RABBINATUS STRICTUS:

RABBINATUS STRICTUS:

A GROWING DISEASE IN THE JEWISH WORLD

A Special Tirade from Rabbi Gershon Winkler

In recent weeks, I have been trying to help some people deal with the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate in Israel and in the U.S. concerning the validity of their Jewishness. It’s been a difficult and frustrating battle, to no avail. An entire family of several generations is being questioned when there is no question, and dealt with in regards to the issue of Who is a Jew in ways that would make the sages of the Talmud gag. The numerous sources I brought to support the situation of these fine people who have been living and breathing Jewish for as long as they have been alive, were rebutted by the rabbinates not with counter-sources but with the lame explanations of: “Times are different” and “Many from Russia and Ethiopia have tried weaseling their way into Israel with claims that they were Jewish when in actuality they were not, and we must therefore be more strict about it…” etc. etc. etc. Yes, I argued, I understand, but this family did not emerge out of the blue suddenly with claims of Jewish identity; they have been devotedly living as Jews for as long as they have been on the face of the earth, through three generations! Regrettably, the matriarch of the family, influenced by the dogmatic, doctrinal consciousness of the fundamentalist community she has bought into, introduced the fact that she’d been adopted, and did not know if her biological mom was Jewish. And so I in turn reminded her rabbinate the Talmudic, halachic dictum that one can disqualify oneself, but one cannot thereby disqualify one’s children or grandchildren (Talmud, Yevamot 47a). And as Rashi ruled: “Since your children had all along been considered Jewish, you are not believed to testify against that established fact and to disqualify them” (on Talmud, Yevamot 47a [v’eyn ey’dut la’avodat kochavim]). To make my case even stronger with more updated halachic sources, I quoted to them from the responsa of the late ultra-ultra-Orthodox halachic authority Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, of Blessed Memory, whose photo adorns the livingroom walls of these rigid rabbis, and who, responding to a similar case, wrote:

• “Since she has children, and she has all these many days been considered Jewish, she would now have to bring clear testimony of two kosher witnesses that she was all this time not Jewish, and also did not convert.  And even if her father were to testify that she was not born Jewish, it is moot since she has children, as is discussed in the Talmud (Yevamot 47a), just the same as if a man had grandchildren, he is not believed to disqualify even his own children, and that is the final ruling of the Shulchan Aruch in Evehn Ha’Ezer 4:29.  And therefore, if there are no two kosher witnesses who can testify before a rabbinic court that she is not Jewish and did not convert, then both she and her children are kosher [i.e., fully Jewish]” (Iggrot Moshe, Yorah De’ah, Vol. 2, No. 131).

Did it help? Nope. None of it. I begin to wonder. Who are these people? Are they really Jewish themselves? What has gotten into them? What religion are they practicing? I don’t recognize it.

Unfortunately, old-school rabbis like Moshe Feinstein have become all but extinct, replaced by overzealous, albeit impotent so-called halachic authorities who shy from taking the daring risks their predecessors took. The difference between the old school of Orthodox rabbis and the latter-day school is that the rabbis of the older school considered in their halachic ruling the spirit of the law, whereas the newcomers are tragically stuck on the letter of the law to the detriment of many.

But one recent morning, while slurping down my cereal, and still feeling very sad about the whole thing, I was leafing through the March issue of a magazine called TRIBE, and my slurping died down as I read an article entitled “Unchain your Faith”, by Rabbi Paul J. Kipnes of Congregation Or Ami. Here is one of my favorite points of his article that brought me some degree of solace:

• When our Israelite ancestors participated in the Exodus from Egypt, they liberated themselves from much more than just slavery and Pharaoh’s taskmasters…they left behind 400 years of Egyptian-influenced preconceptions about religious faith. In the intervening 3,000 years, we Jews again have found ourselves enslaved by a host of oppressive ideas about our Jewish religion. Some of these misconceptions arise out of selective misinterpretation of our sacred texts; others result from the growing misguided fundamentalism that has steadily seeped into out Jewish and non-Jewish worlds.

Bravo! What insight. So true. That explains it. And how tragic for our people, that they are being misled by so-called rabbinic authorities who rule so stringently over the naïve and less-informed of their constituents, and bring suffering upon so many of those who have blindly bought into their authoritativeness. Who is a Jew is but one such issue. Untold numbers of “chained women” or Agu’not continue to languish without love and affection, unable to remarry because their recalcitrant husbands refuse to grant them a Jewish religious divorce, or Gett. And these rabbis in their paranoia-fueled piety continue to polish, reinforce, and add further links to these chains by not annulling such marriages like their predecessors would (Talmud, Gittin 33a; (Iggrot Mosheh, Evehn HaEzer, Vol. 1, Numbers 79, 80, 191, and Vol.3, Numbers 46 and 48)).

