Galilee Diary: Whose wall?

By Marc Rosenstein, originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Galilee Diary.

The Council of Progressive (Reform) Rabbis in Israel views the Western Wall as an area that does not represent the Jewish attachment to God, the experience of prayer, or modern Jewish thought… For the Reform Jew the Wall may be a place of historical connection, but it does not have any place in a Reform theology.

-Responsum of the Council of Progressive Rabbis in Israel

It takes me about four hours to get to Jerusalem by public transportation; not a great distance as distances go in the world – and merely a fraction of the distance to the North American Diaspora. And Jerusalem is very familiar to me from living there and visiting frequently over the years. I even remember it before the unification of the city in 1967. Yet sometimes it looks, in my “peripheral” vision, like another world. And since it is the “center of the world,” and the capital of Israel (depending on whom you ask), it represents Israel in the eyes of the world. Thus, sometimes it seems that the Jews of Boston and Omaha and Phoenix are more involved in the symbolic events occurring in Jerusalem than are we Galileans. You might say that Jerusalem looks to us like Washington DC looks to a Montanan: What’s all the fuss?

This mismatch comes to mind in the wake of the most recent installment
in the ongoing jousting match between the ultra-Orthodox and the
liberal movements in Jerusalem: violating a court order, the Women of
the Wall, a group of women who pray every Rosh Chodesh at the Western
Wall, took their prayer out of the Robinson’s Arch area that had been
designated for them, and held it in the open plaza behind the
“official” prayer areas at the wall. One of them even put on a tallit –
and was promptly arrested (and released after a few hours
“interrogation”). The repercussions have been continuing for weeks,
almost entirely among liberal Jewish organizations here and abroad.
Most Israelis, who are not affiliated with these movements, are not
very interested in what seems to us to be a test-case for religious
rights of a significance equivalent to Rosa Parks’ historic bus ride.
Indeed, they can’t imagine why a woman would want to put on a tallit
anyway.

In a climate of public discourse that can best be described as
a conversation of competitive victimhood, we liberal Jews have jumped
in with gusto. There is no group in Israeli society that doesn’t see
itself as victimized by those in power: Arabs, the ultra-Orthodox,
residents of the periphery, settlers, peaceniks, the anti-religious,
the state as a whole, etc., etc., – and now, Reform and Conservative
Jews. And to highlight one’s victimhood, it is generally useful to
label the other side as an archetypal oppressor (Nazi, Taliban, Iran
are common epithets). The trouble is that since everyone is busy
cultivating his/her own particular victimhood, no one really has
patience for or interest in anyone else’s. So we find our cries of
“gevalt” being mostly ignored. Moreover, in a country whose declaration
of independence begins “In the Land of Israel the Jewish people
arose…” it is not entirely self-evident to most people that we are
all “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The
historical and ideological bases of Israel and the United States are
quite different from each other. The problem of the Women of the Wall
is not just a case study in the individual’s right to free religious
expression in a neutral, secular democracy. It is rather a call to set
forth a vision of what we want the Jewish state to look like as a
Jewish, democratic state.

As long as we Reform Jews speak the language of secular
democracy and claim moral authority as a persecuted minority – so long
will we continue to be considered an irrelevant nuisance here. Our
strength is in offering a meaningful alternative at the level of the
community, the school, and the synagogue, in realizing the vision of –
and modeling – a Judaism that can meet the spiritual needs of the
citizens of a modern state and can live in harmony with democracy.

It is too easy to say what we don’t want (religious
discrimination) and too difficult to say what we do want (i.e., do we
really want Israel to look just like the United States? If so, how will
it be a Jewish state?). We need to be the visionaries of a state that
lacks them in our generation – not still another group of victims vying
for headlines and sympathy.