Rabbi Yehuda Amital was on a mission last week as he met with the U.S. vice president, Jewish leaders and laypeople, rabbis, students and Christian clergy.
It was the 71-year-old Orthodox rabbi’s first visit to the United States since he was appointed to the Israeli Cabinet after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
To every audience, Amital preached tolerance and tried to demonstrate that Jewish law is not inconsistent with the peace process.
Amital is unequivocal about his view of Judaism’s values; The primary value, which supersedes all others, is for human life, he said. Next in the hierarchy is Torah, and third comes land.
Amital explained his view in separate meetings with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Catholic, Protestant and Russian Orthodox religious leaders; New York archbishop Cardinal John O’Connor; hundreds of Jews of all religious persuasions who came to hear him speak at an Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan; and students and faculty at Yeshiva University.
He also talked at a briefing with members of the Jewish media.
Amital told his listeners that “the prime minister asked me to be the minister for inspiration,” and that is clearly how this minister without portfolio understands his role.
The elderly rabbi repeatedly said he is not a politician, though his diplomatic finesse belies the disclaimer.
By virtue of his “natural calling,” he said, he is a teacher of Torah and head of Har Etzion, a yeshiva in the West Bank that he co-founded ant that was the first yeshiva to combine study with military service.
He also founded Meimad, the Movement for Religious Zionist Renewal, based on the principles of democracy and openness.
Amital, a Holocaust survivor whose family perished at Auschwitz, said he was asked by Prime Minister Shimon Peres to try to help heal the wounds Rabin’s killing inflicted on Israel and the Jewish people.
He was asked, he said, to try to help narrow the bitter ideological and religious differences that yawned and threatened to “destroy the whole society.”
In the end, it was his “obligation to represent Torah” that compelled him to serve, he said.
But the questions remain. “I ask myself, am I worthy to represent Torah?” Then, he answered: “I have no choice.”
Amital said he is serving, ultimately, to protest the “chillul haShem,” or desecration of God’s name, that took place when Rabin was assassinated by another Jew.
He is also seeking to protest the notion “that Torah means extremism, that Torah means you don’t support the peace process.”
In fact, “there is no contradiction between halachah and the peace process,” he said, referring to Jewish law. “You may oppose the peace process, but don’t say it’s a question of halachah.”
Amital seems eager to paint himself as a maverick, perhaps so he can win credibility as a fair arbiter in the midst of a conflict.
“I don’t represent religious Jews because I wasn’t sent” to the government “by religious Jews and I suspect that some of the religious people are really unhappy I am there,” he said with deliberate understatement and a wry smile.
Yet he does not always agree with the government.
He said he disagreed with the Israeli government’s recent decision to ban Brooklyn Rabbi Abraham Hecht from entering the country because he allegedly poses a danger to the state.
Hecht had said Jewish law permits killing Israeli leaders who endanger Jewish lives by trading land for peace.
“I don’t think he’s dangerous,” said Amital, adding that the government action is “a way to turn him into a hero.’
Amital said he has no illusions that the Oslo accords, the term used for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, would lead to an ideal peace, only that it is a “way to prevent more bloodshed.’
Amital also describes his ministerial mandate as one of strengthening Jewish identity inside Israel as well as the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jews.
He is also the head of a new Israeli government ministerial commission on the Israel-Diaspora relationship that will address, in part, what he termed the “emergency” of assimilation and intermarriage in the Diaspora.
Amital said he was “moved” by how warmly “the secular community” in the United States received him, leading him to feel that this community believes that “Torah still has a relevant message.”
This “gives me strength,” he says.
In America, “even secular Jews believe that the Torah has a relevant message. The main problem in Israel today is Jewish identity, and Jewish identity means you have to dialogue with Torah,” he told several hundred Jews who gathered to hear him speak Feb. 8 at Manhattan’s Congregation Oheb Zedek.
Earlier that evening, about 250 Jews studied rabbinic texts on debate and tolerance with Reform, Conservative and Orthodox rabbis in the synagogue’s basement – ironically the very same place where Hecht first announced that it was permissible, according to Jewish law, to assassinate a leader who endangered Jewish lives.
The rabbis who led the Torah study session have participated in regular joint dialogue and study sessions for the past four years under the aegis of the Jewish Community Center on New York’s Upper West Side.
But when news of their joint session last week became public, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada appealed to the Orthodox rabbis not to participate.
The 94-year-old organization, based on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has “close to 500 members,” said its director, Rabbi Hersh Ginsberg, among them the heads of some of the most prestigious fervently Orthodox yeshivas in North America, as well as deans of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school.
The group’s effort to get Orthodox Jews to withdraw from participating was not rooted in opposition to Amital, Ginsberg said.
“He’s an Orthodox rabbi and a nice guy, so why not hear him speak?” said Ginsberg.
Instead, the group tried to convince Orthodox rabbis that it is prohibited by Jewish law for them to participate with non-Orthodox rabbis in any type of religious event.
But the effort seemed to have little impact.
The four New York Orthodox rabbis who usually participate in the dialogue came to the Amital event, and the response by Jews from the Upper West Side was visibly enthusiastic.
At most of his stops the rabbi was asked about efforts to win legal legitimacy for non-Orthodox streams of Judaism inside Israel.
He listened intently, sometimes to lengthy arguments about civil rights. Then he dismissed the idea, saying that the battle for religious pluralism should not be fought in the political realm, but among the people.
“Come to try to convince people to build [Conservative and Reform] synagogues,” he said.
He said he supports the Conservative-supported school system in Israel and is against banning Conservative and Reform representatives on local religious councils.
He was also clearly has empathy for those who would like Israel to officially embrace non-Orthodox Judaism as it does Orthodox. “I can understand, I can feel your frustration,” he said.
Yet he warned his listeners that “you cannot bring the American way” of Judaism to Israel. “You must find the Israeli way. This is your main problem.”
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