Rabbi David Golinkin, renowned halachist and president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, is a man with a mission: bridge the chasm between dati (religious) and chiluni (secular) in Israel. He began as a pulpit rabbi in the Conservative movement in Israel, but experience soon changed his life goal.
Recently in Vancouver, he explained what started him on this quest, and how he is going about it. He began with a story.
Standing in the security line at Ben-Gurion Airport, he showed his ID to the young woman standing guard.
“What kind of professor are you?’ she asked.
“Talmud,” he replied.
Her answer: “What is Talmud?”
The woman had gone through the Israeli secular school system, yet never heard of Talmud. Had she studied any Jewish material in school? Yes, but it “wasn’t important. Who remembers?”
These and other encounters led Rabbi Golinkin to realize that from the pulpit, he could do little to change this imbalance. Young secular Israelis who had matured in the secular school system knew nothing of Jewish religion, culture or Bible, let alone Talmud.
“And whose fault is this?” he asked our congregation rhetorically. The founders of the state! Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, had allowed exemption for haredi yeshiva students from the army, and at the same time, created two school systems, the secular and the religious.
Since then, even the small amount of time in the secular schools devoted to Bible has been cut in half.
In an online interview with him I continued the discussion.
What to do? First came the TALI schools with enhanced Jewish studies programs, now 94 schools and 166 preschools, reaching 40,000 children – over 10 per cent of the public elementary schools and five per cent of preschools. But still, how many children can you reach outside this system, especially given the meagre level of government support.
So, Rabbi Golinkin has begun to train teachers and administrators who will go on to work in the public system.
The Schechter Institute’s master’s program for Israeli teachers has more than 600 students and 1,360 graduates. They spread out across the country, working to influence, or infiltrate, if you will, the secular system from the inside.
What is the biggest hurdle? Money. The funding for TALI has always been an issue. It is now one million shekels ($250,000), only 10 per cent of TALI’s budget. Needless to say, every minister in charge of education, no matter the party, has had to be convinced that such an odd duck as TALI should receive equitable funding.
I note here that the late Zevulun Hammer was impressed with what TALI is doing, although his successors have been less friendly – to say the least.
What, I asked, are the chances that a new Israeli government, any new Israeli government, would be more favourable to increasing support for this endeavour?
“Very doubtful,” he replied. “Likud and Labor do not care about pluralistic Jewish education. Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid’s party) cares, but it’s not clear if they will be in the government.”
Over the years, we have lived in and visited Israel. We have seen first-hand a growing antagonism between sectors of Israeli society: the resentment, not to say hatred, of the secular who serve in the army toward the haredi who sit at home; the antagonism of the haredi for modern Orthodox; results of this total separation of systems, which continues to widen the gulf; a society that seems unable (or unwilling) to mediate among the factions.
Why should we care? What we need now, Rabbi Golinkin writes, is a “‘Jewish revolution,’ and that revolution must adopt itself to the Israeli reality.”
He quotes Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld: “A society without true roots is a society without a future.” If the secular Israeli does not, cannot know about the rich culture of Judaism, what will anchor the society such ignorance creates?
