The illustrious 19th-century rabbi Israel Salanter once compared religion “to a bird held in the hand. If grasped too tightly it will die—and if held too loosely, it may fly away.”
In Israel today there are those who claim that the “bird” has been squeezed to death by the constricting laws of an over-rigid Orthodoxy. The Orthodox, however, point out that where the “hand” has been too open, religion itself has fled. What is indisputable is that the religious atmosphere of the Holy Land is sickly, and this festering condition will continue to erupt from time to time.
The prescriptions for Israel’s religious malaise differ as widely as do the diagnoses. In the past these differences have centered around issues like the rabbinic monopoly of marriage and divorce, the drafting of Orthodox girls into the army, Sabbath restrictions, and regulations against the raising of pigs. Recently a new issue has been added and its degree of importance is emphasized by an Israeli newspaper headline: “Raising of Pigs and Reform Synagogues in Israel—Issues in Coming Elections.”
The latest controversy was probably provoked by an announcement of the Hebrew Union College that it intended to build a school and chapel in Jerusalem. Indeed, for several years religious liberals in America have passed resolutions urging the “establishment of an indigenous non-Orthodox Judaism in Israel.” Now these plans and sentiments have begun to evoke violent reaction from the Orthodox leadership, of which the following release from the Israeli Ministry of Religion is typical: “We have been reluctant to admit that there is a greater difference between Reform and true Judaism than between Catholics and Protestants.” And “Reform Jews are more dangerous to the religion of Israel than admitted atheists.”
Through the haze of charges and countercharges perhaps one can make out the issue. What is the actual state of religion in Israel? What role does it play in the inner life of Israelis? And is there a genuine call for “liberal” Judaism?
These were some of the questions I took with me to Israel some months ago, and on which I have been reporting to the Reform movement in England and America. But it is with reports as it is with the hands the rabbi spoke of: they, too, risk breaking the delicate bird of truth on the rack of some schematic formulation. It may be that the following excerpts of a journal kept during my discussions and meetings with Israelis will offer a more living—even if less tidy—picture of a situation in Israel that raises questions not only for Israelis but for the Jewish community in America.
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On the plane: I have been trying to put together the impressions of Israel’s religious situation I carry with me from America. I am not, of course, the first one sent to “spy out the land.” A number of Reform leaders had reported to the rabbis at their last convention that not only was there wide dissatisfaction with the restrictions on religious freedom imposed by an Orthodox minority, but a “great thirst” for a liberal Judaism in Israel. Others had been skeptical about any such “thirst,” and the final resolution asked for an “indigenous” Judaism, emphasizing that there was no intention of imposing any American Jewish religious patterns on Israel.
But, the question still remained: What was the strength of the reputed impulse toward a modern, liberalized Judaism, and in what ways was it manifesting itself? I reviewed what Israelis visiting America had told me. On the one hand, the enthusiastic, one might even say fiery, response of a Hebrew University professor to the prospects of a liberal synagogue in Jerusalem: “They will burn it down,” he had prophesied, it seemed to me almost gleefully, “but we’ll build it again. And if they burn it down again, we’ll build it again.” His wife, demurring, had suggested that liberal religion could well arrive in Israel unaccompanied by conflagrations. But she agreed with her husband that thousands of Israelis would be interested.
On the other hand, the Israeli couple studying at Columbia had been rather amused by my questions. The man, a teacher for many years in Israel, was not aware of any thirst there for liberal Judaism, or at least not in the kibbutz in the Emek where he worked—and his wife agreed. Perhaps there was in the cities, they suggested, for they had seen how on festivals like Passover and Shavuoth people who felt uncomfortable in the Orthodox synagogues came to the kibbutzim to taste the holiday atmosphere there. The teacher’s wife had often arranged these festivals in their kibbutz, and while they eschewed direct religious content, she felt they were beautiful. I asked about Yom Kippur, a holiday emphasizing neither nature nor nationalism. “Yom Kippur is still a problem,” she agreed, “but our settlement has solved it fairly well. We dress in our best clothes and the food is special.”
“The food is special!” I had exclaimed.
“Yes,” she laughed. “Those who want to, of course, can fast, but we gather the children at sundown before the meal. I play a record of ‘Kol Nidre’ and we read some appropriate selections from the Bible and Rabbinic literature and even from the prayer book.”
I asked if the selections were read or “prayed.”
“No, they are read,” her husband answered with a smile. There was a pause while I tried to think of further questions. “I suppose it really is a question of faith,” he offered. “It depends on whether you are a ‘believer.’”
I remembered feeling somewhat irritated at his pat analysis of the religious problem in terms of “belief”—in part, I suppose, I felt a troubled realization of how little “belief” had to do with so many synagogue activities in America.
