In 1952, Rabbi Harold Schulweis left New York for the West Coast, where he hoped to be beyond the reach of the religious establishment that had ordained him.
For nearly four decades, Schulweis was left to do as he wished. As senior rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom, an influential Conservative synagogue in the upscale, largely Jewish San Fernando Valley town of Encino, Schulweis busied himself with systematically chipping away at the conventional structure of the American synagogue. Eventually he came to regard the process of decentralization and democratization he had launched as "Jewish perestroika."
Among Schulweis's accomplishments: the creation and transformation of the havurah into the basic subunit of progressive American Jewish congregational life; the establishment and training of a cadre of hand-picked "pararabbinics" and family counselors vested with decision-making powers normally deemed the sole domain of the rabbi, and periodic attempts to undermine the fatalism and xenophobia, characteristic of some ultra-Orthodox circles, which he believes have infected the Jewish mainstream.
In the course of his pursuits, Harold Schulweis has achieved national stature—rarely attained outside of Orthodox circles—both as a congregational leader and a thinker of consequence.
Lately, however, he has become increasingly ill at ease. He has lived through a number of major earthquakes during his sojourn in southern California. But it is not the incessant shifting of tectonic plates underfoot that worries him. Schulweis's internal seismograph is tuned, rather, to the rumbling of a more militant Judaism that he fears could bury those who have embraced pluralism as a basic Jewish value.
Unless the Jews both here and in Israel who are not part of the ultra-Orthodox community imbue themselves with the strength, will and savvy to fend off the coming spiritual onslaught, he believes, a cataclysm will result. The warning signs, for Schulweis, are plain. In Israel, for instance, ultra-Orthodox and allied religious parties have achieved hitherto unimaginable parliamentary strength. Inevitably, he believes, they will force a change in the "who is a Jew" statute, to the detriment of non-Orthodox and secular Jews everywhere.
In California, meanwhile, astute Agudath Israel politicos stalk the halls of legislative power, seeking to become the arbiters of Jewish law on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, the Lubavitchers, or Habad, have successfully established themselves—in the eyes of many nonobservant Jews and not a few Hollywood stars—as one of the few authentically Jewish activist organizations deserving funding.
These days, Schulweis, a liberal, a religious humanist and a spokesman for Conservative Judaism who professes a distinct sympathy for Reconstructionist principles, sometimes seems to stand with his back to the proverbial sea. Theologically certainly, Schulweis is far to the left of most of his colleagues. He is by no means alone in his alarm at the inroads made by the ultra-Orthodox, but he says he was one of the first to realize they could never be appeased—that ultimately he would have to take a public stand against the values and tactics they have adopted.
"Fundamentalist Orthodoxy is practicing apartheid against us," Schulweis says. "There is a real danger now of a Karaite/Sadducee split within the Jewish people. Push is coming perilously close to shove. I myself have never spoken out on the pulpit against the Lubavitch for their cultishness and their anti-goy sentiments before. I think it's important to do so now.
"Once and for all," he adds, "non-Orthodox and secular Jews—here and in Israel—are going to have to take religion seriously. The issues I address in my sermons are not just matters of philosophy. Ideas have consequences. Theology has teeth."
Born in 1925 in the Bronx, Schulweis felt the intellectual teeth that bite and the claws that scratch early on. His father was a Socialist and a Yiddishist. The Schulweis household teemed with visiting Yiddish poets, writers and actors. The talk at the kitchen table was of the great Jewish thinkers.
"And the popular world had greats like Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen S. Wise," recalls Schulweis. "I remember going with my father to hear them at Carnegie Hall and being greatly attracted to their heroic stance. These people spoke in prophetic terms—there was a love of language and a lack of embarrassment at dealing with lofty, global Jewish concerns you don't see much these days."
Of course, Schulweis realizes that times have changed, that the ringing rhetoric of a bygone era—when the Nazi onslaught could be addressed forcefully and with great moral clarity—would now sound false.
"Things are muddier now. They've been that way since 1945—there are no open-and-shut cases. And that's true of Judaism and Israel as well. Not because of a failure of nerve, though—there is simply a general revulsion against absolutism."
