So much for a safe haven. We came from the lands of Kristallnacht to create a Jewish homeland, and look what happens: Haaretz reports tonight that the reform synagogue in Ra’anana, an upper middle-class northern suburb of Tel-Aviv, has been desecrated, most likely by Jews (Hebrew link here).
Ra’anana is home to many Israelis who rear from English speaking countries, countries in which progressive Judaism is a norm. In Israel it tends to be badly accepted, not only by the general population but by the authorities. The various progressive movements (Reform, Conservative, even modern Orthodox) are outcast. Marriage consecrated by a reform rabbi will not be recognized as legal. Women rabbis who arrive at the wailing wall wearing ceremonial attire get arrested.
Such attitudes leave progressive Israelis with no way of being Jewish except being fully secular, but that seems to be the least of our problems. Inspired by the powers that be, a zealot mob now goes ahead and commits actual violence: breaking windows and spraying on the building’s walls (in Hebrew) the words: “it’s begun!”. And why shouldn’t they? They have been told, by their rabbis, by their teacher, by the state, that this isn’t really a synagogue. How can they tolerate such obscene fraud in their own back yard?
Being Israelis, we are taught nothing about the history and legacy of these movements. I was astounded, on visiting Charleston, SC, to learn that the city’s reform community dates back to 1824. I grew to think of reform judaism as a rootless, modernist folly, put together by self-hating Jews who were jealous of the gentiles for their church organs. In Budapest I learned of the Neolog movement. Its name was never uttered in the schools I attended. That would have presented too much of a challenge to the Orthodox rabbis’ political monopoly.
Presenting a more pragmatic, compromise-driven approach to the regional conflict didn’t help the progressives much. The memory of Reform Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes, one of the great leaders of pre-state zionism and the Hebrew University’s first president, has been all but deleted. Only the university press and a lawn in one of its campuses are named after him. Magnes took a staunch anti-war approach in 1948. Both him and his movement have been punished for this.
Current leaders of progressive Judaism in Israel, such as the truly inspiring Rabbi Gilead Kariv, head of Israel’s Reform community, are regarded as marginal figures. Marginal? By myself perhaps. It appears that others regard them as dirt worthy of actual terrorism, the same form of terrorism that is being commited by settlers against Palestinians within the scope of “price tag.”
God may be forgiving. Bloggers are much less so. Desecrating a place of worship, be it a mosque or a synagogue is an abominable act. The irony of a synagogue desecrated by Jews screams to the sky, and yet I doubt that we will hear much of an outcry over this. This is, after all, the Orthodox Jewish state.
