Connecting to the masses of humanity that thronged Jerusalem’s streets Monday night to take part in Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s funeral, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by this momentous demonstration of respect and admiration.Yosef had touched the lives of so many people in so many different ways and this was their tribute. Never before in the history of the State of Israel had so many Israelis – over 800,000 according to most estimates – converged for a single purpose. In fact, more came to pay their last respects to Yosef than existed in the State of Israel at its founding. Fewer took part in the demonstrations against the first Lebanon war in the early 1980s; fewer participated in the socioeconomic protests in the summer of 2011.Most of the people who came to pay their last respects were the Sephardi Jews for whom Yosef had channeled his prodigious abilities so tirelessly to “return the crown to its rightful place.” He worked to restore Sephardi Jewry to its past greatness, when the leading Torah scholars like Sa’adia Gaon and Maimonides and Rabbi Yosef Karo were from Babylonia and Spain and Turkey.Thanks to Shas’s political success – which unlike Ashkenazi haredi parties rested on a less religiously observant though strongly traditional-minded constituency who would just as soon vote Likud – Yosef managed to get more Sephardi rabbis and judges appointed to the Chief Rabbinate and the religious courts, institutions that had previously been dominated by Ashkenazim and their Ashkenazi customs. Today, someone named Vaknin has as good if not a better chance of being appointed to a rabbinic position as someone named Weinstein.The political movement that he led also created the El Hama’ayan network of schools with over 50,000 pupils and the lucrative Beit Yosef kosher supervision apparatus. Both institutions have helped strengthen the Sephardi customs and culture endorsed by Yosef. And not unlike the secular Zionists who eschewed “exilic mentality,” Yosef rejected the unique Sephardi traditions that had developed in the Diaspora in favor of a “melting pot” approach.With the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land, argued Yosef, the rulings of Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulhan Aruch who lived in the Land of Israel, should take precedence – at least for Sephardim, though some have claimed that Yosef believed Ashkenazim should follow Karo’s rulings as well. Though this pitted him against Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and other Sephardi rabbis who argued that Moroccan, Algerian and Iraqi communities should preserve their own Diaspora customs, Yosef’s approach was highly coherent and put Sephardim on the offensive against encroaching Ashkenazi culture.Not all of the people who attended Yosef’s funeral were Shas supporters. There were Ashkenazi haredim – either hassidic or from a Lithuanian background – who respected Yosef as a halachic authority and were awed by his ability to leverage his scholarship into political clout against the secular Zionist establishment. Yosef’s genius is legendary. He is said to have had a photographic memory. Many tell the story of how Rabbi Ezra Attia, head of the Porat Yosef yeshiva in Jerusalem – where Yosef was eulogized this week – begged Yosef’s father to allow the 14-year-old prodigy to return to his yeshiva studies. The boy’s father had withdrawn him from the yeshiva to help run the family grocery.“Better I should come to work in the store than the boy,” pleaded the head of the yeshiva. “My Torah study matters less than his.”Yosef used his tremendous reputation as a scholar and halachic authority to make daring and innovative rulings. In 1973, as newly appointed Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, Yosef broke with the consensus of haredi Ashkenazi rabbis – including rabbis from Chabad, a movement normally so active in Jewish outreach – and ruled that the Beta Israel from Ethiopia were full-fledged Jews, thus facilitating their immigration to Israel and integration in Israeli society. In 2009, Yosef threatened to fire any school principal from Shas’s El Ma’ayan school system who refused to accept Ethiopian pupils. A conspicuous number of Ethiopians were among the hundreds of thousands who paid their respect.Yosef’s Torah scholarship and readiness to be lenient and deal with political questions arising from the renewal of Jewish sovereignty were evident in his rulings on diverse issues from conversion to swapping terrorists for Jewish prisoners to ceding parts of the Land of Israel. He was also innovative and lenient in day-to-day religious matters such as listening to the recorded voice of a woman singing to using a hotplate on Shabbat.YET WHILE his Torah scholarship is widely acknowledged, Yosef was criticized by the Left and the Right for failing to use Shas’s political power to significantly improve the socioeconomic lot of his constituency. He improved the religious prestige of Sephardi Jewry and alleviated feelings of inferiority, but he did little to truly advance them. Former education minister Yossi Sarid (Meretz), writing in Haaretz, accused Yosef of establishing a separatist education system that “impoverishes the minds of students…” And Ben Dror Yemini, a right-wing columnist for Ma’ariv, criticized Yosef for adopting what he claimed was the Ashkenazi haredi stance against military service for yeshiva students, a move that