{"id":185663,"date":"2026-05-01T17:09:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T01:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=185663"},"modified":"2026-05-12T20:13:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T04:13:44","slug":"goren-as-proxy-alliance-theory-and-the-capture-of-the-rabbanut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=185663","title":{"rendered":"Goren as Proxy: Alliance Theory and the Capture of the Rabbanut"},"content":{"rendered":"

R. Shlomo Goren<\/a> (1917-1994) rises through the IDF chaplaincy<\/a> because David Ben-Gurion<\/a> (1886-1973) needs a halakhic<\/a> (Jewish law) authority who answers to the secular state. The standard rabbinical establishment objects. Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog<\/a> (1888-1959) makes the formal appointment of Goren<\/a> based on Ben-Gurion’s recommendation. From that moment, Goren’s career sits inside a coalition<\/a> that runs from Mapai<\/a> through the Labor<\/a> establishment through the General Staff. His paychecks, his platform, his protection from herem<\/em><\/a>, his ability to publish rulings and have them stick all flow from the secular Zionist<\/a> coalition<\/a>.
\nRead his career through Alliance Theory<\/a> and the halakhic<\/a> content recedes. The coalition<\/a> position comes first. The rulings follow.
\nApply the four coalition questions<\/a>.
\nWho provides Goren<\/a> his status, income, and protection? The IDF, the Labor<\/a> government, the Religious Zionist<\/a> orbit at the margins. Not the Haredi<\/a> (traditional Orthodox) yeshiva<\/a> world. Not the old rabbinical guild.
\nWho does Goren<\/a> risk angering if he speaks plainly? The Haredi establishment, whose framework treats the secular state as illegitimate ground for halakhic authority.
\nWho benefits if Goren’s framing wins? The secular Zionist<\/a> leadership that needs Jewish legitimation for its state. Religious Zionists who want to serve in the army without losing their halakhic standing. Agunot<\/em><\/a> (chained women) whose husbands fell in 1948 and 1967 and need rulings the establishment will not give. The Langer children. Helen Seidman.
\nWhat truths would cost Goren<\/a> his position? That his appointment depended on Ben-Gurion. That his rulings track what the secular state needs. That standing outside the state coalition would leave him a private rabbi with strong views and no platform.
\nStrange Bedfellows<\/a> predicts the alignments. The halakhic<\/a> positions track coalition membership rather than independent reasoning. Religious Zionist<\/a> rabbis who privately doubt Goren’s reasoning back him because the alternative is conceding halakhic<\/a> authority to the Haredim. Haredi rabbis who privately concede Goren<\/a> has a case attack him because the alternative is conceding halakhic<\/a> authority to the state. Each side argues on the merits. Each side recruits the merits the coalition needs.
\nThe Seidman case in 1970 sets up everything that follows. Helen Seidman<\/a>n, an American on a secular kibbutz, wants to marry a kohen. Goren converts her in a quick proceeding. Ovadia Yosef<\/a> (1920-2013), then chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, joins a confirming bet din. Goren defends the move to R. Yechezkel Abramsky<\/a> (1886-1976) in a long letter that names the political stakes. Labor wants civil marriage. The Seidman case offers the wedge. If the rabbanut refuses to convert her, the secular coalition might push through legislation severing marriage from halakhic authority. Goren frames the conversion as saving rabbinic jurisdiction over Israeli personal status. Hold the territory. Retain authority. Hoffmann<\/a>, Chaim Ozer’s<\/a> hesitation, and the Mishna Eduyot principle<\/a> of preserved minority views supply the citations that legitimate a move already required by coalition logic. The Haredi establishment reads the Seidman conversion as a man who handles halakha to serve political ends. When Goren runs a parallel maneuver on Borokovsky two years later, the explosion has already been primed.
