Expanding the Conversation: Seth Farber
In Israel today, the question of “Who is a Jew?” is not only legal—it’s deeply personal.
In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, Rabbi Seth Farber, founder and director of Itim, reflects on the intersection of religious authority, individual identity, and democratic values. Drawing from biblical narratives, courtroom battles, and grassroots activism, Rabbi Farber explores how Israel’s religious bureaucracy impacts the lives of citizens at every major life cycle moment—marriage, burial, conversion—and what it will take to create a Jewish state that welcomes all Jews.
Discussion Questions
- “Mi Eilah?” – Who Are These?
Rabbi Farber frames his talk around Jacob’s biblical question, “Mi Eilah?” as a metaphor for how Israeli institutions question Jewish identity. How does this question resonate today, especially for converts, immigrants, and those outside the Orthodox mainstream? - Pluralism and State Power
What are the implications of having state-controlled religious institutions in a democratic society? What models might reflect a pluralistic vision of Judaism in Israel? - Conversion and Inclusion
What does the episode reveal about the experience of Jews by choice in Israel? What does it say about the boundaries of community and the authority to define Jewishness?? - Judaism and Zionism
Farber argues that Judaism is not an afterthought in the Zionist story, but central to it. How do you interpret the relationship between Judaism and Zionism today? - Hope and Responsibility
Despite the bureaucratic and legal challenges, Rabbi Farber speaks of being “blessed to live in this moment.” What gives you hope when thinking about Jewish identity and the future of the Jewish people?
Show Notes
Video/Image
- Seth Farber speaking at Israel at a Crossroads
Further Reading
- Itim: The Jewish Life Advocacy Center
- Seth Farber “The Chief Rabbinate’s blacklist isn’t defending Judaism. It’s undermining it.” JTA (July 10, 2017)–Farber referred to this article in his talk.
Transcript
Ellie Gettinger
Welcome to Expanding the Conversation, a podcast series that brings the Jewish Theological Seminary to you. The series focuses on the messages that emerge from Israel at a crossroads navigating religion, democracy and justice. A Convening that took place at JTS in April 2025. I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of outreach for the Center for Lifelong Learning, and I will be curating the series, which will highlight key messages from the convening itself with insights from our panelists that were recorded separately.
In this episode, we hear from Rabbi Seth Farber, the director of Itim. Itim means Passages in Hebrew. It is an Israeli advocacy organization dedicated to building a Jewish and democratic state in which all Jews can be full Jewish lives. In both his remarks and our conversation. Rabbi Farber explored the many ways the religious establishment impacts personal decisions, particularly around high stakes moments like weddings, burials and conversion.
He opened with a biblical story about family coming together and the challenges in reuniting.
Seth Farber
Let’s be honest, our people are dysfunctional. We always have been. And because of that, I’d like to take you to a moment in our history where we sought for just a moment to address the dysfunctionality. After generations and generations of not just not getting along, where brothers, tried to kill each other, where brothers dismissed each other for who they were.
The family finally comes together at the end of the Book of Genesis. After all this tragedy and all this trauma for a moment, if just a moment, everybody is together. Joseph is told the Book of Genesis in chapter 48. Having brought the family together, Joseph is told your your father is sick. Joseph takes his two sons, Menashe and Ephraim, to meet his father, ostensibly for the last time. Jacob is told your son, the Viceroy, his children are coming before you. Jacob proceeds to tell Joseph a concise form of Jewish history. He kind of rewrites Jewish history, forgetting about all the bad stuff except for the loss of his wife. God appeared to me in Canaan.
He blessed me. He promised me I would be a great nation. And then I’m like, just. And like every story that we’ve known until now about the dysfunction of the family. Jacob promises, Joseph that the family will come together again. A kibbutz galyuot, The returning of the exiles of sorts. Of course, it happens in exile.
Your two sons who were born here in Egypt, your two sons who were born in Egypt. They will be mine. Everybody will be together again. Then the Bible gets to what I perceive to be the seminal verse of the Book of Genesis, something that’s so instructive for the discussion of Jewish pluralism in Israel.
