Change the System, Don't Join It

Our brethren have made our hearts to melt.

—Deuteronomy 1:28

Rabbi Michael Graetz offers a provocative suggestion: Masorti must form a political party. This is a bad idea on two counts: first, it would put the Masorti movement into the sick bed of political parties in Israel—political institutions whose existential crisis is a major component of the dysfunctions of the Israeli political system; and second, it would put the Masorti movement firmly in the camp of party-politicized religion. The Masorti movement should not play into the establishment of religion in Israel that has so catastrophically compromised the well-being of the Jewish faith in this country.

Yet, Graetz has written an important article. He makes a number of observations that deserve profound study by anyone concerned with the state of Judaism in the Jewish world. Beginning on the most personal level, there is his statement of the experience of participation in a Hebrew-speaking society where he exults in the "joy of living as free Jews in a free Jewish society," citing this joy as one of the roots of Masorti Judaism in Israel: "There is such pure joy just in conversing with our children and grandchildren in Hebrew. There is spiritual exhilaration in talking with our children about Jewish history, while feeling strongly that they are a part of it, together with us." My wife and I have certainly thought of this when, in awe and thankfulness, we hear our infant grandson speak new words and expand his vocabulary in a world that is framed for him, from the beginning, in the Hebrew language.

More generally, Rabbi Graetz speaks for many of us, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, when he expresses a foundational understanding of what it means to be an Israeli Jew in the early twenty-first century. The poem "Tourists" by Yehuda Amichai, to which Graetz alludes, has several important themes. One of them, as Rabbi Graetz so beautifully puts it, is the redemptive potential of Israeli society that finds expression in the most ordinary tasks: "This is my attempt to contribute to the redemption that Yehuda Amiḥai talks about, to getting ourselves to see the glory and the transcendence in the most banal tasks of daily life. Truly, to sense redemption in the prosaic act of buying some fruit for the family in the shuk is the key to the whole: this is a society suffused with redemptive potential." Surely Graetz's insight has the stuff of profound truth. Whether we live in Israel or in the Diaspora, we live in a Jewish world where Amichai's shuk is a reality. Unlike the pre-Zionist reality described by Pinsker in Autoemancipation, Jews are no longer "ghosts," all spirit, culture, and religion, with no material base on God's earth. Ours is a world where Jews are free to choose to live in democratic states in the Diaspora or to live in Israel—where they frame their existence in a Jewish language; live according to the Jewish calendar (imagine the approach of the High Holy Days with no need to write letters to high school sports coaches: "Please excuse Joey from practice on Yom Kippur"!); exercise power in the form of a state; and, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg teaches us, undertake the struggle to do so in an ethical manner.

Graetz notes the unique nature of Israel as a society in which Jewish culture is dominant and the Jewish ethos in its various forms is the mainstream ethos:

In all diaspora societies, Jews assimilated towards the dominant ethos of where they lived, thus acculturating as "Jewish" ideas with firm roots in Islam and Christianity, in dictatorship and democracy, and in many other realms as well. In Israeli society the natural ethos to which everything naturally assimilates is "Jewish civilization" itself.

Rabbi Graetz explains his personal approach to the rabbinate against the backdrop of his profound recognition of the qualities of Israeli life and culture:

I concentrate on the people, on my friends, on the wonderful human potential, on the free flowing compassion that is so available [End...