Who is a Jew? Part Two - The Jewish Chronicle

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JF: People look at us and say:“The Baptists don’t have their own homeland so why should Jews, if you are a religion?” If we say we are an ethnic group, the question is:“In that case, why is there conversion?”

The reason why this JFS decision is so profound is because it is forcing us to do something which we have avoided for two centuries, since the Enlightenment — which is to define ourselves. We are in a mess about it. We needn’t be. It is so soluble.

The very people who have been telling you, Howard, for years: “What do you mean, you don’t keep kosher? You don’t keep Shabbat?” and made you feel so defensive… those same people, when told by the High Court: “Jews are a faith,” now say:“What are you talking about? How dare you!” It exposed this fascinating contradiction. We have to say in response to that decision, either: “OK, we are not an ethnic group. Howard can’t be Jewish. We are a faith. It is about subscribing to beliefs. There will now be a faith test to get into school,” or: “You are right. We are something different and it isn’t about faith” — in which case why do we have faith schools?

JC: It is Jewish practice. It is not a question of faith, but of practice. Howard, you wouldn’t get into JFS today. You have said you are not a practising Jew.

We are neither a race nor a religion. We are something like a civilisation. Jonathan Freedland

HJ: In Manchester, families that didn’t seem to be at all religious would suddenly start sitting shivah because their son or daughter married out. That was monstrous, the misery that was caused. I watched my own father care about this. He couldn’t have told you why he cared about this. He didn’t know what Jewishness was. There are other more important battles to be fighting at the moment than whether we can marry somebody from another faith or not, and how we then feel about those people from another faith.

We have always had converts to Judaism. We have welcomed converts. We should be only too pleased. It is not as though the whole bloody world is banging at our door saying: “We have got to be Jewish!” and we say: “Hang on, there is a quota.” So, a few people want to be Jewish? A few people love a Jewish man or love a Jewish woman and want to marry them. Gezundheit, come in. And most of them become very good Jews.

GJ: Let me ask Jeffrey about this — a correspondent to the JC a few weeks ago asked:“When did Jews stop being kind? When did Jews stop regarding kindness as a Jewish quality?” And there have been some extraordinary situations. I think the most extraordinary is the case of Kate Lightman, who was converted in Israel by an Orthodox authority and married a man who she knew from years back, a man who happened to be a Cohen. The rule is that a Cohen cannot marry a convert. However, if they do marry — which the Lightmans did, in an Orthodox ceremony in New York — the children are kosher. However, when that same Kate Lightman, who keeps a very kosher home, wanted her child to go to the JFS — a school where she teaches and is the head of a department — they said no.

JC: On what basis did they say no?

GJ: Because they said she connived at something that was anti-halachic. In other words, she “cheated” because she knew this man was a Cohen. But the Orthodox authority in Israel had said:“We accept her statement. We accept that she wasn’t trying to cheat. We accept that she had a love of Judaism.” Now isn’t the JFS decision not only heartless but rather stupid? I think Jonathan’s suggestion is that you could see this coming and if you had a situation like this, you simply say: “This is fine. Come in.” Didn’t Ruth in the Bible say:“I want to be of your people,” and they said:“Fine”?

JC: We can take the Book of Esther, which says that many of the ordinary people of Shushan in Persia became Jewish because “fear of the Jews descended upon them”. What a reason for accepting people as Jews, because they were scared of the ascendancy of the Jewish people! No commitment and no religious identity, but they were accepted.

NG: Can we go back to the Ruth example? At the time that Ezra was pounding the table and demanding more halachic rigidity, into the canon comes the story of a woman from whom will come forth the seed of the Messiah. So it is as if, deep in our collective consciousness, there is the idea that, unless we bring in people from outside, we won’t have this golden future ahead of us. We now live in a time when we see groups where too much in-marriage has resulted in genetic deficiency, so we start to understand it in scientific terms as well.

