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The Secret is Mutual Respect at the Kotel

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by Rabbi Alan Yuter
 
It is being reported that the Israeli Government’s compromise, allowing egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, received predictably mixed reviews.
 
Non-Orthodox Jews are thrilled that Israel, the sovereign state of the Jewish people, is recognizing their liberal, non-Halakhic Jewishness as a legitimate Jewish expression. 
 
Alternatively, the Haredi Agudath Israel of America proclaimed that, “Designating an area at the Kotel Maaravi (Western Wall) for feminist and mixed-gender prayer not only profanes the holy site, it creates yet a further lamentable rift between Jews.”
 
I personally find non-Halakhic solutions to Halakhic problems to be unacceptable. But the Jewish people is greater than any one person’s proclivities. The new egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall should be understood as a political problem. For those Orthodox voices that take tradition to the culture of the remembered past, any change in usage will be taken to be blasphemy. Their real authority text is not the Torah of Sinai and the Oral Tradition; socially conservative, militantly strident Orthodoxy views it own living community’s ethos as the prism through which the tradition is filtered. In contrast, Oral Torah Orthodoxy allows women to perform acts commanded to men because of nahat ru’ah, the good feeling of being included. By treating the community’s tradition as the defacto text, Halakhah actually sheds its elasticity.  
 
Partnership minyanim, of the kind approved by Prof. Daniel Sperber, is at least as Halakhic [because the rites performed do not violate the letter of Jewish law] as many accepted but problematic practices, like allowing multiple aliyyot on Simhat Torah, abolishing halita [plunging meat after salting into boiling water] and directing women to recite the late medieval blessing, “who has made me according to His will.”  The harsh Orthodox response to the Women of the Wall reflects the living religion of the Haredi street, not the norms of the Oral Torah.
 
The State of Israel is committed to freedom of religion as a matter of law and conscience.  If Christianity and Islam are permitted function without governmental interference, no stream in Judaism may be allowed to apply governmental power to advance its own particular world view.  Accordingly, a Jewish and Democratic state must allow its citizens the political right to be theologically wrong. 
 
Just as secular Zionists have the legal right to express their Jewishness as they wish, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews deserve no less. Orthodox Jewry should as a matter of free market strategy support the pluralist mindset because pluralist tolerance insures Orthodoxy’s rights to its rites. Orthodox Jewry would be wise to develop  a pedagogic concern for nurturing, informing, and engaging each individual Jewish conscience, even for those who are not and do not intend to become Orthodox.
 
Now that the Wall compromise has been reached, the Women of the Wall will really be put to the test. Will they continue to pray at the Wall, with tallit, tefillin, and Torah scroll, but without photographers, media coverage, or headline attention?  Was their mission to sincerely pray to a God Who hears prayers in a feminist voice, or was their goal, as an act of consciousness raising, to undermine a patriarchal Jewish Orthodoxy that they view to be hopelessly arcane and irredeemably parochial?
 
While I have no interest in advancing liberal Judaism’s agenda, I do have a keen interest in allowing liberal Jews their political right to act in accord with their own Jewish conscience.
 
The Agudath Israel of America’s response also requires unpackaging:
 
“’Designating an area at the Kotel Maaravi (Western Wall) for feminist and mixed-gender prayer not only profanes the holy site, it creates yet a further lamentable rift between Jews,’ Agudah said in a statement released Monday, a day after the Israeli Cabinet approved the plan for the site.”
 
This claim is unfortunately disingenuous. The present prayer partition at the Western Wall is a post-1967 innovation and change of the status quo to which Orthodoxy both appeals and when it is able, to modify according to its own lights. Agudath Israel here implies that its standards reflect God’s will, its conscience alone may not be compromised, and only its rabbis have the right to determine what is Jewishly wrong. 
 
If the prayer partition were truly essential to public prayer, and if the Wall Plaza claims the status of an Orthodox synagogue, then Agudath Israel’s Great Rabbis should, would, and could have disallowed its faithful from praying at the Wall altogether when Jews had access but not sovereignty over the Wall and no partition was present. What is presented as a fight about faith is in fact a tug of war over turf.
 
Agudath Israel argues that “the maintenance at that holy place of a standard — that of time-honored Jewish religious tradition — that all Jews, even those who might prefer other standards or none at all, can abide.”  Well, Conservative Judaism’s Rabbinical Assembly boasts a “Committee of Jewish Law and Standards.” [my italics] If what is at stake are mere standards or “time honored religious tradition,” but not God’s recorded commandments, what Mordecai Kaplan called “folkways,” then the Haredi and Reform positions carry the same moral valence as Agudath Israel’s Orthodoxy.  But authentic Jewish law is what the Torah authorized court of all Israel legislates; it is not what Orthodox Jews may, by dint of historical habit, just happen to do. [see Leviticus 4:13 and Lamentations 5:7] If Orthodox Judaism wants the respect it demands of others, it must defend its position based on Torah statute, not culture inertia, nostalgic memory, or by social policy of instituting post-Talmudic strictures, the sole goal of which is to foster Jewish “otherness.”
 
If gender separation is a Torah law and not a mere time-honored custom, Orthodox Judaism must now show where this rule is formally legislated as well as where post-Talmudic authorities memorialize this formal requirement. Although most Orthodox rabbis don’t like to admit this fact, at the end of the Sabbatical year, the Head of the Jewish state [not the Chief Rabbi!] reads the Torah in the Temple’s women’s section in the presence of men, women, and children. The Orthodox “tradition” that binds all Israel is the Oral Torah now memorialized in the classical Rabbinic library. Popular culture folk religion does have a voice, but only God gets the veto.
 
Since Orthodoxy believes that Torah is true, it may not mistake culture choice with covenantal commitment. Current Orthodox practice forbids women from slaughtering animals, but the Oral Law explicitly allows the practice. Which position is tradition?  And which view does the God of Israel endorse?
 
Just as Orthodox Jews have a right to their standards, and are worthy of accommodation, so too are non-Orthodox Jews. By disenfranchising non-Orthodox Diaspora Jewry, Orthodoxy’s leadership unintentionally and unwittingly further alienates increasingly apathetic Jews from their Israel and their Torah. If Orthodoxy wants not to be bashed, it would be strategically wise and ethically correct not to bash others. MK  Moses Gafni called the Women at the Wall “clowns.” This callous comment brought shame on himself, animosity toward his community, and ill-will toward Orthodoxy.
 
In conclusion:
 
Both Orthodox and non-Orthodox streams should be allowed to do as they wish in and on the turf to which they are assigned.
 
Respect must be mutual and reciprocal. No more putting up with put downs. There must be civility in public Jewish discourse; conscience that cannot be expressed courtesy will not convince the unconvinced.

Let’s allow the conteding denominational streams compete for and not compel the souls of searching Jews. Let the free marketplace of ideas be the arena for deciding matters of Jewish propriety.
 
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