Having promised Joseph that his two sons will be Jacob’s. The Bible records vayar Yisrael b’ne Yoseph Jacob looked out at the two sons of Jacob, who he’d just promised were going to be his. And he says two words vayomer, Mi Eilah? Who are these? This isn’t just an informational question. It’s an existential question. When Jacob looks at the story of the family coming together, it’s alien to him.
Think about the scene for a moment. Imagine what Joseph’s children look like. They probably got up that morning. They put on their Egyptian best, and I could only imagine that Jacob thought the Joseph sons would come with their Rambam in one hand and their Shulhan Arukh on the other hand. Mi Eilah, is the question that’s being asked over and over and over again the state of Israel, thousands of times every week.
Who are you? You know what they say about Israel. We love aliya and we hate olim. It’s much more than that. We can’t stand the fact, we meaning the Jacobs. We can’t stand the fact that this vision of the family coming together doesn’t look like what we thought it was going to look like by any means. But if the question of mi eilah isn’t just an informational question, if the question of Jewish pluralism is not just a question of information, it’s also a question of of existential character.
And the response of Joseph is particularly instructive. Jacob looks and says mi eilah, vayomer Yosef el aviv. Joseph looked at his to his father and said b’nai hem asher natan Elohim bazer. This has three parts to it, first: These are my children. That’s the first piece of it. The solution to a dysfunctional family. A family that doesn’t get along. A family who refuses to respect it is to acknowledge we’re all part of this. The second thing is: These are not just my children. I know they don’t look like the way you thought they were going to look. I know that you didn’t think that this is the way Jewish history is going to play itself out.
This is part of a much, much bigger story. One that you, Jacob, don’t understand. You’ve lost your perspective. It actually has a double aspect because it’s not just it’s a bigger story. It’s a bigger story that God planned. If all the Jews don’t look exactly like you, Jacob, that’s not because people didn’t turn out the way you thought they would.
It’s because that’s part of God’s plan. There’s a bigger story here than you see. And for those who remember. Traditional interpretations were in the Midrash and subsequently in Rashi. If you remember that text, Rashi says, Joseph, I love this line that Joseph pulled out his Ketubah with ready pulled out his marriage document with Osnat the daughter of Potiphera, right. The priest of On. I know, I know my ketubah doesn’t look like your ketubah. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a ketubah. And then there’s an amazing pause in this story, because if the first question is the transition from informational to existential and the second question is known and the saying, the response is there’s a much, much bigger picture out here.
And our solution to the diversity of our people is not to deny them who they are, but to embrace them for who they are and who could they could be. The biblical text records Bring them close to me. I wish to bless them. This third dimension is actually the most dramatic. It requires a demand from Joseph, also something we have to meet somewhere for Jacob to bless. Joseph has to move as well.
The story of Jewish pluralism in Israel is a painful story. It’s a painful story that has a dramatic history, a history of a series of bad decisions, of horrifying decisions.
What I do Itim, We’re trying to effect rectify the situation. We’ve helped more than 100,000 families navigate the labyrinth of Jewish life in Israel. People who came to the Jewish state and said, I want to live Jewish. You think after 2000 years we’d get that right? But quite the opposite. Over and over and over again, Whether you’re an immigrant from the FSU, from the former Soviet Union, or an immigrant from the states, or you grew up in Israel, day after day, people are asking mi eilah, Who are you? We know you are, but who are you?
Ellie Gettinger
ITIM, as an organization, was entirely new to me. In our conversation, I wanted to get a better sense of the organization. Can you describe the work that Itim does?
Seth Farber
We have a pretty robust legal division. 30 people work and we have four departments. One department is just an assistant center that’s helped more than 100,000 families over the years as they navigate. And we’ve represented people in all sorts of systems, in burial and marriage and divorce.
And conversion is a very strong area in which we have, and that allows us to filter up the kind of systemic issues that are that are problematic in Israel at any given time. Is there anybody you go to will say, if you have a problem call Itim when the issues filter up, then we have a legal division that basically tries to take things systemically when we see ills in society and things that the religious establishment I say more than the rabbinate, it’s the religious establishment. This could be the rabbinical courts. It can sometimes be even the Interior Ministry. When we see them overstepping their bounds or doing things that actually are detrimental to what our perception of what the Jewish state should be.
