Farewell to a Rabbi of Peace

I doubt many Moment readers know of Rabbi Yehuda Amital who passed away in Jerusalem this past July at age 85. They should. He was a giant among the lovers of Israel. No one could have loved the land of Israel more. No one could have loved peace more.

Before the war, Amital was a student at a yeshiva in Romania. His entire family perished in Auschwitz, and he himself spent eight months in a Nazi labor camp, where he was sustained by the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi of British Palestine. After Liberation, he immigrated to Israel where he fought in the War of Independence.

Deeply religious with no more than four years of secular education, Amital developed the concept of the hesder yeshiva: a yeshiva where students both learn Torah and train for the army, serving in religious units where they can do both. In so doing, he provided a path for religious Jews to fulfill their national duty. In the Gush bloc, the only area of substantial Jewish settlement captured by Jordan in 1948 and retaken by Israel in 1967, he was asked to head Yeshiva Har Etzion and nurtured it into the “Harvard of religious Zionists,” an institution known for intellectual rigor and love of the land of Israel. He cared little for rank and chose to share authority in his yeshiva with Rav Aharon Lichtenstein.

In 1988 he founded Meimad, the Movement for Religious Zionist Renewal, to provide a political outlet for those committed to both Judaism and democracy. While the party failed to win a Knesset seat, it sat in later Knessets in coalition with the Labor Party. It persists as an important rallying point for those religious Zionists concerned with peace and social justice. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Amital was asked to join the government as an expression of religious support for the state. Although he disliked political life, he served as a minister without portfolio for eight months before returning to his yeshiva until retiring in 2008.

Amital sought moderation. He understood that “not everything in the world is black and white—mostly it is grey.” Thus, he was skeptical of zealots who would destroy the world to promote the one value they held dear. Yet he taught his students to think for themselves and was happy to see them engage in public life even when they followed political paths that were not his own.

While intoxicated with Torah, Amital possessed remarkable practicality and common sense. He was not afraid to change his mind when reality around him changed. Although one of the first to join the settler movement after 1967, he rethought his political path after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Asked if the Palestinians should be required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he smiled and responded: We all know it is a Jewish state. Why should we force them to humiliate themselves and say so? 

His life as a Torah sage was infused with humanistic values. He argued for civil marriage, claiming that this option would prevent the debasement of religion by secular Jews who laugh at the rituals as they are forced to receive a religious marriage certificate. He emphasized open dialogue and respect for differences: “Our love for our country must not blind us from criticizing its shortcomings. We remain very, very far from the ideal Jewish state....Closing the social gaps, concern for the vulnerable elements of society, fighting poverty, respectful treat-ment of the non–Jews in Israel—all these measures will bring us closer to the day for which we long.”

I did not have the good fortune to be one of his students or to know him well. But I did have the opportunity to meet him on a number of occasions and was always amazed by his combination of piety, warmth and sensitivity to the needs of others. Most recently, I brought a group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim American religious leaders to meet with him at the yeshiva. In a soft voice, he tried to explain to them how his love for the land of Israel led him to settle in the West Bank and to support a Palestinian state. I am not certain they understood how his political moderation combined with religious Zionism.

Amital was well aware that his approach made him an outlier in traditional religious Zionist—let alone settler—circles. When I asked him about a year ago how many adherents he had in the religious community, he gently suggested that he was most popular in the secular community. But this did not cause him to soften his views.

His passing leaves contemporary Jewry bereft of a Torah giant who understood that kiddush hashem—the sanctification of God’s name—is the guidepost for a Torah-believing Jew. His emphasis on values, not just legal acumen, made him a great Torah scholar. He often spoke of the parable of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, who taught that a student whose zeal for learning was so intense that he did not hear the cry of a baby in the next room was a student whose learning had no value. To borrow a term from Shia Islam, he was not only a Torah sage but an object of emulation. He was a scholar who grasped that the ways of the Lord are good and pleasant and that we honor God by imitatio dei. And as a religious leader he came closer than most.

Marshall Breger is a professor of law at the Catholic University of America.