Feeling Hopeful

Several different people have asked in the last few days what I’m hoping Pesach will bring us all this year. It’s an interesting question, more so than I thought at first blush. Passover, of course, is a highlight of the year for us all. Families come together. The weather is usually dramatically improved over what it had been just weeks earlier. As a result, the whole effort to clean out our kitchens takes on a barely-hidden second level of meaning: yes, we are acting in accordance with tradition and law to rid our homes of even the last consequential crumbs of bread or any other leavened product, but we are also—and at the very same time—cleaning out the past year and its musty, fusty residue and preparing ourselves for a new year. Like I suppose it must also be for other Jewish Americans, the lead-up to Pesach is also a time of reflection for me personally: as I slowly pack away my snow boots and start trying to remember where I stored my walking shorts last fall when it was finally too cold to wear them, I feel a year falling away and something new dawning on the horizon. What will it bring us? That, pace Hamlet, is the question!

It’s always the question. But how much the more so this year with its pandemical accouterments, with its facemasks and endless CDC guidelines, with the scramble for vaccination in full swing as the age-limit drops and more and more of us get in line for our shots. Although we are obviously not through the viral woods just quite yet, things are feeling hopeful in a way they weren’t just a couple of months back. And so, as Pesach dawns, I find myself—and here I answer the question I led off with—I feel myself suffused with a sense of hopefulness and unanticipated optimism. I suppose readers all know the joke about the difference between a Jewish optimist and a Jewish pessimist—the pessimist says, “Things couldn’t get any worse,” while the optimist responds, “Of course, they can!”—but even so, even despite our ethnic proclivity to expect disaster around every corner (which trait some would say we have elevated to an actual art form), I find myself hoping for the best, feeling buoyed by my hopeful sense that the worst really is behind us and normalcy will soon return to our beleaguered land.

The first Pesach had something of the same feel to it.

There’s more to that thought than you might at first think. Scripture—and this is particularly true of the Torah—is a literary work intended to present the story of Israel’s origins to an audience eager to learn the backstory to the great covenant that Jews in later centuries understood to bind them to God. As such, the laws that are the stuff of the covenant are interspersed with the narrative to create a kind of patchwork feel to the whole. To shul-Jews who hear the Torah read aloud weekly, this aspect of the text is so familiar as to be both unremarkable and almost unnoticeable. And yet it is also the case, at least here and there, that the juxtaposition of law and narrative creates a slightly misleading impression for those reading or listening only casually.  And a good example of that has to do precisely with the first Pesach, the experience in Egypt of which all subsequent Passovers have been the echo in history.

Set into the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt are all the rules that govern the paschal offering, the zevach pesach. The rules are somehow both complicated and simple: the Israelites are to procure a lamb or a kid on the tenth of the month, keep it safe it four days and then, on the fourteenth of the month they are to slaughter it, paint their doorposts and lintels with its blood, and eat it roasted with matzah and some bitter foodstuff. Scripture then quickly, almost imperceptibly, shifts into the future: this is not a one-time thing, it turns out, but the harbinger of a future holiday, one the observance of which will constitute a memorial, a festival, and a chukkat olam (i.e., a permanent statute). Furthermore, Passover—the holiday being heralded by this, its earlier iteration—is to be not simply “a” festival, but “the” festival of the Jewish year, the one that will, among other things, frame permanently the relationship of Israelites to their non-Israelite neighbors, to the citizenry of other nations, to the world itself: liberation from bondage will henceforth be the platform upon which the Israelite nation will stand for all time as the citizenry looks out at the world, the foundational story of which the rest of the nation’s history will be at least in some way derivative.

It’s a stirring passage, one known to most. But it obscures, at least slightly, the predicament of the actual Israelites to whom Moses is speaking. These are slaves who are being told to put their hiking boots on and get ready their walking sticks: departure, Moses tells them unambiguously, is imminent. Left undiscussed is how this must have played itself out among the Israelites themselves. Again and again, God has—speaking from their perspective—failed to get Pharaoh to grant them their freedom even for just a few days, let alone actually to free them from bondage. And this failure has repeated itself not once or twice, but on nine separate occasions. (The ancient Israelites had no reason to expect specifically ten plagues: they experienced them one by one—and each one was a failure: the wonders and signs may have been impressive, but they were still slaves, still not free to go, still being told to trust in the future without actually having been made free.)

