NORTHBROOK, Ill. (JTA) – I can confidently say that I am one of the first Jewish professionals to have used e-mail.
At one of the first college student conferences I ever ran, a student approached me on the last day to suggest that on the following year's application, we also ask for e-mail addresses.
"Sure," I replied. "What's e-mail?"
That was the start of my encounter with the joys, frustrations and dangers of this medium. And since the day I first started by dialing a number, hearing a long tone, waiting several minutes to connect and waiting even longer to have e-mail pop up on the monitor, I have been receiving e-mails predicting the imminent demise of the Conservative movement.
That was about 18 years ago, and the e-mails keep coming.
Now, of course, the predictions also appear in listservs, on Web sites, in podcasts and blogs, in news releases and notably in the Jewish press. They come from sociologists, demographers, professors, clergy, synagogue presidents and people at the Kiddush table and in the parking lot. It is not unusual for many Jewish reporters to "objectively" refer to the movement as "beleaguered" or "under siege."
So first, here's the bad news. Our numbers are shrinking. Our members are getting older. We're being battered in the press. Our institutions are faltering under the weight of old governance systems and the global economic crisis. We're fighting among ourselves. [Add your own critique here.]
Now for some good news. More people are learning and studying Jewish texts, Jewish history and Jewish culture. Kids are still going to Israel with USY and Ramah. Our day schools and camps are experiencing what we hope is a temporary decline, but it is clear that they are no longer just for the rabbi's children. Women are not only in leadership positions, they're also on the bimah. Laypeople – not just the younger ones (and yes, there are younger ones) – are reading Torah. Conservative Jews are involved not only in their congregations, they comprise much of the leadership of federations and other Jewish organizations. A large number of student Hillel leaders come from Conservative backgrounds. And no matter what they call themselves, many of the independent minyanim are Conservative – they use Conservative siddurim and chumashim and approach text using methods championed by the Conservative movement. [Add your own good news here – I know you have some.]
So if things are good, why are they bad?
Our problems are real, for sure, and we must approach them seriously. The Conservative movement has contributed much to American Jewish life. I do not consider it a failure if one of our own becomes involved in another denomination or organization. It means we're doing our job – it's the natural outgrowth of Schechter's klal Yisrael.
But it does trouble me that we have not successfully created Shabbat communities in most of our congregations. It troubles me that most students do not find the level of commitment in their home communities that they do in USY or Ramah or Koach. It does trouble me that if they do find it, it's likely not in the Conservative movement, so they may become involved in other communities not by design but by default. And it does trouble me that our clergy and laity become more concerned about institutional viability than about motivating themselves and others to live fully Jewish lives.
What can we do about it? It's easy to assign responsibility, but it's courageous to shoulder it. If I were speaking to the key leaders of the movement, professional and lay, I would start by handing each of them a mirror and asking them to take a long, hard look.
It's easy to blame the institutions – and there is plenty of blame to be assigned to them all. But how many rabbis tell their president that in order to be a more effective leader, the two must study together for an hour every other week? How many presidents tell their rabbi the same thing? How much time do we spend teaching and encouraging people to observe Shabbat or to keep kosher, compared to the amount of time we spend making the bar or bat mitzvah schedule or collecting membership dues?
The business side is important, to be sure, but your shul should be more than a business. Yes, I know your congregation is different. But really it's not.
If our institutions are out of touch with our members, know that this didn't happen yesterday. And if you've only complained about it, then stop complaining because complaining alone won't help.
I know people might suggest that because I am employed by one of these institutions, perhaps I am naive, perhaps apologetic, perhaps defensive. Certainly our life experiences color everything, including our opinions. I accept and understand that. I also have to look in that mirror because there are times when I, too, get lost in the politics. So let this serve not only as an admonishment to others but as self-indictment as well.
We all have a lot of work to do. United Synagogue, Women's League, Men's Club, Ziegler, JTS, the RA, CA, JEA, JYDA, NAASE, Masorti, Mercaz, Schechter – all of us. We can form coalitions, make demands, threaten, cajole and continue to fight it out in the press. It's all a smokescreen and doesn't confront the real issues.
Those e-mails have been coming for 18 years. I predict they will come for another 18 years and beyond – until the technology becomes ancient and something takes its place.
