The rebbe and the chancellor

JEWISH RELIGIOUS MODERATION IS OUT OF FASHION


The theological distance between 3080 Broadway, the Manhattan headquarters of Conservative Judaism’s Jewish Theological Seminary, and 500 Bedford Avenue, home of the Satmar hassidic dynasty across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is best measured not in miles but in light-years.

It was always a stretch to find any common denominator between the foremost insular ultra-Orthodox hassidic sect with its vilification of political Zionism, rejection of modernity and theological rigidity, and the stream of Judaism that was first to embrace the Zionist idea, foremost in pursuing a golden mean between religious practice and secular ideals, and which preached that Halacha need not calcify into irrelevance but could evolve to meet contemporary needs.

Both groups, however, are in the throes of leadership changes that reflect polarization and radicalism as the dominant trend in Jewish religious practice. “Mainstream” Judaism, it appears, is becoming passé.

Satmar, self-obsessively, has long thrived on religious and political intemperance. Now it is to be mirrored, or so it seems – at the opposite extreme – by Conservative Judaism, which is on the brink of rejecting Judaism’s admittedly unprofitable middle road for a theological radicalism that would make it nearly indistinguishable from Reform Judaism.

FIRST THE Satmars. Their transition crisis results from the grave illness of Grand Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, 91, who has led the dynasty since 1980. He hovers, unconscious, near death in Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital. His dynasty, which originated in the Transylvanian Mountains of Hungary during the late 1700s, looks set to break apart.

The ailing rebbe is the nephew of the fiery, charismatic grand rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. In the late 1940s, following Hitler’s war against the Jews, rebbe Joel brought the sect’s survivors to the New World and settled in Williamsburg.

As a little boy, I met Rebbe Joel when my father – a hassid, but not a Satmar – took me to him for a blessing. We were ushered into the rebbe’s study; he spoke briefly to my father, offered us his blessings, and gave me a ritual wine cup as a keepsake. It is the one I use to this day.

(In the hassidic haredi world the rebbe serves as a spiritual conduit to God. A hassid makes no milestone decisions, in either business or private life, without the rebbe’s blessing. For a hassid the rebbe’s mystical powers trump mere talmudic prowess.)

With no natural successor – rebbe Joel, who died in 1979, and his rebbetzin, Feige, were childless – their nephew, Moshe, was anointed the sect’s leader in 1980. The transition was not a smooth one; the community was bitterly divided between supporters of rebbe Joel’s widow (who had her own candidate) and those of her nephew.

Eventually, Moshe’s leadership was solidified and the sect continued to thrive. It now numbers perhaps 100,000 souls, some 20,000 families.


EVEN BEFORE he took sick seven years ago, two of Moshe’s four sons – Aaron, 57, the eldest, and Zalman Leib, 53, the youngest – had contested for their father’s mantle. Aaron was named (by his father) chief rabbi of Kiryas Joel, north of New York City, while Zalman Leib was brought back from Jerusalem to became the chief rabbi in Williamsburg.

As the April 7 New York Jewish Week phrased it, “the sons have waged an unstinting, contentious battle for control of the Satmar Empire during their father’s long decline.” At stake is a communal estate estimated at $500 million, including 26 properties throughout New York State, plus the political clout and religious direction of the movement.

That struggle has forced the factions to turn to the New York State courts, which appear reluctant to intercede. Rabbinical courts controlled by the respective sons have issued halachic rulings in their own favor. And when push comes to shove – as it did one recent Simhat Torah – the NYPD had to be called to physically separate the warring factions.

Chris McKenna of the Times Herald-Record, which serves the Hudson Valley and Catskills, described the scene outside the hospital where the dying Moshe lies: “As Zalman Teitelbaum, chief rabbi of the main Satmar congregation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was about to be driven away in a black SUV, his older brother, Aaron, leader of the dominant Satmar congregation in Kiryas Joel, arrived in front of him on Fifth Avenue in a black Cadillac and swept into the hospital with his entourage. No words were exchanged.”

Observers predict the Satmars, with their two religious courts, will fragment into separate factions with Aaron controlling upstate and Zalman downstate; but only after a bitter dispute over a division of the communal assets. Neither will lead the sect toward a more centrist Judaism. Each seems intent on putting his own narrow interests above the good of the kehilla, forget the larger Jewish world.


ACROSS THE East River in upper Manhattan, a new chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary was announced last week. There were no traumatic deathbed scenes, no charismatic rabbis vying for supremacy, no NYPD breaking up unruly factions. Everything was done with the decorous understatement one would expect from a moribund movement. The previous chancellor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, simply retired. His successor is Prof. Arnold M. Eisen, 54, chairman of Stanford University’s Religious Studies Department.

