1

     There is something very special about many of the Israeli government’s decisions. When the consequences of these decisions become obvious one cannot help but wonder: Why did the government decide to get involved in these issues in the first place? It would have been far better if they stayed out of it altogether and refrained from making any decisions.

      One such decision is newly planned simplified giyur (religious conversion to Judaism –Translator’s note) for hundreds of thousands of non-Jews according to the Halachah (collective corpus of Jewish religious law –Translator’s note) who received Israeli citizenship after making aliyah under the Law of Return.  Implementation of such a law would give Israel’s Chief Rabbinate unilateral control over conversions to Judaism in the country.

2

      There is actually nothing new about the giyur procedure itself. Conversion to Judaism has existed since times immemorial, and so did the opposite process – Christian conversion and conversion to Islam, because other confessions also saw the need to offer corresponding procedures for conversion.

      Unlike Christianity and Islam, however, Judaism rejected any forms of proselytizing. Conversion to Judaism has always been seen as a purely personal act. There is good reason for that. Apart from the specific traits of Jewish mentality, which can sometimes be complicated even for the Jews themselves, there is also the unique and difficult destiny of the Jewish people. So a person who wishes to become Jewish must understand fully and completely with what exactly he intends to connect his life.

    It therefore should not be surprising that rabbis have traditionally discouraged people from converting to Judaism. 

      So what could have suddenly changed? Where did these plans to conduct a giyur for 300,000 all at once come from? 

False arguments

1

      Let us only ignore the myth that the Israeli government is concerned about the need for national unity, which could supposedly be achieved by mass Jewish conversion.

      There is no indication that Israeli leadership is concerned with the issue of national unity. 

      This is definitely not a matter of concern for the rabbis, since no other segment of Israeli society is more elitist than the Orthodox.

      The rabbis have long stopped concerning themselves with the problems of the Jewish people. They are busy dealing exclusively with issues of the Jewish community, which is why the synagogue became a community home long ago.

      But if in the Diaspora it plays the role of a national symbol and attracts Jews as a cultural center, the synagogue does not have that role in Israel. The Jewish people are united by different national symbols and other cultural centers.

      However, the rabbis succeeded brilliantly in dividing the nation. When ritual laws become so excessive that even Jews who observe a traditional lifestyle cannot sit down together for dinner because the rabbi of one Jew allows him to eat from a jar that the rabbi of the other Jews does not consider sufficiently kosher, how can we even begin to talk about national unity?

2

    Sadly, nobody believes any more in the myths about the openness of Israeli society, which is supposedly ready to embrace anyone who feels a connection with the Jewish people and the state.

    There is good reason for that.

    It is enough for one to compare the results of the adaptation of former Soviet citizens in the USA and Israel, and this elaborate creation of Israeli myth-making in the best traditions of the East instantly collapses.

    True enough, their own elites, their own closed circles which do not reveal themselves and do not welcome the stranger exist in any society. But closing themselves from the stranger is not the same thing as being intolerant, aggressive and authoritarian toward the stranger.

    Those who immigrated to the USA from the former Soviet Union cannot imagine what their former compatriots encountered when they arrived in Israel.

    No one in the United States drummed it into their heads that they are criminals, members of the mafia and prostitutes, that they don’t have the slightest idea about freedom, hygiene, morality and upbringing and that their children are morons who cannot even finish high school. Israeli society aimed this avalanche of strongly negative attitudes at millions of arriving “Russians”, mobilizing all its resources for that purpose – the media, the educational system, government institutions, including the police and the courts and personal connections.

    This explains why former Soviet citizens who fled to the USA acquired over the past fifteen or so years the status and self-identity of full-fledged American citizens, whereas in Israel those very same former Soviet citizens gained the status of a socially weak population, problematic in every possible way.

    There is nothing surprising about this result. The openness of American society is based on the ideology of a law-governed state and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of respect for the individual, not on declarations and mythmaking.

    These notions are completely alien to Israeli society.

    That is why mocking and humiliating someone who is a stranger, who is not “one of us” has become the norm in Israel, a tradition imported from the old-time shtetl, belligerent toward any stranger.

     The bearers of the so-called Israeli culture don’t even realize what an ugly tradition it is and how it fragments the nation and poisons it with bitter feelings, nor are they aware that they accept such ugly attitudes as a matter of course.

    How could mass giyur bring the non-Jew closer to Israeli society if boorishness elevated to the norm drives out from this society even pure-blooded Jews?

