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(Tanḥuma, Balak 10):
אף על פי שמשתבח אותו רשע ואומר ויודע דעת עליון פיו העיד בו ואמר לא ידעתי |
Open Letter To ‘Proudly Jewish’ Rep. Andy Levin, Married To Gentile, Who Thinks Judaism Is A Culture
NEW YORK— In 1958, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, sent a letter to 51 Jewish intellectuals asking their opinion on how to identify who is a Jew.
Ben Gurion had both a personal and political interest in the question. In 1946, Ben Gurion’s son Amos, then serving in the British Army in Europe, married Mary Callow, a young Christian woman from the Isle of Man. Amos Ben-Gurion was wounded in battle; Mary Callow was his nurse in the British Army hospital in which he spent several months recovering. Before the wedding, Amos had consulted with his parents. His mother, Paula, objected to her son’s marriage to a non-Jew and asked her husband to “talk Amos out of it.” Ben-Gurion met with the bride and decided instead to find a way to convert her via a Reform rabbi visiting London, who quickly performed the conversion.
Ben-Gurion may have overcome his wife’s objections but realized that he had alienated the orthodox establishment irrevocably by recognizing other forms of Judaism. The question of identity loomed much larger after the Knesset passed the Law of Return in 1950. Ben-Gurion intended the law, which grants immediate citizenship to people of Jewish ancestry, to be as inclusive as possible, even allowing for gentiles married to Jews to gain citizenship. After Ben-Gurion’s approach was fiercely opposed by many other groups, he decided to send his letter.
The responses to Ben-Gurion’s letter were varied but 38 of the 46 responses Ben-Gurion received, even from secular scholars, called for following halachic Jewish law in registering Jews in Israel. For the orthodox scholars this was not even a legitimate question. Rabbi Aaron Kotler, founder of the Lakewood Yeshiva, opened his letter to Ben-Gurion in this way: “I am amazed at the fact that a question considering the purity and integrity of the Jewish people, whose preservation is the basis of our existence, should be posed as if it required some other solution or opinion from me. The question has a simple and explicit answer in the Holy Torah. … It is clear that a Jew is only someone who is a Jew according to the law of the Torah.”
While Ben-Gurion may have entertained hopes of establishing a “new Jew” in Israel who was not bound by halacha both in his personal life and in his choice of spouse, he realized that he would effectively be creating two nations within the fledgling state and stopped short of recognizing secular conversions or gentile spouses for the purpose of registering citizenship. Both of these were added later to the existing law, the former being adopted by Israel’ supreme court just a few months ago, raising concerns about future Jewish unity within Israel.
For many American Jews however, the question of their Jewish identity has never even been a troublesome dilemma. For them, Judaism is chicken soup and cheesecake, matzoh and gefilte fish, with a little celebration of festivals to add flavor. Anyone willing to sign on the dotted line stating he is Jewish will be happily accepted by numerous Reform, Conservative or Reconstructionist communal leaders who lead “culturally” Jewish communities, while his children could study in parochial Jewish schools and proudly identify as Jews.
One such proud Jew unfazed by Jewish identity issues is Rep. Andy Levin (D.-Michigan), a recent addition to Congress who identifies as a Reconstructionist. In a recent Haaretz interview, Levin stated that for him Judaism is “not just a religion. We’re a people, a culture, a food, a language, a history.” Levin is most concerned about one religious imperative: that of embracing the stranger, although somewhat patronizingly he believes that the stranger we most need to embrace is the Palestinians:
“Jews are great at the stranger who’s the immigrant or the African-American,” Levin claims. “We have to dwell on our most challenging stranger. I insist we can coexist. How amazing could that new chapter be if we see each other as human beings?”
True to his own beliefs, Levin embraces Rep. Ilhan Omar despite her recently equating Israel with the Taliban and Hamas. For Levin, this is merely a “call for accountability” for human rights abuses which he claims Israel and the US are evading by not submitting to ICC jurisdiction. “The one thing I cannot accept is assuming the U.S. or Israel are above accountability,” Levin asserts but for some reason omits a call for Palestinian accountability over firing rockets on civilian targets, payments to terrorists who slay and murder Israeli citizens and educating their children to become martyrs by killing Jews.
However if Levin is demanding a call for accountability, he should first demand it from himself. Claiming that Judaism is a religion means that it has a mandate of requirements for an individual, otherwise there can be no religious demand to embrace strangers. Among those mandates are Shabbat, Kashrut, family purity and Tefillin. Levin however would eschew a religion demanding any obligations from its adherents.
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If he had troubled to study the Torah, the body of laws which comprises those eternal, immutable obligations, he would have found that the stranger mentioned in context with love is one who accepts the seven Noachide laws which proscribe murder, theft and illicit laws – surely not the Palestinians who engage daily in land theft, encourage murder of Jews and enact laws which enable the execution of those who sell land to Jews. Do they view Jews as human beings?
All this is of no concern to Levin, since for him Jews are simply “a people”. If we are a people we have an identity, as Ben Gurion realized, and it is not so simple to maintain. Levin himself married a gentile but is still convinced that his children are part of the Jewish people, but exactly how? Does eating a matzoh ball, identifying with spurious Palestinian national aspirations or lighting a menorah (with a Christmas tree in the background) make them Jewish?
As for language, Levin does not speak any language of the Jewish people, neither Yiddish nor Hebrew and if the Jewish nation’s historic bond is what maintains them, he should be aware that Rabbi Saadia Gaon defined the nation 1000 years ago: “Our nation is only a nation through its Torah.”
Levin will continue to pick and choose his Jewish identity as he pleases but he should stop short of declaring himself a proud Jew until he has thoroughly investigated what Judaism itself has meant for the past 3000 years: Devotion to G-d and his Torah, adherence to all of its precepts and belief in the right of the Jewish nation to its eternal birthright in the entire land of Israel.