On Wednesday, the cantor saved a world

     “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he has saved an entire world.”

     So the Talmud tells us, and so Chazan Eric Wasser did several weeks ago Wednesday, when he gave up one of his kidneys so that a congregant in his shul could live.

     Eric Wasser is cantor of the Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The congregant is Harvey Jaffee, himself an extraordinary and selfless human being who in recent years has been a Judaics teacher to teenagers, many of whom often bring friends to class with them. Jaffee’s kidneys had failed him, and the prognosis for a long life (much less a productive one) was grim, to put it in the best light.

     Shortly before the surgery, Mr. Jaffee sat with Chazan Wasser. “My children want to know what they can do for you,” he told his cantor. “They want to thank you, but they can’t even begin to think of something appropriate for the person who saved their father’s life.”

     Wasser did not miss a beat. “I should be thanking you,” he said, “for giving me the opportunity to help extend a life of someone who does so much good for others.”

     I visited the two men in the hospital the day after their surgeries. In my time with Chazan Wasser, I thanked him for this tremendous mitzvah generally, and specifically for saving the life of a man who has taught me so much about selflessness and courage. The cantor repeated to me what he had said to Mr. Jaffee, that he is the one who is thankful for the opportunity. We both also marveled at a compassionate God who could put two people who were so perfect a blood and tissue match for each other.

     Both men also had something else to say—pass it forward.

     A healthy person can donate a kidney; a part of the liver, lung, or intestine; or bone marrow. According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which maintains a running count on its website, as of the moment I write these words, 99,357 people in the United States are awaiting a kidney to save their lives; 15,715 people are waiting for a liver; another 1,621 are in need of a lung. Eighteen people die each day because no transplant is available in time.

     There are approximately 20,000 people who need donated bone marrow; the average is 3,000 deaths a year because no matching marrow was found in time.

     Blood is the easiest to donate, yet almost always is in short supply in emergency situations. The American Red Cross says that it takes 80,000 units per day to meet the nation’s needs; in one week in February, it announced that it was short 50,000 units of blood. Last September, a nationwide blood shortage caused postponement of elective surgeries in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, which were the heaviest hit areas.

     Clearly, the need is there and, in the case of blood, there is virtually no halachic barrier to donating. Under Jewish law, however, is it permissible to donate a healthy organ? And what about being an organ donor after death—what does halachah have to say about that?

     (A digression is in order. Consider the rest of this article to be a taste of what is available in the JFNNJ-sponsored Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning, a program near and dear to the heart of Harvey Jaffee, the recipient of Cantor Wasser’s kidney; he has done much in the last few years to keep the Hebrew University-created program going. Much of the material cited here is the subject of two lessons its Ethics of Jewish Living curriculum, one of the program’s four core courses.)

     Because saving a life is a prime directive in Judaism—the Torah demands that we “not stand idly by” when another person’s life is in danger (see Leviticus 19:16)—whether it is permissible to donate live organs would seem to be a simple question to answer. It is anything but. There is a clear-cut conflict in Jewish values here: While Judaism maintains that we must do what we can to save a life, it also maintains that all humans are equally valued and, thus, are equally entitled to protection and preservation.

     If all human life is precious, we must go out of our way to save a life. Yet, if all humans are equal, we must draw the line when our own lives are put at risk.

     This is a valid concern in organ donations. After all, general anesthesia can pose a risk and complications can arise during surgery. Seventy years ago, 640 people out every 1 million who were administered general anesthesia died because of it. Today, the number is closer to seven out of every one million, although the risk is a bit higher for people over age 65. In December, a study of a popular anesthetic, etomidate, revealed patients given that drug “had 2.5 times the odds of dying [within 30 days] than those given propofol,” another popular anesthetic.

     Anasthesia is only the entry point in the risks associated with surgery. Perhaps a more serious concern is what is known as Health Care Associated Infections (HAI); one in every 20 patients contracts an HAI while in a hospital; too many die. The HAI-related death in our area two weeks ago of Rabbi Yossie Stern, founder of Project Ezrah and its executive director, undrescores that risk.