3

    Those who initiated mass giyur have another consideration in its support. They say that a united nation must share the same culture. And since most symbols of Jewish culture are associated with the Jewish religious tradition, one should be drawn into this culture through these symbols. 

    But culture is more than symbols alone. Culture encompasses the entire content of life.

    If Jews were not dispersed around the world for the 2,000 years, there would not have been any contradiction between symbols and the content of Jewish culture.

    This contradiction arose naturally over these 2,000 years, because under the impact of their non-Jewish environment the content of life for different parts of the Jewish nation became so dissimilar that it became totally impossible to speak about any commonly shared Jewish culture.

    This is what the rabbis fail to understand.

    A present-day rabbi is a man of the community, for whom the Jewish nation has become no more than an abstraction, precisely because he does not understand the special characteristics of the culture the Jewish nation developed in different countries of the Diaspora. The rabbi is used to talking about the nation behind the four walls of the yeshiva and connecting the content of life of the modern Jewish people to the practice of life that existed 2,000 years ago. Why won’t he look out the window at the real Jewish people? This was exactly what men of authority did in the past – they knew the real, living Jewish nation, deriving wisdom from the realities of its life. 

    But the present-day rabbi is not interested in the Jewish people. He is content to address that part of it which he addresses inside the yeshiva.

    This distinguishes him fundamentally from the rabbis of the early years of Jewish exile whom he quotes as authoritative sources: the rabbis of the past knew the Jewish nation, while present-day rabbis know quotations about the Jewish nation.

    Soviet Jewry is a component part of the Jewish nation with its own understanding of life, formed in unique conditions behind the “iron curtain”.

    Soviet Jews value as sacred acquired basic knowledge in exact sciences that is essential for modern civilization as well as knowledge of history, without which a person cannot comprehend the logic of present-day events. It was no less important for a Soviet Jew to introduce his child to these areas of knowledge than for an Orthodox Jew to introduce his child to the laws of Kashrut.

    How can anyone assert that this understanding of life, new to the Jews, is not part of G-d’s plan? In any case, this understanding of life allows one not only to engage in discourse but also to live according to the instructions of learned Jewish sages who taught the people that those who fail to teach a son some trade, teach him to steal.

    They turned out to be so right!

    The most amazing thing is that the former Soviet Jew’s attitude to education and work, which he derives from his overall understanding of life, places him closer in terms of shared culture to the former Soviet Russian, or the former Tatar, Uzbek or any other ethnic group belonging to what used to be the Soviet people. On the contrary, it pushes him away most forcefully from Orthodox Jews who have obtained from the state the right not to teach their children such sciences as math, physics and other unnecessary “goyish” wisdoms, unbecoming of Jews.

    So what kind of commonly shared culture can we talk about?

    There is no commonly shared culture in Israel, and there cannot be one. 

4

    Someone may believe the myth that the rabbis are responsible for the destiny of the Jewish people, and this is why no one but they have the honor to conduct a giyur for 300,000 Israeli citizens, non-Jews according to the Halachah.

    But the rabbis do not carry the responsibility for the Jewish people.

    The Jewish nation has long outpaced the rabbis, who now drag along at the rear. The Jewish nation pursues various sciences and arts in violation of rabbinical prohibitions, and it developed agriculture, revived the land of its ancestors and built the Jewish state despite rabbinical prohibitions.

    The rabbis benefited from the fruits of these endeavors. As everybody knows, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The Israeli secular elite is aware of this, which is why it used the rabbis to carry out special requests from the state.

    It involves not only such issues as mass giyur. The involvement of the rabbis in politics has legitimized corruption and made it the norm precisely because the rabbis are willing to sacrifice the interests of the people to the interests of their community. That is why it was so easy to get them to consent to the provisions of the Oslo Accords, to the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and to the election of Shimon Peres as President of Israel.

          In short, the rabbis will carry out any request from the state’s leaders so long as they can preserve their entitlements, with hardly any concern about their responsibility for that state and its people.  

    What is the purpose of the proposed mass conversion?

1

    The answer is immediately apparent when one looks around at those who fill numerous jobs and who put on a military uniform.

    No doubt, mass giyur is necessary for those who received under their control the tremendous cultural capital amassed by Jews in the Diaspora and managed to destroy it in the Jewish state. They brought about such a sorry state of affairs that the Jewish people are no longer interested in coming to live in their national home and have even started to leave it. In fact, those born in the country are largely represented in this trend.

