Letter to Yedioth Following the Ban on Renting Apartments to Non-Jews

Yedioth Ahronoth – 2010

The public statement by rabbis prohibiting the rental of apartments to Arabs has aroused a series of reactions for and against it. Many of them—from both sides—are tendentious, selective, and misleading. It is therefore important to explain that this is a document replete with distortions and demagoguery, containing nothing at all of Jewish law. What we have before us is a political pamphlet whose authors suffer from poor judgment. They enlist sources of Jewish law for their purposes through distorted interpretation, and precisely for that reason the matter is exceedingly harmful and deeply flawed.

This public statement constitutes a desecration of God's name. It is liable to endanger Jews abroad. Above all, it is an illegitimate distortion of Torah. Whoever wrote it should return to the study hall rather than issue rulings in Israel.

Indeed, there are clear sources of Jewish law that forbid selling land in the Land of Israel to non-Jews (with many views regarding the group to which this applies). There are also prohibitions on marrying non-Jews and on intermingling with them. The public statement mentions serious and painful security and social problems. But the absurd mixture of arguments presented in it, each of which is relevant to a different group of non-Jews (and some of them are relevant to Jews as well), is a mixture of falsehood and truth that is more harmful than an outright lie and, of course, invokes the name of Jewish law in vain.

Jewish law recognizes the complexity of reality. Its decisors are supposed to base themselves on a comprehensive view, not on a simplistic picture. They must be aware of changing times and diverse circumstances. But the authors of the public statement did not do so. They ignored, for example, the fact that according to several important decisors the prohibition of "you shall not show them favor" does not apply to a resident alien, and that quite a few decisors wrote that most non-Jews today fall under that category. They also ignored the fact that there are major decisors who apply this prohibition, and most of the discriminatory rules of Jewish law, only to the ancient non-Jews and not to non-Jews today.

They also ignore the fact that physical concerns about violence and terror apply only to a minority of hostile Arabs, and certainly not to all non-Jews. By treating falling apartment values as a matter of Jewish law, they imply that according to Jewish law one may not, for that reason, sell homes in Tel Aviv to Haredi Jews, and likewise that one should not agree to the establishment in our neighborhood of a home for children from broken families. They forget—and cause others to forget—the words of the late Rabbi Herzog, as well as the simple common sense that in a democratic state it is impossible to discriminate against non-Jews in any sphere whatsoever, whatever interpretation one gives to the prohibition of 'you shall not show them favor'.

There is concern about a hostile takeover of the state's lands and assets. There is a complex problem of intermarriage. Jews cannot live in Arab communities. All these require a forthright and courageous response, and had they written that, their words would have had value and would have met with broad agreement. But such a response cannot be mounted through a distorted and simplistic interpretation of Jewish law, and through disregard for the most basic moral rules.

According to such a simplistic interpretation of the sources, which does not recognize changing circumstances, one should flog wayward women, cast unbelieving Jews into a pit, forbid women from studying Torah, perhaps even carry out "an eye for an eye" literally. But the art of issuing rulings in Jewish law lies in combining the sources with their application under changing circumstances. Anyone who does not understand this does not know what Jewish law is.

In the present context, two conclusions follow from this: first, municipal rabbis are state employees, and any advocacy on their part of violating state law requires their dismissal (incidentally, the rule of law is itself a value recognized by Jewish law). Second, anyone who interprets the sources of Jewish law in so distorted and immoral a way, anyone so gravely detached from reality and from the values of Israeli society, suffers from severely impaired judgment in matters of Jewish law and is unfit for any rabbinic position. All that remains for us is to pray that "Restore our judges as at first, and our counselors as in the beginning".

Rabbi Abraham is

a lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies

Bar-Ilan University