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Biography / The making of a dove By Yair Sheleg Tags: books, Israel news Be'emunato: Sipuro shel harav yehuda amital (Be'emunato: The Story of Rabbi Yehuda Amital), by Elyashiv Reichner Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 301 pages, NIS 98 Over the years, Rabbi Yehuda Amital, head of the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (where students combine compulsory military service with their Talmudic studies) in Alon Shvut, has become one of the rabbis that even secular Jews (including those on the left) love to love. There are two reasons for this. For one, he has a sunny personality. Even more critical, however, are his political views. Advertisement It was Rabbi Amital who in the late 1980s founded the Meimad movement, which, from its inception, has advocated moderation in both the religious and political spheres. Nor is he afraid to attack his colleagues, who are rabbis affiliated with the right-wing religious Zionist camp, for their views. Journalist Elyashiv Reichner's biography of Amital, 83, unfolds the fascinating, complex story of this man. For many years, he taught at Yeshivat Hadarom in Rehovot, which was headed by his father-in-law, until, in 1965, he decided to move to Jerusalem. Two years later, he was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was in the period immediately following the Six-Day War, and the leaders of the movement to renew Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion, in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, were inviting him to head the yeshiva that they were establishing there. (I myself studied at that yeshiva under Amital's leadership.) The book speaks extensively of Amital's personality and educational approach, for good reason. These are the real reasons he is so beloved by students and friends alike, including those who disagree with his views. Amital is an open-minded, original thinker, difficult to pigeonhole, and his character is reflected in his work as an educator. Unlike so many rabbis and yeshiva heads, Amital explicitly discourages his students from following in his footsteps. Students frequently pepper him with questions unrelated to issues of Jewish law, and he always responds, gently but firmly, that they should think out the matter for themselves. Even on issues of Jewish law, he has been known to advise the inquirer to investigate the problem independently by consulting the sources. He always emphasizes that he is not interested in producing "Amital look-alikes." He has the reputation of being a determined optimist. Reichner relates that, on one occasion, when the rabbi's daughter earned a score of only 50 percent on an exam, he consoled her: "Don't feel bad. At least you knew half the material." As a Holocaust survivor (Amital was born in Hungary in 1924, and lost his entire family in Auschwitz), his attitude toward that subject is sincere and does not smack of self-righteousness: For instance, he has no difficulty acknowledging that he cannot answer why the Holocaust occurred, and he is furious with those who try to do so. The late Israeli poet Abba Kovner, himself a Holocaust survivor and a leader of Jewish resistance forces in the Vilna Ghetto, once asked Amital how he could still believe in God after the Shoah. Amital replied, "And how can you still believe in humanity after the Holocaust? After all, no one pretends to be able to understand God, yet we supposedly understand other human beings." He is not afraid to express himself frankly on the link between the Holocaust and religious faith. Reichner writes that, only last year, Amital confessed to his students that, as a survivor, he found it painfully difficult on Jewish festivals to utter the phrase, "Thou hast chosen us from among all the other nations." His originality articulates itself in his style as a yeshiva head: A year after his appointment, he decided to invite an American-Jewish rabbi to share the post with him. He turned to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a disciple and son-in-law of Rabbi Joseph Ber (Yosef Dov) Soloveitchik, the leader of the modern Orthodox movement in the United States until his death in 1993. This was a highly unusual step, as few yeshiva heads are willing to share the honor of their position with someone else. Amital said, however, that he simply felt that he could not direct the yeshiva by himself. This is how the impressive 40-year partnership between Amital and Lichtenstein began. Essentially, they complement one another: Lichtenstein is the introverted intellectual while Amital is the Hasidic soul bursting forth with all the enthusiasm of an extrovert. Two years ago, the pair astounded everyone when they announced who their successors would be at the yeshiva's helm, and turned over authority to them: Rabbis Yaakov Medan and Baruch Gigi. (Generally, this turnover takes place only with the death of a yeshiva head.) Ideological transformation The book discusses at some length the dramatic change that Amital's ideological stance has undergone. As a youth in Hungary, he became familiar with the philosophy of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and turned into an avid disciple. Amital came to Palestine in November 1944, after having been liberated from a German labor camp by the Red Army earlier that year. Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, as he mourned the death of eight of his students in the fighting, he published the book "Hama'alot mima'amakim" ("The Ascent from the Depths") considered to be a basic text for the adherents of the messianic camp among religious Zionists; many regard it as the formative document in the thinking of the Gush Emunim movement, which was established in the wake of that war. Less than a decade later, in 1982, Amital did an ideological about-face and began to spearhead a totally different approach. First of all, he passionately advocated the creation of a commission of inquiry into the events that led up to the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut?s Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. He then expressed grave reservations over Israel's entry into Beirut and over the first Lebanon war in general. His famous statement that, if he had to choose between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, he would choose the former, ultimately led to the founding of the Meimad movement. Reichner, a journalist with the right-leaning daily paper Makor Rishon, offers many possible explanations for this fundamental change in thinking. There are those who believe that Amital's sensitivity to the value of human life - specifically, to the loss of yeshiva students in the first Lebanon war - brought about the metamorphosis, while others argue that it was a belated eruption of Holocaust-induced trauma. According to Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, one of his more well-known former students, the change can be attributed to a general process that is occurring in Israeli society, especially its elite groups - a passage from Zionist activism to a more dovish approach more open to making compromises for peace - and which Amital is keenly aware of, as one of the few yeshiva heads who subscribes, for example, to Haaretz. In my opinion, the explanation that Reichner himself offers - the pain Amital felt over the death of his students in the first Lebanon war - is highly problematic. Although Amital was visibly shaken by the death of eight of his students in the Yom Kippur War and although, as a result, he suspended his active involvement in the yeshiva's affairs for an entire six months, he did publish "The Ascent from the Depths" during that period. I think therefore, that it was not the deaths themselves that caused him to react differently, but rather the essential difference between the two wars. Although the Yom Kippur War stemmed from Israel's failure to seize several opportunities for negotiations with the Arabs, it was perceived, after the fighting broke out, to be a clearly defensive war. Israel was forced to fight for its life and, nonetheless, managed to come out of the war with a fairly impressive military achievement. The pain that Amital felt over the death of his students in that war did not lead to any basic ideological change but apparently augmented his belief in the messianic process. In contrast, the first Lebanon war was an optional military campaign, and this in itself, in addition to Israel's indirect responsibility for the massacre in Sabra and Chatila, set off an alarm in Amital's mind. In fact, during that period, he frequently referred to the sounding of alarm bells. Furthermore, it can be argued, as Sherlo does, that the changes in the attitude of Israeli society toward the messianism of Gush Emunim influenced Amital. After the Yom Kippur War, it might have been thought that Jewish settlement activity in the territories and the reinforcement of a personal commitment to Zionist principles - particularly as an antidote to the gloomy mood produced by the war - would lift the nation's spirits, as Gush Emunim's leaders hoped. What happened instead, however, was that Israel's elite groups (the secular press and much of both the business sector and academia) began to regard Zionism's new flag as something to be rejected rather than as a cause to be espoused and proudly championed. My impression is that Amital feared the hostility could turn against all religious Jews and even against Judaism in general. This is Reichner's first book, and he certainly should be praised for the scope of his research and for his detailed account of Amital's life so far. Nevertheless, I do have two stylistic reservations. First, Reichner is not sufficiently sensitive to the essential difference between a book and a newspaper article. On many occasions, readers are offered direct quotes, in some cases lengthy ones; instead, Reichner should have incorporated the statements into the flow of the text. This tendency draws added attention to the book's second problem. The narrator seems to be too closely involved with, and too much of an admirer of, the biography's subject. We frequently get the impression that what we have here is a student praising a revered teacher rather than an account provided by an emotionally removed biographer. I admit that this is a natural hurdle for all people who write about their teachers or rabbis (the author too attended the Har Etzion Yeshiva for a year). This is especially the case for Reichner, who is also distantly related to Rabbi Amital. In a book intended for the general Israeli reading public, the approach of a more removed biographer would have been appropriate. Yair Sheleg is a commentator on religious affairs for Haaretz. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Produce problems Jordan Islamists protest imports of fruit grown on 'land taken by Zionists.' Payback time? America's opponents in the Mideast: Financial crisis is divine punishment.

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