    In such circumstances mass giyur opens up great opportunities for bringing over a fresh flow of newcomers to supplement the continuously depleting resources of the Jewish nation, so that there are enough people to serve the ruling elite and to ensure that it has enough of a population to rule. The leaders also reap another benefit of such an approach: they do not have to deal with the problem of foreign workers, which other nations have to confront. It is so much more convenient to use such a simplified method when there is a need to expand the numbers of the Jewish people.

    Incidentally, some Kabbalists believe that the Chinese are descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. What a stroke of luck! This could be a virtually infinite reserve of slaves and laborers!

2

    Then again, mass giyur is like manna from heaven for “Russian politicians”. This is not just because they will increase their electorate base. There is a more serious reason.

    Mass giyur will help “Russian politicians” to conceal the truth, which has long revealed itself: because of their flagrant incompetence, “Russian politicians” are incapable of resolving problems – they simply cannot do it. And they have successfully proved it by not solving a single serious problem among those the Great Aliyah encountered in Israel.

     Problems will be aplenty after the mass giyur. So who will the bewildered native-born Israelis go to for help when they once again discover in retrospect what they had done with their own hands?  They will no doubt appeal to “Russian politicians” who will claim to be experts in this matter.

    In this imaginative way “Russian politicians” will continue building their questionable careers as representatives of their community who defend the rights of the poor and destitute, those who cannot speak for themselves.

    There must be a reason why there are so few poor and destitute among the “Russians” living in the United States. Perhaps it is because the state has made an effort to create appropriate life conditions for the people instead of expanding the numbers of community representatives in the government apparatus. 

    Now even a child will understand that mass giyur is a blessing for Judaism experts.

    It will make it so much easier for them to show their disdain for such “goyish” subjects as math and biology. If the work of swelling the numbers of the Jewish people should turn into a common practice, there will be a growing need for other kind of experts – those who will teach hundreds of thousands of people how they can become Jewish and those who will determine the qualifications of those converting to the Jewish people.

    What is most important, this will give a large group of people a sense of being irreplaceable, something that would have been impossible to obtain in any other way.  

    Why is mass conversion dangerous for the Jewish people?

1

    It’s certainly true that the Jewish nation positively does not need such a mass giyur. Moreover, it is extremely dangerous for the people. 

    First, mass giyur will gravely undermine Jewish self-identity.

    The Jewish nation knows how to preserve itself and who should be considered Jewish. The nation’s vital resources of intuition guide it to find the right answers. That is why the unique course of Jewish existence can be completely spontaneous and unrestrained.

    Experience has shown this to be true.

    Even in the Soviet Union where three generations of Jewish people had no access to Judaism they did not lose themselves. Soviet Jews did not have a traditional community, did not have rabbis and did not have anyone to tell them what it meant to be Jewish. So what happened to these Jews? They survived and found their own method for self-identification. Moreover, when the time came, they began their fight to make Aliyah to Israel, and restored and invigorated Jewish life in the country.

    This serves to prove that the nation’s real experience is considerably more extensive and powerful than its self-appointed shepherds can possibly imagine.

    The process of taking on the Jewish identity can also be completely spontaneous and unrestrained.

    Those non-Jews who wished to become Jewish by accepting the Torah always found the way to do it. This path exists today as well: one can find a suitable community, a teacher and can simply begin to live according to the Jewish tradition. People will welcome the ger (“stranger” or “proselyte”) and guide him. There is no need for any government institutions or exams to determine the qualifications of those converting to Judaism.

    The government’s brazen intervention in the natural flow of the Jewish nation’s life will bring the people nothing but harm. Acting through its representatives the government will undermine the nation’s instinct for self-preservation and will make meaningless the cherished sentiment of sharing the uniqueness of the Jewish national destiny, which is the source of the nation’s vitality. 

2

    Second, mass giyur will produce the impression that the problem, which has existed for at least two hundred years, has been solved.

    It is the problem of the relationship between the Jews and non-Jews in modern conditions.

    Two hundred years ago the traditional Jewish community began to fall apart and the Jews were at a loss. Part of the people isolated themselves from strangers and from the problems of the modern world, which from then on they considered exclusively as the problems of those strangers, even more than before. The other part of the people did the opposite: they rushed to fraternize with other world nations and to involve themselves most actively in their destiny.

    Everybody is well aware of how it all ended in Europe.

    But it is becoming increasingly more obvious today that the destruction of the traditional Jewish community is the result of a general world-wide process. Dynamic world forces have been set in motion, destroying the traditional lives of all nations.

