Transform the Chief Rabbi’s Office
Yitro, 5774
Shmuel Herzfeld
On my recent trip to Israel I had a lengthy meeting in the office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel. After leaving that meeting, now more than ever I feel that for the sake of the Jewish people around the world, and for the sake of the State of Israel, the Chief Rabbi’s office is in need of a major transformation and reformation.
Before one can get married in the State of Israel the Chief Rabbi’s office needs proof that the couple is Jewish. If the couple in question has immigrated from abroad then a letter is needed from a diaspora rabbi that attests to the couple’s Jewishness in order to permit the couple to get married in Israel.
Recently, a couple came to Rabbi Avi Weiss and asked him for such a letter. Rabbi Weiss submitted this letter in the same manner that he has done for the past forty years. Only this time the couple was told that Rabbi Weiss’ testimony was not sufficient. In other words, the Chief Rabbi’s office overturned forty years of practice and no longer believed Rabbi Weiss. The Chief Rabbi sent Rabbi Weiss a letter stating that Rabbi Weiss’ testimony is suspect because he engages in practices that are not in accordance with Jewish custom. (At the meeting one of the representatives of the Chief Rabbi told me that they heard that Rabbi Weiss has a female cantor.) The letter also stated that this information was given to the Chief Rabbi’s office by a rabbi who is an official of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA).
On Sunday, January 12, along with Rabbi Weiss’s attorney, Assaf Benmelech who is also a board member of Ne’emanei Torah V’Avodah, I had a lengthy meeting with the relevant parties at the Chief Rabbi’s office. Despite the fact that at that meeting the Chief Rabbi’s office entirely retreated from its original statement about Rabbi Weiss and has now issued a second letter in which they state that they fully accept Rabbi Weiss’ testimony, I left that meeting more concerned than ever about the role of the Chief Rabbi’s office.
Many people have written about this and about the problems associated with the formal centralization of religion under the Chief Rabbi’s office. But I want to talk about it from the unique perspective of having sat with them and seen how they operate.
There are two issues that I saw from the inside. One is a narrow issue that relates to how the Chief Rabbi’s office conducted itself inappropriately with respect to Rabbi Weiss and the other is a broader issue that relates to the role of the Chief Rabbi in general. Both of these issues demonstrate why the Chief Rabbi’s office desperately needs to be transformed.
As it relates to the narrow issue: The manner in which the Chief Rabbi’s office acted, demonstrated to me that they are unqualified to be arbiters of who from the diaspora can get married in the State of Israel.
A narrow view of how they act shows that the basis for all their activity is not halakhic but political.
The Chief Rabbi’s office told us on Sunday that they actually do not have any questions about Rabbi Weiss’ ability to provide testimony. They said that the whole matter was a mistake by a rabbi on their staff named, Itamar Tubul. Rabbi Tubul is basically a bureaucrat who they explained is not sufficiently sensitive to the American Jewish community and incompetent and unfit for his position. According to their description of the matter, Rabbi Tubul had called an official from the RCA about Rabbi Weiss and the Rabbi at the RCA told Rabbi Tubal that Rabbi Weiss was problematic.
I asked who they spoke with from the RCA and they refused to tell me. They said, “If we tell you our sources then no one will ever want to speak with us again.”
I told them that their actions were unacceptable and more in accordance with a Soviet style court than with Halakhah. They accept secret testimony about people and use it to discredit their reputations and thereby affect the lives of innocent people who are trying to move to Israel and get married in the Jewish state.
I said, “Let there be sunshine in the land. If someone has a problem with another rabbi and they are willing to say it, then it should be a matter of public record. Otherwise, we are discrediting rabbis on the basis of petty politics and secret lists.”
Not only is this practice of the Chief Rabbi unethical. It is also against Jewish law and against the spirit of our Torah.
Maimonides rules, “Ein mekablin edus elah befnei baal din, we receive testimony only in the presence of the litigants” (Edut, 3:11). In this case, the Chief Rabbi not only accepted testimony about Rabbi Weiss without him being there, it also refused to tell him who testified about him. This is against Jewish law.
This might seem like a minor point but it is reflective of the way the office of the Chief Rabbi conducts itself. It acts without transparency and without consistency. If we don’t act with transparency and consistency, then ultimately we will have corruption.
One of the Ten Commandments is. “Lo taaneh ve-reiakhah eid shaker, do not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:13).
The Sefer Hachinuch (38) explains why this commandment is included in the Ten Commandments:
For the world rests upon true testimony…and false testimony is the source of the destruction of society. The laws of this commandment such as from who one should accept testimony and from who one cannot accept and the other details of the law are explained in Tractate Sanhedrin.
In other words, by seeking out and encouraging secret testimony about other rabbis the Chief Rabbi’s office is actually violating the Ten Commandments.
I asked them if their practice was in accordance with Halakhah and they said, “we are not speaking about Halakhah at this time.”
So fundamentally as it relates to the narrow point about Rabbi Weiss’ testimony they are acting in a way that is inconsistent with Jewish law and inconsistent with what we require and demand of our dayyanim.
And this is reflective of a general approach on their part, which can and has led to gross corruption, which is a very poor reflection of the Torah and therefore a chillul Hashem.
In parashat Yitro, Yitro tells Moshe that the Jewish people need to have a judicial system. Here are the categories that Yitro tells Moshe we should look for in a judge:
anshei chayil, yirei Elokim, anshei emet, sonei batzah, men with leadership qualities, Gd fearing, men of truth, who hate injustice” (18:21).
