With a war raging as his tenure ends, Chief Rabbi David Lau faces the most loaded issues of his career

Photo: Flash 90

Rav David Lau is in the final month of his ten-year term as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. He leaves his post with so many existential issues facing the country still unresolved: the war to uproot Hamas from Gaza, the continuing protests in Tel Aviv, the lack of a draft law for chareidi yeshivah students. But through it all, his charge has been clear: The role of the chief rabbi is to reach each and every Jew

The haunting scene took place just before our interview in the Chief Rabbi’s office. A young war widow, whose soldier husband died without leaving children, had arrived for the chalitzah ceremony.

Over the past six months, the once-rare rite has tragically become commonplace. Until October 7, chalitzah would normally be performed before the dayanim in the Great Rabbinical Court of Appeals. But Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Rav David Lau noticed that the widows felt awkward in that setting. So he began offering to host the ceremony in his office, lighting a memorial candle and explaining that chalitzah is a kind of farewell, an extension of the Jewish practice of sitting shivah.

When the widow who arrived before our interview was asked to lean against the wall, she leaned against a pillar on which the picture of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ztz”l has hung for the past decade.

“Rav Shlomo Zalman, whose boundless love of the Torah, Am Yisrael, and the soldiers putting their lives on the line were all closely linked, would have happily deferred and considered it a great zechus,” said Rav Lau, removing the picture from the pillar.

This is the final month of Rav Lau’s ten-year term as chief rabbi. His replacement will be elected soon. On the eve of the final Shavuos of his tenure, I sat down with him in his office for a special interview that said as much about the status of the chief rabbinate as it did about the state of country.

We’re sitting down moments after a chilling chalitzah ceremony. In past wars, we’ve seen many cases of agunos, and stories are told to this day about Rav Ovadiah Yosef’s efforts to free them. How is it that the issue hasn’t come up during this war?

Am Yisrael has gone through an unbelievably difficult period over the past six months. But at the same time, thanks to the holy and dedicated work being carried out by so many, and despite the fires, the mutilation, and the pure evil we’ve encountered, we haven’t had a single agunah since the start of the war.

Identifying all the bodies is an almost impossible task in a disaster of such a scale.

There were questions of identification, but we did everything possible to ensure that the bereaved women could at least have certainty, and in the civil aspect as well, I had the zechus to provide help and give the right instructions. We have had one or two questions, but these were questions of identification.

Including those who were abducted to Gaza and about whom we have very little information? Isn’t that a state of uncertainty from the standpoint of halachah?

Without going into the details, I can say that we’ve been able to obtain the information required to achieve certainty. It must be understood that given the scale of this terrible disaster, the IDF rabbinate has done an amazing job on both the military and civil fronts to ensure that there isn’t a single agunah. It’s almost incomprehensible, given our experience in previous wars.

We opened our conversation on chalitzah right after the mournful ceremony that took place in your office. In the current environment, with the relationship between religion and state so fraught, the ceremony of chalitzah itself also has the potential to stir up strong emotions. How would secular people even know about it, or connect to it?

This is my place as a rabbi, to know how to approach people and explain that this is another part of saying goodbye. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve performed a chalitzah ceremony in my office, even though the Great Court is just two floors above me. We do it here out of sensitivity, attentiveness, and concern for the feelings of both the brother and the wife. The procedure is painful. It’s a rav’s duty to carry it out with maximum sensitivity, but I can say that one feels every time that the deceased is here with us and is saying thank you for this parting.