    These dynamic forces brought the Jews to the land of their ancestors, where they rebuilt the Jewish state.

    This event is no less important than the destruction of the Temple, which led to the dispersion of the Jews. That is why this generation, returning from the Diaspora, needs a new paradigm of national existence as much as the generation exiled into the Diaspora 2,000 years ago.

It turns out, however, that the Jews were totally unprepared for this momentous event of this era. This is not in the least surprising.

    It turns out, however that the Jews were totally unprepared for this momentous event of our times. This is not in the least surprising.

    The Jewish nation spent 2,000 years learning how to become dispersed among world nations. It must now learn the opposite: how to gather the nation and rebuild its unity.

    The Jewish nation spent 2,000 years learning how to live among other world nations. It must now learn the opposite: it must receive in its own environment those representatives of these nations who have chosen to connect their lives with the Jews. But the Jewish nation has no idea how this can be accomplished.

    Instances when soldiers who gave their lives to defend the Jewish state were buried under some fence because they were non-Jews according to the Halachah showed such an outrageous aspect of this problem that there was a general outcry of indignation in Israel. 

    However, no matter how appalling these instances may be of themselves, they exposed something on a wider scale. They showed the ineffectiveness of the entire system of relationships between people – not only between Jews and non-Jews but also between the Jews themselves. So the 300,000 non-Jews according to the Halachah are actually just a part of an enormous and serious problem. That is why the intention of all the explicitly interested parties to turn the resolution of this problem into a farce absolutely cannot be tolerated.  

    The fact that it is impossible to resolve all these accumulated problems within the framework of the tradition established in the Diaspora is the result of the stagnation of our religious thought. We have lost any sense of direction and go from one catastrophic failure to another, blaming our spiritual inadequacy on the G-d’s inscrutable ways.

    This stagnation of thought is responsible for the fact that we live with a double standard and are not even aware of it.

    We find it natural for us to demand that word nations recognize the right of the Jews to have their own national identity. But in our own state we find it acceptable to deny non-Jews the right to freedom of conscience, and we demand that they renounce their identity.

    We pride ourselves on withstanding the pressure to convert to Christianity or Islam. Yet we, in effect, demand from others that they undergo Jewish conversion, because we deprive them of the most basic civil rights unless they do.

    Without a doubt, such conduct is not merely dubious but so reprehensible that it evokes a warranted wave of indignation against us and gives our adversaries justification for their hatred of the Jews.

    Such an attitude to life also disorients our Jewish nation, which no longer understands the world it lives in.

    Why do we need bogus Jews, Jews by coercion? In the end they will start hating us for this coercion not because they are hostile toward Jews due to their background and origins but because we are infringing on the individual’s self-identity which is inadmissible.

    Why are we doing something like that? Is it just because the rabbis cannot offer the Jewish nation anything except for the things they have become accustomed to over the 2,000 years in the Diaspora? But this should be the problem of the rabbis – the problem of their limited religious experience.

    We can ask ourselves: should we continue to reinforce their misconception, should we sustain them in their conviction that they continue to have some kind of objective authority in the nation’s eyes?

    Undoubtedly, the answer is no, we should not. Moreover, we should protest against it. We are not looking to introduce religious reforms, no, that’s not the issue. It is the rabbis who would like to get off with nothing more than reforms.

    We need something entirely different: we should find a new interpretation for our entire existence in the era of return, the era of kibbutz galuyot, and it must be a religious reinterpretation. Our protest must have a clear-cut goal – to awaken Jewish religious thought, taking it out of its stagnation and to make people think instead of continuing to build castles in the air.

    In this respect, the presence of non-Jews among us can become a genuine catalyst.

    What is the meaning of their coming to the Promised Land together with us? The rabbis would like us to believe that they are similar to the Egyptians who tagged along with the Jews during the Exodus from Egypt and provoked them to revolt against G-d. But the rabbis squeeze Jewish life into the rigid mold of familiar stereotypes, whereas we know what it is like in reality.

    We know these non-Jewish people. The rabbis did not live side by side with them, we did. We were deeply immersed in their lives, and they shared with us the achievements of their centuries-old culture. We went to school and worked together with them; we built and defended the country with them; we went through good time together and endured trials and tribulations together.

    It is now they who are becoming immersed in our lives. They see our strengths and weaknesses from the inside; they see how we struggle in vain to climb out of the tangled web of our problems, and they recognize us for what we really are as a people, not in anti-Semitic myths.