The bottom line is, we can all get along. I'm looking in the mirror and I invite you to join me. We have a lot of work to do.
(Richard S. Moline is the director of Koach, United Synagogue's program for college students.)
---'With a heavy heart we will soon say Kaddish on the Reform and Conservative movements," Rabbi Norman Lamm, the distinguished chancellor of Yeshiva University, recently proclaimed in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "The future of American Jewry is in the hands of Haredim and the Modern Orthodox."
Lamm's triumphalistic prediction has, unsurprisingly, elicited strong and angry responses from Conservative and Reform leaders who consider their movements youthful and vibrant. For a historian, though, the prediction cannot help but call to mind earlier attempts to divine American Judaism's future.
When Lamm was young, those who followed trends in Jewish life expected to say Kaddish for Orthodox Judaism. A careful study in 1952 found that "only twenty-three percent of the children of the Orthodox intend to remain Orthodox; a full half plan to turn Conservative." The future of American Jewry back then seemed solidly in the hands of Conservative Jews.
Years earlier, in the late 19th century, Reform Judaism expected to say Kaddish for other kinds of Jews. The great architect of American Reform Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, titled his prayer book "Minhag Amerika" — the liturgical custom of American Jews — and given the number of synagogues that moved into the Reform camp in his day, his vision did not seem farfetched. Many in the mid-1870s believed, as he did, that the future of American Judaism lay in the hands of the Reformers.
Before then, of course, those with crystal balls expected to say Kaddish for Judaism as a whole in America. One of the nation's wisest leaders, its then attorney general, William Wirt, predicted in 1818 that within 150 years, Jews would be indistinguishable from the rest of mankind. Former president John Adams likewise looked to the future and thought that Jews would "possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians."
All these predictions made sense in their day. All assumed that the future would extend forward in a straight line from the present. All offered their followers the comforting reassurance that triumph lay just beyond the horizon.
And all proved utterly and wildly wrong.
Lamm's prediction is unlikely to break this depressing streak of failures. Admittedly, Conservative Judaism today faces significant financial, demographic and ideological challenges, but Reform Judaism faced greater challenges 75 years ago, when it was by far the smallest and most divided of our three religious movements. Yet it successfully reinvented itself, winning over to its ranks many Jews whose parents might never have considered Reform Judaism an option. Conservative Judaism, with its new and more youthful leadership, could stage a similar comeback. Orthodox Judaism, ironically, serves as the poster child for what a beleaguered religious movement can accomplish. Its revival over the past 50 years is one of the great stories of postwar Judaism.
At the same time, and notwithstanding the abundant evidence that Lamm might muster on Orthodoxy's behalf — its prodigious birthrate, its expansive day school movement, the success of Yeshiva University, the remarkable spread of Chabad and more — Lamm's triumphalism flies in the face of a history that has humbled so many would-be prophets, and glosses over American Orthodoxy's all-too-real challenges.
Five challenges are especially worth noting:
First, Orthodox Judaism in America has had trouble retaining its members. According to demographer Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it loses more of its members over time than any other Jewish religious movement — understandably so, since it is harder to be Orthodox than to be any other kind of Jew. Since Orthodoxy represents, even by the most generous estimate, only 13% of those who define themselves as Jewish in America, that represents a significant demographic problem.
Second, Orthodoxy in America is suffering from a severe leadership crisis. The greatest of its 20th-century leaders — Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbi Aharon Kotler, Rabbi Moses Feinstein, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and others — have all passed from the scene. Their successors, who do not carry the mantle of the great pre-war European yeshivas, have not achieved the same breadth of acceptance. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, who is Soloveitchik's son-in-law and now the rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel, has bemoaned "the current dearth of first-rank gedolim," or giants, in America. Historically, religious movements that cannot count on indigenous leadership to direct them have not fared well in America — at least not for long.
Third, American Orthodoxy is experiencing a significant brain drain. It sends its best and its brightest to Israel for long periods of yeshiva study, and unsurprisingly, many of them never return. One can think of multiple examples of remarkable Orthodox men and women who might have had a profound effect on Jewish religious life in America but preferred to cast their lot with the Jewish state. Can a movement that sends its most illustrious sons and daughters to Israel truly expect to triumph here in the United States?