     The talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva, in responding to an exaggeratedly hypothetical situation, ruled that we do not have a right to risk our lives to save the life of someone else. “Your life,” he said, “takes precedence.” (See the interesting discussion in Babylonian Tractate Bava Metzia 62a.)

     As noted, however, he was responding to an extreme hypothetical, one that requires absolute certain knowledge of the outcome. Absolute certainty is hard to come by, however. Is any risk forbidden, or is it a question of degree of risk?

     For this, we turn to a discussion in BT Sanhedrin 73a. There it is stated that the Torah demands “that if one sees his companion drowning in the sea or being dragged by an animal, or being attacked by bandits, he is obligated to come to his rescue,” either by himself, or by hiring others to do so, if the situation allows for it.

     Maimonides, the Rambam, codified this in his Mishneh Torah, the Laws of the Murderer and of Saving Lives, 1:14: “Anyone who is able to rescue and nonetheless does not, violates the prohibition of ‘Do not stand idly....’”

     In his commentary to Sanhedrin 73a, the 13th century French scholar Menachem Meiri went further: “Not only is he himself required, if he can do so without endangering himself..., but even through the assistance of others whom he must hire....”

     In other words, we are dealing with degree of risk. If there is a 50-50 chance of survival or less, the risk is considered a “vadai sakanah,” a certain danger, and Jewish law forbids taking that risk. Once the risk falls below 50 percent, however (safek sakanah), a strong minority of opinion allows the risk to be taken.

     The late Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, in Yechaveh Da’at 3:84, applied this to kidney transplants.

     Because “God-fearing medical experts” state that “the removal of a kidney is minimal, and that roughly 99 percent of kidney donors recuperate fully...,” he ruled in 1980, “according to the halachah it is permissible, and even a mitzvah....And this worthy mitzvah will protect the donor as a thousand shields.”

     Rabbi Solomon Freehof, arguably Reform Judaism’s foremost legal authority, was not so positive in his response (see Freehof, S., “Kidney Transplants,” in New Reform Responsa, 1980), however, because “the operation on the potential donor to remove the kidney involves danger and may not go well,” and the operation itself “may not be quite successful.” Thus, while not banning the procedure outright, he ruled that “Jewish ethics does not require us to enter into potential personal danger...when the benefit of the one to be rescued is itself not absolutely clear.”

     Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis echoed this in a 2008 responsum regarding a live liver donation. It acknowledged that “Jewish tradition sees the preservation of human life as a mitzvah of the highest order.” However, “if the attempt to rescue another person would pose a mortal danger (vadai sakanah) to our own lives, we are forbidden to attempt the rescue...[because] ‘your own life takes precedence.’”

     The CCAR responsum referred to “live liver donation surgery” as a “safek sakanah. If so..., an individual is not obligated—and may well be forbidden—to donate part of his or her liver for transplantation.”

     “That decision,” it added, “is a valid Jewish choice, and we must not criticize a person for making it.”

     On the other hand, “The procedure's risks, though not insignificant, are manageable,” the CCAR responsum said. Thus, there is a need to “balance the predominant viewpoint, which grants us the necessary right to safeguard our own lives from danger, with the minority viewpoint, which reaches beyond this bare minimum standard of conduct toward a higher aspiration for our lives.”

     On balance, it ruled, “One is therefore permitted to serve as a live liver donor.”

     That ruling ran counter to an opinion offered in 2002 by Rabbi Moshe D. Tendler, certainly someone on the right halachically who nevertheless is more open to transplants and even favors stem cell research (he is also a Ph.D in biology and a recognized medical ethicist).

     “The Judaeo-Biblical tradition forbids self-sacrifice even to save the life of a loved one,” he wrote in On the Beat, the New York Organ Donor Network Newsletter. “Live donation of kidneys has proven to be a low-risk procedure for the donor. The same cannot be said for adult/adult liver lobe transplant. Until the surgical technique improves, the risk to the donor who must donate a major portion of the liver is too great to encourage this procedure. Adult/child transplants, however, requiring only a small lobe of the liver (which has the ability to regenerate in a short time) can be approved.”

     Because “the shortage of organs is so acute,” Rabbi Tendler in the same article took a far more lenient, albeiut cautious, view on the issue of paying donors for their organs. He admitted that this was a slippery slope, but one he felt was worth the risk.