    Perhaps all this is happening so that we should contemplate the problems of our times together, the problems our rabbis do not wish to contemplate?  Perhaps this is happening so that we should join efforts and start seeking out new solutions to common problems, solutions that could never occur to those who did not walk together the same difficult road behind the iron curtain?

     Then again, maybe they are sent to pull us out of the isolation in which the rabbis have plunged us and to become  the connecting link between our nation and the nations to which they belong by birth according to G-d’s will?

    In that case, we need each other the way we are: as honest, direct, open and staunch people. It is only possible to lean on that which offers resistance.

    Mass giyur would crush everything – both the people and their interrelationships, so there is nothing left to lean on. We cannot allow this happen. 

3

    Finally, there is a third reason why we cannot permit conducting a facilitated mass giyur.

    Mass giyur would exceed the possibility of the Jewish people to withstand the tremendous damage they have already suffered at the hands of native-born Israelis referred to lovingly as sabras.  

    Israeli sabras are undoubtedly the favorite children of their mother-and-father, the Jewish nation. If that were not the case, the Jewish nation would not have invested so much in this new population, which was born and raised in the land of the ancestors.

    The nation invested without evaluating its input, bringing along into its state everything of value it acquired living among cultured nations. It imported political ideas to the ancestral land and formed the structure of the state, where native-born Israelis were going to live; it revived the Hebrew language so that they could speak one language, and it created the economy, science, literature and the arts for them. The nations made a maximum amount of effort for native-born Israelis to have what any cultured people enjoy.

    Yet, unfortunately, these efforts did not benefit native-born Israelis but caused harm because it led to the appearance of the most devastating of all Israeli myths – the myth of “we built the state”.

    Native-born Israelis got it into their heads that they – and they alone –

built the state.

    The sabra – Israel’s favorite child – failed to understand the most essential point: for him to enjoy all those wonderful and expensive toys, his mother and father, his grandmother and grandfather, as well as many generations before them had to work tirelessly and live through a lot of hardship among the various nations, which spent centuries creating their great culture.

      But the Israeli sabra imagines that all this is his own accomplishment since as “the builder of the state” he possesses unique qualities and special innate genius. He can do absolutely anything and understands everything, and that is why there is no reason for him to be concerned. Why should he when he accomplishes any task with such remarkable ease.

    It is not the fault of the Israeli sabra that he has developed a mentality consistent with this kind of thinking. Its main characteristics are megalomania and inability to perceive reality in its true dimensions. The blame lies on the sabra’s mother-and-father – the Jewish nation – who drummed into the youngster’s immature head the ridiculous idea that there is nothing difficult about building the state.

    What happened next was only natural: the state grew and blossomed, but the adolescent, the Israeli sabra, did not grow and mature together with the state. He remained an infantile adolescent – young, inexperienced and … foolish.

    He was not foolish on a personal level – native-born Israelis, just as people everywhere, are different in that respect, some are smart and others foolish, but the majority is definitely smart. But collectively they undoubtedly manifest a mentality that is more than problematic.

    There are so many attractive features about this mentality that it makes one wonder: what wonderful people the Israeli sabras would have become as adults if they were not spoiled by the mythical claim that “we built the state”.

    The Jewish state system is consistent with this very myth. Only the Jewish nation looks the other way and refuses to acknowledge that.

    The very fact of the existence of the Jewish state, with its parliament, cabinet ministers and other administration officials flatters the Jewish nation. But the adoring mother-and-father, i.e., the Jewish nation, close their eyes to the fact that these officials have never matured to become government figures but remain people from some local neighborhood with a corresponding limited worldview. Therefore, they tend to resolve problems within the narrow circle of their friends and schoolmates – those who lived next-door and played soccer with them in the backyard.

    They do not see or understand broader problems that lie outside their neighborhood and their intimate circle of friends. That is why their vision is narrow and limited, and they are unable to see far into the future.

    The Jewish nation has every right to be proud that the Israeli sabra  is speaking in Hebrew – the ancient language of our ancestors. But native-born Israelis used this language to introduce a new type of Jew, who they called “social Jews”. So perhaps this is the time for the Jewish nation to ponder on the issues presented in Hebrew and listen more attentively to this smooth-sounding childish gibberish.

    Israeli sabras have not disappointed the Jewish nation in that they were able to get rid of their galut image as humiliated and humble Jews. But having rejected this stereotype of insecurity they simultaneously lost the acute awareness of Amalek’s danger – that special irrational hatred of Jews coming from an anti-Semite. The Israeli sabra lost that special seventh sense – the anticipation of the imminent threat of a pogrom always present in a Diaspora Jew.