Moreover, says Schulweis, the Protestantization of the American Jewish community mitigates against ideologically motivated calls to action. "There has been a tremendous amount of acculturation by American Jews—not to another religion, but to the commercialism, materialism and hedonism of what I think of as T.V. culture. But it isn't merely a Jewish phenomenon. We've all been seduced by the garden of Gucci."
Living in New York during the 1950s, one could still avoid being overwhelmed by a crass mass culture, Schulweis says. Apart from everything else it has always been, New York was a city of ideas. During his years as a graduate student in philosophy at New York University, Schulweis learned that students didn't simply take courses—they took sides. "Sidney Hook didn't teach political philosophy," he says. "He offered a program, a way of life. N.Y.U. was like that."
Schulweis's grandfather on his mother's side, however, was an Orthodox Talmudist. And he enjoyed some success in turning his grandson away from the determined secularism that pervaded his father's household. Schulweis's undergraduate degree in 1945 came from Yeshiva University, his Ph.D. in theology from the Pacific School of Religion some 30 years later.
Schulweis would not characterize himself as a maverick, but youthful rebellion did play a part in his decision to seek ordainment. He had never responded well to authoritarianism—neither his father's nor his religion's. His God, consequently, was a friend, not the tyrant many others envisage. "There are various ways in which we express our Oedipal resentments," he explains. "One is to become a rabbi."
On June 21, 1950, shortly after his ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a small item in the New York Times caught Schulweis's eye. The story noted that Agudah rabbis had recently gathered to excommunicate Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, and to burn his prayer book.
"That excited me," recalls Schulweis. "Even before meeting him I was in his camp."
Schulweis was drawn to Kaplan's steadfastness. Here was a genuine rebel, a thorn in the side of organized Judaism. And eventually Kaplan's program sparked Schulweis's intellectual sense of wonder. The young rabbi liked the naturalism in Kaplan's approach to religion. Kaplan espoused a Judaism without supernaturalism. Rather than sanctify a glorious mythic past, he emphasized human choice and the collective experience of the Jewish people, placing a greater premium upon the present.
"I have always been attracted to the heroes of religious audacity," says Schulweis. "My earliest religious recollection is of Abraham and Moses quarreling with God—and getting away with it. I have a basic fear of subservience, of learning that the purpose of religion may merely be obedience to God."
Schulweis's first two years as a rabbi were unhappy—as an assistant rabbi at Temple Emmanuel in the Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester. "As an assistant rabbi," he recalls, "you really are what the title implies, whether you like it or not. You can't make your own decisions—there are so many channels to go through for every little thing and in the end it boils down to a practical veto by the senior rabbi."
Schulweis also found the setup too adversarial for his tastes. "If you preached a successful sermon," he says, "the senior rabbi died a little bit. If not, you caught flak. I really hated it."
Meanwhile, New York was beginning to pale for Schulweis. True, there was a continuity within the Jewish communities along the Eastern Seaboard that Schulweis learned to value. In places like Baltimore and New York, Jews had the depth of generations of Jewish life to draw on for identity and sustenance. People could talk about their grandparents having been active in one organization or another, and it meant something special to them. "There was a transmission," says Schulweis, "of sentiment and pieties which I have always treasured."
But the East Coast, he believed (and still does), was where the institutions of Jewish power resided. You could feel them looking over your shoulder. And when it comes down to that, he thought, it is time to get out.
In 1952, responding to rumors of greater spiritual freedom out West, Schulweis left New York for Oakland, where he became leader of Temple Beth Abraham, a largely middle-class synagogue of some 500 souls. The relief he felt there was palpable. California was still pioneer country—a rabbi could be inventive, could loosen up his services in a fashion that would have been unthinkable back east.
During the 1960s, Schulweis, a supporter of the N.A.A.C.P., involved himself in the civil rights movement. And as the decade progressed, he found himself identifying with the hippies of Haight-Ashbury as well. These were gentle rebels, kindred spirits. One Passover, he instructed his synagogue's sisterhood to host a second seder for the Jews among the hippies in the basement of a neighborhood Protestant church.
