These are not the values of Israel

Some weeks ago the chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliahu, publicly offered that Jews should not rent or sell property to non-Jews. He was criticized for his abhorrent views. To his defence, alas, some 39 other local, municipally appointed rabbis signed a decree that sought to justify his execrable opinion in religious terms on the basis of Halachah.

That was too much for the rest of the country. 

The statement of the signatory rabbis is now being investigated by Israel’s attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, to see whether it is legally offensive. That it was morally offensive is incontrovertible.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu severely condemned the rabbis’ decree. “Such things cannot be said, not about Jews and not about Arabs. They cannot be said in any democratic country, and especially not in a Jewish and democratic one. The State of Israel rejects these sayings.”

President Shimon Peres expressed what most Israelis felt. “The rabbis’ letter creates a fundamental moral crisis in Israel which affects the definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The State of Israel is composed of Jewish citizens and non-Jewish citizens, and we all have the same rights, which include the right to practice any religion. This fundamental right is engraved in our Declaration of Independence, as well as in legislation forged in the Knesset. I call on all of us to keep intact the true nature of the democratic, Jewish and egalitarian State of Israel.”

Many rabbis also rejected the decree. The two chief rabbis of the state have condemned the statement. Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, spiritual leader of the Shas party, refused to join his name to the decree. Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Elyashiv, head of the non-chassidic Ashkenazi haredi community, rejected the decree with the pointed message, “I’ve said for some time that there are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them.” 

David Rosen, the Jerusalem-based international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, perhaps said it best when he wrote of Rabbi Eliahu and his colleagues that they “represent not only a halachic regression and a capitulation to scaremongering, but they are guilty of nothing less than chilul hashem, a desecration of the Divine Name, and an embarrassment to our Jewish heritage.”

In effect, the entire secular and observant establishment in Israel  rejected the reprehensible outlook and teaching espoused by Rabbi Eliahu of Safed and his supporters. Their values are not the values of the State of Israel, they have proclaimed loudly. 

We cannot urge the “moderates” of other religions to reject the dreadful attitudes and the behaviour of their extremists if we ourselves do not do the same. We, therefore, join in rejecting and condemning these rabbis’ detestable decree. They do not speak for Israel.