What Moses tells them is, at best, unlikely: that God will bring yet another plague against the Egyptians and this one actually will work. And yet they do what Moses tells them to do: unsure as they must have been that this is going to work, having every reason to be suspicious, knowing they’ve been told before that Pharaoh will collapse under the weight of God’s imposing presence, they still do what they are told, painting their doorposts with blood, readying their walking sticks and their hiking boots, eating the meat according to their instructions…and waiting.

And then, finally, the midnight hour came. The tenth plague was the most awful imaginable and the nation and its hard-hearted leader could finally bear no more. The Israelites went free…but they must have been more surprised than impressed. For us, Pesach is the festival of freedom. But for the actual Israelites whose story rests just behind the narrative, Pesach—the first Pesach, the one undertaken in the shadow of all those many failed attempts to get Pharaoh to let the people go—for those people, it must have been a festival of hope, of faith, and of courage. They had every reason not to go along with the plan—they had, after all, been down that path nine times in the past—but they felt themselves able to hope, to dream, to look into the future and see freedom from the oppressive circumstances of the only life they had ever known.

I would like to suggest we adopt that line of thinking for this year’s celebration. I too am looking into the future this year, thinking carefully about what may yet come in the course of the next months. The numbers are going in the right direction. Although we are still reeling from the loss of well over half a million of our co-citizens to this horrific virus, including more than 3000 in Nassau County alone, the latest numbers seem encouraging. The vaccination program, despite its chaotic start, is working: as of this week more than a quarter of all American adults have been vaccinated at least one time and 14% of our co-citizens have been fully vaccinated. It’s tempting to see some light at the end of the tunnel, even though the flip side of those statistics—that 75% of Americans have yet to get their first shot and a full 86% have yet to receive both—is beyond sobering.

Still, Pesach is our festival of hope in the future, of national willingness to ignore the failures of the past and feel sanguine and optimistic about the future, of readiness to trust the leadership of our leaders and feel secure that, at least eventually, we will leave this state of viral bondage and become the fully free citizens of a fully immunized nation. Hopefulness is what’s called for…and Pesach is just the right context for the cultivation of hope. Therefore, I’m allowing myself to feel positive and hopeful…and I invite you all to join me in embracing both those emotions.

What I Saw on Mulberry Street

At first, I was slightly amused by the whole brouhaha that followed the announcement last week by the estate of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, that it would stop republishing and selling six of the famous author’s books, including such classics as And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, and McElligot’s Pool.  I know all these books; they were classics of children’s literature so long ago that I remember reading them when I actually was a child and enjoying them immensely. We all did. Dr. Seuss was part of the children’s canon back then: read by all, touted endlessly by librarians and teachers, and considered controversial—as far as I recall—by none. Just the opposite, actually: if there was one children’s author from back then whose whimsy was deemed charming and fully acceptable, it would certainly have been Dr. Seuss.

But times have changed. And there is no question that illustrations in all the books in question feature caricatures of various minority groups, particularly Asians (depicted with slanty lines for eyes, pigtails, and conical coolie-style hats) and Black people (shown shirtless, shoeless, and wearing grass skirts). On the other hand, Dr. Seuss himself was a powerful enemy of fascism who published more than 400 wartime cartoons savaging Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese leadership. And some of his books were thinly veiled anti-fascist parables: it is widely understood, for example, that Yertle the Turtle (1958) was meant as a direct attack on fascism (apparently dictatorial Yertle originally sported a Hitler-style moustache) and that Horton Hears a Who (1954) was meant as a kind of encouraging parable about the American occupation of Japan. More to the point for Jewish readers is that The Sneetches (1961), a book that the estate will continue to publish, is a focused, double-barreled attack on racism and anti-Semitism and was understood that way from the time it was published. Nor was this imputed meaning—the author himself was widely quoted at the time as saying formally, that The Sneetches “was inspired by my opposition to anti-Semitism.”