"It was a sight," says Schulweis. "Here were these kids with their long hair, their bangles and beads, and we all sat around singing 'Had Gadya.' "
Some time later, the University of Judaism in Los Angeles asked Schulweis to fly down to deliver a series of weekly lectures on Jewish philosophy. Schulweis liked what he saw.
Los Angeles was teeming with Jews and they seemed more intensely Jewish than their counterparts to the north. Yet L.A. was even more open to experimentation than Oakland. When Valley Beth Shalom, a small, demoralized congregation reeling from a spate of unsuccessful rabbinical stewardships, sought his services, Schulweis headed south in 1970.
His first concern, he recalls, was with the country club atmosphere he found in the synagogue, which had few qualms about excluding those who could not afford minimal dues. He consequently appealed to wealthy congregants to double and even triple their membership dues in order to pay for these people.
To his surprise—Schulweis says one of his failings, which it took him years to overcome, was a pronounced bias against the wealthy—they came through, and have continued to do so for the last 18 years. With this matter settled, he launched the shake-up of traditional religious observance he believed would never have been conceivable in the East.
It began relatively inauspiciously, with small, mostly symbolic changes. For instance, Schulweis dispensed with the rabbinic robe. It put too many barriers between himself and the congregation. He introduced Hasidic clapping to break up the somber, cathedral-like ambience of the Sabbath service. The Zeitgeist of the times, he believed, weighed against formality. Schulweis, hoping to introduce some joy into the Sabbath services, brought in an accordionist on Friday nights and, after services, encouraged his congregants to dance.
In 1973 Schulweis told a skeptical Rabbinical Assembly convention in New York's Catskill Mountains that it had dawned on him from the start that his new congregation was comprised of a new breed of Jew who required special treatment.
His grandfather, he told them, had been a religious Jew. The rhythm of his private life had been synchronized by his daily prayers, his sense of community honed by his devotion to upholding the commandments of his religion. His father, though irreligious, had not surrendered his ultimate fidelity to the Jewish people. He was, said Schulweis, an ideological Jew, as were those who became Zionists and Bundists, Socialists and atheists.
The people in Schulweis’s congregation, many of them accomplished me-generationers decades before either the practice or the term gained currency, lacked an ideology to sustain them. Indeed, these "psychological Jews," as Schulweis characterized them, regarded community with as much suspicion as they did religion. The only reason they deigned to join a synagogue at all was that they figured it might benefit their children to grow up slightly less jaded in their Jewishness than they were.
In the process, however, Schulweis's congregants, neither atheists nor believers, neither Zionists nor assimilationists—merely passionless and spiritually unencumbered—had inadvertently turned their synagogue into a crass reflection of themselves. The synagogue existed, it often seemed from their attitude and behavior, for their own private, individual enjoyment. Which is why, says Schulweis, Shabbat Minhah Bar Mitzvahs became the rage at Valley Beth Shalom. By holding the ceremony in the early evening when the other worshipers were safely in their homes, the parents had relieved their son of the burden of learning a haftorah, and themselves of having to throw a kiddush for a bunch of freeloaders.
On the eve of his first Rosh Hashanah at Valley Beth Shalom, convinced that he could not do business on this basis, Schulweis had a heart-to-heart chat with his flock. It was clear, he said, that they meant little to each other. They met in boardrooms, in social halls, but how many could say they had even been in one another's homes? Schulweis realized this privatism was endemic to southern California. But if they did not know each other, if they weren't friends, how could they be expected to pray, to learn and to act together?
Schulweis's remedy was the havurah. He divided those of his congregants willing to participate in his experiment into groups of 10 families, striving in each to attain a balance of social, cultural and celebratory ingredients. The task of each havurah, he said, was to teach itself, through discussions and shared readings, what it meant to be Jews; to break down the walls between them, and to coax the tremendous, pent-up lay energies contained within them.
This grand experiment proved eminently successful. People who might once have been strangers found themselves regularly sharing Sabbath meals, building sukkoth, administering hanukot bayit—housewarmings—and visiting the sick and bereaved.