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Shannon Airport, Ireland: Just finished something by the talented poet Yitzhak Lamdan, recently deceased, whose journal Sheaves was often devoted to religious questions. A particularly telling passage: “It is not a paradox to say that if there are enemies of religion in Israel, enemies of faith and of the lofty values of Torah, then these enemies are primarily the official leaders of our religion, and through their insensitivity, bad manners, and hypocritical tactics, and through their limited vision and striving for power, a striving which does not bother about means, they are the ones who more than any others drive away the younger generation.” I recalled similar sentiments, based on different premises, offered by a peppery Orthodox professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University, Dr. Isaiah Lebovitz. A group of American rabbis visiting Jerusalem several years ago had been both impressed and disconcerted by this thin, medium-sized man who wore a narrow peaked cap perched precariously on the top of his head and whose cropped mustache suited his bristly manner of speech. With a wry tongue, Lebovitz had criticized the “fossilization” of rabbinic leadership, and at the same time disturbed his own audience by asking, “And where does it say that we must observe the Torah in order to be happy—who says that religion must make us happy?” Some of his essays on the religious problems of Israel, recently published as a book, are quite an antidote to the “peace of mind,” the “family that prays together stays together” kind of religion. Dr. Lebovitz objects strenuously to any attempt “to sell religion” on the basis of health, psychology, or even ethics. In Judaism, “there is a complete contradiction between the worship of the God of the Torah and the worship of the God in the heart or conscience, which is really the worship of man . . . .”
“The purpose of the Sabbath,” he writes, “is not to take care of the recreational needs of the working man. For this purpose we have the Histadrut. . . . There is no purpose to the Sabbath except holiness—to impose upon one-seventh of the life of man a special way of living which does not stem from his own nature, inclinations, and needs, but from his decision to subject himself to the Kingdom of Heaven—a way of life different from the natural way of life.” It is from this almost austere Orthodoxy that Dr. Lebovitz lashes out at the present rabbinic leadership in Israel. He points out that those who protest against Jews working on the Sabbath do not hesitate to drink the water of Tel Aviv brought to them by Jews working on the Sabbath; that they take full advantage of the security provided by the non-Orthodox boys and girls who guard the borders on the Sabbath. The truth is, he claims, that the leaders of Orthodox Jewry do not really want to undertake the responsibility of applying the laws of tradition to the new conditions of the Jewish state. They prefer to maintain the illusion that Jews are still a society living under the protection of a non-Jewish government, and thus maintain the laws which were adopted only for the “Exile.”
I wondered what the official Israeli religious leadership felt. Did they really prefer that the mass of Israelis who could not accept Orthodoxy lead completely secular lives rather than become interested in some non-Orthodox form of Judaism? One of the most influential leaders of Orthodoxy in America had given me his answer by saying, “All that a non-Orthodox religious Judaism can do is deprive people of their conscience. Today, though the secular may fight religion, at least they know what it is. They know that religion means the full observance of the Torah. Knowing this, if they some day become baalai tshuvah—repentant—they will at least know What to return to. No,” he concluded, “Liberal or Conservative religion is worse than no religion at all because it sanctifies the errors of the people.”
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Lydda Airport: We arrived about eleven at night and circling round the airport we saw not only the brightly lit expanse of Tel Aviv below, but also large patches of light up and down the coastline. Somehow, I thought I could recognize the smell of the air and ground as we walked from the plane toward the airport building—a slightly acrid odor of dust and clay; you get it more sharply near the ruined Arab villages. The encounter with the customs and visa officials was much briefer than two years ago. On the bus to Tel Aviv everyone sat in silence, peering through the windows at the clusters of boxlike houses that have arisen near the tin huts of abandoned immigration camps.
There was no conversation in the bus—it was the silence that seems natural to human beings who have just been wafted through space to descend upon a piece of land where life is lived in a vastly different way. But then the bus driver turned the radio on and our first hour in the Holy Land was filled with the loud blare of American popular music.
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Tel Aviv: The houses seem a bit more dilapidated and the faces in the streets reveal the recent influx from North Africa and the Orient. It may be a hasty impression, but there seems less joy around. I asked my taxi driver, Shlomo, about it, and he agreed—there was a grimness and tiredness. “Look at me,” he explained. “I was wounded in the war, so I had the right to buy and operate a taxi. This was a good job once. Now I have to work seven days a week from morning until late at night just to feed and clothe my family. Almost everybody is in the same position. A government worker with a good job will get maybe 180 to 200 pounds a month after taxes are deducted. A good hat costs about 25 pounds. Figure that out. When I buy a suit I have to make a loan to pay it back over months. I wouldn’t mind,” he added, “if only I could see some hope for the future, in three or five years—but what change can there be?—and this after twenty-five years of working and fighting.”
I tried to turn the conversation towards the religious situation. But apart from some bitter words about the attempts of the Orthodox to cut down taxi service on the Sabbath, Shlomo didn’t seem interested. Well, I think even Maimonides admitted that a man cannot be deeply concerned with religion when “he is hungry or weak or pursued by his enemies.”
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Yesterday I called the office of a woman who had said some time ago that she was eager to arrange some meetings with people in Tel Aviv to discuss liberal Judaism—but she had left that very morning and would return in a year. I wondered for a moment if “they,” as a mystical friend used to refer to the Deciding Powers above, were really with me. . . .
