Equal Access to God - Pesah 5774

My eldest son’s bar mitzvah was in Israel two-and-a-half weeks ago. He lives at Kibbutz Ein Gev, which might just be Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden), located on the eastern shore of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. We put together complete, Conservative-style, fully egalitarian Shabbat evening and morning services there for family and friends and kibbutzniks, but we started the process in Jerusalem, two days earlier at the Kotel, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. There, on Thursday morning, we held a service where Oryah laid tefillin and read Torah, accompanied by his immediate family.

What was particularly unique and interesting about this day for me, in addition to my son’s bar mitzvah, was that this Thursday morning service took place not at what most of us think of as the Kotel, but at what might be described as a new ancient location: the southernmost area of the Western Wall, just under the archaeologically-significant outcropping of the wall known as Robinson’s Arch. (It was named after the early 19th-century American biblical scholar, Edward Robinson, who identified the arch on a visit to Palestine in 1838 as part of the ancient bridge that led to the Temple plaza from Jerusalem’s downtown prior to the Roman destruction in 70 CE.)

To distinguish it from the main plaza in front of the Western Wall where most people congregate, this area has come to be known informally in recent years as “HaKotel HaMasorti,” the Conservative Western Wall (Masorti being the international term for the Conservative movement).  But now it has a new name: “Ezrat Yisrael.” It’s really a very clever name: it’s the name of an area in the Second Temple that was open to all Israelites (i.e. those who were neither Kohanim or Leviim). However, to the speaker of modern Hebrew it suggests a place that is open to all Jews, differentiated from the women’s section in an Orthodox synagogue called the ezrat nashim, the women’s section that is separate from that of the men in any Orthodox synagogue; this name also derives from ancient Temple, where there was also an ezrat nashim.

Since last September, when the Israeli government finally agreed to make access to the Masorti Kotel easier, there are a couple of new features at the Robinson’s Arch area. There is now a huge, expansive platform with several rolling lecterns overlooking the site, which may be reserved in advance by anybody wishing to hold an egalitarian service there. There is also a special, separate entrance adjacent to the main entrance to the Kotel Plaza, with a sign saying “Ezrat Yisrael” and a security guard (although no metal detectors, as for the traditional Kotel). These innovations have made the whole experience far more pleasant and convenient and accessible than the site had been previously. As I passed through the new entrance, I thought, Pithu li sha’arei tzedeq, avo vam odeh Yah. Open for me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter to praise God. (Psalm 118:20 - We sang those words a few minutes ago in Hallel.) It has been a long time coming that this prayer space of equality, where women and men may worship in contemporary style, where all can be seen as equal with respect to God, where all may participate fully, is now open to the public and functioning respectfully.

We held our service on the new platform, overlooking the ancient walls built by King Herod nearly 2,000 years ago, and enjoyed the relative peace and serenity of the scene as compared with the hubbub of the traditional Kotel area.

A little basic history is called for here: Prior to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, Judaism was mostly centralized. Worship was governed by the kohanim, the priests, and included pilgrimage and agricultural sacrifice.  When the Temple was destroyed and the role of the priesthood effectively nullified, a new group of leaders, scholars that went by the title of “Rav” or “Rabban” or “Rabbi” developed a new way to engage with God: through words of prayer and words of study. As a result, they redefined what it means to be holy for Jews. Holiness would no longer be assigned to one central place, but would be carried with the Jews in their hearts and minds wherever they went throughout the world. We each carry within us the spark of holiness, and wherever we gather to sanctify time or to engage with the ancient words of our tradition, that holiness multiplies itself to make a miqdash me’at, a little place of holiness.

(As an aside here: It was this portability and effective democratization of Judaism that enable us to survive. As I referenced on Shabbat Hagadol, we could have disappeared when the Romans ceased the Temple service. But instead we found a creative workaround. This is why the Dalai Lama convened a bunch of Jewish leaders back in the early 1990s to learn strategies on how a people may maintain its faith in exile; this tale was the subject of Rodger Kamenetz’s book, The Jew in the Lotus.)