"During an economic depression in the aerospace industry in the 70s," says Schulweis, "a number of engineers within our synagogue found themselves suddenly unemployed. I know of havurot which drew together to help their haverim, making contacts for them with employers in related fields, assisting them in the writing of résumés, offering counsel and support to the families involved."
For years, however, the "havurization" of the American synagogue was regarded with considerable trepidation within the non-Orthodox rabbinical community. During his speech to the Rabbinical Assembly Schulweis noted that many rabbis feared they and their synagogues would become superfluous as a result. If people could live Jewish lives on their own, why bother with synagogues and rabbis?
Schulweis argued that, in fact, the havurah would eventually increase the importance of the rabbi. "The rabbi becomes important to the community," he said, "only when the community itself shares his interests and participates in the sancta of our tradition."
The "Jewish distance" between the rabbi and the psychological Jews, he said, made the rabbi indispensable as a functionary but insignificant as a guide. Unfortunately, the psychological Jew needed the latter far more than the former. True, as a functionary the rabbi became indispensable. But in the process, said Schulweis, "he became less relevant."
Perestroika did not stop with the havurah. These had done wonders to personalize the synagogue, but there was more to Judaism than self-affirmation, and whatever that was, Schulweis's congregants—spiritually unsophisticated, overpowered by mass culture, their families no more immune to institutional erosion than any others in America—needed it badly.
"Outreach," complains Schulweis, has become the great Jewish slogan of our times, a panacea for all the community's organizational ills. "About 10 years ago, however," he recalls, "I realized that we didn't have a delivery system. Outreach is fine, but you have to ask the obvious question: Who is going to do the reaching out?"
Again, Schulweis looked to his congregants for an answer. The solution was to handpick members who, with suitable instruction, could be relied upon to counsel the others on Jewish matters. Schulweis had noticed, for instance, that many of his congregants knew little about the rites of passage so integral to Jewish life. A son is born, and suddenly the parents start scrambling for a mohel (a circumciser), for a suitable name for the child, for someone to tell them what might be entailed by the pidyon ha'ben (redemption of the first-born) ritual. The child approaches 13, suddenly there is the matter of a Bar Mitzvah. The parents have no clue as to what the ceremony is about or how to throw a reception that isn't tawdry but actually adds something of moral value to the event.
After training them for two years, Schulweis dispatched his pararabbinics and mechanchei ha'mishpacha, or family counselors, to the homes of his congregants, where they were empowered to provide information and counsel.
Thus a parent intent upon splurging on expensive floral centerpieces for a Bar Mitzvah might be persuaded to consider purchasing books instead, each to be signed with the names of those seated at their respective tables and then donated to a deserving institution, such as an orphanage or a library for the handicapped. Parents planning a lavish wedding might be urged to contribute 3 percent of the money earmarked for the simcha to Mazon, a locally based national program to feed the poor and homeless, Jews and non-Jews alike. Members of a family struck by the death of one of its members could receive help in choosing a cemetery, selecting a casket and arranging a service.
And at a more mundane level, Schulweis's emissaries went into the homes of families, offering parents something of Jewish value to impart to their children. "It has been my experience," says Schulweis, "that many of my congregants had nothing Jewish to say to their children. They had been struck dumb by the dominant culture. We tried to provide them with the resources—stories, songs—to restore their Jewish voices."
Of course, there could be no ignoring the psychological needs of his "psychological" Jews. Often they came to him with personal problems he as a rabbi was hard put to address. Schulweis therefore set up a counseling center at the synagogue. The counselors staffing it were members of the congregation who had been trained by professional psychiatrists and psychologists. In existence some dozen years now, the center currently assists about 100 troubled members of the wider Jewish as well as non-Jewish community each week.
Next Schulweis went to work on what he perceived as his community's warped perception of its place in the larger, non-Jewish world.
It had been his lifelong observation that Jews lapsed easily into a view of the world as implacably hostile. Not even Schulweis's affluent congregants could escape the recognition that the world appeared, as a matter of course, to detest even them.
