The RRC has crossed a line

(JNS) — As a lawyer who spends his days defending the civil rights of Jews in education—usually public education, sometimes private schools or universities, but never Jewish institutions—reading about the triumph of anti-Zionism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is in some sense an unsurprising experience. I see in these accounts all of the same hateful rhetoric I see from pro-Hamas agitators everywhere else—that Israel “is committing apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism,” that the urban combat in Gaza is really “genocide” and that “Israelis were white settler colonialists,” etc., etc., etc., blah blah blah—you’ve heard it all before. (Though I confess the Reconstructionist anti-Zionists do score a point for creativity when they claim that believing Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state is “antisemitic.”)

Anyone who was paying attention in Hebrew school knows that what’s being said by these young people, who claim they want to become leaders of the Jews, is at odds with the entire Jewish canon, with its traditions, its rituals, its calendar, even with the Jewish cookbook and the menu for Jewish holidays. It’s clear to anyone who’s read the Torah—the book that begins with the creation of the world, and then zooms in to focus on the Jewish people and God’s promise to them of sovereignty in the land of Israel, and which ends with Moses standing on Mount Nebo as God shows Moses and describes for him the land, promised to the Jewish nation, which Moses will not enter.

The inconsistency between Jewish ideas, Jewish memory and Jewish culture, on the one hand, and the Reconstructionists’ position, on the other, is obvious to anyone who’s attended a Jewish wedding and watched the groom break a glass so all, even at this happy time, will remember our loss of Jerusalem. It’s clear to anyone who was still awake at the end of the Passover seder, which ends with the words: “Next year in Jerusalem.” And anyone who was paying attention in Hebrew school could add a great many more such examples, quotations and customs.

It’s true that Judaism has no creed to which one must assent to be considered a member of the tribe. If you’re born in or convert in, you’re in, and you can be almost as much of a nudnick as you want, and nobody can throw you out.

But there are limits, as Spinoza discovered. His powerful mind had taken him so far away from his tradition, and his teachers and his family that he didn’t care. But as his life shows, it does happen that some Jews cross even the distant and fuzzy line defining the Jewish people, and when they do, they leave the Jewish people. That’s why Spinoza was excommunicated.

It happens in our own day as well. Like Baruch Spinoza, the Jews for Jesus have crossed a line. They say they’re Jewish, but we know they’re not. They don’t, thank God, pose anywhere near as much of a threat to us as Spinoza posed to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, which was trying to set itself on its feet as its members fled there from the Inquisition, and as they tried to get and remain on decent terms with the good Christian burghers of Holland. So for the most part, we just ignore the Jews for Jesus, and we don’t have to go to the trouble of actually excommunicating them. More aggressive hostility is meted out by Jews worldwide to the Neturei Karta, who not only oppose Zionism but celebrate and make common cause with the enemies of Israel.

When apostates join with our enemies to try to cause our destruction, it’s time for the Jewish people as a whole to act. And when people not only announce that the very idea of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel is antisemitic and abhorrent but also proclaim that the murder of Jews because they are Jews living in the land of Israel is a historical necessity to make “Gaza free,” it’s time to call those people what they are. They are not Jews who disagree with other Jews: They are enemies of the Jewish people. They have taken themselves outside the line. Like the Neturei Karta and Jews for Jesus, they are no longer anything that the Jewish people can or should recognize as Jews.

The West is a tolerant part of the world, and everyone has a right to his or her own opinion. Reconstructionists are entitled to whatever beliefs they choose, and they can read the Torah as a metaphor or a dated document, or an instrument of white patriarchal oppression or any other thing they wish. But there is a certain basic duty of truth in advertising.

Years ago, I interviewed a guy who had been born to a Jewish mother and a Christian father. His parents had divorced, and his mother’s parents tried as best they could to make a Jew out of him but failed. He wound up a Presbyterian minister who ran a church in a mall on Sundays. But on Saturday, he called it a synagogue. On Saturdays, they read the Torah, and then the Brit Chadasha—the “new covenant,” otherwise known as the Christian Gospels. On Saturdays, he claimed that he was a committed Jew. When I confronted him with the facts of his childhood, he first asked me to turn off my tape recorder and then ended the interview. When the interview was published in The Wall Street Journal, the synagogue closed down because the deceptive wrapper could no longer work.

It’s time to take the wrapper off of the people at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. They are not training rabbis—not rabbis in any recognizable sense of the word. America is a free country, and people have the legal right to do what they want and to call themselves whatever they want. But the Jewish people have no obligation to be deceived, and it would be a good thing if the institutions run by Jews who actually live within our canon and our traditions and our calendar and our kitchen would make this clear.

There are lines, and by allying itself with people who want to kill Jews, the RRC has crossed them. It’s time for the Jewish people to tell the RRC goodbye.