So we are left with an interesting dilemma. Geisel, a life-long Lutheran who actually suffered a bit of anti-Semitic discrimination in college when he was mistaken by some bigoted classmates for a Jew, was a proud anti-fascist, a virulent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, and a true American patriot. And he published some books that featured images which feel—at least by today’s standards—racist or at the very least inappropriate for books pitched at impressionable children. The managers of his estate solved their problem the easy way by deciding simply not to republish six of the man’s books, thus ending the controversy by eliminating the problem. An alternate approach, of course, would have been to re-edit the books, eliminate the offensive imagery, and bring out versions that feature the original text with illustrations tailored more precisely to suit modern sensitivity. And speaking specifically as a Jewish American, the fact that there aren’t any Stürmer-style caricatures of hook-nosed Jews holding huge bags of money in these books shouldn’t be a factor in our evaluation of the evidence: if anything, the thought of Black parents cringing when they come across racist caricatures of Africans should be more than resonant with Jewish parents able to imagine being in exactly the same position and feeling exactly the same level of hurt and outrage. And that brings me to the question that feels to me to be at the heart of the matter: should works deemed utterly non-offensive in their day be altered, either slightly or dramatically, to suit evolving standards with respect to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc.? It’s an interesting question, one that goes to the heart of the question of what literature actually is and what role it could or should play in society.

There are, of course, lots of examples of books that have been successfully revised to suit modern tastes. Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None was originally published in the U.K. as Ten Little Negroes (and the third word on the cover was specifically not “Negroes”). That was deemed offensive here, so the publisher just made up a different title. (The English publishers eventually did the same and brought the book out under the marginally less offensive title Ten Little Indians.) In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a favorite of my own children years ago, Roald Dahl originally depicted the Oompa-Loompas who worked in the factory as African pygmies and the depiction was basically of them as slaves and certainly not as dignified, salaried employees. A century earlier, Dickens himself was prevailed upon to tone down Fagan’s Jewishness in Oliver Twist, which he did by halfheartedly removing some of the references to Fagan’s ethnicity. Of course, when the author himself makes the revisions we are having an entirely different discussion: surely the actual authors of books should feel free make whatever changes they wish to their own work. The question is whether the world should “fix” published works to make them suit issues that were on no one’s radar, or hardly anyone’s radar, when the book was written and published.

Some readers will recall that one of my pandemic coping exercises last spring was embarking on a re-read of Mark Twain, a favorite author of my younger years. I was surprised how well many of his books stood the test of time, but I found myself most engaged of all by my re-read of Huckleberry Finn. Widely and entirely reasonably acclaimed as an American classic, the book is basically about the relationship of Huck and Jim, who is almost invariably referred to as Negro Jim. (Again, that’s not the word that appears in the book.) Of course, Mark Twain was writing about Missouri life in the 1830s and he himself was from Missouri and a child of that era. So he certainly knew how people spoke and I’m entirely sure that that word was in common use to reference Black people. Today, that word is anathema to all and is considered unusable in normal discourse, written or oral. But what about the book itself? Should it be “fixed” by having the dialogue altered specifically to reflect a dialect of English spoken in those days by no one at all? Or should the book itself be dropped from high school or even college reading lists as something too offensive to allow, let alone to require, young people to read? Huckleberry Finn is an interesting book for many different reasons, not least of all because Jim, a slave, is depicted sympathetically as a man of character, virtue, and strong moral values—a fact made all the more poignant by the fact that he is depicted as almost wholly uneducated. Indeed, Jim is a grown man with a wife and family, while Huck is a boy of thirteen or fourteen and the clear implication is that while the white world has failed utterly to make Huck into a decent adolescent, Black Jim, an uneducated slave, is quite able to bring him to the threshold of decency by showing him how to behave in an upright manner. So the book is hardly anti-Black. Just the opposite is far more true: in many ways, Jim, not Huck, is the hero of the book. And yet the constant use of that word is beyond jarring. Editions have been published for use in school that simply omit the word or change it. Is that a rational compromise? Or does that kind of bowdlerization deprive the book of its essential honesty, of its ability to depict a society as it truly was and not as moderns vaguely wish it had been? It’s not that easy to say.