prevented large swathes of Sephardi young men from entering the labor market. And Yosef allowed Shas’s politicians to expel Haim Amsalem for backing IDF service and professional training for haredi men.Indeed, there was a paradox to Shas’s success. Shas would never have mustered such a strong following with an impeccably modern, universalist, social democratic agenda to create programs for the deprived, to improve the educational and job opportunities for the marginalized populations of the development towns, which arguably would have helped Sephardim advance and integrate better into Israeli society. Instead, the agenda that made Shas so popular among Sephardi Israelis also seemed to perpetuate many of the problems that Sephardim faced. The educational institutions set up by Shas shunned the secular education that could have helped Sephardi Jews get ahead in an increasingly knowledge-based job market. And Arye Deri and Eli Yishai tapped into Sephardi Jewry’s largely justified resentment for being discriminated against by the secular Ashkenazi establishment in the first decades after the establishment of the State of Israel. This tactic might have worked to increase Shas’s electoral strength, but it also reinforced feelings of victimization precisely at a time when Israeli society was beginning to change. It was no coincidence that Shas’s power reached a peak of 17 seats in 1999, when Deri was on trial and eventually convicted for using for his personal benefit state funds received by a yeshiva.Deri and others in Shas claimed – and many of Shas’s constituents apparently believed – that Deri has been targeted as part of the Ashkenazi establishment’s campaign to destroy a man who had challenged its political hegemony. Yet, while Shas fanned these ethnic flames, the party did very little for the socioeconomic betterment of its constituents.Still, Israel’s political system did not leave Shas with many options. Ours is not a particularly liberal democracy. Historically, political parties have reflected specific ethnic, socioeconomic and religious enclaves within Israeli society.Mapai, which later became the Labor Party, has tended to represent an increasingly upper-middle class, quasi-socialist Ashkenazi elite, which by discriminating against Sephardim and segregating them in “development towns” helped create the need for a specifically pro-Sephardi political party.Herut, which later became Likud, originally represented the Ashkenazi right-wing secular capitalists. And while the party did integrate into its upper echelon Sephardi politicians from development towns like Beit She’an’s David Levy and Kiryat Malachi’s Moshe Katsav, their specifically pro-Sephardi message was watered down by competing interests.The National Religious Party, which, like the haredim, had its own separate school system, also tended to be dominated by Ashkenazim. The tension between Sephardim and Ashkenazim within the NRP was accentuated when in 1981 Aharon Abuhatzeira broke with the party and created Tami, an acronym for Tnuat Masoret Israel or Movement for the Heritage of Israel.Other initiatives, such as Charlie Biton’s Black Panthers (modeled after the American version) with its Communist agenda were too radical and secular for the traditional-minded Sephardim.Meanwhile, the haredi Ashkenazi Agudat Yisrael, and later Degel Hatorah, defended their own constituents from the secularizing attempts of David Ben-Gurion’s “melting pot,” in particular the IDF service geared at creating “new Jews,” and established their own independent education system, but did nothing for Sephardi Jews. It was no other than Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach, the powerful Ashkenazi haredi spiritual leader, who backed the idea of creating a Sephardi haredi political party largely along the lines of the two Ashkenazi haredi parties with MKs who followed the orders of a rabbinic leadership. But Shach had hoped to exploit Shas to tap into the large traditional-minded Sephardi vote while keeping Yosef and Shas’s political leadership subordinate to himself. And this worked until Shas rebelled against Shach to join Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 Labor-Meretz government.SINCE THE 1959 Wadi Salib riots in Haifa, which marked the first major public demonstration of discontent at Mapai’s blatantly ethnic-based discrimination, only Shas under Yosef’s leadership managed to organize into a coherent and quite formidable political force Sephardi Jewry. There was undoubtedly a paradox to Yosef’s political success. To appeal to the masses, Yosef and his politician messengers strengthened feelings of victimization and emphasized tradition at the expense of socioeconomic advancement. This definitely helped Shas to succeed where other political initiatives undertaken by Sephardim failed. But at the same time Shas’s political agenda might also have perpetuated many of the problems faced by Sephardim in Israel. Arguably, Yosef had little choice due to Israel’s illiberal democracy, which continues to be split along ethnic, religious and socioeconomic lines. Nor is it clear that Sephardim would have been better off without Shas.What is certain is that Yosef was an unparalleled Torah scholar who used his genius to institute halachic innovations and wield political power in a way that has transformed the lives of millions of Jews. Some of these millions were in Jerusalem this week to pay their respects to a truly great man.
