In Israel, as opposed to the United States, worshipers don’t wait for the rabbis to allow them to pray under equal conditions. In light of the attempts to stop them, Prof. Tamar Ross, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and one of the pioneers of the religious feminist wave, recently said: “The train has left the station; the rabbis can throw stones at the windows and shout ‘Shabbes, Shabbes.’”
Above left: Benjamin Brown; Above right: Tamar Ross
Ha'aretz has long analysis of what it says is possibly a looming split between liberal Zionist Orthodox and Modern Orthodox Jews on one hand and more conservative Zionist Orthodox and Modern Orthodox Jews on the other.
The article is too long to summarize here, but two quotes perhaps some up the extremes of both of those sides well.
The liberals:
In Israel, as opposed to the United States, worshipers don’t wait for the rabbis to allow them to pray under equal conditions. In light of the attempts to stop them, Prof. Tamar Ross, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and one of the pioneers of the religious feminist wave, recently said: “The train has left the station; the rabbis can throw stones at the windows and shout ‘Shabbes, Shabbes.’”
The conservatives:
As a leading scholar of Orthodoxy and a religiously observant Jew, Dr. Benjamin Brown of the Hebrew Thought Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem criticizes the winds of this great Jewish revolt. “My prediction is that the most recent liberal trends are about to lead to a split in religious Zionism or Modern Orthodoxy,” he says. “As opposed to the split between religious Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy, for which there is some practical justification - and I regret that, too - here there is no justification. The liberals should have crossed the lines and switched to the Conservative movement.”
Hebrew University's Ben Brown has clearly crossed the line from being a scholar who studies Orthodox society to an advocate for part of that society and an opponent of another part of it. If you want to know why Israeli universities are increasingly not taken seriously outside of the hard sciences and math, Brown's quote here is a very good example of why.
You can read the entire article here.