Conservative and Reform leaders intend to protest this denial of religious pluralism.
In Israel, opening or closing main thoroughfares on Shabbat is an issue. TV censorship is an issue. Insulting new immigrants and restricting their freedom to eat what they want is an issue.
Religious pluralism is not an issue.
Relations between U.S. and Israeli Jews are troubled by misunderstandings. Each partner cherishes a basic principle ignored by the other.
For almost 30 years the American Jewish Congress conducted the America-Israel Dialogue, which annually brought eminent U.S. Jews together with their Israeli counterparts to discuss shared concerns.
Fascinating and serious, these dialogues nevertheless reminded one of the late Israeli comedian Shaike Ofir’s line: A monologue is one person talking to himself and a dialogue is two people talking to themselves.
Whatever the issue, whether law or literature, women’s rights or political extremism, the Israeli contingent always seemed to hark back to aliyah, or immigration. To them this was the bedrock of the Israel-diaspora relationship.
To the American Jewish participants, aliyah was irrelevant. They had their own mantra — the religious pluralism so fundamental to American Jewish life. They ascribed most of Israel’s political, religious and social ills to its failure to wrestle free from the grip of an unbending, coercive religious establishment.
But the response of their counterparts was less than sympathetic. Women’s right to pray at the Western Wall? The right to marry and be buried under non-Orthodox religious auspices? Somehow these issues didn’t excite the Israelis.
For most Israelis, religious pluralism means their right to pick and choose their observance of tradition — but it’s always Orthodox, as pithily summarized by Professor Shlomo Avineri, who said, “The shul I don’t attend is Orthodox.”
In a recent piece, “Orthodox Democracy,” in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, David Landau questions whether religious pluralism is essential to modern Western democracy. He suggests that unrestrained religious pluralism is peculiar to U.S. society.
Great Britain, which has an established church, is no less a democracy than the United States, notes Landau. He suggests that Israel, as a Jewish state, can be linked to an institutionalized Orthodox establishment and still remain democratic.
In Israel, relief from a coercive religious establishment does not necessarily mean alternate religious streams, but “opting out.” Pressure isn’t so much for alternate religious forms of marriage, divorce and burial, but for nonreligious civil ceremonies.
It may be that just as Israel must learn to live with a U.S. Jewry unprepared to join the miracle of the return to Zion, so U.S. Jews may have to live with and, hopefully, continue to love, an Israel unprepared at this stage to grant full recognition and legitimacy to their brand of Judaism within its domain.
Israel’s recognition of non-Orthodox conversions conducted abroad while not recognizing such conversions conducted in Israel is illogical and contradictory, but perhaps it’s a necessary compromise. Not to recognize conversions by Conservative and Reform rabbis abroad would be a rejection of those streams in Jewish life.
And yet for U.S. Jewry to demand that Israel adopt its definition of religious pluralism in the face of Israeli rejection or indifference to it would be a kind of imperialism.
Perhaps we shall have to live as best we can with these contradictions, at least until we can convince U.S. Jews of the importance of aliyah and they can persuade Israelis of the value of U.S.-style religious pluralism.