History of the Jews (98 page)

 

[They] raised the youth that was lacking in wisdom to the heights, and clothed them with pride, while casting in the dust the elders who had acquired wisdom. They taught the child at school that here—in the land of Israel!—there was no need to observe the commandments of the Torah. When the boy came home from school and his parents told him to pray, he answered that the teacher said it was unnecessary or that the instructor had called it nonsense. When the rabbi came and told the boys to observe the Sabbath, they would not listen to him because the club was organizing a football match or the car was waiting to take them to the beach…if the Rabbi pleaded and wept, they laughed in his face, because that was what the instructor had ordered…. Sages of the Torah were thrust into a corner while boys rose to greatness because they held party cards.
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The Orthodox were also outraged over the way in which many institutions broke the ancient rules over segregation of the sexes. Near centres of Orthodoxy there were angry scenes over dance-halls and mixed bathing. Over the conscription of girls into the army the Council of the Great Men stigmatized the law as one to be defied even at the risk of death. That was one of many battles the religious element won.

They also won on the central issue of marriage. The secular state of Israel was obliged to forego the institution of civil marriage. It imposed Orthodox law even on secular unions, under the provisions of Sections 1 and 2 of the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953. Secularist members of the Knesset voted for the law because otherwise Israel would gradually have split into two communities which could not intermarry. But the law led to hard cases and protracted litigation, involving not only non-Jews and secularized Jews but Reform rabbis and their converts, since the Orthodox rabbinates enjoyed the sole right to recognize conversions and would not accept Reform ones. The Orthodox marriage and divorce experts, quite legitimately from their point of view, subjected entire categories of Jewish immigrants to the strictest tests. Thus in 1952 the divorce practices of 6,000 Bene Israels (Jews from Bombay) were scrutinized as irregular (though eventually validated) and the marriages of the Falasha Jews from Ethiopia were queried in 1984.

There were many bitter disputes over remarriage and divorce. Deuteronomy 25:5 imposes levirate marriage on a childless widow and the brother of the deceased husband. The obligation is ended by
the
halizah
or refusal of the brother-in-law. But if he is a minor the widow must wait. If he is deaf and dumb and cannot say, ‘I do not wish to take her’, she may not remarry. This case actually occurred in 1967 in Ashdod; moreover, the deaf and dumb man was already married. So the rabbinate arranged a bigamous marriage and supervised the divorce the next day.
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Hard cases also arose when one party to a marriage refused a divorce. If the refusal came from the woman, a divorce became difficult but if it came from the man it was impossible. In a 1969 case, for instance, a husband was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for six indecent assaults and three rapes. The wife sued for a divorce, the man refused and the couple remained married under rabbinic law, the wife having no civil remedy in Israel. On such cases, Rabbi Zerhah Warhaftig, a former Minister of Religion, took a relaxed view: ‘We have a legal system which has always sustained the people. It may contain within it some thorn that occasionally pricks the individual. We are not concerned with this or that individual but with the totality of the people.’
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The point might have been better put but it contained the truth, to which the difficulties of the new state drew attention, that Judaism is a perfectionist religion. It contains the strength of its weaknesses. It assumes that those who practise it are an elite since it seeks to create a model society. That made it in many ways an ideal religion for a new state like Israel, despite the fact that its law was in process of being formed about 3,200 years before the state was founded. Because of Judaism’s unique continuities, many of its most ancient provisions were still valid and observed by the pious. They often reflected the form rather than the content of religious truth but it must be stressed again that ‘ritualistic’ is not a term of reproach for Jews. As Dr Harold Fisch, the rector of Bar-Ilan University, put it:

 

The very word ‘ritual’ in English carries a pejorative quality derived from the Protestant tradition. The word in Hebrew is
Mizvot
(religious command) and these have the same moral force whether involving relations between man and man or between man and God. It is the latter part of the code that embodies the so-called ritual commandments and these are on any proper appraisal as indispensable as the ethical commandments.
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The essence of the ritual spirit is punctilious observance, and that again is a Judaic strength particularly well adapted to a new state. All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past. Many of the hundred or more countries which became independent after 1945 had to borrow institutions and traditions from their former colonial rulers or invent them from a past which was largely unrecorded. Israel
was fortunate because her past was the longest and richest of all, was copiously chronicled and kept fresh by absolute continuities. We have noted that the Jewish genius for writing history lapsed between the time of Josephus and the nineteenth century. Once the Zionist state was founded it expressed itself not merely in history but above all in archaeology. Statesmen and generals, like Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin, and thousands of ordinary people, became passionate archaeologists, both amateur and professional. The study of deep antiquity rose to the height of an Israeli obsession.