\nYosef and Goren were friends before Langer. Yosef wrote Goren a warm letter in 1961 congratulating him on the Israel Prize, calling him “my friend and dear one, the great Gaon famous to the four corners of the earth,” and asking Goren to send him notes on Yabia Omer. They served together as joint chief rabbis of Tel Aviv from 1968 to 1972 and the cooperation was real. Yosef sat on the Seidman bet din. They cooperated on the 1972 Chief Rabbinate election with a shared candidate list for the Rabbinate Council. Even after Langer broke their working relationship, Yosef sat as mesader kiddushin at the wedding of Goren’s son Rami in 1982, and warm holiday letters between them continued to the end. The friendship was real. The break was made by sustained Haredi pressure on Yosef from outside that he could not, in the end, refuse. Mishloff’s dissertation<\/a> has the documentary record from Goren’s personal archive: the 1961 letter, the 1972 cooperation protocols, the 1982 wedding, the 1981-82 holiday correspondence. Coalition logic does not predict opposition automatically. It predicts that pressure overrides existing relationships when the cost of holding them runs high enough.
\nThe Rabbinate Council protocol from the first session after Goren and Yosef were elected, dated 5 Kislev 5733 (November 10, 1972), shows the structural split surfacing nine days before the Langer ruling. Yosef proposed that fateful halakhic questions be referred to gedolei torah outside the council with both chief rabbis’ agreement. R. Aushpizai responded that the council had elected its own gedolei torah. R. Tchorsh argued that reaching outside lets any decision get challenged and that the council was a sovereign body. R. Zevin pointed out that consulting gedolei torah might have killed the Hallel-on-Independence-Day decision earlier. Goren backed Kapach’s compromise: the council consults gedolei torah only when it judges a question fateful enough to require it. The vote was a fight over jurisdiction. Yosef wanted the council to defer to Haredi authority outside the Rabbanut. The council majority insisted on its own sovereignty. The structural split was already in motion. Langer was the first detonation, not the cause.
\nIn the Langer case<\/a> in 1972, a brother and sister are declared mamzerim (offspring of a forbidden union, barred from marrying most other Jews) by a rabbinical court. The ruling locks them out of marriage to other Jews. Goren convenes his own panel, reviews the evidence, and rules them not mamzerim.
\nThe substantive halakha<\/a> sits closer to Goren<\/a> than the Orthodox alliance could afford to admit. Avraham Borokovsky<\/a> had been declared the children’s halakhic<\/a> father based on a chazaka that he had converted before marrying their mother in Poland. Goren’s evidence cuts that chazaka apart. Borokovsky cannot say who converted him. He cannot say whether his circumcision preceded or followed his immersion. He cannot finish the first sentence of the Shema. He does not know which tefillin to put on first. He attends church. Witnesses see him cross himself. He has his Israeli child baptized. Rambam’s marriage-specific qualification of the chazaka principle requires affirmative evidence of conversion, which here is missing. Goren’s argument is not the heroic stretch. The opposition’s reliance on chazaka is the stretch.
\nThe coalition reading rests on this. If Goren applied standard evidentiary rules, the expulsion of Goren<\/a> had no halakhic<\/a> ground. The opposition therefore had to engage at a different register. They engaged on procedure (the secret bet din), on personal character (the eagle who would not consult), on coalition discipline (the kol koreh<\/em> (proclamation), the violence, the Shach<\/a> speech<\/a>), and through the suppression of supporting evidence. They did not engage on the merits.
\nThe kol koreh<\/em> against Goren is the document Bachko was referring to in his letter to Shach<\/a> when he warned that the destroying angel would not stay bounded to its original target. Once the language was licensed against Goren, it became available against Modern Orthodox poskim, against religious Zionists, against Haredi figures who would not toe the line, eventually against Mazuz. The mechanism stays constant. The targets change. Each new kol koreh<\/em> draws legitimacy from the previous ones. The format is self-reinforcing.
