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In the previous chapter I reviewed recent initiatives in which liberal observant activists founded alternatives to the religious institutions of the state. These alternatives, I have argued, represent activists’ “scaling down” of public Judaism and of religious authority from the level of state institutions to the level of communities and individuals. One of these projects, a network of conversion courts led by Religious-Zionist rabbis, was co-founded by Rabbi Shaul (Seth) Farber, the head of ITIM (lit. Times) – a liberal Orthodox organization.In this chapter, I examine in greater depth the activism of Rabbi Farber and his colleagues at ITIM in their efforts to amend the policies and functioning of Israel’s Jewish religious institutions.

The ITIM organization operates in the nongovernmental sphere of civil society organizations that monitor and work to modify the functioning and role of the religious institutions of the state.85 The organization is called “times” because of its original mission to assist Israeli Jews to have “positive and significant encounters with Jewish life” on major Jewish “times” such as weddings, births, conversion, and burial (ITIM n.d.). The organization still considers improving the Jewish life of Israeli Jews as its main objective but its means of attaining this goal has changed dramatically since its inception, as I describe throughout this chapter.

ITIM’s staff members are trained professionals – lawyers, social workers, rabbis – who are paid for their work. I treat them as activists because they aim to bring about not only institutional change but also social change. In their work I found evidence of three discourses about activism. The organization’s formal mission is to improve the encounter of Israeli Jews

85 _{This realm is known in Israel as “Religion and State Relations” (yahasei dat ve’medina) and it is}

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with the state’s religious authorities. They do it by assisting individuals who contact the

organization’s Hotline. The Hotline’s workers, some of whom have background in social work and law, assist individuals who face challenges in their interactions with the religious authorities. They provide guidance or represent their interests in front of the authorities. In this sense, the organization’s activism is oriented toward “empowerment” of vulnerable populations (Elyachar 2005; Hemment 2007; Kamat 2002).

At the same time, the organization’s leaders increasingly focus on legal and legislative efforts to reform the religious establishment – a change that would bring about, according to them, a more just social reality in Israel. Their activism, therefore, is oriented toward reforming state institutions as a means of social change (Greenberg 2014; Paley 2001).

While these two discourses play out in ITIM’s formal mission and ways of action, I identify another, more implicit, discourse of identity as the basis of their social activism (Melucci 1989). This discourse, I argue, impacts the organization’s work as much as its formal missions. In everyday talk and in my interviews with them, organization members told me that through their activism they seek to carve a more central space for their identity as liberal and halakha- observing Jews. My analysis in this chapter touches on the “empowerment” and “reform” discourses of the organization but its focus is on the informal discourse of identity and social belonging, and on how it shapes the organization’s work.

To conceptualize ITIM’s activism, I turn to insights of anthropologists who study other groups of activists. The first is Naisargi Dave’s work on queer activists in India. Dave asks, “Why are activists, activists? Why do (these) activists act?” and the answer she provides is, “because, collectively, they nurture ethical ideals about what the world could look like” (2012, 4). In a different passage she writes that activism begins with “the previously unthinkable that is

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now a flickering possibility” (ibid, 10). To study it is to study the relationship between “the virtual and the actual”: between the world that activists imagine and the actual world they inhabit (ibid).

The activists I study in ITIM are in a very different position and life circumstances than the queer activists Dave studied in India. Liberal Orthodox Jews in Israel are not a marginal, underprivileged, and persecuted minority. In fact, they are members of numerous dominant social groups in Israel: they are Jewish, mostly Ashkenazi, religious (dati’im), middle-class, and educated. And yet, their activism is very much driven by their self-perception that, as halakha- observing Jews who hold a liberal worldview, they are underrepresented in the state’s religious institutions. ITIM staff aims to improve Jewish religious services for the sake of all Jewish citizens. Staff members in the organization promote changes to the state religious system, which they believe would improve this system and make it more just. As I will show in this chapter, however, the changes they promote are motivated also by their vision of an Israel in which their kind of Jewishness is more central and influential.

This leads me to yet another insight I borrow from Dave’s work. Because activism is a form of mediation between the “virtual” and the “actual,” it is a process in which affects are produced. Activism is an affective work when dreams of transformation confront the norms, institutions, and moralities of political engagement (Dave 2012, 10). In this chapter I investigate ways that activism of leading staff members in ITIM is, in fact, affective activism; it is activism that is shaped by affect that is produced in the process of mediating the Israel that these activists seek to bring to life and the Israel in which they live.

