Rabbi Yochanan Fried, who chaired the session, explained that though the topic seemingly dealt with a very specific sector, the crises of that sector are currently reverberating throughout Israel society – whether through the religious courts or through ideological decisions the community makes and will effect all of Israel.
Rachel Bolton, who runs Israel's largest religious advertising agency, Bolton & Potenzial Advertising, and was ranked as one of Israel's 50 most influential women, explained that the reason the religious Zionist community has by-and-large created insular enclaves for itself, similar to the hareidi-religious "is because of the kids. If we didn't have the problem of bringing up and educating our kids, we would live in Haifa – in mixed [religious and secular] communities. We wouldn’t need separate communities. But the secular culture is pulling the entire world toward it. We are forced to find ways to preserve this way of life in our homes among our children."
Bolton added that today she sees a "hareidization" of the national religious youth. "Kids come back from schools saying, 'let us do away with television, let's not buy this newspaper or that newspaper. I gave a lecture to modern orthodox girls a while back and asked them if there were two buses outside - one with hareidi-religious women and one with secular women – which one would they board. At the time they said the secular one, but today they would give a different answer."
Rabbi Re'em HaCohen, Chief Rabbi and Head of the Hesder Yeshiva in Otniel, accused hareidi society of ignoring the Jewish people's spiritual responsibilities for each other. "Someone who says 'I don’t care that the non-observant person is not observant' goes against the Torah," said HaCohen, whose brother Gershon HaCohen oversaw the implementation of the Gaza expulsion. "Since the Enlightenment, most people are not observant of the halacha [Jewish law], but it is forbidden for us to disengage from the secular public."
HaCohen gave an example of shemitta [agricultural sabbatical] year to illustrate his point, saying that while the national religious rabbis found Jewish legal methods of creating gentile ownership of the land during the shemitta year – enabling it to be worked, where otherwise it would have been forbidden - the hareidi-religious do not accept the state rabbis' arrangement. "We do it in order to prevent forbidden fruits from being in the markets – to prevent the non-observant Jews living in Israel from violating the shemitta year," HaCohen said. "The hareidi-religious do not necessarily care about what the non-observant eat."
Bar-Ilan University professor of communications Dr. Aliza Lavi spoke about the state of religious Zionist rabbinic leadership. "The institution of the rabbinate has gone bankrupt," she declared. "We each listen to our own individual rabbi and young people go to ask every private question that people used to decide on their own to their rabbi. What we are witnessing is a reluctance to make decisions."
Dr. Lavi also said that the youth of religious Zionism represent a completely different culture than the average Israeli. "During the Disengagement last summer, my friends would ask me, after watching the footage of the youth on the television, 'Why are they dancing? Why are they happy?' Boys and girls quoted from scripture in front of the cameras and people had no idea what they were saying. We are speaking about a different culture."
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, Chief Rabbi and Head of the Hesder Yeshiva in Bracha attempted to define the terms "national religious" and "national hareidi," which have gained wide use and refer to two streams within the religious Zionist world in Israel. "A National Religious person is a Jew who relates positively to the world around him," Rabbi Melamed said. "This is the stance of the Torah – to relate positively to science and technology and movements around us."
Rabbi Melamed said that the phenomenon of hareidi-religious Jewry was created as a response to outside threats. "We didn't always have the concept of hareidi-religious," he said. "Hareidi means 'concerned' or 'trembling' and in times of anxiety we have more hareidi-religious. When the Enlightenment began and the gentile world became open to Jews, the hareidi movement started – fearing that adults and adolescents would choose the wrong path and choosing to prevent all study of science in order to preserve our tradition. There are some drawbacks to this approach, but it is noble in its loyalty to our tradition. I can understand the CharDaL (hareidi leumi, the national-hareidi) approach, whereby there is a recognition of the good in science and society, together with the recognition that there is some sort of danger that full openness will result in a larger percent of young people leaving the traditions. I am not sure which approach was more successful historically, but numerically speaking, the national religious public is paying a price in recent years – seeing young people leave in both directions, toward both non-observance and hareidi-religious life. Maybe the national-religious became too compromising, accepting too many foreign principles. Maybe over-academization was at fault. The national-hareidi approach also has drawbacks, though. G-d did not want us to be angels, but rather to discover both the heavens and the earth. I myself don't like the expression CharDaL and don't like the concept of anxiety at all. I prefer to just base myself as a Torah Jew."
