Last week, in a blog post about Jewish terrorism and the implicit support of religious nationalist rabbis, I mentioned that Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of Ateret Cohanim yeshiva has a gutsy liberal side and that I would explain it in a later post. Well, here we go.
We’re going to get philosophical here. Aviner is a major intellectual figure on Israel’s political right, an outstanding defender of the theology of Greater Israel. He’s also a leader of the Hardal school of theologically hardline Zionists who move constantly rightward on questions like women’s rights and civil liberties.
So what makes him liberal? Quite simply, his defense of modernity. In an Orthodox world that is moving increasingly toward Haredi fundamentalism, Aviner is a fearless defender of science, rationalism and the rule of law.
Aviner is a major intellectual force in religious Zionism and the settler movement. He is the chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Beit El and dean of Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in East Jerusalem, the Irving Moskowitz-backed institution that won fame in 1990 for taking over a Christian site, St. John’s Hospice, causing an international uproar. Aviner became a focus of international controversy again during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza last January, when it was reported that the rabbinate was handing out booklets to soldiers featuring an incendiary passage by Aviner – a warning to soldiers not to show mercy to enemies. (If you’re thinking he was misquoted, here is the full Aviner piece as published by his own yeshiva.) On top of that, last February he wrote that rabbinic law forbids Arab participation in the Knesset.
For all that, he has gained a reputation in much of the settler community as something of a leftist heretic for his opposition to soldiers disobeying orders when commanded to evacuate settlers. Last year he was prevented by right-wing rabbis from speaking in his own settlement. Some far rightists are calling him “the Shabak rabbi,” which is akin to calling someone an informer or turncoat. (Shabak is the Hebrew acronym for General Security Service, or Shin Bet.)
But there is a deeper liberalism in operation, and it’s important to know about it. This past July he was asked by a student at his yeshiva, during a lunchtime discussion that was transcribed, whether dinosaurs actually existed. This is a charged issue on the Orthodox right. Acknowledging that dinosaurs existed implies that the world isn’t 5,770 years old and, by extension, that the Torah isn’t literally true. The issue caused a crisis in Israel following the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” in 1993, when Tene (TEH-neh), one of the country’s largest dairy companies, lost its kosher certification for putting dinosaurs pictures on its flavored yogurt containers.
Aviner’s reply to the question was an eye-opener, and a stark reminder that there is still a difference between Modern Orthodoxy and Haredi or ultra-Orthodoxy, and that the settler movement is, in its own way, on the side of modernity (more on that in another post).
The motto of American Modern Orthodoxy, alert readers recall, is Torah u-Mada, “Torah and Science.” Modern Orthodoxy begins with the insistence that faithfulness to the Torah should not shut one off from the intellectual progress of the modern world.
Well, Aviner’s reply to the question about dinosaurs was, in a word: Hey, we’ve found their bones. We know they’re real. And if the Torah seems to say otherwise, that’s “irrelevant.” Citing the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loewe of Prague (1525-1609), Aviner says “that the purpose of science is to describe reality, while the Torah describes what reality should be, i.e. what is good and what is bad.”
Read Aviner’s words about dinosaurs and Rabbi Loewe, after the jump:
