I have been thinking a lot about the interview with Yoav Sorek, which I previously blogged about, and I decided to translate the interview. The interview is from Makor Rishon, Friday, January 22, 2010/7 Shevat 5770. Below is part I.
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The First Post-Orthodox
Yoav Sorek, the wild boy of the yeshiva journalists, took off his kippah and stayed religious. The Torah, he explains, needs to remove itself from sectorialism, from the condition of exile and rigidity, and to link up with the people, redemption, and to reality. The secret is secularization and returning to religion. Did you get confused? He’s not.
By Tsur Ehrlich
“Did you hear?” whispered one friend to another, “Yoav Sorek took off his kippah.”
“What?” will ask the agitated person, “He took off his kippah? He broke all the rules? S-e-c-u-l-a-r? “No.” the first will answer. “Do you think? He’s just a religious thinker. Go figure.”
“The man is a fundamentalist,” the third will say. “He wants to return to the laws of the Torah that they did away with even before the Middle Ages.”
“He is a neo-Reform,” the fourth will say, “real Reform. He wants to change halakhot.”
And the fifth, the one who will read until the end, will try to explain: “He is a secular believer and observer of the commandments; he is a religious post-Orthodox person.”
“Ahah” will say the other with relief, “we understand.”
Nevertheless, Yoav Sorek is one of the least mixed up religious people who are walking around here. He has a clear approach (mishnah berurah), which is original and challenging, that he has laid out over the past decade-and-a-half in articles which have published in different places, among them the “Shabbat” supplement of “Makor Rishon” which he edits. At its heart stands the distinction that the return to Zion and the establishment of the state of Israel are a new phase in the history of Judaism, which requires it [i.e. Judaism] to be renewed-just as it knew how to change itself two thousand years ago when Jewish sovereignty was lost. It must bring unto itself the everyday life, the profane, just as it did until the destruction [of the Temple]. Religious Zionism failed in understanding this change and from a theological standpoint it remains ultra-Orthodox, and secular Zionism chose separation instead of change. The time has arrived for an Israeli Judaism, a Judaism of a people in its land, for a Torah which doesn’t limit itself to one segment of the population and mark itself with a kippah.
“Essentially,” he explains a few weeks after the uncovering of his head, “secular Zionism was right, there is a need to replace the diaspora religious lifestyle with a new Jewish lifestyle, one of a people establishing an exemplary society in its land. But when it comes to details, Orthodoxy was correct. It is impossible to build a people without halakhah, without a deep commitment that expresses itself daily in life of the individual and in the world of the community. I am therefore secular, in the secular Zionist sense, which expresses itself in the uncovered head and in the identification with the secular Zionist enterprise, and a religiously observant person of the commandments (shomer mitzvot), in the concreteness of life, commandments that of course still need to adopt new forms that are more appropriate for the secular Zionist tilting of the balance, and that time has yet to come.
The forty-year-old Sorek, who was born in Rehovot and a computer programmer by profession, first hinted at this symbolic step in a comprehensive article that he published two years ago in the academic modern-Orthodox journal “Akdamot.” There he proposed that rabbis should lead mixed religious-secular communities and as a symbol of non-sectoriality they should forgo the wearing of a kippah. “Every religious male (ben Torah),” he wrote, “if they would conduct a small thought experiment and examine this possibility seriously, that he should soon start going without a kippah on his head, will feel, it seems to me, a strong gut reaction, one that is shocking, that will make clear the depth of the leap that is here, the depth of the release from defensive conceptions and the opening up to a new Jewish dialogue that truly wants to return the Torah to the people.”
After the first month with the canopy of heaven (kipat ha-shamayim) he confirms that “in this step there was something liberating, catchy. The side that says, ‘I can cleanse my belief, my connection with what I believe in, my belonging to the Jewish people, my worship of God,’ whatever you want to call it, because this removes the automatism, which is warm but numbing. The removal of the kippah is like jumping into the water. It is scary but refreshing, revealing. It makes you stand facing reality. Despite this being a small step and inconsequential halakhically.”
He explains that according to a large number of poskim, covering ones head for men is optional, even in prayer. When he prays with a minyan he wears a kippah, but when he prays individually his head is uncovered. “Prayer without a kippah prevents me from saying incorrect words. With a kippah, in the framework of religious obligation, we are able to pray in a way that separates us from the experience of existence, because this is the written version. To pray, for example, about the return to Jerusalem, to whom we have already returned. Our sages (Hazal) built the prayer on values that the people were then in need of, without redemption. In the same manner our generation needs to build prayer on the basis of the values that the people needs in the redeemed lives. Think to yourself what a meaningful prayer it would be if in the shemonah esrai prayer every day we would say blessings which relates to the foundations of our existence as a society-correct eduction, an appropriate legal system, national stamina, social solidarity.”
Now I am Just an Israeli
In the meantime, he is having experiences of a religious person in secular skin. “One day I found myself in Meah She’arim, I needed to buy some things for the hanukkiyah, and all the time I was afraid that if I will enter into some store they would feel me non-kosher food, for they’ll say ‘this goy…’ When it was time for minchah I said, if I will stand here and pray without a kippah they will stone me. I stood in a side corner and tried not to make any movements of one who is praying. A child who was passing by with his mother asked her alarmingly, ‘What happened to the man? It looks as if he is in need of help.’ You suddenly realize how difficult it is to perform religious actions without the religious banner.”
“Or an example in the opposite direction: I don’t shop at the chain AM:PM even though it is convenient and close to me, because this is a chain that represents the desecration of the Sabbath. At one time I didn’t buy there because a religious person doesn’t enter there, now it is because I don’t want to. In the past I always felt in stores like someone who is representing something. Not just a plain customer, rather, a religious person. Now I need to remind myself that I don’t have a sign on my head. I am able to show interest in everything and I need to behave properly because of essential reasons, and not as a representative of the sector that stands against the ‘regular’ society. I am now part of it. This is bouncing around inside of me, this is a very interesting experience. Until I took my kippah off, I never felt how much belonging to religious society was meaningful for every step that I took. Now I feel it.”