When I was deeply involved in the research that led me to publish my translation of the Psalms, I became aware—slightly to my naïve amazement—of the existence of Christian editions of the Psalms from which all references to internecine strife, violent clashes between opposing groups in old Jerusalem, the corruption that led at least some poets to condemn the Temple priesthood, and the deep alienation from God with which at least some psalmists struggled—that the psalms depicting all of that challenging stuff had been nicely excised from the book so as to create a book of “nice” poems. (This parallels a Christian edition of the Old Testament I once saw from which the entire book of Leviticus had been omitted, presumably lest readers be offended by the notion that animal sacrifice and the safeguarding of ritual purity were essential elements of the covenant between God and Israel.) Those editions of the Psalms struck me as ridiculous and precisely because the resultant book was specifically nothing like the original work and gave a totally incorrect impression of the original work. But would one of the Dr. Seuss books under discussion really  have been substantially altered by some of the drawings of black or Asian people replaced with more respectful images?

My feeling is that the Dr. Seuss affair is indicative of a larger issue in society. Obviously, changing a few drawings in a book is not such a big deal and is something that I’m sure happens without fanfare in the world of publishing all the time. But this specific issue seems to have struck such a chord with so many precisely because Dr. Seuss is deemed, not entirely incorrectly, as representative of a simpler world—by which term people generally mean one in which it wasn’t deemed necessary to care what smaller groups in society felt or thought. We’ve come a long way since then, and rightly so. The Seuss estate could certainly have felt justified in commissioning some new drawing to avoid going against modern feelings about ethnic or racial stereotyping. The books themselves would have been substantially the same. Once that line is crossed, however, and the book no longer is the same as it was—“fixing” the language in Huckleberry Finn, for example, or eliminating Shylock’s Jewishness from the play or Othello’s blackness—that is missing almost entirely the reason literature exists in the first place: to stir up emotion, to challenge readers’ preconceptions, and to educate—in the literal sense of the world: to draw the reader forward to a new level of understanding of the world of the author…and of the reader as well. 

To Boldly Go

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched the video released by NASA last month of Perseverance         descending towards the surface of Mars and then gently landing on it. (Click here to watch. You won’t be sorry!) I don’t know much—or rather, anything—about the aerodynamics of space parachutes, but watching this spacecraft slow down from its initial descent speed of 1000 miles per hour and then gently plop down in the center of the thirty-mile-wide Jazero Crater is just riveting. The event itself was not unprecedented—an earlier visitor named Curiosity landed on the Martian surface in 2012, but it didn’t have any cameras aboard to record the landing. (It’s still there, by the way, completing today as I write its 3137^th day on Mars.) Nor was Curiosity the first vehicle to set itself down on Mars—that would be the old Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe that landed on Mars in 1971 but only managed to convey data to earth for 14.5 seconds before conking out. And there have been other attempts as well, most notably probably the Mars Exploration Rovers of 2003 and 2004.

What intrigues me the most, I suppose, is that the point of sending Perseverance to Mars is not to collect soil samples or to chart the geography of the planet, but specifically to attempt to answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. It’s widely understood that Mars once flowed with water. So the question—way simpler to ask, apparently, than to answer—is whether we can find the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that could have flourished when Mars was wet. Perseverance, a rover the size of your average car, also has along for the ride a little helicopter named Ingenuity to fly overhead and attempt to see what would not be visible from the ground. I’m completely into it! But I have to stop thinking of Perseverance and Ingenuity as the Martian versions of Star Wars’ C-3PO and R2-D2. (That would be silly. Or would it be?)

Like many people my age, I suppose, I grew up dreaming about the planets and about the possibility of human beings actually visiting them. Nor was I alone among my classmates at P.S. 196 to dream in that direction: space adventurism was just part of who we were back then. (I was eight years old when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, nine when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet.) I remember both those events clearly, but more than that I remember the specific way that neither felt like an end unto itself, but far more meaningfully as one more step forward on the great journey that would eventually bring us to Mars and beyond.

