Godol HaDor suspected by Romans of being a Christian

There has been a ongoing dispute amongst our commentators regarding the influence of Christianity on Judaism. One of the documented cases appears in the gemora regarding R'Eliezar HaGadol - the godol hador. A man who was the ultimate mesora man - who never said anything he hadn't heard from his rebbe. He was also certified by Heaven as knowing the correct halacha. Here are the relevent sources describing how great he was - plus the gemora in Avoda Zara regarding his arrest by the Romans because they suspected him of being a Christian. [I am aware that Rashi has a different explanation]

Sukkah(28a):Our Rabbis have taught: It happened that R. Eliezer passed the Sabbath in Upper Galilee, and they asked him for thirty decisions in the laws of Sukkah. Of twelve of these he said, ‘I heard them [from my teachers]’; of eighteen he said, ‘I have not heard’. R. Jose b. Judah said, Reverse the words: Of eighteen he said, ‘I have heard them’, of twelve he said, ‘I have not heard them’. They said to him,’Are all your words only reproductions of what you have heard?’ He answered them, ‘You wished to force me to say something which I have not heard from my teachers. During all my life [I may tell you] no man was earlier than myself in the college, I never slept or dozed in the college, nor did I ever leave a person in the college when I went out, nor did I ever utter profane speech, nor have I ever in my life said a thing which I did not hear from my teachers’.

Bava Metzia(59b): Concerning the Oven of Aknai… R’ Eliezer presented all possible explanations for his position but his colleagues did not accept them. He then said to them: If the halacha is in accord with my position then the carob tree will support me. Immediately the carob tree uprooted itself and moved either 100 amos or 400 amos. They said to him that the movement of the carob tree was not a relevant proof. He then said to them: If the halacha is in accord with my position than the river will support me. Immediately the river flowed backwards. They said to him that the river was not a relevant proof. Again he said: If the halacha is in accord with my position then the walls of the yeshiva will show support. Immediately the walls of the yeshiva started to fall down. R’ Yehoshua rebuked the walls: If Torah scholars are arguing with each other concerning halacha what is it your concern? Consequently the walls did not fall out of respect for R’ Yehoshua but they did not return to their original position out of respect for R’ Eliezer and they remain in this intermediary position. Again he said: If the halacha is in accord with my position then let Heaven offer support. A Heavenly Voice immediately called out: Why are you arguing with R’ Eliezer since the halacha is always in accord with his views? R’ Yehoshua stood up and said: Torah is not in Heaven! What did he mean by that? R’ Yermiyahu said: Since the Torah has already been given at Sinai we do not pay attention even to a Heavenly Voice concerning halacha—the Torah itself says that halacha is determined by the vote of the majority. R’ Nossan met Eliyahu later and asked him what was G‑d doing during this debate? Eliyahu replied: He smiled and said “My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me.” That day that R’ Eliezer was outvoted they brought all that R’ Eliezer had declared ritually and burned it. They also voted to ostracize him…

Avoda Zara(16b): Our Rabbis taught that when R’ Eliezer was arrested because he was suspected of being a Christian they took him to the court to be judged. The governor asked him, “How can a saged like yourself be involved in these worthless activities?” R’ Eliezer replied, “The Judge is right.” The governor thought that R’ Eliezer was referring to him when in fact R’ Eliezer was referring to his Father in Heaven. Because of the governor’s misunderstanding the governor said, “Because you have faith in my judgment I am pardoning you.” When he returned home his students came to console him but he refused to accept their consolation because he was upset that he had been accused of being a Christian. R’ Akiva said to him, “Will you give me permission to say one thing of that which you have taught me?” R’ Eliezer gave him permission. R’ Akiva then said, “Perhaps you were exposed to Chrisitian teachings and it gave you pleasure and that perhaps is the reason that you were arrested?” R’ Eliezer replied that R’ Akiva’s comment caused him to recall an incident. “Once I was walking in the upper market of Tzipori when I met one [of the students of Yeshu] by the name of Yaakov of Kfar Sekaniah. He said to me that it is written in your Torah (Devarim 23:19) that one should not bring money which had been paid to a prostitute into the Temple. Can it be used to build a bathroom for the High Priest? I did not answer him. He then told me that he had been taught by Yeshu that it says in Michah(1:7), For of the hire of a prostitute has she gathered them and unto the hire of a prostitute shall they return. That means that they came from a place of filth so let them go to a place o filth. Because I enjoyed these words I was arrested as a Christian. That is because I transgressed that which was said in the Torah. Mishlei(5:8) says to ‘Remove your way far from her’ – and that is a reference to heresy or Christianity while ‘come not close to the door of her house’ is referring to the ruling power.” Others interpret the end of this verse to be a warning to stay way from a prostitute rather than the ruling power.

