Ya’acov Ne’eman, whose resignation in December as Israel’s finance minister helped trigger the government’s collapse, washed his hands clean of politics during a speech in San Francisco last week.
Claiming no interest in the outcome of the May 17 elections and no desire to uphold any party, Ne’eman turned about face and declared the Israeli government has no right to decide the laws and legacies of Judaism.
Neither the Knesset nor the courts have the mandate to even draft a constitution, he said. Instead, the Jewish people, and not solely Israelis, should be steering the state, he added bluntly.
Whether he likes it or not, Ne’eman has become an expert in Israel’s religious tensions. His namesake commission worked throughout 1997 to resolve the debate over whether non-Orthodox rabbis could conduct conversions in Israel. It’s generally understood that the Ne’eman Committee failed in its goal.
Ne’eman came to the Bay Area to address the International Conference on Jewish Medical Ethics.
Speaking at San Francisco’s Hebrew Academy on Thursday of last week before the conference began, Ne’eman broadly outlined what he considered fair game for government legislation.
In a stately voice, he asked the audience, “Do the two values of Israel — being a Jewish state and a democracy — really contradict each other?”
Sometimes “yes,” he answered.
While the Law of Return allows all Jews to become citizens of Israel, for example, the same does not apply to anyone from another religion.
Part of the problem is economics.
Ne’eman related a scenario whereby some flippant rabbi could go to India and bless 2 million people instantly as Jews. If the $130,000 aid package given to each Jewish immigrant was offered to such converts, it would cripple the economy.
“This is not a question of pluralism,” he said, “because no other religion is as pluralistic as Judaism.”
But Ne’eman stopped short of a solution to the issue of conversion and immigration, saying the matter “should be solved by courts, but certainly not in [the courts’] current composition.”
Ne’eman, who is Orthodox and a lawyer, was perhaps referring to the generally liberal and, according to him, sometimes too powerful judicial system.
On a related issues of the jurisdiction of the courts, Ne’eman asserted that torture is also justifiably in their realm. In response to a question on why Israel can have a Basic Law on the right to “human dignity” but still allow government-sponsored torturing, Ne’eman said it’s a matter of survival.
“If your children were on the bus, you’d take the same approach,” he said. “One hundred percent, not 99.9 percent, of the terrorists who have been tortured gave information that saved lives. What can I do? I fully support saving lives.”
Ne’eman added that Americans don’t have to face such contradictions because “the Secret Service and the FBI don’t have to report to courts. We Israelis, I suppose, are too liberal.”
However, when it comes to staking claims on the identity of the state, “this should be decided not by courts or politicians but by Jews from all over the world in dialogue,” he said.
A constitution can also only come from the people, he said. And it can only come about by free choice and compromise.