It may have been a generational thing. My parents, for example, did not dream of Mars. For them, in fact, the whole space thing was more of a contest than a science project and the specific point was not to do any specific thing at all, only to do it before the Russians got there and did it first.

But for me and my pals in fifth grade the whole space thing had nothing to do with beating the Soviets and everything to do with conquering new frontiers. Nor was this something we intuited on our own: when that disembodied voice opened every new episode of Star Trek (our favorite TV show, and by far) by referencing space as “the final frontier,” we all understood it to be saying almost clearly that our brave astronauts were merely the latter-day descendants of the brave settlers who risked everything to move west in their Conestoga wagons and establish an American presence in the western part of North America back in the nineteenth century. (That the parallel was not at all that exact—in that the crew of the Enterprise was not seeking out that “new life” and those “new civilizations” so that they could push them off their own soil and settle there themselves—did not dawn on me back then. Or at least as far as I can remember, it didn’t.)

I was on my way into twelfth grade when Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and the sixteen-year-old me was still possessed of the same enthusiasm for our nation’s space program that the younger me felt so keenly. But I had evolved in other ways by then: I still dreamt of travel other planets, maybe eventually even to other solar systems, but an element of social justice had crept into my field of vision and part of the point of pursuing the exploration of space, my hip teenaged self thought, should be precisely to use each successive discovery as a way to combat the kind of parochialism and provincialism that allowed so many of our fellow earthlings—centuries after Copernicus—still to think of our home planet as the center of the universe.

By the 1970s, of course, no one would admit to actually thinking that. Everybody understood perfectly well that the planets were in orbit around the sun, that the solar system itself was part of a much larger galaxy that contained not some other stars, but about 400 billion of them. But although no normal person would have insisted that the sun and the stars travel around the earth, the world continued to behave as though that were the case, as though the earth were the center of all existence. The adolescent me saw in space exploration the ultimate way to combat that kind of self-serving provincialism…and, perhaps, in so doing to ween humanity away from the supposition that the universe exists to serve their needs.

By college, I had moved on in my space-fantasy-life to wonder more seriously about the search for extraterrestrial life and to wonder, given our endless interest in meeting the neighbors, if it could just possibly be the case that the neighbors were just as interested in meeting us as we were them. And if that were the case, then was it not just a matter of time before we actually would hear from them? And by “hear from them, “ I meant really hear from them, not via a momentary glimpse of a mysterious silver orb in the nighttime sky or an otherwise inexplicable blast of radio noise from somewhere out there in space—but in the specific way the residents of Hispaniola heard from Columbus on December 6, 1492, when he landed on their island—where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are today—and simultaneously changed the history of that island, this hemisphere, and the world utterly and forever in as long as it took him to step off his ship onto dry land. And yet those neighbors have never come a-calling. Or have they?

A few years ago, I wrote to you all about Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped reddish rock about 2600 feet long that scientists noticed one day hurtling through the cosmos. (To read what I had to say then, click here.) I left the matter unresolved, but had it drawn back to my attention just recently with the publication of Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January of this year. Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard and the chairman of its Department of Astronomy, has studied all the data and concluded that the most likely explanation for the existence of Oumuamua in the first place is that it is a kind of light sail, a spaceship that gets its energy from sunlight or starlight and that was either launched by some alien civilization in our direction or else set out in the cosmos as kind of in-place space buoy (in which case it would be more correct to say that it was we who ran into it). The book was reviewed both worshipfully and harshly—some of the reviews were respectful, while others were filled with the same kind of sarcasm born of ill ease and disbelief that once greeted the theories of Copernicus or Galileo. I read the book and enjoyed it, finding the argumentation plausible and the conclusions, if not fully convincing, then at least intriguing and challenging.