The seminary does not formally control the movement; but, as its flagship institution – whither JTS goes, so goes Conservative Judaism.

Eisen, and those who backed his appointment, clearly want to take the Conservatives to the theological Left. Schorsch had opposed the ordination of gay rabbis and the authorizing of Conservative rabbis to perform same-sex marriages. Eisen, in contrast, seems intent on championing the cause of gay and lesbian ordination.

Whether Conservatives will also sanction homosexual marriage may be decided in December by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.

It’s worth recalling that Conservative Judaism broke away from the Reform movement – not Orthodoxy – in the late 1880s in order to “conserve” traditional values and as a reaction to Reform radicalism. Some say the catalyst was Reform’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, which abandoned Jewish dietary laws and the idea of Jewish peoplehood.

But now the Conservatives – once the largest non-Orthodox stream – are shrinking. Reinvigorating middle-of-the-road traditional Judaism seems beyond its leadership’s abilities. With Orthodoxy moving theologically ever more rightward and Reform moving ever more to the left, Conservatives have failed to make an appealing case for a centrist alternative.

Once the movement joins the more liberal branches in (what amounts to) dispensing with Halacha, the trend toward religious fragmentation will accelerate further.


ALMOST paradoxically, then, the new leaders of both the Satmars and the Conservatives share a commitment to parochial interest over what is best for Jewish civilization as a whole, thus devaluing the idea of striving for a religious consensus.

Each faction professes to know God’s will. Indeed, as this momentum spirals one can foresee a Judaism that is ever more heterogeneous, losing its philosophical, civilizational and theological core.

It is already happening. What do Chabad and other millennial sects have in common with Satmar? What does ultra-liberal Judaism – which increasingly is to Jewish observance what homeopathy is to traditional medicine – have in common with Orthodoxy? Left unchecked, this scenario of religious disintegration will result in a Jewish people with no sense of a common past and no aspiration toward a shared future.

Such worries seem irrelevant to the protagonists on both sides of the East River. But to this Jew, who long ago left the insular haredi world into which he was born for what he hoped was a more centrist Judaism, the trend is tragic.

Gaza , Egypt & the EU – Time for some answers

I supported Israel’s disengagement from Gaza for reasons that need not be re-hashed.

The chaos that prevails inside Gaza was predicable. No one realistically expected the Palestinian Arabs to turn Gaza into a peaceful oasis along the Mediterranean – a prototype and a harbinger for a Palestinian state that would be connected to the West Bank.

Now it is official. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declares from Damascus: “We do not promise our people to turn Gaza into Hong Kong or Taiwan, but we promise them a dignified and proud life behind the resistance in defense of their honor...”

“Resistance” – a sterile euphemism for more slaughter, killing, and suffering.

So Gaza’s lovely Mediterranean coastline and its environs will remain brooding and broiling with Islamic fervor, a wellspring of hatred for modernity, Jews, and Western notions of liberty.

That is the prerogative of the democratically elected representatives of their benighted people.

But what we ought not ignore is the increasing military danger that Gaza has become.

Arms, rockets, and bullets are flowing into Gaza from the Egyptian Sinai unhindered. So too, we are told, are experts in the use of explosives and irregular warfare.

It is just a matter of time until the weapons – and the expertise – become good enough to do serious damage to Israel. For now, the Katyushas are missing their targets, and the kassams fall mostly in open fields.

When the enemy get luckier (and better), they will hit a strategic installation (the power plant in Ashkelon, for instance), or – God forbid – a kindergarten.

Then there will be a price to pay. For them and for us.

No one doubts that the IDF will be forced to launch a land invasion of the Strip – an Operation Defense Shield for Gaza.

All this begs the question: Why is Jerusalem not pressing the Egyptians to do more to control the border? And if the Egyptians are doing the best they can (as some Israeli analysts insists) and that is not good enough, why don’t we find a mechanism that would enable them to do better?

And what of the EU observers?

Are they sitting around making spaghetti or are they endeavoring to screen who comes and who goes?

And if they are not doing an adequate job – and (again) the reports are contradictory – why don’t we hear official Israel complaining?

Moreover, where is Washington which pressed Israel into signing the ill-conceived arrangements along in Rafah?

Do we really have the luxury of sitting back and saying that we can’t expect more from the Egyptians? Or that we don’t want to alienate the EU at a time when we need their support for efforts to isolate the Hamas government? Or that Condoleezza Rice has enough tzuris and we don’t want to add to them?

If so, our cost-benefit analysis is incredibly myopic.

It may make sense in the short-term not to rock the boat, to make believe Gaza is someone else’s problem, but in the long term (say a year from now) we may be setting ourselves up for a military incursion that -- by the time it comes -- will be frightfully expensive for us and well as for the enemy.

