Education, General

Rabbi Chaim Amsellem met last week (March 26) with our students from the Beit Midrash for Human Rights in cooperation with Hillel at Hebrew University. Rabbi Amsellem, a Sephardic Haredi rabbi, is a founder of the Shas Party but resigned to establish the Am Shalem movement. Rabbi Amsellem, an articulate man with a commanding presence, opened the discussion with an explanation of his motivations for this move: “What motivates me is getting out of my shell. I see the injustices in Israeli society as well as in the society that I am from, Mizrahi society, and I decided that the best way to make change is to act within the political system.” Rabbi Nava Hefetz brings us her fascinating impressions from this meeting with a ground-breaking leader in Israeli society.

By Rabbi Nava Hefetz

On Rights and Torah Study

“The society that I come from,” continues Rabbi Amsellem, “forces poverty on its children! It doesn’t allow them to study the core curriculum and professions. High achieving students should sit and learn Torah, but those who are not should be allowed to enlist in the army, earn an education and work. There is inequality of opportunities from the start because there are those who have no chance of going to university like you. This prompted me to start talking about rights.”

Rabbi Amsellem does not hold back criticism of Shas. “Shas was demagogic and misled the public. They went to simple people and said to them: ‘We want to restore ourselves to our former glory.’ Send your children to our schools and we will educate them in the tradition of your ancestors, like it was in the countries you came from. But the tradition of the ancestors was not Lithuanian, it was Zionist and moderate. People visited the synagogue on Friday night and on Saturday went to the beach. The naïve people who sent their children to Shas schools did not imagine that they would perpetuate ignorance and create a generation of youth reliant on public funds. It is not legitimate to take the Mizrahi population that was Zionist, moderate and working and turn them into Haredim.”

Upon his resignation from Shas he never imagined what kind of minefield he would be entering. “I entered a field brimming with mines of all kinds. On top of that I added another: easier conversion for those defined as Seeds of Israel (Zera Israel) and after that yet another: Haredim enlisting in the IDF. Israeli society did not understand that these topics are destroying society. Regarding Haredim enlisting in the army, there are enough people promoting the issue today, therefore I am focusing on the issue of conversion. I work on raising awareness amongst Israelis through Halachic solutions. The rabbinic establishment is onerous, and only makes things worse and drives people away. I am a man of the Halacha, I want to include everyone, and I act according to the saying: ‘Do not close the door to converts.’ I have a target population that I want to reach: the center of Israeli society.

The issue of the Shmita/ Sabbatical year for land and debts (according to the Bible, every seventh year, debt is forgiven and land is left unworked) is extremely relevant to the situation in Israel today, when there is no land allocated for building public housing, and when debt forgiveness – or in contemporary language ‘haircuts’ – is only for the wealthy.

A Torah Bypass Route

From this piercing critique on the rabbinical establishment, Rabbi Amsellem moves on to talking about asylum seekers. “This is a difficult problem,” he continues. “The Torah tells us: ‘If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master’ and Maimonides adds to this that the verse relates to and includes all human beings fleeing a particular place, and that we are obligated to them.”

Rabbi Amsellem points to the socio-economic side of the Torah. As an example, he brings up the issue of debt relief. The issue of the Shmita/Sabbatical year for land and debts– when there is no land allocated for building public housing, and when debt forgiveness – or in contemporary language ‘haircuts’ – is only for the wealthy. Rabbi Amsellem also speaks about the Prozbul [A writ, issued historically by rabbis during the Second Temple period, technically changing the status of individual private loans into the public administration, allowing the poor to receive interest-free loans prior to the Smita/Sabbatical year while protecting the lenders.], or in his own words, “a Torah bypass route.” He adds, “If that would have happened today they would call Hillel a Reform Jew. Unfortunately, today we don’t have a Hillel to show us the way.”

Unfortunately, issues such as women’s rights, Arabs, the LGBT community and others were not raised in the meeting due to lack of time or because they were ticking time bombs… time will tell if Rabbi Amsellem will march on the path of human rights to a discourse that includes all the groups that live side by side in Israel.

“I come from an inclusive world,” says Rabbi Amsellem. Yet it seems that there are limits to this inclusion – when he was asked whether, in light of his statements, what are his views of the Reform or Conservative movements? The question made him uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to mention these movements. Are these the limits of his inclusion?

More on the Beit Midrash for Human Rights at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem