Daniel Gordis: A Haredi public intellectual arguing that (some) Haredim should not be able to vote?
OK, it’s more complicated than that (as we’ll see), but while Haredi MK’s continue to flex their political muscles, Haredi Rabbi Dov Halbertal argues for a complete separation of religion and state.
The war will end, sooner or later, likely sooner. Israelis will limp out of the war — a war with many accomplishments, but also a war that is likely to fizzle out with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime still intact. It’s not what most people here hoped for.
When the war recedes into the rear-view mirror, election season will start to take over. A critical issue in these elections is going to be in the issue of the Haredim, who continue to extort billions of shekels from the government in exchange for their not toppling the coalition, and who continue to insist that their sons should not serve in the army, at a time when a manpower shortage is literally crippling the IDF.
One fascinating Haredi rabbi has regularly staked out surprising positions on these questions; two of his recent social media posts afford us an opportunity to introduce him to our readers.
Rabbi Dov Halbertal is an Israeli Orthodox (Haredi) rabbi, attorney, lecturer in Jewish law, and public intellectual. A former head of the Office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel, he is both a Haredi leader and an advocate for a complete separation of religion and state in Israel. He regularly argues against continued government subsidization of the Haredi community — a strikingly dissenting voice within his own community. Brilliant and fearless, Rabbi Halbertal is a voice that deserves to be heard beyond Israeli circles.
The video above (originally posted here on Facebook) needs no explanation. But to understand Rabbi Halbertal’s recent Facebook post below, one needs background on two recent incidences in which the army imposed religious standards on soldiers.
First, the story, as reported here in the Times of Israel, about the soldiers who were jailed for barbecuing on Shabbat.
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And second, the story, as reported here in the Times of Israel, about soldiers who were punished for wearing “indecent” clothing when they had no obligation to be in uniform.
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With those stories now clear as background, we can now proceed to Rabbi Halbertal’s recent post, based (as he notes) on a piece he wrote for Haaretz:
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The shocking incidents involving female squad commanders who were discharged and then prosecuted over a dress code, as well as Border Police soldiers tried for grilling on the Sabbath, demonstrate once again the ethos of religious coercion — an insatiable, impervious compulsion to interfere in the lives and values of others. And still they call it a “dress code,” when it deserves to be called precisely what it is: a code of religious coercion. The following is what I published at the time in Haaretz:
As an Orthodox Jewish man, I am about to write some sharp words — but I cannot refrain from writing them, out of a conviction that the time for radical change has come. I regret that I must focus on failures and shortcomings rather than on achievements and strengths. Just as occupation corrupts — as even those who see a necessity in it will admit — so too does politics corrupt religion. The union of politics and religion is a recurring cycle of moral injury and fraternal hatred. The religious establishment corrupts the fabric of the state, and the state corrupts the fabric of religion, and so it goes, endlessly. The only viable solution, for the sake of religion and for the sake of the state alike, is to adopt the First Amendment principle of the American Constitution: the separation of church and state.
I do not believe that anyone is obligated to fund my faith. It is not morally defensible for the secular public to finance yeshiva students, or the blessed fertility rates among the ultra-Orthodox. Nothing is more galling than the spectacle of receiving generous sums from the hand of secular society while spitting in its face. The ultra-Orthodox community rails against the values of secular society — Zionism, creative endeavor, military service, gender equality, and more — yet harbors no hesitation whatsoever when it comes to demanding and receiving funding that only encourages further defiance. Let us be honest: there is no justification for a secular public to subsidize those who hold its values in contempt.
The solution I propose serves the interests of religion even more than those of the state. I do not wish to belong to a coercive society. I do not wish to belong to a society that harbors inciters of racism, nor do I wish to belong to a religious community that is ungrateful. Distorted modes of thought are not part of Jewish law — they stem from distorted interpretation, rooted primarily in the corrupting alliance between politics, the establishment, and religion. The Jewish community in the United States would never dare to block streets or assault police officers over the opening of a shopping mall on the Sabbath. There, certainly, no rabbinic petition would be issued calling on Jews not to sell or rent homes to non-Jews.
The time has come to say: enough. Enough of religious political parties. Enough of the shameful preoccupation with budgets for self-serving purposes while ignoring the state and the wider world. Enough of the moral and aesthetic corruption of religion. Enough of imposing laws upon a public that does not believe in them.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King’s famous address, I say: I have a dream. I have a dream of severing politics from religion. I have a dream that a secular child will study the sources of Judaism out of love, rather than out of well-founded fear of what is reflected in the shop window of the religious establishment. I have a dream of belonging to a moderate, broad-minded ultra-Orthodox community whose motto is: live and let live.
It sometimes seems as though the consciousness of ultra-Orthodox society is shaped by a sense of persecution — as if that sense of victimhood furnishes it with its identity and its raison d’être, as though the President of the United States or the Supreme Court had no higher priority than the eradication of religious Judaism. Is it any wonder that, with such a communal consciousness, antisemitism and Jew-hatred flourish? What would we ourselves think of an arrogant, self-absorbed religious sect that fancied itself a light unto others while sowing division and separation?
Every person — Jew or gentile — must be free to live according to his or her beliefs, on the basis of civic equality and genuine recognition of the human rights that belong to all people, created as they are in the image of God. One thing is clear: there is no worse option than the union of religion and politics.
Imagine a world in which that was the prevailing Haredi outlook.
Shabbat Shalom.
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