We also have a policy division where we work with the decision makers in Israel. Whether it’s the tenacity of someone is in the case at full time or someone who’s not a lobbyist, but someone who is discussing the issues and understanding the issues and making sure that our voice is heard in committee meetings.
Some of the issues are taken care of on the municipal level, the legal division in the and the policy division of Itim. They basically try to change things systemically. Vision is where we started talking about it at the beginning, and that’s our conversion. That we started a seven or eight years ago.
We now have something like 70 rabbis that are supportive of it and 46 rabbis that are converting on a regular basis. We have conversions every week and we’re certainly the largest converting group outside the state of outside of the rabbinate of the state of Israel. We’re the largest in the world. We’re now we’re in outright competition with the rabbinate, I like to say.
And I and I and I believe it. Our goal is not to continue to do this forever. Our goal is to negotiate with the state of Israel, the religious establishment, to create a different style religious establishment that provides people with choices. And if they want to convert the way the rabbinate is converting, great. If they want to convert the way we are great.
And I think there can be different channels. But the ways people can choose how to live their Jewish lives.
Ellie Gettinger
Getting back to his talk, Rabbi Farber details some of the ways in which people are looking for additional channels for their religious lives.
Seth Farber
We just finished a study. We interviewed 400 families that went through Israel, through rabbinical courts.
It’s one of the streams and it’s in order to get married in Israel, you have to go through the rabbinical courts to either prove you’re Jewish, if you’re an immigrant from the former Soviet Union primarily, or if you want to get divorced. We asked couples if you knew what you were going to go through, would you get married again?
40% said wouldn’t want to do it. That’s a tragedy, it’s a failure. It’s not a failure of the religious authorities. It’s a failure of the Zionist enterprise we were taught. I think it was a mis-teaching that Herzl and Ben-Gurion were the great threat to traditional Judaism. That’s what they taught us in Hebrew University, in graduate school. They taught us that Zionism was considered the great threat to Judaism.
One of the things we’ve learned since October 7th, is that Zionism and Judaism actually have a capacity to go together specifically when there’s no religious coercion. It’s not just that these individual stories of heroes, young men and young women and older men and older women who in the face of incredible catastrophe, sought to express their Jewish lives.
It’s a symptom of the fact that people in Israel feel strongly about their Judaism. Jews in Israel want to express their Judaism. So how can it be that 87% of Jewish Israelis say they have very, very little confidence in the religious establishment? But what I’m really here to tell you is not the horrifying stories I see every day, and I’m here to tell you is not only is there hope, but there’s real hope.
Sometimes we have to go to the courts. Sometimes we have to argue the case. Sometimes we have to work on regulations. But the most important thing is we have to tell a big story, there is a big story going on right now. My parents both ran from Europe. They’re both survivors. My father was smuggling arms for the Haganah in 1947 in Berkeley.
I grew up here, with most of you screaming: One, two, three, four. Open up the Iron Door. Five, six, seven, eight. Let my people immigrate. I got to Israel and I thought we had made it. And then I realized the social fabric of Israel, the opportunity to forge ahead with what Rabbi Greenberg calls the Third Era in Jewish history, not only in his terminology of a new covenant, but a Third Era in Jewish history, where we’re now determining what Judaism is going to look like for the next millennia.
That’s incredibly, incredibly powerful. And there are signs in every way that things are changing. The chief rabbi, the new chief rabbi who’s been in power for four and a half months. I met the previous chief rabbis in the first year of their term. Once or twice we said we would meet all the time. Never happened. The present chief rabbi, has met me already four times.
He’s agreed to sit on panels with me. There’s a dialogue going on. Something’s changing. Not just in the leadership. Something’s changing in the Israel, body politic, people are recognizing they’re waking up that Judaism is important to them and they’re not going to suffer anymore. The ills and the failures of a religious establishment that keeps on asking mi eilah, Who are you?
We’ve been incredibly, incredibly successful in the courts, even this morning. We’ve been incredibly successful. If I I’ll just give you one example. If you open up the website of the Religious Council in Kiryat Motzkin, a small town northern Israel, you will find there an apology from the chief rabbi of Kiryat Maskin to a mikvah attendant. Four years ago, he called on the phone and said are you were make for attending to works for me.
