Describing himself as “a passionate moderate,” Rabbi Shlomo Riskin sees increasing hop that a working agreement on Israel’s peace policy can be reached between jewish settlers in the West Bank and the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
Despite the heated rhetoric after the trauma of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, a national consensus can be achieved through a middle-of-the-road approach, said Riskin, the American-born Orthodox chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Efrat.
The 55-year-old rabbi gave the keynote address at the West Coast convention of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, considered and centrist voice of the American Orthodox community.
“I’ve concluded with great sadness, but necessary logic, that Israel should leave Arab-populated areas,” Riskin said Monday in an interview. “At the same time, we must give the settlers every security that they’re part of Israel. These norms must be expressed in political terms, but we certainly can’t leave the field to the extremists.”
Riskin said, “Peres is trying very had to reach a national consensus, and he told me personally that he will not dismantle the settlements.”
In his address to the Orthodox Union, Riskin focused on Yigal Amir, the confessed assassin of Rabin, and concluded that he was not a singular aberration in Israeli society.
“The three most important aspects of Judaism in Israel today are the nation, the Land of Israel and the Torah,” Riskin said. “The nation comes first, because it gives both the land and the Torah their reality and Sanctity.”
He said both the national-religious wing, which “helped produce an Amir,” and the Rabin government underemphasized the principal of the national consensus, “the first in its zeal to claim all the land, the second in its zeal to divest the land.”
For Riskin, “Amir was no aberration, but a part of both tragedies.”
The ultimate decision on the future of Israel must come through democratic choice, rather than interpretation of God’s will, he added.
“The Jewish people are given the right under Jewish law to make the ultimate decision on their future, in the absence of a divine voice,” Riskin said.
He said his own decision to make aliyah, and specifically to Efrat, crystallized in 1981, when Rabin visited his former congregation, Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York, and encouraged the young rabbi to follow through on his plans.
In 1983, he moved to Efrat, whose 7,000 residents are 65 percent Israeli and 35 percent immigrants from English-speaking countries. An additional 4,000 to 5,000 settlers are on their way, he said.
Regarding recent moves by the Interior Ministry to bar certain American Jews from entering Israel, Riskin said the Israeli government must be extremely circumspect in its new policy of rejecting some American extremists from settling in Israel.
Only potential immigrants with known criminal records should be kept out, he said. Otherwise, Israel is in danger of catching a new strain of McCarthyism, he said.
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