The State of the Jews

Last week, I argued that Taglit-birthright israel is an astonishing, unexpected success, but that the communities that send their young people to it have failed them by neglecting any follow-up programming. Thus, the experience doesn’t get a chance to transform into a long-term identity-building relationship with the Jewish world.

Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner, who directs one of the largest post-birthright programs in North America, begs to differ.

The JPost published a short letter from him. I’m publishing the full text (which he emailed me).

Post-birthright programs, he says, are “invisible” beside the thousands of birthright buses crisscrossing Israel. But they’re there, and they’re huge.

Birthright Israel’s Post-Trip Doubling Effect

Rabbi Daniel S Brenner

In his opinion piece on December 30th, 2009 Haviv Rettig Gur writes regarding Taglit- Birthright Israel “these connections are wasted if they are not directed at new Jewish experiences back home.” He ends the piece with a short question: “Where’s the follow-up?”

The work of “follow-up” is not as apparent to the public eye as the sight of hundreds of Taglit- banner buses on Israel’s roads. But since I have the pleasure of working with a young staff who have succeeded in providing new Jewish experiences to over fifty thousand Taglit-Birthright Israel alumni in North America during the past year, I have the opportunity to see the follow-up every day. Here is one example:

In 2009, the total number of Taglit-Birthright Israel North American trip participants for 2009 was just shy of 19,000. In the last few months, we have worked with volunteer leaders from those buses to host over 12,200 young adults for home-hospitality Shabbat meals in North America. 93% of our NEXT Shabbat meals involved some or all of the core ritual elements of Shabbat. More importantly, we found that nearly every volunteer felt that this was a positive Jewish communal experience and wanted to host again and get more involved in their local community. By the end of 2010, volunteers from this group of 19,000 trip participants will have hosted over 30,000 young adults for a NEXT Shabbat event.

This particular program is one of four areas of focus for Birthright Israel NEXT that begin on the trip and flow naturally into involvement post-trip (the others being Hebrew language learning, deepening the Israel connection and encouraging community involvement). In addition to the Shabbat program, Birthright Israel NEXT runs ulpanim for young adults in ten North American cities, works with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through local consulates in select cities to deepen ties to Israel, and has involved thousands of post-college young Jewish adults by partnering with local Jewish and Israel-focused organizations (we linked up with thirty-two such organizations in the last year). It is through these four areas (and through many partners) that we are on track to involve 100,000 young Jewish adults in our programming in 2010.

These figures do not count the “ramping up” of programs from our on campus partner Hillel and from our colleagues at MASA, two organizations who have certainly devoted significant energy to “Birthright follow-up” in the last two years. Nor do they include the work of forward-thinking Federations, like the CJP in Boston, that have adopted new models on campus that are delivering follow-up success.

Gur asks the right questions, but I would like to offer a counter-analysis. Those young adults who go on Taglit-Birthright Israel trips and then get involved in Birthright Israel NEXT or with campus-based partners are actually doubling and in many cases quadrupling the overall impact of the trip. In our programs, we see young Jewish women and men come off of their Israel trips with a spark of energy that causes them to reach out to their friends (most of whom have not gone to Israel) and involve them in Jewish life. As a result they are transforming their social circles and injecting Jewish content and Jewish experiences in ways that they never did before. Our job at NEXT is to work within these social circles and to provide critical initial steps that will help grow sparks into new commitments. Those commitments, however, ultimately require the active engagement of young adults by the entire Jewish community. We hope to partner with many more community-based organizations, both established and emerging, as we continue to grow.

Although it is often unseen, Taglit-Birthright Israel participants are quietly transforming their generation in North America and every Jewish organization has the potential to benefit from their renewed passion for Israel and for Jewish life.

Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner
Executive Director
Birthright Israel NEXT

Update: The partial interview was replaced with the complete one.

Shameless plug: A conversation on how the Jewish people may be falling apart.

I don’t know yet, but the right-wing Arutz Sheva says so:

Middle East expert Mordechai Kedar said Monday that Dr. Sari Nusaiba of Birzeit University, north of Ramallah, has had to go underground in the wake of an article that claims an historical connection between the Jews and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Interviewed on Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew news journal, Dr. Kedar said that Nusaiba would not be the first prominent Arab to publicize the link.

Dr. Kedar said that Haj Amin El-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, declared in 1929 that the site’s association with King Solomon’s Temple was beyond all doubt, even though he would become part of the Nazis’ efforts against the Jews.

Whatever our politicians may tell their overseas donors, official Israel, when it even notices the Diaspora, has a profound disrespect for it.

Rabbi Dr. Ed Rettig (my dad) and Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber explain in The Jerusalem Post how tragic this disrespect can be in the field of conversion.

Of the convert Ilana, they write:

Scandalously, Ilana lives without medical insurance, is unable to work, and has been waiting for more than two years for her case for citizenship to make it to the Supreme Court. In every other Jewish community in the world, Ilana is Jewish. Not here. This is because the Interior Ministry has taken it upon itself to review conversions that were performed worldwide in terms of its own bureaucratic criteria.

Let’s be clear here. Ilana’s conversion was Orthodox. Israeli law demands official recognition of her conversion. And those refusing to recognize it are not rabbis. They’re not religious at all, in fact. They’re merely Interior Ministry pencil-pushers trying to prevent the “floodgates” of conversion granting automatic Israeli citizenship through the Law of Return.

Since 2002, however, the State of Israel has taken a step backward, refusing immediate recognition of conversion certificates issued by recognized communities in the Diaspora. Today, if someone converts in a Diaspora community, it will take at least a year before the State of Israel recognizes that person as Jewish.

Though the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all converts should immediately be allowed to emigrate under the Law of Return – a law that has become sacrosanct in Israel-Diaspora relations – the Justice and Interior ministries continue to insist on draconian “citizenship tests” for converts that horrify each of us, from our different perspectives.

American Orthodox rabbis, the Interior Ministry feels, can’t be trusted to decide who is in and who is out of the Jewish people.

It is the feeling of a handful of ignorant bureaucrats – ignorant of Judaism and Jewish identity, and ignorant of Israeli law – that decides the day.

Why? Because the Diaspora is silent and respectful. Instead of demanding respect for their support and love, the Diaspora assumes Israelis are either their betters or their “ethnic” cousins. Either way, you can’t demand too much.

So Ilana falls through the cracks.

Phil Weiss is angry that Israeli law has no mechanism for intermarriage, since there is no civil marriage and the religious hierarchies that handle personal status law do not recognize intermarriage. He learned of this dark reality, though not its source or reasons, from Shlomo Sand.

I pointed out that Israel’s marriage laws, like its divorces, burials, etc., are not constructed against Muslims or Catholics, but in the old Ottoman confessionalist models, which are agreed upon by everybody.

Now he returns to accuse me of misrepresenting the essential evil of this system:

Well I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s great book now and Gur is I believe misrepresenting the reality. Sand makes it clear that a bar on intermarriage was no leftover accident of history. “In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary [sic] that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage.’”

It sometimes amazes me that someone can launch a years-long cultural attack against an entire society without knowing some really basic facts about it, such as the degree to which its “ethnic democracy” is a common phenomenon, or the mechanisms for marriage, or the fact that its marriage laws that effectively forbid intermarriage are supported by the minority religions more than by the Jews.

Of course, the problem is not with the singular fact of the year of the passage of the law, but with the thick layer of deconstruction slathered over it by Sand. The law formalized the already-existing Ottoman system, preventing the state from having to take away from the Muslim minority its generations-old sharia courts. The Muslims, Druse and Christians were not predisposed to give these up for a new Israeli jurisprudence. This wasn’t accomplished by Israeli racism – by and large the Druse are admired by Israeli Jews, but still demanded their own courts – but by a cultural commitment of Israel’s religious groups to maintain their traditional collectivist identities.

I neglected to note – and this is important for Weiss to consider – that I am no supporter of the rabbinate. I have done everything in my power, including Jerusalem Post editorials, interviews, etc., to advocate against Israel’s established rabbinate. My own father is a Reform rabbi. My wife’s father is an Orthodox rabbi. When we married in Israel in March 2008, it was in a wedding unrecognized by the state of Israel because neither of our fathers (who together officiated) were recognized rabbinate officials. We refused to invite a state rabbi to our wedding. Our legal standing is through a quickie civil marriage conducted in a Baltimore courthouse a few weeks earlier.

I don’t like this system. I think the “state church” of Israel has utterly politicized Israeli spirituality and collectivized Israeli religious identity. Without getting into the real suffering the haredi-controlled rabbinate is causing to agunot and would-be converts, the greatest tragedy is that the politicization of religiosity has had the effect of making Israel a spiritual wasteland. I yearn for the day – and I teach in a high school program and premilitary academy to bring it closer – when Israelis look to American Jews to discover how to construct authentic personal spiritual journeys.

But for all that, it’s simply not the reality to claim that the system was born primarily as a means of preserving Jews from religious intermarriage. That misunderstands the motivations of the early years of the state, and ignored some of the most basic identity structures of Middle Eastern religions – where religion is more akin to tribes than to the individualistic confessional faiths of the United States.

Consider: How much is the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq to do with theological difference, and how much tribal? Are the Christians of Syria merely a confessional difference, or a collective tribal one? Or the Druse in Israel, who have an intermarriage rate estimated at 1% despite commonly dating Jews during our shared military service, and who live in their own villages apart from the Arabs or the Jews – are they primarily an American-style religion or a Middle Eastern tribe?

Weiss doesn’t prove anything by quoting the date of the passage of the law and then Sand’s ideological interpretation. He must show not that the Jews of Israel identify collectively like all other Middle Easterners, but that their personal status laws go beyond that and are motivated by a special prejudice against minorities. Since he can’t prove it, he interprets it.

I grew up with these attitudes in American Jewish life. They’ve faded a lot since I was a kid. But in Israel they were memorialized in law. Later Sand writes that even the liberal secular Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said, “A Jewish state is one in which Hebrew Law plays an important part, and in which the laws of marriage and divorce of Jews are based on the Torah.”

Here is Weiss’ main mistake: believing that at their core Jews are the same in the US and Israel, and therefore the values of one can easily judge the other. American Jews have transformed into a Protestant-style individualistic faith. Israelis, perhaps 60% of whom hail from the Muslim world, have transformed the notion of Jewishness into a Middle Eastern religion-affiliated national collective that draws more from Muslim world identities than from Zionist ideology.

This is a vast gap in the basic structures of identity, and the two communities (which are together 80% of all Jews) will have to start learning about each other in order to begin to understand each other better. In the meanwhile, it’s not legitimate to offer cheap and easy indictments of the other community. Israelis are fond of saying that American Jews are either disappearing or living on “borrowed time.” Both are false, and come from an Israeli misunderstanding of what it means to live one’s Jewishness as Americans. Some Americans (still a small minority) believe Israeli Jewish nationhood is somehow a warping of the essentially religious nature of Jewishness. True, it’s a deep change, but no deeper than the American spiritualization of Jewish identity. After all, the shtetl Jew was not merely an autonomous citizen with a spiritual affiliation. He was part of a feudal corporate system that identified Jews as a distinct group with distinct living areas and separate legal obligations.

Jews have been many different things in different periods, and both Americans and Israelis are new kinds of Jews. Neither is “wrong.”

As for Aharon Barak, again, this is a twist of the truth. Some of the influence of Halacha in Israeli law includes, for example, viewing the prostitute as the victim, and the pimp and client as its perpetrators. That Israel draws from millenia of Jewish legal thought is not bad, as long as it is subject to oversight over the question of equality and the Basic Laws.

There are more responses to my claims in the comments on Weiss’ site, but I can’t respond to them because I’m awaiting approval as a commentor. These include the claim that what I wrote about “German ethnic origin” in article 116 of the German constitution isn’t there at all. This is a strange complaint. Google it. It’s there. (Search “right of return” on Wikipedia to find it easily.) It refers to East European German-speakers in the post-war period who had nowhere else to go – but had never been citizens of Germany.

Another comment responds to my statements about Israeli marriage law by bringing up the debate over Palestinian family reunification across the Green Line. This is an important question – the Supreme Court decided it on one vote – and I’m happy to get into it if that’s necessary. It continues to be debated to this day. But it has nothing to do with marriage law. Can we stick to one topic at a time?

Beware the labels, the simplistic jargon laid over a complex reality. That’s my takeaway from online comments I read over the weekend that reached truly weird conclusions about, well, me, by falling in love with lingo and abandoning all semblance of self-critical reflection.

In a long joyful reflection on a Shlomo Sand lecture at NYU, American Jewish anti-Zionist blogger Philip Weiss describes the “high” of discovering a deep narrative for his long-held political beliefs.

Of all the events I’ve covered surrounding Jewish identity and Israel in the last year, none has given me so much pleasure as the lecture last night by Shlomo Sand at NYU on the Invention of the Jewish People.

Weiss’ joy surrounds Sand’s new history of the Jews – a history that rips away the old “Zionist” narratives and replaces them with a new story: the Jews are Khazars and Yemenites and Bergers. There’s no such thing as “Jewish peoplehood.” Israel is founded on a lie.

I’m all for intellectual stimulation, and I love new theories based on new historical evidence. Unfortunately, in Sand, I got neither. As Weiss points out:

Sand offered very little by way of evidence. You will find that in his “boring” book, he said. This was an aria not a chalktalk.

Will you? Or will you find more historical surmising based on partial records and incomplete theories? Elsewhere, Weiss reports Sand saying that:

…at the supposed time of the Exodus, the Egyptians also controlled Canaan. The kingdom of David and Solomon was not a kingdom at all, but a small settlement around Jerusalem.

I have a professor cousin who believes that King Solomon didn’t even exist. Sand isn’t radical in his historical reconstructions. In fact, his “discoveries” are really just run-of-the-mill and johnny-come-lately academic theories.