And she said Yes. And he said, Are you the Ethiopian? And she said, Yes. And he said, When did you convert? And she said, I didn’t convert. He hung up the phone and he sent out a WhatsApp to his community saying which made it to her as well, because she’s a member of one of the ultra-Orthodox synagogues in Kiryat Motzkin.
And that said, if you went to the mikveh with the Ethiopian attendant, please ask a rabbi if you have to go again. I’m not telling you that the horrify you. I’m telling you that to tell you after four years, the apology arised and that mikveh attendant was hosted by the chief rabbi of Israel two weeks ago in his office, where he apologized on behalf of the state of Israel for the way she was treated.
So, yes, sometimes we have to use the courts and sometimes we have to use policymakers and sometimes you have to use the press. Some things are changing with more and more people are saying Here I’ll get to my last point. We’ve represented all sorts of people in court, Maxim, Maxim and Alina Sarnikov
Maxim and Alina made aliya because of you. You’re responsible for them, more than the people of Israel. They made aliya the 1993 and second grade. They went to school in. They both went to second grade in Ashkelon in P.S. 3 They grew up together. By the time they were 16, there were a couple. By the time they were 18, they drafted together Maxim in Aliya because his mom is Jewish, Alina, mainly because her dad is Jewish.
They went to the army and they said to aliya, you’re never going to be able to get married to Maxim unless you go through a conversion. The Army has a conversion program, as many of you know. Today, in Israel, 6% of Israel’s Jewish population is not a halakhically Jewish. In Maxim and Alina said We want to be part of this.
So Alina went through the conversion program in the Army, and Alina has a conversion certificate from the chief rabbi of Israel. And years after right at Maxim and Alina’s Wedding, which I performed under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi. And you’ll hear why in a minute at their wedding when the major television station in Israel came to film us.
Maxim looked at the camera. He said, You know, when they dropped me and I’m in field intelligence, they dropped me on the side of the Litani River in Lebanon. He said, No one question my girlfriend’s conversion. But in 2012, when they came into Ashkelon, Rabbi Bloi, he was the chief rabbi of Ashkelon, said, I don’t accept the army conversions.
She said, I’m holding a conversion certificate of the chief rabbi of Israel. And he said, I don’t accept and go to the rabbinical courts. The rabbinical court supported her standing, but it didn’t make a difference for Rabbi Bloi, I assure you, when he tells the story, he doesn’t call me Rabbi Farber. And in the end, in 16 Rabbinates and 40 soldiers were being told, even though they’d converted under the auspices of the chief rabbi, not talking about private conversions that I’m involved in.
I’m not talking about non-Orthodox, I am talking about conversions of the Chief Rabbinate. They wouldn’t accept. And we sued we sued the Chief Rabbinate to recognize their own conversions. Only Kafka could make that up. I can’t. What I’m telling you is because we went to court, because we weren’t willing to let anybody say mi eila anymore. Today in Israel, every rabbi and it has a registrar that registers converts there.
It’s not legal not to register converts. We’ve changed things, and this is my takeaway. It’s an existential problem. People are challenging people’s identities. We need to work towards a place where people say by name, These are my children. This is part of a bigger story. There’s an unbelievable story that we are blessed to live in this generation. We are blessed, all of us, people living in Israel, people living here in North America, in the former Soviet Union, in South America and in Europe and in Australia.
We’re blessed to live in a moment where our family is coming together and we can’t for even a moment give up the dream of what it means for our family to come together. And I’ll leave you with one sentence let no one tell you in the area of religious pluralism that Israel is 76 or 77 years old, Israel is 77 years young. There’s no reason to think we would have gotten it right by now. Things have happened. There’s been changes in our community, but it’s up to us and our children to change that. We’re young enough to change things. We’re doing it.
And together we’re going to move this project forward. Community initiatives are the bread and butter of what has to happen in Israel for things to change. There’s a dual movement that has to happen. I believe very strongly in community initiatives and even kind of stepping out. It’s no secret in Israel, following multiple attempts to change legislation in one area that’s particularly close to my heart, which is the issue of conversion to Judaism.
