Secular Talmudist

Rookie MK Ruth Calderon hopes to set an example of how secularists and Haredim can engage one another respectfully

By ROBERT SLATER
RUTH CALDERON521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
RUTH CALDERON521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
While Haredi Jews shout and spit at secularists, while secularists abandon Israeli towns for being “too ultra-Orthodox,” a softspoken, secular Talmudic scholar hopes to use her new, powerful platform as a Knesset Member to begin a revolution – one that would offer secularists a chance to dislodge the Haredim from their near-total monopoly on Judaism.
Should Ruth Calderon succeed – or even make strong inroads toward reaching her goal – she will be undoing a status quo arrangement between ultra-Orthodox and secularists in Israel dating back to the founding of the state. Increasingly, secularists like Calderon are dismayed at the burden they must carry as part of that status quo, allowing thousands of ultra-Orthodox to study Torah instead of joining the Israel Defense Forces or entering the work force.
With her non-preachy style, the softness in her voice betraying no anger, and her rich Talmudic scholarship, Yesh Atid’s Calderon, 51, has emerged as an outspoken star among the 53 (out of 120) new MKs elected last January. Though she long had disdain for politics, she loves her new role. “I am surprised to say that I enjoy myself,” she tells The Jerusalem Report. “I feel my muscles are working. This place makes you feel that all your abilities are working.”
Upon learning in February that she had to give a 10-minute maiden speech to the Knesset, Calderon texted Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid and asked, “Can I teach something?” She was reluctant to give a fullfledged policy speech in her first days as a Knesset Member. “Yes,” replied Lapid, “as long as you don’t do a chavruta,” that is force non-Orthodox and Haredi MKs to become study partners.
The Tel Aviv-born Calderon stole the show February 12, when she gave a 14-minute Talmud lesson, lacing it with references and quotations. Firing a shot across the bow of the ultra-Orthodox, she declared quietly but decisively, “The Torah is not the property of any stream. We gave it away, when we thought there was a more important task, to build the army and the state and farming and industry. Now we must take back what is ours.”
Jewish liberals applauded her; the Haredim, not clear at all what her motives were, and so used to venomous secular attacks on their way of life, could not easily typecast her. So they chose to see her as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Accordingly, the ultra-Orthodox adopted the same caustic rejectionist language toward her that they used for secularists who engaged in Haredi-bashing.
In its editorial the day after Calderon’s Knesset speech, Kikar Hashabbat, the ultra- Orthodox website, wrote that she represented “the new enlightenment, the new forces that have arisen and want to make extinct the Haredi community as we know it. They endanger us,” the website proclaimed, because “they use our scripts and culture against us.”
To Calderon’s great surprise, the speech went viral almost immediately, reaching over 171,000 hits on YouTube, far more than the hits amassed for Calderon’s “boss,” Lapid, when he gave his maiden Knesset speech.
Apart from the religious issue, Calderon stoked controversy in other areas. In February, she urged that the national anthem be changed so that it was more Arab-friendly.
At a right-wing religious Zionist conference in Ramle in April, she described the movement’s anti-Arab stance as racist.
On May 14, Calderon and I sat at a table in the Knesset dining room as MKs and aides rushed around frantically, conducting lastminute negotiations over the state budget.
Despite her recent arrival to the Knesset, she seems right at home. She converses comfortably with non-Orthodox and Haredi Knesset Members alike. “We are in this building for hundreds of hours,” she tells The Report. “So you have to talk to one another.”
Whereas other Talmudic teachers are didactic, Calderon is gentle and nondogmatic.
She detests the verbal violence she found in the Knesset, noting, “It’s not just the words; it’s the way Knesset Members try to hurt each other by hitting below the belt. It is the manipulation that is painful.
It’s something that I don’t understand.” She hopes to set an example of how secularists and Haredim can engage one another respectfully.
For three decades prior to entering the Knesset, Calderon founded a number of pluralistic Jewish study centers. She hoped to build a new Hebrew culture that would enable hundreds of thousands of Israelis to study within institutions “that do not dictate to them the proper way to be a Jew.” Though she won praise for her efforts, she lacked the budgets and other resources to affect real change in society. But, now she is more hopeful; sensing the influence that comes with being a Knesset Member, she says, “I am overwhelmed by the power that you have. You are under a magnifying glass.”