Jerusalem mayor asks Supreme Court to halt offensive gay parade

Haaretz reports:

_{By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent}

Jerusalem's mayor and city manager urged the High Court of Justice on Thursday to prevent the Gay Pride parade from taking place in the capital next Thursday, on the grounds that it would offend the public's sensibilities.

In a joint letter to the High Court, Mayor Uri Lupolianski and city manager Yair Ma'ayan wrote: "Past experience shows that the parade greatly offends, deliberately and unnecessarily, the feelings of Jews, Muslims and Christians, who view its sheer existence, and the blatant manner in which it takes place, as a desecration of the holy city and of the values with which they were raised."

The letter was sent in support of a petition on the matter filed by right-wing activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir.

Ma'ayan and Lupolianski stressed that their request contradicts the position of the municipality's legal counsel, Yossi Havilio, who favors holding the parade.

Havilio, who sent a separate response to the court, argued that the parade's organizers are making every effort not to offend the city's Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities.
[...]

Messianic Jews - unwelcome missionaries in Israel

Haaretz reports:

[...]
Israel's tiny community of Messianic Jews, a mixed group of 10,000 people who include the California-based Jews for Jesus, complains of threats, harassment and police indifference.

The March 20 bombing was the worst incident so far. In October, a mysterious fire damaged a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews, and last month ultra-Orthodox Jews torched a stack of Christian holy books distributed by missionaries.

The Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning, but the Ortiz family says vigorous police action is needed.
[...]
Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a country whose population consists of a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus and has little tolerance for missionary work.

At the same time, Israel has warm relations with U.S. evangelical groups, which strongly support its cause, but these generally refrain from proselytizing inside Israel. Even the Mormon church, which has mission work at its core worldwide, agreed when it opened a campus in Jerusalem to refrain from missionary activity.

[...]
Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish, observing the holy days and reciting many of the same prayers. The Ortiz family lights candles on the Sabbath, shuns pork and eats matzoth on Passover.

Ami Ortiz, interviewed at the Tel Aviv hospital where he is being treated, comes across as no different from any Jewish Israeli his age. He's a sabra, or native-born Israeli, who speaks English with a Hebrew accent, has an older brother in an elite Israeli army unit and was hoping to join the youth squad of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team.

But his religion also holds that one can embrace Jesus - Ami calls him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua - as the Messiah and remain Jewish. Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, believe that the Messiah has yet to come, that he will do so only when he chooses, and that any attempt to pre-empt his coming is a grievous sin.

Rabbi Sholom Dov Lifschitz, head of the ultra-Orthodox Yad Leahim organization that campaigns against missionary activity in Israel, says Messianic Jews give him great pain.

"They are provoking... it's a miracle that worse things don't happen," he said.

Messianic activists appear to have had some success among couples with one non-Jewish spouse, as well as immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union who have loose ties to Judaism.

Or Yehuda, a town in central Israel with many immigrants as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews including a deputy mayor, Uri Aharon, was the scene of the May 15 book-burning.

Ami Dahan, a local police official, says hundreds of Christian religious books were burned on May 15 in an empty lot in town. He said Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon, has been questioned on suspicion that he instructed youths to collect the books from homes where they had been distributed and told them to burn them.

