Fighting for Democracy and Pluralism in the Jewish World

The enormity of this event lies in its pettiness.

A few weeks ago, Rabbi Micky Boyden, a well-liked Reform rabbi in the town of Hod Hasharon, a quiet Tel Aviv suburb, was invited to recite a prayer at the local commemoration of Israel’s war dead on Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. Rabbi Boyden, who lost his son Yonatan in combat in Lebanon in 1993, founded the local “Kehilat Yonatan” synagogue and was active in the Yad Labanim organization that memorializes Israel’s war dead. However, a few days before the ceremony, he was called by the organizers and given an ultimatum: Either he agrees to deliver the prayer without the use of his “rabbi” title or he would not be allowed to participate.

Stunned, he refused.

The Jerusalem Post reported:

According to sources in the Hod Hasharon Municipality and on Yad Labanim’s board, all of whom asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue, the removal of Boyden from the ceremony came after an Orthodox Sephardi synagogue threatened to disrupt the ceremony should Boyden be allowed to chant the prayer from the stage.

Rabbi Reuven Hiller, the local Orthodox rabbi behind the incident, made no bones about his motivations, saying: “If he wasn’t a Reform rabbi, we’d let him do it, but with Reform rabbis, their belief in God is questionable. I’ve had long conversations with my cousin, a Reform rabbi in the U.S., and it’s a very far thing from what Judaism always was. So the Reform can’t represent the entire audience as a prayer leader. They should find someone who is in the consensus” to chant the prayer.

Rabbi Heller’s blindness to the Boyden family’s sacrifice on behalf of all of Israeli society, combined with the supine response by the organizers (and indeed of some senior political leaders who were made aware of the situation and refused to get involved) reveals something regarding the state of Reform Judaism in Israeli society.

Deeply informed by Western notions of spiritual autonomy, Reform Judaism has great success in America, a culture founded, after all, by individualistic dissenting Protestants. However, in Israel, Reform Judaism faces challenges conveying its message. Most Israeli Jews have their roots in Eastern Europe and the Muslim world. These are lands whose cultures were historically unaffected by the Protestant Reformation, with its revolutionary shift in the way individuals authenticate religious practice and belief. Yet, as notions of individualism have taken root in Israeli society since the 1980’s, Reform Judaism has become a religious option for a growing, if still modest, number of Israelis.

Iri Kassel, executive director of the Reform movement in Israel, points to significant achievements: 24 congregations; 60 adult education projects; 47 kindergartens; 13 chapters of its youth movement; a pre-army academy; 30 rabbinical students; 400-600 weddings conducted yearly; 2,000 Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremonies; and major cultural hubs at Beit Shmuel in Jerusalem, Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv and the Leo Baeck complex in Haifa. He also cites an example of greater community impact: the all night Shavuot Torah study (tikkun) that attracted some 1000 participants to Beit Daniel, a “place to be” for young, educated Tel Aviv twenty-and thirty-somethings.

In addition, there is the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) whose legal initiatives and social action work have a widely recognized effect on the democratic and Jewish nature of Israeli society. Most notable was the recent Israeli Supreme Court decision to recognize the rights of Reform (and Conservative) converts to make aliyah.

Yet, this progress has produced some hostile responses. Rabbi Boyden’s experience, strenuously condemned by AJC in a letter to Prime Minister Olmert, highlights the current shoddy state of intra-Jewish relations. Most recently, for example, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Modecai Eliyahu suggested that Reform Jews were to blame for the Holocaust. This act too was publicly condemned by AJC. And yet, significantly, neither the abuse of Rabbi Boyden, nor Rabbi Eliyahu’s screed, engendered strong responses from Orthodox Jewish religious leaders in Israel.

Intra-Jewish dialogue, on the front burner of the Jewish world agenda in the 1990’s, has been largely dormant since the Palestinian resort to a campaign of terror and violence was launched in 2000. Jewish attention shifted to the need to protect Israel and Diaspora communities.

Perhaps the time has come to re-evaluate that shift. Clearly, the threats which we have focused on since 2000 are not going away soon. Rising anti-Semitism, denial of Israel’s right to exist, physical assaults on Jews and Israelis continue. Yet, the cancer of internal intolerance continues to inflict damage while our attention is elsewhere.

The toxic combination of the bigotries of small-minded people, combined with the unfortunate tendency of good people to look the other way, fed the maltreatment of Rabbi Boyden. The abuse of a bereaved father, whose dead son was a military hero who died defending this county, just because he is a Reform Rabbi, must be recognized for what it is ― an existential threat to the ability of the State of Israel to be either Jewish or democratic in a meaningful way. The silence of local and national leaders illustrates how far behind we have fallen in raising awareness and dispelling preconceived notions and prejudices about the various streams of Judaism.

To paraphrase Ben-Gurion’s remark on the British White Paper of 1939 which curtailed the immigration of Jewish refugees: In light of what happened in Hod Hasharon, we must remain resolved to fight the battles against our external enemies as if there were no internal challenges to Israel’s spiritual integrity. At the same time, we must now resolve to fight those internal challenges to the unity and decency of the Jewish people, as if our external threats had been put to rest.

Rabbi Edward Rettig is Associate Director of AJC’s Israel/Middle East Office.