Among the few achievements for religion in the current
Knesset session that politicians can boast of, is the last-
minute passage of the Religious Councils Law, intended to
block the entry of Reform and Conservative representatives
onto those councils. The official purpose of these councils
is to supply "religious services," meaning that they disburse
the government's budgetary allocations in support of
religion. (U.S. readers are reminded that there is no
separation of "church and state" in Israel, and thus the
government openly supports the operations of all the
religions of its citizens.)
The recent legislation is a response to a decision of the
courts -- as is virtually all religious legislation of the
past several years that was passed (such as the kosher meat
importing bill) and that was not passed (such as the
Conversion Law). The religious community has not launched
initiatives to enhance the place of religion in Israel, but
only fought a defensive battle to preserve things as they
have been.
The religious councils are political bodies appointed
partially by the city councils. All the parties, including
the secular ones, appointed representatives to the councils
but their representatives were always religious Jews. The
Reform and Conservative fought a long battle in the courts to
win the right to represent the atheist and anti-religious
Meretz party on the councils.
The religious councils have come under much criticism in
recent years. The State Comptroller wrote that a surprising
proportion of their budget goes toward the salaries of those
council members who get paid (the chairmen and his deputies,
if any). Pundits opine that the real function of the councils
was originally to give political patronage to members of the
NRP who used to dominate them. Former MK and current
secretary of Degel HaTorah Rabbi Moshe Gafni has long
maintained that the councils should be abolished and their
functions absorbed into a department of the regular municipal
government.
All this background is to explain what the real issue is in
the fight over Reform membership in the religious councils,
and what it is not. The spokesmen for the heretical movements
maintain that the issue is financial: they want to join the
councils in order to see that things are handled fairly and
that their movements get their share of the public funds.
Many, even within our camp, assumed that our stubborn and
determined resistance to the Reform initiative was to prevent
them from getting funding for their destructive programs.
This is not true.
It is true that we are against them getting any public money
since they will put it to no good use. However, this has only
made their definition of the issue more credible and helped
them to divert attention from what is really at stake.
Our gedolim have long maintained that we do not battle
over money. This is a principle that explains many of their
positions, both in internal differences and in external
fights. (Of course it remains for them to determine in each
case what the real issue is -- whether money or perhaps
something else -- and then to apply the proper principles for
action.) In this case they only insisted on the very public
power play by Rabbi Ravitz, chairman of the Knesset Finance
Committee, because a very crucial principle was at stake, the
real point of contention that underlies the individual issues
involving the Reform.
There is only one Judaism, which is based on the Torah and
fully accepts both its written and oral components. There is
much room for diversity within this framework, but anything
outside of it is not Judaism. Self-declared representatives
of heretical movements cannot be allowed entry, as such, into
Jewish contexts since that acknowledges their ideologies as
just another "stream" of Judaism -- which they emphatically
are not. They are Jews with non-Jewish ideologies.
