Last month, before the elections in Israel and at the time of the intense debate about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress about Iran, one of his arguments for going to Washington was that he doesn’t just represent the State of Israel but the entire Jewish People.
He said this was also his reason for attending the demonstration in Paris in the wake of the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher, even though the president of France asked him to stay away.
Netanyahu’s claim raises a number of questions both within Israel and beyond. For example, his claim to speak for the Jewish People may provide another reason for Israel’s Arab citizens – some 20 per cent of the population – to regard the statement as further evidence that their country’s prime minister doesn’t represent them.
The claim also became problematic when many American Jewish leaders urged him not to come. The left-leaning advocacy group JStreet even canvassed Jews in the United States to sign lists stating that Netanyahu doesn’t speak for them. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who’s Jewish, described Netanyahu’s statement as arrogant.
An editorial in the Forward, the leading American-Jewish weekly, speculated tongue in cheek that, as only 25 per cent of the six million Jews in Israel voted for Netanyahu and 70 per cent of the 5.3 million American Jews voted for Barack Obama, the president of the United States may have more reason to regard himself as speaking for the Jewish People.
So who does represent the Jewish People? Answer: no individual, however exalted her or his office, and no organization, however pretentious its title, can claim to speak for us all, or even for most of us.
Judaism has no pope, which means that no rabbi can speak for all Jews or even for all religious Jews. The Israeli chief rabbinate has made claims to represent authentic Judaism, but even the majority of Orthodox Jews has justifiably ignored it.
Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel have different chief rabbis. Some have been less than role models. For example, the previous Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yona Metzger is currently under police investigation for massive misappropriation of funds and related offences while he was in office.
Despite its exalted self-definition, the World Jewish Congress is basically in the hands of one philanthropist who got it from another philanthropist. Though it makes occasional representations to governments, nobody believes that it actually speaks for the Jewish People.
Even locally, representation of the entire Jewish community eludes those who claim it. Two previous British chief rabbis have been peers of the realm with seats in the House of Lords, but despite their reputation outside the community, they didn’t represent even its Orthodox sector, to which they belonged.
Though the lay equivalent, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has a distinguished history, its role seems also to have been overshadowed in recent years.
The former Canadian Jewish Congress, perhaps modelled on the Board of Deputies, came close to a version of democratic representation, but it has now been dismantled by philanthropists who claim to have Jewish interests at heart but appear to have no patience with the democratic ambitions of their less affluent sisters and brothers.
We’re a pluralistic community. Neither savvy politicians nor successful philanthropists and their staff can represent us. As the Forward editorial put it, “We’ve learned to find vitality and sustenance in a dynamic pluralism that resists centralization.”
The same article also provides the most cogent answer to Netanyahu’s claim: “We have survived into modern times because we haven’t relied on one leader – a king or prelate or pope – and instead embraced the fact that we are diverse in more ways than we can count.”
Or as Daniel Gordis of Jerusalem’s Shalem College, writing in the Jerusalem Post, put it: “No one has ever spoken for all Jews, and it is hard to imagine anyone ever will.”