Fourth, American Orthodoxy remains deeply divided over the issue of how to confront modernity. This is not a new problem; tensions between "accommodators" and "resisters" in Orthodox life date back to the 19th century. But now, in the absence of broadly respected leaders, the fault lines between Modern and right-wing Orthodox Jews have deepened. The question is whether Orthodoxy can survive as a very broad "big tent" movement or whether, like Conservative Judaism of an earlier era and like so many non-Jewish religious groups that have faced similar challenges, it will ultimately polarize. Big tents have a bad tendency to collapse and split apart, especially in the absence of a strong center. The fact that Orthodox Judaism does not have any strong institutional ties binding together all its factions makes the danger of schism all the greater.
Finally, American Orthodoxy is facing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crushing losses experienced by some of its most generous philanthropists, the billions of dollars in endowment lost in the Madoff scandal and the projected collapse of numerous day schools suggest that Orthodoxy's best days may be behind it.
In the world of religion, smugness and self-assurance are usually risky. As Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Mainline Protestant denominations have discovered, success in the present provides no guarantees for the future. If anything, saying Kaddish for other religious movements has often been the first sign of a movement's own impending decline.
___
Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and the author of "American Judaism: A History" (Yale University Press, 2004).
Dear Chevreh,
I'm writing you with an urgent request. There is a member of our community, a devoted husband and father of two young girls, Jon Galinson, who is battling Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Jon's best hope for a cure is a stem cell transplant. I'm inviting your community to cosponsor this Marrow Drive taking place at Netivot Shalom on Sunday, June 14, 1:00 – 6:00 pm. Cosponsoring only entails spreading the word. You can, of course, also choose to contirbute to the expense of the registry, but this is not our expectation. Please help us find a match for Jon and for thousands like him by coming to our drive and joining the national donor registry. (There is also going to be a "Be the Match" registry at the Israel in the Gardens Festival, Sunday, June 7 at Yerba Buena Gardens. http://www.sfjcf.org/gardens/2009) And please join me in registering yourselves.
You can help save the life of a member of our Bay Area Jewish community. Attached, please find both a useful BLURB for circulation (also pasted below in this email), as well as a PDF flyer. If you can help us by committing to spread the word, please RSVP to Jane Sperling Wise at janesperling@yahoo.com or on her cell: 415-305-7224. Jane is spearheading a team of hopeful friends, and will be the best help in this process.
My thanks, chevreh, for considering this urgent act of Piku'ach Nefesh, of Saving a Life.
Congregational budget-makers frequently divide into two camps that approach the task in different ways. The first camp is likely to include children of the Great Depression, experts in finance, elementary school teachers, and persons anxious about their own money situation. Their first priority is to make sure that the budget balances and that the congregation makes no plans or commitments it is less than 100 percent certain it can meet. They squint over budget sheets like bookkeepers of old with their bright lamps and shoulder garters—I call this camp the Green Eyeshades.
The second camp typically includes young clergy, upscale decorators, Baby Boomers, college professors, and commission salespeople. They firmly believe that with God (or even without God) all things are possible. They say, "We are a congregation, not a business." This camp can be identified at budget meetings mostly by their absence. When shanghaied into talking about money, they glaze over. Staring at a distant sunrise, they float over the surface of numerical reality—I call them the Rose-Colored Glasses.
The division between the Eyeshades and the Glasses is as old as Mary and Martha, Moses and Aaron, Job and Job's wife. It is as deeply rooted in our culture as the duality of secular and sacred, temporal and spiritual. There is nothing wrong with it, so long as people see themselves as members of one team and value one another's contributions. But too often, the division becomes rigid—one group always thinks of ways to spend more money; the other always says we can't afford it. It certainly forms part of the tension between clergy called to transform lives and boards elected to control purse strings—especially when they understand their roles that way.
The budget process often sets up friction between the Glasses and the Eyeshades. Typically the word goes out for each program unit to request a budget for next year. Knowing how these things work, program committees (full of rosy thinkers) ask for more than they expect and then some. A finance committee (strapping on their eyeshades) puts all of the requests onto a spreadsheet as a "dream budget." Usually even the dream budget gets trimmed quite a bit, making it resemble the Green Eyeshades' own, fiscally-sound dreams.
