Orthodox Rabbi Talks of Splitting Jerusalem, Faces Backlash
...a prominent Orthodox rabbi broke ranks with the official Orthodox line last week and called for an open discussion of the division of Jerusalem...Yosef Kanefsky, senior rabbi of B’nai David-Judea Congregation, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles’s Pico-Robertson neighborhood...an opinion piece he wrote for the October 26 edition of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles...Headlined “An Orthodox Rabbi’s Plea: Consider a Divided Jerusalem,” the piece called on Jewish leaders to approach the Israeli-Palestinian peace conference scheduled to take place in Annapolis, Md., with an open mind, especially on the question of Jerusalem...
...The discussion he sparked was so robust, in fact, that it made it into the pages of the Los Angeles Times, which ran a story on Kanefsky’s opinion piece on the front page of its October 28 “California” section(*)...The 44-year-old Kanefsky, a former associate rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale — a New York congregation led by Orthodox maverick Avi Weiss..Kanefsky said he learned to speak out from Weiss, who is known for advocating liberal positions that often put him at odds with the Orthodox establishment. For example, both Weiss and Kanefsky allow women to read from the Torah in their own prayer groups.
Daniel Korobkin, a West Coast representative for the Orthodox Union and a personal friend of Kanefsky’s, noted that..What is different about Kanefsky, Korobkin said, is his take on geopolitics. “His political positions are not necessarily aligned with liberal Orthodoxy or with his teacher, Rabbi Avi Weiss,” Korobkin said. “Rabbi Kanefsky not only takes a liberal religious worldview, but he does the same thing with his politics.”
I'm sure that consideration for the religious expressions of Jewesses doesn't necessarily affect a Rabbi's intellectual failure regarding the future of Jerusalem but I think maybe some time spent in a "mechitzahed" environment might help the Rabbi regain his senses.
Here's an outtake from the LA Times story:-
(*)
In a thoughtful, often anguished opinion piece in Friday's Jewish Journal, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, senior rabbi at Congregation B'nai David-Judea in West Los Angeles, wrote that neither Israel nor the Palestinians had been honest in telling the story of their conflict since the 1967 Mideast War. And without such honesty, he said, no meaningful peace talks could occur.
Now, the rabbi wrote, as Israel approaches a possible peace conference with the Palestinians this fall, the Israeli government must be free to discuss the status of Jerusalem, despite the strong opposition of many Orthodox Jewish groups and others.
"It's not that I would want to see Jerusalem divided," Kanefsky wrote in the article for the weekly Los Angeles newspaper that chronicles Jewish life and issues. "It's rather that the time has come for honesty."
Well, that's so much hogwash, you should excuse the non-kosher reference.
And in writing the following, it is obvious that Kanefsky has just finished reading Gershom Gorenberg's book:-
On our side, this means being honest about the story of how Israel came to settle civilians in the territories it conquered in 1967, and about the outcomes that this story has generated. An honest reading of this story reveals that there were voices in the inner circle of the Israeli government in 1967-1968 who warned that settling civilians in conquered territories was probably illegal under international law.
But it isn't nor wasn't. And the Rabbi, who, I presume has a grounding in Halacha and Talmud, Rambam and Radbaz, should know a few things about Israel, Eretz-Yisrael, the "reconstitution of the Jewish National homeland", the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine text and a few other things if this is what bothers him.
Maybe it's just the Los Angeles ambience?
And this excerpt illustrates that the Rabbi is, to be generous, slightly delusional and irrational:
The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story -- a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don't owe anything to anyone.
This bit doesn't make sense. What has a story or narrative and its truth have to do with the Muslim Waqf destruction of Jewish antiquities, with the Israel governments' decisions to discriminate against Jews and prohibit prayer on the Temple Mount and with many other issues discussed here at this blog for the past 3.5 years?
For one thing, as he says that his op-ed was preceded by a sermon, I am sure it didn't carry the title "Sermon on the Mount".
Here's the letter I sent to the Jewish Journal:-
A careful reading of Rabbi Kanefsky's opinions reveals an unsettled mind. While not calling directly for a redivided Jerusalem, he does everything to make that possible by suggesting that Israel's "story" of the past 40 years is dishonest and therefore, it and we Jews and Israelis are at fault, somehow.
His article was preceded by a sermon at his congregation, one, I am sure, that was not entitled "Sermon on the Mount". For if he had discussed but one issue, the state of the Temple Mount in Muslim hands, which is what a redivided Jerusalem implies, he would realize that he is telling a fairy tale. What story could we Jews tell in a decade after the Temple Mount would be surrendered? Would there be any archeological artifacts left? Could Jews pray below at the Kotel in security? Would there be any graves to be found on the Mount of Olives?
Rabbi Kanefsky may be the spiritual leader of an Orthodox synagogue but I think his loyalty is to the League of Trembling Israelites, an intra-denominational Jewish sector that seeks the high moral ground while retreating from what it means to be Jewish.
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