Hazony may bemoan the fact that the judges, in the matter of the Women of the Wall, entered potentially catastrophic territory where, perhaps, sensitivity would dictate a preference for informal arrangements. Nevertheless, the true outrage in the character of the court’s activism should have been directed at the obvious prejudice the court supports in discriminating between Jews who, on the one hand, are female, feminist, progressive, and not all Orthodox, and Jews who, on the other hand, are male, traditionalist, and Orthodox.

The judges, in effect, gave notice that the sensitivity of the religious feelings of the state-recognized Chief Rabbinate, which opposed the petition of the Women of the Wall, can be overridden. Yet, in the matter of the various groups that sought court recognition to be permitted to pray either in a quorum or even individually, the judges gave preference to the Chief Rabbinate, which has sought to prohibit entry onto the Temple Mount.

I also found disagreeable the citing by Hazony in a positive fashion of the Ottoman practices in force at holy sites, as if this were a precedent on which one should rely. Firstly, now that we have a Jewish political entity which has finally assumed sovereignty over the Jewish homeland, any Ottoman code should be superseded and therefore become irrelevant. Secondly, as a result of the Ottoman legislation and practices, which kept Jews away from the Temple Mount (except for singular cases such as the visit of Sir Moses Montefiore), the British were able in 1929 to appoint an international commission following the Arab riots that year. Those riots, resulting in 133 Jewish dead, began, at the behest of the mufti, in the Temple Mount courtyards. One year later, the commission declared that the Western Wall was part of the Haram es-Sharif, it being Waqf property. The practical ramification of that was the prohibition of Jews from blowing the shofar at the Wall. That, to my mind, is not an example of a sensitive resolution of a dispute. In fact, Yasser Arafat continuously refers to the conclusions of this committee to justify his opposition to any arrangement in Jerusalem that would not leave him with sovereign rights over the Temple Mount as well as the Western Wall and, in addition, the prevention of Jews from conducting any archeological digs under the Haram es-Sharif compound on the Temple Mount.

Israel’s policy regarding the Temple Mount since 1967, supported by the Supreme Court, has been self-defeating. The issue of the Temple Mount, thrust to the fore at the Camp David II deliberations, is at a point where the Israeli establishment is forced to choose either to ignore its importance to the fabric of Jewish historical and political self-identification or to capitulate in the name of compromise and self-abnegation. That the justices of the country’s Supreme Court would lend a hand to this while supporting such relatively trivial matters as the Women of the Wall should have been a point raised by Hazony.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh

 

The central argument of Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz’s essay on the meaning of the Sabbath (“Secret of the Sabbath,” Azure 10, Winter 2001) is that the Jewish day of rest represents a unique synthesis of the passive and the active: Of the individual’s acquiescence to nature, which according to Lifshitz expresses passivity, and his attempt to control nature and transform it into a symbol of his power and uniqueness, which is active.

At first glance, this sounds like another version of the Aristotelian golden mean, according to which virtue may be found by avoiding extremes and walking a middle path. But in applying this model to the idea of the Sabbath, Lifshitz ends up making a far more dramatic claim, in effect arguing for the complete uniqueness of Jewish culture and theology. Not satisfied with depicting the Sabbath as a golden mean between activity and passivity, Lifshitz turns it into a tool by which Judaism as a whole may be seen to act as such a mean, between Western civilization, which represents the domination of nature by man, and Eastern civilization, which encourages man to be receptive to nature and subservient to it. In the Sabbath, Lifshitz argues, Jewish civilization offers a balanced alternative to both.

We may leave aside the problems inherent in such generalizations. (For example, Lifshitz contents himself to cite Descartes’ ideas about nature as proof of his claim, as if Descartes were somehow representative of all of Western culture, from its cradle in Greece to our own technological age.) The real problem with this argument lies, however, in the way it depicts the relationship between God and man in Jewish theology as one based on imitation. In Lifshitz’s mind, God’s creations observe the Sabbath not because they are thus commanded, without reference to any rational meaning. Rather, man observes the Sabbath in imitation of God’s creativity, an act which transforms man into a creative being as well.

This line of reasoning is sophisticated, but it does not work. It is sophisticated because, in arguing that this is imitation not of God per se but of his actions, Lifshitz seems to avoid the problem of fashioning an image of God—and Judaism always distinguished itself from paganism through its unequivocal prohibition of “graven images,” of imitations of the divine essence. But this effort to preserve the imitation of God’s creativity while avoiding the problem of divine images does not, in the end, succeed.

For the biblical command against imitating the image of God is a sweeping one. It does not merely prohibit the fabrication of likenesses of him; it goes as far as to include the idea of imitating divine actions through actions of our own. An absolute separation is required, one that does not allow any connection between the divine and the human. While Lifshitz himself argues strongly that part of Judaism’s uniqueness is its complete separation between God and his creations, he nonetheless violates this division by calling for imitation of the divine, particularly through creative action.

Aside from this problem, I would like to call into question Lifshitz’s employment of the Sabbath idea in his critique of instrumental rationalism as formulated by the Frankfurt school. The only connection between the two, it seems, is that both address the idea of “labor.” The Sabbath indeed requires that one refrain from work one day per week, but Judaism does not argue that labor itself leads to man’s dehumanization, as do the thinkers of the Frankfurt school. In order to show that there is anything here more than a similarity of terms, what is required is a far broader conceptual effort, one that would analyze the entire pattern of consciousness inherent in the idea of the Sabbath, and not only the prohibition of labor, in order to offer a critique of a complete way of thinking—as the philosophers of the Frankfurt school attempted to do with the idea of rationalism as it developed in Western culture with the Enlightenment.

In principle, I am sympathetic to Lifshitz’s basic insight that the “critical thinking” of the Frankfurt school may be connected with the fundamentals of Jewish philosophy. Special care, however, must be taken in articulating this point, so as not to undermine the fundamental principles of Jewish belief, on the one hand, while still showing that the connection between the two is more profound than a mere affinity of terms.

Pini Ifergan
Jerusalem