The fund drive naturally falls short of the "dream" goal. How could it not? Calling a goal a dream almost guarantees that you'll fall short. The finance committee sharpens its pencils and begins grinding the dream down to a practical nub.
The program people rise up, asking "How can we say we can't afford what God has called us to accomplish?" The finance people answer, "Good stewards live within their means." The Green Eyeshades with their pencils and their spreadsheets go to battle with the Rose-Colored Glasses, armed with blunt-end scissors, opera glasses, and pink feathers. It is not a pretty picture.
Sometimes the Roses win the day until they've run up deficits and the Greens come like an exasperated crew of parents to clean up after them. If the Greens win too consistently, the Roses trade their glasses in for blinders and quit dreaming. Sad.
Nothing can do away with the division between Green and Rose; it is too deeply rooted in the temperaments and histories of the players. But if we can't change human nature, we can at least stop setting up the budget process to bring out the worst in us. Here is a budget process that can help narrow the divide:
Instead of starting by inviting program units to submit budget requests to the finance committee, this process begins with the governing board. Their first task each year is to define not a budget but a statement: A Vision of Ministry. The Vision is a short list of the new and different ways this congregation plans to transform lives over the next one to three years.
Why a short list? Because if you have a long list of priorities, they are not priorities! The fact that something does not make the list does not mean that it won't happen. The Vision is a short list of things the board means to accomplish no matter what. While creating it, the board will bank a number of ideas for the future: pieces of a long-term vision to which the board is not prepared to make an iron-clad commitment this year.
The board may create the Vision by itself. Or, better, it may ask a varied group, including staff and clergy, to join them in creating a statement for the board to authorize. The Vision of Ministry confronts directly the question that most budget debates are about indirectly: What aspects of our mission will be our top priorities?
The board votes a new Vision of Ministry each year. It also adopts, and less frequently revises, written Budget Policies defining the core principles that will guide budgeting each year. The principles will likely include fair compensation, adequate building maintenance, a financial audit, adequate insurance, and a strong mandate to maintain high standards of health, safety, and accessibility.
After the board adopts the Vision of Ministry and the Budget Policies, these form the basis for the annual call for budget proposals from the program units. The request is not for a "dream" budget but for a budget that will accomplish the Vision and comply with the Policies. The board, not a finance committee of Green Eyeshades, determines the actual proposed budget.
The annual fund drive, then, communicates the Vision of Ministry over and over again. Contributors are asked for amounts which, if about half of them say "yes," will make the Vision possible. The board, clergy, and staff make it clear that the Vision is not something the congregation plans to shoot for but that it intends to accomplish. Year after year, the people learn that when this congregation asks for gifts, it means it. If they give what is asked, the results promised come to pass. Over time the fund drive becomes easier, more pleasant, and more popular.
One reason for this is that the division between Green Eyeshades and Rose-Colored Glasses, while it never goes away, is addressed in creating the Vision of Ministry. The fund drive comes, not in the middle of the argument, but after it has been resolved.
TEL AVIV — When Gabrielle Pollack sought to say kaddish for her recently deceased grandmother, the young female soldier found that in the Israeli Army, it can be daunting to be a Conservative Jew.
And the army, for its part, found it can be daunting to accommodate one as non-Orthodox Jewish movements increasingly jockey to break the Orthodox monopoly over official religion in Israel.
Pollack, 19, is part of a 15-strong group from the Conservative youth movement Noam serving together in Nahal, a military division that combines army service, civil service, and work for their movement. But the military chaplaincy, like all of Israel's official Jewish religious
agencies, is an Orthodox institution that does not recognize a woman's right to be counted and participate equally in formal prayer.
As a result, Pollack, whose grandmother died earlier this month in upstate New York, was told she could not recite the Jewish prayer of mourning for her at her Army base's regular Orthodox minyan. According to Conservative Rabbi Debbi Grinberg, the Noam group's spiritual leader, the base chaplain initially agreed instead to let her organize an alternative, egalitarian minyan at the base's sanctuary where she could do so — but then reneged, apparently after an Orthodox soldier on the base protested.
After days of impasse, related Grinberg, who acted as Pollack's advocate during the dispute, the chaplain gave Pollack keys to a classroom to hold a gathering where she could say kaddish but formally requested that she not hold an actual prayer service there. He suggested the participants instead recite psalms and the kaddish prayer, but indicated she could do as she wished once there.