    That is why native-born Israelis act recklessly both internationally and within the country’s borders, without any awareness of the consequences of their decisions.

    The results are there for all to see: together with the mass Aliyah, native-born Israelis managed to bring open anti-Semites into the country. The immature sabra refers to these people as repatriates because he is unable to distinguish between the different types of non-sabras. They all seem the same to him.

    No one could imagine that there would be so much anti-Semitism in the Jewish state. But it is an unfortunate fact. 

    It is now suggested that all anti-Semites should also be converted to Judaism with great fanfare through an accelerated program and in the spirit of universal approval. There are, perhaps, those who assume that anti-Semites might change their ways after they affiliate themselves with Jews?  Or, perhaps, some assume that anti-Semites will refuse to undergo giyur because it is against their convictions?

    Nothing of the sort will happen. People of honor might refuse to convert because they were always honorable people. They connected their lives with Jews at a time when this meant nothing but trouble to them. They did not do it to receive Israeli citizenship as a desired prize. They did not lie in the past and will not do it now.

    Mass giyur will, sooner or later, bring about such a devaluation of the Jewish identity that it will attract various low lives who will rush to convert as fast as their feet will carry them and even egg on their buddies: “Hurry up, pals. They’re writing folks down as kikes here.”

    Won’t that be something?! We will hear so many new jokes that people will split their sides laughing!

    But the immature sabras do not understand any of this because they are young, inexperienced and … foolish. 

    It is no longer news that Israeli sabras do not value the Jewish nation’s contributions to Israel because of their myth of “we built the state”. The cultural capital amassed by the Diaspora has turned into a toy in the hands of native-born Israelis, which the favorite child simply broke to pieces and destroyed.

    The Great Aliyah saw it all happening and felt its impact.

    This is not the subjective opinion of a number of individuals. There are objective criteria, which allow us to evaluate the activities of the “builders of the state” – the high level of corruption and crime, lawlessness and absence of civil or criminal prosecution against wrongdoers. There is also the growing gap between the poor and the wealthy, the native Israeli’s role in the crisis of the educational system and the weakening of the army, and, finally, the mass fleeing of intellectuals from Israel.

    It is painful to remember the human cost to Israel of the adventure of the Oslo Accords: the daily barrage of rockets fired at Israeli towns, the circle of enemy armies growing in front of our eyes and closing around us.

    Not surprisingly, with “successes” such as these, native-born Israelis, the pampered children of the Jewish nation, would like their mother-and-father, that is, the Jewish nation, to continue to take care of them, support them in everything, indulge their whims, look the other way when the “children” misbehave and, most importantly! – supply them with more and more new toys in the shape of repatriates, volunteers, contributions, and such like.

    But the resources of toys seem to be running out.

    That is why they demanded the Jewish nation as their new toy, so that they can ruin it as well.

    Issues must be addressed by the government at the national level

1

    Now is the time for the Jewish nation to say its resolute “NO”.

    The Jewish nation is not a toy. And if the nation wants native-born Israelis to finally understand this, it should immediately intervene in the farcical plan referred to as the mass giyur and prevent it.

    Native-born Israelis went too far with their plan for a mass giyur. It is time to curtail everything that has become the norm of life in Israel: absence of any accountability among those who exercise power, cynicism of interested parties, and speculative use of national symbols and sentiments.  

    Nevertheless, the problem that brought forth the plan to conduct a mass giyur exists in reality and it must be solved.

    In fact, it is possible to solve it.

2

    First, Israel must reinterpret its Law of Return.

    We should just put an end to the hypocrisy of elevating this law to the status of the sacred cow of Zionism. Native-born Israelis who announced the era of post-Zionism have so little trouble slaughtering any other sacred cows that their “tremulous” attitude to the Law of Return makes one unwillingly suspect something dubious here.

    There is good reason for that because there is no other law that is more deceitful and immoral than the Law of Return in its current wording.

    This law makes all the people, Jews and non-Jews alike, assume that the new population of Israeli sabras are the natural continuation of the Jewish people who returned to the land of their ancestors.

    The point is that this is no more than an illusion. Native-born Israelis were conceived as the renunciation of the Jewish nation, and this is how they see themselves. In order for them to be born, the Jewish nation has to disappear.

