Posts Tagged ‘school admissions’
The who is a Jew crisis – whose fault?
1. The British Jewish community is now in serious trouble, its right to have schools for Jews threatened on two sides. The High Court is about to decide whether JFS can apply its admissions criteria by reference to exclusively orthodox criteria of Jewish status. And the government has recently changed, and is currently in the process of a critical examination of the application of, the laws of selective admission as they relate to faith schools.
2. The surest way to resolve both crises is to determine whose fault they are.
3. In typical style the British Jewish community has already offered a number of possible public answers to that: the Chief Rabbi, the London Beth Din, the parents of the children challenging admissions.
4. In other words, everyone except the rank and file of the British Jewish community: but it is we who have brought this on our selves.
5. A reform leader went on the BBC Radio 4 this morning to explain that the JFS crisis is because orthodox rabbis do not recognise “all” decisions of the reform, so that “technically” the child is not Jewish.
6. An orthodox rabbi was asked to reply to that – so he said “Judaism is not a democracy – you have to abide by the rules.”
7. Which is the point. When judges or Ministers examine our community to see these selective rules in application, they will see that we enforce them strictly only against people on the outside looking in. Once a person is accepted as “technically” Jewish, they can eat what they like, do what they like, and nobody regards them as beyond the pale of the community. But the product of a reform conversion, who may observe more of the rules of kashrut than 90% of our community, who may pray to God more often than 95% of our community, is dismissed as unworthy to mix with our children because of being not Jewish.
8. This attitude is halachically sound, but spiritually bankrupt. While we as a community hold our own rules of religion in apparent contempt, why should we expect judges or Ministers to accord respect to any of them?
9. In the tochahah warnings, God warns that if we behave as if the world is without a ruler, He will allow the world to carry on as if it were. Here too, if we behave as though being Jewish is a matter of mere genetics, God will show us the emptiness and futility of that approach.
10. So the only real answer is, as always, nachpeso derochienu venoshuvo – to sort out our own communal behaviour. If we can live in a way which gives the impression that the rules of the Torah and the rabbis are worthy of respect, perhaps others outside the community will be encouraged to follow suit.
Reform Judaism – The Penny Drops
1. A certain Jewish school is being taken to court for refusing admission to a child who is not halachically Jewish, although the child is Jewish according to the Reform movement. So one might expect them to be enthusiastic about the litigation: but they are not at all, because they have realised that once the courts intervene in matters of who is and is not Jewish there is no guarantee that they will adopt precisely the Reform’s criteria – they might substitute their own entirely.
2. The Talmud noticed something similar a few centuries ago. At the end of the tractate Avodah Zarah two rabbis are eating in the palace of a non-Jewish king. He insists that one of them is offered all kosher facilities. The other says “What about me?” To which the answer is that the King has been watching this second rabbi’s behaviour, and has come to the conclusion that he does not consistently follow one set of rules but makes them up as he goes along to suit his convenience.
3. We can ask the non-Jewish world to respect our religious practices when they are consistent and sincere, based on adherence to the Code of Jewish Law redacted centuries ago in codification of still earlier authority, based on time-honoured majority practice where opinions originally differed. Once we adopt a do-it-yourself free-for-all attitude where we make the rules up ourselves, they are not worthy of respect and will not receive it.
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