``some rabbis shouldn't be given pens''

Povoking mayhem BY URI DROMI
Miami Herald

JERUSALEM -- Imagine that prominent Christian clergymen in the United States would have issued an edict forbidding renting or selling homes to Jews. What mayhem would erupt! Jewish leaders and organizations would raise hell, there would be rallies and legal actions attacking this on constitutional grounds, and ultimately the disgraceful act would be killed and buried.
Yet exactly such an event occurred last week, except that it happened in Israel, the Jewish state, and it was a group of rabbis who had issued a decree forbidding the renting or selling of homes to non-Jews.

We have seen religious leaders going astray before. In September, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, caused a world alarm when he threatened to burn copies of the Koran. President Obama denounced it on moral grounds and as commander-in-chief warned that such a lunatic act would be a ``recruitment bonanza for al Qaeda.'' Maybe the president could have sought a federal injunction to enjoin Jones from the Koran burning; maybe not.

This is not the case with the Israeli rabbis, though. Those who signed that infamous edict are municipal rabbis, who are employed by the cities and whose paychecks come from the national treasury (my taxes). In other words, they are not private citizens, but civil servants.

As such, I would expect that on the wall in their offices there will hang the Declaration of Independence -- the document closest to a constitution in Israel -- that says clearly that the State of Israel ``will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex.''

How can those civil servants, then, issue such blatantly unconstitutional ruling, defying the core values of our state?

They can, because there is no clear separation between religion and state in Israel. Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, wrote about generals being confined to their barracks and rabbis to their synagogues.

We seem to have succeeded with the generals. Not so much with the rabbis. Those who signed that edict get their salary from the state and seem to obey its laws, but at the moment of truth it is revealed that they listen to a higher authority: the Torah, the Jewish law.

But does the Torah allow the discrimination of non-Jews? I read in the same Bible that those rabbis surely have, in Leviticus 19:33-34: ``And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shall love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.''

This is not a rare statement at all. As a matter of fact, the Torah goes out of its way to warn the Israelites to treat the ger (stranger) with respect, and take care of his/her needs.

The edict caused an uproar in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned it, Holocaust survivors lamented that it reminded them of other, darker, periods, and most important, Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashiv, one of the most prominent rabbis in Israel, criticized it, saying that ``some rabbis shouldn't be given pens'' to write such edicts. His reasoning, however, was disappointing. He was against that move, he said, because it would trigger anti-Semitic reaction. Pragmatic reason, then.

If pragmatic, not moral issues are at stake, I would therefore add another reason why such an edict should have never been issued. Article 11 of the Hamas Charter stipulates that ``the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf (a religious endowment) throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.''

So those rabbis, by dragging property rights, socioeconomic and political issues into the religious domain, make a compromise and co-existence in our turbulent area impossible. Here is how the Islamic radicals see it, in Article 13 of the same charter: ``[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion.'' And they mean it: Death warrants are issued against Arabs who sell property to Jews. I'm glad that some of those rabbis have withdrawn their signatures. What we need is common sense and moderation, not acts that might push us toward religious war.

Uri Dromi is a columnist based in Jerusalem.



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