Published: 13 January 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Israel’s new government is a watershed for some Jews both inside and outside Israel.
Ofri Ilany won’t be celebrating Hanukkah this year, nor Purim and certainly not Pesach.
The Israeli historian will not be celebrating any Jewish holidays because he cannot subscribe to the public Judaism supported by the ultra-Orthodox and far Right of Israel’s new government.
“Judaism in present-day Israel is behaving like the Catholic Church in Franco’s Spain. This is the time to shun it, to drop out,” he wrote in Haaretz.
“My disconnect from Judaism does not stem from indifference. As of now, I believe that it’s the proper response to the arrogance of the parties that comprise the government, all of which are waving the banner of Judaism proudly. I don’t want to be associated with Kahanism in any way shape or form – not even by association.
“The despicable plans to buttress Jewish identity in virtually every realm of life demand a response of sweeping boycott, as well as a sharp counter-movement. If this is the direction Judaism is taking, the result will be that many people will not wish to be part of it.”
Ilany wrote that while Diaspora Jews might be able to say the extremists do not represent the” real Judaism”, this idea was not open to Israelis.
“Judaism that abides in the space around me is not that of queer synagogues in San Francisco. It’s the Judaism of classes taught in elementary school, rabbinical kashrut supervisors and Chabad’s Hanukkah doughnuts. These are all elements of my identity that I no longer wish to cultivate.
“Under the present circumstances I do not want to say “who has sanctified us through his commandments” or to “recount the heroism of Israel.” I look forward to better days, when Judaism will return from “a thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech,” in Paul Celan’s words. When that happens, I will be able to light a Hanukkah candle. But that time is not visible on the horizon.”
A Zionist rabbi who can no longer pray for Israel’s leaders
On the other side of the world, Ansche Chesed, a Conservative synagogue in the liberal bastion of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, announced it will no longer recite the standard Prayer for the State of Israel as part of its services.
The congregation has stopped reciting the prayer which describes Israel as “the initial sprouting of our redemption” and asks God for the success of its leaders. Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, Ansche Chesed’s long-time leader, told Forward he can no longer honestly and full-throatedly pray for the success of Israel’s leaders, ministers and advisers, since its new government includes right-wing extremists he considers akin to the Ku Klux Klan.
“I just could not imagine us saying this prayer that their efforts be successful. I think their efforts are dastardly.”
Rabbi Kalmanofsky did not think it was enough to join hundreds of his colleagues in signing a letter last month vowing not to let the Religious Zionist party’s leaders speak at their synagogues. Like many of those rabbis, he gave a sermon — or as he described it, an “impassioned screed” — decrying the results of the latest Israeli election, but felt the situation demanded a more sustained response.
At first, he thought he’d write something to replace the prayer for Israel pasted into Ansche Chesed’s prayer books, but “that just proved a little harder than I thought,” the rabbi said. “It may yet come.”
He looked at some alternative — “lefty” was the word he used — prayers and poems that have circulated over the years but found them too “ambivalent about Zionism” or otherwise lacking, concluding that they would not “work for me as a Jewish prayer in a Jewish setting.”
So, for the last few weeks the congregation has been reciting Psalm 122 to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem and all who live under her authority.”
READ MORE
Why I’m Turning My Back on My Jewish Identity (Haaretz)
Why this Zionist rabbi has stopped saying the Prayer for the State of Israel (Forward)
Illustration: Avi Katz
