Rabbi Freundel's Reaction to The AJC Survey

The assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel by a Jew who by appearance, word and deed is part of the traditional Torah community, stands in my mind as the greatest chillul Hashem (profanation of G-d's name) in my lifetime. Sadly, much of what has occurred in the year since then has simply continued that process of chillul. Painfully, that chillul has come at the expense of many missed opportunities that might have made things much different.

Immediately after the assassination, I sensed the beginnings of a real cheshbon hanefesh (accounting of the soul) precisely in those quarters most closely aligned with the ideological turf in which Yigal Amir was raised. I had hoped that, after this appropriate beginning within the community out of which the perpetrator came, there would then continue to be a similar process throughout the entire Jewish community.

In my view, the Rabin tragedy was fostered by everyone in the Jewish community. Incautious rhetoric, dehumanization of the other, and name-calling had gone on everywhere. It is just as bad to tell settlers that they are of no concern and that they might just as well spin like propellors, as it is to label people as traitors and heretics. This is especially true when these people had previously been held up as heroes, by settling as they had in Judea and Samaria.

In my view, neither side of the peace process has a truly good solution. There are risks and dangers whichever way one turns. Rather than admitting the limitations of the two positions and discussing the really narrow band of considerations that should determine which direction to go, each side substituted bravado, or grandiose claims about their own position and demonization of the other side for reasoned dialogue.

In a Rosh Hashanah sermon some two months before the assassination I had warned that acting in this way was a formula for tragedy, but I had no idea that it would be a tragedy of this magnitude. In the aftermath of the assassination I sensed stirrings of the kind of reassessment necessary to begin a healing process.

Then came the infamous Nightline town meeting. Perhaps it would have happened without that TV program, but certainly that disgraceful public display of recrimination, on the part of people who should have known that this was exactly the opposite of what was needed, didn't help matters.

My assessmant of the speakers who appeared on that program was that something like 80% of the comments from the right were offensive and inappropriate to the situation. This was surpassed by the left, whose comments were nearly 100% consistent in being absolutely the wrong things to say if what one wanted to achieve was soul searching, change and a healing experience. Comments like that, which had previously been relegated to the background by the tragedy, not only continued, but increased in volume and in the public's awareness in the days after the town meeting. Eventually, this first opportunity for healing was gone.

A second opportunity for healing presented itself in the moments immediately after the murder of Rabin. Young Israelis, stunned by what had happened, went searching for a sefer tehillim, a book of psalms with which to pray for their fallen leader.

It was a most graphic reminder, especially to those who see Israeli youth as being spiritually lost, that a desire for something transcendent still exists. At a time of national tragedy these young people, many of whom lack any formal training or much knowledge about their religion, turned to that religion and its traditions for comfort, because they understood that there was something there that could speak to them in their hour of need.

Instead of building on that desire and that experience, it too was lost, almost before it began.

A third missed opportunity has come from the American Jewish community. There was a time when no matter what our disagreement with the Israeli body politic and with Israeli society, our support for Israel remained untouched and untouchable. In recent years this has begun to change.

When the "Who is a Jew" issue was foolishly brought into the Knesset some years ago, the left in Jewish life threatened to remove its support for Israel were the bill to pass. Not to be outdone, during the Rabin administration, some on the right refused to hold the traditional Israeli bond appeal on the High Holidays as a protest against government policies. In both cases, these groups or individuals were sadly mistaken in putting their particular agendas, no matter how important, above support for the State.

In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination we had a chance to change all that. We could have, in every segment of the Jewish community, committed ourselves to support the State at all times and to make that support more important than our particular political or religious agendas.

This is not to say that we could not protest against particular policies of the State. I have no objection, and frankly, find it a healthy thing, that Jews around the world take such an active concern and part in Israeli affairs. If someone has a position on the peace process or on pluralism in Israel, they should make their voice heard through every legitimate channel available.

What should not be allowed, however, is threatening the survival of the State or threatening one's overall support of the State.

Unfortunately, in the past year, this process has only accelerated. The issue of religious pluralism in Israel is seen as a tragedy by some and as an opportunity for triumph by others. Frankly, I think both sides are overreacting to the importance of the issue. The fate of the denominations and movements in Jewish life is not going to be settled by a vote in the Israeli Knesset, especially when that vote can be undone by the next government and redone in the government after that. In fact, that is one of the problems in bringing issues like this to the Knesset, because it allows for precisely that kind of political maneuvering and change on issues that are of an eternal religious nature and not of a temporal political nature. Unfortunately, the issue is on the table, and once again, people who disagree with the direction in which Israel appears to be heading are threatening to remove their support for the Sate. It has gone further than that. This issue has been used to destroy those few remaining bastions of pluralism where members of all denominations could meet, perhaps to argue, but at least to sit under the same roof. One by one, these are disappearing.

The crumbling of structures of pluralism along with the tenor of this debate and the threat that one group or another will no longer support Israel makes the climate even worse than it was a year ago. If there was one thing that united all members of the Jewish people, it was the State of Israel. When we now reach a stage where that support is conditioned on Israel following my particular political or religious agenda, we no longer have that basis for coming together, and the strains and stresses that led to Rabin's death only become worse.

When one adds to these missed opportunities the outrageous statements made by people both on the left and the right about the opposition, one must conclude that the atmosphere is, if anything, worse that it was before the assassination. Voices have been raised on the left calling the Orthodox "Sadducees," and therefore in effect outside normative religion. Voices have been raised on the right suggesting that Reform set itself up as a separate religion in Israel and therefore that Reform is not Jewish. This has been spiced by the usual accusations and recriminations to the point where it is hard to be optimistic about any semblance of communal unity surviving for more than a few decades.

I sometimes feel that those of us who care about such things are merely holding on, simply slowing the process so that the tragedy of complete schism be avoided for a few more years or decades, in the vain hope that sanity will return and somehow we will come back from the brink. There is nothing, unfortunately, in the last year or in recent events to give one much hope, but then again, Jews have always clung to the hopeless at moments like this, and sometimes that which was without hope has become reality.

Finally, the question for today is not whether Jewish organizations should be involved in Israeli politics. They are and they will continue to be. In my view, there are many ways in which this can and should be done.

The question is also not whether there should be other forms of religious Judaism in Israel other than orthodoxy. The burden here falls on those who want to form such movements to find enough people living in Israel to create a critical mass for these movements. Israel is, after all, a free country, and people will do what they want to do. No government policy is going to determine whether Conservative or Reform or some other flavor of Judaism succeeds or fails in contemporary Israel. Israelis will vote with their feet and so far they have largely voted to keep away from such attempts.

The critical question is whether or not we are going to see beyond our limited horizons to a larger Judaism, in which despite all of our difference we can create some semblance of unity and transcendent values that will be more important than our denominational concerns. So far, and in particular in the year after Rabin's death, we are failing miserably at that task.

I recently had a young man tell me that he had decided to convert to Reform Judaism rather than Orthodox Judaism. His decision is his decision and I do not quarrel with it. I do wonder, however, how a person who is not Jewish came to the conclusion that somehow one flavor of Judaism is a different religion than another. We used to have differences, we then became denominations. We appear now to be on the verge of being different religions entirely. In that type of an environment, I am afraid that the Rabin assassination may not be the end, but rather the first of a tragic series. It is not too late, but the momentum is in the wrong direction and there are very few voices trying to stop that momentum and get it to reverse itself.