Published: 31 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In Jerusalem, on May 26, seven rabbinical students from the U.S., Israel, and the UK excitedly received their graduation scrolls from Rabbi Daniel Landes, former director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Landes parted ways with Pardes in 2016 and recently founded Yashrut, an outside-the-box rabbinic ordination initiative he calls “pre-denominational.” Rabbi Landes proudly announced that he had ordained a total of 43 students, equivalent to the number of consecutive years he has taught halacha (Jewish law) classes.
His speech was a scathing critique of both Jewish liberalism and orthodoxy in their current manifestations. Liberal denominational statements, he said in American slang, were “written by committees and have the poetry of a Walmart circular, advertising what’s on sale.” Orthodox ideological statements “always sound as though they’re written by someone really smart but ad-absurdum extreme and written as if he’s nursing a persistent toothache, with a lot of anger wrapped in one message: ‘it’s our way or the highway’.” All denominations, he asserted, were concerned more with the wellbeing of their own paying members and institutional hierarchies rather than with klal Yisrael (the entirety of the Jewish community).
Students of Yashrut, he continued, were typically “allergic” to two things: religious denominations and ideologies.
Rabbi Landes is one of a small group of pioneering rabbis who have, in recent years, decided to break with mainstream Orthodoxy and ordain women alongside men. Yeshivat Maharat, founded by Rabbi Avi Weiss in New York, has been granting women Orthodox ordination since 2009. Beit Midrash Har’el, led by rabbi Herzl Hefter (where this writer has been studying since 2017), has emerged as the first co-educational Hebrew-language ordination framework in Jerusalem.
Yashrut’s ceremony had a clear activist aroma, reflecting the biographies of many of the graduates on stage. Aryeh Bernstein of Chicago, for instance, is director of the Avodah Justice Fellowship, educational consultant for the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and staff educator for Farm Forward’s Jewish Initiative for Animals. “The Jewish people,” he wrote in a personal statement distributed in a booklet to the audience, “came to being as vulnerable famine refugees welcomed by a wealthy foreign nation, protected for generations before a wicked new regime vilified, oppressed and enslaved us.”
Daniel Atwood, a gay LGBT activist from New York, received Rabbi Landes’ mantle after being denied ordination during his final year of study at the Modern Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, for reasons still undisclosed. “I feel a real sense of responsibility for the Jewish people as a whole, and in particular to the communities I come from and the LGBT community,” Rabbi Atwood told The Jewish Independent. “I don’t see this just as a degree for myself, but rather I’m an emissary for a large group of people who have been marginalised and left out.”
At the ceremony, Yashrut granted the inaugural Game Changer Award to Rabbi Aaron Leibovitz of Jerusalem. Six years ago, Rabbi Leibovitz founded Hashgacha Pratit, a non-profit dedicated to providing high-quality kosher certification to restaurants in a bid to break the monopoly of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. After handing over the mechanism to Tzohar, a mainstream Modern Orthodox organisation, Rabbi Leibovitz founded Chuppot, a non-profit committed to providing Orthodox wedding services to couples incapable or uninterested in marrying under the Chief Rabbinate. In a speech highlighting the values of truthfulness and community to today’s rabbis, Rabbi Leibovitz warned the graduates never to lose sight of the publics they serve. “Do not be more than one or two steps before the public, and never lose eye contact with the mainstream,” he said. “This rule protects us and allows us to continue to influence the people in a sustainable way, without getting stuck at the edge.” “You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself,” he continued quoting Nelson Mandela. “Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but of humility.”
Sarah Mulhern, a native of Salt Lake City and faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, said she had studied the laws of kosher food with Rabbi Landes in Jerusalem four years ago, before continuing her curriculum with him via the internet. For her,being a rabbi meant representing “a depth of Jewish wisdom and knowledge that is inaccessible to most Jews and yet belongs to them.”
Isaac Landes, a new graduate of Yashrut and the son of Rabbi Landes, said he wanted to become a rabbi “to be an example of a way in which people can interact with their Jewish heritage, and also have a relationship with God.” A student of Victorian history at Hebrew University, the new Rabbi Landes added that modern rabbis should have heightened responsibility for people in their communities. “To guide them and be guided by them on their Jewish journey.”