     As he noted, he was not alone in thinking this way. “Leading medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine in the USA and Lancet in England) have published thoughtful articles suggesting that remuneration will not lead to the commodification (treating as a commodity) of body parts, or exploitation of the indigent, if the organs are donated to the national organ bank and not directed to a specified individual,” he wrote. “The Jewish tradition reluctantly concurs with this analysis because of the overarching consideration of ‘saving a life.’”

     Clearly, when it comes to live donors, most decisors argue that Jewish law encourages organ donations when the odds favor a full recovery for the donor. There is no risk to a donor who is already dead, however. It would seem, therefore, that organ donation after death is less problematic from the standpoint of Jewish law.

     Yet, the opposite is true, for a number of reasons.

     Foremost among these are the belief that we humans are created in the image of God, and how one defines death.

     If we are created in God’s image (assuming God has an “image,” which normative Jewish tradition insists He does not), then desecrating the human body in any way for any reason desecrates that image.

     On the other hand, if God commanded that we “must not stand idly by,” to not desecrate the human body to help others also violates God’s law.

     In an August 1995 article in Moment Magazine, Adena K. Berkowitz provided a heart-wrenching example of this conundrum. The case involved “an Israeli girl who flew with her family to the U.S. for a liver transplant. On the plane, the young girl, while on life support, was declared brain dead. The team assembled to try to save her life now turned to her family and asked if they would donate her remaining healthy organs. They said no. The Israeli family explained, ‘We feel for the other families and we want to help, but we have asked our rabbi and he has said that it is not permitted under Jewish law.’”

     If their rabbi did say such a thing, it was because he considered that leaving the body intact, meaning not “desecrating God’s image,” was of greater importance than the mitzvah not to stand idly by when someone’s life needs saving.

     Desecrating God’s image, in fact, is a non-issue in such cases, according to all but the most rigid authorities. Even the Talmud seems to acknowledge this. In a discussion in BT Chullin 11b, we are told parenthetically that when “an individual’s life is at stake, desecration of the deceased is permitted.”

     True, some authorities deny this—not because God’s image is being desecrated, but because the body of the deceased will not be whole at the time of the resurrection of the dead. No less a medical ethics authority than the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, for many years the supervising rabbi of Shaare Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem and one of the foremost Orthodox authorities on halachah and medicine, forbade a cornea transplant because the donor “will be blind in his eyes” at the time of resurrection. It is not clear, however, where Rabbi Waldenberg actually stood on transplant issues. In one instance, at least, he approved of a kidney transplant, despite his views on resurrection.

     Most people believe that Rabbi Waldenberg’s view, in fact, is the normative Jewish belief, but it is not. For example, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, chief rabbi of Beit El in Israel and head of Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim, called such assertions “nonsense.” The donor “will not be missing anything,” he wrote in 2004. “On the contrary, an organ with which this great mitzvah is done will reappear twice as healthy [at the time of resurrection].”

     The Agudath Israel of America, for one, does not permit organ donations after death, except in very narrow circumstances. Most rabbinic organizations, however, here and in Israel, take the opposite view. The Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, and the Reform CCAR all encourage their laities to become organ donors, within set guidelines. Other rabbinic groups permit organ donations, but only to save the life of another Jew, or in some cases only an observant Jew by their definition of observance. Rabbi Tendler, among many others, considers such positions to be a chilul hashem, a desecration of God’s name.

     It should be noted, in passing, that virtually all authorities allow the acceptance of a transplanted organ, even if they oppose donating that organ, as in the case of the young Israeli girl just cited.

     The more serious halachic hurdle to post-death donation is defining death; more accurately, defining when death actually occurs. Jewish law maintains that if actual death (as opposed to some arbitrary medical definition of death) has not occurred, to harvest an organ is to commit murder (or, at the least, to hasten death).

     Time of “death” is critical in organ donation. Kidneys and the pancreas remain viable for a while even after death, but livers, hearts, and lungs must be harvested before the body of the donor has completely shut down.

