Reviewing 5773: Fighting over Jewish pluralism

NEW YORK (JTA) – In 5773, the religious wars just would not go away.

In Israel, elections extending Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister delivered big wins to two anti-Orthodox-establishment upstarts, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett. For the first time in nearly two decades, Israel’s coalition government included no haredi Orthodox parties.

The Israel Defense Forces took steps to end the draft exemption for haredi men. Israel’s Ministry of Religious Services agreed for the first time to allow non-Orthodox rabbis to serve in communal positions with state-funded salaries.

And the Reform and Conservative movements finally broke through years of apathy to get the Israeli government to consider changes to the Orthodox monopoly over ritual and prayer at the Western Wall – but there’s been no movement beyond proposals.

In the U.S., Yeshivat Maharat, a New York school for women founded to train Orthodox female rabbinic authorities, graduated its first class of Orthodox clergy, known as maharats.

The Supreme Court granted federal benefits to same-sex couples and struck down a California law banning gay marriage in the state.

While Jewish liberals seemed to have a good year, Orthodox leaders and institutions were on the defensive.

Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy, became the subject of a $380 million lawsuit by former students alleging that two rabbis who used to teach at the Yeshiva University high school for boys in the 1970s and 1980s committed hundreds of acts of sexual abuse. When YU’s chancellor, Rabbi Norman Lamm, announced he was stepping down, he apologized for mishandling the allegations when he was university president.

The Satmar hasidic community in New York lined up to support an unlicensed therapist from Brooklyn charged with the repeated sexual assault of a female teenager in his care.

Even after Nechemya Weberman was found guilty and sentenced to 103 years in prison, community support did not waver; Satmar leaders inveighed against the victim and her supporters.

But to extrapolate a storyline or trend from these disparate events could be folly.

For one thing, the Orthodox sex scandals might be more about the dawning of a new age of reckoning on sexual abuse than the prevalence of sexual misdeeds among Orthodox Jews.

And for all the triumphs that Jewish liberals saw this year, demographic trends suggest that Jewish communities in the United States and Israel are growing less liberal.

Data released in January from the 2011 Jewish population study of New York showed that two-thirds of the metropolitan region’s Jewish population growth over the last decade occurred in two haredi neighborhoods in Brooklyn. While there hasn’t been a national Jewish population study in more than a decade, data suggest that Orthodox Jews, with high birthrates, will represent an ever-larger proportion of the American Jewish community.

“The traditional population of American Jews has high fertility and the non-Orthodox population as a group is well below replacement level,” New York University sociologist Steven M. Cohen, one of the study’s researchers, told JTA.

While fertility rates among non-Orthodox Israelis are not as low as those of American Jews, they lag behind those of Orthodox Israelis. The relative size of Israel’s haredi community as a share of Israel’s total population is expected to double by 2020, to 16 percent.

In Israel, the culture wars between haredi and non-haredi have focused on the haredi draft exemption and the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over marriage.

In the U.S., the battle has been over Jewish values. Is it a Jewish value to support the right of gays to marry or does the practice contravene Jewish ethics? Should Jews press Washington to make a concerted push for Israeli-Palestinian peace or is such pressure now not in Israel’s best interests? The divisions among American Jews do not fall neatly along denominational lines.

Meanwhile, the American Jewish political divide appears slowly to be widening. Though Jews as a whole still skew heavily Democratic, in last November’s election President Obama dropped at least six points among Jews from 2008, winning an estimated 68 percent of the Jewish vote.

Divides over politics and religion stood in sharp contrast to the relative consensus that largely held on international issues.

There was practical unanimity that Syria’s civil war not spill over the border, that instability in Egypt not turn the Sinai Peninsula into a breeding ground for Islamic militants, that Iran be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons capability, that the European Union enforce its decision to designate Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization.

But external threats did not dominate communal discourse in 5773. There wasn’t the same public urgency on Iran as in past years. The Egyptian coup in July was less concerning for Israel than the 2011 revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak.

The Israeli-Palestinian relationship was marked more by the absence of progress than anything else  – until U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry coaxed both sides to the negotiating table in July. The mini-war in Gaza in November 2012  lasted eight days and resulted in the deaths of some 150 Palestinians and six Israelis; after that, Israel’s border with Gaza was mostly quiet.

It was tragedy in the United States that left the community with lasting scars. Late last October, a massive storm surge generated by Hurricane Sandy battered communities, synagogues and Jewish schools up and down the Northeast coast. UJA-Federation of New York convened an emergency meeting to authorize $10 million for rebuilding efforts, many of which continue today.

Outside the United States and Israel, big stories included the banning of Jewish ritual slaughter in Poland, a new German law regulating ritual circumcision, a controversial exhibit in a Jewish museum in Berlin,  a much-criticized deal between Argentina and Iran to investigate the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center bombing, sexual abuse scandals in Australia, concerns about far-right movements in Hungary and Greece and the appointment of a new chief rabbi in England.

The good news: None of these stories was about major Jewish calamities.

To be sure, Jewish people suffered tragedies in 5773 – from natural disasters, from Gaza rocket fire. But for a people obsessed with survival, the absence of mass casualty events in 5773 made it a remarkable year as much for what did not happen as for what did.