Chief Rabbi David Lau puts his career on the line to stand up for halachah

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

Of the unbroken, thousand-year long chain of rabbinic history that current Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau represents, only the last two generations are immediately obvious in his modest office near the entrance to Jerusalem.

The portrait of his grandfather, Rav Yitzchak Yedidiah Frenkel — a former chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and major influence on the boy then known as Dudi — hangs over the desk, both in reality and in spirit.

And in the velvet lapels of his rabbinic frock coat, and the way that the current chief rabbi mixes substance and anecdote, it’s not hard to detect the trademark style of his father and predecessor-but-one, the venerated Rav Yisrael Meir Lau.

But even if the long-gone generations don’t get a seat around the table, the full weight of all those rabbinic ages reveals itself in a few sentences that frame the painful situation that he’s now in — one that few of Rav David Lau’s ancestors could have contemplated.

“If the Knesset would enact a law forcing a doctor to sign that a person who has high fever is totally healthy, do you know a doctor who would obey?” he asks rhetorically. “If the Knesset enacts a law that it is not necessary to build a building with cement, would an engineer agree because it’s the law?

“I am entrusted with upholding the standards of halachah, continuing the chain of rabbanim throughout the generations,” he says with quiet emphasis, shoulders squared. “Is it conceivable that someone should order me to sign something that I believe to be halachically wrong?”

Not a man given to hyperbole, the chief rabbi isn’t exaggerating. Courtesy of the conversion reform bill now being pushed by the Bennett government, which seeks to dilute current standards by allowing local rabbis to oversee conversions, that is the choice he could soon be forced to make.

“The minute giyur operates outside of the Chief Rabbinate,” says Rav Lau, explaining the severity of the threat to halachic conversion, “then when ten Jews stand in Itzkovitch or Zichron Moshe, you’ll have to ask each one, ‘Who converted you?’ It will split the Jewish people.”

For months, Israel’s chief rabbi, a man of measured speech, stayed silent even as the Bennett government — in a three-front alliance of Reform, secularists, and the liberal wing of the National-Religious world headed by Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana — mounted an unprecedented assault on the standing of the Chief Rabbinate.

As other rabbinic and public figures attacked the controversial moves to liberalize kashrus provision in Israel — laws that went into effect last week — Rabbi Lau kept his counsel, preferring behind-the-scenes interventions to public attacks.

But two weeks ago, he broke his silence with a bombshell move.

“With great pain I want to inform you,” he wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Bennett, “that if the conversion bill proceeds, I will be forced to remove my oversight from the conversion system and will immediately stop certification of conversions.”

It was the nuclear option. Backlash from Finance Minister and arch secularist Avigdor Lieberman was both predictable and fierce. Representing hundreds of thousands of voters — both from the right and left — who resent what they call “religious coercion” in the form of Orthodox control over personal status and other aspects of public life, Lieberman accused the chief rabbi of extortion and called for his ouster.

As he abandons the path of quiet diplomacy, Chief Rabbi David Lau faces the unknown: While the government seems to have backed away from other flashpoint struggles in its bid to reorder religious life in Israel, notably Reform recognition at the Kosel, it appears determined to press ahead on the issue of conversion, a high priority for Lieberman’s Russian-speaking voters.

That’s where Rav Lau thinks that Diaspora opinion could be critical to the debate in Israel.

“The minute rabbanim abroad announce that they will not be accepting the certificates issued in Israel, that the decision will cause a rift between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, I think that it will clarify the issue for those who don’t understand it.”