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Torah belongs only to God
JONATHAN ROSENBLUM THE JERUSALEM POST
Without the ability to compromise, to overlook slights, and to value the innate differences of other human beings, meaningful inter-personal relations are impossible. Thus our sages counsel the oiltivation of a soil and pliant nature. Overlook the faults of others, even the wrong they do you, they counsel, so that God will be similarly forgiving in examining your failings.
That compromising attitude, however, applies only to that which belongs to us - for example, our honor or our money. But one has no right to compromise with respect to his neighbor's property, and even less concerning that which belongs to God.
The Torah is the heritage of every Jew, but it belongs to no Jew. Neither the greatest scholar nor the most ignorant boor has the right to abrogate or alter a word of the Torah. When it comes to explicating God's Torah, truth, not peace, is the ultimate value.
It is dedication to truth alone that explains the unified rejection of the Neeman Committee's findings by leading rabbis across the spectrum of Orthodoxy.
The point made by the rabbis is both simple and incontrovertible: Clergymen who reject the halach^ should be not be charged with responsibility for preparing converts for a haladiic conversion. Conversion is the means of acquiring citizenship in the Jewish nation.
Just as one who wishes to become an American citizen must undergo a rigorous screening process and swear fealty to the laws of the land, so too one who wishes to join the Jewish people must declare his or her allegiance to the laws of the Jewish people: the halachah. Those who deny the binding force of halachah cannot possibly train converts for acceptance of halachah.
Between halachic Judaism and the heterodox movements it is almost impossible to find any point of commonality. In any court of law, it would be possible to state a cause of action for trademark infringement against the Reform and
Conservative movements for appropriation of the name Judaism.
As outrageous as that statement will be to some, it is freely admitted by the more honest in the Reform and Conservative camps. Alexander Shindler, past president of the American Reform movement, put tlie matter succinctly: "Either you accept halachah or you are outside. We have chosen to be outside." W. Gimther Plaut, a leading Reform thinker, has stated clearly, "neither God nor Torah can be considered as universally commanding sources for Reform halachah."
The head of the Beit HaMidrash located at Hebrew Union College openly proclaimed on Mabat his intention to continue performing same-sex "commitment" ceremonies. That decision (like everything else in Reform Judaism), he said, is left to the conscience of the individual rabbi by the Reform Rabbinical Council of Israel. At the Reform movement's recent convention in Dallas the fare was non-kosher, and the reading of the Haftorah was can-ceUed so that Eric Yofiie could give a longer speech on tlie importance of learning Torah, defined as reading four books a year.
Conservative thinkers are less open about their rejection of halachah. Yet they have made the Revelation at Sinai something so amorphous as to deprive it of all binding force. No longer is the Torah the Word of God, but rather divine inspiration, in which "divine and human elements are inexorably bound up," in the words of Seymour Siegel, longtime professor of theology at the Jewish Tlieological Seminary. Sinai is no longer the defining event in world history, but a mere opening conversation.
Against the Torah's repeated insistence on its own immutability. Conservative theologians argue that our religious obligations change according to their ability to express and evoke our faith, and that those commandments for which the divine purpose is no longer evident
may be allowed to fall into obsolescence. The Almighty God, in their view, is incapable of giving us a set of laws valid for all times and places.
"So long as a [Jew] is serious about his responsibility and concerned about his Jew-ishness," writes Siegel, "he is doing the right thing in the sight of the Lord." Try, however, to find one verse in the Torali in which God says, "Do whatever you want, as long as you are sincere." Conservative Jews have fully internalized the theological message that halachah is not a binding system of Divine Law. According to the movement's recent self-study, 76 per cent believe that one can be religious without observance.
Conservative Jews differ from Reform Jews not theologically but in their slightly greater taste for religious ritual.
But both movements have far more common with one another than with halachic Judaism, as their leaders freely acknowledge in the recent Commentary symposium on American Jewish belief. Both are democratically driven from below by an unlearned laity.
Perhaps most relevant for the conversion issue is the recent finding that 69 per cent of first-bom children of Conservative converts many non-Jews. These movements have failed to provide their converts with any meaningful attachment to Judaism, certainly none capable of transmission to another generation.
It is not the medieval rabbis but Israel's world-wise finance minister who has stuck his head firmly in the sand and failed to confront reality. Mr. Neeman has been betrayed by tlie lawyer's habit of thinking that for every problem there is a legal stratagem. In so doing, he would vitiate all content from conversion and reduce a process that is supposed to be a reprise of our ancestors' acceptance of Torah at Sinai into a set of empty rituals.
Better the wisdom of the rabbis, who dare to speak the trutli, tlian tlie arid formalism of clever lawyers. □
Jewish mutual tolerance
ABBA EBAN THE JERUSALEM POST
The leaders of religious Orthodoxy have awakened veiy late to what they believe to be the "danger" of Conservative and Reform Judaism.
The first conferences of a reform movement were held way back in 1844. By 1880, the successes of reformist congregations in America were closely related to the massive German-Jewish immigration of the 1840s and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations was created in 1873. This does not sound like a movement of wild innovation.
Since then, the major developments in Conservatism and Reform have been the sharp swing to Zionism, especially since the 1967 Six Day War, and the brilliant achievements 9f Jewish higher institutions of learning in various fields of Jewish scholarsliip. The contribution of Jewish Theological Seminary scholars is especially impressive. Today, Conservative Jews insist on the sa-credness of the Sabbath and stress Jewish nationalism as inseparable from the moral and intellectual culture of the Jewish people. They give passionate support to the secular Zionist movement.
As ambassador to the United States, I was personally honored by doctorates from Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminaiy ■ and the Hebrew Union Colleges in Jerusalem and Cincinnati. An Israeli diplomat who spumed these contacts would be making a fool ofhimself.
In Conservative institutions, tliere has been a movement away fixim Orthodoxy by ordaining women rabbis, but this is a response to universal American concepts, not a rebellion against them.
In Israel, the Orthodox establishment has been reluctant to acknowledge the Zionist fervor of Conservative and Reform Jews. The embarrassing fact that the major Zionist offensive in the 1940s was led by an eminent Reform rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, is held as a dark secret by the Orthodox establishment
Another achievement of Conservative and Reform Jews has been their numerical domination of the Jewish scene. They are believed to number about 80 per cent of those American Jews who claim a Jewish identity. If this is true, or even a rough estimate, it follows that Israel's cause is imdermined by tlie antagonisms that define the current relations between the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements. Israeli leaders, such as Finance Minister Yaakov Neeman and Jewish Agency Chairman Avra-ham Burg, are rendering invaluable service to Israel by their devotion to the prospect of united action and common purpose by all the Jewish religious movements.
It is not sufficiently stressed that there is something distinctively anti-American in tlie hostility expressed by some sectors of Orthodoxy against the newer movements in Judaism.
In historic terms, the relatively new movements in Judaism were attempting to "Americanize" their devotions by making them congenial to the movement and impulse of the present age. The need to adapt new realties to changing conditions is not an offence against existing traditions. It may tum out to be their only salvation.
For most of the 50 years culminating in the jubilee celebrations, tlie foundations of our state were laid jointly by coalitions of the Labor movement with the main bodies of religious Zionism. In the mid-1970s there was a sharp swing of the religious movement toward diplomatic theories that have become more militant and less consensual than before. The tum to the right of religious Zionism is a more serious symptom - and cause - of our iresent malaise than are the Uieo-ogical differences tliat divide the Israeli nation.
Nothing would help Israel more than the re-constitution of the historic alliance that brought this nation to birth. □
Abba Eban is a former Israeli foreign minister.
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