Pollack went on to hold two egalitarian services in the classroom, Grinberg said, and recited kaddish. But she was unhappy with this outcome.
"This is not a solution, because he didn't say she could pray in the synagogue," said Grinberg. "What? The synagogue is for Orthodox people, but not for her because she wants to pray in an egalitarian minyan?"
Army rules prohibit soldiers from being interviewed by the news media, making it impossible to speak with Pollack herself. But the IDF spokesperson's office confirmed the outlines of Grinberg's account in a prepared statement.
"Several solutions were offered to the bereaved soldier which, on the one hand, conformed with the rules of her particular strain of belief, and yet maintained accepted base protocol," the statement said.
"It was agreed that the soldier would hold an all female minyan in a separate room, in accordance with her beliefs. The soldier has been conducting a minyan of this nature for several days.
"It should be stated that The IDF works to the best of its ability to allow its soldiers their freedom of religion, in accordance with their different beliefs."
Military sources voiced exasperation with the fact that Conservative movement leaders in Israel had taken the event public. Earlier in May, one said, members of the military Rabbinate met with Conservative movement rabbis about accommodating the needs of soldiers in their community. Following this, they said, the Conservatives approached the military rabbinate about Pollack's specific problem, and chaplains agreed to resolve the matter.
But Conservative spokesman Shmuel Dovrat said, "We did not get to any conclusion" in the meeting with the IDF Rabbinate. "It was a nice, a good conversation, but with no bottom line, the beginning of what we hoped would be a communications channel."
The IDF Rabbinate's slow and unsatisfactory response to Pollack right afterward showed that channel was "futile," he said.
For Israel's tiny Masorti movement, as the Conservative Judaism movement is known in Israel, the episode offered an opportunity to once again make its case against Orthodox Judaism's monopoly of the Jewish state's governmental religious institutions. Under settled arrangements governing religion and state in Israel, all Jewish religious appointments and places of worship under state jurisdiction rest in the hands of the Orthodox. This includes army synagogues, which are used exclusively for Orthodox services, and the army rabbinate, which is staffed only by Orthodox chaplains.
Israel's Reform and Conservative movements have long been keen to change this status quo. The two non-Orthodox movements have long battled the government on issues like state funding for synagogues, which they began to receive for the first time last year. On May 19, The High Court ruled that the state must also fund conversion classes operated by the Reform and Conservative movements, breaking an Orthodox monopoly on this.
Last September, the Conservative movement cast its attention on the army. In a letter to the IDF chief-of-staff, Masorti officials demanded that non-Orthodox rabbis be brought into the army rabbinate — a request that was turned down.
Stymied at changing the chaplaincy's makeup, Masorti leaders sought, instead, to break the Orthodox monopoly over army synagogues, attempting to hold Conservative services in them, too. Pollack's kaddish dispute, in fact, follows a disagreement last Yom Kippur, when Pollack tried to hold an egalitarian service in the synagogue only to be stopped by the chaplain.
"We are saying that Conservative soldiers should receive the same attitude from the army that Orthodox soldiers do," Conservative movement spokesman Shmuel Dovrat told the Forward.
Orthodox rabbis give short shrift to this complaint, claiming no injustice was done. Pollack was allowed to assemble recite kaddish elsewhere, they noted. Synagogues should be reserved for "prayer according to the majority," said Benny Lau, a leading modern-Orthodox rabbi who is familiar with this dispute.
There are about 40,000 Conservative Jews in Israel. Meanwhile, even discounting Haredim, who do not serve in the army, around 700,000 Israelis — one in 10 — are traditionally observant — or in American terms, Orthodox. Roughly another 700,0000 define themselves as religiously traditional, usually meaning that on occasion they attend an Orthodox synagogue.
That is still a minority. But the Conservative movement is unlikely to experience much support from the secular Jewish majority. Secular Jews often decry incursions by Orthodoxy into the secular arena. But where there is a place for religion in government or society, such as in army synagogues, they expect it to be Orthodox.
These disputes come as the IDF Rabbinate is also under fire on a separate front. After the Gaza campaign, it came under criticism for distributing booklets to fighting soldiers with an overly zealous right-wing agenda. The criticism was not only from nongovernmental organizations, but also from the Ministry of Defense. Following the incident, the IDF Personnel Directorate released a document limiting the military rabbinate's involvement in educational activities.