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I’m Still trying to get some meetings together, but without much success. One of the people in charge of the ZOA House here comforted me: “Nothing spiritually new grows in Tel Aviv.” As for religion—last year the ZOA had run High Holiday services in their new building, and had filled the hall—because it was air-conditioned, some said. But the ZOA man had wondered whether it was not due to a revived interest in religion. So this year they arranged a special Sabbath service before the High Holidays with a dazzling array of cantors—they love cantors here, he says. Despite lots of publicity, they were forced to call the service off a few days before the Sabbath because of lack of response.
He was discouraged in general. “It’s quite different from the way it used to be.” His mood reminded me of my last visit to the ZOA House two years ago when, with a group of American tourists, I met a blond, middle-aged woman from Tel Aviv. After the customary conversational skirmish between Israelis and American tourists—“When are you coming to Israel?” and the answer, “We can do more for Israel working in America”—the lady from Tel Aviv had burst out, “Well, if you don’t come over we’ll be drowned by the niggers! Never mind that look,” she had continued angrily to the Americans, whose mouths had dropped. “Never mind—I’m not Jesus Christ and I don’t have to love them. Twenty-five years ago I gave up a comfortable home in Canada to settle here. We wanted to build a land not rich in material things but with ideals and culture—and we built it. In spite of everything, we built it, and now it’s being torn down and we’re being drowned by a mass of illiterate and barbaric immigrants from the mellahs of North Africa. Sure they’re Jewish, but what have I got in common with them?”
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Ramat Hadar: I think I’ve arranged my first group meeting at Ramat Hadar, a village near Tel Aviv and one of the older settlements specializing in chicken farming. I was visiting relatives there today and attended an executive meeting of the village leaders. They were talking about their sewage problems, but by a switch admittedly more desperate than deft, I turned the conversation to liberal religion. One of the settlers, a tall Yugoslav Jew, offered to arrange a meeting the very next night, promising that I would find “fertile ground” here.
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The meeting, advertised as a “talk on liberal Judaism in America,” has been held but I am not sure what conclusions to draw from it. Because some people had complained that there was something improper about having a Reform rabbi speak on religion in a community building which was used by some of the older men for services on the Sabbath, we met in the schoolhouse instead. It was cold in the classroom and we sat in our coats. Some twenty five people had gathered, and after my carefully prepared talk in Hebrew the Yugoslav who helped to arrange the meeting opened the discussion. He felt the need, he said, for a communal type of religious expression that he could offer his child. “I’ve tried to go to synagogue a number of times,” he said, “but never yet have I heard a word there that goes to my heart, or bears upon my own life.” One young teacher, who seemed to have followed my talk sympathetically, confessed that he felt he was raising a “generation of Karaites who knew the Bible but little else of the spirit of Jewish life as it had been developed after the Biblical period.”
At that point, somebody standing in back of the room asked for the floor and cleared his throat. I was told that he was a former member of the Marxist Mapam, and now a teacher at Ramat Hadar. He launched into a vehement defense of the character of Israeli youth, objecting to the “constant maligning” of it that was going on in Israel. If I wanted to see true religion, he suggested, then I ought to go to the Negev and see the youth working and fighting there. To be willing to work on the land and to offer one’s life to the freedom of the state—that was ethics and religion in the highest sense.
I tried to warm up the discussion by contrasting the last speaker’s words with the ideas of Dr. Lebovitz, but few had apparently heard of Dr. Lebovitz. I read them a passage from one of his essays: “We must ask ourselves whence comes this youth, that sees nothing wrong in carrying out a terrible act of retaliation [the Kibya attack]. It is all the result of using the religious category of ‘holiness’ for values which are social, national, and political—a type of usage which is frequent among us—the use of the category of the absolute—that which is beyond any human revaluation or reckoning—applied to secular matters . . . the use of the Bible and the prayer book as sanctions for values which really spring from the human conscience and feeling. . . . If the nation and its welfare and the state and its defense are ‘holy,’ then even Kibya is possible and permissible. This is the terrible punishment that results from the transgression of the commandment, Thou shalt not take the name of Thy God in vain.”
The only reaction to this passage was the comment of an elderly man, who in a mixture of German and Hebrew said, “These are interesting matters and perhaps when we have straightened out some of our economic and military problems, we will be able to think about them more seriously.” The Yugoslav again tried to help: “If we can find so much time and energy for politics, we should find time for this as well.” But it was obvious that the discussion was ended.
Afterwards, some people told me that there hadn’t been more discussion because most of those present had not understood my Hebrew. Although they had lived in Israel for over twenty years, they could participate in a discussion of this sort only if there was a German translation. The farmers in Ramat Hadar could speak a market-place Hebrew and read a newspaper—but to read a book in Hebrew or participate in an intellectual discussion on an unusual subject was still a strain—this after twenty years. And doesn’t poverty of language affect not only the powers of communication, but thought processes as well, inhibiting subtle distinctions? No wonder that some of Martin Buber’s best books have not been translated from their original German into Hebrew—for want of a market, say the publishers in Israel.
True, some of Judaism’s most inspired religious experiences, in the Biblical period and afterwards, emerged out of circumstances at least as harsh as those facing the Israeli today. But if any specifically Israeli religious impulse is to manifest itself at this time, it can hardly be the intellectualized kind possible in countries where there is both the language and the leisure for extensive discussion.