His error is not in the theories themselves, but in pretending to hold newly-obtained truths that spectacularly affirm his preexisting politics. It is this sleight-of-hand effort that transforms this project – like Weiss’ own pretense to scholarship – from honest critique to mere political hypocrisy.

How else to explain the confusion reflected in Weiss’ account. He quotes Sand:

“I don’t deny Jewish identity. I’m not fighting against someone’s identity. There is identity of homosexuals. They are not a people. We are composed of a lot of identities.”

But then quotes Sand again:

“I am anti-racist. And an anti-anti-semite,” he said. “But look at me, do you think I hate the Jewish?” More devil eyes flashing. “I don’t hate myself… I hate the Jewish people? But that doesn’t exist. How can I hate something that doesn’t exist?”

So the Jewish identity he is emphatically not fighting against – does not exist. Did you get that?

You can argue Jewish nationhood is antithetical to, oh, Jewish religiosity (as do some haredim) or universal liberal values (as do some on the radical left). But faced with millions of people that believe that they personally constitute a Jewish nation, does it make any kind of sense to say it doesn’t exist?

Identities are decided by the people who hold them, not by the politicized professors who oppose them.

Leaving identity behind, we then have another example of what I am beginning to call the anti-Israel “errors-by-labeling.” Here, Sand creates a definition of democracy which, well, removes much of the free world from the democratic camp.

When Sand said that Israel was not a democracy, and a Zionist called out, “It is a flawed democracy,” Sand bellowed. No: a democracy is founded on the idea that the people are the sovereign, that the people own the state. That is the first principle of a republic going back to Rousseau. Liberalism and civil rights are not the core. Yes, Israel is a liberal society. It tolerates Shlomo Sand’s heresy, for instance, and puts him on TV. But it is a liberal ethnocracy.

His theories on Ashkenazim carrying Khazar blood – interesting. His theories on Jewish roots of the Palestinians – fascinating. But this? This is just stupid.

Why? Because most democracies are ethnic democracies. Most of the free states of this planet define a specific ethnos or nation whose interests they serve. Examples: Ireland, Finland, Germany, Romania, Georgia, Italy, Spain. All are constitutionally devoted to a single ethnicity, which is defined in their constitutions as a group that is not equal to the sum of their citizens.

Israel’s “ethnocracy” is the standard among democracies, not the exception. In fact, only two states share Sand’s view that the state belongs to the sum of its residents or citizens: the US and France.

A good example is in a survey of the “rights of return” of various democracies – a right granted to non-citizen “affinity Diasporas.” Such a “right of return” is not the province only of Zionists (or of the future Palestine). In fact, it is shared by these fine states:

There is Germany (link is PDF), whose constitution, in article 116, recognizes something called “German ethnic origin” as a grantor of automatic citizenship.

India allows “Indians by descent” easier access to full citizenship than other residents.

And Finland, which despite defining itself as a “state of all its citizens” still grants special naturalization rights to ethnic Finns who have lived for centuries in areas under Russian or Czarist sovereignty.

Lithuania’s constitution is explicit (article 32.4) that “Every Lithuanian person may settle in Lithuania” – a right granted not to absentee citizens (which would be obvious), but to non-citizen ethnic Lithuanians.

How about democratic Armenia? Article 14 of its Constitution states: “Individuals of Armenian origin shall acquire citizenship of the Republic of Armenia through a simplified procedure.”

Or Bulgaria, whose constitution (Article 25.2) states: “A person of Bulgarian origin shall acquire Bulgarian citizenship through a facilitated procedure.”

Or Greece, whose constitution (article 108) decrees that:

The State must take care for emigrant Greeks and for the maintenance of their ties with the Fatherland. The State shall also attend to the education, the social and professional advancement of Greeks working outside the State.

It was Greece that granted automatic citizenship to Ukrainians after the fall of the Iron Curtain merely because they belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Even Israel’s national religion – something I have written against often – is not unusual among the democracies. Both Greece and Ireland place a single national religion above others and give it constitutional status that has made it synonymous with national identity. Thus Greece’s constitution assures us that:

The prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. The Orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging our Lord Jesus Christ as its head, is inseparably united in doctrine with the Great Church of Christ in Constantinople and with every other Church of Christ of the same doctrine, observing unwaveringly, as they do, the holy apostolic and synodal canons and sacred traditions.

Similarly, the Preamble to Ireland’s constitution:

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire,
Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,
…
Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

And on and on. If Israel’s “ethnocracy” is not democratic, we need a whole new set of words. Because then neither is India, Japan, all of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Germany or Mexico.

What do we learn from this latest example of intellectual laziness? Beware unfounded labels, and call out those who use them.