\nIn English coverage you sometimes see “kol koreh<\/em>” rendered as “rabbinic proclamation,” “open letter,” or “rabbinic ban.” None of those translations quite captures it. The closest analogue in secular institutional life might be the academic open letter signed by hundreds of professors. The signature mechanics are similar. The coalition pressure dynamics are similar. The relationship between substance and signal is similar. What differs is that the kol koreh<\/em> carries explicit halakhic weight in Haredi life. A figure declared outside the camp by a kol koreh<\/em> cannot be the mesader kiddushin at his nephew’s wedding, cannot have his rulings relied on, cannot place his sons in mainstream yeshivot. The document does institutional work that an academic open letter does not.
\nR. Bezalel Zolty’s published critique<\/a> (his name appears variously as Yolti or Tzolty in transliteration) is the closest the opposition came to substantive halakhic engagement. Zolty was Av Beit Din of the Supreme Rabbinical Court at the time and later Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. Marc Shapiro’s lecture series identifies the critique as three installments in HaPardes that engage Goren on the Rambam-Tashbetz axis Goren<\/a> invokes, with Zolty leaning on the Tashbetz’s treatment of the Iberian conversos who chose conversion under duress. Borokovsky did not freely choose at all, which is the textual gap Goren’s primary argument exploits. Where the rest of the opposition operated through kol koreh<\/em> signatures, public denunciations, and procedural attacks, Zolty took the substance seriously. The framework’s<\/a> prediction holds even here: only one figure on the opposition side engaged the merits, and his engagement still required leaning on a precedent whose factual fit was contested.
\nGoren did not stand alone. The November 1972 panel had nine dayyanim, with Goren<\/a> as the first signatory and eight others who insisted on anonymity given the coalition pressure already visible at the time of the ruling<\/a>. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency<\/a> identified one of them the following August. Goren<\/a> disclosed the name at a Chief Rabbinate appointments committee meeting that was discussing R. Shalom Mizrahi’s candidacy for the Supreme Rabbinical Court. Praising Mizrahi as the first to sign the heter after him, Goren cited his spiritual courage. R. Eliezer Goldsmith, an opponent of the heter on the committee, had been an enthusiastic backer of Mizrahi’s candidacy until that moment. He immediately expressed reservations. Mizrahi paid the institutional cost for his signature in real time, on the public record.
\nThe other seven dayyanim remained anonymous in Goren’s published ruling. Marc Shapiro’s lecture series<\/a>, drawing on Yair Halevy’s<\/a> dissertation and on R. Eitam Henkin’s posthumously published research<\/a>, recovers some of the names. Mishloff’s dissertation<\/a> confirms three: R. Yaakov Nissan Rosenthal, long-serving head of the Haifa rabbinical court; R. Yosef Glicksberg, rabbi of Givatayim; and R. Chaim Pardes, Av Beit Din of Tel Aviv. Mishloff says further names came to her in interviews under conditions of confidentiality, since Goren had asked the dayyanim for ongoing protection. Rosenthal, when asked about the heter, denied sitting with the bet din while not denying his signature. The Matzav obituary thread on Rosenthal notes openly that he “was ostracized by some\u2026 because he was suspected of having Zionist tendencies,” which is the suppression mechanism visible in his obituary thirty-eight years after the heter. Other identifications in Shapiro’s lecture rest on archival work not yet broadly verifiable in English-language sources. The framework predicts both the recovery and its incompleteness.
\nBeyond the bet din proper, the broader circle of rabbinic support runs through figures the formation could not credibly dismiss. R. Yehuda Henkin<\/a>, in a same-day note from a March 1973 visit recovered fifty years later by his son Eitam, recorded his grandfather R. Yosef Eliyahu Henkin saying Goren was a great rabbi whose ruling could not be dismissed. R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik privately backed Goren per Manny Holzer’s reports to Aaron Rakeffet, though other sources dispute this<\/a>. R. Avraham Elkanah Kahana Shapira, later Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, supported Goren<\/a>. R. Yosef Mashash<\/a>, then Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Haifa and known as Yosef the Lenient, supported the heter through correspondence Shapiro reports<\/a>. R. Pinchas Menachem Alter<\/a>, then rosh yeshiva of Sfas Emes and later the Pnei Menachem of Ger, reportedly sent Goren a private letter of congratulations and prevented the kol koreh<\/em> from going up in Gerrer territory. Shapiro flags<\/a> this last claim as not yet documented in writing.
