Is the biggest danger to Torah coming from Israel's own rabbinic establishment?
Over the past thirty-plus weeks in Israel, there has been lots of talk about the pros and cons of judicial reform, and about the ways that it should and should not be done. While that issue has taken center stage, other important legislation has also been proposed or passed which has been largely ignored... yet many of these changes will have far-reaching - and potentially detrimental - effects on the nature of religion in Israel.
Some of the most recent proposed legislation further empowers the government-sponsored Rabbinate, both at the national and local levels, even as it centralizes rabbinic power more than ever before. And that’s only a piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Rachel Stomel of the Center for Women’s Justice has wide-ranging knowledge of the Rabbinate and the consequences of state-sponsored rabbinic power, and provided needed insight into the history of the Chief Rabbinate, the reasons that the Knesset is trying to increase the Rabbinate's power, who is resisting this legislation, and the reasons that religion married to state power is dangerous to Torah Judaism.
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