Pajama Rabbi Seized!

Last week, I promised to devote at least the first few of my letters this year to some of the more remarkable or controversial events that took place in Israel during my stay there earlier this summer. Today, I would like to devote myself to the scandal surrounding the KGB-style pre-dawn raid that brought into police headquarters for questioning one Rabbi Dov Haiyun, a Rabbinical Assembly colleague and the rabbi of the Moriah Congregation in Haifa. What specifically the police were thinking by arriving at Rabbi Haiyun’s doorstep at 5 AM to bring him in rather than simply phoning him up and asking him to stop by police headquarters later in the day to answer some questions is part of the issue, as is the larger question of what Rabbi Haiyun’s treatment says about the precarious position all my R.A. colleagues occupy in Israel. I would like to write today about both those issues.

Whatever its ultimate reason, however, the overkill here—treating a scholarly, gentle man as though he were a dangerous drug lord who, if he had somehow been tipped off that the police were on their way, could easily have been on a private jet out of the country before anyone was the wiser—is an integral part of the story, not an amusing side-detail. Indeed, the aggressive behavior of the police was clearly meant not simply to accomplish its overt goal of bringing an individual in for questioning by the police, an everyday event that would normally receive no press coverage at all, but something darker and more nefarious. Nor can it be irrelevant that Rabbi Haiyun was never actually arrested at all, merely questioned and released. Could the real goal of the whole incident merely have been to intimidate the rabbi (and, by extension, his and my colleagues who serve congregations in Israel) and thus to discourage him and them from repeating the dastardly deed of which Rabbi Haiyun stood accused: marrying a couple without registering that marriage with the Chief Rabbinate? It feels like we’re getting warmer.

But whatever the “real” point of arresting my colleague in his pajamas was, the specific complaint lodged against Rabbi Haiyun places him in a strange, Catch-22-like situation: obliged by law to register the weddings he performs —a 2015 amendment to the Law for Marriage and Divorce specifically stipulates that anyone at all who performs a wedding ceremony for a couple and then fails to register it with the Chief Rabbinate is liable to a two-year prison sentence—but also not permitted to register them since he is not an Orthodox rabbi certified by the above-mentioned Chief Rabbinate, Rabbi Haiyun’s dilemma is thus part legal, part procedural, and part existential.

The reality is that non-Orthodox rabbis perform weddings in Israel all the time. Joan and I attended one just last summer, a lovely garden ceremony overlooking the walls of Jerusalem presided over by my colleague, Rabbi Mauricio Balter, executive director of Masorti Olami, the international organization of Conservative and Masorti synagogues outside North America and Israel. When I asked the bride if she and her groom were planning eventually to go to Cyprus or Canada (where her parents grew up) to have the kind of civil wedding that the State of Israel would recognize—since weddings performed by non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are not recognized by the State either, not only not by the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate—she explained that they had no such intent and that it simply didn’t matter to them what the Ministry of the Interior thought regarding their marital status. They were being married, she further explained, under a chuppah in Jerusalem by a rabbi they respected and whose work they would not insult by seeking some meaningless piece of paper in some foreign land just to placate the forces of darkness that govern religious life in Israel. She spoke passionately, which impressed me. Her husband, an oleh from Russia, seemed on precisely the same page. When I asked Rabbi Balter if he wasn’t worried about being in contravention of the law, he told me that that amendment to the Marriage Law was passed as a sop to the ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, but that it was brazenly and openly flouted by rabbis of many different varieties with no discernable consequences at all. Was the daring Haifa raid that brought Rabbi Haiyun in for questioning meant to signal a sea-change in that policy of benign neglect and principled non-application of a scurrilous law? Or was it just an example of overzealousness on the part of police officers eager to placate the local rabbinate but not specifically intending to send anyone any sort of message through their actions? The bottom line is that it’s hard to say. Both alternatives sound plausible. But behind this particular incident is a far more complicated issue in desperate need of resolution.

The notion of a “chief” rabbinate—that is, a specific body recognized by the State as the sole arbiter of all religious issues that affect Jewish people in any way—that specific version of an ultimate religious authority that has no legal obligation to act in any specific way other than however it wishes and which has the right to disenfranchise and delegitimize any rabbis deemed excessively liberal in belief or practice, is unfamiliar to Americans, but remains a feature of Jewish life in many Western nations. There are, for example, such “chief” rabbinates in the U.K. and in France, as well as in Ireland, South Africa, Russia, and several other countries. Invariably, these institutions are run by Orthodox rabbis who discriminate openly and, in at least some cases, proudly against non-Orthodox rabbis. None of them stands for much other than the preservation of its own power and authority. As a people, we would be better off without any of them.