\nThe formation’s portrait of Goren as isolated was always false. The portrait depended on suppressing the supporters. The suppression worked because the supporters had reasons for silence the coalition could enforce. Shalom Mizrahi<\/a> signed first after Goren and watched his Supreme Rabbinical Court candidacy collapse the moment Goldsmith learned of the signature. Yaakov Nissan Rosenthal<\/a>, the long-serving head of the Haifa rabbinical court, gave careful denials in public and stayed ostracized in Haredi memory for “Zionist tendencies” until his death in 2010<\/a>. The other dayyanim on the panel kept their signatures anonymous because Goren recognized the cost of public association, as he stated in his published ruling regarding the “ugly atmosphere created by extremist elements.” Fifty years of accumulated public memory has internalized that suppression.
\nR. Yosef Eliyahu Henkin<\/a>, the leading American posek of his generation, blind and ninety-two in his final year, told his grandson R. Yehuda Henkin<\/a> during a 1973 visit that Goren was a great scholar whose ruling could not be dismissed. The grandson recorded the conversation in same-day notes that the great-grandson R. Eitam Henkin recovered and published decades later in Studies in Halakhah and Rabbinic History<\/a>. R. Yehuda Henkin later wrote on Cross-Currents<\/a> that his grandfather said Goren was a great scholar whose ruling could not be dismissed, and that the principles of the ruling would need other scholars to agree before becoming general halakha. Hatzofeh (Mafdal) reported only the first part. Hamodia (Agudah) reported only the second. The published anti-Goren letter that bore Henkin’s signature was, per Eitam Henkin’s recovered material<\/a> reported in Shapiro’s lecture series<\/a>, extracted under conditions Henkin’s frailty and blindness could not resist. The signature is real. The framing is coerced. Apply the four questions<\/a> to the figures around Henkin in his final months and the answers come clear. The American Haredi public could not tolerate the leading posek of the previous generation publicly siding with Goren. The cost was unacceptable. The signature got extracted. The actual judgment got recorded by a grandson writing it down the same day, in a note his own grandson eventually published. Without that note, Henkin’s position would be lost.
\nThe pattern repeats at the highest level. R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach<\/a> (1910-1995) signs the kol koreh<\/em> against Goren and privately tells Ben Mayer that Goren can be relied on for army halakha. Auerbach praises Goren’s army achievements until the end of his life. Ovadia Yosef<\/a> sits on the bet din that ruled the children mamzerim and signs the document opposing Goren’s election. After the Langer heter was published, Yosef’s first response was acceptance. He told the press he would not strongly oppose it. He sat with Goren in a public reconciliation meeting and issued a statement condemning the violence against Goren. Only after weeks of Haredi pressure did he reverse. When his signature appeared on Hanoch Langer’s marriage certificate he claimed he had been tricked, that the certificate was slipped in among the hundreds he signs each week. Then in 1999, in private, he tells his student Shitrit that Auerbach caused us a lot of problems in the matter of the Langer children. Yosef did not complain about Goren. Yosef complained about the Haredi posek who would not let Goren’s heter (permissive ruling) stand. The public coalition position contradicts the private substantive judgment. The two positions hold inside the same man for twenty-six years because the coalition logic permits no other option.
