"Once upon a time, Judaism and renewal
were almost synonyms," Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli said this week at a meeting of the Knesset's lobby for religious freedom and pluralistic renewal in the Knesset, although she did not specify exactly what "once" she meant. "Otherwise we would not have come and gone so far. Then this distorted and broken thing happened, that precisely in the State of Israel, the fulfillment of our enemies and longings, the people of Israel came and rose in their land and got stuck in their land with all their might and turned Judaism into politics and struggles for control. "Therefore, the struggle for Jewish renewal is not just a Jewish struggle and not just a spiritual struggle, but a first-class civil struggle."
While the listener digests Michaeli's connection to Judaism and already invites her to a personal prayer book as a gift, the minister surprises him with a great Jewish innovation: Judaism is, among other things, freedom of movement, that is, public transportation all days of the week.
Michaeli, it turns out, also demonstrates an exciting connection to the Western Wall, also entirely renewed: "The fact that the vast majority of Israeli citizens have become accustomed to treating the Western Wall as an ultra-Orthodox synagogue is a breakdown. We will have to liberate the Western Wall again, friends. " Volatile sounds of joy were heard from the audience.
The lobby for freedom of religion and pluralistic Jewish renewal is headed by Gilad Karib of the Labor Party, currently chairman of the Knesset's Constitution Committee and former chairman of the Reform movement, and Michal Rosin of Meretz. Jews are so new that one heads a movement that would not have survived in Israel without donations from abroad and without help from the High Court, and the other - defines itself as "a secular woman who chooses a Reform synagogue", adding the favorite phrase for people who do not recognize a Jewish mitzvah It will fall on their heads, and if they recognize it, they will not keep it: "Judaism is as much mine as that of others." Maybe.Depends on what others.
The Reform movement boasts 50 synagogues and centers in Israel. This is a number that can only impress those who do not know how many Orthodox synagogues there are here: about 15,000 according to data from the World Synagogue Association from 2014. Since according to the same data, 200 new synagogues are opened every year, of 35 Every year, a thousand Gabayim (all volunteers) add more and more satisfied customers, in a momentum of real Jewish renewal, and they need a reformed renewal, just as Rishon Lezion needs a collectors' edition of the New Testament. The citizens of Israel, what to do, rejected the Reform Gospel. Even the synagogue we do not go to is an Orthodox synagogue, and if we go to the Western Wall - we will go to the Western Wall that looks Jewish to us: men with domes and a tallit with the help of men, women in modest dress with the help of women. And we will not feel that we are a fault that needs to be fixed, and if it needs to be fixed - it really will not be Merav Michaeli, but thanks for the suggestion.
Not only Michaeli, Rosin also wants to liberate the Western Wall.
Despite being secular, she supported the struggle of the women of the Western Wall to pray in the central plaza.
The event did not succeed in becoming a sweeping and spontaneous popular phenomenon, but served as an effective ax in the hands of the Reformers, when they mobilized American Jewry against the broken Western Wall and against Israel itself.
In 2013, Minister of Religions Naftali Bennett announced the opening of "Ezrat Yisrael", a mixed prayer plaza, alongside the separated plaza.
Of course, this was not enough for someone who pretended to be only a finger, on his way to take over the whole body.
The women of the Western Wall scoffed at the extension and called it a "sun terrace."
The Reform movement in America insisted on the practice of mixed prayer in all parts of the Western Wall, no less.
Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in America, said: "To gamble on the ultra-Orthodox at the expense of other currents is an unwise act, and it will have consequences that cannot be remedied through additional promises."
Jacobs himself belongs to Judaism from a very particular stream: he refused to say whether he holds interfaith ceremonies, opposed the conversion law, the sale of JNF land to Jews in Judea and Samaria and the appointment of Tzipi Hotovli as minister of the Diaspora, condemned Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy To Jerusalem. His and their agenda is strangely similar to that of the Left Party platform, more so than to the Passover Haggadah.
In Israel, too, the activity of the Reformers goes far beyond religious services to a handful of interested people. The Reform movement is not a religious current, as it claims to be, but an extreme and aggressive left movement, whose goals are not necessarily related to religious freedom, or to any freedom. The movement has been supported for years by the New Israel Fund, the one they are trying to build on the ruins of old Israel.
Michaeli, like the Reformers and the foundation, seems to have no real interest in Judaism unless it can harness it in favor of what it calls "civil rights," that is, a radical agenda, which is inherently anti-national in general and Zionism in particular, religion in general and Judaism in particular. All one has to do is call this ideology "freedom of religion and pluralistic Jewish renewal" - notice the high rate of beautiful words one after the other - and no one will notice that there is no freedom, or Judaism, or pluralism here. Just as the liberation of the Western Wall to which Michaeli refers is not a liberation, but an occupation.
The Western Wall should be occupied
because the construction of a mixed plaza next to the separated plaza did not lead to the hoped-for results of a voluntary influx into the Reforms.
"Ezrat Yisrael" is open to all, beautiful and well-kept, free from the intervention of rabbis.
Michaeli, Karib, Rosin and the women of the Western Wall can pray in it with a tallit and tefillin eight times a day, if they wish.
But most of the time, the mixed plaza stands desolate, while the ruined Haredi Western plaza is bustling with Jewish life and Jewish faith, a daily and humiliating testimony to those who oppose the true Jewish renewal of the resurrection of the people of Israel in their land.
The people of Israel have chosen, of their own free will, to renew themselves in their own way and according to their faith.
This is what bothers Michaeli, and this is the breakdown she wants to fix.