The chances are excellent that we will never find out if Professor Loeb was right or wrong about Oumuamua. It—Oumuamua itself—is long gone into interstellar space; we’ll debate it for a while, then let it fade into the background among other unproven theories relating to the distant neighbors we feel certain must exist but have, at least as yet, been unable to find any clear trace of. But I continue to feel certain that the neighbors are out there…and that they day will come when they come to call and we on earth finally have no choice but to seize just how tiny a piece of God’s great universe our little planet actually does constitute. Will that happen anytime soon? There’s no way to know…but if Professor Loeb is right about Oumuamua, the doorbell could ring now any time. It’s clear that Perseverance is not going to find Mars filled with little green Martians eager and able to establish diplomatic (and every other kind of) relations with their counterparts on Earth. But each step we take towards exploring the cosmos makes it that much more likely that we will attract the attention of extraterrestrial space watchers gazing at the heavens and waiting for signs of life on a planet other than their own.

 

 

 

This Week in Israel

There are two ways to approach this week’s decision by the Supreme Court of Israel regarding conversions to Judaism undertaken by non-Orthodox Jewish groups: as a big deal and as not such a big deal.

The not-such-a-big-deal approach would have to be rooted in a narrow appraisal of what actually happened: the court voted that, with regard to their right to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, the Ministry of the Interior does not have the right to distinguish between individuals who convert to Judaism based on the specific rabbinic group that oversaw their conversion…and that this obligation not to discriminate between converts applies even if the conversion in question took place in Israel itself. That last sentence will require some unpacking for at least some, but the underlying idea is simple enough: the Ministry had been obliged by law for decades to respect the conversions of converts from all denominational streams within Judaism if those conversions took place outside Israel. Weirdly, though, this entirely reasonable policy was denied people who convert to Judaism in Israel itself, where the right of the ultra-Orthodox to control those instruments of government that determine matters of personal status—marriage, divorce, Jewishness, etc.—has practically gone without saying since the state was founded seventy-three years ago. On top of that (in the weirdness scale, at least) is the fact that we are, at the end of the day, speaking about only very few people: there aren’t that many non-Jews in Israel who are interested in conversion and the Masorti movement, as the Conservative movement is called in Israel, and the Reform movement together only convert between thirty and forty individuals in a given calendar year. So it’s not like the decision is going to affect a lot of people or alter the fabric of Israeli society in any meaningful way. Why then, the naïve outside observer might wonder, is everybody reacting so strongly to this week’s decision?

It’s a good question. For one thing, the matter has been simmering on the back-burner for a long time. (Click here, e.g., to read a New York Times article from 2005 about the original court case relating to conversions outside of Israel.) But it’s also true that civil rights issues—both as played out in the court of public opinion and as tried in real court—are often so narrow in scope as to sound petty or even unimportant…other than to those who realize the potential implications and ramifications of the decision the public or the court is being challenged to reach. (To cite an American example, it would be missing the point almost entirely to think that all that legal wrangling in the 1960s about desegregating lunch counters or public buses was about luncheonettes and buses, as opposed to being about the larger issues they represented with respect to the civil rights of Black Americans.) And that is, I think, what we have here: a Supreme Court decision that will affect fewer than four dozen people in the course of an average year, but which has ramifications for Israeli society that will extend far beyond the narrow scope of decision itself.

As though they were actors stepping out from the wings to recite the speeches an unseen playwright put in their mouths, the various spokespeople for the various segments of the Israeli population duly appeared in one media-context or another to deliver their pre-assigned soliloquies. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate, a group wholly under the sway of the ultra-Orthodox, was almost sputteringly speechless in its dismay, predicting the imminent collapse of Israeli society if even one single convert to Judaism who hadn’t committed fully to a hareidi lifestyle were ever to be permitted to slip past the gatekeepers. For their part, of course, the spokespeople for Masorti and Reform Judaism were on-line instantly to express their delight. And the largest secular civil rights organizations also spoke uniformly approvingly of the decision. I even noted some actual converts to Judaism putting their two p’rutot in and expressing their gratitude to the court for its decision enabling them to live as they choose in a free country that, at least in theory, has always guaranteed the equality of its citizens before the law.

As is always the case, however, there are several elephants in the room.

