Two Aspects of Jewish Identity

16 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 lWO ASPECTS OF JEWISH IDENTIlY by Joel B. Wolowelsky Dr. Joel B. Wolowelsky is Chairman ofAdvanced Placement Studies at the Yeshivah ofFlatbush in Brooklyn, New York, and an associate editor of Tradition. A public tumult was created not long ago in Israel when a fallen soldier of the Israel Defence Forces, a recent immigrantfrom the former Soviet Union, was buried at the edge of the military cemetery. His mother was a Christian, and neither she nor he had ever undergone any formal conversion ceremony. Because he was not Jewish, he was not buried among the Jewish soldiers. No one who was offended by this decision argued that he was technically Jewish by virtue of patrilineal decent or some non-Orthodox conversion ceremony. In fact, the whole issue was argued viscerally. The young man had come to Israel to throw in his lot with the Jewish people; he fought as a Jew, was killed as a Jew, and deserved to be buried as a Jew. To be sure, this argument resonated positively even among halakhically committed individuals, especially those who saw service in Tsahal (the Israeli Defence Forces) as part of their Israeli-Jewish identity. This was true despite the fact that allegiance to halakhic norms precludes accepting nontraditional definitions of Jewish identity. The nature of halakhic commitment demands subjugating personal feelings to objective halakhic requirements , but personal interrelationships can make it difficult to simply dismiss as a non-Jew someone who identifies Jewishly and either suffers as a Jew or works loyally on behalf of the Jewish community. We shall argue here that Halakha does not necessarily insist that such an individual has absolutely no Jewish identity, his or her halakhic standing as a non-Jew notwithstanding. Some three decades ago the "Who is a Jew" debate had a very different face when Brother Daniel, a born Jew who apostatized and Two Aspects ofJewish Identity 17 entered the Christian clergy, sued the Israeli government for immediate citizenship based on the Law of Return. "Even a sinful Jew remains a Jew," he argued. Virtually everyone cheered when the Israeli secular courts rejected his petition. Even the most secular Israeli was not prepared to grant Jewish status to a Christian monk. Yet there was an uncomfortable feeling that had the rabbinic courts had jurisdiction, they might have been forced to recognize his claim. Arguing against this assumption, R. Aharon Lichtenstein wrote a seminal article showing that in theory Halakha allowed for the loss of Jewish identity, technical family lineage notwithstanding.l As people move away from traditional Jewish observance' and allegiance, he noted, they increasingly lose halakhic standing as a Jew. They may be excluded from certain rituals which are generally limited to Jews, such as being counted for a minyan, and so on. Yet throughout this continuum, they remain Jews able to effect a valid marriage with other Jews. "[Yet the1important thing for us is to recognize the fatal fallacy of the notion that, ad aeternitatem, the crown ofJewry can never fall off, no matter how ill it is worn," wrote R. Lichtenstein.2 At some point, it is possible to be so far removed from Jewry that one has no functional status at all as a Jew. An important part of his presentation, the bulk of which we shall not attempt to summarize here, was to draw an analogy between the dual components of the uniqueness ofthe land ofIsrael and the corresponding dual attributes of Jewish identity. The land has a distinct holiness (kedushat Erets Yisrael). The first hallowing of the land at the time of Joshua expired when the Jews were exiled; those mitsvot which depend on the sacred status of the land of Israel-tithing, for example-were not in effect during the Babylonian Exile. It was not until Ezra's return that the land regained its sacred status. What, then, was the status of the land in the intermittent period? Was it identical with that of, say, Iceland? The answer offered by R. Lichtenstein, quoting the late RavJoseph B. Soloveitchik, is to distinguish between kedushat Erets Yisrael, the "holiness" ofthe land (which forces us to relate to it on...