Yitzchak, I beg you not to apologize for speaking the truth, even if the pressure’s on

Dear Mr. Yitzchak Herzog,

I

was quite pleased when I heard you’d been elected to serve as the next chairman of the Jewish Agency. That bit of news awakened memories of friendly conversations between us years ago, which focused, in part, on issues of assimilation. And perhaps you really will succeed in beginning to reverse the disastrous trend currently engulfing Jews around the world. In the spirit of that hope, I wish you success in your endeavors, and may every blessing accompany you in your new position.

In your opening remarks upon accepting your new post, you referred to the “plague of intermarriage” — an apt description of the current state of world Jewry and an accurate assessment of the challenge you must now face. The fact that you were pressured to backtrack, apologize, and modify that painfully true statement has surely shown you who you’re up against in your capacity as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Your conciliatory words, made up of stock phrases such as “my words were taken out of context,” and “I meant what I said, but not what you think,” frankly sounded hollow compared to what you related about your friends in America who are beside themselves as they see their children and grandchildren disappearing from the Jewish landscape through intermarriage.

And there, in that skirmish over your choice of words, lies the real tragedy. Those who put pressure on you to retract your description of the current rate of intermarriage as “a plague” have placed a nearly impossible challenge before you. Just weeks ago, a popular Jewish author named Michael Chabon gave the commencement address at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, which shocked even some of their affiliated personalities. Chabon urged the HUC graduates and their parents to abandon promotion of Jewish-Jewish marriage, calling it “a ghetto of two” and even saying he needed to do “teshuvah” for having married a Jewish woman and having taught his children that marrying Jews is the preferred option. Chabon extolled the virtues of “outmarriage” on the grounds that the human race is strengthened and improved by the blending of different genetic strains, and condemned the overarching Jewish ideas of havdalah and kedushah — separation and sanctification. In that atmosphere, Mr. Herzog, how will they let you speak of the mass exodus from the Jewish People as a plague?

BUT THERE IS ONE AREA where you might be given some room to act and perhaps to stem the tide of assimilation, and that is among a certain sector of the Israeli expats who’ve made new lives for themselves in the US. True, surveys indicate that yordim are assimilating through intermarriage at a faster rate than any other group of Jews in in America — and on my own lecture tours around the US, I’ve met young Israeli yordim who’d served in elite IDF units, yet who had no qualms whatsoever about marrying “local” (read non-Jewish) girls. The secular Zionist diet they’d been fed in Israel hadn’t given them a minimum of Jewish identity that would prevent them from taking such a step.

Yet there are many Israeli expats of a different type, those who would be defined in Israel as “traditional.” While one can’t quite define them as shomrei mitzvos, they are far from the classic chiloni who rejects religious observance as a matter of principle. The traditional Jew, most typically from a Sephardic background, has a strong Jewish identity, keeps Shabbos at least in broad strokes, observes the chagim and perhaps lays tefillin — and for him, the worst thing that could happen is to see one of his children marry a non-Jew.

Yet in many communities, these Jews can’t find suitable schooling for their children. There are no “public religious” schools, such as they would typically choose in Israel, and they are shocked by the cost of tuition at private Orthodox schools. Reform or Conservative “Hebrew school” or “Sunday school” is out of the question for them, since they think of themselves as religious Jews. And for reasons of their own, chareidi communities in America aren’t eager to take these children into their schools. The upshot is that the expat children fall through the cracks in the system and end up in public school by default. This community is crying out for help. Assimilation among them could be prevented if affordable schooling, offering traditional Jewish education, could be provided. I believe, Mr. Herzog, that here you will find a broad base for action that can stop the bleeding from at least one of the wounds caused by this plague of assimilation. While others may not allow you to interfere with their suicidal agenda, these traditional Israelis would surely welcome your intervention. And if I may paraphrase Megillas Esther, who knows but that for a time such as this you have come to the chairmanship?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 717)