By DONNIEL HARTMAN
For the first time since the creation of the State of Israel, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate has ruled that municipal rabbis can withhold a kashrut certificate from produce grown in the country during the shmitah year (sabbatical for the land). On the surface, this ruling would seem to be an internal halakhic debate, and one promoting religious pluralism at that.
But the ensuing battle over the ruling has little to do with the halakhic legitimacy of heter ha mehirah (a permit, similar to the one used for “selling” chametz during Pesach, allowing use of Israeli produce during the shmitah year by “selling” the land of Israel to a non-Jew). Rather, it is a battle over a much larger question: Does the national rabbinate regard the State of Israel as a Jewish value?
The sabbatical year, as originally developed, envisions a utopia of shared property and produce during which class distinctions are overcome and all share in the land’s bounty. In the Bible, the implementation of this law is connected to God’s miraculous assistance which makes it economically viable. Yet because such miraculous assistance did not historically come to pass, shmitah has almost never been practiced.
At the foundation of the State of Israel and Zionism is the decision of the Jews to function as a people and a religion within the confines of realpolitik. In the real world, security and economic viability are not in the hands of God – they are the responsibility of human beings. In the real world, agricultural resources, economic growth and jobs for citizens are strategic needs, and it is a fact that Israeli farmers cannot relinquish a year of their work and profit every seven years.
While permission to “sell” the land is no doubt a legal fiction, it is a vehicle through which the rabbinate has historically embraced a much larger value – the value of creating a viable state for the Jewish people. This fiction enabled the utopian Jewish value of shmitah and the value of creating a viable and secure home for the Jewish people to live with each other.
The rabbinate’s reversal of its longstanding decision has been enabled by religious Zionists’ exclusive focus on land and foreign policy issues, and their related relinquishing of the rabbinate to the ultra-Orthodox – a community which by definition does not think that national issues are religious issues.
As distinct from ultra-Orthodoxy, religious Zionism is founded on the belief that the Jewish national enterprise can, and must, be integrated into our religious value system. For the ultra-Orthodox, the secular institutions governing Israel are no different from those governing Poland or the United States. They represent a political reality, not a Jewish reality; as they do not believe the state embodies Jewish values, they find no inherent problem in actions that may bring the state harm.
Calling the rabbinate’s decision to let rabbis “choose” to accept or reject heter ha-mehirah pluralistic is in fact a cynical use of the term. There already are 57 different levels of kashrut in Israel; nobody is forcing anybody to eat food they do not believe lives up to their standards.
The issue is not one of enabling choice, but of deciding whether the modern State of Israel has a Jewish partner, in the form of the official rabbinate, that is willing to regulate halakhic issues in light of the state’s real needs. So long as Israel has a national rabbinate, we must demand that it be loyal and committed to the state’s welfare. A national rabbinate not loyal to the state itself is an oxymoron we can ill afford.