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Jerusalem: At last I found someone in Israel who is eager to work for liberal Judaism. He is another Yugoslav Jew, the co-owner of a small hotel in Jerusalem, and two years ago he had actually arranged “liberal” religious services in the dining room of his hotel. He tells me that there are some three thousand Yugoslav Jews in Jerusalem, many of whom had belonged to the Liberal synagogue in their native country. He assures me that many other thousands would be interested. I asked him, of course, why if there was such interest they did not start religious activities themselves. His reply was that the economic situation was too oppressive. This year he had tried again to arrange High Holiday services and, at the suggestion of the officiating rabbi, charged four or five pounds for a seat. But even this small sum was too large, and the services were not held. He promised to arrange a meeting of Yugoslav Jews to discuss the problem with me.
The hotelkeeper is sincerely troubled about the lack of opportunity for non-orthodox religious expression in the country and, particularly, about the lack of religious teaching for children outside the Orthodox religious schools. To illustrate this, he related an incident involving his eight-year-old son. A few weeks ago the boy had noticed a small group gathered around a man who was telling stories near the corner of his street. He joined the circle. The story-teller made a date with the children for a meeting at the same place the following week. After several more meetings the man invited the boys to continue the story-telling sessions at a nearby house. Some of the boys, including the hotelkeeper’s son, had gone along, and here is the way the boy described what had happened: “There was a blackboard, and on it the man drew two pictures. Under one picture he wrote ‘the good man,’ and under the other ‘the evil man.’ Once, he went on, this bad man had come along and slapped the face of the good man. The good man could have slapped back, but instead turned the other cheek. The name of that good man was Jesus.” The man was a Christian missionary. A growing number of children have been attending missionary schools this year, and an anti-missionary society has been formed here.
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The subject of Christian missionaries in Israel has been receiving a great deal of attention in the press these days. One member of the Knesset had been telling me that it is symptomatic of a profound spiritual problem in Israel and not to be dismissed lightly, nor explained by food packages and free tuition at the mission schools. He pointed out that a definite spiritual vacuum was felt by many young people since the establishment of the state, that they were yearning for some “intangible something” to replace the Zionism that had previously engaged their spiritual yearnings. Calls like “the conquest of the Negev” do not fill the inner emptiness, which this particular member of the Knesset felt was really a religious thirst.
The Knesset member could understand, he said, why some sincere and young people might well find in the Christian missions a spirituality and dedication lacking in their own Jewish religious institutions.
Everyone seems to agree that something is needed to fill the empty spiritual space left by the attainment of the Zionist dream. But is there any connection between this “something” and liberal religion?
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The meeting with the Yugoslav Jews fell flat, and the hotel owner who had been so enthusiastic about the possibility of liberal Judaism in Jerusalem was embarrassed. He told me he had been out of town the day of the meeting and that someone had gone around to the people who were planning to come and warned them that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the founding of a “new religion.” As a result, only two men showed up. One of them, who had been the president of the Liberal religious community in Yugoslavia, came in order to tell me that there was definitely a need for a Liberal synagogue in Jerusalem and that Yugoslav Jews would be interested, but that nothing would happen unless they were provided with a building where they could worship as a community. Then he went on, with an earnestness that broke through his faulty Hebrew and German: “You have to understand what is going on here culturally. They want us to become one nation quickly and ask that we mix always with the others. Israel is supposed to be a melting pot. Nu, I hope the pot itself doesn’t melt, and if it doesn’t, we’ll all some day speak Hebrew. But this will not happen in our generation. For six years I have been trying to learn Hebrew. I know now I’ll never be able really to speak it. I would like to—but I can’t, that’s all. What then should I do—give up my pleasure in conversation, in telling a joke, in hearing a lecture? Look, we got together with Jews from Iraq at one meeting. They eat certain types of foods and so a smell comes from their mouths which they don’t notice because they are used to it. But I do notice it. And they notice a smell from my mouth and what makes the Iraqi laugh doesn’t make me laugh; and vice versa.”
The sincerity with which he spoke made vivid the tragedy involved in the campaign for Hebrew now going on in Israel. “One language means one heart,” is a slogan you read in buses, and posted in the streets. Unpublicized is the genuine shrinking of the meaningful content of life suffered by a generation which must learn to give up its native tongue, which calls itself, ironically, “manure” for the future.
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Zvi Schiffrin arranged a meeting with the “Anglo-Saxons,” as. American and British Jews are called in Israel. Zvi is a tall, good-looking boy with direct and friendly blue eyes whose job it is to help the “Anglo-Saxons” find jobs in Israel.
It was not an easy task, he explains, because a good proportion of these coveted immigrants from the West were “crackpots” who, having been maladjusted at home, remained equally maladjusted here.
We had agreed to conduct the meeting in Hebrew, but after ten minutes everybody lapsed into English. There was the usual talk about feeling “something” missing since the war. Some claimed that they missed “Jewish content” even in Jerusalem. Schiffrin voiced a thought with which many agreed. He felt the main problem in Israel today was a moral one, and that there had been a definite personal and communal backsliding during the last two or three years. “Anyone who doesn’t want to histader—feather his own nest—is considered a bit of a fool. And you hear so much talk these days about material things—like getting an apartment or adding another room.”