\nR. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik<\/a> silence works the same way from a different coalition<\/a> position. Manny Holzer reports that JB<\/a> privately backed Goren<\/a>. R. Aaron Rakeffet<\/a> asked Soloveitchik<\/a> who said Goren’s arguments had validity, but that the rabbis worried Goren was an innovator who might dance to the politicians’ tune. The substantive judgment supports Goren. The public position cannot afford the substantive judgment. Soloveitchik<\/a> stays silent. Saul Lieberman<\/a>, the JTS Talmudist regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest rabbinic textual scholar of the twentieth century, asked the same question by Goren in a letter, responds privately that he knows Goren’s Torah, knows his yiras shamayim<\/em> (fear of God), is certain Goren is correct, and cannot say so publicly because his JTS position makes any public support useless to Goren.
\nGoren’s December 31, 1973 letter<\/a> to Lieberman<\/a> names what the silence costs. He writes that he has never felt as free to decide according to his conscience as he does now, that the Orthodox establishment has read him out anyway, and that he can therefore decide halakha according to what he believes. He makes a brakha<\/em> (blessing) on the bad like on the good. The expulsion freed him from the coalition<\/a> discipline that would otherwise have constrained him. The cost was being read out. The benefit was the freedom to be a posek. The Rav<\/a>, , Yosef<\/a>, Pinchas Menachem at Ger, all chose institutional preservation over public substantive judgment. Goren chose the opposite. He could afford to because his alternative coalition<\/a> (IDF, Labor<\/a>, religious Zionism<\/a>) sustained him. The figures with the standing to overturn the case were the figures most constrained from speaking. The case was therefore decided publicly by figures whose substantive judgment was weakest and whose coalition<\/a> positions were most secure.
\nStephen Turner’s frame on convenient beliefs<\/a> covers what happens when a real gaon publicly supports Goren. R. Chaim Zimmerman<\/a>, the Hebrew Theological College gaon by everyone’s acknowledgment, moves to Israel and aligns with religious Zionist<\/a> circles. He publishes in HaTzofeh openly supporting Goren in April 1973, framed in atchalta de’geulah<\/em><\/a> (redemption) language. Auerbach<\/a> responds. He cannot say Zimmerman is unlearned. He cannot say Zimmerman is unserious. He reclassifies Zimmerman as contaminated by secular studies and dismisses the article on those grounds. The framework has no room for a Lithuanian gaon who supports Goren. So any gaon who does so must be moved out of the gaon category. The belief that Zimmerman’s secular learning explains his position is convenient because it lets Auerbach<\/a> preserve the rule that no real gaon supports Goren. The evidence cuts the other way. The belief is held because the coalition<\/a> needs it.
\nJeffrey Alexander’s cultural trauma framework<\/a> names what the Orthodox alliance does with the case. The Haredi society visible today did not exist in the 1960s. Halevy’s thesis<\/a> is that the Langer affair forms it. The expulsion does the work. The case is the stage. Goren is the polluting figure whose ritual exclusion consolidates the moral community. Rav Shach<\/a>‘s speech<\/a> in Bnei Brak is the moment captured live. Goren is worse than the Reform. Goren must be expelled from the camp. Goren’s place is outside if mamzerim are now allowed in. The vocabulary is purity vocabulary. The function is constitutive. The Steipler<\/a> comparing Goren<\/a> to Aharon Chorin<\/a> completes the structure. Chorin was an early-nineteenth-century Reformer the Chasam Sofer expelled. The formation needs the Chorin slot filled. Goren<\/a> is available. The historical fit is poor. Chorin rejected halakhic authority outright. Goren<\/a> operated within halakha and reached a heter the formation refused to accept. The drama recapitulates the Chasam Sofer’s Hungarian moment a hundred and fifty years later. The expulsion ritual produces the community the formation needs. Three coalitions (Lithuanian, Hasidic, Lubavitch) attack Goren on different grounds and converge on the same outcome because the outcome is what the moment requires.
