Abba Kovner once asked Amital how he could still believe in God after the Shoah. Amital replied, “And how can you still believe in humanity after the Holocaust?”
October 14, 2008 Atheist Critiques of Religion, Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust, Meimad and the Religious Peace Movement in Israel, Religious Moderates Criticize Fundamentalists No CommentsBiography / The making of a dove – Haaretz, October 12, 2008
By Yair Sheleg
Be’emunato: Sipuro shel harav yehuda amital (Be’emunato: The Story of Rabbi Yehuda Amital), by Elyashiv Reichner
Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 301 pages, NIS 98
Over the years, Rabbi Yehuda Amital, head of the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (where students combine compulsory military service with their Talmudic studies) in Alon Shvut, has become one of the rabbis that even secular Jews (including those on the left) love to love. There are two reasons for this. For one, he has a sunny personality. Even more critical, however, are his political views.
It was Rabbi Amital who in the late 1980s founded the Meimad movement, which, from its inception, has advocated moderation in both the religious and political spheres. Nor is he afraid to attack his colleagues, who are rabbis affiliated with the right-wing religious Zionist camp, for their views.
Journalist Elyashiv Reichner’s biography of Amital, 83, unfolds the fascinating, complex story of this man. For many years, he taught at Yeshivat Hadarom in Rehovot, which was headed by his father-in-law, until, in 1965, he decided to move to Jerusalem. Two years later, he was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was in the period immediately following the Six-Day War, and the leaders of the movement to renew Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion, in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, were inviting him to head the yeshiva that they were establishing there. (I myself studied at that yeshiva under Amital’s leadership.)
The book speaks extensively of Amital’s personality and educational approach, for good reason. These are the real reasons he is so beloved by students and friends alike, including those who disagree with his views. Amital is an open-minded, original thinker, difficult to pigeonhole, and his character is reflected in his work as an educator.
Unlike so many rabbis and yeshiva heads, Amital explicitly discourages his students from following in his footsteps. Students frequently pepper him with questions unrelated to issues of Jewish law, and he always responds, gently but firmly, that they should think out the matter for themselves. Even on issues of Jewish law, he has been known to advise the inquirer to investigate the problem independently by consulting the sources. He always emphasizes that he is not interested in producing “Amital look-alikes.”
He has the reputation of being a determined optimist. Reichner relates that, on one occasion, when the rabbi’s daughter earned a score of only 50 percent on an exam, he consoled her: “Don’t feel bad. At least you knew half the material.”
As a Holocaust survivor (Amital was born in Hungary in 1924, and lost his entire family in Auschwitz), his attitude toward that subject is sincere and does not smack of self-righteousness: For instance, he has no difficulty acknowledging that he cannot answer why the Holocaust occurred, and he is furious with those who try to do so. The late Israeli poet Abba Kovner, himself a Holocaust survivor and a leader of Jewish resistance forces in the Vilna Ghetto, once asked Amital how he could still believe in God after the Shoah. Amital replied, “And how can you still believe in humanity after the Holocaust? After all, no one pretends to be able to understand God, yet we supposedly understand other human beings.”