The first is that the Supreme Court decision affects the Ministry of the Interior only and requires that it, as a branch of the government, not distinguish arbitrarily between individuals based on data deemed by the court to be extraneous to the adjudication of their situations. What that means practically is that the Supreme Court decision does not oblige the Rabbinate itself to consider converts outside of Orthodoxy as valid Jewish people—and in a country where there is no such thing as civil marriage and Jews can only marry with the approval of the Rabbinate, that matters a lot. (There isn’t even civil burial in Israel: the cemeteries and the Burial Societies that serve them are too in the hands of the Rabbinate.) So these handful of converts, whose status with respect to matters handled by the Ministry of the Interior has now been settled, still have a Sisyphean task before them if they wish to do any of the various things most Israelis take for granted, among them getting married and having the government recognize the union, getting divorced and being enabled to re-marry, dying and being buried in a Jewish cemetery. So it wouldn’t be that wrong to say that this week’s decision creates, rather than heals, an important schism in Israeli society by creating a class of civil Jews who have the formal status, but only very few of the basic rights, Jews born to the faith take for granted. So that’s one of the elephants in the room, known to all but mentioned, as far as I could see, by almost none in the wake of this week’s decision.

And then there are the Russians. This is huge. Over a million Jews from the former Soviet Union have immigrated to Israel since 1989 and today those immigrants and their descendants constitute more than 15% of Israel’s population. The detail that distinguishes the Russians and other FSU types from other large immigrant groups in Israeli society like Jews from Iraq or Yemen is that something like a full quarter are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly related to the fact that Jewish life was suppressed for so long under the Communism that there were relatively few Jewish families that remained fully intact and intermarriage with non-Jews was rife for decades. Layered over that fact is the reality that many of these people—most of them, in fact—have been living in Israel for decades now, speak fluent Hebrew, have served in the IDF, and think of themselves as “real” Israelis. Except that the Chief Rabbinate refuses them the right to marry, to be buried in Jewish cemeteries, etc. No one seems sure how to fix the problem either—nor does this week’s Supreme Court decision go very far towards finding a solution since it only affects the policies of the Interior Ministry and the immigrants from the FSU are all citizens anyway.

The closest parallel for Americans to consider is the one between these immigrants from the FSU and the undocumented immigrants in our own country. Everybody agrees that having 11 million undocumented souls living in our midst but not paying taxes, not paying into the Social Security system, not feeling free to phone 911 if they are in danger, not participating in national or local elections—the one thing upon which everybody seems to agree is that the status quo is intolerable and has to be addressed. But how exactly to address it is a different question entirely. The notion of rounding up all 11 million people living illegally in this country and deporting them to wherever it is they came from in the first place is an idea that appeals to many in theory, but lacks any real practical possibility of ever happening. The ideas put forward by the current administration, and particularly by Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, seem to presuppose that the only real solution is to find a path for these people to seek citizenship that would involve some level of catch-up (for example, paying taxes on money earned in the U.S. during their time here but on which they never paid income tax) and would exclude criminals. Eventually, we have to deal—one way or the other—with these millions and millions of people!

And the parallel is almost exact: Israel cannot simply look away and ignore the fact that 15% of its Jewish population simply isn’t Jewish enough for the Chief Rabbinate. (That they are considered more than Jewish enough to serve in the IDF only adds fuel to the fire.) And the only practical solution has to do with conversion: since these people were already not born Jewish, at least not technically, a procedure has to be evolved for them formally to embrace Judaism and solve the problem that way. Since such a solution would almost definitely have to involve the more liberal denominations whose understanding of religion in general and Judaism in particular are more sophisticated, more scholarly, and more intellectually and historically justifiable than the extremist Orthodoxy of the Chief Rabbinate, the Supreme Court decision this week speaks indirectly to that whole set of issues by bestowing the mantle of legitimacy—if not in the eyes of the Rabbinate, then at least in the eyes of the State—on people who convert through movements more given over to the principles of tolerance, non-judgmentalism, pluralism, and intellectual integrity.

So those are the two elephants hiding in full sight for most Israelis. And that is why this week’s Supreme Court decision not only matters, but has the potential to be truly transformative in the effort to create a kind of Israeli Judaism that rejects the kind of know-nothing fundamentalism that is the hallmark of the kind of Judaism represented by the Chief Rabbinate and in its place embraces a version of Judaism rooted in acceptance, fairness, tolerance, and spiritual integrity.