In understanding the activism of ITIM, I also find James Clifford’s (2004) outlook on activism to be particularly illuminating. Although Clifford’s analysis is based on a completely

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different field than mine – his context is decolonizing tribal activism – his way of understanding activism is helpful in the case of liberal observant activism in Israel. Clifford argues that in activist movements in colonial and postcolonial settings, the past plays a central role: “loyalty to a traditional past is, in practice, a way ahead, a distinct path in the present” (ibid, 156). He does not argue that tradition is invented as part of indigenous politics but, instead, that in indigenous rights movements after the 1960s, there is constant blurring of the “sharp antinomies of

progress” of before and after histories of colonial impact (ibid). 86

I argue that Clifford’s foundational observation about activism as both “backward and forward looking” (ibid) is particularly helpful in the case of Jewish religious activists in Israel, who perceive the halakha, Jewish religious law, as central to their activism. Halakha is Judaism’s legal corpus that has been developed over the past two millennia. It continues to be developed today, as rabbis are called to rule on contemporary issues that were not addressed by the halakhic poskim (rulers) in the past. For instance, Orthodox rabbis in contemporary Israel have been debating about the halakhically-appropriate ways of using Assisted Reproduction Technologies (Kahn 2000). In Orthodox Judaism today, rabbis make halakhic pesikot (rulings) by

demonstrating that their interpretations of halakhic sources are linked to earlier pesikot that were codified over time, in what Phillips (2004) calls a “chain of interpretation” (11). Contemporary Orthodox society, therefore, perceives halakha as a Jewish past that constantly impacts and shapes the Jewish present.

In the context of my study, Clifford’s prism of understanding activism as a way of “going backwards into the future” complements Dave’s insight about activism as a relationship between the virtual and the actual. As my analysis below demonstrates, to staff members of ITIM, the

86 _{In fact, he rejects this theoretical line, mostly identified with Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of}

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way to an Israeli state in which tolerant, moderate, and pluralist Judaism sets a more central tone, goes through a Jewish past of halakhic knowledge. In their activism, ITIM staff members turn to halakhic sources to show that the alternatives they advance represent halakhic principles while the Rabbinate’s policies are, in fact, contradictory of these principles. Their reliance on halakha, however, not only legitimizes their activism but it also legitimizes their Jewish identities. By establishing the halakhic foundation to their activism, the activists of ITIM assert their Jewishness as “authentic” and, hence, legitimate.

In their activism, ITIM’s activists strive to make public Judaism a “personal” matter. This is evident in the affective activism of key members; in the way in which halakhic discourse is utilized not only to reinforce the initiatives they promote but also their own Jewish identities; and in the organization’s emphasis on maintaining a close contact with the Jewish-Israeli public and on representing its interests.

Their efforts to personalize public Judaism –to make the religious policies of the state into something that Israel’s Jewish citizens are knowledgeable of and voluntarily engage with – is one dimension of the broader process of scaling down Judaism, that I outline throughout this dissertation. This chapter illustrates that the activism of liberal observant Jews not only embodies the notion that the political is personal but it also highlights activists’ aspiration to relocate the Political – in this case, Israel’s religious politics – from state institutions to the day-to-day lives of Israeli Jews.

ITIM: A Brief Organizational Biography

From Outreach to Activism

The ITIM organization is one among numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of religious as well as secular orientations, that work in a field known as “Religion and State

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relations” (yahasei dat vemedina). As I described in the previous chapter, the secular opposition to the status quo arrangement is almost as old as the state. This opposition has included various nongovernmental organizations that attempt to change the status quo, either by pushing toward separating religion and state or by promoting a more heterogeneous and accommodating

religious establishment. Over the past two decades, the secular opposition to the Chief Rabbinate was joined by Religious-Zionist activists, community leaders, and scholars. 87 _{They have formed} nongovernmental organizations that seek to amend the official Rabbinate’s policies in

accordance with Jewish religious laws.

These organizations can be sorted into two main groups. The first group is composed of organizations that try to lead institutional change through influencing policy and legislation and through public advocacy. Among the dominant organizations in this field are Ne’emanei Torah Ve’Avoda (on which I write in chapter two); The Israel Democracy Center, a liberal-Orthodox research and policy center; and Kolech (lit. “your voice”) – an Orthodox Feminist organization. The second cluster is composed of organizations that help, mostly through litigation, individuals who have grievances against the religious institutions. One of the primary foci of these

organizations is protecting women’s rights in their dealings with the religious institutions of the state, particularly in the realm of marriage and divorce. Dominant organizations are Mavoi Satum (lit. “dead end”) – an Orthodox-Feminist organization that represents women in divorce cases; and the Center for Women’s Justice – an Orthodox-Feminist organization that works to protect women’s rights in their dealings with the Chief Rabbinate.

87 _{I describe the background of this development in chapter two. Briefly, it is related to a dramatic}

increase in the number of Israelis, most of them are immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, who are not eligible to receive services from the Rabbinate because they are not considered Jewish by halakhic standards. It is also related to increased polarization within Israel’s Orthodox society between ultra- Orthodox and moderate Orthodox sectors.

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ITIM is one of the leading organizations in this field that does both these functions. The organization’s official mission is to help Israeli Jews to “navigate the religious authorities’ bureaucracy in Israel,” as stated on the organization’s home webpage. The scope of their activity, however, goes well beyond that.