That said, I must confess that I have become, in recent years, somewhat disenchanted with whole Kotel experience. It has become an obsession for our people - these ancient stones. Certainly, they are laden with history, and certainly, it is a place that speaks with great emotional power. But since the Roman destruction, there really are not holy places in Judaism like there are in, say, Islam. Holiness is where the Jews are, and is not tethered to any particular location.

But the fascination with that big, open-air, continuous pick-up minyan adjacent to an ancient retaining wall is challenging to me. It has a faint whiff of avodah zarah, idolatry. The history of the Temple Mount is powerful and inspiring, incorporating the ancient Jewish tale of destruction and rebuilding coupled with hope and Divine connection, but it has never been, and was never intended to be what it has become in recent years: an Orthodox synagogue. We do not worship rocks, ladies and gentlemen. We worship only God.

Today, the Kotel has a mehitzah (that was not always the case) and an Orthodox rabbi appointed by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, who has expressly forbidden mixed minyanim, or even women-only services that feature women singing out loud like men do. I continue to read accounts of how some of the worshippers there have become increasingly bold about telling others how to behave / pray / walk / dress and so forth in the plaza. Ladies and gentlemen, there are many paths to God, and if my approach differs from yours, that’s fine. We should make an effort to accommodate each other where possible, and respect each other’s path.

When I am at the Kotel, I too feel the ancient reverberations of our history and our tradition emanating from that wall. And I feel the sadness of loss, the hope of rebuilding, and the yearning of two thousand years of exile. Indeed, the ancient ruins of Israel, the wellspring of our heritage, made it not just possible but mandatory that the Jewish state be located there, and not in Madagascar or Birobidjan or Brooklyn or Vilna.

But even more, I feel the pain of divisiveness, the arrogance of those within our midst who want to tell others what to believe and how to act, the anger at the insulting and even dangerous behavior of those who have somehow incorporated intolerance into their religious zeal.

If those Herodian rocks could speak, what would they say? Can’t you people all just get along? Can’t you just accept that there are many paths through Judaism, that every Jew should be entitled to visit this venerated, historical place and access God through whatever means he or she chooses? If those rocks could speak, wouldn’t they remind us of the Talmudic passage that tells us that the Second Temple was lost due to sin’at hinam, causeless hatred?

The victory of the last year, when the Netanyahu government agreed to created this open prayer space for egalitarian groups at Robinson’s Arch, is of utmost importance because of the message it broadcasts to the Jewish world: Women count too. And this message, which is a bridge we crossed at Temple Israel in 1976, has not yet infiltrated into much of the traditional Jewish world. Pesah in particular is a time when we should actively recall this, because of a passage in the Talmud related to the seder (Pesahim 108a):

ואמר רבי יהושע בן לוי: נשים חייבות בארבעה כוסות הללו, שאף הן היו באותו הנס.

Ve-amar Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: Nashim hayyavot be-arba’ah kosot halalu, she-af hen hayu beoto hanes.

R. Joshua ben Levi said: Women are obligated for the Four Cups, because they too participated in the same miracle.

It may be hard to believe for the frummer residents of Beit Shemesh and Boro Park, but half of those who were redeemed from Egypt were female. And so they deserve a place at the table as well, not relegated to another room or behind a mehitzah. And not just on Pesah, but in all aspects of Jewish life.

Why do we need to continue to focus on the equality of women? Because there are Yiddish signs in neighborhoods of Brooklyn asking women to step off the sidewalk in deference to a man. Because there is an ongoing campaign in Jerusalem and other primarily Haredi cities to remove women from sight: prohibition of women on advertising billboards, or when they do appear, vandalization by anonymous zealots. Because an eight-year-old girl, Naama Margolis, was harassed and spat upon by Haredi residents of Beit Shemesh two years ago because they felt that her dress was was not sufficiently modest. Eight years old!

