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Temple Beth El Blog

Swarsensky Memorial Weekend 2020

12/07/2020 02:25:48 PM

Dec7

Charles L. Cohen

Rabbi Joshua Weinberg, a leading figure in American Reform Zionism, focused his 2020 Swarsensky Memorial Weekend presentations on the divisions among Israeli and Diaspora Jews over who should define what constitutes legitimate religious practice in Israel. Voicing the concerns of many Jews that the present arrangement is both politically undemocratic and liturgically uninviting, he proposed an updated Zionist project to reinvent the meaning of “being Jewish in the Jewish state.”

Across the globe, Weinberg argued, Jews regard Orthodox religious practice in the Holy Land as the standard against which other forms of Judaism are measured, whether rightly or not. This paradigm, he affirmed, is no longer tenable: it spiritually dispossesses many Israeli Jews by forcing them to identify as either Orthodox or secular, distresses most Diaspora Jews by demeaning their indigenous practices, and obstructs realizing a unified worldwide Jewish community.

These strains reflect tensions embedded in the original Zionist movement itself: should a realized Jewish state concentrate on protecting Jews from persecution while advancing secularized ideals of peace and justice, or should it function as a mechanism for instilling Jewish culture and religious practice? The State of Israel’s foundation entrenched rather than resolved these conflicts: it created a civil government premised in part on valuing religious freedom but ceded control over defining officially sanctioned religious practice to an ultra-Orthodox rabbinate determined to enforce their particular vision of Jewish tradition against all comers.

In opposition to the status quo’s cession of religious authority in Israel to this powerful minority, Diaspora Jews must, Weinberg urged, trumpet a counter-narrative that endorses their equal responsibility for defining Judaism and upholding Jewish values in Israel. Grounded as it is in the experience of Diasporic pluralism, Reform Zionism has a mission to promote religious openness and tolerance in Israeli society through concerted political action.

April 30, 2025 2 Iyar 5785