The idea that Reform has a bright future in Israel is pure fantasy
At a recent Jerusalem Post conference, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described breaking chareidi power as one of his government’s key imperatives. In the follow-up question-and-answer session, he was asked how he intended to achieve that goal. He responded that he seeks to elevate the status of the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel. Those comments are fully consonant with the prime minister telling Rick Jacobs, the head of the American Reform movement, in a July segment on CNN, that there is a great thirst for Reform Judaism in Israel and that it might well become the dominant form of Judaism in Israel one day.
And in Sunday’s cabinet meeting, agreement was reached on an unprecedented NIS 40 million allocation to the Reform and Conservative movements through a new department named Hayahadut Hamit’chadeshet (“Innovative Judaism”). About the only thing that the diverse elements of the current Israeli government seem to agree on fully is the need to weaken the authority of the chief rabbinate — e.g., with respect to kashrus and matters of personal status. And that is being done largely as a form of outreach to American Jewry in the hopes of healing the frequently discussed breach between American Jewry and Israel.
AT ONE LEVEL, the outreach to the heterodox movements is pure pandering. Bennett has burned his bridges with the Israeli right, and will need new sources of funding to sustain his political career in the long run. And for that, he has turned to those affiliated with the American heterodox movements.
But the idea that Reform has a bright future in Israel is pure fantasy. True, there are Israelis who would put their children in a subsidized Reform nursery school or rent a Reform bar mitzvah hall. But the claim that there is a thirst for American Reform is based on the mistaken assumption that American Reform represents a step up in Jewish identity for “secular” Israelis. It doesn’t. Nearly 30 years ago, the Guttmann study revealed that the average Israeli Jew who defines himself as secular is more observant with respect to basic rituals — Friday night candle-lighting and Kiddush, fasting on Yom Kippur, refraining from chometz on Pesach, kashrus, and bris milah — than American Reform Jews.
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