This is all the more reason why the Ezrat Yisrael is so important. While certain quarters of Judaism are busy trying to make women invisible, we have succeeded in elevating them by actually building a raised platform. We have physically elevated those choosing to worship adjacent to the ancient site of Beit HaMiqdash, and thus raised them spiritually as well.

Chairman Mao famously said, “Women hold up half the sky.” Well, they did in ancient Israel too, and in Egypt, and they do so today. (Maybe even more than half.) But that does not mean that our work is done - on the contrary, we must continue to strive to make men and women equal partners in holiness, with equal access to God.
By bringing together the sparks of holiness found within every one of us, male and female, we can only raise ourselves higher.

Hag sameah.

We Were All At Sinai. (Women, Too.) - Va'et-hannan 5773 (Summer Sermon Series #4)

Today’s topic is egalitarianism, the principle that men and women are equal under Jewish law. This is an especially hot item today, given some high-profile recent events in the Jewish world. 

The curious thing is, I thought that the argument over women’s roles in Judaism ended thirty years ago! I grew up in a Conservative congregation that counted women as long as I could remember. My mother served for years as a gabbayit and frequently read Torah. Temple Israel became egalitarian in 1976, when Rabbi Waxman’s wife Ruth was called to the Torah, and chanted the haftarah as well. I never thought that in 2013 we would still be talking about it.

And yet we are, perhaps largely due to the activities of Women of the Wall, the group of women, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, that meet regularly every Rosh Hodesh for a service at the Kotel, the Western Wall. I mentioned last week that in their first service since the Israeli Supreme Court officially sanctioned their service, including the wearing of tallit and tefillin and praying together out loud, a large group of Haredim (often but inaccurately called “ultra-Orthodox”) attempted to obstruct them by harassing the 350 worshippers and boxing them out of the Kotel plaza by busing in yeshivah girls at 6:30 AM. WoW has kept the issue of egalitarianism at the fore in the wider Jewish community, both in Israel and here.

Judaism’s segregation of women and men into separate and unequal roles is a long-standing tradition, but one that we should work even harder to reverse. After all, we live in a world in which women are a majority of college students. They may not yet earn as well as men, but nobody thinks twice today about female doctors, lawyers, CEOs, or politicians. Why should the situation be any different in the synagogue?  In a world in which women are presidents and prime ministers, how can we countenance denying them equal leadership roles in matters of faith?

And while the majority of our ancient books - the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), rabbinic texts - reflect the position of women in the eras in which these books emerged, we no longer live in those times. Halakhah / Jewish law has changed throughout the ages to reflect new social realities, and it should continue to do so today. There is a rabbinic principle in halakhic analysis called “shinui ha-ittim,” loosely translated as, “times have changed.” Sometimes, we have to account for the fact that the world continues to move forward, and what applied yesterday may not still be valid today. As a people, and indeed as a species, we mature, evolve, we learn; so too do our laws and customs.

So why was it so surprising, for example, when one of the new members of the Israeli Knesset, Dr. Ruth Calderon, a professor of Talmud at Hebrew University, gave a Talmudic lesson to the Knesset at her swearing in? The original Hebrew video of this on YouTube has had over 200,000 views, a very large number for a relatively small Hebrew-speaking population. (Here is a version with English subtitles.) It is a beautiful and heart-warming speech that I urge you to view. 

It is surprising because we are still in a transitional time, a time in which many quarters of the Jewish community still reject full female participation in Jewish life, still do not call their daughters to the Torah in acknowledgment of becoming bat mitzvah, still segregate women on the other side of a mehitzah, which can be as minimal as a curtain and as extensive as a complete wall, and justify all of this with the apologetic statement that “women are on a higher spiritual plane, and therefore do not need the mitzvot to which men are obligated.”