As far as Grinberg is concerned, the conflict over synagogue usage is part of a broader battle to have Conservative religiosity recognized by the IDF as equally legitimate to Orthodox religiosity.
IDF rules state, for example, that soldiers must be clean-shaven, except for those who grow beards for religious reasons, When three male Conservative soldiers from Pollack's program stopped shaving, as per tradition, from Passover to Lag B'Omer, they were told by their superiors the army rabbinate did not view theirs beards as religiously motivated facial hair. They were later given license to grow beards — but only after Lag B'Omer (May 12) when they had planned to resume shaving anyway.
Contact Nathan Jeffay at jeffay@forward.com.
--- Wednesday May 20, 2009 JPost.com: "No Ayatollahs for Israel" Rabbi Andrew Sacks Many years ago, shortly after the first McDonald's restaurant opened in Jerusalem, I spoke with a group of Jewish youth visiting from the States. They lamented the fact that the restaurant was not Kosher. This led to a discussion where over half of the participants felt that Israeli law should require restaurants - at least in western Jerusalem - to be Kosher. No Big Macs with cheese. "This is a Jewish State and the laws should reflect Jewish values and traditions," one opined. Iran is a theocracy with some signs - however ersatz - of democracy. Israel (L'Havdil, as we say in Hebrew) is a democracy with theocratic elements. Striking the balance in day to day life can be a challenge. In the past few days we were witness to Supreme Court decisions that moved toward clarifying this dilemma. Israel's Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to stop discriminating against Reform and Conservative conversion institutes in favor of Orthodox ones with regard to funding. The government was not obligated to fund conversion classes, the court stated, but as long as they did so, Masorti and Reform conversion classes could not be denied. Now I can already hear the vicious talkbacks that will follow this blog claiming the fallacious, and deceitful, nature of these non-Orthodox movements. But Israel is a democracy and it is the norm in democratic countries that the civil courts protect the rights of minorities. Funding must be color-blind. It must be allocated to groups who meet established criteria. In addition, Israelis are voting with their feet. Although they have no material advantage to gain by converting with the liberal Movements - many are choosing to do so. This is all the more so as the Orthodox establishment (which also excludes the modern Zionist Orthodox rabbis) keeps its doors all but locked to those who seriously seek to enter. "The declared intention of these conversion institutions is to integrate the new immigrants who want it, into the ranks of the Jewish people, while learning and becoming familiar with the Jewish religion, its principles and customs, while taking an active part in the life of the Jewish community," Judge Beinisch wrote, quoting from the petition to the court. Beinisch opined, "the exclusion of the Reform and Conservative movements violated fundamental principles of the democratic system, that is, freedom of speech and pluralism." The Supreme Court will soon decide about funding for Brit Milah (ritual circumcision) of non-Orthodox converts, the use of Mikvaot for conversion and brides (ritual immersion baths) by the non-Orthodox, and funding for non-Orthodox rabbis to serve as municipal employees. The Masorti Movement opposes the continued financing of an official Chief Rabbinate, along with its thousands of State funded employees. But as long as the institution continues to exist we will insist on funding that is fair and equitable. The court noted that the majority of Jews in Israel and in the world are not identified with the Orthodox Movement. It is high time our Rabbinate took note. This decision came only days after the Supreme Court called upon the Rabbinic courts to show cause why they should be allowed to retroactively annul the status, as Jews, of those who long ago entered the faith. Yesterday I joined in a demonstration held opposite the home of Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman. The news has reported that he was planning to increase the powers of the rabbinical courts to let them rule on matters relating to money and children in divorce cases. This would be a tragic step toward the already ugly discrimination these rabbinic courts demonstrate toward women. But, I am grateful that we indeed live in a country where the civil courts may keep the religious institutions from overstepping their authority and violating citizen rights. We may be witnessing the dawn of an era of religious pluralism where Masorti and other streams will be granted their rightful places. So, in the end Israel is not Iran. Women may choose to wear pants or a dress, to cover their hair, or not. Halacha [Jewish law] must be respected in Israel. The rights of those who live by Halacha must be protected. But the Judaism that I see emerging will be as colorful as the rainbow. |