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The IDF rabbinate breaks faith
By Gershom Gorenberg
Tags: Israel News, Judaism, IDF

The news in brief: A woman soldier asked to say kaddish, the mourner's prayer, in an army synagogue. The rabbi of the base refused to let her. Again the army rabbinate showed narrow-mindedness that offended its legitimate target audience - soldiers with religious needs.

And for the news in full: In mid-May, a woman soldier serving at a Nahal base learned that her grandmother had died and received the standard one-week furlough to be with her family. The next day, her parents flew to America, where the funeral and shiva were to be held. The soldier - a member of a Nahal group from Noam, the youth movement of the Masorti (Conservative) Movement - returned to her base. There she got a call from her father, who said that he was unable to say kaddish where he was, for lack of a minyan. He asked her to say kaddish in his place.

The soldier spoke with the rabbi of her base and suggested that she organize a minyan of women in the synagogue at the base. At first, the rabbi agreed. But another religious woman soldier objected to such openness. Her own rabbi, she told the rabbi of the base, forbade such a practice. The army rabbi consulted his commanders in the Israel Defense Forces rabbinate. Then he informed the soldier from Noam that if she liked, she could organize a minyan in a classroom on the base. But she could not say kaddish in the IDF synagogue. The soldier was deeply offended. A representative of the Masorti Movement contacted the office of IDF Chief Rabbi Avihai Ronski - who supported the base rabbi's "solution."
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Please note: The army rabbinate transgressed twice. Its first sin was discrimination against Conservative Judaism. An army base has a synagogue to meet the religious needs of soldiers. Soldiers from the Masorti Movement have every right to use the facility.

But the rabbi could have suggested another solution. In Orthodox Judaism, there are also synagogues where women say kaddish, from the women's section. Some halakhic authorities oppose the practice; others permit it. The IDF Rabbinate doesn't need to take the more stringent stance. Its job is to serve soldiers. In this case, a soldier needed to mourn in a religious framework. Instead of providing spiritual support, the rabbinate worried about what religious hard-liners would say - a common form of cowardice in the religious world - and failed to perform its mission. That's the second sin.

In the realm of belief as well, the IDF rabbinate's narrowness hurts those it should serve.

At a recent Shabbat meal, a soldier told me about the previous Shabbat at his boot camp. The rabbinate sent a duty rabbi, who taught a class on Friday night. The entire company was required to attend. The rabbi spoke of final redemption. He expressed his dismay about the disengagement from Gaza, which he termed "a retreat in the process of redemption" of the Jewish people.

For someone secular, the obvious problem is that the army ordered soldiers to attend a religious lecture. For the religious soldier who spoke with me, there was another problem: Instead of Torah study, which could have made a Shabbat at the base more pleasant, he was treated to someone preaching a political and theological view to which he deeply objects, presented as the kosher version of Judaism in the IDF. The next morning, the rabbi added insult to injury, berating the exhausted recruits for not having prepared to read the Torah portion at morning services. The stunned soldiers had expected the army rabbi to do that for them.

The controversial booklet that the IDF rabbinate distributed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza should be seen in this context. The booklet contained extreme views on politics and combat ethics. A section that justified harming the enemy's civilian population, for instance, said that "cruelty is a bad quality, but it all depends when."

During the storm over the booklet, an important detail was overlooked: The material reached the public after a religious soldier turned it over to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence, which gathers soldiers' testimony about serving in the occupied territories. A member of the organization - himself religious - told me that the soldier was disturbed that "a very specific interpretation of Judaism" had become "the official voice of Judaism within the IDF." That is, religious soldiers felt betrayed that a body speaking in the name of their faith voiced a message they found foreign and frightening.

The IDF rabbinate has a legitimate task: serving soldiers with religious needs. It should offer spiritual support and help soldiers meet their religious obligations as they fulfill their military duties.

Its job is not to promote a religiously hard-line and politically ultra-nationalist version of Judaism. If the rabbinate can't fulfill its real purpose, the IDF should disband it and create a chaplaincy corps that can do the job.
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