    The Law of Return gives native-born Israelis, as legitimate heirs of the Jewish nation, the right to claim as theirs the property of the entire nation: the right to its ancestral land, to its symbols and to its cultural and financial resources. Misled by this law, the nation provides all this to the native-born Israelis without interruption, without the slightest suspicion that the nation itself is nothing but a fertilizer to speed up the growth and maturation of the new population.

    We owe it to the Law of Return that Israel loves the Aliyah but hates the olim, no matter what their country of origin is.

    The Law of Return also misleads those who meet Israelis outside of Israel: they see them as Jews, without understanding that the Law of Return made it possible to replace the mother-and-father, i.e., the Jewish people by their immature child, which behaves according to his infantile experience.

    This explains Israel’s doubtful successes in the world.  

3

     The effect the Law of Return has on people who were born from mixed marriages is totally inconceivable and shocking in its cynicism.

     According to the Law of Return, children of Jews and members of their families, as well as grandchildren of Jews have a right to Israeli citizenship. Yet when people arrive in Israel they do not suspect that they are about to go through a selection process: according to Jewish law, a Jew is one who has a Jewish mother. Having a Jewish father does not make one Jewish. This means that only “real” Jews can enter into a marriage, whereas “not real” Jews are deprived of this right.

    The situation becomes quite absurd: the state that extended citizenship to people who are not Jewish according to the Halachah deprived them of their rights once they were in the country, because the rabbis have monopoly on legal unions, and they protect the sanctity of marriage according to the law of Orthodox Judaism. Mass giyur was intended as a way out – to make it possible to have one’s cake and eat it too. 

    It is here that the glaring discrepancy manifests itself between the rabbinical notion of the Jewish nation and the Jewish nation’s actual life.

    Mixed marriages are indeed problematic. It surfaces as the problem of self-identification for children born to such a family: they have a hard time deciding what they are: are they like their mother or like their father?

    We could, of course, engage in a discourse about universal human values, but life itself brings this problem to the foreground. No discussions or slogans could change that, particularly when the environment only exacerbates it.

    The environment in the Soviet Union exacerbated “the Jewish problem”, and that is why the Jews had to encounter it, whether they wanted to or not.

    The paradox of the situation is that a father’s non-Jewish name allowed many of those who were half-Jewish to portray themselves as non-Jews. Because their anti-Semitic environment demanded proof that they are, in fact, not Jewish, many of these “Jews through their mother” eventually became fiercely anti-Semitic. Examples are galore, and those who know the Jewish nation from its real problems and not through books are well familiar with them.

    At the same time, many “Jews through their father”, who carried Jewish family names and frequently encountered anti-Semitic attitudes often turned into Jewish nationalists.

    Every one of them came across a “pleasant “surprise in Israel: “Jews through their mother” who had an anti-Semitic self-identity were accepted as Jews on legitimate grounds and honor, but “Jews through their father” who proudly carried their fathers’ names were “expelled” from the Jews.  

    The problem of people with mixed parentage is not new, nor is it exclusively Jewish. It appears wherever the environment is antagonistic toward the ethnicity of one of the parents, and the person born in a mixed marriage confronts a difficult choice.

    The marriage partner defines what this choice is: if someone half-Jewish chooses a Jewish spouse, it means the person made a Jewish choice; if he or she marries a non-Jew, it means they made a non-Jewish choice.

    This is a personal matter, and a person does not owe any explanation to anyone as to his choice, but the law must take into account these circumstances.

    Grandchildren become problematic in a situation where only one of their grandmothers or grandfathers is Jewish. That is why such a chain stemming from the rejection of a Jewish choice and with the potential to become infinite must be interrupted through legislative means. A mass giyur will not accomplish anything positive in this respect because absence of government regulation leads to a dangerous situation: eventually the state will be inundated with people who shall call the country where they have arrived a “kike state”, and not the state of Israel.

    There are quite a few indications already now that the process is moving in that direction. 

4

    The Law of Return must be nationalistic. Was it not envisaged that way from the start? From the very outset, the declared goal of the state was to be the ingathering of the Jewish people

    Those who muddled everybody’s minds with talk about the harmfulness of nationalism will thrust all sorts of accusations at us. But we have been nationalists for over 3,000 years, and have heard plenty of diatribes launched at us. What is new here, and since when are we afraid of accusations?

    What is so bad about nationalism? Weren’t  the founding fathers of the state willing to cope with all the hardships because they were reviving their homeland and not merely some plot of land? Nationalism evokes the most sacred feelings in people – love, loyalty and heroism. No one doubted this truth, until through use of brainwashing everybody was assured of the contrary.

