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.