On State Sanction of Religion

Hareidi ('Ultra-Orthodox') and Secularr Jews clash over
Shabbat observance

This week, I'm going to take one of my periodic departures from writing about the weekly Torah portion to focus on an issue that has very much captured the attention of the Jewish world this week.

As I hope I've successfully conveyed in this blog over the past half-year or so, I love living in Israel.  After spending much of my life, especially my professional life as a Rabbi, 'in the woods' in Jewish terms, it is a joy to wake up every morning in a country where being Jewish is 'normal,' not an 'outsider' status.  For Jews, Israel is a very special place, a country whose importance far transcends its tiny size and population among the countries of the world.

That said, there are aspects of the country's religious landscape, whose wisdom escape me.  And not only me; as many of my readers abroad know, in the Jewish State most Jews could not care less about Judaism.  The split between the religious and the secular was long assumed to be about 80% secular/20% religious, but based on the results of the 2015 election the split is now understood to be more like 75% secular/25% religious.  The 'religious' group (in Hebrew, dati) are what we commonly call outside Israel, Orthodox.  That begs the question:  in North America, the majority of religious Jews are not Orthodox, but identify with other streams of Judaism such as Reform and Conservative.  Do such 'non-Orthodox' Jews exist in Israel?  And where do they come out in the figuring of the 75/25 secular/religious split?

The answer is that those belonging to non-Orthodox congregations, or otherwise identifying with those Jewish streams, constitute a very small minority of Israeli Jews.  I have heard a figure of 10% for Reform and Conservative combined, but I think that is a gross overstatement.  And of those who might claim Reform or Conservative affiliation on a survey, most consider themselves at heart 'secular' Jews who melt into the majority of non-religious except at key moments of life and an occasional synagogue visit to prove they can.  So instead being generally seen as legitimate religious alternatives to Orthodox Judaism, the Reform and Conservative movements are seen in Israel as transplants from the Jewish diaspora.  And some immigrant Jews who identified with those movements before they came to Israel, cling to them in Israel out of nostalgia.  I do not believe this is entirely accurate, as we have in our Masorti (Conservative) congregation in Ashqelon, more than a few veteran and native Israelis who come from either Dati or secular backgrounds but became involved with our congregation for a number of reasons.

The reader who has gotten this far might be tempted to ask at this point:  Why does this matter?  If Reform and Conservative Judaism don't seem to resonate with significant numbers of Israeli Jews, who cares?  More specifically, if the non-Orthodox get written out of the Western Wall or the process of conversion of Judaism, why does it matter?  These are two decisions by the Netanyahu government that have the Jewish world inflamed this week, the latest crisis that threatens to cement the split between Israel and the Jews of the rest of the world.

The answer is that religion plays a different, wider role in Israel than in the Western World in general - and certainly, most relevantly, the USA in particular.  In America, the non-Orthodox Jewish streams have flourished for the same reason that so many Christian and other denominations have grown and flourished and become important elements in the religious landscape.  And that is the ironclad separation of church and state - but not religious faith and state - that is mandated by the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution's First Amendment.  In Israel by contrast, the religious landscape is entirely based on the state's ceding of certain personal status issues - marriage and divorce for example - to the different religious groups.  To the different officially-recognized religious groups, that is.  So Jews turn to the state-sanctioned (Orthodox) rabbinate, Christians to the handful of churches with official recognition, and Muslims to their officially-recognized counterpart.  All of these recognized religious bodies receive state funding and sanction, and all other Jewish, Christian and Muslim bodies do not.

This creates a social climate where the recognized religious bodies - in particular the Jewish section of the Ministry of Religious Affairs - try to coerce the vast number of non-religious citizens to behave in religious ways.  But they largely fail, because citizens of a modern, democratic state are unlikely to be coerced.  Probably the most visible ways this plays out, are in Shabbat closings of essential services such as public transport, and in marriage.  Since there is no civil or non-Orthodox alternative to the Rabbinate's hold on personal status, non-religious Israelis flock overseas for civil marriage, then return home where their marriages are recognized by the relevant government ministries - except Religious Affairs.

This coercion, in turn, fuels the public's distaste for religion, period.  And that's too bad.  In the land where the Jewish people found their origins as a people bound to their G-d, the majority of Israelis simply don't care about G-d at all, or about religion, that set of practices and beliefs that express a people's longing for an encounter with G-d.  Would a different role for religion, or a different way of recognizing the various religious streams, make much of a change in this reality?  Who knows?  But I do know that it's unfortunate that religion, in demanding an official role for itself - which by definition, narrows the religious landscape to those religious groups that are officially sanctioned - has become so irrelevant in a country where religion could matter a whole lot more.