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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Rise of Jewry’s Right Wing Religious Radicals
Rise of Jewry’s Right Wing Religious Radicals
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Three forms of religious extremism confronted me recently. The first, when I lectured in the United Kingdom at Limmud where a full one percent of all Jews in Britain gathered for a Jewish studies conference. Every Jewish group was represented, that is, with the exception of the orthodox Rabbinate who boycott the event because of the Reform and Conservative (Masorti) Rabbis present.
The second and more insidious example of frightening religious intolerance hit me as I landed in Israel a few days later for the press launch of my book Kosher Jesus in Jerusalem and discovered a country up in arms about Haredim (poorly translated as ultra-orthodox) who had spit on an orthodox eight-year-old girl for immodest dress (she was wearing a knee-length skirt with shoulders and elbows covered) and another Haredi man arrested for calling a female Jewish soldier a ‘whore’ for refusing to move to the back of a bus. On New Year’s eve Haredi activists dawned holocaust prison garb with yellow ‘Jude’ stars in a vulgar attempt to allege Nazi-like persecution at the hands of Israeli society when in truth all they accomplished was to trivialize the gassing of six million Jews. The finishing touch was placing their own children in concentration camp garb before the world’s media which added the violation of innocence to the defamation of the Jewish state.
And the third was here in the United States where a noted Rabbi, aided by hundreds of incendiary on-line rabble-rousers, publicly demanded I be cast out of Chabad for penning Kosher Jesus (the book, based on Christian and Jewish sources, champions the true story of the Jewish Jesus, refutes once and for all the idea that the Jews were in any way involved with his murder, and encourages Christians to trace Jesus’ teachings back to their original source in the Torah), with some going so far as to demand I be ‘burned out’ of the community, whatever that means. The Rabbi admitted he had not so much as even seen the book.
There is a common thread uniting these stories. Religious extremism festers when decent people are cowed into submission by fanatics whom they falsely believe to be more religious than them. But there is nothing holy about Rabbis refusing to teach 2500 young Jews pining for Jewish knowledge for fear they might legitimize reform clergy. More importantly, it is an abomination to faith for men to treat women abusively. And character assassination based on ignorance and hearsay is an affront to Jewish laws of slander. A black coat will never redeem a dark heart and a long beard is poor compensation for a shriveled soul.
In Israel the fanatics’ defenders pointed out that these heinous acts are perpetrated by only a small number of extremists. True. But in the face of Islamic terror outrages we in the West rightly demand that mainstream Islamic leaders condemn the fundamentalists, lest their silence make them complicit in the violence. The Jewish community must be judged by the same standard and Rabbis of every stripe must these abuses as a sickening betrayal of the core of Judaism.
Other defenders maintained that while the behavior was deplorable secular women were also at fault by insensitively visiting religious neighborhoods immodestly attired and inflaming local sensibilities. These apologetics are a disgrace. Judaism’s central value is freedom of choice and men calling themselves religious must choose to transcend even the most rousing provocation. Violence in the name of G-d is never allowed, a point we have repeatedly made to some of our Muslim brothers who justify Palestinian suicide bombers with arguments that “Israeli humiliations” incite the murders. The Jews suffered extermination at the hands of the Nazis. But that never led them to blow up nurseries and buses, and Haredim who feel provoked must register their protests respectfully and lawfully. The Talmud is clear: a religious man who humiliates a woman by calling her a whore in public has lost his place in eternity.
There is something magical about England’s Jews. They proudly hold on to their Jewish identity, generously support an endless array of Jewish social welfare organizations, and have a higher percentage of children in Jewish education then we in the United States. But there are now only 250,000 Jews in all the United Kingdom and the community can ill afford civil war between reform and orthodox especially given the rapid rise of anti-Semitism in the UK where Israel is regularly lambasted as being more wicked than North Korea.
But British Jews are curiously submissive to their Rabbinic leadership, even when they feel in their gut that some of the rulings contravene basic Ahavas Yisrael and common decency. The Baal Shem Tov extolled the virtue of ordinary Jews who were not Rabbis. Even non-scholars are aware of simple courtesy and must pressure their spiritual leaders to work with non-orthodox colleagues to increase Jewish learning and defend the State of Israel.
At Limmud I was peppered by journalists asking whether I was a candidate for British Chief Rabbi and the strange speculation reached a fever pitch when The Jerusalem Post published a long feature on the conference’s third day exploring the possibility.
I spent eleven years of my life building Jewish student life at the University of Oxford and six of my nine children were born in Britain. I am deeply attached to the country and the community. But the office of a Chief Rabbi which muzzles its occupant from reaching out to thousands of young Jews for fear of offending right-wing sensibilities cannot cater to anything but vanity and egotism. And while I am certainly not immune to those ills, I have never allowed myself to be silenced for any title and no self-respecting person ever would. A Chief Rabbi is not an Ambassador but a leader. The office must be expanded from its current focus on mesmerizing the BBC, thereby perpetuating a myth of Jewish subservience and the need for Jews to win non-Jewish approval, and focus instead on electrifying Jewish youth, before it can attract serious candidates.
The Jewish homo religiosus is not the submissive man of the spirit but rather Yisrael, the rebellious man of faith. And if we Jews are enjoined to emulate our patriarch Jacob who wrestled with an angel, then surely we must also respectfully challenge our spiritual leaders and reclaim our human voice, lest Judaism be overtaken by forces of darkness who masquerade as angels of light.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was the London Times Preacher of the Year at the Millennium and on February 1st will publish Kosher Jesus, a ten-year study of Jesus’ Jewishness and his life as a Rabbi. Twitter @RabbiShmuley. Website: http://www.shmuley.com
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