Shlomo Goren

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Shlomo Goren (1917-1994), was a former Orthodox Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel.

Goren, born Gorenchik, was born in Zambrow, Poland and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1925. He served in the Israel Defense Forces during three wars, wrote several award-winning books on Jewish law, and was appointed Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv in 1968. Rabbi Goren served as Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973- 1983, after which he established a yeshiva in Jerusalem, which he headed until his death.

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[edit] Childhood

Goren was raised in Kfar Hasidim, a Religious Zionist village near Haifa that his father co-founded. He began studying at the Hebron yeshiva in Jerusalem at age twelve, where he was identified as a prodigy. His first book was published when he was seventeen years old.

[edit] Military career

Goren's career was characterized by a commitment to the Religious Zionist values of his youth. He volunteered for the Haganah in 1936, and served as a chaplain for the Jerusalem area during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, during which he tested for and qualified as a IDF paratrooper. Goren was eventually promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General. Following the establishment of the state of Israel, Goren was appointed Chief Rabbi of the IDF with the rank of Major-General, a position he held until 1968. Rabbi Goren used the opportunity to help establish and organize the military chaplaincy's framework, streamlining processes to get soldiers accommodations for kosher food and prayer services. Goren personally wrote a new prayerbook to accommodate the different prayer styles used by various ethnic groups serving in the army.

Goren also served in the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Six Day War, where he was promoted to a full General. Goren was on hand during the capture of East Jerusalem on June 7, 1967, where he gave a prayer of thanksgiving broadcast live to the entire country. Shortly afterwards Goren, blowing a shofar and carrying a Torah scroll, held the first Jewish prayer session at the Western Wall since 1948. The event was one of the defining moments of the war, and several photographs of Goren, surrounded by soldiers in prayer, have since become famous around the world and particularly in Israel. Another photo was later discovered when Shlomo Goren is inside the Dome of the Rock with the Torah and the shofar. [1]

[edit] Controversy

Rabbi Goren attracted many admirers through his passion for Religious Zionism and his combining Zionist activism with a commitment to Judaism and Jewish scholarship. However, his uncompromising personality later resulted in him becoming a polarizing and controversial figure in Israeli politics.

Rabbi Goren spent most of his term as Chief Rabbi of Israel attempting to reconcile Jewish religious teachings with modern problems of the state, including advancements in technological progress and various high-profile conversion cases. Goren often clashed with his more conservative rabbinical colleagues, including his Sephardic counterpart, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, then a member of the Israeli Supreme Rabbinical Court.

One example of Goren's desire to adapt halakha to changing realities in science was his controversial stance on Kiddush Levana, the monthly blessing over the new moon. A prayer customarily added after the blessing contains the words "just as I dance before you and am unable to touch you." Rabbi Goren claimed that since the Americans landed on the moon in 1969, (see moon landing), this line should be changed to reflect that it is in fact possible to touch the moon.

[edit] Temple Mount activism

Rabbi Goren was also well-known for his controversial positions concerning Jewish sovreignity over the Temple Mount. On August 15, 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War, Goren led a group of fifty Jews onto the Temple Mount, where, fighting off protesting Muslim guards and Israeli police, they defiantly held a prayer service.[2] Goren was sharply criticized by the Israeli Defence Ministry, who, noting Goren's senior rank, called his behavior inappropriate. The episode led the Chief Rabbis of the time to rule that no Jews were allowed on the mount, largely to preserve the religious status-quo, but ostensibly due to issues of ritual impurity. (See Temple Mount) Disagreeing with his colleagues, Goren continually maintained that Jews were not only permitted, but commanded, to ascend and pray on the mount, a position also held by a minority within the Religious Zionist movement.

The actual question of Goren's radicalism remains controversial. One widely-repeated story about Goren claims that shortly after the Israeli capture of the Temple Mount, the rabbi either argued that Israel should have destroyed the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, or simply said that it would have been a "good thing" if they had been accidentally destroyed. [3] The account has been repeated in several Israeli newspaper reports and books about Israeli history, but the exact circumstances of the event remain somewhat inconsistent, suggesting the story may be an urban legend.[4] Another story, also possibly apocryphal, claims Goren "single-handedly" captured the city of Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs on June 8, 1967.[5]

Goren repeatedly advocated or supported building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount from the 1960s-onward, and was associated with various messianic projects involving the site. In the summer of 1983, Goren and several other rabbis joined Rabbi Yehuda Getz, who worked for the Religious Affairs Ministry at the Western Wall, in touring a chamber underneath the mount that Getz had illegally excavated, where the two claimed to have seen the Ark of the Covenant. The tunnel was shortly discovered and resulted in a massive brawl between young Jews and Arabs in the area. The tunnel was quickly sealed by Israeli police, and eventually re-opened in 1996. [6]

Goren also made headlines after his term as Chief Rabbi had expired. He was deeply opposed to the Oslo Accords and in 1993 declared that it was Halakhically forbidden to dismantle any settlements in the Biblical land of Israel, and encouraged any soldiers ordered to do so to refuse. In 1994 he announced that Halakha made it a "duty" for Jews to kill Yasser Arafat. Rabbi Goren, who was a strong supporter of alliances between Evangelical Christians and Israel, also denounced meetings between Israel and the Holy See, calling it "blasphemy beyond expression."[7]

However, Goren also spoke out against Jewish terrorism. In 1981 he and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef officially condemned a shooting attack on the Temple Mount by a Kahanist immigrant which resulted in the death of one Muslim bystander and the wounding of several others. In a joint statement released by the Chief Rabbis, they declared that "We and the entire Jewish people attack and deplore the criminal act of murder in every possible way. Through this abominable act [Alan] Goodman has removed himself from the Jewish people...".[8]

[edit] Trivia

Rabbi Goren was a strict vegetarian, a decision he made after visiting a slaughterhouse in Canada to perform an inspection of kashrut. Some claim he was the second vegetarian Chief Rabbi, the first being Abraham Isaac Kook. However, many have pointed out that although Rabbi Kook wrote an essay defending the ideal of vegetarianism, he himself was not a vegetarian.

[edit] Family

Goren was married to Tzfia Cohen, the daughter of prominent Religious Zionist Rabbi David Cohen, the Nazir of Jerusalem, and the sister of Rabbi She'ar Yashuv Cohen, former deputy-mayor of Jerusalem and the present Chief Rabbi of Haifa. Both Goren's father-in-law and brother-in-law were also prominent rabbinical vegetarians.

[edit] Quotes

  • "It is clear that according to Halacha (Jewish religious law), a soldier who receives an order that runs contrary to Torah law should uphold the Halacha, and not the secular order. And since settling the land is a commandment, and uprooting the settlements is breaking the commandment, the soldier should not carry out an order to uproot settlements. This government does not lean on a majority of Jewish support, but rather on Arab votes. According to the Halacha it does not have the authority of a majority, and therefore government directives to uproot the settlements do not have the authority of the majority of the people." [9]- NRP newspaper Hatzofeh, December 19, 1993

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Sources

Preceded by
Isser Yehuda Unterman		 Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
Shlomo Goren
1973–1983		 Succeeded by
Avraham Shapira
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