Rabbinical Tug of War

David Stav is attempting to wrest control of the Chief Rabbinate from the ultra-Orthodox for the first time in two decades

By ANDREW FRIEDMAN
To begin with, Rabbi David Stav is a tough person to interview. With all the activity going on in his office on the second floor of Shoham’s City Hall, where he has served as municipal rabbi since 1998, it isn’t clear just where his attention is focused – on the mobile phone that keeps ringing, the side conversation he’s having with his secretary, or on the guest on the other side of his modest desk.
At the age of 53, Stav’s energy doesn’t exactly electrify the room, but one can certainly feel the rabbi’s clear sense of urgency and purpose.
Immediately upon shaking hands with the man, it is clear he has little time for small talk or formalities. With a landline telephone in one hand and a cellphone in the other, there is no nonsense surrounding the rabbi as he deals with a slew of issues, ranging from ordinary inquiries from local residents to administrative issues facing the Tzohar rabbinic organization he helped found in 1995 to streamline religious services, such as marriage and divorce for nonobservant Israelis.
And yet, amidst it all, it is clear that there is one overriding issue on Stav’s mind – the July election for the position of Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, and the Shoham rabbi’s attempt to wrest control of the Chief Rabbinate from the ultra-Orthodox for the first time in two decades. It is an attempt that has sparked a variety of political firestorms within religious Zionist circles and the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, and also among detractors who regard the Chief Rabbinate as an affront to the liberty and religious freedoms guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.
At first glance, it is easy to see why Stav’s candidacy has aroused the ire of Shas, and why the idea that a rabbi with a knitted kippa (the trademark of non-Haredi observant Jews) could soon occupy the Chief Rabbi’s chair has delighted more than a few members of the Orthodox Zionist establishment.
In many ways, Stav appears to be the ideal candidate to head the country’s religious establishment. As co-founder of the hesder yeshiva in Petah Tikva (the other founders were Rabbi Yuval Cherlow and Rabbi Shai Piron, the current education minister) and a qualified Rabbinical Court judge, even ultra- Orthodox observers agree that Stav is a topflight Torah scholar who has the academic qualifications for the job of chief rabbi.
Furthermore, Stav is a graduate of Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, religious Zionism’s flagship institution, and he believes fervently in the role of the State of Israel as a key factor in the ultimate messianic vision of the yeshiva’s founder, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook. He speaks often and unapologetically about the nationhood of the Jewish People (his talk is peppered with the phrase am yisrael, the people of Israel), and he views himself first and foremost as a servant of the people.
La stly, he says openly that the Harediled religious establishment is deeply flawed and does little to serve the needs of ordinary Israelis. He has pledged to foster deep-rooted administrative change in a governmental body that features prominently in the state comptroller’s annual report of corruption and incompetence in government.
Predictably, perhaps, Stav’s declaration of war against incompetence and what he calls “heartless” religious leadership in Israel has aroused the enmity of parts of the Haredi community. Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Sephardi chief rabbi, exploded with a withering attack against Stav during a lecture in mid-June, calling Stav a “wicked man” who is unworthy to be chief rabbi. Those remarks were followed by Stav being manhandled by Haredi guests at a wedding the following day.
Sources close to the Shas leadership would not comment on Yosef’s attack, but there are several possible explanations for the former chief rabbi’s fury. For the past 20 years, the country’s Chief Rabbis have lacked standing as Torah scholars, with many people saying their only qualifications for the position were to pledge fealty and allegiance to Haredi yeshiva heads. A Stav-led Rabbinate threatens to upset that control.
Furthermore, one Shas spokesperson linked the rabbi’s comments to a political deal between Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi party, and current Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. The deal called for the Bayit Yehudi Knesset faction to support a law allowing a chief rabbi to serve more than one term (currently, chief rabbis are limited to one term) in exchange for Amar’s support for Stav for the Ashkenazi chair. But the Shas official, who spoke to The Jerusalem Report on condition of anonymity, said Bennett was a political novice who showed no understanding of local politics or of the power structure inside Shas.
