Jeremy Rosen
The Evolution and Failings of the Office of the Chief Rabbinate
Summary
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen discusses the history of the Office of the Chief Rabbinate, how it has evolved over time and why he is not particularly a fan of the position.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Yes, it is, because in Israel, it is an official governmentally appointed institution bureaucracy, which has control over many departments of life in Israel, from kashrut to Shabbat, to marriages, to divorce, to burials. Everything in Israel goes through the chief rabbinate. It is a state sanctioned bureaucracy. Whereas on the continent, if you don’t want to belong to a synagogue, or in Europe, you don’t have to. And you don’t have to accept anybody’s authority. And so it’s a very different kind of institution.
Absolutely, it’s the Chief Rabbi of Israel, the Chief Rabbinate who decide the standards of conversion, who can get converted, how can get converted. And they fight against any other group of rabbis. And there are a lot of them who are fighting against the Chief Rabbinate in Israel. Who are fighting for a more European American type of rabbinic leadership, who want to be more inclusive. But the chief rabbi has its lock hold on it, and I think that’s very dangerous. Ruth, when I was a child in Liverpool of 40s, early 50s, I had Chief Rabbi of Liverpool. We honored Chief Rabbi Unterman attending. Yes, Rabbi Unterman went from being the Rabbi of Liverpool, not the chief rabbi, to being the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, and then the Chief Rabbi of Israel. If he called himself at that stage a chief rabbi, then he was taking on a title he didn’t really have. It’s not the Chief Rabbi is a problem, it’s his Beth Din.
Well, you know, if there’s a good example, there’s no question that Rabbi Sacks was a brilliant individual and one of the most successful teachers and publicizers of Judaism to the Jewish and the non-Jewish world. But alas, he did not stand up to his right wing masters. He censored his own book at their behest. He did not give the sort of respect that I would’ve expected him to give to Rabbi Louis Jacobs or to the reform rabbis of his era. And so, however great he was, this wasn’t the job for him. Now, whether that was a mistake or not is neither here nor there. But that’s another reason why I say you can’t have somebody who’s good at everything. A jack of all trades. It doesn’t really work. The same way you could take Herzl. Herzl was a wonderful spokesman. He wasn’t a religious man in any way. He wasn’t born a Zionist, but look what a spokesman he was. Look what he managed to achieved. Or even if you would take somebody like Chaim Weizmann. You might even go for Belkin as a great orator. But would he have been the great, shall we say, compromiser? Very difficult in all these cases.