Interestingly, there is no actual basis in Jewish law for such an institution. Yes, there was once a Sanhedrin that functioned as the ultimate religious authority for all Jews. But that was a feature of antiquity that was in decline for centuries when the Emperor Theodosius II final dealt it its coup de grâce in 426 CE. There have been attempts to revive the Sanhedrin over the ages, including Napoleon’s strange (and unsuccessful) 1806 effort to do just that. But the notion of specific nations having their own “chief” rabbinates was actually a concept foisted on that nation’s Jews by secular governments primarily interested in creating an internal Jewish body that could assist the secular authorities in collecting taxes and collecting vital statistics regarding that nation’s Jewish population.

The history of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel is part of that larger picture. Its story begins in 1842, when the Ottoman Turks combined the offices of “Hakham Bashi,” the rabbi in Istanbul (then still called Constantinople) who represented the Jewish community in the sultan’s court, with the office of Rishon L’tziyon, who represented the Jews of Turkish Palestine before the Turkish government, to create a kind of proto-chief rabbinate for the Ottoman Empire.  Later, under British rule, the High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine “improved” on the situation bequeathed him by the Turks by adding a chief Ashkenazic rabbi to the mix and thus creating an officially recognized “chief” rabbinate that could provide an address to which the British could turn when they wished to speak with the wider Jewish community regarding religious matters. And then, in 1947, as part of the pre-independence negotiations that led to the founding of the State, Ben Gurion sought to bring the religious political parties into the future government by agreeing that the British-sanctioned rabbinate would become the so-called “Chief” Rabbinate of Israel.

And from there things simply evolved to the moment of Rabbi Haiyun’s arrest earlier this summer. I’m sure some of the rabbis associated with the Chief Rabbinate must be decent, learned people. (Nor would it be fair to tar them all with the same brush merely because so many have been accused of corruption, mostly famously Rabbi Yona Metzger, once the chief Ashkenazic rabbi of Israel, who was actually sent to prison after pleading guilty to charges of corruption, theft, money-laundering, conspiracy to commit a felony, and breach of public trust.) But this is not really an issue about the decency or worthiness of individuals at all, but rather something much larger relating to Israel itself and the relationship of its Jewish citizens to their own Jewishness. For secular Israelis, the fundamentalist intransigency of the Chief Rabbinate is an excellent reason to feel good about remaining distant from religious observance. For right-leaning Orthodox Jews, the Chief Rabbinate serves primarily to justify their own views on most things. But for more liberal Orthodox types and for all Israelis affiliated with the non-Orthodox movements, the monopoly that the Chief Rabbinate holds over all matters relating to personal status—including even who may be buried in a Jewish cemetery and all matters pertaining to marriage and divorce—is an intolerable infringement on the kind of religious freedom we Americans take for granted and of which Israelis can only dream.

I belong to a fine Conservative congregation in Jerusalem. The congregation has its own building and its own rabbi, and boasts a large cadre of dedicated volunteers who keep things running. Most, I think, are pleased to have nothing to do with Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and are proud of the degree to which they function on their own and under their own steam. But knowing that their rabbi risks arrest if he performs a wedding and then fails to register it in a way that he is not permitted to do is disheartening, to say the least. (He is barred from presiding over congregational funerals too, at least in the sense that American Jews would understand the concept.) And so the members of Moreshet Avraham—all deeply patriotic Israelis, almost all veterans of the IDF, each fully dedicated to building up Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael—live a kind of double existence: free of the Rabbinate when in shul and under its thumb when they are obliged to interact with the government in any way that involved religious ritual or practice. As a frequent visitor rather than a permanent resident, I myself can easily have nothing at all to do with any rabbis associated with the Chief Rabbinate. But my friends in shul and in our neighborhood are not always that lucky.

Rabbi Haiyun’s arrest could have been a momentary act of idiotic overkill on the part of some overzealous police officers. Or it could have been a monitory bellwether of things to come. No issue divides American Jews from the Israeli government more profoundly than the dismissive disenfranchisement of the large majority of our American-based religious leaders and their (and my) Israeli-based colleagues from any positions of power or authority in Israel. If the Israeli government is hoping to count on diaspora Jewry for its support—and particularly on American Jewry—then the time has clearly come to dismantle the Chief Rabbinate. As the late, great Aretha Franklin would have put it, all we want is a little respect!