“It’s been decades since the National Religious Party [the forerunner of Bayit Yehudi] had any influence or power, and it will take them a fair bit of time to relearn the world of politics,” said the Shas source. “Rabbi Amar made all kinds of promises and told them all kinds of lies, and they foolishly thought that the deal would neutralize Shas’s opposition to Rabbi Stav, but Rabbi Amar has no influence at all inside Shas. That’s the background to Rav Ovadia’s attack on Rav Stav. Sure, it was a personal attack, but even more than that, it was Rav Ovadia sending a message to Naftali Bennett: ‘Don’t talk around us or make deals behind our backs. Talk to us directly, and we can do business.’” Significantly, the Ashkenazi Haredi leadership has remained largely above the fray, perhaps an indication of a feeling among the Ashkenazi power brokers that Stav poses little threat to the Haredi candidate for the Ashkenazi post, Modi’in Municipal Rabbi David Lau, son of former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.
But their silence should not be interpreted as their acceptance of Stav, or of his plans to overhaul the Rabbinate. Stav has tangled with the Haredi Rabbinate in the past (during the 2007-2008 sabbatical year, Stav’s Tzohar rabbinic organization threatened to issue private kashrut certificates if the Chief Rabbinate followed through on a threat to annul the heter mekhira, a symbolic arrangement by which Jewish farmers “sell” their land to non- Jews every seven years in order to avoid the Biblical prohibition of working the land during the sabbatical [shmita] year), and he would likely not hesitate to do so again.
Similarly, sources close to the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party say the group’s rabbinical advisers say they are concerned that a Zionist-led Rabbinate could relax conversion and marriage requirements, thus potentially creating problems with mamzerim (children born of an adulterous union).
“Of course we do not recognize the authority of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate,” Rabbi Moshe Grylak, editor of the Haredi magazine, Mishpacha, and confidante of many leading ultra-Orthodox authorities, tells The Report.
“But here you are talking about issues that will affect our community directly. We cannot accept a situation in which the state relaxes legitimate Halakhic requirements simply to gain some political points at the expense of the Haredi parties.”
Ironically, many supporters of Stav agree with their Haredi counterparts that Yosef’s comments were not necessarily meant to be seen as a personal attack against a political rival. Rather, they say the Haredi battle against Stav actually cuts to the core of a fundamental disagreement about the mandate of the Chief Rabbinate: Will the state-funded institution continue to be an economic and political bonanza for the Haredi political parties, or can it be reformed and turned into a Rabbinate that will be in tune with the needs of the Jewish people? “Can our religious establishment prevent the disengagement of millions of Jews from Judaism and help and inspire millions of Jews to feel proud to be Jewish, to feel connected to their Jewish heritage and to feel joy about their Judaism?” Stav asks.
Stav’s comments were echoed by a variety of leading national religious rabbis interviewed for this article, all of whom explained the Haredi opposition to Stav on ideological grounds. As Orthodox rabbis, all agreed on the need to maintain top-notch Halakhic requirements for the issues facing the Rabbinate – personal status issues, kashrut, burial and more – but all also said the current structure is hopelessly flawed and drives far too many people away from Jewish tradition and custom. The rabbis agree that the system requires fundamental change in order to repair the split between many secular Israelis and the Jewish religion.
“The chief rabbi must find a way to streamline and interpret the ritual of marriage, divorce and burial in a way that are honestly in accordance with traditional Jewish law but which also fulfill the requirements of righteousness and human sensitivity that we have a right to expect from our religious leaders,” Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, rabbi of the West Bank town of Efrat, explains to The Report.
“Of course, the chief rabbi must be an expert in all areas of Jewish law, but the largest question to me is: Is Judaism just a series of ritual, Halakhic definitions, or does it also include a feeling, universalistic, humanistic side?” Riskin adds.
