Gary Rosenblatt reports in the New York Jewish Week 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 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.