Of course, this has been the custom for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, and I do not wish to cast aspersions on the way that others worship, because then I would be just like the Haredim that are trying to obstruct WoW. However, times have changed. Women and men share much more than they used to, and not just the workplace. Statistics show that among younger couples, men are far more likely today to stay home with the kids while the wife works, and to share in running the affairs of the household. We are living in fundamentally different times. And we here in the Conservative movement more readily acknowledge the changes in gender roles in the wider society, and reflect them in our Jewish practice.

Those that say that we in the Conservative movement have gone off the traditional rails because we have enabled womento participate fully are right only with respect to history. But in terms of halakhah’s response to modernity, they are the ones who are wrong. And we have traditional sources on which to base our elevation of women in Judaism.

As a simple example, there is a clause found multiple times in the Talmud that is relevant here. It goes like this:

שאף הן היו באותו הנס

She’af hen hayu be’oto ha-nes.

Literally, it means “since they (feminine) were part of the same miracle.” It’s used in three places: once in reference to women’s obligation for reading Megillat Esther on Purim (Megillah 4a), once in reference to women’s obligation to light Hanukkah candles (Shabbat 23a), and once referring to women’s obligation to drink four cups of wine at the Pesah seder. This last one is most applicable today, as we read the Ten Commandments. Women must drink the four cups of wine because they were redeemed from Egypt along with the men. Well, the Torah also tells us (Exodus 20:15, e.g.) that kol ha’am, all the people, witnessed the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, shortly after the Exodus from Egypt. The women were there, too, and as much a part of that seminal, covenantal moment as the men.

Many followers of traditional Judaism swear up and down that the only three positive, time-bound mitzvot / commandments to which women are obligated are making hallah, lighting Shabbat candles, and going to the miqveh, and they are exempt from all others. They are wrong. This is a mistaken understanding of rabbinic tradition, and the Talmud mentions many other mitzvot to which women are obligated in addition to the three I have identified above. Here are just a few examples: Berakhot 20a-b and Eruvin 96a suggest that women may put on tefillin; Megillah 23a states that a woman may read Torah before the congregation; Menahot 43a states clearly that women are required to fulfill the mitzvah of tzitzit, etc.

Reading in the larger sense, the fact that women have traditionally been excluded from the performance of many mitzvot is more about sociology than what is found in traditional Jewish sources. The rabbis defined a woman as something less than a man, in the same boat with children and slaves, because that is how women were understood in Israel and Babylonia 1500 years ago, and in so doing they exiled women to the other side of the mehitzah.

The Conservative movement has, since the mid-1980s, encouraged women’s equal participation; we have ordained female rabbis since 1985. The vast majority Conservative synagogues are egalitarian.

Given how times have changed, it is therefore upon us to continue the struggle to bring women to the same status in Jewish life as men, to offer women the same opportunities for participation as men have traditionally been given. How can we do this? By continuing to call our girls to the Torah as benot mitzvah, to teach female members of our community to be shelihot tzibbur, prayer leaders, and Torah readers, to encourage women to take on other mitzvot traditionally thought of as masculine, such as tallit and tefillin, and generally to provide more opportunities for women as well as men to participate fully in Jewish life, on equal terms.

And by the way, it is not only the Conservative movement that acknowledges this. No less an Orthodox authority than Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the pre-eminent halakhic decisor of Orthodoxy, gnashed his teeth and invoked the inflexibility of halakhah in the face of modernity when he conceded in a 1976 teshuvah (rabbinic answer to a halakhic question; Iggerot Moshe OH 4:49) that women may indeed put on a tallit, blow the shofar, and shake the lulav, and recite the appropriate berakhot. Not that many women in Orthodoxy do these things, but in theory, they can under Rabbi Feinstein’s authority. (To be sure, this was not a concession to the Conservative movement. Rabbi Feinstein elsewhere insisted that Conservative synagogues are not synagogues, and that Conservative rabbis are not rabbis.)