As with most political fights, there is more at stake in the battle for the Rabbinate than political kingship and personal pride. With an annual budget of NIS 63,781,000 and an opaque approach to public relations (the Ministry of Religious Affairs did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls for this article), the Rabbinate has been an important source of income and job creation for the lowincome Haredi sector in recent years.
Take marriage licenses, for example. Stav has proposed abolishing the current system under which engaged couples must turn to the Rabbinate in their city of residence for a marriage license, and allowing all couples to turn to any state-certified Rabbinate for this service. The result, he says, would force local Rabbinates to improve the services they provide, or ultimately to render themselves irrelevant. He has made similar proposals to overhaul the Rabbinate’s kashrut authority, which, he says, is wasteful, frustrating for restaurateurs seeking certification and does not effectively oversee the restaurants that are certified as kosher.
The current rules have also created fertile ground for deep-seated corruption charges.
Last December, former Sephardi chief rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron was charged with fraud, attempted fraud and breach of trust for his alleged role in granting fictitious rabbinical ordination certificates to non-observant members of the security services so the latter could increase their salaries.
More recently, on June 21, police raided the home of outgoing Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who is suspected of accepting bribes, fraud and money laundering.
Police questioned Metzger for 10 hours, and eventually released him to five days house arrest. Metzger has reportedly been banned from leaving the country or contacting three other suspects who were arrested as part of the investigation.
Stav has built a strong base of support from within the religious Zionist community, both among politicians and rabbinical leaders alike.
Nevertheless, Stav’s campaign has gone far from smoothly, even inside the community from which he hails. Part of that has to do with the coincidence that the campaign for chief rabbi has coincided with the political alliance between Bayit Yehudi and the secular Yesh Atid faction.
That alliance, in place since late 2012, has set some religiously conservative elements in the knitted kippa world on edge, particular in the West Bank. There, influential rabbis, including Kiryat Arba’s Dov Lior and Beit El’s Zalman Melamed, may share Stav’s desire to make the Rabbinate more user-friendly for non-observant Jews, but they support more religiously conservative candidates for the position, including Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, the municipal rabbi of Ramat Gan and religious Zionism’s senior statesman.
If the current election campaign has focused on defining the role and functioning of the Chief Rabbinate, outside “official” Orthodox circles, the discussion surrounding the race has not focused on the type of Rabbinate that is needed, but rather on whether Israel needs official state religion at all.
Naturally, Reform and Conservative groups bristle at the legal block to having their marriages recognized by the State of Israel.
At best, they say, the discrimination is a crass violation of the state’s founding principles; at worst, they say, the confluence of religion and state poses an existential threat to the state, perhaps event to the Jewish people itself.
“Shlomo Amar, the Sephardi chief rabbi, told the Hebrew-language paper, Makor Rishon, that it would be better for a person never to pray at all than to pray in a Reform synagogue,” Rabbi Uri Regev, the former head of the Israel Reform Action Committee who now heads Hiddush, a lobbying organization committed to fostering religious freedom in Israel, tells The Report.
“That’s a regrettable stance, but a totally legitimate one for a private individual to take.
But for an official representative of the State of Israel? For Israel’s leading religious figure? To the extent that the Israeli leadership failed to denounce the rabbi, his words are perceived and should be perceived – as representing Israel’s Jewish face. And it just so happens that the vast majority of the people who support Israel on Capitol Hill, in AIPAC, in the Federations and elsewhere – pray in exactly the synagogues on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that Rabbi Amar says one should never set foot in. So the rabbi disenfranchises some of Israel’s strongest supporters,” says Regev.
Even worse, say opponents, is that current laws violate the fundamental principles of both democracy and Judaism, and create a confluence that can only bring abuse and dishonor to both. They point out that the Torah does not call for the appointment of a “chief rabbi,” seeing instead the ideal method of religious government in the Sanhedrin, the 71-member ancient council of Torah sages that was charged with tackling the halakhic issues of the day.
In addition, by discriminating against non-Orthodox marriage in Israel, Regev points out that the state is in violation of its own Declaration of Independence, which guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience.”