I feel sorry for those who clothe themselves with layers and layers of self-righteousness and veil their hearts with foreskin, and who worship halachah like some kind of deity, and do so in the name of God, causing unnecessary pain to those who seek their counsel. They completely ignore the clear teachings and rulings of sages down the ages that we do not create doubt where there isn’t any, and we do everything possible to eliminate it where there is, especially when it involves the casting of aspersions on entire families, let alone generations. They stomp self-righteously over our sacred Torah in the guise of honoring her.

The Talmud frowns upon those rabbis who decide halachic issues from a place of stringency. As the eleventh-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki writes: “For every person has the option of being stringent, and when one renders a prohibitory decision it is then not necessarily based on the Tradition, for when he is in doubt, when the halachah is not clear to him, he will take the easy way out and forbid. But one who renders a permissible ruling relies upon the Tradition [for he must wrestle with it] and the theorems drawn from his intellect, and such is truly hora’ah [the process of halachic decision-making]” (Rashi on Talmud, Ketuvot 7a).

“To be stringent,” my teacher’s teacher’s teacher once said, “you need not be such a scholar” (19th century Rav Shmuel of Salant quoted in Rimon & Wasserman’s Shmuel B’doro [Tel Aviv 1961], p. 125). Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it this way: “The law, stiff with formality, is a cry for creativity, a call for nobility concealed in the form of the commandments. It is not designed to be a yoke, a curb, a straight jacket for human action. Above all, the Torah asks for love…All observance is training in the art of love. To forget that love is the purpose of all mitzvot is to vitiate their meaning (A.J. Heschel in God in Search of Man, p. 307).

Yet, these velveteen rabbis fear taking chances on behalf of the people, and instead forbid and forbid and forbid, forgetting the admonishment of the fourth-century Rabbi Dimmi: “Is it not enough what the Torah has forbidden, that you need to add further proscriptions?” (Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:1 [25a]). Halachah without compassion, the ancient rabbis taught us, “is like a man coming to buy a pint of wine. Says the wine seller: ‘Give me your flask’ and he gives him a cloth pouch. Or like a man coming to buy oil. Says the oil seller: ‘Give me your jar’ and he gives him a corner of his cloak” (Talmud, Avot D’Rebbe Natan [2] 32:8).

They zealously revere the concept of the Messiah and his ancestor King David but are yet afraid of being naked, of dancing in loincloth before the Holy Ark like David did. They are afraid of “making waves” and thus cause the waters of Torah to stagnate and become undrinkable. They construct higher and higher hedges around the Torah, heavily veiling her natural beauty and dimming her radiance until she is barely noticeable, hidden away behind their darkened zeal for a cause they are slowly killing. “It is all about Torah!!” they declare. “We have nothing but Torah! We love the Torah! We are doing this for the Torah!” – forgetting the admonishment of their ancient predecessors: “One who claims that he has nothing but Torah, does not even have that” (Talmud, Sanhedrin 109b). They have made the hedge more important than the garden, ignoring the warning of the loin-clothed sages of antiquity: “Let not the hedge become more important than the vineyard” (Midrash B’reishit Rabbah 19:4). Or: “Do not build the fence too tall lest it collapse and tear up the garden [it is intended to protect]” Talmud, Avot D’Rebbe Natan [2] 1:1). Or: “Better a hedge a mere ten cubits tall that will stand, than a hedge 100 cubits high that will fall (Talmud, Avot D’Rebbe Natan [1] 1:1). These rabbis claim to “know better”. They revel in their authority and convince themselves that they do what they do for the sake of the Torah and for the sake of God when in truth it is for the sake of the Golden Calf that they’ve created and of which they piously declare: “This is your God, O Israel!” And sadly, they are followed with blind obeisance by those who have innocently bought into their illicit dogma in the hope of doing what is right in the eyes of God.

I tell you, Moses is fuming up in the heavens. He is smashing tablet after tablet up there.

As for God – trust me, God is pissed.

I lament them, I lament how far they have taken advantage of the innocence of so many. Thank God, King David is not alive today, or he would have been excommunicated by these rabbis for wearing shorts in front of the ark.

Indeed, I cast serious doubt upon the Jewishness of those who question the Jewishness of others. After all, as the second-century Rabbi Yosef taught: “One who possesses the following three qualities, it is certain that he is of the seed of Abraham – compassion, modesty, and performs acts of lovingkindness” (Talmud, Kallah Rabbati 10:4). Or as the Talmud puts it even more boldly elsewhere: “One who is compassionate toward others, it is certain he is of the seed of Abraham, and one who is not compassionate toward others, it is certain that he is not of the seed of Abraham” — and in fact they are probably descendants of the mixed multitudes that blended with our people during our exodus from Egypt (Talmud, Beitzah 32b).

Enough said.