Rabbi Haim Amsalem is a “Sefardi”[1] political activist in Israel. (We’ve met him previously on this blog.) One of the founding members of the ḥaredi Shas political party, he was expelled in 2010 in large part due to his dissent over the halakhic policy of the Sefardi rabbinical establishment (rabanut) dominated by then Chief Rabbi Ovadyah Yosef and his sons. His major complaint was and is that the Sefardi rabbinate has adopted the extremist, stringent approach to p’sikah (halakhic decision) characteristic of the Ashkenaic ḥaredim at the expense of the classic – and much more moderate – Sefardi tradition. For his temerity, Amsalem has been branded a “Reformi,” which is just about the worst thing an Orthodox Jew can call another Jew.[2] Not to be outdone, Amsalem strikes back in kind: it is the Sefardi rabanut, he claims, that is actually doing the work of the Reformers.[3] He explains that it was the Asheknazi Orthodox rabbinate that actually created the Reform movement in 19th-century Europe through its narrow, sectarian, and rejectionist p’sikah that drove millions of Jews away from Torah and tradition. And the Sefardi rabbinate in Israel today is making the same mistake, “creating” Reform Jews through its slavish imitation of the halakhic method of the “Litvaks.”
Rabbi Amsalem is clearly a much better polemicist than he is a historian. The Orthodox rabbinate of central and western Europe did not “create” or “invent” (as he puts it) the Reform movement in those regions. The historical reality, as usual, is far too rich and complex to be shoved into a simplistic theory. We know that all the streams of modern Judaism, including the one called “Orthodoxy,” emerged in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by the culture of modernity. True, the Reform movement did not strike roots in the “Sefardic” world (i.e., among Jewish communities in Muslim countries), a fact Amsalem cites as evidence that the rabbis there were able to retain the loyalty of the not-so-observant masses. But that may have less to do with the rabbis’ moderate halakhic policies than with the fact that modernization and secularization developed differently in every region and that the culture of the “Sefardi” world was less hospitable to the division of the Jewish community into separate religious sects.
Still, Amsalem raises an interesting point: the existence of a distinct “Sefardi” approach to halakhah that was more lenient and less divisive than the one that rose to dominance in Ashkenazic Europe and that continues to prevail in Orthodox circles today. This isn’t just Amsalem’s contention. The idea has received academic backing from Professor Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University and the Shalom Hartman Institute, whose books[4] trace in detail how the rabbinical authorities of Jewish communities in Muslim lands adopted an “inclusive” halakhic policy, consciously directed their p’sikah toward the community as a whole and not only toward its most religiously observant (“Orthodox”) segment. Unlike their ḥaredi European colleagues, the Sefardi rabbis avoided stringency for its own sake, seeking to strengthen the bonds that connected their people – including the not-so-observant ones – to the Jewish tradition. This moderate, inclusive approach characterized the Sefardi rabbinate of the state of Israel in its early years; such outstanding figures as Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Hai Ouziel and Rabbi Hayyim David Halevy, whose p’sikah spoke to the concerns of a Jewish community far beyond the walls of the yeshivah, come quickly to mind. It is this “classic” Sefardi halakhic tradition that Rabbi Amsalem wishes to restore.[5]
We wish him luck.[6] In the meantime, all of this goes to demonstrate a point that we regularly make on this blog: there is no such thing as “the” halakhah. The nature, content, and direction of rabbinical decision is always a particular expression, the product of an ongoing conversation between a particular Jewish community and the texts upon which its people build their religious lives. If classic “Sefardi” halakhah differed from other approaches, it is because the p’sikah of the Sefardi rabbis was informed by a unique set of historical and cultural circumstances. It can hardly be otherwise. Though every halakhic tradition shares much in common with every other, each such tradition is a halakhic world of its own… which means that all halakhah is “sectarian” halakhah. Thus, what we call progressive halakhah is no more or no less “sectarian” than any other variety, be it Ashkenazic or Sefardic. What makes it different is that it is uniquely ours, the product of our own community’s conversation with the texts and sources of Jewish law.
We’ve known this all along, of course. But we should be grateful to Rabbi Haim Amsalem for the opportunity to review the facts.
___________________________________________________________________________
[1] “Sefardi” in quotes because that word has become a shorthand label for the Jewish communities originating in Muslim lands and not only for those who trace their ancestors to the Iberian peninsula.
[2] Well, except perhaps for “Amalek,” a cute (?) pun on the name “Amsalem”; they’ve called him that, too.
[3] Kind of reminds us of that old Rabbinic proverb הפוסל במומו פוסל, I.e., the name-caller is often guilty of the same defect. See B. Kiddushin 70b.
[4] See his Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), which draws upon his Hebrew works He’iru p’nei mizraḥ (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uḥad, 2001) and Masoret ut’murah (Jerusalem: Makhon Ben-Zvi, 1993).
[5] See his Facebook page: the slogan “מחזירים עטרה ליושנה”, “Let us restore the crown to its former glory,” carries some clear halakhic/traditional implications.
[6] He’ll need it. His effort to organize a party to compete with Shas floundered in the 2013 Knesset elections. He’s currently affiliated with Naftali Bennet’s Bayit Yehudi, the present-day heirs of the dat-le’umi (National Religious) Orthodox Zionist parties that, for the most part, were dominated by Ashkenzim.