     Traditionally, death has been defined since talmudic times as when breathing ceases. This is based on Genesis 7:22, which states, “All in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life.” In the 17th century, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Modena explained the Talmud’s definition as meaning that the brain has stopped functioning. “[A]ll opinions agree that the fundamental source of life is in the brain,” he wrote. “Therefore, if one examines the nose first [the Talmud’s test], which is the organ of servitude of the brain, and there is no spontaneous respiration, none of them [the rabbinic opinions] doubts that life has departed from the brain.”

     It is this opnion that was seized on as the game-changer in organ transplantation. If brain function, not respiration, is the key to “actual death,” then livers, hearts, and lungs may be harvested to save a life.

     The case of 20-year-old Alisa Flatow, the New Jersey native who was the victim of a suicide bomber in April 1995, is the paradigm here. After she was declared to be brain dead, her father, Steven Flatow, consulted with Rabbi Tendler and with his own rabbi, Alvin Marcus. With their approval, he agreed to allow his daughter’s heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and corneas to be transplanted into six people who were on the transplant waiting list. Although two of the six subsequently died, the lives of four people were saved.

     “Alisa Flatow will not only get credit in heaven above for the four people alive, walking around with her organs, but the many hundreds who will be saved because other people will be inspired to follow her example,” Rabbi Tendler was quoted as saying in the Moment article.

     Accepting brain death as the definition of actual definition would seem to be supported by a comment in Mishnah Ohalot 1:6a. According to that talmudic source, a decapitated person is dead regardless of whether blood continues to flow, or the body continues to twitch. Rabbi Tendler argues that a “brain-dead person is like a physiologically decapitated” one.

     Another noted and widely respected decisor, Rabbi J. David Bleich,  disagrees. In Time of Death in Jewish Law, he wrote, “only irreversible cessation of respiratory and cardiac activity accompanied by total absence of movement” is death according to Jewish law.

     Rabbi Bleich (who does support low-risk transplants in cases of live donors) does agree that decapitation ends life; a passing reference in his rather lengthy heavily-footnoted discussion indicates this. He simply does not agree that decapitation is the same thing as “brain death,” because it is impossible to say with certainty that a person’s brain is indeed “dead.” He quotes Dr. Henry K. Beecher, who headed a Harvard Medical School study on brain death published in 1968, who subsequently wrote, “Only a very bold man, I think, would attempt to define death....We felt we could not define death.”

     In the end, in the case of post-death organ donations, it boils down to which authority one is willing to heed, or to personal choice. Rabbi Bleich’s position notwithstanding, ever more authorities today are willing to accept “brain death” as actual death. Saving a life, or several lives, as in the case of Alisa Flatow, takes precedence, in their view.

Highlight of the gods?

Purim is upon us. All hail Marduk. All hail Ishtar.

Oy vey.

There are some decidedly Jewishly off-key elements regarding Purim (aside from the fact that pur means lot in Akkadian, not Persian), and uppermost among them are its heroes, Mordechai and Esther.

We know Esther was not the good queen’s Jewish name, because “her” book tells us her name was Hadassah. I prefer her English name, Myrtle (Hadassah derives from the word hadas, which means myrtle, a symbol of righteousness). “Esther” has nothing to do with myrtles or righteousness. The name derives from a Semitic deity, Ishtar, or Astarte, she whom the Greeks and later the Romans adopted, calling her Aphrodite and Venus respectively.

In other words, Esther is the personification of the pagan goddess of love, and she plays the role to perfection in M’gillat Ester (The Scroll of Esther). First, she goes out on one date and becomes queen of the Persian Empire. Next, she defies the rules of the Persian court, yet has the king blubbering about giving her whatever she wants, up to and including half of his empire. Such things did not happen because she was better at Scrabble than he was.

As for Mordechai, while the name appears elsewhere in the Tanach (Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, both referring to the same person, but not our hero), this does not prove that the name is a Jewish one. “Mordechai” comes from the Babylonian god of war, Marduk (it actually means “follower of Marduk”). Our Mordecai leads a war of sorts when he thwarts Haman’s genocidal plan, and obtains the king’s permission for the Jews to take up arms against their attackers, killing 75,810 of them in two days of fighting.