We started the first, Yediot Aharonot, the largest Israeli daily, called it the first rebellion of the Religious-Zionist community. And following a whole set of procedures where we tried to change legislation of how conversion works in Israel, the National Conversion Authority. We simply this is how by the way, I know I’m Israeli because we just decided to create facts on the ground and just started converting our set right.
We just started performing conversions ourselves was the first time the religious Zionist community had moved out of the dream that somehow the Chief Rabbinate was the be all end all. So I understand that the notion and by the way, today we’re doing 30% of the Orthodox conversions in Israel. As a startup with a budget write, the budget of the national conversion authority is 146 million shekel per year.
Earlier, our budget for this particular program was about two and a half million shekel a year, and we’re doing 30% even with a number of initiatives that are all certainly not just worthy, but highlight the power the community initiatives can take, can take off. And I think there’s also a need to force the hands of the religious establishment to tell you two stories about October 8th that I was involved in.
Okay. One more successful than the other, in my humble opinion can We were in a serious state of shock after Simhat Torah, not unlike you. We convened in our office. I have 30 people working with me, nine or ten lawyers, and we had a meeting on Zoom the next day and we said, What are the points that we can leverage what our work is to help the situation right now?
I sent off three letters to the chief rabbi and the ninth or 10th. I don’t remember which day it was. The first one related to burial. I was very involved almost ten years ago in arranging a new system of burial in Israel that allows soldiers who were killed in the line of duty, who weren’t halakhically Jewish or weren’t able to prove it, but who were fighting in the Israel Defense Forces to be buried, so to speak, within the fence.
There was a modus operandi that was created that enables soldiers who were killed in the line of duty to be buried. I come back to those words that I use all the time, not just with dignity, with respectfulness is a response to the need of the community. Earlier, the Chief Rabbi, I said it’s simply inconceivable given the fact that 6% of Israel’s Jewish population is not halakhically Jewish, that there weren’t people in the Nova Festival who either aren’t halakhically Jewish or studying for conversion, and we need to come up with a way. Now, a directive needs to come after you office now that says, just like we we bury soldiers like that, they were able to be buried.
Second letter I remember was a few days later related to the issue of mikvah. And this is such an important issue for me because I want to understand what makes Israel different than any other example we’ve ever had in the last 2000 years.
If you look at a local mikvah here in the States, so the average number of people let’s just talk about women for now who visit that mikvah, I don’t know, 100, 200, 500, the number of women who use Israel Israel’s because every year is 600,000. Okay. That is a staggeringly high number. Do you need to have a policy that people can come through the front door and have access?
And we’ve sued the state of Israel to allow women to have autonomy in mikvahs and not to have to use the attendants that are provided by the rabbinate. And we’ve changed the law multiple times. So on the 13th, the 14th of October, when there was a massive call up and there were 300,000 men who were slowly leaving their homes and there were sirens going off and just about every community in Israel.
And then our office started getting calls from women who said, I’m too scared to go to the mikvah. I have kids at home and my husband’s been called up and what am I supposed to do? And I sent off a letter to the chief rabbi, and I said, Hey, it’s an emergency. We need to open mikvahs for us during the day, which is traditional a lot of practice is not generally done unless is in the time of emergency.
And we wrote a whole brief explaining why this was a time of emergency. Now, the first letter I got back from the chief rabbi said, No, no, no, we don’t need to do that. And there was a series of letters back and forth until the 30th of October and 30th October. I got a letter saying after we’d already opened, the mikvahs was in every city during the day.
I got a letter thanking us for the initiative to open mikvahs for us. On the other hand, when it came to the burying of people in the Nova. The response I got was, We know how to answer it. We know how to deal with that, don’t worry. And I kept on writing in my letters. You can see there’s going to be desecration of God’s name.
Someone is going to be buried outside the fence. And the question is, is Judaism going to be a moment that sanctifies God’s name or is going to a place that horrifies God’s name? Desecrates God’s name? And the truth is, we lost that battle. There were two people, two families. But I’ll just tell you one follow up story, because it’s so it’s tragic and it’s beautiful at the same time.