Notice that the text doesn’t require us to find the most brilliant judges, but rather the ones with the most integrity. The approach of the chief rabbi’s office falls short in this crucial area. (And that is even before we look at the fact that the previous chief rabbi is under arrest for fraud and bribery charges.)
But the problems with the Chief Rabbi’s office are much greater than just a bureaucratic failing in this one narrow area or the existence of the possibility of corruption.
The most serious problem goes to the heart of the question of whether or not the Chief Rabbi should have authority over the diaspora Jewish community.
After meeting with the relevant figures of that office, my impression of the Chief Rabbi’s office is that it is an office that has almost no understanding of the American Jewish community and yet it is trying to impose its will upon the community and centralize the American Jewish community.
I asked the folks I met there if they had ever been to Washington DC or even to America. Only the Chief Rabbi himself said he had been to Washington, for a one- day visit on a tour he did three years ago. One of the people there told me that he was the most knowledgeable one in the office about the American Jewish community because he did his shelichut in Canada. I then asked him when he did his shelichut. He said, “Before you were born.”
There is no comprehension of the diversity and vibrancy and the challenges and struggles of the American Jewish community.
In Rabbi Lau’s office I saw hanging two portraits of two former chief rabbis right next to each other: Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook and Rav Yitzchak Halevi Herzog. These were great rabbis. They were anshei chayil; men of vision: towering intellects and sensitive hearts. I would have felt confident that those rabbis had an understanding of the sensitivities of the diaspora Jewish community but that is no longer the case.
We should ideally be able to ignore them, but we can’t. They have enormous power to decide who can marry in the land of Israel and they have the ability to divide the Jewish community and delegitimize entire Jewish communities.
And the scariest part of all is that they are trying to increase their authority and increasingly centralize the Jewish community. The same way they have centralized how conversions can be done in America, they may try to move (if they are unchecked) to centralize who is capable of officiating at a wedding and serving as a rabbi in a synagogue in the diaspora. This is a scary thought which we need to speak out against. Sadly, rather then speak out against this phenomenon, the RCA is seeking to empower itself by forming a partnership with the Chief Rabbi.
Ultimately the real question is what do we want Israel and the Jewish people to look like.
Do we want it to look like a Hareidi synagogue? Or do we want it to look like some of the other images we saw this past week in Israel? We saw many inspiring images in Israel that reflect the rich diversity of Jewish life in Israel.
We saw an elite unit of boys from a cross-section of Israeli society serving in the Golani brigade finish an exercise where they walked for five days without sleeping and then stood and sang a rousing version of Hatikvah; we saw a secular girls school dancing very modestly but with great energy at a Poel Yerusahalyim basketball game; we saw people planting vineyards and farmers raising crops; and we saw exciting malls in Be’er Sheva that are turning this once desert town into a thriving city.
The Jewish religious community is much, much bigger than the Hareidi community and the vibrancy of our spiritual lives will be threatened and possibly destroyed if it has to go through a Hareidi bureaucracy.
Rabbi Weiss was supported in his struggle by an organization known as Ne’emani Torah Ve-Avodah. This organization has put forward an exciting proposal that would allow for different religious communities in Israel to religiously govern their own communities so that each community is not at the whim of Hareidi monopoly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiXSAWoRM3I&feature=youtu.be
It is not the only model for transformation of this office, but it is one model. We need a model that will ultimately reflect the vibrancy and diversity of spiritual life that currently exists in the Jewish community.
When the Children of Israel camped at Sinai the Torah states, vayichan sham yisrael, and Israel camped there” (19:2). Rashi says, “ke-ish echad be-lev echad, like one person with one mind, but all other campings were done with fighting.”
But what does unity mean? It doesn’t mean that we do everything exactly the same way. It means that we make space for others and we can recognize that our way is not the only way.
If we follow the current path of the Chief Rabbi’s office it will lead to a Hareidization of our faith and the eventual exclusion much of American Jewry and a disenfranchising of any approach to Jewish faith that is not fundamentally Hareidi. This is a profound mistake that will have severe consequences for our people.
I recently finished reading one of the most inspiring biographies I have ever read. It is called Unbroken Spirit, by Prisoner of Zion, Rabbi Yosef Mendelevitch.
Mendelevich explained that when he was in the soviet Gulag in the 1970’s, he received a letter from the then Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, telling him that in order to survive in the Gulag he did not need to keep kosher and he did not need to avoid chametz on Pesach. He needed to eat to survive and this is why the chief rabbi’s office reached out to him and connected with him to tell him that. More than just needing to eat, he needed the spiritual nourishment that Rabbi Goren was able to offer him.
But we no longer have Chief Rabbis of that stature who reach out sensitively to support and inspire Jews throughout the world. Imagine if we had an official, spiritual figure who could be a source of inspiration to Jews throughout the world. That is a beautiful and romantic idea but alas that era is over and we should not expect it to return. Instead, we have the opposite phenomenon. We have a Chief Rabbi’s office that does not look with respect upon the Jews of the diaspora. So what we need to do is to stand up to the Chief Rabbi’s office until it proves that it is worthy of its predecessors. We need to demand from them that they not intrude with their policies into the lives of our spiritual community. We need to demand a major transformation of this office. For the sake of the spiritual survival of our people we need a new path.
1