An expert on Jewish life called for Israeli and American Jews to stop “name-calling” and to help bring the Jewish people, despite their difference, closer together.
Dr. David Hartman, founder and director of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, made his remarks at a program forum of the American Jewish Committee’s Jewish Communal Affairs Department. The session, titled “Jewish Religious Unity and Polarization: America and Israel,” was part of the agency’s 81st annual meeting, which concluded Sunday at the Grand Hyatt Hotel here.
Hartman noted that issues such as conversion, how to handle children of mixed marriages, and divorce centered on the larger controversy over pluralism in Jewish religious life. He said that these disagreements should not pose a threat to Jewish unity: “I do not believe that the unity of the Jewish people entails total agreement on subjects of values or on how Jewish history should proceed. A healthy people needs to have, and will have, healthy disagreements.”
ARGUMENTS BECOMING MORE DESTRUCTIVE
He stressed, however, that arguments among Jews are rapidly becoming more destructive than constructive. “There is extreme polarization in Israeli society today, and it is accentuating a climate of nasty dialogue and an atmosphere of nastiness,” said Hartman. “It is this sentiment over all others that is becoming pervasive in the Jewish world.”
He added: “We are also seeing arguments that are critical of institutions, not positions. Power blocks have surfaced, rather than ideological clarity. Delegitimization has taken on greater significance than intelligent conversation.”
Hartman suggested that Jews, both within Israel and in the United States, stop listening to “hysterical predictions of assimilation” and “seek a framework of shared values in order to make current debates more intelligent and constructive.”
He continued, “The urgent need now is to understand the arguments, not just to listen to each other’s abuse. No clarity of the issues can ever come from this confusion, and we will find ourselves going around in circles.”
Alfred Moses, former AJC vice president and member of its Board of Governors, and chair of the National Jewish Religious Dialogue, commented: “Over the past two years, a select group of lay leaders of the differing Jewish religious denominations have been meeting, under the auspices of the AJC, to share common ground, promote areas of agreement, air differences, and prevent legitimate differences from spilling over into religious bigotry.”
Currently, he said, “they are working on the thorny problem of conversion. The procedure has been, and will continue to be, careful deliberation, open dialogue, and advocacy for a conversion procedure that will be acceptable to various sectors of American Jewry.”
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