In the latest example of how the Chief Rabbinate has lost touch with reality, on Wednesday – Yom Kippur eve – Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar issued a ruling halting a long-standing custom of women to immerse in a mikveh ritual bath the day before the fast.
Amar made the announcement in a letter he sent to Rabbi David Banino, head of the Jerusalem religious council’s mikveh department, telling him that mikveh directors and attendants should not allow women to immerse in the mikvaot they operate unless it is for Jewish family purity.
What the decision effectively did was exclude married women, singles, divorcées and widows who wished to immerse in a mikveh for spiritual purposes ahead of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
The motivation behind Amar’s ruling was what he described as “awful promiscuity.” He explained that in current times “we have arrived at a situation so awful that things which we were embarrassed to think about in private and in inner sanctums have become a symbol of freedom and progress.”
Besides being illegal for discriminating against women, Amar’s ruling is an insult to women who wish to immerse in a mikveh as part of their spiritual growth with no connection to their menstrual cycle.
“It is unfortunate that on the eve of Yom Kippur, a time when Jews unite in reflection and humility, the Jerusalem religious council is choosing to divide Jews,” said the director of the religious services advisory organization Itim Rabbi Seth Farber.
While unfortunate, Amar’s ruling is not surprising. There is a trend within the ultra-Orthodox-run Chief Rabbinate to dismiss any act of religion that does not meet its strict standards. This applies to kashrut laws, the participation of women in religious leadership roles and the way progressive Jews – mostly from the Reform and Conservative movements – are continually disregarded at the Western Wall.
Amar is the same rabbi who has repeatedly brought his followers to the egalitarian prayer plaza at the Kotel to pray and to prevent progressive Jews from being able to use the site.
Amar was also the rabbi who in 2017 said that Reform Jews “deny more than Holocaust deniers.”
“Today there was a hearing on the Kotel on the petition of the cursed evil people who do every iniquity in the world against the Torah – they even marry Jews and non-Jews,” Amar said at the time.
That is why it was so disturbing to see Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana meet with Amar on Friday together with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau. The reason he met Amar – a former chief rabbi – and not with Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef is because Yosef is reportedly boycotting the minister from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina Party due to his kashrut reform and other future plans for the rabbinate.
Kahana can meet with whomever he likes. One photo from the meeting though was particularly disturbing. It showed Kahana kissing Amar’s hand. Had Kahana not read what Amar said about fellow Jews just a few years ago? Did he not know about the rabbi’s controversial decision to block women from immersing in mikvaot under the excuse that doing so was promiscuous?
It is time for the government to break the hold these rabbis and their ultra-Orthodox patrons have over religious life in Israel. The coalition led by Bennett together with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, is the perfect government to do so. They do not have haredi partners and while both men are holding onto the hope that the haredi parties of Shas and United Torah Judaism will one day enter their government, they should not let that hope hold them and Israel hostage.
Today, on the eve of Sukkot, is the perfect time for the government to start enacting these changes. Sukkot is a holiday that shows the beauty of Judaism; it represents our understanding of how homes are temporary, our concern for the environment and commemorates how God sheltered the Israelites when they left Egypt.
Now is the time to show Israelis that Judaism is not a political tool in the hands of people whose only interest is to shut out those with whom they don’t agree. It is time to stop the politicization of our religion.