A tall young man with curly short-cropped dark hair, who had been silent so far, spoke up, and everybody listened to him with respect. He was a young American who had been blinded in the third week of the Israeli war. (Despite his complete loss of sight, he had only a few weeks ago earned his doctorate in foreign languages from the Hebrew University.) Sitting in his chair, his hand resting on the halter of the seeing-eye dog that lay by his side, he protested against the constant talk about spiritual emptiness in Israeli youth. He thought that there was no more of a spiritual or moral crisis in Israel than anywhere else; less of one, in fact. Maybe he suggested, what the “Anglo-Saxons” were really feeling was a natural nostalgia for the culture and homes they had left behind. It was obvious from the quiet that followed his remarks that he had touched a sensitive spot. Few of the “Anglo-Saxons” were free from inner struggle as long as they held on to passports that could at any time rescue them from the austerity and strenuousness of Israeli life. They were looking for help. They wanted to reinforce the idealism which had brought them to Israel in the first place and was now in danger of evaporating in the weariness and cynicism they felt all about them. What they needed was new inspiration—but nobody at the meeting was at all sure that the synagogue and prayer and religion could offer it.
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An American who left his kibbutz in the Northern Galil after five years told me he feels this lack of “something” was in part responsible for his leaving; and he thinks it is definitely a religious matter. “We find out in a kibbutz that not all problems are solved by communal living. The girl who can’t find a husband and sits in her room alone at night, or the parents who lose a child—they need solace. Isn’t that part of what religion deals with—the blows and puzzles of life?”
His kibbutz had a mixture of Lithuanian and American Jews, and the attitudes toward religion there had reflected these different origins. “I didn’t know you were aduk—Orthodox,” a Lithuanian friend had commented upon entering the American’s room and seeing the Ten Commandments hung on the wall, and the American had found it almost impossible to explain to his neighbor that one could be religious and still not Orthodox. Yet this American felt that even among the European Jews there were now definite signs of a yearning for religion. “When I came to the kibbutz in 1947, only three people had registered for fasting on Yom Kippur. Five years later half the kibbutz was fasting—why?”
He described the Bar Mitzvah ceremony which had been instituted at his kibbutz. A boy or girl, when they reached the age of thirteen, prepared a paper on a portion of the Bible and delivered it before the kibbutz on a Sabbath eve. Thirteen “mitzvot”—commandments—were also involved in the ceremony. These “commandments” had, of course, nothing to do with religion. They consisted of tests in which the boy proved himself—as, for example, working a full day in a certain branch of agriculture, or spending a day by himself in the city. One year, the story goes, one of the “commandments” was to shoot rats that were overrunning the settlement that year. “But,” asks this American, “why did they have to have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony at all at the age of thirteen? The time of entrance to the political parties is sixteen.” No, something deeper was involved here—a sense of spiritual frustration. Look, he said, at the bitter political contention that has split one of the oldest kibbutzim in Israel—Ein Charod. Ostensibly it was a difference over an East-or West-oriented foreign policy. But can political differences account for the violent hatreds which flared up between families and friends who had worked together for so many years? The American felt that the antagonisms there were really rooted in an ever-growing feeling of emptiness. The mystics, too, liked to trace the destructive influences in life to spiritual power which does not find its proper outlet.
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This afternoon I interrupted my schedule of meetings for a trip to Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz on the outskirts of Jerusalem where the Egyptian army was stopped during the war. The heavily pock-marked walls still give evidence of the fury of the fighting. Some Arab workers were building a house on the Jordanian side and we were able to see them clearly and hear their shouts and laughter. Watching them you thought how easy it would be for somebody with a loaded gun, on either side, to pull the trigger and stop the laughter.
Ramat Rachel is not a religious kibbutz, but a group of young people here have been experimenting with religion. They set aside a room, empty except for a constantly burning light hanging from the ceiling, and a table in the center on which stand a laver of water and some bread, reminiscent, I suppose, of the “shew-bread” in the Temple. A man who had attended one of their services reported that it consisted of a period of silent meditation followed by the reading of a Psalm. He had asked permission to recite the Kaddish, and the young people had not objected. Probably similar experiments were occurring elsewhere in Israel, and it would be worthwhile finding out about them and comparing them.
Anyway, at least one person in Israel thinks that there is a connection between this yearning for “something” and liberal Judaism. The following letter appeared in the Jerusalem Post only a few days ago:
Sir: Your leader of December 13 on our “spiritual famine” (“Banning the Robe”) was praiseworthy and long due. It described a lack in this country which cries to high heaven.
Cannot something be done to satisfy this need? One of the most effective means for filling this need comes through community religious services, but Why do so few people and youth attend services? Why not try to make the services and the spiritual environment in the house of worship and the house itself more attractive? My experiences in the United States and in the U.S. Army lead me to think that we need shorter services and prayers, more singing together, a more dignified arid reverent atmosphere in the place of worship. The entire family should be able to pray together. My wife, for instance, used to attend services with me in the U.S. where we could participate in worship as a family—she will not attend services where she has to sit in a woman’s gallery.
