The former home of David Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv is a cramped apartment-sized museum whose main hall is a dark library with overpopulated shelves. It’s not the most pragmatic venue for launching a political manifesto aimed at a broad audience.
But Alan Feld, a prominent investor in Israel’s booming tech sector, insists nowhere is more fitting than the humble abode of Israel’s first prime minister for the unveiling that he organized on Sunday of a new social charter that he and other cosignatories hope could help settle the unresolved issues of the role of Judaism in the Jewish state.
“This festering issue goes back to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which Ben Gurion coauthored, and right now it’s really the core of the conflict that has divided Israel for the past nine months,” said Feld, 61, who was born in Canada and has been living in Israel for 30 years.
“Ahead of the High Holidays and a fateful week for the State of Israel, we’re coming back to the drawing board to finish this work,” said Rabbi David Stav, another cosignatory of the charter who heads the influential Tzohar rabbinical group, which many view as an alternative to the ultra-conservative Chief Rabbinate. Stav was referencing a Supreme Court hearing Tuesday that may lead to a constitutional crisis because it’s about the government’s ability to limit the court’s power.
The new charter is a 650-word pamphlet titled “The Principle of Consensual Judaism in the State of Israel.” Among its 51 signatories are moderate Orthodox rabbis alongside seculars like Polly Bronstein, an activist fighting the right-wing government’s judicial overhaul, and the head of a left-leaning group, Darkenu.
Billed by its creators as a compromise between secular Jews who fear religious coercion and devout Jews who worry over Jews being alienated from their heritage, the document’s 11 points include several that are likely to put off many staunch secularists.
Alan Feld speaks at the Ben Gurion Home on Sept. 10, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Guy Anto)
One passage pledges that Israeli Jewish teens will be “Jewishly literate, including on the Jewish religion, history and culture.” Another says that the state is a Jewish national home, its symbols will be Jewish and its institutions “will respect halacha,” or Orthodox Jewish law.
The charter also features segments to which many devout Jews would object, including equal status for non-Orthodox Jewish denominations and autonomy for every “city or region” on the issue of observing Shabbat.
It also says all citizens will perform a two-year mandatory national service – a reference to the exemption from military service enjoyed by tens of thousands of Haredi yeshiva students, which began with a dispensation that, when Ben Gurion agreed to it in 1948, related to only about 400 people.
And it rejects any attempt to “legislate religious laws through coercion.”
Visitors to the Ben Gurion Home in Tel Aviv listen to Alan Feld speaking on Sept. 10, 2023. (Guy Anto)
Eilam Leshem, a young social activist who was one of the 50 or so individuals who attended the launch at the organizers’ invitation, waited patiently through the presentation to pose a critical question during the Q&A part of the evening. “They’re legislating democracy away right now,” he said. “So it seems to me the immediate priority is to block the undemocratic legislation, maybe then work out some of this.”
Many of the opponents of the judicial overhaul believe it compromises democratic principles because it seeks to weaken the judiciary and make it subservient to the government. The overhaul’s supporters dispute this, saying the judiciary has accumulated excessive powers and that democracy requires more checks on the court, as well as greater electoral accountability for its judges.
But this fight, which is “tearing at the fabric of Israeli society,” Feld said, is not about political science.
Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid (L) with Tzohar head Rabbi David Stav after signing the rabbinical group’s ‘Resolution of ethical principles’ for the April election campaign, January 23, 2019. (Tzhoar)
“It all comes down to our definition, which we have not really defined, as a Jewish state. The big judicial controversies are not about labor laws and corporate practices but on religion-themed issues, like conscription for yeshivah students, sex-segregated buses, etc. It’s about the fact that the Supreme Court has filled a vacuum that we created as a society when we did not define what it means to be a Jewish and democratic state, or even what we mean by Jewish,” Feld told The Times of Israel.
Some of the speakers at the event on Sunday took a stab at defining what Judaism means to them.
Bronstein, a secular mother of two, said, “The most Jewish moment of the year for me is not Yom Kippur, but the siren on Memorial Day.” Some on the secular left, she said, have “an exaggerated antagonism, some of it because of perceived coercion, to anything that smells Jewish.” Judaism, she said, “needs to be made accessible to them, and the way to do that is to reduce coercion.”
Many Israelis feel that the lack of transportation on Shabbat, separate bathing hours for people who want sex segregation in public pools, and other laws meant to accommodate religious sensibilities are coercive. Conversely, many devout people feel that their freedom of worship is violated when traffic is allowed to drive on Shabbat in their neighborhoods, or when their taxes are used for what they regard as violating the sanctity of Shabbat.
An undated photo of a bus running in Tel Aviv on the Sabbath. (Tel Aviv Municipality)
The charter stops short of defining what constitutes a Jewish state. Instead, it sets out some very general principles. For example, the section on state recognition for all Jewish denominations doesn’t even list them, leaving the door open, conceivably, to controversial streams such as Messianic Jews, whom many Jews consider Christian missionaries.
The audience made no attempt to obtain more clarity on the document bearing the names of 51 cosignatories, who make up an eclectic bunch including several retired generals; tech executives; Prof. David Gliksberg of the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law; and Adina Bar-Shalom, the oldest daughter of the late former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef.
Asked about the issue of enumerating Jewish denominations, Feld told The Times of Israel: “There will be parameters around this issue as well. The idea is to have a broader tent that most Jews in this country can accept.”
But can such a change come from a small room of about 50 people?
“Maybe I’m naïve but if so I’m proud of my naivete, because that’s the only force that ever achieves change,” Feld, who is devoutly Modern Orthodox, said. “We can be negative and speak about what we don’t want, but we need to be naïve and show what we do want to do in order to live together harmoniously with each other.”