That was an important element in creating an organic nation. But it was insignificant compared to the living force of a religion which had formed the Jewish race itself and whose present custodians could trace their rabbinical succession back to Moses. The Jews had survived precisely because they were punctilious about their rituals and had been prepared to die for them. It was right and healthy that the respect for strict observance should be a central feature of the Zionist community.

The outstanding example was the attitude of the Jews towards the Temple Mount, when courage and providence at last restored it to them, along with the rest of the Old City, during the Six Day War of 1967. It was a simple decision to restore the ancient ghetto, from which the Jerusalem Jews had been driven in 1948. But the Temple posed difficulties. It had been completely destroyed in antiquity. But no less an authority than Maimonides had ruled that, despite the destruction, the site of the Temple retained its sanctity, for all time. The
Shekinah
never departed, and that was why Jews always came to pray near the site, especially at the Western Wall, traditionally believed to be close to the west end of the Holy of Holies. Since the Temple site retained its sanctity, however, it also required Jews to be ritually pure before actually entering it. The purity rules surrounding the Temple were the strictest of all. The Holy of Holies was banned to all except the high-priest, and even he entered it only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Since the Temple area was equated with the Mosaic ‘camp of Israel’ which surrounded the sanctuary in the wilderness, the purity provisions of the Book of Numbers applied to it.
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In this book, God defined to Moses both the causes of impurity and its cure. A person became defiled by touching a corpse, a grave or a human bone, or by being under the same roof as any of these. Then it adds: ‘And for an unclean person they shall take of the ashes of the burnt heifer of purification for sin, and running water shall be put thereto in a vessel: And a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the vessels, and upon the
persons that were there, and upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead, or a grave.’
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The heifer had to be red and ‘without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke’. Most important of all, the critical part of the operation had to be carried out, to avoid defilement, by Eleazar, the heir-apparent of Aaron. When he had produced the mixture, it was stored ‘in a clean place’ and kept for when needed. The authorities insisted that the heifers were rare and costly: if only two hairs of the animal were not red, its ashes were invalid. They disagreed on how many heifers had been burned. Some said seven. Others said nine. After the destruction of the Temple it was impossible to prepare new ashes. A supply remained, and it was apparently used to purify those who had been in contact with the dead as late as the Amoraic period. Then it ran out, and purification was no longer possible until the Messiah came to burn the tenth heifer and prepare a new mixture. Because the purity rules, especially over the dead, were and are so strict, rabbinical opinion agrees that all Jews are now ritually impure. And, since no ashes exist for their purification, no Jew can enter the Temple Mount.
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The Law of the Red Heifer has been cited as an outstanding example of
hukkah
, a Judaic statute for which there is no rational explanation but which must be strictly observed because divinely commanded in the clearest possible manner. It is just the kind of rule for which gentiles always derided the Jews. It is also the kind of rule which Jews insisted on observing whatever the disadvantages, and so retained their Jewish identity. So, from 1520 at least, Jews prayed at the Western Wall but not beyond it. After the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem fell in 1948, Jews were prevented by the Arabs from using the Western Wall or even from looking at it from afar. This denial lasted nineteen years. With the recapture of the Old City in 1967, the Wall was available again and on the first day of Shavuot that year a quarter of a million Orthodox Jews tried to pray there at once. The entire area in front of it was then cleared and a fine, paved open space created. But nothing could be done about Jews entering the Temple Mount itself. All kinds of ingenious rabbinical arguments were put forward to allow Jews to enter at least part of the area. But in the end the consensus of rabbinical opinion was that the entire site had to remain out of bounds to Jews who really believed in their faith.
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So the Chief Rabbinate and the Ministry of Religions put up notices forbidding Jews to go on the Mount under pain of
Karet
(‘extirpation’ or loss of eternal life). The fact that thousands of Jews ignored the warning was cited as evidence of the impotence of the rabbis. Its observance by large numbers of
pious Jews, despite their intense anxiety to enter the area, was equally if not more significant.