This is Shabbat Nahamu, the Shabbat of comfort, when we begin the arduous process of healing and rebuilding in the wake of Tish’ah Be’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish year and the commemoration of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. Today we read the first of seven special haftarot that speak of redemption, as we look toward Rosh Hashanah and the holiday cycle of Tishrei. And there was a hint of reconciliation from Orthodoxy this week: the Orthodox Union (OU) and the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Modern Orthodox rabbis, issued a statement this week against the protests that have taken place at the Kotel. While not exactly endorsing Women of the Wall and their struggle, the carefully-worded document includes the following:

Recently we have witnessed a frightening exacerbation of internal discord and an ominous intensification of inflammatory rhetoric. We have heard vile insults, offensive name-calling — including the inciteful invocation of the name 'Amalek' — and vicious personal attacks emanating from all sides on the various troublesome issues that we now confront. We have even witnessed physical violence. Indeed, in recent months we have seen precincts of Jerusalem’s Old City, in the shadow of the destroyed Temple for which we mourn today, become a venue for provocation and insult, rather than a place of unity for the global Jewish community.

 

We urge all Jews to celebrate the diversity of our community, whatever our ideology or choice of head covering. Each of us — men, women and children — is a cherished member of our people and we must educate all members of our community to honor and respect each other. We pray that all will one day soon glory in the rebuilding of our nation and our Temple.

OK, so it does not exactly say, “let’s build an egalitarian section at the Kotel.” But it is a statement against sin’at hinnam, the causeless hatred for which the Second Temple was laid waste on Ninth of Av in the year 70 CE. And that should be what Shabbat Nahamu is all about. We are all in this together, and we cannot let our internecine theological disagreements drive us apart.

We were all at Sinai. Women and men. So says the Torah. And we are all equally permitted to partake of the full extent of what Jewish life offers. We can live and worship comfortably alongside those who do not accept egalitarianism, but we must continue to stand up for equality in Jewish life. Let us hope that the rest of the Jewish world will soon be willing to daven alongside us as well.

Next week, we’ll talk about Israel.

Shabbat shalom!


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, July 20, 2013.)

This is the fourth installment in the seven-part Summer Sermon Series, in which we are discussing the essential Jewish values that we at Temple Israel highlight in our approach to Judaism. This is our vision of Jewish life; the first three installments are:

1. Telling our story

2. Being a welcoming congregation

3. Engaging with Torah

Let My People Pray - Va-era 5773

When Israel was in Egypt’s land / Let my people go

These are the words of the old spiritual, originally composed and sung by black slaves in America about their plight, their desire to be set free from bondage. Slaves who were brought here from Africa were stripped of their original tribal cultures and made to worship as their white Christian masters did, and they found strength and solace in the messages of the Bible. The thematic line of this spiritual, “Let my people go,” comes from Parashat Va-era, which we chanted this morning. God instructs Moses to go to Pharaoh and say:

ה' א-ֱלֹהֵי הָעִבְרִים שְׁלָחַנִי אֵלֶיךָ לֵאמֹר, שַׁלַּח אֶת-עַמִּי, וְיַעַבְדֻנִי בַּמִּדְבָּר

The Lord, God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness.”

What the spiritual leaves out is the second part of that verse, about worshipping God in the desert. What is God’s justification for requesting freedom for the Israelites? It is not necessarily that they deserve freedom because slavery is wrong. Rather, they should be released so that they could receive the Torah and thereby worship God freely. The command given to Pharaoh from God is as much about religious freedom as it is about physical freedom. Moshe delivers this request to Pharaoh multiple times in this parashah and next week’s, as the plagues are unfurled on Egypt, and it is always couched in the language of spiritual purpose. As our Etz Hayim commentary points out (p. 359), “It was not only freedom from something, it was freedom for something.”

