The Jewish Power Blog: The Power of Rabbis
As Israel continues to teeter on the edge of a “constitutional crisis” (or maybe has already slipped into one), wherein the difference branches of government refuse to recognize each other’s authority, it is interesting to consider a historical perspective.
As Jews established themselves in communities throughout the diaspora in the middle ages, a bipartite structure became virtually universal: each community was governed by two leaders or leadership elites: lay leadership, generally expressing power based on wealth and/or relations with gentile rulers (which generally went together); and rabbis, whose authority was based on their knowledge of Torah. (This might be seen as a continuation of the concept described a few posts ago – the political/professional dichotomy of kings and priests; and today we have synagogue presidents and rabbis, federation presidents and professional staff.) In order to maintain a balance between internal autonomy and external security within the gentile environment, the two authorities had to function together: the lay leaders dealt with external relations, negotiating the community’s privileges and obligations to the state; the rabbis were responsible for halakha, the Jewish law that governed the people’s everyday lives within the community. Often they managed to work in harmony. Sometimes not. For example:
In about 930 CE, the lay leader of the Babylonian Jewish community, David ben Zakkai, asked the leading rabbi of the community, Saadya Gaon, to give his legal imprimatur to a real estate transaction. Saadya judged the contract to be legally flawed, and refused to sign. Furious, ben Zakkai fired him. Saadya responded by excommunicating ben Zakkai. Ultimately calmer heads intervened and a reconciliation was effected.
(Any similarity to the conflict between the attorney-general and the various ministers of the current coalition is purely coincidental.)
The impasse is a classic example of how the two types of authority can collide. And it shows that the power of the rabbi only exists insofar as the community accepts it. In a community based on the belief that halakha represents God’s will, the authority to determine the halakha is crucial; however, there is a delicate balance between the rabbi and the community; ultimately, the rabbi, for all his or her power, is an employee of the community, and can be dismissed at any moment by the lay leadership. And in modern non-halakhic communities, the rabbi’s authority is even more precarious, based not on so much on legal wisdom but on more subjective criteria such as charisma, pedagogy, and spiritual leadership.
Usually the rabbi’s authority was confined to a particular local community. Rabbis consulted with colleagues elsewhere and generally tried to judge in accordance with widely accepted principles, but every community and every incident was unique, and there was rarely total consensus – and limited success at setting up wider geographical rabbinical hierarchies (for example, the Council of Four Lands in Poland, 1580-1764). The concept of a “chief rabbi” is a modern invention, sometimes imposed by the state, and usually relevant only for communities defined as Orthodox, who accept halakhic authority.
In 1921, with the establishment of British mandatory rule in Palestine, the British imported the concept of chief rabbi, which had developed in England over the previous century. It was not received with enthusiasm. For secular Zionists seeking to build a Jewish nation-state, it was not just irrelevant, but symbolized a return to the exile, with its semi-autonomous religious communities (a view that the British formalized with the Palestine Communities Ordinance in 1927). And the local Orthodox communities saw it as an unwelcome imposition of secular state authority on Jewish communal autonomy.
And yet, here we are, a century later, and the chief rabbinate is alive and well, operating an extensive bureaucracy that certifies communal rabbis, supervises functionaries like kashrut inspectors, operates the Western Wall plaza, authorizes and performs marriages, and operates the network of rabbinical courts (mainly for matters of divorce, inheritance, and conversion). Because it is a state-sanctioned system, most people tend to accept its authority when they have to (e.g., matters of marriage and divorce), or when it is convenient (standardized kashrut supervision); however, even this limited authority continues to diminish as alternative marriage arrangements become more common (common law, civil marriage abroad) – and, at the other end of the spectrum, there are many who won’t rely on the chief rabbinate’s kashrut certification and seek out other halakhic authorities. And of course there are those who seek spiritual and halakhic guidance elsewhere, be it in Hasidic rebbes or Reform and Conservative rabbis (who are, of course, not considered rabbis by the chief rabbinate).
The continued existence of the chief rabbinate raises the question: are we a state or a shtetl? Are we a democracy, with freedom of and freedom from religion? Or is Israel a voluntary community of believers who accept the authority of the halakha – and the rabbis who interpret it – to guide their lives? Is there not a category mismatch when a legal system based on the individual’s belief in God and God’s commandments is enforced by a secular state on millions of individuals who don’t share that belief? Is this not making a mockery of halakha – and of democracy? Moreover, by making rabbis, in the eyes of much of the population, not spiritual guides and moral authorities, but state bureaucrats – and by attempting (with limited success) to suppress alternative halakhic interpretations and non-halakhic expressions of Jewish religiosity – the chief rabbinate by its very existence can be seen as diminishing the Jewishness of the Jewish state.
Perhaps we’ve been in a constitutional crisis since 1921.