Raised in a decidedly secular home in Tel Aviv – her mother came from Germany, her father from Bulgaria – the young Calderon absorbed her parents’ Zionist beliefs readily, wondering at the same time what Judaism was all about. “There was a sort of soft spot for Jewishness,” she notes. “I was fascinated, intrigued, and drawn to this Jewish thing.”
She had no epiphany when it came to studying the Talmud. But she does remember how divided Israel was when she was a child, “between either you are secular and you don’t touch those books [Jewish texts] or you are religious and you study them.”
She does recall her father telling her of his grandfather, a rabbi in Bulgaria, who owned a Talmud covered with white seashells.
In the early 1980s, while functioning as an education officer during her regular IDF service, she invited guest scholars to lecture to soldiers on Jewish identity, especially on the Talmud. When she asked a lecturer toward the end of her army service where she could undertake serious Talmudic study, he suggested she enroll in the Oranim Academic College in northern Israel. “I didn’t think of this as a career but as a hole in my self. I needed to do this. There was something missing,” she confesses.
In her maiden Knesset speech she explained how the Talmud filled that void.
“When I first encountered the Talmud and became completely enamored with it, its language, its humor, its profound thinking, its modes of discussion, and the practicality, humanity and maturity that emerge from its lines, I sensed that I had found the love of my life, what I had been lacking,” she declares.
After studying at Oranim from 1982 to 1985, she obtained a teacher’s certificate in Bible Studies. While at Oranim, she organized a program that taught Jewish identity to kibbutz children “in a secular way.” It was the start of Calderon’s efforts to create institutions aimed at building a new Hebrew culture, hoping to help secularists interact with traditional Judaism.
Sensing that at heart she was an academic, Calderon enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a Master’s and PhD in its Talmud Department. Her Talmud studies did not make her more religious; but, she says, they made her more Jewish, they made her Jewishness more profound. “The Talmud gave me a language, it gave me words to experience what I am feeling and to live in a richer way,” she says.
Studying Talmud at the Hartman Institute’s Beit Midrash from 1985 to 1989, she wondered, “Why don’t we secularists have a Beit Midrash? Why don’t we have a place where we are not always guests of someone else?” In 1989, setting out to create just such a place, she founded the Jerusalem-based Elul Beit Midrash program for pluralistic Jewish learning. It was Israel’s first joint Beit Midrash for men and women, religious and secular. She also studied at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem, focusing on public policy, education and philosophy.
In 1989, she married Guy Ben-Shahar, a social worker from Kibbutz Efrat. She and her husband have three children – two girls and a boy. In 2008, she and Guy divorced.
Then, in November 1995, came the pivotal event that shaped the rest of her life – the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. That event brought a crisis to her and to Elul. “We had a dream that we were building a bridge between religious and secular communities,” she recalls. “But the assassination made us understand that the gap was much deeper than we understood.”
She felt a need to go to Tel Aviv. “The Rabin assassination shook me,” Calderon says.
“Seeking answers in the kibbutz movement and religious Zionism, I was disillusioned by these ideological communities. I wanted to go home to simple values of humanity.”
She asked Elul officials to start a branch in Tel Aviv but they declined, thinking the city was too much like the American Wild West.
“It was kind of a non-Jewish place, a kind of Los Angeles.”
And so Calderon decided to found her own learning center that would promote the renewal of Hebrew culture. In 1996, she started ALMA – the Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv, and designed it to be a Liberal Arts college. Israel, she believed, could benefit from having colleges that displayed more open-mindedness in their subject matter. “I felt it was a pity that we don’t have such schools,” she says. “Turning you into an engineer in Israel doesn’t open your mind.” The school offered courses in history, philosophy, art and poetry. Calderon taught Talmud there. With only 200 students, the school had far too few students to meet the minimum required to hand out degrees.