Schulweis never has denied that anti-Semitism remains a threat in the world. But rational reasons accounted for irrational anti-Semitism—reasons ranging from jealousy and envy of Jewish success to the hatred generated by the great, terrifying Christian myth of deicide.
"But to believe that Jew-hatred possessed ontological properties," says Schulweis, "is to adopt a terminal cynicism, to withdraw from the world in the fashion of a Shimon BarYochai or to assimilate in a desperate attempt to escape from this leprous community of ours. I understand Jewish resentment and anger and contempt for Western civilization," he says. "I just think it's suicidal."
Around 1960, Schulweis came across a book, Their Brother's Keeper, by Phillip Friedman, which documents the travails of European Christians who protected Jews from their Nazi tormentors during World War II. "As the years progressed, I realized that Friedman had only scratched the surface. Estimates now are that between 50,000 and 500,000 Christians either actively protected Jews or collaborated with those who did."
In 1962 Schulweis established his Institute for Righteous Acts, in Oakland, to undertake the empirical study of such apparent altruism and its philosophical significance for Jews. If the world could truly not abide its Jews, how could one account for so many people—even those not entirely well-disposed toward Jews-risking their lives and property to save them?
Some 25 years later, Schulweis became aware that many of these rescuers had, in fact, suffered greatly for their compassion. Many, particularly in Eastern Europe, discovered after the war that they had become pariahs in their own communities for having assisted Jews and were forced to emigrate to North America. Today, says Schulweis, most of those still alive are old, sick and impoverished. Yet the Jewish community, which was quick to set up Holocaust centers to bring Nazis to justice, has never invested nearly the same energies in helping these people.
Schulweis's response was to establish, in 1987, the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers. Its mandate, he says, "is to do a Klarsfeld and Wiesenthal with these people. We have hunted out the war criminals. We have not undertaken a systematic, active search for those who helped us. It is important that we seek them out and, where necessary, try to sweeten the remainder of their lives. And it is incumbent upon us to further study this phenomenon of altruism, to discover whether it can be transmitted, perhaps even curricularized."
[The foundation is run out of the New York offices of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and is chaired by New York lawyer E. Robert Goodkind, whose fund-raising success has enabled the organization to provide financial and medical assistance to needful Christian rescuers, in some instances arranging urgent medical care for them, in others, getting them into Jewish homes for the elderly. The foundation has also been able to mete out regular stipends to rescuers living both in the United States and abroad. "The response within the (Jewish) community," Goodkind told me, "has been tremendously heartening."]
Schulweis recalls the mayhem not long ago in the West Bank village of Beita, where a confrontation between Arab villagers and a group of Israeli children ended in the killing of a teenage Jewish girl. The Israeli military authorities attributed the death to the accidental firing of an automatic weapon carried by one of the children's guards. (See Present Tense, March/April 1989.)
"An important thing happened there," says Schulweis. "Some of the Palestinian women inside Beita tried to protect the children from the mob. If we could go back in time to the Spanish Inquisition, I'd bet we'd find a fair number of ordinary people who did the same. I'm sure that this kind of thing happens all the time.
"I think our moral salvation and that of our children is dependent upon being able to face up to this. You can't preach that he who saves a single life saves an entire world and then refuse to recognize this extraordinary self-sacrifice, simply because it is more comforting to retreat inward."
Yet with few exceptions, the Jewish community has remained indifferent. Schulweis takes a jaundiced view of this insularity—he calls it "a form of chosenness that is poisoning Jewish sensibilities." And he has no doubt that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and particularly Habad, which he calls a xenophobic cult fearful and disdainful of the non-Jewish world, obsessed with spiritual as well as corporeal purity, is riddled with this sense of chosenness.
Schulweis compares the unease he felt during a recent encounter with a Lubavitcher with the dread felt by Jacob while meeting his brother Esau, after wrestling an anonymous man beside the Jabbok tributary.
Esau reputedly greeted Jacob with a kiss on the neck. But biblical commentators argue that there is some ambiguity suggested in the markings over the Hebrew word "kissed." This expression of brotherly love, they think, may instead have been a long-repressed bite.
