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Alienation from Israel hitting liberal seminaries.
by Gordis, senior vice president of the
Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Describing
New York Jewish Week
"a new battleground emerging" among
liberal American rabbinical students
in Israel, he cited such examples as a
second-year rabbinical stu-
student seeking to buy a tallit on the
dent at the Jewish Theological
condition that it not be made in Israel;
Seminary says her year-in-
Israel experience, as part of her academic a discussion among students where
one said that the anniversary of Israeli
training, has been "enriching and incred-
independence should be marked as a
ibly painful" in terms of what she sees of
Israel's relationship with the Palestinians. day of mourning; and the students who
celebrated a peer's birthday at the bar in
"The Israel I see does not seem to
Ramallah with anti-Israel slogans on the
reflect so many of the Jewish values that
walls.
my family and community raised me
Gordis noted that liberal rabbinical
with:' she said.
students who profess strong support for
The woman, who asked that her
Israel are often treated like "pariahs" by
name not be used, is part of a group of
their fellow students.
American rabbinical students in Israel
In an interview, Gordis said his piece
who meet every other week "to share
was based on extensive conversations
our struggles and hopes and dreams for
with rabbinical students in Israel for
Israel." She added that "it was through
this group that I ended up" at a "birthday the year and that the level and tone of
follow-up calls and correspondence
party in Ramallah" for a fellow student
from officials of their respective schools
at a bar featuring anti-Israel slogans in
underscored that he had "touched a raw
Arabic.
nerve.
The birthday incident was cited in a
He said the complaints were that he
recent Jerusalem Post
opinion piece by educa- was hurting fundraising efforts back
home, according to one official, and
tor Daniel Gordis as an
example of the disturb- spreading lashon hara (critical hearsay),
according to another.
ing level of discontent
"I don't buy it," Gordis said of the criti-
with the Jewish state
cism, noting that he was careful not to
among a number of
,
quantify the extent of student attitudes
Reform, Conservative
highly critical of Israel, but was high-
and Reconstructionist
Daniel Gordis
lighting a "troubling but undeniable
rabbinical students
shift in loyalties" among "bright, decent,
spending a year in Israel.
thoughtful and deeply Jewishly commit-
While officials of major rabbinical
ted" young people who will be future
seminaries are publicly downplaying
leaders of American Jewish life.
reports of anti-government actions and
The Gordis essay prompted a number
sentiments among their students in
of
published replies in the Jerusalem Post,
Israel, saying they have been exaggerated,
as
well
as blogs and internal discussions
they privately admit that the issue is
among
students and administrators.
real and of deep concern. And the highly
"I
remain
convinced that, if anything,
critical views among some students is
this
enormous
response and defensive-
causing at least several American Jewish
ness
shows
that
I was correct:' he said.
leaders in the liberal movements to ques-
tion the value of the year-in-Israel pro-
Arab Dialogues
grams in their current form.
Putting liberal rabbinical students "exclu-
sively in classes in Jerusalem for a year
Young Skeptics
rather than using Israeli society as a set-
"The central objective of the program is
ting for complex and nuanced explora-
to build a Zionist mindset," said Rabbi
tion is an enormous missed opportunity:'
Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise
according to Gordis.
Free Synagogue (Reform) in Manhattan.
The key to the year in Israel should be
"Otherwise it's a wasted opportunity."
experiential, he asserted, calling on the
He said if a significant number of stu-
seminaries to expose students to the full
dents are disenchanted with Israel, the
breadth of Israeli life, including the pro-
programs may be "deeply flawed" and
grams of the Ayalim Association, where
should be reviewed.
post-army secular Zionists are helping to
Several troubling incidents of distanc-
develop communities in the Negev and
ing from the Zionist cause first surfaced
Galilee, and serious beit midrash Torah
in an April 1 essay in the Jerusalem Post
Gary Rosenblatt
A
28
July 28 - 2011
study between post-army secular and
religious Israelis.
But seminary officials point out that
they already run extensive seminars and
site visits for their students in Israel.
What tends to happen, though, the
administrators say, is that some of the
future rabbis on their own time are
inclined to seek out and participate in
a range of programs that open them
up to encounters and dialogue with
Palestinians. And the students' liberal
leanings, universalist natures and sym-
pathy for the underdog sometimes com-
bine to find them viewing Israeli policy,
particularly regarding the settlements
and West Bank occupation (not to men-
tion the Orthodox monopoly on conver-
sion, marriage, divorce and male prayer
at the Western Wall), as oppressive and
immoral.
In mid-March, Rabbi David Ellenson,
president of the Reform
movement's Hebrew
Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion,
told a colloquium spon-
sored by the American
Jewish Committee
on the distancing of
David Ellenson American Jews from
Israel that he estimated
that about 20 percent
of Reform rabbinical students who spend
their first year of study in Jerusalem
come back feeling "hostile" toward the
Jewish state, and another 10 percent
return "indifferent?'
While noting with pride that the
Reform movement is the only one to
require each of its future rabbis to spend
a year in Israel, Rabbi Ellenson noted
that young American Jews tend to feel
"mystified, at best, and alienated, at
worst" in learning of and grappling with
some of Israel's religious and political
policies up close.
After the Gordis essay appeared in the
Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Ellenson sent out a
lengthy letter to the HUC-JIR community
noting that his colleague and friend had
"focused on several extreme examples of
anti-Israel sentiment among rabbinical
students attending non-Orthodox semi-
naries" and that he himself felt "the over-
whelming majority" of these students did
not share such views.
He went on to note how much more
complex Israeli society has become over
the last four decades, and that "a time of
unity and solidarity" has been replaced
by "a broad array of views and by the
sense of an increasing strain on the
Israel-diaspora relationship?'
Attached, Critical
Rabbi Ellenson described the mood
among students as "a kind of engaged
confusion, born of an honest attempt to
grapple with the complexities of their
relationship with Israel, the land and the
people."
In an interview, Rabbi Ellenson said he
regretted having used the word "hostile"
in his talk at the AJC. He said it would
be more accurate to say that after a year
in Israel, many HUC students feel "both
attached to and critical of Israel?'
He met last week with rabbinic stu-
dents about to be ordained, one of whom
told him her rabbinate will be about her
love for Torah, not about Israel, which she
finds problematic. And he said another
rabbinic student who is pro-AIPAC, the
Jewish lobby, said she felt very much out
of place among her peers.
The rabbi worries most about "indif-
ference" among students, stressing HUC-
JIR's commitment to affirm among its
students "the centrality of Jewish people-
hood on their path to Jewish leadership."
Our communal challenge, he said, is to
be able "to have a conversation where one
can show commitment and love for Israel
and at the same time be able to engage
critically" And he is not at all certain we
have reached that level of candor and
commitment.
The issue may just be heating up.
Daniel Gordis is working on a 4,500-
word piece for Commentary magazine
that will expand on his concerns; estab-
lishment officials are worried about what
it will say and the fact that it will further
highlight and prolong their discomfort
with this issue.
Stepping back, it seems that the Peter
Beinart Syndrome — the concern,
expressed a year ago in the New York
Review of Books that young American
Jews are choosing liberal values over
Zionist ones — has reached our liberal
rabbinic seminaries.
That shouldn't be surprising. Our
future liberal denomination rabbis are
prime examples of the current genera-
tional clash over values, history and emo-
tional attachment to Israel. On the one
side are young people, raised as liberals
and humanitarians, who have grown
up seeing Israel through the prism of
intifadas, harsh and inconclusive wars in
Lebanon and Gaza, and increasing inter-
national isolation.
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