Call for Jewish Law to Be Part of the Binding Law of the State

Jewish law should become part of the binding law of the State in order to bridge the gap between religious and secular Israelis. This is the view of State Comptroller Yitzhak Tunik, expressed in his speech at the opening of a Justice Ministry seminar on Jewish law recently.

The seminar, entitled “Coercion and Oppression,” and attended by many judges and lawyers, was organized by Deputy Attorney-General Nahum Rakover. The keynote lectures were given by Supreme Court Justice Dov Levin, and leading lawyer Yitzhak Meron.

The State Comptroller maintained that the chasm that divides the religious and the secular today grew from the failure of the State of Israel to adopt Jewish law as the law of the land from the start.

‘A BEING FROM ANOTHER PLANET’

The religious problem at the time of the establishment of the state was not nearly as serious as it is now, Tunik recalled, because both religious and secular Jews were nurtured by the same heritage. Even secular Jews, Tunik continued, “regarded the ancient Jewish heritage as the moral force behind the settlement of the land of Israel.” Today the secular Jew looks on the religious Jew as if he is a “being from another planet.”

“We related to Jewish law merely as a legal system, and neglected to emphasize the fact that Jewish law is a cultural heritage,” Tunik charged. “We did not understand that we were abandoning ‘the spring of life’.”

The State Comptroller, himself a former leading lawyer, said he believed the solution lay in educating both sides of the religious conflict, and in recognizing that Jewish law is a “tremendous cultural asset” which is relevant today.

Tunik urged the courts to base their judgements on Jewish source–the Mishna, the Talmud, and the Rabbinical response from the Middle Ages until today. He foresaw no difficulty in mastering these sources since Israeli lawyers had no trouble in learning Anglo-Saxon law which itself was based to some extent on Jewish law.