Like Esau, the Habadnik gripped the hapless rabbi in a bearlike embrace, professing fervent love for his Yiddishe neshama, his eternal Jewish soul. With regard to Schulweis's interpretation of Jewish life and law, however, the bearded rabbi was less charitable. The Lubavitcher rebbe had clearly instructed that one could neither love nor accept heresy—one could only mourn its occurrence and take steps, wherever possible, to root it out.
But what, asked Schulweis, if the rebbe were wrong in dismissing his brand of Judaism as heresy? Surely the Rambam himself would have been loath to render so drastic a judgment. "I'll tell you the truth," said the Habadnik. "I'd rather follow my own rebbe when he is wrong than follow you when you're right."
The Habadnik then kissed Schulweis on the cheek, asked that he not take offense and left. Schulweis has been doing a slow burn ever since.
Schulweis was offended because he believes this kind of thinking threatens to obliterate a pluralism that lies at the heart of Judaism. History, not just tradition, is what makes Judaism, Schulweis believes; no text alone, however sacred, can offer the final word on it.
At first, Schulweis thought that his friends within the Orthodox community would ultimately repudiate the divisive disdain expressed by the ultra-Orthodox. But it never happened. People who were delighted to discuss Jewish issues with him over coffee and cake refused to appear on his pulpit or to share in prayer with him at his synagogue. Like the Catholic clergy before Vatican II, they feared that doing so would bestow legitimacy or equality upon his own brand of observance. "The moderate Orthodox have remained silent over attempts to delegitimize us because they fear the ultra-Orthodox may turn on them as well."
Indeed, Schulweis recalls from his seminary days an inclination within the Conservative movement to appease the Orthodox. It was clear to him then, he says, that they would never succeed at this, no matter how reverential their behavior.
Eventually, Conservative Jews learned the lesson only now becoming apparent to the modern Orthodox. Ultra-Orthodoxy is inherently exclusionist. Even the Hasidic movement finds itself divided over the proper interpretation of the word of God. Within the cloistered world of the ultra-Orthodox, the sight of a knitted kipa, or skullcap, which the non-Hasidic Orthodox favor, can inspire suspicion and delegitimization. Within the ultra-Orthodox world today, there is, for instance, mounting unease with the Zionist component of modern Orthodoxy. Some believe that Zionist nationalism has undermined other, traditional Jewish values. Ultimately, believes Schulweis, the modern Orthodox movement will find itself singled out. It, too, will learn that there can be no appeasing such true believers.
Today Schulweis rarely talks the shallow rhetoric of unity among the Jewish people. Today he appears to believe that Jews will do better to preserve the "space in their togetherness" than to achieve "a smothering intimacy that obliterates all differentiation."
"So many of the problems we regard as external are really internal," Schulweis says. "American Jews are so naive, they think that by contributing money to Habad or other institutions ostensibly urging Jewish unity, they are helping to ensure the survival of an 'authentic' Judaism. What they don't realize is that money talks, and that in this instance it speaks for divisiveness."
Schulweis hopes that the most recent flap over the proposed redefinition of "who is a Jew" in Israel will, in fact, sensitize the non-Orthodox to the dangers they face. "Perhaps now they will understand that the ultra-Orthodox are not merely eccentric and idiosyncratic."
The fundamentalist Orthodox, Schulweis believes, face an even greater internal danger, engaging as they do in what Schulweis calls "exclusionary split thinking." He says, "Split thinking is a disease. When you do it you lock yourself out of a tremendous reservoir of history and ethos, ritual and charm and beauty."
Schulweis recounts a marvelous anecdote to illustrate his fear of Orthodox exclusivity, which he argues is based upon an inherent metaphysical racism. The story tells of two Lubavitchers. One of them explains: "The whole world is divided between 'them' and 'us.' No point speaking about 'them.' Among 'us,' the world is divided between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. No use talking about Sephardim. Among Ashkenazim, the world is divided between Hasidim and Mitnagdim. No use talking about Mitnagdim. Among the Hasidim, the world is divided between the Satmar and the Lubavitcher. No use talking about the Satmar. Among the Lubavitcher there are the intellectual and the farbrengen types. No use to talk about the latter. Among the intellectuals there are you and me. And you know how little you know."
