Interview with Yoav Sorek-Part V
Below is the final part of the interview with Yoav Sorek.
Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.
The Holiness in the Seam Line Sector
Maybe redemption will come from what you call the boundary sector, people who occupy the area between the religious and the secular?
“Correct. Taking off the kippah is maybe a type of joining this diversified expanse. I am joining it as a datla”sh (dati le-she-avar/”a person who used to be religious”) who observes the commandments, or however you want to call it. It’s about people who have in common that they think that Jewish identity is essential, the root, that it needs to guide us and we have to connect to it in a serious manner. On the other hand, they understand that the religious Orthodox version is not that which will save us. These people don’t buy this package deal, for any number of reasons. Newly religious (hozrim be-teshuvah), those who are no longer religious (hozrim be-she’eilah), Biliakists who are the Last of the Mohicans, those who have been in mixed preparatory (i.e. pre-army) programs, and more. All of this group is in my eyes holy, since there is found the key. In this linking.
“But this group is amorphic. It deviates. Everyone and his own combination. What is lacking is a concrete world view that is able to bring about commitment, that is able to sprout a social process beyond the interesting things that are able to result from each one of these figures. And this is the mission that I see for myself, the movement that I am trying to build. I don’t have either the ability or the desire to establish a new denomination. Our aspiration needs to be to link up with established processes and to existing forces and to give them tools that they don’t have.”
And they are?
“When I meet people who are close to me ideologically, I feel that if it is possible for me to have a unique contribution, it is the absence of the feeling that I need to break something in order to go to where I want to go. I come from a long line of rabbis and I love dearly the give-and-take of the halakhic decisors (poskim) throughout the generations, who worked hard to clarify God’s word, and I feel that what is needed to be done today is to continue this enterprise. And this is possible to do in the context that I am talking, and not in the discussions that are totally blind to what is going on around them, which exist in the majority of the study halls (betei midrash). I feel that this is continuity, traditionalism, that here is the awe of God. I feel that many people are standing in a sort of fissure between their religiosity and other things, and I am not.”
There are other existing denominations who sit on the seam line: the traditional-Mizrahi and the traditional-Conservative.
“What is correct about the traditional (masorati) model is that in popular belief there are two levels. There is something that is obligatory and there is another higher level of what you would do if you wanted to invest more in the religious side of your life. So it seems in the Mizrahi society, and this is a correct model for the future. In a certain sense this model exists within halakhah, just that it is fuzzy. The ‘Shulhan Arukh,’ and it is possible to prove this in a number of places, is written for scholars, for people who want a higher spiritual level, and it is clear that not everything in it is meant to be obligatory for everyone. For example, it is written there that a person needs to be one of the first ten people in the synagogue. How can everyone be one of the first ten? It is clear that this is intended for one who wants to behave in a pietistic manner.
“The one problem with the Mizrahi traditionalism is that it is very conservative. It demands to preserve religion as it was in exile. It says, I want that there should be an ideal religious model that is very Orthodox, and I want to observe it partially. From the perspective of the traditional person, let the messiah never come, don’t make innovations, don’t invent anything.”
And the Conservative model? The more halakhic wing of the movement would seem to be close to you, just that in your eyes the turning point is Zionism and not modernity.
“I call my approach post-Orthodox. A return to what Judaism was before Orthodoxy. From a halakhic standpoint, the legal decisions of Rabbi David Golinkin, the Israeli representative of the halakhists in this movement, are Orthodox legal decisions. For better and for worse. He also doesn’t think, so I think, that redemption has arrived.
“I have no problem to identify with many aspects of what is called the right-wing of the Conservative movement. I am deterred, on the other hand, from a halakhic approach that searches for a Judaism which doesn’t injure too much, that doesn’t infringe upon modern life too much, politically correct. I am averse to this. The problem with the Conservative movement is in the tune and not the content. It creates a not so good connotation, and in a number of cases deservedly so.
“But nevertheless, I think that in the religious crisis of today in which Orthodox Jews are a minority within the people of Israel and also responsible for some of the distortions of the way in which the Torah is implemented in reality, they don’t have the right to right anyone off.
Maybe their desire is not that the Torah won’t impinge upon modern life, but, rather, that it won’t contradict additional values that are accepted by us, humanistic values?
“I don’t automatically agree that the accepted morality is preferable to the morality of the Torah. In my opinion, until this day it has proven the opposite. I am not at all sure that there don’t have to be sacrifices in the Temple may it be speedily rebuilt, and I am sure that the majority of the Conservatives-and many Modern Orthodox-will fall off their chair is you will propose to them a Temple with sacrifices. I think that we need to work towards a renewal of the laws of purity and impurity, not to nullify them. Not to minimize the Torah as fast as possible, rather, sometimes also to increase it in areas in which it isn’t present today.”
Why should we renew the laws of impurity and purity?
“They are laws that organize the relationship to the inorganic world. They were one of the central religious occupations of the Second Temple Period. There is in this a type of deep religiosity that we don’t know today, that is lacking for us.”
The halakhah needs, according to his opinion, to return to the path of slow development which characterized it until it was frozen when Orthodoxy began-excluding that which is connected to the historical turning point of the establishment of Israel in its land, this needs to undergo a radical change.
“And this is not just with regard to the laws of the state (hilkhot medinah), rather, in connection to the body, the relationship to work, the relationship to a person’s time and many other things.”
But when we get down to details, Sorek is as stingy as a cheapskate. I propose to him as a classic example the commandment of taking tithes (terumot u-ma’asrot): Aren’t payments to the National Insurance Institute the sort of the proper sovereign, reasonable, and effective incarnation of the commandment of tithing-a social commandment in its source,which is observed today in a meaningless framework, the destruction of fruits, and incumbent only upon farmers? He is reluctant. It is preferable for a commandment be done out of love, he says, than through a tax which is perceived as a punishment.
But “there is something almost neurotic in the religious reality today,” he agrees. “The truth is that the younger generation in the religious community knows a little bit about how to free itself from this. It chooses more, it connects more. Along with this, to give up on halakhot on a whim would be irresponsible.”