By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Navah Hesetz was born in Tel Aviv. Her parents had emigrated from Italy in 1947, a year before the founding of Israel, and she grew up in what she called “a very secular Israeli family.”
“In my childhood I never had any contact with Jewish life. I was Israeli and for lots of the Israelis in the early ‘60s, Judaism didn’t concern us. We were the ‘new Jews’ in comparison with the Jews of the Diaspora,” she said.
Only later in life did she really connect with her own Jewishness, which she sees as inexorably tied to her concerns for human rights, whether they affect Palestinians living under Israeli occupation or what is happening to the Israeli population within the so-called Green Line.
Hesetz is the education director for Rabbis For Human Rights, and she spoke in Seattle at a luncheon session for the Anti-Defamation League on May 1. She was drafted at the last minute to fill in on a speaking tour of the Pacific Northwest for Rabbi Arik Ascherman, RHR executive director who remained in Jerusalem to deal with a family emergency.
The essence of her message was that the need to respect human rights comes from the tradition of Jewish teachings as well as the immediate situation on the ground.
The base of her ideology “is taken from my heritage, and my sources are the Bible, the Talmud and the great Jewish philosophers from throughout the ages,” Hesetz explained.
“We know that Israel is strong. We know that we have one of the best aircraft in the world and we have the best soldiers, and everything is the best. I don’t have to go and affirm my strength every morning,” she added. “I want to see the human side. Even though we’re there [in the West Bank and Gaza], we have to be the watch-citizens or the watch-rabbis, to see that no violations of human rights occur.”
She also cautioned that the concern for human rights was not limited to the well-publicized issues of the Occupation and the intifada.
“What is going on in Israel is we are violating human rights in every corner, in every city,” said Hesetz. “As Jews, we cannot allow violations of human rights wherever a human being lives, whether he is a Palestinian or a foreign worker or a woman who cannot get her divorce because the Orthodox rabbis don’t give her one.
“I would like to work with the status of women in Israel, child abuse — there is a lot of child abuse today in Israel,” she said. “For me, it’s not enough to go to the shul and pray. It’s not enough to preserve Jewish life. As a future rabbi I would like to see the Israeli society to be looking toward tikkun olam — to be a more just society.”
Rabbis for Human Rights was formed in 1988 to respond to the indifference of much of the country’s religious citizens and leadership to serious abuses of human rights by the Israeli military during the first intifada. The organizers believed both religious and the non-religious Israelis needed to be reminded that Judaism demands concern for the suffering of innocent people, even those viewed as “the enemy.”
Describing itself as “the rabbinic voice of conscience in Israel,” RHR is unique in having member rabbis and rabbinical students from the Reform, Orthodox, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements working together for a common goal. More than 90 rabbis and several more students, all Israeli citizens, are part of the group. Their work includes assistance to individuals, publicity campaigns for causes they embrace, civil disobedience and lobbying Knesset members.
Before becoming a rabbinical student, Hesetz, who holds a Master’s degree in Jewish History, worked as the curator of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. She said she eventually decided “that instead of looking to the past, I had to look to the future, and the future was education and trying to pass my Jewish experience in the Diaspora Museum to the young generation in Israel.”
“Israeli society is not homogeneous,” she said. “Today we have more than a million Israeli Arabs with Israeli ID cards and passports. I’m not talking about the Palestinians behind the Green Line. We have more than a million Russian immigrants that were cut off from their Jewish roots and their Jewish identity. Forty percent of them, maybe more, are not what we in Israel — what the Orthodox extreme call halachic — Jews, according to the Halacha but they go to Israeli schools, they go to the army; they fight in the army,” she said.
“The American community at-large [has] a lot to contribute to Israel, both emotionally and intellectually, and to show us how we can live in a pluralistic society,” said Hesetz. She said the face of Israeli society has been undergoing major shifts in the last decade, including the entry of more than 200,000 non-Jewish foreign workers from the Philippines, Romania and other Asian and Eastern European countries. Hesetz said all these changes, and the higher birth rate among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, are producing an increasing strain on Israeli democracy as people try to balance the desire to build and maintain democratic and pluralistic institutions with the demands of remaining a Jewish nation.
“It’s not black-and-white,” she said, “and the gray areas are bigger than any other area. Within this gray area, we as Jews must try for pluralism and human rights as all costs…. So our organization is a little bit controversial because the situation is complicated.”
When told that many American Jews see public disputes with Israeli government policies as being disloyal to the State of Israel, she looked as if she could not believe her ears.
“Would you say such a thing in America?” she asked. “I do think there is nothing wrong — on the contrary, it would be wrong if people like us wouldn’t work to prevent violations of human rights,” Hesetz added. “What we’re trying to show is that democracy is in the core of Judaism.”