How a hardcore settler rabbi got ‘cancelled’ for talking to Reform Jews

ANSHEL PFEFFER: Rabbi Eliezer Melamed’s fate exposes the faultlines in Jewish fundamentalism and religious ultra-nationalism over engaging with non-Orthodox Jews

ELIEZER MELAMED’S HARDCORE religious nationalist credentials are impeccable. He is the rabbi of Har Bracha, a settlement deep in the West Bank overlooking Nablus. His father is the rabbi of another settlement and his mother has been for over three decades the driving force behind Arutz Sheva, the main settler media group.

He is also the dean of a hesder yeshiva, where students combine Torah study with military service. In 2009, he openly backed pupils who refused to obey orders to evict an illegal settler outpost and for four years the IDF severed its connections with the yeshiva.

There are few if any more prominent rabbis today in the settler movement, yet in recent months, many of his colleagues in the Haredi-nationalist (hardali) wing of Orthodoxy have been ostracizing him. It reached a peak two weeks ago when two senior rabbis, Dov Lior and Meir Mazuz, publicly rescinded their haskamot [endorsements)] of Melamed’s latest book on halakha [Jewish law].

Cancelling a haskama is a very rare move. A haskama is like one of those blurbs you see on the covers of more secular-minded book. Once they’re printed, that’s it. Especially as in this case, the two rabbis claim to be doing so, among other reasons, because they’ve discovered objections to some of Melamed’s rulings.

In other words, they’ve had to admit what everyone knew anyway, that rabbis routinely endorse their colleagues’ books without actually reading them.

FULL STORY How a hardcore settler rabbi got 'cancelled' for talking to Reform Jews (Haaretz)

Photo: Rabbi Eliezer Melamed (Nir Keidar)