Aharon denies ordering the burning. He says the books were collected from a neighborhood of mostly Ethiopian immigrants who are easily persuaded by
missionaries.

"There are three missionaries who live and work in the town, and every Saturday they take people to worship and try to brainwash them," Aharon said.

Many Messianic Jews say they recognize the sensitivities involved and do not distribute religious material or conduct high-profile campaigns. But Aharon noted a recent Jews for Jesus campaign with signs on buses that equated two similar Hebrew words - Jesus and salvation. Public outrage quickly forced the bus company to remove the signs.

Lawyer Dan Yakir of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel says the law allows missionaries to preach provided they don't offer gifts or money or go after minors.

"It is their right according to freedom of religion to maintain their religious lifestyle and disseminate their beliefs, including through literature," he said.

But the obstacles are evident, raised not just from religious activists but by the state.

Calev Myers, a lawyer who represents Messianic Jews, said he has fought 200 legal cases in the past two years. Most involve authorities' attempts to close down houses of worship, revoke the citizenship of believers or refuse to register their children as Israelis. In one case, Israel has accused a German religion student of missionary activity and has tried - so far unsuccessfully - to deport her.

"In incidents of violence, police are reluctant to press charges," Myers said.

The book-burning caused shock among U.S. evangelicals.

[...]

The Ortiz family moved from the United States to Israel in 1985, qualifying as immigrants under Israel's Law of Return because Leah, the mother, is Jewish. In 1989 they moved into Ariel, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and established a small Messianic group which now numbers 60, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, according to David Ortiz, the pastor and Ami's father.

He said that he built the community through conversations with friends and neighbors, but did not actually go door-to-door distributing religious material to strangers in the traditional sense of missionary work. David Ortiz says he has also proselytized in the Palestinian areas - prompting Islamic leaders there to warn against contact with him. Ortiz said he had no problem if Messianic Jews discuss their religious views with others and persuade them to believe in Jesus.

When the family began holding study sessions, a rabbi warned Ortiz not to speak about Jesus outside the home.

[...]

Meanwhile, the Messianic Jewish believers are taking no chances. These days they worship under the protection of an armed guard.

Religioius leaders demand cancellation of offensive gay parade

Letter written by religious MKs, rabbis asks ministers to cancel parade or move it from Jerusalem's center to outskirts of city, far from religious centers, holy sites, eyes of children. 'Freedom of speech doesn't include abominable acts,' they say

by Neta Sela YNET

The Shas Party and its chairman Eli Yishai, MK Uri Ariel (National Union-NRP), United Torah Judaism, and the leaders of the Rabbinate demanded on Thursday that the Pride Parade scheduled to take place in the capital next week be cancelled or transferred to an enclosed space on the city's outskirts.

A letter sent by Attorney Doron Shmueli to a number of government ministers said, "You are asked to order and act towards the cancellation of the 'Pride Parade' in the city of Jerusalem, or alternately you are asked to qualify its sexual content and not to allow the organizers of the event to do whatever they please. You are also asked to limit the parade to an enclosed area, to which entry will be prohibited to anyone under the age of 18."

The rabbis and religious MKs explained that "the acceptance of the parade as part of our lives does not oblige us not to defend ourselves against it or to defend those that require protection against it, especially children. The easy access to the sexual content of the parade exposes children to negative influences. The public interest is to defend the children." The letter further stated that "the unusual sights of the parade can do harm to the public order." Regarding freedom of speech, they claimed this right does not include "abominable acts".

Problematic location
The religious leaders also deemed the parade's location problematic. "The place designed to hold the parade is within close proximity of the Old City's walls and on the path leading to the Western Wall and the sites sacred to Christianity and the Islam.

