Will Your Rabbi Be Arrested at the Kotel? |
It was 2015, and we were on our way to Israel for our oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah. For her celebration, she had chosen to read from the Torah with Women of the Wall at their Rosh Hodesh gathering at the Kotel. With family and friends from across Israel and visiting from the States, we stood wrapped together, feeling such pride as she chanted from a tiny scroll the women had managed to smuggle in for their special service (see video). The joyful lifting of voices drowned out the screaming and whistleblowing that surrounded us that morning, allowing her to joyfully claim her voice in this holy community of women whose greatest passion is simply to practice their Judaism as free Jews in the way they best see fit, in relationship with God and the Jewish people, at the holiest of sites for our Jewish people.
It was such a powerful parenting moment to joyfully celebrate on one hand, and on the other, to watch our son, her brother, and her grandfathers have to sit on the sidelines without access to this very special moment. We were together in our pride, and yet the physical distance between us felt vast.
Four years later, we were back in Israel for our son’s bar mitzvah. This time at Ezrat Yisrael, a small, modest slice of access to the ancient walls that once surrounded the Temple, the egalitarian section off a side entrance. Again, family and friends gathered with us for this very special moment. This time, our whole family stood together, surrounding one another as we lifted our voices in prayerful thanksgiving, chanting, singing, and celebrating both his bar mitzvah and Hanukkah. The liberation of that togetherness was its own kind of miracle.
To choose an egalitarian prayer space, to choose to stand together as men and women, to read from the Torah as our daughter did, to wrap oneself in a tallit and tefillin, to lift one’s voice without restriction is not a rejection of Judaism. It is an expression of it. It is the exercise of religious freedom in its most sacred and personal form. Freedom of religion does not only mean the freedom to be Jewish. It means the freedom to be Jewish as you understand your covenant with God, your relationship with ancient tradition as it grapples with modern sensibilities and innovation. It is about time and space, and your place as one with the Jewish people. How can we speak of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, of all Jewish people, and then tell a significant portion of those people that their Judaism is illegitimate at the very wall that stands as a symbol of our endurance and resilience within our collective spiritual heart?
This week, the Israeli government did just that. In advancing its latest legislation transferring the Kotel and governance of its prayers to an Ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, it is dismantling and criminalizing religious egalitarian prayers. It is striking at the heart of access and inclusion for all Jews at this holiest site and imposing seven years of imprisonment on women who engage in deep meaningful ritual in these public spaces.
How can we ask the Diaspora to love Israel, to bring their children to Israel, to invest their identity and their resources in Israel, and then pass laws that criminalize the way those same children pray? How can we stand and speak to Jewish unity, and then seek to criminalize Jewish leaders for their Jewish practices? Jewish unity cannot coexist with this kind of discrimination. It is a contradiction that strikes at the very soul of what it means to be Am Yisrael, how we express ourselves as Am Echad.
Let us be clear about what this law actually is. In any other democratic country in the world, a law that restricts how a religious minority may pray at its own holiest site would be recognized immediately for what it is: a violation of religious freedom. If any other country passed legislation forbidding Jews from praying in the manner of their tradition, we would name it without hesitation. We would call it antisemitic. We would mobilize. We would protest. The fact that this law is being advanced in Israel, the Jewish state, does not make it less of a violation; it makes it a more painful and disorienting one. I love Israel. I support Israel with my whole heart. And it is precisely because of that love that I insist that Israel must be guided by the deep values of freedom of religion. I love Jewish unity, and it is an expression of our Jewish unity that Israel must defend our essential right as Jews, not as liberal egalitarian Jews, not as religious Jews, but simply as Jews, to practice our freedom of religion in Israel. This law sows dissonance and divisiveness through the global Jewish community at the very moment we can least afford it, driving a wedge between Israel and the millions of Diaspora Jews whose love for Israel is deep and real but who will not be told that our Judaism does not count.
This week, just miles from the places where our two spectacular family celebrations occurred, the Israeli government passed the first reading of their law criminalizing our simchas and threatening our space to express and practice an egalitarian Judaism freely. Israel’s leadership has the opportunity for moral clarity, to stand up for Jewish unity, and to fight for all Jews. They can reject this bill, honor Jewish pluralism, and keep the Kotel what it has always been meant to be: the heart of an entire people. This is not a cagey political move that we can afford to ignore and about which we can remain passive onlookers; this is not a distant policy debate. This is personal. This is our family. This is our Judaism. And we cannot afford to be silent.