Then there is the date for Purim—Adar 14 for most of us, Adar 15 for anyone living in a city that had a wall surrounding it during the days of Joshua (meaning Jerusalem, at least in current times). Adar 14 was “Marduk’s day” in Mordechai’s day (see, for example, II Maccabees 15:36). In his day, too, Adar 15 was a solar festival; Marduk, being the creator god of Babylonian myth, had a central role in that, as well.

All of this suggests that the Purim story is probably an adaptation of pagan mythology, as some scholars theorize. That Marduk and Ishtar never appear together in ancient pagan texts, however, would seem to work against such a theory. If anything, the story would be a combination of pagan myths.

Such a combination is not out of the question. M’gillat Ester has two separate ancient literary motifs—a court intrigue involving Mordechai, and a harem intrigue involving Esther. Each of those could have drawn on ancient Marduk and Ishtar legends, as well.

That such things troubled the sages of blessed memory is indicated by a discussion in the Babylonian Talmud tractate M’gillah 7a—a tractate dedicated to the rites and rituals of Purim. In the discussion, we find the vestiges of a debate about whether M’gillat Ester should even be included in the Tanach.

Other problems entered into this debate, as well. There are, for example, several glaring omissions in the book. God is nowhere to be found, albeit indirectly; prayer is never heard, or even suggested; the Jews party hearty after their victory, but are not seen thanking the God who delivered them; “the Jew Mordechai” refuses to bow to Haman because to do so would violate a Jewish law that does not exist; and he appears to have no qualms about turning over his cousin and ward, Esther, to the harem of a non-Jew.

On the other hand (Judaism always has an “other hand”; just ask Tevye), there are just as many indications that pagan motifs were borrowed to retell biblical tales.

The story of Joseph comes to mind, for one. Joseph is imprisoned on a false charge; the Jews in Esther are falsely charged. Joseph’s life turns around because the king of Egypt’s sleep is disturbed; the fate of Esther’s Jews turns around because the king of Persia’s sleep is disturbed. Joseph is “dressed in fine linen” after his elevation; Mordechai “left the king’s presence in royal robes of blue and white.” Joseph was led through the capital city in a royal chariot, with a shouting runner before him; Mordechai was led through the capital city on a royal steed, with a shouting runner before him.

Another story that comes to mind is that of King Saul and Agag, king of the Amalekites, in I Samuel 15. Mordechai’s ancestor is someone named Kish; Saul had a son named Kish. Haman is called an Agagite, suggesting that he is descended from Agag. In the original, Saul is ordered to kill all the Amalekites, our bitterest and most dangerous foes, but spares Agag. For this, he has his kingdom wrested from him. The Esther story thus would seem to be a replay of the original Saul-Agag encounter, with the intention of vindicating Saul.

In the end, none of this matters compared to the message: The God of Israel keeps His promise. No matter what they throw at us, we are here to stay.

Chag Purim Sameach.

Women, tefillin, and tzitzit: A myth-understanding

First Published in the Jewish Standard: 30 January 2014

Two Modern Orthodox day schools in New York — SAR Academy in Riverdale and Ramaz in Manhattan — are embroiled in controversy for allowing young women to don tallit and tefillin, if they so choose.

From a halachic standpoint, there should be no controversy. The Torah does not forbid women from wearing either. Just the opposite; it seems to require them to do so. Certainly, when it comes to wearing fringed garments, we have the word of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Menachot 43a that women are required to do so. As for tefillin, we have examples of women who did both, beginning in the Babylonian Talmud itself. In BT Eruvin 96a, for example, it is clear that women may wear tefillin if they wish to do so.

Men decided that women should be exempted — or prohibited outright — from wearing either tzitzit or tefillin, the Torah notwithstanding. There is no clear-cut explanation for why they did so, as can be seen in the just-cited Eruvin discussion and a longer one in the BT tractate Kiddushin.

The Eruvin example focused on King Saul’s daughter Michal. The gemara says that the sages did not object to her wearing tefillin.