Aside from this, the parade is scheduled to be held on a weekend, during which the ultra-Orthodox community tends to visit the Western Wall, a remnant of our holy temple. The holding of the parade as it has previously been seen on the path designated for it constitutes a heavy blow to public sensitivities, especially those of the Jewish (religious-Orthodox), Christian, and Muslim public residing within close proximity of the Old City."

The letter also dictates that the parade is to be banned from taking place "near religious neighborhoods, while exhibiting a lack of modesty harmful to religious sensitivities and beyond the limits of tolerance required for the remanding of freedom of expression and demonstration in our legal system."

The religious parties requested that the parade be moved to "a different place on the outskirts of the city and far from religious centers and underage bystanders, who are liable to be exposed to this wrongful content, and especially not to make use of public parks to which the public flocks during its free time."

Last year, despite last-minute efforts at cancellation, the Pride Parade was held in the center of Jerusalem with the participation of thousands of people. Meanwhile, the ultra-Orthodox community held a rally in which elegies were read. In November of 2006, the ultra-Orthodox community succeeded in its efforts and the parade was held inside a Jerusalem stadium.

Religion as foundation of democracy - Israel is not unique

Jun. 18, 2008
Haviv Rettig , Jerusalem Post

"The Jewish-Israeli case is often said to be unique," begins an article by Dr. Alexander Yakobson, a senior lecturer in Roman history at Hebrew University, in the summer 2008 edition of Israel Studies, an academic journal on Israeli society.

The country's strangeness comes from the "'extra-territorial' character of the Jewish people, Israel's ties with the Jewish Diaspora and the strong connection between the Jewish religion and the prevalent notion of Jewish peoplehood," explains the author. Some celebrate this uniqueness, "pointing to the uniqueness of Jewish history and culture," and some are critical of it as "inconsistent with modern civic democracy," but rarely is the "underlining premise of uniqueness" questioned, Yakobson believes.

Now he's out to change that, with an argument that examines the constitutions of other democracies to show that Israel is neither officially nor in practice alone in its, well, uniqueness.

"There are numerous other cases where national identity and religion are officially connected in some way, and where there are official bonds between a nation-state and an ethnocultural Diaspora," he writes.

The Greek constitution, for example, makes some surprising provisions. Though it promises, to quote from article 13, that "every known religion is free and the forms of worship thereof shall be practiced without any hindrance by the State and under protection of the law," its preamble nevertheless begins with: "In the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity." In the constitution itself, article 3 asserts that "the prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ" and takes pains to note that this church, "acknowledging as its head Our Lord Jesus Christ is indissolubly united in doctrine with the Great Church of Constantinople and every other Church of Christ of the same doctrine."

Yakobson's article, titled "Jewish Peoplehood and the Jewish State, How Unique? - A Comparative Survey," summarizes more extensive findings of a book he co-authored with Israeli constitutional thinker Amnon Rubinstein titled Israel Among the Nations. The idea presented in the book, and the newly-published article, is an important contribution to the international discussion surrounding the Jewish state.

It isn't merely that an Israeli scholar has located another freakish case - Greece - among contemporary democracies, but that religion-based ethnocultural identity is the social glue of a broad swath of the free West.

The preamble to the Irish constitution begins: "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred." Norway's constitution decrees that "the Evangelical-Lutheran religion shall remain the official religion of the State," that "more than half the number of the Members of the Council of State shall profess the official religion of the State," and even that "the inhabitants professing it are bound to bring up their children in the same." Poland, Bulgaria, Armenia, Georgia and much of Scandinavia, but also the United States and Britain, all are revealed to be more committed to their cultural uniqueness - through religion - than one might think.

But the most fascinating and unexpected example cited in Yakobson's argument is not, in fact, Western: "The Tibetan Constitution adopted by the Assembly of Tibetan People's Deputies in 1991 begins, 'Whereas His Holiness the Dalai lama has offered a democratic system to Tibetans, in order that the Tibetan People in-Exile be able to preserve their ancient traditions of spiritual and temporal life, unique to the Tibetans…' It states that the '…future Tibetan polity shall uphold the principle of non-violence and shall endeavor to
be a Free Social Welfare State with its politics guided by the Dharma, a Federal Democratic Republic…' At the same time, the Dalai Lama is proclaimed as 'chief executive of the Tibetan people' and given considerable powers," Yakobson writes.

