As an Israeli, Rabbi Shaked had every right to criticise Israel

Liebe Kellen Chairman, Beit Emanuel Synagogue Parktown

Last Friday night, Beit Emanuel shul was packed, including strangers who had come for the first time to listen to a rabbi who dares to speak his mind. His sermon was greeted with a round of applause and he continues to receive messages of support from world Jewry.

Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked is actually an Israeli who served with distinction in a combat unit of the IDF. He feels he has the same rights to engage in Israeli politics as Natan Sharansky, who was on the front page of your newspaper only the week before, saying exactly the same things.

Rabbi Shaked has just returned from Israel, where he attended the funeral of his brother, who died in tragic circumstances. Yet, Rabbi Shaked, who has conducted dozens of funerals in South Africa, has no right to conduct a funeral in the land of his birth. Or a wedding. Or a bris.

Israel is the only parliamentary democracy in the Western world in which Reform (and Conservative) rabbis have inferior religious rights.

The State recognises only Orthodox practices. Orthodox rabbis are subsidised. Orthodox shuls are subsidised. Reform and Conservative rabbis and shuls are not. Women who attempt to pray in the Conservative or Reform manner, have been stoned or arrested.

The issue is not whether Orthodox Jews agree with Reform practices; of course they do not. But the measure of religious freedom is whether you tolerate others whose religious practices are not your own. Israel fails that test, and non-Orthodox Jews, who have kept silent for nearly seventy years, are no longer willing to be silent.

Your article notes that Rabbi Shaked was invited to speak at the ANC congress by the Kathrada faction of the ANC, describing Ahmed Kathrada as a “staunch supporter of BDS”.

Kathrada’s far more significant role was as the first senior ANC figure to speak up against Jacob Zuma and the Guptas.

The political symbolism that Jewish Report has missed, was a rabbi invited by the anti-Zuma faction, standing up in the centre of a fraught political conference, essentially saying: If I have the courage to speak out against the flaws of my own government, you ought to have the same courage to speak out against the flaws of yours.

Your paper showed courage the week before, in which you devoted several pages to making the same point as Rabbi Shaked, telling Benjamin Netanyahu to “get off his political high horse”.

You said: “It is about unity in diversity! It is about accepting that we are all different and we may not agree with the way someone else does things. As long as that person does it with integrity, honesty and neutrality, surely they have a right to do it.”

We commend you for that.