Gershom Gorenberg on why Israel should separate the state and the synagogue:
While writing "How to Prove You're a Jew" for The New York Times Magazine, I ran the personal experiment of seeing whether I could come up with evidence of Jewishness that might satisfy the Israeli rabbinate. My detective work yielded meager results. No official U.S. document lists me as a Jew. No Jewish marriage contract, or ketuba, for my parents lay hidden in an attic. No Orthodox rabbi alive knew my late mother as a child. With a cousin's help, I found what's probably a record of my grandmother's arrival at Ellis Island in 1910, with her ethnicity listed as "Hebrew" -- but her name is spelled "Sure" rather than "Sarah." Maybe that document would convince a judge in Israel's state-run rabbinic courts. Maybe not.
All of which makes me a fairly typical American-born Jew -- not too different from Suzie, the woman I wrote about in the Times, whose daughter was nearly unable to marry in Israel. In the article, I explained that marriage in Israel is entirely the province of religious authorities, which for the Jewish majority means the state-run rabbinate. Rabbinate jobs are awarded as political patronage; secular parties have satisfied religious coalition partners by giving those jobs to ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Increasingly, the rabbis in the state bureaucracy demand proof that people registering to marry are really Jewish. The proof they seek -- government documents, testimony from a select group of Orthodox clergy -- is unavailable to most American-born Jews.
Judging by how quickly the article climbed the "most e-mailed" chart it disturbed many American Jewish readers. In writing that piece, I kept to the role of narrator, telling a story. But one can't tell a story like this without seeing implications. Here are a few.
Most obvious, Israel needs to separate state and synagogue. As a matter of human rights, it is unacceptable that a couple seeking a civil marriage must go abroad. It is also absurd that to have a religious ceremony, one must be vetted by a clerical bureaucracy, then find a clergyman approved by that bureaucracy.
The point of separation is not only to protect nonbelievers but also to protect Judaism from the state. As Tulane University sociologist of religion Brenda Brasher once pointed out to me, the United States is the most religious country in the West precisely because of its unusual separation of church and state. America is a hothouse of religious innovation and variety, because religious institutions have to attract people to come through their doors. They can't depend on the state to pay their budgets. Judaism in Israel, tied to the state, alienates most Israeli Jews.
Read the rest (and comment) here.
--The Editors
