Appointed by the British Mandate as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine (alongside Sephardi Rabbi Yaakov Meir), the 56-year-old Kook spent his last 14 years building the agency which, he hoped, would be a centerpiece of the Zionist enterprise, an inspiration of public morality and national peace.
A hundred years later, the agency that was launched amid great expectations has come to be widely derided as an engine of national schism, public wrath and religious shame.
While delivering its more prosaic services – a religious court system; marriages and divorces, and kosher supervision – Kook hoped the Rabbinate would also serve as a moral inspiration for the future Jewish state.
Moreover, having served as a rabbi in London, and thus been exposed to the big world that sprawled beyond the Land of Israel, Kook hoped the Rabbinate would become a moral authority not only for observant Jews, but also for their secular brethren, and not only in the Promised Land, but worldwide.
The limits of this vision became apparent already before his death in 1935, as ultra-Orthodoxy had mostly rejected his version of Judaism, and ignored the agency he built. Then again, he did win the respect of secular Zionists, having genuinely admired and continuously dialogued with the pioneers, despite their apostasy.
The stature Kook established was preserved by his successor, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, who like him was a towering scholar, a fervent Zionist, and a citizen of the world. The Rabbinate’s prestige survived Herzog’s death in 1959, but a series of internal scandals and external challenges since the 1970s spawned half-a-century of spiritual decline, political marginalization and public disgust.
THE FIRST setback, a titanic clash of egos, came in the 1970s, when the Rabbinate was actually headed by two of Israel’s greatest-ever Talmudic scholars, Shlomo Goren and Ovadia Yosef, who were, respectively, Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis.
The pair’s backgrounds were entirely different. The Polish-born Goren’s career as the builder of the IDF’s chaplaincy was shaped in the fire and brimstone of three wars’ battlefields. His great rivals back then were the secular generals on whom he imposed the army’s observance of Shabbat and the dietary laws, while doing the thankless work of locating and burying casualties, and devising the eligibility of missing soldiers’ wives.
The Iraqi-born Yosef’s nemeses were the Ashkenazi sages who marginalized Sephardi rabbis and their centuries-old legacy regarding Jewish law. Yosef’s crusade since his twenties for Sephardi identity and pride, and his willingness to confront much older Ashkenazi rabbis, would later result in his establishment of the Shas Party with which he reshaped Israeli politics.
Despite their very different origins and goals, in terms of their personalities, Goren and Yosef had much in common, as both were independent-minded warriors. The result was war, at the Rabbinate’s heart.
The chief rabbis’ collision was triggered by a case involving two Israelis whose mother did not divorce before bearing them from another man, and thus were bastards from Jewish law’s standpoint, and as such could not marry other Jews (Deuteronomy 23:3).
Faced with an angry secular public, and convinced he had a halachic solution for the problem, Goren allowed the siblings’ marriages (based on dubious information that the mother’s first husband wasn’t Jewish, and her marriage was thus invalid). While at it, Goren overruled Yosef. Moreover, he tried to use the case to establish a special court of rabbis from around the world that would be headed by Boston-based Joseph D. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) and be tasked with tackling unique cases like the two siblings’.
Rabbi Yosef saw all this as an attempt to marginalize him personally and Sephardi rabbinical authority in general. The result was a decade of mutual charges, leaks, intrigues and mudslinging that made the pair an emblem of unbridled animosity, and the Rabbinate a casualty of their war.
It was a trauma from which the Rabbinate never recovered. The politicians now sought mild personalities on whom they could count to harmonize. That aim was achieved, but by installing chief rabbis who lacked charisma, or rabbinical stature, or both.
Meanwhile, external events also debilitated the Rabbinate, and even more severely than one personal war, no matter how intense.
ISRAEL’S POLITICAL tilt from Left to Right since 1977, and Rabbi Yosef’s establishment of Shas in 1984, resulted in the Rabbinate’s gradual takeover by ultra-Orthodoxy’s politicians.
Rabbi Kook’s vision for the Chief Rabbinate, along with the rest of his Zionist theology, meant nothing to ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who ascribed to the agency no religious value. What they saw in it was a repository of jobs for their cronies as rabbinical judges, city and neighborhood rabbis, kashrut supervisors, and marriage registrars.
The result was the Rabbinate’s deterioration into a bureaucracy with little spiritual standing and moral pretension. The most glaring symptom of this devaluation was the 2003 appointment as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Yona Metzger, who was later convicted and jailed for assorted financial crimes, including money laundering, tax evasion and accepting million in bribes.
The bribes involved the international drama that the Rabbinate would turn into an Israeli tragedy: Soviet Jewry’s liberation.
The unexpected influx of a million immigrants within hardly a decade included an estimated 300,000 partial Jews and non-Jews. The result was a clash between Israeli and rabbinical law. The former granted citizenship to a full Jew’s non-Jewish spouses and their offspring. The latter, however, defines as Jews only those born to Jewish mothers.
This gap left some 200,000 people who grew up in Israel, and graduated its schools and army, unable to marry here, since Israeli law places matrimony in the hands of the Rabbinate, for which they are not Jewish.
The Rabbinate tells such Israelis to undergo its conversion process. However, its model of conversion means becoming Orthodox, a demand that most prospective converts reject. So does Modern Orthodoxy, whose rabbis say the immigrants’ partial Jewishness is a product of anti-Jewish persecution, and should therefore entail a more lenient conversion process.
This is besides the Modern-Orthodox argument that conversion to begin with should ignore observance, and besides suspicions that the Rabbinate harasses the immigrants because they dilute ultra-Orthodoxy’s demographic weight and political clout.
Beyond these partialities lurks the chief rabbis’ relative levity. The gravitas of Rabbi Kook, who ruled that farmers should cultivate the Land of Israel despite the biblical sabbatical year; the courage of Rabbi Yosef when he ruled that Ethiopian Jewry is Jewish; and the bellicosity of Rabbi Goren when he green-lighted two bastards’ weddings – are all gone.
Instead, the Rabbinate is widely hated as an aloof establishment that makes thousands feel hassled when they seek a divorce, or when their kosher-serving restaurant is stamped non-kosher because it opens on Shabbat. Mainstream Israelis also feel the Rabbinate hampers the national interest, which is to embrace semi-Jews, certainly not to intimidate them, let alone sell conversions for money, as Rabbi Metzger did.
Now, inspired by Roman-era sage Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction canceled converts’ duty to make a sacrifice at the Temple, Modern-Orthodox rabbis hope to use the current political crisis to retrieve the Rabbinate from ultra-Orthodoxy’s tutelage. If successful at this, they promise to deliver a more outgoing, worldly, pragmatic and compassionate Rabbinate.
Such a Rabbinate would doubtfully become the kind of national leader Rabbi Kook had in mind, but it would start its long climb to the peaks of which he dreamt, from the nadir to which it has sunk.