In the end, however, not even Schulweis has been able to escape the lure of split thinking—at least not with regard to the question of Palestinian nationalism and the intifada, or uprising, that it has provoked. Schulweis was outspoken in criticism of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon; he has given his pulpit over to Hanna Siniora, the editor of the pro-Palestine Liberation Organization East Jerusalem newspaper Al-Fajr (and to speakers for the ultra-right-wing Americans for a Safe Israel as well); but he has remained unusually silent during the intifada.
Though against split-thinking, Schulweis stands foursquare behind havdalah—separation, or in the case of his own silence on this matter, the distinction between what he calls dissent and intervention.
Despite the belief among a growing number of Jews in this country that diaspora Jewry must be moved to criticize certain Israeli policies—that it alone is in a position to do so safely and rightfully—dissent does not, says Schulweis, appear to be absent within Israel itself; nor is it in danger of fading from the scene.
As proof he notes that the Israeli Supreme Court recently overruled the military censor and even the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency, in the matter of the publication of an article critical of the Mossad's former chief. Lieutenant General Dan Shomron, the Israel Defense Force's Chief of Staff, has testified at a closed-door session of the Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee that he does not see much chance for the army to quell the intifada, and this, says Schulweis, has been bandied about freely in the Israeli press. Senior I.D.F. officers have repeatedly warned of the adverse effects the policing of the occupied territories is having on the army's morale and its training schedules, and their concerns are shared by a majority of Israelis.
Still, says Schulweis, the diaspora dissenter's problem is not so much that there is no dissent in Israel, but that Israeli dissent has not succeeded in forcing a turnabout in foreign policy.
Between Israel and the diaspora, Schulweis believes, there is, at best, a limited partnership—one in which Jews outside Israel assume few of the risks of their Israeli counterparts. Schulweis has a son who lives on a kibbutz and who serves in miluim, the army reserves. He pays taxes and has—says Schulweis—won the right to participate in the public argument over the proper course for Israeli foreign affairs.
In contrast, he notes, people like Stanley Sheinbaum—one of five American Jews who went to Stockholm last December to meet with P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat—intervened in the affairs of a sovereign state of which they are not citizens. Convinced of their judgment, they have "infantilized" the Jewish state in the manner of a father who imposes his will on a foolish child who must be saved from endangering itself.
And what if critics are not correct, asks Schulweis? "What life and death consequences for diaspora Jewry follow upon the interventionists' endangering decisions?" Indeed, he says not even the death of an average of one Palestinian youngster a day will force him to intervene in a situation he believes is far more complex and morally shaded than that depicted in the media. Not if it goes on for one more year and not for another 10.
"It's not a question of numbers or age, and it's not a question of time," says Schulweis. "I just don't know what to say, and I think it can sometimes take as much courage to shut up when that is the case as many assume it takes to speak out in dissent. I'm not at all sure that silence is always a mark of cowardice and dissent the mark of moral heroism.
"I think the bottom line, for me, is that I have a feeling for the sincerity and morality and democratic character of the Government elected by the people of Israel. My take on Israel is that they're all scared as hell. I don't think they enjoy this intifada. Their fear is genuine and justified, and they are in the process of working it out. Until they do, I am not going to use whatever political clout I may have to pressure them to do something they might think is against their interests."
So how come Harold Schulweis pulls out the stops when it comes to the "who is a Jew" imbroglio?
"For all its intensity," says Schulweis, "in no way does this intervention affect the safety and security of Israel. Moreover, the amendment directly affects the status of diaspora Jews and their religious institutions. Nor is there any question here of dealing with the state's sworn enemies.
"The fact is that there is no duplicity in joining the dissent on one issue and opposing it on another. All dissent is not rolled up into one package."
Sheldon Teitelbaum, a Los Angeles—based journalist, is a frequent contributor to Present Tense. He last wrote "They Love America" (January/February), on the Israeli community in southern California.