The Rift in Israel (RLE Israel and Palestine) by S. Clement Leslie

Author:S. Clement Leslie [Leslie, S. Clement]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317449997
Google: bUCsCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-05-22T03:19:14+00:00

In a later chapter we shall try to assess the meaning of these ideas and their implications for the future. Here we shall note the action being taken by those who express them. Their writings and seminars have been referred to. There are also more systematic forms of study. Some young people go to the University in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, where their studies include a mixture of cultural and social subjects and 'Judaica'. A certain number each year attend classes and seminars at the Jewish Theological Seminary's hostel, maintained by the Conservative Judaism movement of America. This movement lays great emphasis on scholarship and in America systematically relates Jewish to secular learning: its New York seminary runs joint courses with Columbia University with mutual recognition for degree purposes. It sends a number of rabbinical trainees and other students for a year's study in Israel and associates local students with them, primarily for the American visitors' benefit but also for their own sake. The Israeli students are by no means all committed to religion. They include each year young secular Kibbutz members of the sort we have encountered. These meet, among their teachers and fellow students, men of a type unknown to them in Israel — orthodox or near-orthodox Jews with a fairly wide secular education, more advanced than their own, who can discuss religious questions with them in their own terms but with authority. There are such men in Israel but they are few, and if they wear the mantle of local orthodoxy they are put out of court by the Establishment's reputation as narrow and repressive in its approach. This may be the explanation for the otherwise extraordinary fact that there is little or no contact between the young seekers in search of religious meaning and the religious University of Bar-Ilan. There would seem however to be some opening here for initiative on either side.

Some American rabbis visit secular Kibbutzim for a few days' stay and are, they say, besieged by questioners who seem intrigued to meet men, and their families, of orthodox practice (as seen on Sabbath eve in the Kibbutz dining-hall) but broad educational equipment and cultured conversational style. Among the seminars inJerusalem is one conducted by a disciple of Martin Buber. Buber's religious and ethical teaching has never had as much appeal within Israel as outside but it appears to hold considerable interest for some of the Kibbutzniks. It is impossible to guess how fruitful the whole marriage of American Jewish teaching with the secular Israeli desire for study may prove to be. Some observers in Israel doubt whether the approach of any American movement can be radical enough to achieve a permanent effect: perhaps not without some bias, they regard a form of Judaism which can content the secularized, half-assimilated Jewry of the West as unfit to deal with the sharp spiritual challenges that any 'modernized' religious life in Israel will have to meet. On the other hand other equally well-placed judges think that the best prospect for a religious revival in Israel is to be found here.

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