“The state has no business granting rabbis civil powers of coercion,” Regev says. “I’m not advocating a complete, American-style separation of synagogue and state – it makes sense for the state to provide religious services, just like it provides education and culture services. But the funding should be allocated fairly, according to adherence.”
Perhaps even more significantly, rising numbers of young people are voting with their feet and rejecting the Rabbinate infrastructure completely. If Hiddush’s numbers are correct, nearly one in five marriages that involve at least one Israeli Jewish spouse now takes place abroad, and not only in cases in which people are ineligible for Orthodox marriage.
Wedding packages are available in Cyprus for just 520 euros (NIS 2,500), making the option to travel abroad to get married affordable for large numbers of Israelis who cannot get married here, or simply do not want to grant legitimacy to a system they view as biased or even abusive.
Equally significantly, the number of Jewish Israeli couples who simply choose not to get married has spiked over the past decade, to the point that for many long-term, committed, monogamous secular Israeli couples, the question they ask is no longer “when” to get married, but rather “if” they want to formally tie the knot.
It should be noted that some Orthodox officials have started to advocate reform in civil law. Rabbis such as Efrat’s Shlomo Riskin and Har Adar’s Naftali Rothenberg now support breaking the Orthodox monopoly over marriage in Israel. Rothenberg proposes creating a civil track for marriage, to run in parallel to the current religious option. That, he says, would ease questions of divorce and mamzerut because halakha does not recognize the validity of marriages outside the purview of Jewish law.
“By forcing Israeli couples to marry in accordance with halakha, we actually open the door to many problems,” Rothenberg told Israel Radio. “If a couple gets married in accordance with the halakha in Israel, but divorced under civil law in Las Vegas five years later, you’ve actually created an enormous halakhic problem. But there would be no problem allowing couples who got married under civil law to divorce in the same manner, because according to Jewish law, they would never have been married in the first place,” he said.
However, Rothenberg and Riskin appear to be a small minority inside the religious Zionist world. While few in the Zionist Orthodox establishment would advocate the civil enforcement of halakha in today’s world, the slogan “the Jewish People, in the Land of Israel, living according to the Torah of Israel” remains a strong guiding principle. While even the most stringent rabbinic voices in the Whole Land of Israel camp do not advocate civil penalties for public Shabbat violations, they do say there is a place for halakha to define civil law on matters of public concern, even if individuals can – and do – choose to exercise their options abroad.
As the race for the Rabbinate reaches a climax, more questions than answers remain.
No final date has been set for the election, nor has the field of candidates been finalized.
There can be little doubt that Stav has the thick skin required to play the political game, but it is far from clear that he has the political clout to pull out a surprise victory. Should it become clear that Stav will not be elected, some observers say he could step down in favor of Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, the widely respected municipal rabbi in Migdal Haemek.
Other candidates to succeed Metzger are Rabbi Eliezer Igra, head of the Beersheba Rabbinical Court and Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, son of former chief rabbi Avraham Shapira.
In addition, the makeup of the Electoral Assembly that will elect the next chief rabbis has yet to be decided. While MK Elazar Stern (Hatnua) proposed expanding the assembly to 200 members in order to ensure minority and pluralistic representation on the voting panel, the bill failed to garner the requisite support and the panel will continue be comprised of 150 members, including 80 rabbis and 70 nonrabbinical public officials. Most of the voting members are current municipal rabbis, together with a variety of local and regional council heads.
On paper, that would appear to give a majority to one of the Haredi candidates, but Stav says he is confident about his chances, noting he has gained the support of at least some of the Haredi members of the Electoral Assembly.
“People want rabbinic leadership,” says Stav, “and it is up to us to provide it. We’ve failed on that count in recent years, but you can see by the questions I get from secular and religious Israelis alike that the Jewish People has not given up. The Jewish People may not wear kippas, but the nation is very religious in terms of spirituality, of wanting moral leadership and guidance.” 