The Kotel in 1910, with men and women praying in close proximity, without a mehitzah. Many such images exist.

The religion that God bestows upon the Israelites in the latter parts of the book of Shemot / Exodus is, of course, that of the priestly sacrificial worship, practiced first in the desert using the portable tabernacle, the mishkan, and in later centuries in Jerusalem at the First and Second Temples. Fast forward more than a millennium, to the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and the Jews needed to find a way to reach God through a means other than sacrifice. And that route was prayer, which we continue to do today. Rather than animal sacrifice, we offer today avodah shebalev, the service of the heart, as Maimonides puts it.

Here at Temple Israel, as is the custom in virtually all Conservative synagogues, we pray in a style that reflects the openness of our society to full participation of men and women. This is, of course, a break with historical Jewish practice that only came about within the last half-century or so. We are egalitarian; we count women and men equally under halakhah / Jewish law. And this is as it should be, because the world has changed in the last 2,000 years.

In our society, women can be doctors, lawyers, CEOs, judges, politicians, or even the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. So why, when it comes to Jewish ritual, should they be confined to the “back of the bus”, that is, the other side of the mehitzah (the wall separating the sexes in Orthodox synagogues)? Why should women be prevented from leading the community in tefillah / prayer, reading from the Torah, becoming rabbis or mohalot (those who perform ritual circumcisions) or soferot (scribes that write holy documents like the Torah)? The very idea of keeping women from participating in all aspects of Jewish life is not just absurd, but deeply offensive.

Times have changed. We have changed. And mainstream Judaism has always accommodated change.

I was recently asked by a member of this community if I would work as a rabbi in an Orthodox synagogue. My answer was, as you may not be too surprised to hear, no. Not because I do not respect Orthodoxy and those who choose to pursue Judaism according to its principles - I do very much so, as an advocate of religious freedom and pluralism. Not because Orthodoxy is inauthentic - it is of course as authentic an expression of Judaism and at the same time in many respects just as modern as we are. And not because much of Orthodoxy does not accept me as a rabbi.  I could never be an Orthodox rabbi because this, the Conservative movement, is my spiritual home.

There are three principles of Conservative Judaism that are to me non-negotiable:

1. That we accept that Judaism has developed and changed historically, and what we today call Judaism was not handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, but is a product of two millennia of natural growth. Judaism as we know it, including Orthodoxy (a modern concept in itself), has never been fixed.

2. That we accept modern understandings of God and the Torah, according to the tools of academic inquiry and contemporary philosophy, and allow them to stand alongside and interact with the traditional views;

3. (and this is the most important item) That we accept men and women as being equal before God - the principle of egalitarianism.

Today is not only Shabbat, the second-holiest day of the Jewish calendar, but also Rosh Hodesh Shevat, the first day of the eleventh month of the Jewish year. Rosh Hodesh is not really a holiday; it is a day that is slightly elevated above the rest of the month because it marks the renewal of the lunar cycle that was so important to our ancestors. Today is the day of the new moon.

Unlike other, more significant holidays, Rosh Hodesh has no special practices other than a few liturgical changes. There are no special foods, no particular ritual items like ram’s horns or palm fronds or a candelabrum. To my knowledge, there are no Rosh Hodesh songs or stories.

In his comments to the story of the Molten Calf (Parashat Ki Tissa), Rashi cites a midrash that the women are given Rosh Hodesh as a day of rest because the female Israelites refused to surrender their jewelry to Aaron to build the calf. So there is at least a midrashic basis for making Rosh Hodesh a special day for women.

As such, there are two things that have developed for Rosh Hodesh in the last two or three decades. One is the widespread establishment of women’s Rosh Hodesh groups, which can take a variety of forms because there is nothing in classical Jewish literature or practice that indicates how to do this. Rosh Hodesh groups often feature discussion, recitation of tehillim / psalms, some group activities, and of course food, and all for women. I have, in fact, never been invited to participate in a Rosh Hodesh group! (But hey, I’m not bitter.)

