Marching Into Delicate Religious Territory

Some of his fellow Orthodox rabbis look at him askance. Rabbis in comparatively liberal Jewish denominations look at him with admiration for daring to break the mold.

But in accepting the presidency of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California -- a body that many Orthodox rabbis refuse to join -- Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky said he didn’t have to think twice about such divergent opinions. He said he took the post because he hoped to build bridges among Jews of varying religious and political views, and to reach out to Muslims.

“For me, it’s not a matter of courage,” he said of the formidable task ahead. “I believe in this. I believe this is the way the Jewish community should work. This is the way rabbis should function .... It didn’t require any soul-searching at all. Quite the opposite. It would have required a great deal of soul-searching if I were inclined not to do it.”

Thin, composed and, at 41 with hardly a line on his face, Kanefsky had already cut a controversial profile among Orthodox Jews as senior rabbi of B’nai David-Judea Congregation in West Los Angeles.

He scandalized some of them when in June 1997 he became the first Orthodox rabbi in Los Angeles to break the gender barrier by allowing women at his synagogue to read the Torah, the first five books of Hebrew Scriptures inscribed on scrolls of parchment, during special women-only services.

Women there still do not read during the main services, when men and women sit in different sections of the sanctuary, separated by the traditional partition or mechitza. Nonetheless, Torah reading by women at their own services was a departure that upset some fellow Orthodox rabbis.

“He is in many ways a loner here in this [Orthodox] community. We’re close friends, but I don’t share his philosophy and approach,” said Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City. “He’s pushed the envelope on women’s issues within orthodoxy ... He’s the most liberal Orthodox rabbi in town.”

Kanefsky, who started his two-year term as board president in May, describes himself as modern Orthodox. “We’re occupying the liberal edge of Orthodoxy,” he said.

“The reality is there are members of the Orthodox rabbinate in the city who already, for other reasons, other positions I’ve taken, really don’t have much to do with me, and that’s all right,” he said in an interview at his synagogue office.

The board is the only rabbinic organization in Southern California that is open to all rabbis, regardless of their denominational affiliations, according to Rabbi Mark Diamond, the full-time vice president of the board who oversees its day-to-day operations. The board serves as common ground for rabbis from San Luis Obispo to San Diego and is committed to interfaith programs with Christians, Muslims and others, said Diamond.

Despite the intent, the number of Orthodox rabbis who have joined the cross-denominational board of rabbis has been on the decline. Others quietly offer counsel and support behind the scenes.

“There’s a lot of pressure on Orthodox rabbis not to” join, said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, a Reform rabbi at Temple Beth Ohr in La Mirada and a former board president.

Today, of the 270 members, no more than 20 are Orthodox, according to Diamond. He said the board did not keep records of how many Orthodox rabbis formerly were members. Kanefsky is the only senior Orthodox rabbi with a major congregation to be a full-fledged member.

One Orthodox rabbi, who formerly served as president of the board of rabbis in the late 1990s, Rabbi Abner Weiss, recalled at least three senior rabbis of major Orthodox synagogues who had left the board in the last seven years or so. Weiss, who now leads the Westwood Village Synagogue, serving students and faculty at UCLA, said the exodus was probably precipitated by what he described as a drift by liberal streams of Judaism from traditional teaching.

The willingness of some liberal rabbis to bless mixed marriages or ordain women or gays is among the reasons for Orthodox rabbis’ reluctance to join the board, Weiss said. Orthodox rabbis also objected to the Reform movement’s decision several years ago to define a Jew as someone whose mother or father was Jewish, he added. That was a break from the tradition that holds that a person is born a Jew only if his or her mother was a Jew.

Weiss, like Kanefsky, remains one of the few Orthodox rabbis to hold full membership on the board. “Those of us who continue to work together believe that indifference is much worse than difference,” Weiss said.

Now, Kanefsky will probably stand out again as one of the few Orthodox rabbis who will join an advertising campaign planned next week in support of Israel’s withdrawal of the 9,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza. That ad campaign’s principal backers in Southern California come from the majority, more liberal streams of Judaism in America, the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist.

“He is in a particularly sensitive position, shall we say, as an Orthodox rabbi of a leading congregation when it comes to this issue,” said Diamond. “There are many in the Jewish community, particularly in the Orthodox community, who are opposed to disengagement” in Gaza, said Diamond, a Reform rabbi.

Even for Kanefsky, the planned Israeli pullout from Gaza is not without problems.

“It’s very, very painful,” he said, for the Jews in 21 settlements who are being asked to leave their homes, and for national pride.

He also said the short-term prospects for a peace dividend are remote.

“There is a level of retreat, no question,” he said of the Gaza, which was annexed by Israel during the Six Day War with Egypt, Jordan and Syria in June 1967. “Rather than continuing for the sake of pride and national ego, rather than continuing on the same mistaken path, we’re going to actually rectify the mistakes we have made,” he said.

He called the disengagement an act of bravery and courage: “It’s painful. It’s very painful. We have this concept of repentance. Repentance is painful.”

On the home front of Southern California, Kanefsky is advancing a four-point program he hopes to accomplish during his two-year term as president of the board of rabbis: renewed interfaith dialogue, especially with Muslims; support for Israel; finding common ground among Jews here; and social action.

The chief goal, he said, is to reinforce “the sense of overriding, overwhelming united religious peoplehood” among Jews.

On the issue of stepping up dialogue with Muslims, Kanefsky said he hoped to build on the work already being done by others. For instance, although relations between local Muslim and Jewish leaders have been strained at times, some Jewish leaders have remained in contact with local Muslim leaders even as the Board of Rabbis excused itself from formal discussions.

Likewise, the relatively new Jewish World Watch, established by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, has been a leader in enlisting 20 other Southern California synagogues in speaking out against genocide, particularly in the Darfur region of Sudan, and coming to the aid of those displaced by civil war, hunger and homelessness.

In looking for common ground among Jews, Kanefsky wants to start joint Torah study programs involving geographic clusters of synagogues of different denominations.

Kanefsky, married and the father of three children, graduated magna cum laude in psychology from Yeshiva University in New York in 1985, and spent time at the university’s Gruss Institute in Jerusalem before being ordained to the rabbinate after studies at the university’s affiliated Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in 1989. He also has a master’s degree in medieval Jewish history, completed in 1989. He has served at his current synagogue for nine years.

“I hope that Jews who look at one another as being the ‘other’ and different recognize that we’re all beginning with the same premises,” Kanefsky said. “We all have the same heroes. We all have the same text. We all treat that text with great reverence and ask it to teach us how to live. We’re all speaking the same language, if nuanced differently .... We’re all drawing from the same well.”