    The example of present-day Europe shows us what happens when people no longer have these feelings and when the state no longer has a master, i.e., a nation responsible for it.

    When the nation that is the master of the state loses its self-identification, it disorients all the citizens of its state, irrespective of their nationality. They can no longer understand what is considered “right” and “wrong” in this state, and what rules they should abide by. In the end, it makes matters worse for everybody, because society sinks into chaos that is dangerous for all of the state’s citizens, those belonging and not belonging to the title nation.

    If those who arrive in Israel accepted our conditions in advance there would be no need to advance new conditions, like mass giyur, for instance, once they receive Israeli citizenship. But for this to be possible the law must not mislead anyone.

    This is a normal approach to the issue: when the law no longer corresponds to the realities of life, it is revised – because laws are there to resolve problems and not create them. 

5

    Second, we must take a resolute stance against those who think that they have the right to hate Jews and the right to obtain citizenship in the Jewish state. They will have to choose: it’s either this or that.

    They have every right to hate Jews, if they wish to, whereas we have every right to rid of them our society and our state. We know the price Jews pay for hatred aimed at them all too well.

    That is why immediately revoking their citizenship and expelling such “citizens” from the country would be a justifiable response.

6

    Third, we should clearly define our state not as the Jewish state, but the state of the Jewish nation – the Jewish nation in its current shape that it has acquired as the result of its 2,000 years of Diaspora existence. 

    Then everything will fall into place and it will be natural that some of the people living in the state of Israel are non-Jews who connected their lives with our people and want to live side by side with them. 

    But by proposing to us the religious ceremony of the mass giyur we are told that ours’ is a Jewish state.

    Does anyone really know, what is a Jewish state?

    Is it the state, where the Jerusalem police protect the homosexual and lesbian marchers during the “Gay Pride parade”? This does not quite agree with the opinions of our religious authorities about the Jewish state, does it?

    Another question is what, in fact, do Jewish religious authorities understand about matters of state, when for 2,000 years they were involved exclusively in the problems of the community? What relationship can they have with the modern state, which we imitated from European Christians?

    Europeans created the modern state for a genuinely sacred goal – to create conditions of absolute equality of all citizens, so that some citizens could not use G-d to exert their power over other citizens.

    It is more relevant to us in Israel than anywhere else, because if we fail to understand the Sacred Meaning of this state idea, it may not be too long before we have religious wars, with everybody fighting against everybody, including religious wars between Jews.

    If it so happens that rabbis will begin to fight against each other, it is possible that non-Jews will be the ones to try to stop them. Unfortunately, our history is replete with such examples.

    That is why it is necessary to return rabbinism to the community, its natural environment. Let there be spiritual leaders, but only for those members of the community who recognize their authority and, most importantly, who provide for them out of their own pockets – as was the case for 2,000 years and as it is in the Diaspora to this very day.

    Many questions that plague us today will then resolve themselves, the issue of marriage registration being one of them. This issue must be the responsibility of the government and no one else.

    As for the Jewish nation, there is no need for concern. It will not abandon the traditional huppah during Jewish weddings just as it did not forsake the Jewish circumcision rite, though nobody forced the people to do it.

    It is far more important for the people to move beyond the limited vision of serving G-d that the rabbis prescribe. Only when cognition of the laws governing the physical world built by the Creator, productive work, self-discipline and responsibility to uphold the law become just as sacred to the Jewish people as prayer, the dietary laws of Kashrut and study of the Torah will the nation notice how much its life has changed. 

7

    The state must take upon itself the task of self-identification, as a national and not confessional issue. The title nation ought to decide what it would like its state to be. If the title nation adapts its value system to be consistent with modern civilization, if it elevates moral norms to such a height that people begin to see themselves as children of One G-d (instead of being lowered to the level of every confession and encouraging its prejudices), both Jews and non-Jews with legitimate rights of residence will be proud to live in such a state.

    People will then realize how much they have in common and how important it is to preserve the state, which gives protection to each of us so that we can build a home for ourselves, work and bring up our children.

    Incidentally, the rabbis will continue to be irreplaceable, because nobody can resolve the issue of confirming someone’s Jewishness, so important in Israel, better that they can. Bu they should perform this work as citizens, not spiritual shepherds.

    As for how one relates to G-d, every person will define his or her own personal relationship with G-d the way he or she identifies it. 

 September 19, 2008

Mass Giyur English complete with Liora's added sections August 2010.doc