Cutting off her nose (and ours) to spite her face

The bill in question, sponsored by the Bayit Yehudi party, would significantly reduce the haredi (ultra-Orthodox)-dominated rabbinate’s ability to torment couples seeking to wed. Current law requires couples to register in the city where one of them lives, meaning they can at best choose between two municipal chief rabbis, and sometimes have no choice whatsoever. Some municipal rabbis have exploited this monopolistic power to make life miserable for applicants – especially, though not exclusively, converts (some haredi rabbis don’t recognize the state-sponsored conversion system) and immigrants from the former Soviet Union (who often have trouble producing sufficient proof of their Jewishness to satisfy more stringent rabbis).

Bayit Yehudi’s bill seeks to solve this problem by introducing competition: It would let couples register with any municipal rabbi in Israel, thereby allowing them to patronize those who offer the best service. Moreover, forcing municipal rabbis to compete for these couples’ businesses (and the attendant fees) would create an incentive for all of them to become more user-friendly.

But last week, Livni vetoed this bill in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation – solely because she was mad at Bayit Yehudi for blocking a bill her Hatnua party had sponsored.

There’s nothing wrong with playing hardball politics, nor is there anything wrong with insisting on a horse trade: Conditioning support for another party’s bill on its support for yours is standard political tactics. But smart politicians usually threaten to veto bills that primarily interest the other party, rather than their own constituents or the general public. That maximizes their leverage, since they have little to lose politically if the other party won’t play ball. 

Livni, in contrast, chose to veto a bill that primarily benefits secular Israelis – i.e., the very people her party ostensibly represents. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have trouble registering a marriage. The religious Zionists who comprise Bayit Yehudi’s base are much less likely to have their Jewishness questioned by the rabbinate to begin with, and usually know a rabbi who can help if they run into problems. Thus instead of punishing Bayit Yehudi’s electorate, she is punishing her own, and the broader Israeli public.

Moreover, Hatnuah’s bill was also aimed at liberalizing the haredi-dominated rabbinate: It called for expanding the panel that chooses the chief rabbis from 150 to 200 people and requiring 20 percent of them to be women, with the goal of adding new, non-haredi members to what is currently a Haredi-dominated panel. That’s certainly a worthy aim, and Livni is justified in fighting for it. But if liberalizing the rabbinate is her party’s goal, vetoing another bill that also furthers this goal is like cutting off her nose to spite her face.

Equally egregious was her failure to attempt negotiations before resorting to hardball, even though a reasonable compromise was almost certainly achievable. First, Bayit Yehudi explicitly promised to support Hatnua’s bill if an agreement could be reached on how to appoint the new members. Second, though nine of its 12 MKs voted against the bill in the Knesset, party chairman Naftali Bennett actually voted in favor, indicating that he would be a willing partner in finding such a compromise. Third, one of the bill’s main goals is to increase the chances of electing a religious Zionist as the next Ashkenazi chief rabbi, thereby ending decades of haredi domination; that’s a goal Bayit Yehudi shares.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Bayit Yehudi has demonstrated a sincere desire to liberalize and improve the rabbinate: Just over two months have passed since the government took office, and it has already proposed two important reforms. One was the marriage registration bill. The other, unveiled last week, would gradually abolish the position of state-appointed neighborhood rabbi and instead give communities government funds to hire rabbis of their own choice.

This proposal won headlines mainly because it would for the first time let non-Orthodox communities obtain funding for their rabbis as well. But the implications are much broader than that; as with the marriage registration bill, the goal is to significantly improve service to the public by introducing competition. Before, neighborhood rabbis were appointed by the rabbinate bureaucracy and were paid regardless of whether or not they did anything useful for the communities they supposedly served. Now, they will be appointed by the communities themselves – meaning they will have to provide good service in order to get and keep their jobs.

Given Bayit Yehudi’s proven commitment to liberalizing the rabbinate, it shouldn’t be impossible to agree on a revised selection process for the chief rabbis that would further this goal, assuming Livni were willing to engage in good-faith negotiations. After all, she likes to think of herself as a master negotiator; indeed, her last election campaign revolved entirely around her self-declared ability to negotiate a final-status deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But apparently, negotiating with a fellow Israeli politician is beneath her. Instead, she has chosen to punish all Israelis by vetoing a bill aimed at improving marriage registration for everyone.

With the Religious Services Ministry controlled for the first time in decades by a party that has shown real interest in reforming our ossified religious bureaucracy, it would be tragic if this opportunity were lost due to one woman’s petty spite. Unfortunately, the man who ought to be calling her to order – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – appears to have gone AWOL, due largely to his personal loathing for Bennett. Having already sacrificed a golden opportunity for economic reform in order to undermine Yair Lapid, it seems that on this issue, too, Netanyahu would rather accomplish nothing than let a political rival claim an achievement.

Thus Livni’s small-mindedness may actually be serving Netanyahu’s interests. But it’s doing the rest of us a great disservice.