There were two families were buried outside the fence because of that. Now we’re in the middle of sponsoring legislation that will demand that anybody killed in terrorist incidents, that they will receive the same treatment, whatever their, you know, bonafides. So they will be buried because the family wants buried in the Jewish cemetery in a halachic way that doesn’t hurt anybody else.
We didn’t win that battle. Well, it’s much more important is that there was a sense that something has to change here. There has to be a recognition of the significance of this moment. This is not a shtetl anymore. Not us living in Israel, not you living here. Something dramatic has changed. From my perspective, something beautiful. Incredible. What generation gets the opportunity to change Jewish life for the next millennia?
So it goes slowly and it goes from the bottom up, but it also goes from the top down. People always ask me, What’s in your toolbox? And the answer is a stick and a carrot for not able to change the way an institution that exists and has gigantic budgets available to change the way they think. And we’re not going to be successful even if we do all the bottom up.
And if we don’t do the bottom up, we’re certainly not going to be able to change the way they think.
Ellie Gettinger
Let’s talk a little more about your toolbox. What are the other ways that Itim is delving into religious disparity in Israel?
Seth Farber
Just issued a long 88-page report where we did something that no one’s ever done before, which is we followed the money of how the Kotel is funded.
Ellie Gettinger
What did you find?
Seth Farber
We found out that they’re operating and it’s a governmental agency, like a semi-governmental agency, but they’re not meeting just about any of the criteria that the government says that they have to meet to do this. I’ll just give you one example and forget about the we just got we discovered some really interesting things about the Kotel.
One is that it turns out that you can have a bar mitzvah on the inner sanctum of the Kotel, but only if you give a certain amount of donation to the Kotel Authority. That doesn’t seem right for a semi-government organization that seems, you know, dead wrong. So we found that, again, that’s even the way their organizational structure works.
At the head of the Capital Authority is a rabbi who’s been there for many, many years. And governmental agencies are supposed to have turnover and boards and a review and, well, oversight. All those things are not happening in a way that they should be. So that’s something we’re trying to promote again in a time where there wouldn’t be war.
Some of the other things that are going on in Israel that are shaking the core of Israeli society, these things would become we’d be able to fix things much quicker than we are able to do now.
Ellie Gettinger
In the Q&A, Rabbi Farber addressed the importance of developing a welcoming environment for those who convert to Judaism.
Seth Farber
And every year in Shavuot, in our office, we have a bet who’s going to be the first person to come along in the press. If Ruth was truly converting today, she wouldn’t be accepted, right? Every year there’s like a pool in the office. If you’re asked a historical question. So I think the jury’s still out or we don’t. Right. Or Halakhah doesn’t always speak the language of what we perceive to be historical truth, the historical development of certain halakhot. You know, we the jury’s still out.
We simply don’t have enough concrete information. And even if we had the historical information, we still don’t have enough capacity to we we sublimateourselves at a certain point, a certain process and that doesn’t mean it’s not dynamic. Quite the opposite. The question of what determines in general how someone converts and the extent to which conversions are accepted or not.
This is the Achilles heel of our generation. I’m being nice. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate, they’ve is completely twisted halakha. You might remember, because I became famous for publishing the blacklist of the rabbis, who the Chief Rabbinate rejected when they were with. They we agreed in court that they would give us the list of rabbis they accepted, and he sent me the list of the rabbis they had rejected.
Judaism is so committed to making sure that converts are fully embraced by our community. The way we know that someone who is not observant is still part of the Jewish community. We learn that from the convert, according to the Talmud in Masechet Yevamot. Where the convert is the paradigm for the person, not only do we not check after them when someone converted, we don’t start asking questions at all.
So what does it mean that Alina, the rabbi of Ashkelon, wouldn’t accept this conversion? What does it mean that we have lists of rabbis in this institution for generations of rabbis who were committed to Halakha? What does it mean that all of a sudden, the moment it comes on JTS stationery or RA stationery, it’s it’s automatically rejected? What kind of absurdity is that?
I say with full confidence, because I’ve seen it happen the other way for political reasons. I’ve seen the chief rabbi himself certified conversions that came out of conservative synagogues in North America because there was a family relative involved. That kind of hypocrisy is not acceptable if we believe that we’re not a shtetl anymore. If we have enough confidence to get up and say something new is here, we’re in a new era in Jewish history.
