Liberal American rabbinical students are turning away from Zionism.......

[freepalestine]

Awakening: Liberal American rabbinical students are turning away from Zionism, sometimes with disgust


by Philip Weiss on May 8, 2011
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Gary Rosenblatt reports in the New York Jewish Week (http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/gary_rosenblatt/alienation_israel_hitting_liberal_seminaries) on a growing controversy over whether American rabbinical students should spend a year in Israel, part of the Zionist training they get in their seminaries. The controversy began when Daniel Gordis wrote that some of these students were expressing heretical ideas. Rosenblatt:

A second-year rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary (http://www.jtsa.edu/) says her year-in-Israel experience, as part of her academic training, has been “enriching and incredibly painful” in terms of what she sees of Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians.
“The Israel I see does not seem to reflect so many of the Jewish values that my family and community raised me with,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Jewish Week....

“The central objective of the program is to build a Zionist mindset,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (Reform) in Manhattan. “Otherwise it’s a wasted opportunity.”
He said if a significant number of students are disenchanted with Israel, the programs may be “deeply flawed” and should be reviewed....

Several troubling incidents of distancing from the Zionist cause first surfaced in an April 1 essay in the Jerusalem Post by Gordis, senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Describing “a new battleground emerging” among liberal American rabbinical students in Israel, he cited such examples as a student seeking to buy a tallit on the condition that it not be made in Israel; a discussion among students where one said that the anniversary of Israeli independence should be marked as a day of mourning; and the students who celebrated a peer’s birthday at a bar in Ramallah with anti-Israel slogans on the walls....

What tends to happen, though, the administrators say, is that some of the future rabbis on their own time are inclined to seek out and participate in a range of programs that open them up to encounters and dialogue with Palestinians. And the students’ liberal leanings, universalist nature and sympathy for the underdog sometimes combine to find them viewing Israeli policy, particularly regarding the settlements and West Bank occupation (not to mention the Orthodox monopoly on conversion, marriage, divorce and male prayer at the Western Wall), as oppressive and immoral.
Gordis noted that liberal rabbinical students who profess strong support for Israel are often treated like “pariahs” by their fellow students.
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/05/awakening-liberal-american-rabbinical-students-are-turning-away-from-zionism-sometimes-with-disgust.html#more-42260

[Dumb]

“The central objective of the program is to build a Zionist mindset,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (Reform) in Manhattan. “Otherwise it’s a wasted opportunity.”
He said if a significant number of students are disenchanted with Israel, the programs may be “deeply flawed” and should be reviewed....

What does the program do besides send students to Israel? Seems like that's all it takes for these students to develop their pro-Palestinian views...

[Inquisitive Lurker]

There is actually an anti-Zionist sect of Judaism, mainly based in New York. It calls for the abolition of Israel, citing evidence in the Tanach that the Jews should not have a homeland. The are frequently attacked, literally and figuratively, by other denominations.

[Inquisitive Lurker]

Duplicate post.

[hatzel]

The are frequently attacked, literally and figuratively, by other denominations.

I'll just take this opportunity to point out that one of the major reasons they are attacked by other sections of world Jewry is because they have a tendency to write a load of books claiming that the Holocaust was divinely ordained with the intention of punishing the Jews for pursuing Zionism. Many people consider this a mindlessly stupid thing to say. Until they started coming out with all that shit, they were fine, their arguments concerning the interpretation of Halacha were interesting and in many cases accurate. Teitelbaum's Vayoel Moshe, for instance, highlights many pertinent issues. But they shot themselves in the foot with some of their more outlandish claims, which was quite effective in instantly isolating them from other sections of Judaism, as one could perhaps believe, which has left a lot of their other criticism languishing in the dustbin for most who aren't still living in the 17th century...

Incidentally:


It calls for the abolition of Israel, citing evidence in the Tanach that the Jews should not have a homelandSlight misrepresentation. They do (mostly) support the peaceful dismantling of the Israeli state (though some would be happy to see it violent overthrown), citing the Talmud more than the Tanach, though of course the lines are blurred between the two. Still, it's not really to do with the Jews having a homeland per se, they're just waiting for the Messiah to roll in and set it up, and then be the king of the universe or something. It's more about the rebelling against the nations than it is about the existence of the state. There are two issues to take into consideration, one of which is the prohibition (according to some; it's a debated point) on the Jews re-entering Eretz Yisrael as a collective before the coming of the Messiah (the Zionist movement of course constituting a collective movement), the other is rebelling against the nations. As such, the former precludes the existence of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, whilst the latter only concerns forcibly rebelling against the nations to establish said state.

As of yet, I have not known any of their arguments to forbid the hypothetical situation in which, for instance, the Jews were invited to establish a homeland (which could or could not take the form of a state, as homeland is not necessarily synonymous with a state) in, say, Argentina, by the nations, not least by those who lived there. Of course they might start talking about why that was also forbidden if such an event ever transpired, but still, your statement was technically false, in as much as they claim that the Jews, should, must and will have a homeland when the time is right. And that their critique of the current homeland in Israel is based more on its location and its methods of establishment than it is on its mere existence as a homeland for the Jews.

[Inquisitive Lurker]

I'll just take this opportunity to point out that one of the major reasons they are attacked by other sections of world Jewry is because they have a tendency to write a load of books claiming that the Holocaust was divinely ordained with the intention of punishing the Jews for pursuing Zionism. Many people consider this a mindlessly stupid thing to say.


Really, now why is this so illogical? It was easily within the (non-existent) God's power to stop the wholesale slaughter of His "Chosen People," and yet He did not. Logically He either didn't care or He endorsed it. Or, of course, He doesn't exist. Their viewpoint is valid. What's the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, I forget. Think it meant time of trials or time of testing. Shoah or something?

Hey Rabbi, can I interest you in buying a mint edition Art Scroll Stone Edition black leather-bound gilt edges copy of the Tanach? I paid $60, never opened it, I'll sell it to you for $50 plus shipping.