UTJ Viewpoints

1. The Facts

In order to protect and serve people wounded in war, it was decided to build a fortified emergency room adjacent to Barlizai hospital in Ashekelon, Recalling that Hamas rocked reached Ashkelon, it was decided to initiate a building program.

Graves were found at the site, IBA news reported that Orthodox physicians were not uncomfortable with moving the graves, Rabbis Ovadia Yosef and Shelomo Amar, permitted the removal of the graves, which were of earlier medieval Byzantine Gentile origins.

The Agudath Israel non-Zionist party supported the postponement of of the construction and incurring the increased costs, because the moving oif graves is a matter of higher principle. PM Benjamin Netanyahu at first supported the delay required by Agudath Israel and its parliamentary spokesperson, Yaakov Listman, because he made coalitionist commitments; the public outcry at a demand take to be unnecessary, cruel, obscurantist, expensive, and excessive moved the PM to defer to popular opinion, including among the Israeli modern Orthodox. The notion that a population that does not serve in the army—see bSota 44b—work for a living, yet consumes human resources created by others unified the nation against the extremists, who not content to live their lives as the wished, insisted that they be taken as the conscience of the nation.

The hospital did not want to postpone the erecting of the building, which would waste time and resources.

The ultra Orthodox are both right and wrong. They make a claim that is correct, that Judaism is defined by Torah law. Their reading of Jewish law is not only incorrect; their reading of Jewish law reveals the real religion that exploits the rhetoric of a professed religion for political and social ends.

On one hand, cemeteries are called atra qadisha, holy ground. Cemeteries are neither sacred nor holy, they are profane and impure because human remains are impure. Treating the dead as ilu, the ancient Ugaritic word for a god, or praying/talking to the dead, or talking to the standing stone [ matseva] is forbidden according to Jewish law [ bHullin 40a] Paganisms often exploit fear of death to manipulate its masses.

In order to save lives, even the Sabbath may be violated.

It is argued that the graves in question are not Jewish. The claim is contested by the pious; you cannot really know for sure.

Here Jewish law comes to the rescue. The removal of a grave is to many opinions a rabbinic offense. The doubt as to whether the graves are of Jewish people is sufficient warrant to justify a legal ruling. mYoma 8:7 rules that the mere potential to save a life is grounds for violating the sanctity of Shabbat and Yom Kippur, which are both more sacred than graves.

For some Jews, taboos the origins of which are in the dread of death mindset reflect the real and actual religion, which is subject to community. Conscience and accepted convention. The greatest offense is committed by those who publicly challenge public policy and deeply Held theological views ,however in error they might be.

When there is a double doubt or when lives are at risk, the Torah law of life supersedes superstition, custom, and law. That there is no conversation tolerated regarding what is correct reveals the real tenets of a Judaism that is more “ultra” than Orthodox and which is committed more to private standards of hierarchy than public standards of holiness.

Archeologists cannot provide information. They are secular scientists with secular biases. They are ideologically and programmatically opposed to ultra-Orthodoxy’s sense of propriety, religious discipline ,and religious epistemology.

Rabbi Yosef is a tainted rabbi because he was a chief rabbi of the secular state of Israel. He is learned but he is biased. As the religious elect, our views are well based; other opinions are by definition well biased. Rabbi Yosef is looking for leniency’ were Rabbi Yosef sincere, he would look for stringency and sincerity and submit to our great rabbis whose laws are not only on the written books you can read, they are etched between the lines of the books, discernible only by those who are so religious and unbiased that they can, with their intuition, read the mind of God.

Professor Jacob Neusner reminds his students to study religion as social scientists and as humanists, reading both the culture and the writings that are for that culture taken to be canon. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, if really Orthodox, know that it is foolish and not pious to be superciliously strict. To endanger lives for graves that may not be Jewish makes zero sense according to the logic of the law. So why is Mr. Yaakov Listman so obdurate and unbending?

According to the real Haredi Judaism—which is similar to but incongruent with the Judaism of the Dual [Oral and Written] Torah—earlier time is mythic time, sacred, and alive; contemporary tine is secular, static, and dead. The needs of the present defer to the past; the Halakhah that really counts is not what is written in the holy books, it is the religion proclaimed as “Torah opinion,” daas Torah, by rabbis so modest that they are called gedolim, or great ones. Listman is not interested in what Jewish Law really says; he is very devoted to a public display of fervor, of winning concessions and obedience to his rabbis, regardless of the cost in resources, time, treasure, and life.

Therefore, the dead who “live” in the past animate and haunt the present, which must defer to the saintliness fo yesteryear. A reflex of this “cult of the dead,” in Ugaritic the Marzeah cult, is “inviting” the ghosts of family members decease to “appear” at weddings in order to celebrate the continuation of the family line. I suspect that there is some ambivalence regarding this anti-Torah folk belief. While the ancient Egyptians and Ugaritians provided food for the dead at sacred meals and in tombs, contemporary weddings do not charge a per plate setting fee for such hoary guests.

For some, Judaism reveres the past, death, and devotion expressed in behavior that shows zealousness for God that will be noticed in culture. For others, Judaism sanctifies the present, celebrates life, and asks that we act humbly before God, fiercely before wrong, and generously before the image of God in every and any human being. Rather than look well before one’s clients, Israel has to be honest to God