The Man Behind the Curtain

Last night around midnight, I left my apartment to come check my e-mail at the local internet cafe. As it's been a month since I last bought an internet card for my computer (and as I'm looking into getting something better in terms of home internet service, anyway), I couldn't do anything internet-related from home, and I needed a walk anyway.

I never made it to an internet terminal. On the way there, I ran into a couple of fellow teachers from my school who were having a beer across the street from the internet cafe. I stopped and joined them. In short order, a few other teachers, back from galavants around Moscow, joined us as well. And so we had a merry time for about an hour and a half, having brews and talking about this and that.

Somewhere in the course of the conversation, the subject of movies came up. Someone asked which movies had profoundly changed people's lives. The responses ranged from the ponderous (The Godfather, 2001: a Space Odyssey, The Women) to the downright silly (Kindergarten Cop). While I didn't have an answer right then, I started to think, as I walked home, how much The Wizard of Oz has changed my life. And, to a great extent, how much that film has to say about the Jewish community today.

It's amazing how much Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man have in common with the Jewish masses of today. Like Dorothy et al, today's Jews are wandering along a yellow brick road in search of "home", a place of Jewish peace and unity. And like Dorothy et. al, the Jews who constitute the vast majority of Jews today either can't or won't see the man behind the curtain.

Who is the man behind the curtain? That man is the Orthodox rabbinic establishment, in Israel and the Diaspora. I am sure that some people who read this will accuse me of "Orthodox-bashing", of hating my fellow Jew. Before that goes much further, I feel quite a bit of explanation is in order.

I do not wish the destruction of Orthodox Jews or of Orthodox Jewry. I merely wish the end of the political control that community exerts on the Jewish community, far out of proportion to its actual numbers, importance, or relevance. I object to the way Orthodox commentators have obfuscated the real nature and causes of "division" within the Jewish community, and have caused countless Jews to avoid taking a progressive stance on community issues for fear of non-existent "problems" they or their children may supposedly encounter.

Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community pretends to be something it is clearly not. It claims to be the Judaism of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It claims to be the sole, original, authentic Judaism given at Sinai and delivered, unchanged, through the ages. This claim relies on the wider community's ignorance of its own history, a history that has been characterized more by change and development over the centuries than by the blind imitation of the past. But the man behind the curtain doesn't want us to see this.

Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community uses smoke and mirrors to avoid letting us see how much it is the cause of our communal "division". Unlike most commentators in the Jewish world today, I do not see a community that is "hopelessly divided" amongst itself. I see only one division within the Jewish community today that has any meaning: the division between an increasingly Haredi Orthodox world and the better than 80 percent of Jews in Israel and the diaspora who characterize themselves as Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist, Hiloni (Secular), Just Plain Jewish, or any of a dozen other categories.

Let's face it: there is no real division among the rest of the community. Non-Orthodox Jewry may have its disagreements, but we have never politicized them. The Conservative rabbinate takes a backward and immoral position on patrilineal descent, but it has not and never will politicize its opinion by attempting to impose it on all other Jewish communities here and in Israel. And the clear fact that better than 70 percent of the Conservative laity have the sense to reject this outdated and divisive position indicates that liberal Jewry is far more united than Orthodox commentators would have us believe.

No, the cause of "division" within Jewry today is Orthodoxy's insistence, subtle and not-so-subtle, that it alone constitutes the Jewish community. Orthodox Jews, like fundamentalists of all religious persuasions, are entitled to build such a wall around themselves, either to pretend that the rest of their co-religionists do not exist or to call them heretics.

But we do not have to let that kind of fundamentalist delusion effect our wider community. We do not need to let a hidebound, anti-Zionist Israeli rabbinate force shmitta prohibitions on Israeli Jewish farmers, giving their business over to Arabs who are often hostile to the Jewish state.

We do not need to give the same rabbinate control over marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, and immigration into Israel. When Israel's chief rabbinate starts rejecting even mainstream "Modern" Orthodox conversions, and retroactively declaring even the born-Jewish spouses of people converted by the official Israeli rabbinate non-Jewish (as has happened recently), it is time for all of world Jewry to take away powers they are using irresponsibly, to the detriment not only of the Jewish state but of the Jewish people throughout the world.

We do not have to send out our sons and daughters to die on the West Bank, so that people who get draft deferments to sit around in yeshiva can hold onto an illusion that G_d will not tolerate any cessation of "Judea and Samaria" to the Palestinians. Let the fence be completed; Israel can and will withdraw to defensible boundaries slightly beyond the Green Line, a right given it by the United Nations in 1967. But our sons and daughters do not have to die to protect the homes of fundamentalists who put literal interpretation of Torah and Talmud above the Jewish people's need for peace.

We do not have to tolerate a situation in which 300,000 patrilineal Jews in Israel--people who endured decades of Soviet repression only to end up second-class citizens on Israeli soil--are considered Jewish enough to be used as cannon fodder but not Jewish enough to enjoy the rights and rites accorded to all other Jews in the Jewish state.

We have failed to act on these convictions because the Orthodox have told us two giant lies over and over again: first, that they are the faithful, the ones carrying on the faith of your ancestors, which you have abrogated or abandoned; and second, that horrible consequences will behall your children if they are not able to marry ours.

The latter claim is the one that cries out for refutation. No great calamity will befall the Jewish people if the Orthodox retreat into their examinations of yichus--examinations that have more in common with the Third Reich than with the teachings of rabbinic sages who delcared it lashon hora (malicious gossip) to question someone's Jewishness--or even declare the rest of Jewry "unmarriageable". All that will happen is that, like every other religious tradition on this earth, Judaism wil have a fundamentalist contingent that doesn't like the Bible critics, doesn't like women's liberation, and doesn't like homosexuals, and that refuses to have congress with a wider religious tradition that, acting on its historical value of emet (intellectual truthfulness), chooses not to sacrifice the emotional and spiritual needs of real people to a distorted image of a past that never was.

We will all stop giving power to the man behind the curtain. And when we do, we will at last click our ruby slippers and go home.