Why Rav Goren Matters: The Legacy of the Langers

 https://mida.org.il/2015/02/06/rav-goren-matters-legacy-langers/

Few embodied the idea that Jewish Law and the State of Israel can and should be one than Rabbi Shlomo Goren · What Haredi lawmakers saw the famous “Status Quo” agreement as a pragmatic arrangement, Rabbi Goren and his Religious Zionist allies saw potential for a true welding of religion and state · The result was the shambles that was the Langer case and the present impasse on personal status · A plea for true religious freedom – for everyone’s sake

 

Rabbi Goren’s vision was programmatic, consisting of distinct elements necessary to making it a reality. For one thing, religious Jews would have to see themselves not as a separate group but as an integral part of the whole Jewish people. When he was appointed the first chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, many in the religious community and the military brass would have been perfectly content for religious soldiers to be segregated into their own “ghettoes” where their religious needs would be met. However, he insisted that the entire military become kosher, that training exercises be minimized on Shabbat, and that there be a synagogue on every base, so that religious soldiers could be fully integrated. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, whose mamlakhti (state-centered) outlook dictated that the military be a melting pot that effaced sectoral, communal, religious, or ethnic allegiances, backed him on this, against opposition within the military. However, for Rabbi Goren, a completely kosher army was goal in itself, whereas for Ben-Gurion it was the price to pay for a “people’s army.”

Next, Halakha would have to be substantially revised in order to seamlessly integrate with the governing of the Jewish state. To that end, Rabbi Goren would offer unprecedented halakhic rulings, arguing that the Jewish state is a sui generis situation in which prior accepted rulings do not apply. For instance, though Halakha long forbade autopsies on Jewish corpses, Rabbi Goren permitted them on the grounds that:

It is inconceivable that the Jewish state would base its health system, which is vital for the nation and the state, on gentile corpses… It is inconceivable that we cannot find a halakhic way to maintain a high level of modern medicine by conducting autopsies on corpses of our own, as is done throughout the world.

Finally, in order to implement his vision, Rabbi Goren would need power—not merely the rabbinic authority accumulated by great rabbis in every generation, but the enforcing power of the state. To this end, the Chief Rabbinate was of paramount importance as a rabbinic body with state-sanctioned power. This is the body that would gradually revise and adapt Halakha to the realities of a modern state. And it was thus crucial to assess and forestall any political threat to the Chief Rabbinate’s power.