On the other hand, the Jerusalem Talmud says the sages did object to her doing so. Some rabbis seized upon this to prove that women are forbidden to wear tefillin (including Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his commentary to Eruvin 96a). That, however, violates a rule established by the Babylonian authority Hai Gaon, who said that where a conflict exists between the two talmuds, we rely on Babylonian version (Teshuvot ha-Geonim No. 46 and elsewhere). Rabbi Isaac Alfasi (a/k/a the Rif) echoes this in his commentary to BT Eruvin 104b in another context, where he says “we rely [only] on our gemara…,” not on the Jerusalem Talmud.

The most common argument heard against women wearing tefillin is that the Mishnah exempts them from “all positive time-bound commandments….” (See BT Kiddushin 29a.) The gemara that follows this, however, challenges the absolute nature of the principle, citing several examples of positive time-bound commandments women must observe.

Also challenged in that discussion is whether wearing tefillin is a time-bound commandment. Rabbi Meir, for one, did not seem to think so. If it is not, of course, then women clearly would be required to wear tefillin because the time-bound principle does not apply to it. That led some rabbis to flat-out prohibit women from doing so. As explained by Rabbi Abraham Gombiner (the Magen Avraham), this is “because [wearing tefillin] requires a clean body, and women are not assiduous enough” about keeping clean. (See his commentary to the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 38:3.) Yet this, too, contradicts an established rule. In BT Berachot 22a, a Land of Israel rabbi named Judah ben Bathyra declared that “words of Torah are not susceptible of uncleanness.” That rule is confirmed two centuries later in Babylonia, according to a discussion in BT Chullin 136b, which states that “the world has adopted… that [view] of Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra….” (As an aside, the gemara at BT Megillah 32a says that women may even appear on the bimah and at the reader’s stand, for the same reason.) The Kiddushin discussion also attempts to explain the tefillin exemption by equating the mitzvah of tefillin to Torah study, which it says women are also exempt from doing (which some insist amounts to an outright prohibition against women studying Torah).

The Torah, of course, seems to have a different view. Says Deuteronomy 31:11-12, all Israelites must learn the law, including women. “[Y]ou shall read this Torah before all Israel in their hearing…, men and women…, that they may hear, and that they may learn….” The issue is muddled, however, by the time of the Mishnah. In one place (BT Nedarim 35b), it states bluntly, “[A father] teaches Scripture to his sons and daughters.” In another place, BT Sotah 20a, however, we begin to see divided opinions. “Ben Azzai [says], ‘a man is required to teach his daughter Torah…,’ [while] Rabbi Eliezer says, ‘whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflot,’” a word that may be translated as lechery, lewdness, unseemliness, or frivolity, among other definitions.

How could anyone ban women from studying Torah if the Torah insists otherwise? Simple; just parse the sentence to fit the opinion.

The verse in Deuteronomy says, “that they may hear and that they may learn.” According to Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah (BT Chagigah 3a), the Torah uses both “learn” and “hear” in the Deuteronomy verse to teach us that “the men came to learn, [but] the women came [only] to hear.” All of this just touches the surface. Every argument that can be raised to prohibit women from wearing tefillin can be challenged effectively. Even more so does this apply to the mitzvah of wearing tzitzit, as BT Menachot 43a makes clear.

The two day schools should be commended for what they did, not condemned.

 What is most disconcerting, however, is the invective being thrown by some on the Internet at the two SAR girls who asked permission to wear tefillin. They have been subjected to the vilest curses and calumnies. Such disgusting behavior violates God’s law, and in profound ways. Women wearing tzitzit and tefillin does not.


Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi of Temple Israel Community Center | Congregation Heichal Yisrael in Cliffside Park.

From out of hubris shall come contempt

   Israel currently has two chief rabbis—an Ashkenazi one and the Rishon L’tzion, the official title of the Sephardi chief rabbi. A bill making its way through Israel’s legislative process would end that division in 2023 by creating a single chief rabbi for the country.

   The legislation is the brainchild of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni of Hatnua, and is co-sponsored by two Bayit Hayehudi leaders—Religious Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett and Member of Knesset Eli Ben-Dahan.

   Livni’s goal appears laudable. “In a state where there is only one president, one Supreme Court president, one prime minister, and one chief of general staff,” she said, “there is no way to justify the doubling of the position of chief rabbi. We have to rid ourselves of the old-fashioned division of ancestral congregations and start bringing the country together.”