To help the school create a new Hebrew culture, ALMA officials invited authors, musicians, painters, TV personalities, poets, and dancers to study in a “Great Books” program for two years with them. At first, the invitees balked, naturally suspicious of any seemingly religious institution. Notes Calderon, “They were suspicious that we were trying to transform or manipulate them into something religious. In Tel Aviv, there is always this suspicion that if you teach something about Judaism, you will get a virus.
“But I said this belongs to you. I said you have the talent and you have just as much right to ‘own’ Judaism as the ultra-Orthodox do.”
After integrating into ALMA, the culturemakers created new songs, art exhibits, and TV series that Calderon viewed as part of a new Hebrew culture. She points to author David Grossman and musician Koby Oz as examples of artists who were swayed in their work by their ALMA studies.
In 1999, while hosting a television show that invited guests to discuss classic and modern Jewish texts, she invited journalist Yair Lapid to be a guest. She recalled that while reading the Bible on the program, Lapid pronounced the name of God as yahweh rather than elohim. Considered the real name of God and thus too holy to utter, yahweh is almost never pronounced. Lapid’s departure from the norm embarrassed and offended Calderon.
She wrote him afterwards, “I don’t like what you did.” They began a regular correspondence and Calderon grew increasingly impressed with Lapid. He contributed to ALMA. She helped him with a book he was writing on Jewish heroes Taking time out from ALMA in Israel, Calderon and her then-husband, Guy, moved to Livingston, New Jersey, where, from 2002 to 2004, Guy was the emissary of the Jewish Federation of Greater Metro West. Hoping to create pockets of her new Hebrew culture, Calderon sought out Jewish institutions before Jewish holidays, suggesting study/ entertainment programs; but they balked, saying, “We are closed. It’s a holiday.”
Finally, Rabbi Andy Bachman let her hold a Shavuot tikkun at the NYU Hillel. That event drew 500 people and subsequent events enjoyed larger numbers. “So I have had the satisfaction of exposing Jewish culture to American groups.”
One day in 2010 writing in his column for the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Lapid comprised a list of his ideal government ministers, naming Calderon minister of culture. Still, she shied away from politics, telling Lapid, “The last thing in the world that I can do is politics. I am too sensitive and they will eat me up. I am not built for that. I am in education and culture.” As if to buttress her unwillingness to enter politics, she agreed in 2011 to become the Director of Culture and Education at the National Library.
In the fall of 2012, with January elections looming, Lapid began forming a political party. He sought out Calderon, hoping she would join his team but she demurred. “Don’t even think about me,” she told Lapid. But, in truth, she was having second thoughts about steering clear of politics. She was growing weary of her work at ALMA. While it was growing spiritually, it suffered from paltry budgets and resources. The organization needed a voice in politics, she believed. But she remained ambiguous if only because she loved her job at the National Library. “I had a lovely job there and for the first time in my life I had a budget from the Rothschild Foundation. I could do culture in any way that I dreamed of.”
But as Lapid moved closer and closer to forming a political party, Calderon found herself more and more attracted to politics and to Lapid’s approach to politics. And Lapid made a pitch to her that she could not resist. “You will be our moral compass.”
Lapid offered her the No. 13 spot on the Yesh Atid ticket when the polls showed his party winning no more than nine to 11 seats.
That was acceptable to Calderon. “I wanted politics a little bit, but I really didn’t want it, so 13 was fine.”
She took to Yesh Atid at once. “What I loved about the new party was that it was the first party I saw that was not homogeneous,” she says. “There were religious, and secular, Ethiopian immigrants, etc. and we were all new. None of us were professional politicians and everybody worked at something outside of politics. We knew how to work with a budget; we knew how to fund-raise.”
Then came the election in January 2013, with Yesh Atid surprising everyone by garnering 19 Knesset seats, second only to the Likud Beytenu’s 31, and ahead of the third-place Labor Party with 15 seats. Ruth Calderon, number 13 on the list, became an MK.
She is taken back by the fuss caused by her maiden speech, and the speed at which her words traveled through cyberspace. Now she must decide how fast she promotes her revolution. She plans to propose legislation creating a pluralist department for Jewish education in the Education Ministry. She also wants to turn public broadcasting into what she calls “a lighthouse of Jewish culture.”
However swiftly she moves in the future, Ruth Calderon has already made quite a splash as a brand-new politician. 