“Antiochus!” ranted from the Knesset podium MK Moshe Gafni, alluding to the Hellenistic monarch who waged war on the Jewish faith, and referring to Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana.
The 69-year-old Gafni (United Torah Judaism) was responding to the 49-year-old, Modern Orthodox Kahana’s reformist zeal, which Gafni, his colleagues and the clerical establishment they have nurtured over the years now see as a strategic threat.
At stake, on the face of it, is one regulatory reform and several others that – if it’s up to Kahana – should follow it, but in fact the unfolding showdown is about the Chief Rabbinate’s mission, and ultra-Orthodoxy’s clout.
The first reform involves supervision of kashrut, a NIS 3.5 billion industry that affects all major food producers and some 15,000 eateries across Israel.
Israeli law demands that any food producer, restaurant, café, or kiosk claiming its food is kosher come under the Chief Rabbinate’s supervision.
That means exposing to the rabbinate the inspected eatery’s entire work process, from purchasing and storage to cooking, frying, baking, and dish washing. The same goes for food producers, including multi-billion-dollar corporations like Tnuva, Ossem or Strauss.
However, ultra-Orthodox rabbis dismissed the originally Modern Orthodox Chief Rabbinate’s supervision as insufficient, and established their own supervision systems.
Unable to undo this trend, the state tolerated it and only insisted that producers and eateries using the ultra-Orthodox venues will do so not instead of, but in addition to using the Rabbinate’s supervision. The result is multiple kosherness stamps on a typical tuna can, cheese cup, or coffee jar, and the Chief Rabbinate’s relegation to second-rate status in ultra-Orthodox eyes.
Even so, this system gives the rabbinate great clout, because most Israelis keep kosher, and most of those keeping kosher are not ultra-Orthodox.
The rabbinate’s clout means deploying thousands of supervisors across the country. That means jobs, a lot of jobs, all of which are offered through the countrywide system of religious councils, the local agencies that eateries and food producers approach when seeking a kosherness certificate.
Now Kahana wants to reboot this system, by transforming the Rabbinate’s kosherness operation from supervisor to standardizer.
According to the reform, any three rabbis will be legally permitted to set up their own kosherness supervision operation. The Rabbinate’s role will be to rule whether such a group does or doesn’t meet its standards. If it doesn’t meet the Rabbinate’s requirements, it will still be allowed to operate, and its kosherness stamp’s validity will be left for the public to judge.
In other words, what until now has been done through a government agency will be outsourced to nongovernmental organizations, whether as nonprofits or as businesses, a choice that will also be left for the public to shape.
It is a plan whose rationale, motivation, and potential results are, from the viewpoint of ultra-Orthodoxy’s rabbis and politicians, an abomination.
THE REFORM’S supporters say that the existing situation already accommodates competing supervisions like ultra-Orthodoxy’s Badatz and Beit Yosef. The reform will simply extend this structure, and allow yet more outfits to issue a kosherness certificate.
One such alternative, the Modern Orthodox Tzohar, currently offers a certificate that – in compliance with existing regulation – makes a restaurant declare it is “under Tzohar supervision, without a Rabbinate certificate,” thus insinuating, but refraining from saying expressly, that it is kosher.
Beyond these semantics and technicalities lurks widespread criticism of the existing system’s political aims and corrupt means.
The rabbinate’s license fee, plus the employment of the supervisor it demands, cost an average café an estimated NIS 20,000 per year. Funneling all this labor-intensive activity into the Rabbinate’s bureaucracy fed much of the political machinery that ultra-Orthodoxy conquered and expanded during its politicians’ 44-year-long alliance with the Likud.
Moreover, media reports over the years have charged that some in the supervision systems have been unabashedly corrupt, that some supervision operations became celebrations of nepotism, and that some supervisors altogether neglect their duties and effectively operate like protection rackets.
Now, if the system is decentralized and privatized, Israel’s food industry will still deploy thousands of supervisors – no one disputes they supply a service that millions of Israelis demand – but the politicians will be removed from the process.
This is what makes ultra-Orthodox politicians attack the reform as harshly as they do, with some of them, most notably Shas leader Arye Deri, claiming that the supervision reform is part of a plot designed “to finish off Israel’s Jewish character,” and is therefore welcomed by Reform Judaism.