The Jerusalem rabbis had a collateral reason for taking a strict line on this issue. They wanted to discourage, in the minds of ordinary Jews, any equation of Zionist military triumphs, such as the recapture of the Old City, with messianic fulfilment. The same argument also applied to proposals to rebuild the Temple itself. Any such scheme would of course have run into violent opposition from the entire Moslem world, since the Temple platform was occupied by two Islamic structures of immense historic and artistic importance. Nevertheless the idea was argued through with characteristic rabbinical thoroughness. Did not the Jews, by divine command, rebuild the Temple on the return from their first, Babylonian Exile, and was not this a precedent to follow now the great Exile was over? No: the precedent applied only when the majority of Jews ‘live upon the land’, and that had not yet happened. Yet at the time of Ezra was not the Temple rebuilt even though the number of Jews returning from Babylon was smaller than today? True, but no divine command has been received; the Third Temple will be erected in a supernatural manner by God’s direct intervention. But this argument was once used against Zionism itself, was it not, and falsified by events? And the first Temple, undoubtedly built by Solomon, was also ascribed to God. It was; on the other hand, the Temple could not be built in David’s time because he was a man of war; it had to wait until Solomon’s time of peace. So today: not until a final peace comes could a Third Temple be built. Even then a true prophet would be required to inspire the event, if for no other reasons than that the details, given by God to David in His own hand, were lost.
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Yes, they were: but details of the Third Temple are given in the Book of Ezekiel. Perhaps; but leaving aside the technical arguments, the present generation was neither prepared nor willing to restore the Temple and its mode of worship: to become so would require a religious awakening. Exactly: and what better way of creating one than starting to build the Temple again?
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So the arguments went on, leading to the majority conclusion that nothing could yet be done. Even a proposal to offer a ritual sacrifice of the paschal lamb was dropped because the exact site of the altar could not be discovered, there was doubt about the priestly lineage credentials of present-day Cohens or
Kohanim
, and (not least) too little was known of the priestly garments to recreate them exactly.
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The Temple, and the arguments surrounding it, symbolized the religious past which was a living, binding force in the new Israeli community. But there was a secular past too, to escape from which the
Zionist state had been created. There the symbol was the Holocaust: more than a symbol indeed, an awesome reality which had overshadowed the state’s creation and which, rightly, continued to be the salient fact in the nation’s collective memory. Judaism had always been concerned not only with the Law but with (in human terms) the ends of law, justice. An endlessly recurrent and pitiful feature of Jewish history in the Exile had been the injuries inflicted on Jews as Jews and the failure of gentile society to bring their perpetrators to justice. The Jewish state was, in part at least, a response to the greatest injustice of all. One of its functions was to be an instrument of retribution and display to the world that Jews at along last could strike back and execute their Law against those who wronged them. The Holocaustal crime was so gigantic that the Nuremberg trials and other machines of justice operated by individual European countries, which we have already described, were plainly not enough. As early as 1944 the research department of the Jewish Agency’s Political Office, then run by the future Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, had begun to collect material on Nazi war criminals. After the foundation of the state, tracing the guilty and bringing them to justice was part of the duties of several Israeli agencies, some secret. The effort was not confined to Israel. Many Jewish organizations, national and international, including the World Jewish Congress, joined in. So did the survivors themselves. In 1946 Simon Wiesenthal, a thirty-eight-year-old Czech Jew who had survived five years in various camps, including Buchenwald and Mauthausen, set up with thirty other camp inmates the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which eventually found a permanent home in Vienna. It concentrated on the identification of Nazi criminals not yet tried and sentenced. The Holocaust was intensively studied for academic and educational as well as retributive purposes. By the 1980s there were ninety-three courses in Holocaust studies in United States and Canadian universities alone and six research centres entirely devoted to the subject. At the Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, for example, the latest technology was invoked to create what was called a ‘multi-screen, multi-channel-sound, audio-visual experience of the Holocaust’, using a 40-foot-high and 23-foot-long screen in the configuration of an arch, three film projectors and a special Cinemascope lens, eighteen slide projectors and pentaphonic sound, all linked to a central computer for simultaneous control. This dramatic recreation of the event might not seem excessive at a time when anti-Semites were beginning to make determined attempts to prove that it had never taken place at all or had been grotesquely exaggerated.
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