Modern Orthodox Icon Grows a Pair

The Jerusalem Post reports,

The rabbinic court system must offer alternate judicial services not under the auspices of the haredi establishment, Efrat Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin said Thursday in response to the appointment Tuesday of 15 new judges to the rabbinic courts, 12 of whom were haredi.

“After this week’s selection of an inordinate number of haredi judges, many of whose chief qualifications were family relationships, I call for an alternative court of religious-Zionist, modern Orthodox judges who will include love of Israel together with concern for the purity of Israel and will express the principle of ‘for the sake of preventing agunot. [women trapped in a marriage by Jewish law] our law finds leniencies,’” Riskin told a conference dealing with the Israeli constitution in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Failed Messiah notes,

“Personally, I think this is a case of too little, too late. The MO-NRP world wasted its time on land and expanding Jewish ‘control’ over the West Bank and Gaza. While it did so, haredim hijacked the apparatus of state religion, making life worse for everyone but, perhaps, a few haredim themselves. And, at the same time, secular Israelis and the Israeli center – made up mostly of traditional Jews who at one time valued rabbis and Orthodoxy, if not as a daily way of life then as an ideal – have moved farther away from religion and have increasingly hostile views of Orthodoxy and of rabbis.â€?

The cost of course, is to world Jewry as well. The myth that being “religious� is synonymous with being “haredi� is one many Jews (including myself many years ago), both religious and secular have bought, both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

The issue though, is not just that this is bad for Judaism itself (which it is, it’s awful) but it is simply a bold-faced lie, absolute historical revisionism. And the Modern Orthodox, who so frequently publicly focus only, or at least, mostly, on the State of Israel, have done nothing but aid and abet this nonsense by allowing themselves to be portrayed as a purely post-1948 brand of Judaism.

Haredi power brokers seized upon this perceived weakness, and further disseminated and contrasted their lie of a unique religious continuity, by incessantly appealing to a past intense purity that never existed the way they pretend it once did, and dismissing the reality that they too have changed just as much (and perhaps, much more) because of the establishment of the Jewish state, just like the Modern Orthodox and secular Jewish communities, but of course, in very different manifestations. And not because Jewish secularists oppress them (they really don’t), but because we all change when a major geo-political development affects us.

Most Jewish communities have substantially changed because of the State of Israel, both there and in the Diaspora. But by overemphasizing and restricting their focus to a religious-Zionist vision that was often speculative, the Modern Orthodox allowed themselves to be marginalized externally by both haredim and secularists, and even internally.

Having said that, Rabbi Riskin’s fight against this haredi power grab is encouraging. Once again, when the haredim go too far and take too much, the Modern Orthodox are demonstrating the will to fight.