The Egyptians need to understand that Gaza can’t reasonably serve as a safe outlet for the Islamist menace that threatens Hosi Mubarak.

The EU should realize that how their observers conduct themselves on this crucial front – in the context of the dangers they face – is as a test case for future EU involvement on the ground in the region.

And Washington should make its own inquiries with Cairo and Brussels about just what is happening at the Rafah crossing.

But the ultimate responsibility rests with Ehud Olmert and Israel's security establishment.

Among its first priorities, the new government must clarify the situation along the Gaza-Sinai border and determine what – if anything – needs to be done.

We need to identify what went right – and what is going wrong – in trying to draw the proper lessons from disengagement.

In a sense, disengagement was an experiment.

To be useful experiments require careful observation.

Israeli Elections - The Wrap

This is it.

Well, you never know. Labor and one of the Arab parties are contesting a number of election districts, so the absolutely, positively final results may not be confirmed for a while.

But here's how my March 26 predictions contrast against the actual totals

KADIMA 27 (29) [690,095 votes]
LABOR 23 (20) [473,746]
LIKUD 15 (12) 282,070]
NU/NRP 14 (9) [223,083]
YISRAEL BEITEINU 11 (11) [281,850]
SHAS 13 (12) [299,130]
ARAB PARTIES 8 (9) [94,460 * there is a recount *
UTJ 5 (6) [146,958]
MERETZ 4 (5) [118,356]
PENSIONERS 0 (7) [185,790]

THE RESULTS, regrettably, provided neither a referendum on disengagement nor a mandate for further unilateralism.

At the same time, the only party unconditionally opposed to any withdrawals, whatsoever – NU/NRP – received only 9 mandates.

All the other right-wing, or quasi right-wing parties, are far more malleable.

Bottom line: Israel remains a fragmented society whose electoral system encourages hyperpluralism. Everyone gets something, and everyone is left unsatisfied.

The saddest part of the election results is the protest vote that propelled a bunch of grumpy, self-interested (and not financially uncomfortable) old codgers into the Knesset under the rubric of the Pensioners Party.

It’s also interesting to note which parties didn’t make it:

Baruch Marzel’s ultra right-wing party received about 25,000 votes. Michael Kleiner’s ultra right-wing party received less than 3,000 votes.

The virulently “anti-religious” (really self-hating) secular parties whose campaign ads were particularly tasteless polled less than 15,000 combined.

And 40,000 Israelis place smoking dope at the top of their agenda.

Israeli elections - How I did

My March 26 predictions versus the actual totals [as of Wed. morning]

KADIMA 27 (28)
LABOR 23 (20)
LIKUD 15 (11)
NU/NRP 14 (8)
YISRAEL BEITEINU 11 (12)
SHAS 13 (13)
ARAB PARTIES 8 (10)
UTJ 5 (6)
MERETZ 4 (4)
PENSIONERS 0 (7)

So my hunch that Kadima would not break 30 mandates was (sadly) correct.

I was close on Labor.

Way off on Likud and NU/NRP. I guess lots of right-wingers sulked at home or wasted their votes on the ultra-Right.

But I was spot on regarding Meretz and Shas.

I had no inkling that the Pensioners Party would even cross the threshold.

Each day is a new reminder that the masses are -- indeed --- asses.

Pass me the humble pie.

Israeli Elections - Some Predictions

On the way to work today, I took the #21 bus from Talpiot to Marcel’s Barber Shop in town.

Based on what I thought I heard the driver say to one of the passengers, and some of the conversation among the waiting patrons at Marcel’s – plus my own gut feeling that Kadima will not do as well as people think, here is the way I see the Tuesday’s Israeli elections shaping up.


KADIMA 27
LABOR 23
LIKUD 15
NU/NRP 14
SHAS 13
YISRAEL BEITEINU 11
ARAB PARTIES 8
UTJ 5
MERETZ 4

Always prepared to eat humble pie... indeed, hoping to.


HERE ARE the predictions of Avi Hoffmann, former managing editor of The Jerusalem Post:


KADIMA 32
LABOR 23
LIKUD 15
NU/NRP 12
SHAS 12
YISRAEL BEITEINU 10
ARAB PARTIES 7
UTJ 4
MERETZ 5


AND HERE are the predictions of Rev. Elwood McQuaid, one of the leaders of the Christian Zionst movement and a longtime analyst of the Israel scene:

"Never doubt the wisdom of barber shop philosopher/political pundits! However, from a distance: Kadima will, as you forecast, not do as well as the polls suggest: 24/25. Labor will not do as well either: 19/20. Likud will do better: 18/19. Olmert will have rough sledding putting a coalition together."