The second is the Women of the Wall. I have mentioned them here before - this is the Rosh Hodesh group writ large, consisting of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform women, that has been meeting in Jerusalem at the Kotel, the Western Wall plaza, every Rosh Hodesh since 1988. They feature a shaharit / morning service conducted entirely by and for women. They did not meet today, because it is Shabbat, but will reconvene again for Rosh Hodesh Adar in a month.

Here is the troubling part: since 2002, when the Israeli Supreme Court allocated the Robinson’s Arch area of the Western Wall for non-Orthodox, egalitarian groups who wanted to conduct mixed-gender services at the Kotel, it has been illegal for any group to conduct a service on the women’s side of the mehitzah at the traditional Kotel, and illegal to conduct egalitarian services anywhere in the Kotel plaza. Furthermore, any woman wearing the traditionally male tefillah accessories, tallit or tefillin, can be arrested, and some of the Women of the Wall have indeed been taken to jail and subjected to harsh treatment.

The Kotel, the exterior western retaining wall of the Second Temple complex, rebuilt by King Herod in the 1st century BCE, has long been considered the holiest site in Judaism. Every tourist group goes there; I remember my first visit as an eager 17-year-old, when the tears welled up from deep within me as I extended a hand to touch the ancient Herodian stones.

The area that is traditionally thought of as “The Kotel” is actually a very small fraction of the total surface area of that western retaining wall; it became elevated because for many centuries, it was the only part of the wall that was accessible to visitors.

Today, the entire Kotel plaza is effectively an Orthodox synagogue. It has its own rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) extraction, appointed by the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Recently, Rabbi Rabinovich wrote an opinion piece in Israel’s Yedi’ot Aharanot newpaper explaining how he is a moderate fighting off the intrusions of “extremists” like Women of the Wall, in which he said the following:

This is how fanaticism operates. It asks for protection in the name of tolerance, then thrives and flourishes until it becomes too late to stop the devastation it brings on us all.
I'll say it loud and clear: As long as I am the Western Wall's rabbi, fanaticism will not establish a foothold at the site. The Kotel's stones can teach us about the price of zealotry.

Women who want to hold a prayer service, who want to participate in the mitzvot of Jewish life, and men and women who want to pray together near the traditional Kotel are “fanatics” who will bring “devastation” on all of us. Thus saith Rabbi Rabinovich.

The worst possible kind of fanatacism is that which has the gall to declare itself mainstream. Non-Orthodox Jews represent more than 80% of American Jewry. What we do is not extreme. We are the mainstream.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Kotel is not a synagogue. It is a very old wall. And it belongs to all of us: Haredi, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, secular, humanist, Zionist, non-Zionist, etc.

Some of you might be thinking right now, “Why does this matter? Why should I care if the Kotel functions like a Haredi synagogue?”

Let me tell you why this matters. We live in an age in which our children’s commitment to Israel, something which the American Jewish community has long taken for granted, is undeniably on the wane. So when they go to Israel with their synagogue or youth group or Birthright or whatever, and they see that the State of Israel, aided and abetted by the intolerance of the Israeli Rabbinate, dismisses the mode of Judaism in which they were raised, this only creates doubt about their connection to the Jewish State. For most of us, ladies and gentlemen, our connection to Judaism is deeply associated with what we do in synagogue. Rejection of our mainstream practices by the increasingly right-wing religious authorities, in league with the Israeli government - THAT is what will bring devastation on us all.

Let My people go, that they might worship Me. Indeed.

There is here a slight glimmer of hope: Natan Sharansky, the former Russian refusenik who is now the head of the Jewish Agency, has been assigned by PM Netanyahu to study the matter and come up with a plan. I am cautionsly optimistic, but let’s see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, let us hope and pray that we are soon set free to worship as we please, as our ancestors once were.

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, January 12, 2013.)