Bronner's take on the Rotem bill - Should we blame the Dati Leumi?

[rhu]

In yesterday's NYTimes, in an article about the fracas over MK Rotem's "Who is a Jew" bill, Ethan Bronner writes the following in his analysis of how we got here (emphasis added):

[T]he chief rabbinate, which for decades was in the hands of Orthodox Zionist parties, is now largely controlled by the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, who are both more liturgically rigid and less concerned with building Israel, integrating Russian speakers or keeping American Jews on board. This came about largely because the Zionist Orthodox movement had focused so heavily in recent years on settlement building in the West Bank and allowed control of religious issues to slip from its hands.

I've opined elsewhere that while Diaspora Jewry has been the canary in this coalmine, this is really the latest salvo in the charedi attack on the legitimacy of the dati leumi and the chilonim. Bronner's analysis, though, is the first one I've seen to state that the reason the charedim have been able to get this far is that the dati leumi took their eyes off the ball.

[Glossary: charedi = "ultra-orthodox"; dati leumi = "Orthodox Zionist"; chilonim = "secularists"]

Discuss. (Civilly.)

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I've said before that this is part of a coalition between the Haredi and Hamas, who are united in their desire to get rid of a modern State of Israel.

[jadelennox]

that's upsettingly believable.

Overly broad generalizations

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

It is hardly true that "the haredi" desire to get rid of a modern State of Israel.

There are some who do. There are also many who do not.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Perhaps unexpectedly, that political movement is also undermining support for Israel amongst non-Orthodox American Jews.

While the charedi might not mind that, in terms of a desire to force failure of the Jewish State, it sure doesn't help things overall.

In the mean time, thanks for the pointer to the article.

[dodajen.livejournal.com]

We asked friends at Shabbat lunch at Pesach how it was the haredim managed to get control of the rabbinate. They said that with so many haredim learning in kollel, and so few rosh yeshiva positions awaiting them when they get out, the volume of haredi applicants has overwhelmed the number of MO candidates for rabbinate positions. And from what we have observed, because many positions in the rabbinate are appointed, once a haredi gets into a high enough position to appoint people under his jurisdiction, he will naturally appoint those he considers to represent the most "legitimate" form of Judaism, not all of whom are the greatest Torah minds, and not all of whom value ahavat Yisrael above other concerns.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. You were one of the people I was hoping would respond.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

I think that sentiment is completely off base. We see precisely the same "right-shift" of the rabbinate in Israel and in America, purely for the same sociological reasons -- in the Modern Orthodox (both the American MO and Israeli Dati-Leumi) world, the bright, motivated people have many professional options, and even of those who get smicha many choose other venues for their professions, as there is no negative social value attached with working "in the real world." In the Charedi world, the opposite is the case -- any "non-rabbinic" profession is looked down upon, so not only do all the "bright stars" of the charedi world become professional rabbis (i.e. religious leaders and teachers), but also many of the "average Joes" choose that route too.

We thus have a lack of supply of MO/DL religious leaders to fill both leadership and mid-level rabbinic roles, with an excess of supply coming from the Charedi world.

This trend has been going for several generations now, and we see the results all over the place, especially at the "bureaucratic" levels of the rabbinic establishment.

Note -- I got this explanation from Rabbi Dr. Jeffery Woolf, who is a neighbor of ours in Efrat, and an ex-Newtonian (you can tell from his title that he would fit in well at Sha'arei, even though he moved away well before it was founded :-) ). By pure chance he was recently interviewed on jpost.com about the Rotem bill here: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/rabbi_dr_woolf_on_why.

The general sense I get here (from sane people whom I trust, including R. Dr. Woolf) is that overall the Rotem bill would be a good thing, and would solve a very serious problem in Israeli society, and does not, despite the heat surrounding the bill, change the status of any conversion done outside of Israel. (It has no bearing on the Law of Return, for instance). It does seem odd that a bill designed to help thousands of non-halachically Jewish Israelis, sponsored by a M-O MK from a predominantly secular party, is being so lambasted in America that it had to be tabled. But somehow nothing about Israel ever goes smoothly... :-)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Bronner's statement -- in an article that was primarily a news article, not an analysis piece -- was an angle that I hadn't thought of or encountered before, but was plausible enough to be worth probing.

What you and dodajen have posted, however, seems an even more likely explanation for the general drift of the rabbanut (here and there).

What I'm curious about and don't know enough to ask properly, though, is this: Does the leadership of the DL/MO "movement", such as it is, (1) see this evolution of the rabbanut as a problem, (2) have a strategy for dealing with this change, (3) have the kishkes to see that strategy through? Fourth, to Bronner's point, how does the DL/MO leadership prioritize this issue relative to, say, the issues surrounding יהודה ושומרון?

And, zeroth, is there such a thing as "the DL/MO leadership" per se?

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

The DL/MO movement clearly does see this evolution as a problem (on both sides of the pond, as near as I can tell). As to strategies (both in terms of their existence and if they will be seen through), I don't know the answer. The MO/DL movement may not be unified enough to agree on the goals, let alone the strategies and tactics for achieving them.

At to Bronner's point, I still think he is off base, though I don't have the facts at my beck and call to support this (though after making a contentious statement like that, Bronner should have to defend). I don't know if, e.g., the NRP (the closest thing there is to MO/DL policial leadership, though it never has attracted the support of anything like a majority of the MO/DL public) ever made a coalition deal where they explicitly ceded rabbinical authority to the Charedim in return for a more "strident" settlement policy. My understanding of the "Charedization" of the Rabbanut has been mostly "bottom up", not top down, and it is very hard to control bottom up phenomena like that. Prominent Rabbis (e.g. Rabbi Riskin) have spoken up in both contexts, but a rabbi like him doesn't have a lot of political power.

[sethg]

That explains the supply of candidates for state-sponsored rabbinic positions, but what about the demand side? If the salaries for rabbinic civil servants were high enough that someone from a MO background would consider it one of many respectable professional options, and if the people responsible for appointing those civil servants imposed hashkafic requirements that haredim found distasteful (“you must accept shitot X, Y, and Z to serve on this bet din”), then the surplus of haredim with smicha wouldn’t matter so much.

Also, I realize that Israel is unlikely to ever establish Madisonian separation of religion and state, but how many rabbis does the government really need on its payroll?

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Note that many of the rabbinic professional roles are teachers, and you could ask the exact same question about teacher quality and teacher salaries in the US -- I suspect that the economics of both cases are similar.

[sethg]

A haredi teacher of haredi students doesn’t contribute much to the broader problem described here; that’s just the, ahem, Byzantine system of the state paying each subcommunity to take care of its own people.

The problem is when haredi rabbis end up in positions of civic authority over non-haredim (e.g., adjudicating divorces and conversions). What kind of increase in the budget for those offices would make them attractive to DL/MO candidates, and if the DL/MO community can only ask for so much state subsidy, what other items of interest to them would have to be cut to compensate?