Writing from the Heart

Isuppose I should mention up front that Michael Graetz is my father and that I wish to participate in this special forum to explain from a sabra's native-born perspective—and specifically from the perspective of a sabra who grew up in the Masorti movement—exactly why my Abba is right.

When in the past it has been necessary to deal with Israeli political leaders about issues that concern us deeply, the sense I've always gotten from our Masorti and international Conservative leadership is that we will do best if we behave like polite tourists in somebody else's country. We must always be nice. We must always appear happy—even perhaps surprised—when someone is willing to meet us, thus even tacitly to give us some recognition. It's true that this servile position was, and is, a function of our much-spoken-about "low numbers" in that we have never had enough votes simply to demand to be dealt with. But there was, and is, more afoot here than mere votes and numbers: our traditional servility also has to do with the mentality of olim that we have had for many years (and, amazingly, I include in this assessment colleagues born not abroad at all, but right here in the Land of Israel). And it also has to do with the k'lal yisrael ideology that we always insist on maintaining, the practical corollary of which is that it is never nice to ask anything for ourselves that others do not already enjoy. In this brief response to my father's essay, I want to address myself to these specific issues. And I do so from a position of peculiar paradox: as the representative of a movement of tzabarim who behave like olim, and also as the son of a leader of the movement in Israel who never acts like an oleh when dealing with the authorities, although everyone knows he is one. (My father grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places!)

Perhaps I should pause to write a bit more about this idea of the political mentality of olim. I am a sabra who grew up in a community, more or less, of olim. In Omer, the Masorti group is big and strong. In theory, we could have been the ruling party—setting budgets, running the educational system in our town, etc. I cannot say for sure if this would have a been a wise move for the development of the Masorti kehillah in Omer, but I put it out there just as a theoretical argument because I would like to play around with the idea of "what if." If the mayor of Omer had been from the Masorti kehillah, we could have had the government pay for our educational undertakings, like ganim and our other Masorti schools. The rabbinate in Omer would have been in our hands and we—and not forces hostile to our very existence—would have been in charge of the mikveh used for conversions. We would have determined the appropriate budget for the Masorti synagogue. We would have run the kashrut system, and we would have determined in what house the Masorti rabbi, paid by the government, should live and how much he (or she!) should earn. Of course, not all of these things would have happened so easily or so smoothly, but the government would have been bound to obey our decisions. Moreover, since we would have been handling all affairs in town in an open, honest, pluralistic, and democratic way, we would be presenting an almost unheard of model for religious political behavior in Israel. We would have been able to show that the appropriate response to the corruption of the religious establishment is not to separate church from state (in the American style), but rather to bring integrity and honesty to the system by shaping it according to Masorti values. In our system, all religious streams would be respected and funded, not just our own!

Now imagine this scenario taking place on a national level. If we could convince both parents of all the students in...