JC: I want to introduce two halachic concepts. One of them is of sh’at hadchak, which means “an emergency situation”. A major halachic principle is that, in relation to things which may not be permitted, in an emergency situation, we relax the law. The next principle is that of what we call tinok shenishbah, a child who is captured by non-Jews and brought up without any belief or practice and therefore, of course, guilty of infringing all the basic laws of Judaism. Finally, he finds his way back to the Jewish community. He is an innocent victim and we ignore all things that he did and we facilitate his return to the bosom of the community.

Now, I would say that in so many of these situations with the JFS the child is not responsible. It is not his or her fault, and I would hope that the Beth Din now, in the light of the Court of Appeal decision, would be able to look at the whole conversion process. I have been asking them to do that for 40 years.

And what about the emergency situation? We as a Jewish community are in an emergency situation, with assimilation in lots of areas; with all the problems facing Israel; with a threat to our survival.

You put these two principles together and I think the Chief Rabbi, who has spoken about us having to be more inclusive, needs to do a lot of hard talking to his Beth Din, if that is really what he means.

JF: I think you are completely right. It is an absurdity that our communal leadership bemoans assimilation, saying: “Isn’t it terrible that young people don’t want to be part of this,” then, having a succession of cases of individual children knocking on the door wanting an Orthodox Jewish education, responds:“Go away, we don’t want you.” Surely they should say:“We don’t care who comes in. We want to know about who comes out the other end.” You would think they would have the confidence to say: “Once you have gone through five or so years of JFS education, you will come out with a passion for Orthodox Judaism.”

Yet our Beth Din prides itself on its intransigence. It thinks of it as a virtue. I remember a case so heartless where somebody had done the whole year and lived with an Orthodox family and when they walked in were asked to say a specific, obscure berachah, the one thing they didn’t know. They were told: “Go back and re-do it.” This was done with a smirk.

You say to them:“But the Israeli rabbinate don’t do this,” and this was how one of the people in the Beth Din replied to me: “Yes, but somewhere in the world there should be a Rolls-Royce service.” So this is the mentality. New York isn’t good enough, Jerusalem isn’t good enough. We are going to be the toughies.

This is an answer to a problem that does not exist. It is suggesting we are about to be overrun. The opposite is the case. If a Muslim marries a non-Muslim, the Muslims celebrate. What was one is now two. We are the only people who say, what was one is now zero. It is completely warped, like a collective eating disorder.

What you said, Rabbi Cohen, about the Shushan people is one of countless examples in our history when, mysteriously, our numbers expand with all kinds of tribes — who would now be completely dismissed — suddenly and magically brought into the tent. And our forebears, whom we revere as great patriarchs — none of them would get into JFS now.

I live in Stamford Hill. I am surrounded by the ultra-Orthodox. I see every day their creativity and adaptability in bending the rules when it suits them and yet in being super stubborn when it doesn’t. We have to recover our confidence to say:“Here is a rule that we adopted at some point in our history. It is time we shed it.” We have the formulation, a beautiful one. I do not know why the conversion ceremony could not consist of a panel of people, confronted by would-be Jews saying: “Where you lead, I shall follow. Your future, your destiny, is my future, my destiny. Your God is my God” — end of story. If it is good enough for Ruth then it should be good enough for us.

JC: It was the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, who declared conversion to any religion other than Christianity prohibited on pain of death. There is a passage in the New Testament that says that the Pharisees will go from one end of the earth to the other to make one convert. So, before the fourth century, we were certainly aggressive in our determination to make converts and some of the great luminaries of the talmudic period were converts. Naomi mentioned Ezra before. The Jews had just come back from Babylon to found the second Commonwealth. Ezra’s main task was to try and solve the problem of intermarriage. A total of 40,000 Jews returned from Babylon to found the second Commonwealth. What were they up to? They were intermarrying. It seems that Jews are not naturally introverts. We are naturally international beings — our history has shown that. We are naturally curious. We are naturally gregarious. We go among other people. So this problem of intermarriage is an issue.