[...]

These examples, Yakobson notes, are hardly outmoded anachronisms, but real, resonant questions in the modern politics of living societies. The Greek state doesn't view Orthodox Christianity as an artifact of its past, but as an education program that serves to define national identity. When a Muslim parent in Italy petitioned a court in 2002 against the obligatory crucifixes present in every classroom in the largely secular country, he briefly won the court's agreement. But the decision was quickly overturned, and the episode solicited an outcry from Italy's public figures. In the words of the country's president, "the crucifix has always been considered not only as a distinctive sign of a particular religious credo, but above all as a symbol of the values that are at the base of our Italian identity."

What does his study mean for Israel? Yakobson explains: "There is nothing extraordinary about a nation-state of a people whose history and culture strongly connect it to a certain religion. This connection, apart from being a fact of cultural and social life, can also be enshrined in a country's constitution and embodied in its national symbols" - even, he adds, if the people who describe themselves by that identity do not, in fact, follow the
religion.

He relates the story of a visiting foreign professor who was asked, "Do you think that the Jewish people are unique?"

"Of course you are unique," he replied, "but you are not unique in being unique."

R' Shmuel Leibovitz, defends Rav Druckman against my criticism

Maybe I don't get it like you claim, Reb Shmuel. However this posting reminds me of the story of the 5 year old child who one day decides to run away from home because he is tired of being told what to do all the time. An hour later his mother meets him standing at the corner of their block and asks him what he is doing there. He replies defiantly, "I ran away from home because you are always telling me what to do.!"So why are you standing on our corner," asks his mother? "Because you don't let me cross the street by myself."
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R' Shmuel Leibovitz, Lod (Garin Torani near Tel-Aviv), Israel has left a new comment on your post "Conversion crisis - what are world wide consequenc...":

Daas Torah said: You can't have a major conversion program in Israel based on views that are rejected and then cry - but I am also a posek. If you are dealing with a single case then it might be relevant to pull out these views. But a massive in your face program which has been protested against from the beginning? Rav Druckman can not claim that he was unaware of the opposition to his program. He is saying - I already created the facts on the ground. I knew from the beginning what I am doing is not acceptable to most poskim. But I figured if I created enough of these gerim they would have to be accepted because of their sheer numbers.

DT, I really don't think you get it at all!

Yes, you can have such a program (it has been around for a long time). And the opposition was always well known to all of us and to Rav Druckman shlit"a and to the dozens of fine dayanim involved.

Nobody is "crying" that "I am also a posek." Rather, we at Tzohar are stating this truth with dignity and kavod hatorah.

Nobody is saying that our gerim SHOULD be accepted because they are "facts on the ground" in "massive numbers." Nobody is saying that our gerim SHOULD be accepted at all, because we don't expect the charedim to accept them. Ever. Nor do we care all that much. The numbers of charedim who would want to "intermarry" with the poeple we convert are next to zero anyhow.

Rather, we are saying that these gerim WILL be accepted, period. Because our Torah outlook and our Torah scholars and our poskei halacha all confirm that we are doing what is right according to the Torah. WE WILL accept our gerim and we WILL perform their weddings, period. We will marry them ourselves when be'ezrat hashem the zug works out, period. It WILL happen, period.

If it takes fighting within the Rabbanut to achieve this, then so be it. If it takes abolishing the rabbanut and setting up our own independent beis din to achieve this, then so be it. It WILL happen.

Nobody here is "crying" for your recognition. What is really happening is Torah people fighting for their rights to live and apply Torah truth as they see it in Israel. They WILL achieve those rights, period, whether you recognize it or not.

Shmuel Leibovitz, Lod (Garin Torani near Tel-Aviv), Israel