   How noble that sounds, and how so on point it seems. Jews are one people, after all, so maintaining two chief rabbis does seem divisive. The real question, however, is whether Livni’s stated motivation—and Bennet’s and Ben-Dahan’s for joining in—is less about unity and more about something insidious, namely the homogenization of Judaism at the expense of Sephardi and Mizrachi standards, practices, and culture. (The Mizrachi, often confused with the Sephardi, with whom they share many customs and practices, are Jews from Arab lands and North Africa. True Sephardim trace their origins to pre-expulsion Spain and Portugal.)

   Livni’s statement also ignores the realities of Jewish life—realities that have existed almost from our beginning as a people. The midrash tells of the frustration felt by the sages of blessed memory at how unresolvable were the decisions handed down by the Schools of Shammai and Hillel. If one said black, the other almost certainly would say white. Which one was correct? If the Oral Law truly was handed down at Sinai, then who spoke for the God of Sinai?

   The sages finally decided to lock the great minds of both academies into a single room, charging them to remain there until such time as they could produce one law that all could follow. Three years went by and yet, if the one said black, the other said white. Nothing had changed.

   Totally defeated, the sages looked to heaven for help. “You resolve this for us,” they cried. “You tell us which one of these two speak for You? Which one of these two teaches Your proper law?”

   Suddenly, a voice came from heaven: “Elu v’elu divrei elohim chaim; this one and this one are both the words of the living God.”

   There is no one truth. There is no one path. There is no one correct answer. There never was. What mattered—what still matters, the only thing that ever should matter—is whether the answer is “for the sake of heaven,” whether it is meant to enhance and enable adherence to God’s law. To insist that there is only one correct way to interpret God’s law or to observe it is to reject everything that Judaism ever stood for.

   Yet rejection of views that contradict our own is precisely what exists in Jewish life today.

   Let us be honest. There are no “Jews,” per se, any more, and perhaps there never was. There are Litvak Jews and Galitzianer Jews; German Jews and Polish Jews; mitnagdim and chasidim; Gerer and Sadagorer; charedi and Reform. In each group, there exists a sense of triumphalism and superiority. There is, however, little sense of unity because there is almost no acceptance of differing approaches to Jewish law, observance, and culture.

   Nowhere is this more evident than in the millennia-old contempt that Ashkenazi Jews traditionally have held for Jews from just about anywhere else, mainly (but not only) Sephardim.

   Sometime in the 4th century, Jews exiled by the Romans from the Land of Israel were resettled in southern Italy. Over the next half millennium, they migrated to a large strip of land extending from Northern France through Northern Germany along the Rhine. That area of northwestern Europe was called “Ashkenaz.”

   From the time that Ashkenazi Jews began to emerge on the scene, its denizens have held to the notion that they know better than anyone else how everything should be done—and that hubris colors everything they do.

   This hubris is evident in many ways, including in a reformulation of Isaiah 2:3 found in the Sefer ha-Yashar, written 800 years ago by Rashi’s grandson, Rabbeinu Tam. The original verse reads, “for out of Zion shall come the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (ki mi-tzion tetzei Torah, u-d’var Adonai Mirushalyim). In Ashkenaz, this became, “For out of Bari shall come the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Otranto,” Bari and Otranto being towns in southern Italy. Long before Rabbeinu Tam’s time, Bari apparently was a center of Ashkenazi learning; before his time and during it, Otranto indeed was.

   A hundred years after Rabbeinu Tam, a German-born rabbi, Asher ben Yechiel, echoed the sentiment after settling in Toledo, Spain. “I would not eat according to [Sephardi] usage, adhering as I do to our own custom and to the tradition of our blessed forefathers, the sages of Ashkenaz, who received the Torah as an inheritance from their ancestors from the days of the destruction of the Temple. Likewise, the tradition of our forebears and teachers in France is superior to that of the sons of this land.”

   That Ashkenazi hubris carried itself into official policy in the State of Israel. The Russian Jews and the German Jews who helped found the state and who were its earliest leaders (ironically, they were mostly secular themselves) made every effort to destroy the culture and religious practices of Israel’s Sephardi and Mizrachi citizens.

