Think Again: Sincerity is not enough

They came to the Kotel to make a political statement: We reject any gender distinctions in Judaism.

By JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
Haredi woman yells at Women of the Wall member at the Kotel (photo credit: Melanie Lidman)
Haredi woman yells at Women of the Wall member at the Kotel
(photo credit: Melanie Lidman)
Two weeks ago, we read in Parashat Shmini how Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron the High Priest, brought a “strange fire in front of Hashem [God]” and were consumed by a “fire that went forth from before Hashem.” Targum Onkelos translates a “strange fire” as one “not commanded by Hashem.”
Their sin was to bring the incense offering that only their father Aaron was designated to bring.
Later this summer, we will read of Korah and his followers. Korah made a specifically democratic argument against the “appropriation” of any special role in the Divine service by either Moses or Aaron: “For the entire assembly – all of them – are holy...”
Nor can there be any question of the sincerity of the followers of Korah. Moses warned them that only one of those who brought the incense offering would survive, and yet 250 showed up the next morning and placed the incense on their censors.
Their evident sincerity did not avail them, and each perished in the same fashion as Nadab and Abihu.
From these two famous episodes, we learn three things. First, when it comes to Divine service, modern categories, like “rights of religious expression” (see the Jerusalem Post editorial “Solomonic solution,” April 113) and “equality,” are misplaced. God has the ultimate say in how we relate to Him and about the form of the relationship. And He may not be egalitarian – the second thing we learn. Korah’s challenge to the unique status of Moses and Aaron was also a challenge to the truth of the prophecy received from God, and punished, as such, with unusual severity by God Himself.
And third, sincerity – i.e., the desire, even intense desire, to worship God in a particular fashion – is not enough. As we saw, Korah’s followers sincerely wanted to draw close to God.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the preeminent Modern Orthodox thinker, made this point once to a woman who sought his permission to wear a tallit while praying. He told her she should first try wearing a four-cornered garment without the tzitzit (ritual fringes on the corner). (Tzitzit on four-cornered garments are not halachically required for women because the mitzva is a time-bound one.) She returned to Rabbi Soloveitchik after three months and told him that her prayers had never been so inspired and exhilarating. He pointed out that her exhilaration stemmed from an act that had no halachic significance, and forbade her from wearing a tallit. Rabbi Soloveitchik’s point was that emphasis on the subjective emotional experience reflects a pagan, not Jewish, approach to prayer.
Jewish prayer takes place only within the context of the Divine command.
SINCERITY, AS a religious determinant, knows no bounds. More than 20 years ago, I asked one of the early leaders of Women of the Wall – who described herself as religiously observant – on what grounds she would oppose Jews for J. conducting their own minyan at the Western Wall. She could not answer.
Nor did she dismiss their doing so out of hand.
Leah Shakdiel, another early WoW activist, envisioned the Western Wall becoming a sort of center for religious rites as performance art, where “different people dynamically evolve various forms of worship so that Jews and Muslims and Christians can pray together to God.”
The power of the Western Wall derives from the fact that it is the last link to the Temple that once stood on the Temple Mount above, and as such is the enduring symbol of Jewish continuity. For it to become a showplace for whatever is avant-garde in religious rites would remove that power.
Even those who claim the right to worship at the Western Wall as their heart desires, and their supporters worldwide, apparently recognize some limitations on “sincerity” as the ultimate desideratum.
I have not heard of any Reform or Conservative fund-raising campaigns to aid the Temple Mount Faithful in their desire to conduct communal prayers on the Temple Mount. Yet no one denies their sincere desire to do so.
NOT THAT it matters, but I’m not convinced even of the religious sincerity of most of those who come to the Kotel on Rosh Hodesh to conduct services in tallitot and tefillin. Those gatherings strike me as more political than religious. The first such gathering was timed to coincide with an international conference of Jewish feminists in Jerusalem more than 20 years ago. It’s safe to say that few of those at the conference were regular attendees at Rosh Hodesh minyanim.
They came to the Kotel to make a political statement: We reject any gender distinctions in Judaism.
The specific attraction to forms of garb worn for prayer by men and public prayer in a quorum, which is only halachically incumbent on men, without first being meticulous on all matters of observance equally obligatory on men and women, is a feminist statement, not a religious one.
An acquaintance of mine was once sitting on a plane to Israel next to a newly minted PhD student from Michigan, who told her that her trip to Israel to study at a “non-Orthodox yeshiva” had been fully funded. Asked what specifically she would be doing in Israel, the young woman replied excitedly she would be going to the Western Wall “to put on a shmatte [old rag].” Noting the older woman’s puzzled look, she continued, “You know, a shmatte,” while miming putting on a tallit. The prime attraction of the Kotel for her was the frisson of causing Orthodox Jews to gnash their teeth.
Anat Hoffman, the leading voice of WoW, is also the executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center (Reform). Yet the Reform movement does not view the Western Wall as possessing any special sanctity. A 1999 statement of the Progressive Rabbis in Israel declared, “One should not consider the Western Wall as possessing any sanctity... The approach of the Progressive Jew toward worship and prayer is opposed to any renewal of the Temple, opposed to the restoration of sacrificial worship....
The Western Wall does not represent Jewish cleaving to God nor the experience of prayer nor Jewish thought for our times.”
If the Western Wall, however, possesses no special sanctity, why is Hoffman so eager to pray there in tallit and tefillin? Secular journalist Hillel Halkin long ago asked the question: “Were they to come to the Wall without prayer shawls, as a simple gesture of respect for the traditions of the place, against what sacred principles of their faith would they be sinning? Are there no other places to practice Jewish feminism in the world, in Israel, or even in Jerusalem that they must do it at the one site where it is sure to infuriate large numbers of Orthodox Jews?” THE ANSWER to that question is twofold. First, WoW and the heterodox movements seek validation of their rites. Their first response to Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky’s proposal to partition the Western Wall into three sections – men, women and egalitarian – was to insist that all three sections have a common point of entry. As Anat Hoffman put it last December, “I want to see and be seen.”
“Be seen” by whom? If Hoffman means seen by God (as in Genesis 22:14), I imagine that even she would admit that His view extends the entire length of the Western Wall. So she must mean some human audience. But the notion that the State of Israel or the distinguished chairman of the Jewish Agency can confer validity on any particular form of prayer by forcing its public viewing is, frankly, pathetic – at least if one conceives of prayer as directed to God.
While the Western Wall may possess no special holiness for the heterodox movements, it does offer the maximum potential for confrontation. And Anat Hoffman is canny enough to know that casting herself as Rosa Parks circa 1955 guarantees maximum photo-ops in The New York Times.
And those, in turn, help fill the coffers of the minuscule Reform movement in Israel and energize the heterodox movements abroad by providing them with a cause – “equal religious rights.” No matter how spruced up and expanded the new area for egalitarian prayer, the heterodox movements will cavil at the Sharansky plan out of fear that with the potential for confrontation reduced, the area reserved for them will quickly fall into disuse.
THE OVERWHELMING majority of Jews who come to the Western Wall every year – men and women, religiously observant and not yet observant – come not to engage in public prayer, but to pour out their whispered supplications to God. Every Jew – and even non-Jews – can address any prayer to God, in whatever language they want, without fear of harassment.
Anat Hoffman and her cohorts should try it.
The writer is director of Jewish Media Resources, has written a regular column in The Jerusalem Post Magazine since 1997, and is the author of eight biographies of modern Jewish leaders.