It was just a few days before Rosh Hashanah, but there was no unusual hustle and bustle at the offices of Chief Tel Aviv Rabbi and former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. The 74-year-old rabbi prefers old-fashioned new year greetings: making phone calls rather than text messaging or Facebook. The rabbi also has a long tradition of talking with each of his well-wishers by phone. But going down the list of people to call is more than just a routine errand; it teaches us a lot about this multifaceted figure, beloved both at home and abroad. You might find him going over postcards sent from Cuba; then he might take a call from disabled veterans from the Yom Kippur War. Next it could be Holocaust survivors or President Shimon Peres. It seems as if every government minister calls at some point. After 50 years in the public limelight, he is elevated as a sage. He is active, articulate, levelheaded, mainstream. But above all, he is concerned about the growing division between secular and religious Jews, the assimilation of the Jewish people and the socio-economic disparities in Israel. The recent wave of social protests had their epicenter in Tel Aviv. The movement, naturally, preoccupied him, although he had to disavow some aspects of it. There is a consensus about the need for social justice. There must be something done to ease things in the housing market, in school tuition, and to lower prices. It is unacceptable that a young person who gives to his country and continues to do so is not able to find a decent place to live, says Lau.
He is extremely troubled by the state of affairs on the socio-economic front, but his reasoning is less than obvious. The high cost of living in Israel leads many youths to emigrate from Israel and meet non-Jewish girls, he says. Assimilation is rising fast. I served for 15 years on the rabbinical court and I know this side of the protest ... A young man who wishes to pursue post-secondary education sometimes has no place to go and no real profession he can obtain in Israel, so he ends up going overseas. Several months later his parents call me and plead that I help convert his girlfriend to Judaism. This happens a lot in Budapest, London, California, and practically everywhere in the world. Parents want Jewish grandchildren. Whether they are religious or not, they want Jewish continuity, and this creates a big mess. Unfortunately, this is much more common today. There were times when this would be limited to Israelis meeting female volunteers who came from abroad to work on a kibbutz, but now this is rampant.
Lau has an explanation for the phenomenon. Today teens are not given all the necessary vaccines against intermarriage in school, he says. A young person goes abroad for several years and returns home with a woman and says, We are both human beings and that is what matters.' I understand this, but this trend just leads to assimilation, which shrinks our population more than all the physical persecutions over the ages combined. With each passing day, we lose many boys and girls because of assimilation.
Rather than hide behind vast generalizations on the matter, Lau provides concrete examples. He cites the famous relationship between Israeli model Bar Refaeli and Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio, which is now reportedly over. Today our society has no problem with a relationship between an Israeli celebrity and a gentile man, he says. Some view them as role models. We are facing a problem. If there are no checks on this trend of young people who have to go abroad, the lurking dangers materialize. This is an existential threat, and this is one of the reasons for my support for the social justice movement.
His awe of the protesters has yet to wane. For the first time in history the public took to the streets en masse over an issue that is not related to national security. We have always come together at times of war and when our national security was at stake, but now people are taking to the streets and talking about cottage cheese and apartments.
Nevertheless, Lau still harbors some criticism about how the younger generation has changed. The young people of today are different that the youth of the past because the older generation of today has not had the same experience as their parents, who live in small tin huts and shoddy cabins. Everyone used to travel by bus, but today many have their own vehicles. Most people live in their own apartment. The young people of today have grown up in an entirely different kind of environment. When we arrived in Israel, the concept of air conditioning was still foreign to all of us, and yet we still managed in the heat. Today you would never enter a car or an office that did not have air conditioning. Slowly but surely, the days in which a fan was sufficient have disappeared. I recall how people used to go all the way to Cyprus to buy a steam iron, the ultimate luxury. Today people can travel to the four corners of the earth without a problem.
Look at the abundance of cars on the roads, and look at Kikar Hamedina [an upscale shopping district in Tel Aviv] ... Some in the upper brackets are far more well off than the rest. The young people of today demand things that the generation of the Palmach, Irgun and the Lehi [pre-state Jewish underground movements] could only dream of. But times have changed and parents are not the same, and neither are the young people.
Despite having said all that, the rabbi does concede a great deal of inequality within the country. There are clear disparities between Israelis in the south and those in the north, he says. They are almost two separate countries, however inaccurate the standard of living is portrayed to be.
Lau also notes the lack of religious groups in the protest movement. The religious chose not participate, he believes, because of the protest's perceived political nature. No one knew who Daphni Leef was when the protest first started. In the early stages of the tent encampment, Kiddush was even carried out on Friday evenings to mark the onset of Shabbat. Eventually, though, the protest movement became incongruent with the moral codes of religious youth. Without going into details, let's just say that living in tent encampments can lead to many uncomfortable situations in terms of religious modesty, and this easily conflicts with the religious upbringing of that sector of the population.
As the protests unfolded, Lau met with top leaders of the social justice movement and invited them to his office for a long conversation. I presented them with the three conditions that I thought they had to meet in order to win over the general public: The first was no violence, God forbid, in any protest venue. I even condemned the fact that a guillotine was placed on Rothschild Boulevard and a shoe was thrown at a member of the Trajtenberg Committee [appointed by the government to address the demands of the protesters] and the derogatory renaming of a street in Beersheba. I could not identify with such acts. The second condition was that they remain above the political fray and do not become affiliated with any particular party; and I also suggested that they do not fight against something, but rather for something, and that they give the government a chance to mend its ways.
