An American woman living in Eretz Yisrael named Ronit Peskin has been doing wonderful work to bring a bit of sanity to the absurdity that is the controversy at the Wall. She recently founded a group called Women For the Wall that advocates for maintaining the sanctity of the Kosel countering the theatrics and agitprop on the other side with appeals to common sense and decency.

She has also been writing regularly about the situation for the Times of Israel and in a recent piece entitled “What People Really Are Thinking about Women of the Wall on the Streets of Jerusalem” she shares the results of a thoroughly unscientific survey she conducted on the streets of Yerushalayim by approaching Israelis at random and asking them to share their religious self-identification and their take on the controversy. After citing the gist of each of the 35 interviews she conducted she sums up:

[O]f the people I asked only 18% support the WoW’s right to pray at the Kotel as they do now … vs. 81% who are opposed to what the Women of the Wall are doing at the Kotel.... I asked mostly masortim 40% followed by 31% datiim followed by 17% chilonim and only 11% Chareidi.

Her attempt to go beyond the rhetoric to get at least some inkling of what the average Israeli thinks of the issue inspired me to try my hand at some empirical analysis of my own on this issue. I decided to begin by examining a post at Commentary’s Contentions site written by its editor Jonathan Tobin a fine journalist who has actually written about anti-Orthodox media bias in the past.

But in this post Tobin writes that it is a “fantasy” to think that “Netanyahu would risk [Muslim] violence merely in order to placate the Women of the Wall or a Diaspora that is disgusted by the way the Orthodox govern the Kotel.” I was intrigued by his reference to a monolithic Diasporic sentiment of “disgust” at the Orthodox. After all the Diaspora is a big place and within its ranks are many hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews for whom he certainly doesn’t speak. Next it includes the millions of Jews who have no religious affiliation whatsoever and likely don’t even know of this controversy at all and whom he thus seems to have written off.

That leaves only the ranks of the heterodox movements. But if we are to be honest their members are of two kinds: a great percentage of them have but the most tenuous of connections to Judaism toIsrael and to the movements with which they are nominally affiliated. All available sociological data shows that they don’t attend temple they don’t give to Jewish causes they’ve never visitedIsrael and they have only the foggiest notion of what their movement stands for.

The only people who can by any stretch of the imagination be thought to be “disgusted” at anything occurring 5000 miles from America are the minority of Jewishly involved heterodox Jews — and how is it that Mr. Tobin presumes to know how they feel bar none? Might it just be that some perhaps many of them regard their movements as Jewishly authentic and bristle at Orthodox views to the contrary yet at the same time believe it to be neither wise nor decent for foreign media-hungry interlopers who’ve been given their own prayer spot to offend and disturb the multitudes of indigenous Israeli Jews as well as the American Orthodox who have come to Israel in droves for decades to study and pray at the Wall at all hours and under all conditions? Might they agree that this disruption of a successful status quo is the last thingIsrael’s fragile societal mosaic needs?

So I contacted Tobin to inquire if he has empirical data of any sort to support his assertion of “a Diaspora that is disgusted.” His reply was prompt:

I'm not sure I can point you to a poll but you can cite demographic studies about the fact that 80-90 percent of Jews who identify with a movement do so with a non-Orthodox denomination. I think it would be very difficult to argue that almost all of them do not oppose Orthodox control of the Wall along with resenting the non-recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis.

I wrote back to note that neither I nor anyone I know has suggested that “almost all of [non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews] do not oppose Orthodox control of the Wall” which Mr. Tobin seems to regard as the only possible alternative to his notion of uniform Diasporic “disgust.” And I inquired once more whether his flat assertion of that notion was based on nothing more than the fact that 80 to 90 percent of affiliated Jews are heterodox and are presumed to resent “the non-recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis.”

As of press time no answer was forthcoming.

OY A RACHMONUS The sweet Yom Tov of Shavuos is with us once again and so a thought.

The brachah of Ahavah Rabbah preceding Kriyas Shema is striking in the way it phrases our request of Hashem for success in learning Torah. Avinu ha’Av haRachaman haMeracheim racheim aleinu [Our Father the merciful Father He who has mercy have mercy upon us] is how we begin the plea for the bestowal of binah in our hearts so that we may understand hear learn and teach Torah.

The urgency is palpable the desperate importance of this supplication so clearly manifest in the repeated invocations of Divine compassion. What it seems the authors of this brachah are conveying to us is that our desire to succeed in our learning isn’t simply a matter of wanting to fulfill a mitzvah be it even the greatest one in the Torah; nor is it only that we wish to experience the sublime joy that learning affords; nor just that we wish to grow into talmidei chachamim with all of the grandeur that this title implies.

Those are all deeply noble goals but what I sense in the words of Ahavah Rabbah is something else. I preface what that is with a personal story told by Rav Michel Shurkin in his Meged Giv’os Olam (translated freely).

Towards the end of Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l’s life I came to speak to him about something. I began by asking “Vos macht der Rosh Yeshiva?” [How is the Rosh Yeshiva?] I was shaken by his reply “Nisht gut nisht gut” [Not good not good]. I asked what had happened and he responded that the doctor had visited him and directed him to sleep one additional hour each day due to the condition of his health. As is well known his practice was to rise each morning at 3 AM and learn without interruption until 8 AM when he would daven shacharis. Then with a deep sigh the Rosh Yeshiva added in a pain-filled voice “Ich vehl bleiben ah gantze am ha’aretz ich vehl bleiben ah gantze am ha’aretz” [I’ll remain a complete am ha’aretz].

Elsewhere in this work Rav Shurkin reports that one of the sons of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ztz”l in a hesped for his father said that Rav Shlomo Zalman never told his young sons “Zolst oisvaksen a gadol” [You should grow to become a gadol] because that places an unhealthy pressure on a child’s tender soul. Instead his father would always say “An am ha’aretz torst nisht zein” [See to it that you aren’t an am ha’aretz].

From Rav Shlomo Zalman we learn that a child is perhaps not at a stage where focusing on the far-off goal of being a gadol b’Torah is productive but even at his young age he can surely be taught that to be an am ha’aretz? Oy a rachmonus!

And from the story about Reb Moshe we learn astoundingly that what drove him primarily was not the desire to become an even greater gadol than he already was (which he surely knew) but to avoid the fate worse than any other of being an am ha’aretz. It took someone davka of his towering stature to know that Torah is so vast in breadth and depth that one can be at home in major portions of it and have learned it intensively for his entire life yet still remain in relative terms an “am ha’aretz.”

And so in Ahavah Rabbah we beseech the all-merciful Eibeshter: Please please have rachmonus on us; don’t allow us to remain am haratzim. And if with just that goal in mind we learn with shkidah and ask in Ahavah Rabbah and elsewhere for siyata d’Shmaya the gadlus will take care of itself.