Yours, etc.,
Ben GaleHaifa, December 28.
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Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—Israel’s liberal synagogues: I set out to visit the “liberal” synagogues, but the truth is that there are none in Israel. There are indeed synagogues in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem that are associated with rabbis who were “liberal” in Europe, but they are now small German landsmannschaften congregations whose services are fully Orthodox.
Rabbi Phillip, the leader of the synagogue in Jerusalem, is a round-faced, middle-aged man anxious not to forfeit the recognition he has finally won from the Chief Rabbinate, which made him officially a rabbi in Israel. He sat behind a desk covered with German and Hebrew magazines, adjusted a yarmelke on his bald head, and puffed a pipe as he explained the intricacies of Israel’s religious situation. American Reform leaders, he claimed, don’t understand the nature of synagogue life in Israel. They don’t understand that were he, Rabbi Phillip, to make any radical changes in the service, his congregation would not stand with him against the violent opposition of the Orthodox. However, he pointed out, in his synagogue they do read the prayers related to the sacrifices in the Temple silently.
No, said Rabbi Phillip, people who are interested in praying in the synagogue are not interested in launching any crusade for changes in the prayers; while those who are interested in religious crusades are really not interested in praying in the synagogue. Rabbi Phillip thinks that if any changes come about in the future, they will come from the Orthodox kibbutz movement, say, Hapoel Hamizrachi.
There is indeed some kind of religious ferment going on in many of the Hapoel Hamizrachi kibbutzim. Only a few days ago, I heard of a debate that took place in one of them over the question of shaving. Some of the settlers, contrary to Jewish law, had begun to use razors, and the question was whether they should be allowed to remain in the settlement. So far the decision has been that they can.
There is a strain between these settlements, which are trying to adjust Talmudic law to actual realities, and the official rabbinate, whose effort to meet the issue has been awkward and insufficient. “I have worked hard,” writes Chief Rabbi Herzog in an article illustrating the success of Israel’s religious leadership in meeting the problems of modern living, “to solve the question of milking cows on the Sabbath, and with the help of technicians . . . I have finally reached a solution whereby it can be done by a machine operated and set by an automatic clock before the Sabbath.” But many problems remain that defeat this kind of solution. It is doubtful, however, whether the tension will ever become great enough to break the emotional and intellectual subjugation of these settlements to the authority of the rabbis in the cities.
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Tel Aviv: The “liberal” rabbi in Tel Aviv is Rabbi Rosenberg. He is younger than Rabbi Phillip, and has a delightful talent for mimicry and caricature that is used most effectively when he talks about Reform Jewish leadership outside of Israel. Rabbi Rosenberg feels that if financial resources and understanding had been provided by the liberal Jewish movements abroad in earlier years, something substantial could have been accomplished—now it’s a bit late, for the mold has been formed. He feels that American Reform leaders don’t understand the Israeli attitude toward religious matters. “They think that if we had men and women sit together during services, great changes would immediately take place in synagogue life.” When a delegation of American rabbis visited with him some time ago, he had advised them not to smoke in public on Saturday, but some of the rabbis had resented his suggestion as being contrary to their “principles.” “They simply don’t understand that Israelis cannot associate the term ‘rabbi’ with a person who smokes on the Sabbath.”
Unlike Rabbi Phillip, Rosenberg has had difficulty in receiving recognition as a rabbi, and it has not been easy to earn a living. Recently he became a teacher in the public school system, although he still devotes part of his time to the small synagogue made up of German Jews that he has presided over since his arrival in Israel. I asked him whether he sensed any interest in religion among his students. His answer, if not reflecting his own bitterness, reflected a situation that called for real analysis. “A peculiar thing,” he told me, “and it frightens me, but the only young people in the school that seem to feel this interest in religion are the sickly and maladjusted ones.”
I went to services at Rabbi Rosenberg’s synagogue this Saturday morning and brought with me what Israelis call a “condition of soul”—which is to say “the blues.” I think it was engendered by the Sabbath meal the night before. It is the custom of my hotel owner to invite those of his guests who are from abroad, a few Orthodox rabbis, and a large number of cantors to the Friday night meal. The cantors get their meals free, but more important for them, they have the opportunity to display their vocal talents before American Jews who may become interested in importing them from Israel. The obvious eagerness of the cantors to find favor in the eyes of rich Americans as well as God was depressing. Afterwards, a young American soldier on leave in Tel Aviv started talking with one of the young Orthodox rabbis. The American had confided to the rabbi that he, on occasion, went out with shiksas. In a burst of missionary zeal, the rabbi expounded on the great danger that lay in this—namely that children might be born out of an impure marriage. As it was, he explained, Israel was filled with people who had inherited permanent and “biologically transmittable” defects of soul because their mothers, though Jewish, did not regularly go to the mikvah (ritual bath). The rabbi didn’t know what could be done now to remedy this defect of the Israeli people—only the Messiah could help. The soldier, who had begun the conversation with the rabbi in good humor, finally just walked off.
It all seemed so hopelessly irreconcilable that night—the gap between the world of religion as it is seen in Israel, and people like the young American soldier.