But they did not follow his advice in full. The prime minister responded to the demands of the masses and formed a committee headed by someone who enjoys across-the-board professional acclaim. Eighteen ministers worked with the committee. The prime minister has even vowed to adopt the committees' recommendations via a government resolution. Unfortunately, I see that one of the protest movement leaders who sat in my office called on the Trajtenberg Committee members to resign. I realized that my words had fallen on deaf ears.
Lau sees a link between the protest movement and the erosion of religion's appeal. The ultra-Orthodox community subscribes to thriftiness, and rather than viewing this concept as a worn-out cliche, they see it as a way of life. Families with many children cannot provide in the same way that a family with two kids can, and this may create a gap between the expectations you have from the materialistic world you are in and the spiritual world you live by. Since ultra-Orthodox parents cannot provide their kids with all the luxuries in the world, they impart them with a great amount of knowledge and give them a warm familial setting. The gathering of the family for a Shabbat and holiday dinner is much stronger as an institution in this community, as is the family bond.
I can say without being suspected of bias that I know both worlds. Assimilating out of Jewish tradition causes many problems that are not part of ultra-Orthodox life. This can be manifested in the expectations and the standards of living. For example, an ultra-Orthodox teen who enters bar mitzvah age normally receives what is tantamount to a personal library of Jewish scriptures; a non-religious boy will get electronic gizmos, video games and the promise of an overseas trip. The ultra-Orthodox child experiences a more spiritual world.
In recent weeks, the gap between religious and secular communities has widened. A group of religious soldiers were evicted from an officers training course after refusing to hear a group of female soldiers sing during an IDF ceremony, pointing to a trend of the national religious community gravitating more toward an ultra-Orthodox way of life
The events do not surprise Lau, who says, The partitions have been raised ... The world has advanced and is more open today. Religious communities feel they need to defend themselves more these days. For example, newspapers today are not what they used to be 50 years ago. The headlines, photographs, topics and style of writing are all different. In the past, daily newspapers were good for all. Today, they do not belong in a religious home. In the past, people would discuss articles by Efraim Kishon, Azriel Carlebach and others in their synagogues. This phenomenon has disappeared as well. The religious community is avoiding public trends due to their influence.
Lau rejects claims that rabbis are more stringent today than they were in the past. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who founded the chief rabbinate of Israel and was a symbol of rabbinical leniency, was opposed to women voting in parliamentary or municipal elections in Israel. No rabbi today is more stringent than he was. Other than Neturei Karta, there is no rabbi, even among the ultra-Orthodox, who would prohibit that today. Stringency has not come from rabbis; it has been dictated by the reality we live in today, a reality that has created chasms which I myself am trying to bridge with my limited ability.
As someone who has been in the presence of presidents and prime ministers, Lau knows how to assess every leader and his or her attributes. He, too, was worried during September, not because of the gloomy security forecasts or the frantic reports of an imminent economic crash, but rather for the demise of our Jewish identities. We are changing the business cards that identify us as a Jewish state, he says. When we have supermarkets called Tiv Ta'am (Best of Taste) and AM:PM, which are open on the Sabbath day and Jewish holidays, we are becoming a nation of consumers who shop seven days a week, like every other nation. This places a question mark at the end of the title 'Jewish state.'"
For Lau, no problem is greater than that of assimilation. I heard about a poll taken in the U.S. that truly frightened me. They asked 100 secular Jews if they believed their grandchildren would be Jewish. The poll revealed that relative to the number of family members and the person's communal affiliation, only 7 percent of the fourth generation would be Jewish. Listen well -- only seven out of 100! On the other hand, in ultra-Orthodox societies outside Israel, in which people marry only within their communities, 100 Jews today will yield 2,500 Jews by the fourth generation, which once again raises the question of whether or not we desire life as a nation.
The question now is what lies ahead for the rabbi. A few years ago people suggested he run for the presidency of Israel, an idea he did not embrace. I am the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, Lau says. The role of a president is not suitable for a rabbi. There is a difference in the lifestyles of the two, and it should be noted that I come from 38 generations of rabbis -- a chain that I would not want to break. When they suggested I run for the presidency, before Shimon Peres won the job, I said that it wouldn't be a personal change for me, but rather a geographical and substantial change for my entire family. On one particular night, after the Sabbath day ended and the family gathered together, the question of my candidacy was raised, the children were told that it had been suggested that their father run for the office of president, and that their opinions on the matter were requested. One abstained, and the rebbetzin and seven other children were opposed. Everyone felt that it was best that I continue to serve in the rabbinate, because that was my generational heritage.
My father was a well-known rabbi in Poland. He perished in Treblinka. I was 5 when he left, leaving me in the care of my brother Naftali. My father said to my brother in the stairwell of the building, 'Tulik (Naftali), watch over Lulik (Israel, me), and make sure you continue the family chain that began 1,000 years ago.' And that is exactly what I am doing.