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By Dan Illouz
(JULY 28, 2023 / JERUSALEM POST) For many years, one of the most burning issues in the State of Israel has been the relationship between religion and state.
Most of the discussions have seemingly revolved around the divisions between the secular population on one side, and national religious and ultra-Orthodox on the other.
However, most polls show that the largest self-defined group in Israel is the traditional, known in Hebrew as Masorti.
What does it mean to be a traditional Jew?
To be a traditional Jew is to love Judaism and the Torah, but stand against religious coercion.
To believe deeply in the mission of Israel as the indigenous and ancestral national homeland of the Jewish People, with a strong Jewish identity, but one that allows each Jew to decide how they practice their Judaism.
Some, who define themselves as traditional, like myself, keep Shabbat, kosher, and other aspects of the Jewish legal tradition, but we also love our brethren who don’t.
Some will make Kiddush on Shabbat before watching a game of soccer and pray that their favorite player will score a goal. Others put on tefillin every morning, but walk around without a head covering the rest of it.
Traditional Israelis accept Jewish law as it was transmitted at Sinai and evolved according to our sages for thousands of years, without seeking to abrogate it, even if they do not keep all of its precepts.
They concern themselves more with their own struggle in keeping the laws rather than who else is or isn’t keeping them.
To be a traditional Jew is to love the people of Israel so much that they can accept others who think, dress, and act differently from themselves.
At the traditional Jewish Shabbat table, no one is prevented from joining. There is a place for all to sit together, where the ultra-Orthodox will sit next to someone from the LGBTQ community, people who espouse a left wing worldview sit next to those with a right wing worldview, and everything in between.
THIS IS not because traditional Jews do not hold strong opinions, of course we do.
It is because, first and foremost, we believe in unadulterated love for our people.
The debates that take place at the traditional Jewish Shabbat table are more interesting and impassioned than the famed debates at Oxford University.
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