   Presumably, this discrimination ended once the Sephardi and the Mizrachi gained political clout—made possible in large part by the activism of a Rishon L’Tzion, the late Chacham Ovadia Yosef—but although the situation in Israel has markedly improved, some of this discrimination exists to this day, particularly in the charedi communities. (For an example of this, do a web search using the words Emmanuel, school, and sephardic.)

   This hubris was always puzzling, not the least because the first Mizrachi immigrants to the Land of Israel were Abraham and Sarah. The Babylonian rabbis who created the version of the Talmud considered authoritative by all were Mizrachi. Sephardi rabbis are among the greatest figures in our religious history. Sephardim excelled in philosophy and science; they gave us great art, literature and liturgy.

   Who can imagine Jewish life today without the many contributions of Sephardi and Mizrachi rabbis, scholars, and liturgical poets?

   Successive Jewish law codes depended on the version Maimonides compiled. Indeed, Jacob ben Asher, son of Asher ben Yechiel, based most of the rulings in his Arba’ah Turim (the “four rows”) on Maimonides’s code, and on the rulings of the Sephardi talmudist Rabbi Meir Abulafia. The definitive code, the Shulchan Aruch, which was patterned after the Ba’al Ha’Turim’s work, is the product of a Sephardi great, Rabbi Joseph Caro. (It was augmented by the glosses of an Ashkenazi rabbi, Moses Isserles, a/k/a the Rema, to make it usable by Ashkenazim, as well as Sephardim, marking one of the rare times when the two cultures found common ground.)

   The Friday night hymn, L’cha Dodi, emanated from a Sephardi. So did other parts of the liturgy used even in Ashkenazi synagogues. Various customs common to all also emanated from the Sephardim, such as the all-night study sessions on Shavuot, a staple in Ashkenazi circles today.

   Creating a single chief rabbi for all Jews in the State of Israel, which almost certainly will play into the hands of this Ashkenazi hubris, ignores the huge differences between how Sephardi and Mizrachi look at Jewish law, and the way the Ashkenazim do.

   A look at the different ways Ashkenazi and Sephardi authorities approach cleaning the home for Pesach is instructive here.

   According to Orthodox and Conservative Ashkenazim, the smooth surfaces of many electric ranges are not eligible for kashering for Pesach, rendering them unusable unless they are covered in a way that will not also burn down the house. Yet, according to decisions by several prominent Sephardi rabbis, including Yosef and another former Rishon L’tzion, Mordechai Eliyahu, glass tops only need a thorough scrubbing and porcelain tops need boiling water poured on them.

   Again, according to Orthodox and Conservative Ashkenazi authorities, there is no way to kasher metal baking utensils. According to Sephardi guidelines, however, cleaning them thoroughly and then placing them in an oven set at the highest temperature for an hour will do the trick. (Do not try this if those “metal” utensils have plastic or wooden handles.)

   The Sephardi authorities also allow the kashering of Teflon-coated frying pans and the like; Ashkenazim do not.

   They also allow the kashering of wood, plastic, and rubber items, such as spatulas and mixing spoons. Ashkenazi authorities forbid it.

   Pesach food is yet another example. Ashkenazim have far fewer foods available to them because of the kitniyot ban, originally a ban on legumes (kitniyot), but now extending to suspected legumes, wannabe legumes, legumes that are not legumes, and the derivatives of each. The Sephardim never accepted this ban—which even some Ashkenazi authorities early on called a “minhag sh’tut,” a foolish custom. (There will be more about kitniyot in a future blog around Pesach time.)

   These halachic differences may be bridgeable over time, but for now there is a wide gap between the two. Having one chief rabbi will not bridge that gap; however well intentioned, it will only exacerbate the situation and, given political realities (Ashkenazi charedim dominate the election process for the post), is only likely to revive the attempts to obliterate Sephardi and Mizrachi culture.

   We as a people have come a long way in 3,500 years. How sad it is that after all that time, we still have not figured out how to make the journey together while celebrating our differences as opposed to demonizing them. How much sadder it will be if legislation supposedly designed to bring us together ends up dividing us even more.