The organization was founded by Shaul (Seth) Farber, a US-born Modern-Orthodox rabbi. Rabbi Farber was ordained at Yeshiva University in New York and immigrated to Israel in 1995. During the time of my fieldwork he was in his late forties. When he talks, he switches quickly and frequently between English and Hebrew. Like many other Modern-Orthodox men, he wears a knitted kippa and he is neatly shaved. He lives in a middle-class town in the center of Israel that is known for its large population of immigrants from English-Speaking countries, where he serves as a rabbi of an Orthodox congregation.

When I asked him in an interview on November 2015 to tell me about the beginning of the organization, he told me about a young secular Israeli couple he met when traveling, who told him they were about to get married and that they did not want to do it through the system of the state’s Chief Rabbinate. Eventually, Rabbi Farber performed their wedding ceremony. He was the only kippa-wearing man at the event, he told me. This made him realize that there are secular Israelis who felt alienated from the state’s Rabbinate, who still wanted a traditional Jewish ceremony at their major life events. He sought to better understand why people felt alienated by the Chief Rabbinate, so he partnered with two other rabbis in an attempt to

systematically identify the Rabbinate’s “weaknesses.” That initiative did not last and, eventually, Rabbi Farber founded ITIM as a not-for-profit organization in 2002.

His vision at first was to “improve the Jewish experience of Israeli citizens.” The organization started as an assistance center that addressed individual calls from people who

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encountered difficulties in their dealings with the state’s Rabbinate. The organization also had educational programs that provided information about Jewish ceremonies at major life events such as the birth of a newborn and Bar Mitzvahs. Gradually, around 2009, the organization also started to address institutional problems in a more systematic manner through legal work. Around 2012, he hired a lawyer to oversee litigation and the organization bifurcated itself into two departments – The Assistance Center continued to address individual calls while the new department for Legal and Public Policy studied and addressed large scale, structural issues within the religious institutions. Currently, Rabbi Farber says, they no longer focus on improving

people’s Jewish experience but on “changing the establishment.”

The Physical is Political – ITIM’s Location and Structure

ITIM’s office is in Jerusalem, the home of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the offices of numerous NGOs that work in the same field as ITIM in Israel. Its location, however, is cut off from the city’s urban fabric. It is situated in an industrial area populated mostly by hi-tech companies at the north-west outskirts of Jerusalem, off three major highways that connect the city with Israel’s coastline and with the southern Jewish settlement bloc in the West Bank. This location is crucial since approximately half of the employees commute to Jerusalem daily from their homes in towns along Israel’s coastal plain and in West Bank settlements. It is also important since the organization regularly hosts numerous visitors from across Israel – clients who come to one-on-one consultations; employees of other

organizations and agencies who come for seminaries and workshops led by ITIM’s staff; rabbis, journalists, lawyers, and donors who meet with the organization’s leaders. Although I never asked Rabbi Farber why he chose this location, I suggest that the physical location of ITIM’s

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office signals that the organization’s aim and scope are not confined to Jerusalem’s limits. Rather, their scale is national.

I mentioned earlier that the organization has a bifurcated structure: The Assistance Center, which provides individual guidance and help, and the Legal and Public Policy

department, which studies the malfunctions of the religious institutions in terms of policies and regulations and prepares court petitions against the authorities when necessary. The organization works with its two departments even if they have somewhat different, and sometimes conflicting, aims.

The Assistance Center is the organization’s Hotline, whose workers respond to people’s queries and complaints about the bureaucracy of the state’s religious institutions. The topic of these queries range across matters of marriage and divorce, burial, circumcision, conversion, public mikva’ot (ritual purification immersion baths), and dealings with the Ministry of the Interior on matters of immigrants’ naturalization.88 _{During the time of my fieldwork there,} between 2015 and 2016, the Assistance Center consisted of four case managers and a director who oversaw their work. The most basic assistance is to provide information. Staff members answer callers’ questions about the various procedures of the religious institutions. When needed, staff members also provide counseling. Based on their intimate familiarity with the system of religious institutions, staff members advise clients about their possible lines of action, and how to avoid mistakes. At times, in complicated cases when clients cannot find a solution on their own, staff members intervene on their behalf and contact the authorities by email, phone or formal letters. When none of these steps works out, staff members may appear with clients at their scheduled meeting with the authorities.

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When the Hotline’s case managers notice a recurring issue that comes up in numerous calls, the first step is to gather further data about the procedure that seems to create problems. It is usually the Legal and Public Policy department, which is also called the Advocacy Center, that conducts further research and evaluates whether there is, in fact, a systematic problem. The Advocacy Center first gathers data about what is happening on the ground. The department employs a research coordinator that studies the proceeding in question. One way of gathering data is by calling various religious institutions and inquiring about the services they offer. Volunteers, like me, usually do this job.

During the course of twelve months, I volunteered in the organization as part of my fieldwork. One of my first projects was to call offices of religious councils across Israel and to ask about proceedings in which phone calls to the Assistance Center indicated there might be a violation of the Rabbinate’s guidelines. If there is a violation, or if the guidelines themselves violate state laws, ITIM’s legal team sends a formal request to correct the situation. If this does not work, they study the issue from a legal standpoint. If there is legal foundation, they file a law