We have a sovereign state and we’re proud of the Judaism of that sovereign state. We’re not embarrassed about it. We don’t start doing backroom deals. That’s what we did. We were in Fill in the blank. This is our moment of expressing a Judaism that embraces our diversity. I feel strongly and I think you’re with me. And this doesn’t compromise on our not our values or our principles at all.
We do not compromise on our principles. And for me that means halakhic principles, but we don’t allow a small group of men, and I make it very clear men. We don’t allow them to rewrite 2000 years of halakhic history to fit their interests that we’re just not going to allow anymore because that is not just the destruction of Judaism, it is the destruction, the denial of God’s hand in history.
Ellie Gettinger
As we wrap up. Is there anything that you would like to add?
Seth Farber
Look, I think it’s really important for listeners to know that the situation isn’t bad. First of all it’s unbelievable that we’re in a Jewish country and we have Jewish marriage, we have Jewish burial. And the government’s funding that. I am not an advocate of total separation of church and state or synagogue and state, as the case may be.
People think, after all the bad stuff you’ve seen in all the corruption, shouldn’t we just, you know, break? And I don’t think there are simple solutions to complex problems. We want to have a Jewish and democratic state, and I think it’s actually a great opportunity of our generation. It’s an opportunity for the last 2000 years. Wow. This is unbelievable.
I do believe that we have to provide people with more opportunities and more choices. And I think people will vote with their feet. I think people now are just voting with their feet to leave. I’d much rather see people vote with their feet to stay, not just leave physically, but like to get married outside of Israel. They get divorced outside their habitat to get married outside the religious councils and more, but more importantly, for the Zionist enterprise to survive and thrive.
People don’t think. They think this is an afterthought, Judaism and Zionism. And I think it’s quite the opposite. I think it’s actually at the core of the story. And one of the things I’m working on now is trying to promote that narrative, that bigger narrative, the story of this really affects every Jew everywhere. I’ll put it this way, people often talk about the three denominations, so I have three denominations, also.
My three denominations are people who want to live in the past. They think nothing happened in 1948 or 67 or 76 or whatever that you choose. Nothing’s happened. We just have to. We just were in there. It’s Israel, but yeah, we’re basically to do the same thing. People only care about the future, whereas they say whatever happened the last 2000 years was a big deviation from Jewish history. Jews were not their homeland.
Now we’re back and let’s pick it up from where we came from. The development of halakha, the relationship to the Jews and the Diaspora, all those things are secondary to, you know, building the land. And there’s a third group that says we have to build a future based on them. Once you break it down those lines that I think the differences between, let’s say the religious, Zionist Orthodox that I subscribe to or the, you know, Masorti movement, they’re there.
They were all in the same place. So we can argue about the differences and the the nuances, but I think we’re all part of that third denomination. I think that’s the denomination that’s most necessary in this generation. Again, as as an Orthodox Jew, I feel like that’s part of the divine plan. We’re going to build something for the Jewish people.
It’s different than anything we ever knew before, and therefore the models we have to work on, the models that we have, and we can’t forgo all the not just the beauty of the last 2000 years, but the responsibility of the last 2500 years. But even given that we have an opportunity to build something very new and hopefully it’ll happen in our lifetimes, you know, that’s the hope.
Ellie Gettinger
Thank you so much, Rabbi Farber, for sharing your thoughts with me. In this episode, I gained insight into the political levers at play in creating a more pluralistic Israel. Rabbi Seth Farber kept returning to the question of mi eila, Who are these? I appreciated his work in providing better answers to this question and his very detailed perspective on how to push Israeli society forward.
Thank you for listening. I hope you will expand this conversation, sharing your concerns and questions, and maybe this podcast with friends and family members. If you want to see complete footage of this session or of any of the sessions of the meeting, Israel at a Crossroads.
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I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of Outreach for JTS. This podcast was produced by me with technical support from Chris Hickey, director of New Media. This is a production of the Jewish Theological Seminary. No part of this podcast may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The views expressed here in may not be those of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
