Reaping What We Sow

I believe that entire Western Wall prayer issue is a red herring. What is really at stake here, and the genuine source of the conflict, is: “Who is a Jew?”.

The Reform and Conservative movements have been trying for decades, by overriding the millennia-old system of Halachah (Jewish law) regarding marriages and conversions, to tinker with the basic ‘DNA’ that defines the Jewish Nation. The leaders of these movements did not consult their Orthodox brethren when they unilaterally began conducting conversions, weddings, and divorces outside of the framework of Halachah.

After years of operating according to their own rules, the Conservative and Reform movements are painfully reaping what they have sown. The damage has been done. It will take nothing short of a miracle to make the nation whole once again.

Two-thousand five-hundred years ago, the Jewish Nation experienced a similar return from an exile in Babylonia, back to a restored national life in the Land of Israel. In the ninth and tenth chapters of the Book of Ezra, the Hebrew Bible describes some of the painful decisions Jews were forced to take in order to recreate a unified national life in the Land of our forefathers.

It seems that we, those who have returned to establish and live in the modern State of Israel, as well as all the Jewish people living in the Diaspora, will be compelled to make similar painful choices. In any event: we will survive, one way or another, as one nation in our Promised Land.