American immigrant Rachel Silvetzky, Director of the Kfar Chassidim Religious Youth Village and former Chairperson of Emunah Israel addressed the issue of Mamlachtiut, Statism, in her address, saying the national religious community in Israel needed to increase the depth of its moral judgment when dealing with the state and its institutions. "The establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel is a miracle," she said. "The ingathering of the exiles was a miracle, too. If not, I would have stayed in a land where my American accent would not be noticed. I would have stayed in the United States and sent an occasional donation. There are a lot of people here who don't think about that miracle I have described, but they are a part of it regardless when they live in and defend this land. "
"However," Silvetzky said, "the IDF is a means and not a goal. We are not a militaristic nation or a Junta. We established the IDF in order to allow us to survive. A soldier that defends the Jewish people - that is part of the miracle, but there is no purpose for [sending our children to be soldiers] other than to defend the Jewish people from an enemy. A commander's order is not inherently holy and there is such a thing as an illegal order and determining that order is an index of our morality…The Prime Minister is not a king – we don't have the law of kings here."
A sub-topic of the dialogue session was "The World of the Religious Woman in Modern Life." Silvetzky decried the suffering of women who haven't received a divorce from their husbands and called upon Jewish legal authorities from all over the religious world to look for ways within Jewish law to prevent such situations from arising. "I do not pretend to know what they are," she said, "but ways must be found to alleviate this suffering."
Silvetzky went on to decry the treatment of religious women at the hands of the government. "A girl tells about the sexual assault she witnessed at Amona and a government minister calls her a liar? Where does he get the impudence? Where are the women's organizations?"
College of Judea and Samaria professor, Dr. Amnon Shapira (pictured above) then took the podium and warned the audience that he saw the Jerusalem Conference as a platform for soul searching. "There are two streams within the national religious community," he said. "We are divided on every possible issue – according to so many parameters. Elections are coming up on whether or not to give up parts of the Land of Israel and it comes from us – from our variant views on the matter. Rabbi Ya'akov Ariel, who I am so sad is not the chief rabbi today, said in Yamit that we were mistaken when we said they would not pull out of Yamit. A believer would never say such absolute things about such matters. We should never say things like 'we are sure that G-d is with us' because someone who is sure G-d is with him does not wear a seat-belt when driving the opposite way into oncoming traffic.
"I am not advocating doubt in the goals and the ultimate ends, but doubt in how to reach them. The Book of Job ends when G-d appears in the storm and says the real religious Jew is not the one who says he knows everything, but he who has doubts. I emphasize - not a doubt in religion or in G-d – but in the ways of getting to the goals."
Shapira slammed the national religious community for adopting the hareidi concept of daat Torah, which he defined as rabbis issuing their opinion on matters without delineating what Jewish legal or Torah concepts they were rooting their statements in. "There is Torah, there is a ruling, but you must prove and root whatever you are saying in the Torah. Proofs and evidence are what you need. The tragedy that happened in religious Zionism is the used of this concept and term daat Torah – which was a cynical creation emanating from the hareidi houses of study."
The professor went on to explain why, in his view, the struggle to prevent withdrawal from parts of the Land of Israel has failed so far. "There will be a referendum in a week and more than 50% are going to vote to hand over parts of the country to the Palestinians - and it is a disaster," he said. "But it is because we made three mistakes: First, we waged a sartorial and tribal struggle of the religious. We forgot that all of our achievements in the past were successful because we were united with the other tribes of Isael. Second, we speak a different language – a religious language – when that is not what our forefathers taught us. Abraham, when he bought Hevron, spoke Hittite, David, when he purchased Jerusalem, spoke Jebusite – only we, today, quote scripture and hope that will convince people. Third, we have failed to present an alternative plan. G-d does not help anyone who does not help himself and a person who does not work rationally is not working."
"We still stand a chance if three things take place," Shapira said. "We must present a political program, we must stop acting as a sector or a tribe, but as the Nation of Israel and we must learn to speak Hittite and Jebusite - to speak the national language instead of the religious language."
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