That charge is unfounded. Kahana’s blueprint is actually disagreeable to Judaism’s non-Orthodox denominations, whose leaders were disappointed to learn it will not legitimize non-Orthodox kosherness systems.
The same goes for the other reforms that Kahana has up his sleeve, and is expected to promote once done with the kosherness system.
THE FIRST of these reforms would target the Chief Rabbinate’s conversion system, which is currently shunned by the bulk of an estimated 300,000 Israelis who according to Jewish law are not Jews because they were not born to Jewish mothers.
Here, too, Kahana has no intention of legitimizing non-Orthodox venues.
The current system sends prospective converts to their regional rabbi, in most cases an appointee of the ultra-Orthodox system which is perceived as hostile toward the Russian-speaking immigration, and excessively strict in its demands from its would-be converts.
The reform would let conversion candidates choose any town’s state-paid rabbi, and thus lead them to Modern Orthodox rabbis whose attitude toward the Russian-speaking immigration is entirely different, both nationally and religiously.
Nationally, Modern Orthodox rabbis see the Russian-speaking immigration as victims of antisemitism, and thus part of Jewish history. That means their conversion process should be more lenient. Regardless of this historic insight, they believe that conversion does not need to include a commitment to lead an Orthodox life, as ultra-Orthodox rabbis demand, thus derailing many conversions, and preventing even more.
In other words, Kahana is out to ease conversion, but not to legitimize non-Orthodox conversions.
That also goes for change in the rabbinical court system, which the new government has already delivered through legislation that reconfigured the body that appoints rabbinical judges. Here, too, change was not about accommodation of non-Orthodoxy, but about ending ultra-Orthodox control of the appointing forum, and effectively handing it over to Modern Orthodoxy.
The only arguable exception to this trend is the Western Wall prayer arrangement, whose proposed reform does involve accommodation of non-Orthodox worship, under the Robinson Arch, south of the existing plaza. However, that blueprint was devised by the Netanyahu government, which suspended it under ultra-Orthodox pressure.
As things are unfolding, the Western Wall reform’s potential passage would complete a set of reforms that would threaten the political empire ultra-Orthodoxy has built slowly but steadily since joining the first Likud-led government back in 1977. Kahana’s reforms thus add up to a Modern Orthodox counterattack in a power struggle and a war of ideas that have been raging for more than 120 years.
The counterattack was unofficially declared by Kahana in a speech from the Knesset podium the day the Bennett-Lapid government was sworn in.
A COMBAT pilot with a master’s degree in law and an alumnus of elitist Modern Orthodox high school Netiv Meir, Kahana is the antithesis of the ultra-Orthodox politician, who typically lacks secular education, and did a minimalistic military service, if any.
A member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina faction who also served with Bennett in the IDF’s commando unit Sayeret Matkal, Kahana would now respond to ultra-Orthodox politicians’ charges that the new government will fight Judaism, and that Bennett might as well “take off his skullcap.”
Referring personally to Gafni and Deri, Kahana – who led F-16 squadrons on combat missions beyond enemy lines – now asked:
“Did you ever get to pray the amidah [the prayer recited three times every day, while standing] while lying down in an ambush, shivering and soaking wet under heavy rain? Did you ever get to pray to God before going to battle? Who are you to teach us about sanctifying God’s name?”
Emotional, invective, and shouted, it was a battle cry. Now the confrontation is underway, and the reforms affecting the Rabbinate’s mandate and resources are but the prelude to the real thing, which – if it’s up to Kahana – will arrive in two years, when the two chief rabbis’ ten-year term will end.
Established a century ago by the fabled theologian of Religious Zionism, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbinate was meant to become a spiritual guide to the future Jewish state, and a major tool in his struggles with ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists.
That vision never materialized. The rabbinate provided little spiritual leadership and much patronage, peppered with political machination, intrigue, and corruption, most notably when former chief rabbi Yona Metzger was jailed last decade for money laundering, tax evasion, and acceptance of millions in bribes.
That lowest ebb in the Chief Rabbinate’s history was, from the viewpoint of Modern Orthodoxy, the direct result of its hostile takeover by ultra-Orthodoxy. Now, with the engine roaring, the vessel cruising, the missiles aimed, and the pilot’s prayer uttered – the battle is ready to be engaged. ■