The “condition of soul” was still with me when I entered Rabbi Rosenberg’s synagogue the next morning. His synagogue is one flight up, so that it is easy to glance from the prayer book through the windows at the passers-by below. There were only about twenty-five men at the services and one little boy who stood near his father, his eyes riveted on the Sabbath strollers below crowding the sidewalks of the main thoroughfare. The service was conducted with pleasant decorum. An elderly German Jew was called to read the Haftorah portion, which was from Isaiah and instead of chanting he read the words slowly and distinctly, spacing the words. “In the days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and bud; and the face of the world shall be filled with fruitage . . . .”
Everyone in the synagogue knew why the old man was reading slowly. The papers were filled that week with news of the spy trials in Egypt and the troubles along the Gaza Strip, and he was pointing out the relevance of Isaiah’s prophecy. “And they that were lost in Assyria shall come and they that were dispersed in the land of Egypt shall come,” he went on, “and they shall worship the Lord in the holy mountain of Jerusalem.”
Looking at their faces in the street, you could see that they had come from “Assyria” and “Egypt,” and many other places. Everybody knew this, of course, but as you looked at them while the words of Isaiah were being read, the strangeness of it all came home.
After the services, I walked towards my hotel behind a North African couple who, with a child on either side, blocked the sidewalk. But nobody was in a hurry under the bright Sabbath sunshine.
My “condition of soul” had quite disappeared. The prayers of the synagogue had been pleasant and the words of Isaiah had been moving in their relevance. It was good, even uplifting, to feel, if only for a few moments, something of the strange connection that existed between the struggling here in Israel and the words of the prophets. It set the poverty and the military danger and the tedious routine in larger pattern, and something of that “larger pattern” colored the rest, at least for a while. Was this the function the synagogue could fill? Could it offer a dimension of meaning and a largeness of perspective of the kind so necessary to people immersed in the immediate and wearying details of a never-ending struggle for mere existence?
One thing seemed clear. The fact that most people were walking in the streets that Sabbath morning, rather than sitting in the synagogue, had little to do with changes in the prayers, or even with the problem of men and women sitting together. People were outside the synagogue simply because they didn’t feel the need for prayer and synagogue at all. It was not the ritual they minded, but the fact that, as the Yugoslav farmer had said, they heard nothing there that went “to the heart” of their felt needs.
No, hovering over and above all these meetings about liberal Judaism was a question more basic than ritual or length of service—the question of religion itself. The unspoken thought in every discussion was—“Can religion offer us what we need today? Is it really a necessary dimension of life?” For if it is less than necessary, then there is no room for it in Israel today. Israelis have time and patience only for the most necessary tasks in their grim struggle for life.
Perhaps this is what troubled me about the remark of that Israeli teacher in America when I asked him about the need for religion in Israel. There, it depends on whether you are a “believer,” he had said. In America it doesn’t at all. It is possible for rabbi and congregation to have an unspoken and perhaps unconscious agreement that synagogue, prayer, and religious ceremony are things you participate in on occasion, whether you believe or not. American religious institutions may flourish for so many reasons other than religious. They are a means of Jewish identification, a place for Jewish education for the children, a way of assuming community responsibility—all perfectly valid reasons in America, but irrelevant to the Israeli, who can achieve these things outside the synagogue. Here there can be only one primary reason for synagogue interest, and that is—religious belief.
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Ramat Gan: Rabbi Rosenberg told me about one Schweiger, or Dmiel, as he has recently renamed himself. He is a teacher of some repute who came to Israel with the famous Second Aliyah in 1905 and lived for many years in Kibbutz Ein Charod. Rabbi Rosenberg said I ought to get the reactions of a man like Dmiel, as typical of the feelings of Israel’s dominant intellectual element, the generation of the old Russian Zionist immigration. What was more, Dmiel, unlike most of that generation, has become very interested lately in some type of religious revival.
I went to Dmiel’s three-room apartment in Ramat Gan on a Saturday afternoon. A white-haired man in his sixties with a warm manner, he invited me in for a glass of tea and told me enthusiastically about his “experiment.” Some fifteen families had gathered about him in Ramat Gan. Their approach was practical. “Words like ‘religion’ or ‘faith,’&” he explained, “must be avoided because the Israeli identifies them with concepts that they are not ready to accept.” His group was trying to arrange a sort of modern Shulchan Aruch—a new code of laws. They had already decided to light candles on Sabbath eve, although many of the group refused to offer a blessing over them. They had also decided to refrain from cooking during the Sabbath day, and lately they had been gathering in the morning to read the Torah together. “As for prayer—well, we’re just beginning our discussion on what to do on Yom Kippur, and so we will have to face that question.” Dmiel indicated that he himself would like to see the group participate in prayer services. Despite the warm reception he gave me, Dmiel was somewhat suspicious of the interest of Reform Jewish organizations in Israeli religious matters.
“Reform to many of us,” he explained, “is still associated with assimilation and anti-Zionism.”
