Israel, up against the wall

The Jewish nation must decide who's in charge: The religion, the state or all of the above.

By Samuel G. Freedman

Jun 22, 2000 |

Whether the Shas party will indeed break permanently from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition, or whether it has just been practicing its usual reckless bluffing this week, the ultra-Orthodox party's importance to peacemaking is as clear as ever. Bizarre as it seems, the completion of a final accord between Israel and the Palestinians may well hinge on Barak's response to the Shas demand that he order a mult-million dollar bailout of the religious schools that serve the party's poor Sephardic constituency.

And simultaneously, if less visibly, Barak's power struggle with Shas underscores a deep controversy within the nation, one with ramifications for the fundamental nature of the Jewish state: the conflict between secular and religious forces in Israel.

Last month, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that an all-female group be allowed to conduct religious services at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and the most historically important in Israel. Because of twin claims on the massive brick rampart, one theological and the other nationalistic, the court's decision dramatically intensified an ongoing conflict over the balance between religion and the civil state in Israel.

At a time when the Barak government has been trying to finesse various compromises to avoid a direct showdown between secular and spiritual elements in Israeli society, the court bluntly asserted the supremacy of the state over religious authority.

To American eyes, the friction between Orthodox and non-Orthodox worshipers at the Western Wall appears to be a struggle about women's rights or pluralism, as the Reform and Conservative branches that dominate American Jewry vie for recognition in the Holy Land. Within Israel, however, all those issues are subsidiary to a far larger debate over the nature of the nation.

From the earliest stages of Zionism, decades before Israel was founded, the nation's secular and religious elements have been ambiguously, ambivalently and yet inextricably bound together. Now that marriage of both necessity and convenience is breaking up.

The Supreme Court ruling in the decade-old suit brought by Women of the Wall, a group of Jewish feminists from across the denominational spectrum, comes as the latest in a series of decisions that have inflamed the ultra-Orthodox community. Those decisions have also troubled the more moderate Orthodox figures trying to negotiate solutions that would stop short of bringing Israel an American-style separation of church and state.

In February 1999, well before the Women at the Wall judgment, a quarter-million haredi Orthodox -- so named because they tremble in awe at God -- had rallied to denounce the Supreme Court as a "judicial dictatorship." Meanwhile, 50,000 secular Israelis were gathering nearby to liken the Orthodox rabbinical leaders to Iran's fundamentalist mullahs and Afghanistan's Taliban.

In the wake of the recent ruling, those tensions have risen again. Early in June, the religious parties in the parliament joined with the right-wing Likud opposition to give initial approval to a bill that would establish a seven-year prison sentence for any woman reading from Torah scrolls or wearing a prayer shawl at the Wall. (The bill must pass two more readings in order to become law.) When 75 members of Women of the Wall, the group that brought the Supreme Court case, prayed there on June 4 for the first time since the ruling in their favor, they were heckled and harassed by ultra-Orthodox men.

The Barak regime's philosophy of diplomacy did pass one major test June 9 on the holiday of Shavuot. A mixed-gender congregation of Conservative Jews managed to worship without being attacked, as they had been for the past several years. But rather than pray as usual on the main plaza of the Kotel, as the Western Wall is known in Hebrew, they gathered in a separate area known as Robinson's Arch. And even though the government provided the 200 congregants with prayer books, Torah scrolls, an ark -- and police protection -- the leaders of the Conservative movement insist that they will accept Robinson's Arch only during a 12-month trial program.

"We continue to insist on our right to pray in the Kotel plaza," said Rabbi Andrew Sacks, who leads the Conservative services. The Reform movement has refused to use Robinson's Arch on even a temporary basis, with Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations ridiculing the setting's "back-of-the-bus" status.

Next Page: The court's decision leaves would-be conciliators in the lurch

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