The next Friday evening I went to the Dmiels’ for supper; his seventeen-year-old son joined us. He was wearing a thin blue shirt, open wide at the collar as if to proclaim that, though it was winter, he needed no undershirt. The young lad placed a knapsack in the corner of the room and then came to the table, where he sat silently, smiling slightly while his father put on a battered hat and recited the Kiddush. I asked the boy if young people he knew were at all interested in the subjects his father and I were discussing. “They’re too abstract for us,” he said with a good-natured grin. A short while later he excused himself from the table, picked up the small knapsack, said “Shalom,” and went out.
“He is going on an overnight hike,” his father explained; and then as if further explanation were needed, added, “That’s our sabra. They are a generation educated for outer deeds more than inner thoughts.”
I am afraid that the reaction of Dmiel’s son is typical of what I get in Israel whenever I try to talk to young people about religion: “It’s something you need in America—but we are Jews without it.”
There have been a number of “spiritual buds” like Dmiel’s group in Israel, but they seem to wither away after one or two years. Some organization that would stimulate and coordinate their efforts might be able, however, eventually to produce something more lasting from these experiments.
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Jerusalem: What of the religious feelings of the Orientals, who now make up about half of the population? Although often lumped together by the visitor to Israel and even by the Israeli, there are vast cultural and religious differences among them. The immigrants from North Africa, for example, are usually more superstitious than religious. The Yemenites, on the other hand, bring with them simple but profoundly sensitive religious feelings.
Israel Yeshiayahu, a Knesset member and a Yemenite, has been very helpful in explaining the feelings of his community to me. He himself was quite shocked one Yom Kippur eve to see a group of young people lolling near the doors of a synagogue in short pants and ostentatiously munching food. “The tragedy is that religion for the sabra is associated almost exclusively with the antics of the Neturei Karta [the extreme Orthodox], with religious politics, the evasion of military duty—with behavior that he not only doesn’t respect but actively dislikes.”
It was different with the Yemenite, who even when he breaks away from religion still has love and respect for the traditions of his family. The Yemenite, explained Yeshiayahu, may ask strict observance of himself, but is tolerant of others, and consequently the children feel less of a yoke in their homes and synagogue. And like all the Jews from the East, they are terribly eager to be “modern.” Were the Yemenites to be presented with a religious tradition which could be considered modern, Yeshiayahu felt they would be attracted.
Yesterday I spent a full day at a meeting of Yemenite workers of the Mapai party in Tel Aviv. Yeshiayahu was the chairman of an afternoon session devoted to the sensitive problem of social discrimination. By skillful questioning, he led those with complaints about discrimination to admit that in most cases the “discrimination” was the result either of the lower educational level of the Yemenite or the unavoidable sensitivity of a minority group.
One man stood up to complain to me that the directors of the educational program did not understand the kind of approach that could be successful with Yemenites. “They come and want us to learn mathematics and tell us how important it is for business and the atom bomb. That isn’t the way to appeal to the Yemenite. If they want the Yemenite to study mathematics or to send his son to study it, they should not tell him that mathematics will help him build a bridge, but that it will help him to calculate the coming of the new moon so that he can say his prayers at the proper time.”
In the evening, Shoshanna Damari, the celebrated Yemenite folk-singer, appeared in a low-cut dress, to the embarrassment of many of the older generation, who tried to avoid looking at her throughout the performance. Scattered throughout the audience were Yemenites who wore beards and hats as signs of their faith. Very few of the younger generation imitated them, but it was obvious that even if they regarded their parents as somewhat outdated, there was no tension or dislike; rather a great deal of respect and affection. There were probably no Yemenites to be found on either side of the fighting going on in Jerusalem about the controversial club house that Histadrut had built near the Orthodox quarter.
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Tel Aviv: A taxi driver this morning told me how he and his friend had blackened an Arab’s eye yesterday. “You mustn’t let them lift their heads,” he had said. “You’ve got to keep them afraid of you.” This came only a short while after telling me that he and his friends were “traditional” and went to the synagogue on occasion.
Of course, the cab driver felt no connection between his “traditionalism” and his attitude toward the Arabs. That seems to be the general feeling, and not even the religionists suggest that there is a connection between the body of Jewish religious “wisdom” and matters like the black market, Kibya, or the Arabs. But with what is religion concerned, if not with this kind of problem? All these years the injunction to love the stranger has constituted a rather academic challenge to Jews, because they themselves were always the stranger. But now there is a stranger in their midst. You see him walking in isolated groups of two or three down the streets of Tel Aviv, or standing silently in the bus queues, and you see that the Arab feels himself to be a “stranger.” The fact that he actually enjoys more civic and social rights, and better economic standards, in Israel than in Arab countries does not change the fact that he has the “heart of a stranger.”
The problem is to reconcile the security problem represented by the Arab with the ethical demands of Judaism. It is a difficult problem, but doesn’t the real test of any ethical and religious commandment occur when an individual or a people has the power to transgress it—power which in certain respects Jews have now for the first time in two millennia?
My survey of the possibility of establishing liberal Judaism in Israel seems to be turning upon itself and chafing for answers to more important questions than that of “liberal” versus “orthodox”—the question of religion itself, and its relevance in a land which has time only for the necessary and relevant.
[The second, concluding part of this article will follow.]
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