\nCharles Taylor’s buffered self<\/a> distinction integrated with John Mearsheimer’s social anthropology<\/a> runs underneath. The Haredi posek operates from the buffered picture of halakhic reasoning where the posek works from text alone, abstracted from communal stakes. The communal posek operates from the porous picture R. Avraham Dovber Kahana Shapiro<\/a> articulates: a posek with communal responsibility cannot decide as a yeshiva learner decides. The buffered picture is a culturally produced fiction. The porous picture is empirically accurate. The Haredi formation requires the fiction to authorize its critique of Goren. Without the fiction, the formation’s procedural objections collapse into coalition signaling. With the fiction, those objections look like principle. Yaavetz’s observation that had the Chazon Ish<\/a> carried communal responsibility his rulings might have been less strict reveals the awkwardness from inside. The buffered exception that paradoxically licensed the buffered claim was a man whose absence of communal responsibility shaped his strictness. The formation cannot afford this recognition.
\nBecker’s hero system<\/a> fits Goren’s self-understanding. Goren reads himself into a prophetic lineage. He visits Rav Kook’s grave to connect himself to Kook’s earlier suffering. He compares his suffering to Eliyahu’s. The hero frame is what lets him absorb the letter bombs and the kol koreh<\/em> and the public denunciations without crumbling. The formation produces no comparable figure on its own side. The opposition consists of Zolty’s institutional ambition, Yosef’s<\/a> coalition migration, the political pressure on Unterman, and the kol koreh<\/em> signatures gathered through threats to sons’ yeshiva placements and daughters’ shidduchim. The formation does not need its own prophetic figure. It needs the figure it expels.
\nThe attack on Goren is fierce, sustained, and personal. It has to be. The coalition target sits behind him. Defeating Goren is the proxy for defeating the claim that the secular state generates its own halakhic legitimacy. Letter bombs arrive at his house. The first comes in June 1974 after Goren attacks Yosef publicly during the Law of Return fight, with a note reading “If you started with Rav Yosef, then be gathered,” a Hebrew wordplay on the names Yosef and yei’asef. The arson at Komemiyut Avraham synagogue follows. The arson at his house takes a second attempt while he is inside. Yeshiva Grodno students are arrested at the Naharia funeral attacks. Stones get thrown at Eleazar Shapiro at a bar mitzvah. Police guard the house for six months. A researcher named Klein needed his own police guard for a year. Hamodia describes the attackers as unbalanced boys who do not represent anyone, the same move Religious Zionist rabbis make after Yigal Amir kills Rabin. The rhetorical leadership insulates itself from what the rhetoric produces. The line between the kol koreh<\/em> signature and the letter bomb is short. The coalition needs the line erased. Each time Goren confronts a coalition flank, the violence escalates.
\nThe institutional removal follows the violence. The 1980 Chief Rabbinate Law caps tenures at ten years with no re-election. Religious Affairs Minister Aharon Abu-Hatzeira (b. 1938) drives the bill through the Knesset. Begin and the Mafdal Young Guard back Goren. The Mafdal old guard around Yosef Burg (1909-1999) opposes any change to the law. Zevulun Hammer (1936-1998) flips to the opposition late. Agudat Yisrael prefers to lose Yosef’s reappointment, whom they back, rather than permit Goren’s. The law passes in March 1980. It takes effect that September. Goren threatens to launch a rival party named Degel Yerushalayim, after Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook’s (1865-1935) earlier movement. Nothing comes of it. He is forced out in April 1983. The instrument changes from herem to legislation. The target stays the same. An alliance willing to lose its own preferred candidate rather than permit Goren’s return is the same alliance that signed the kol koreh<\/em> in 1973. Coalition arithmetic carried the law over the line.
\nThen comes the strategic shift. Open rejection of the Rabbanut<\/a> had been the default for decades. The Eda Haredit<\/a> kept its own kashrut, its own batei din, its own marriage registries. The Rabbanut<\/a> was a treif institution serving a treif state. Goren<\/a> breaks the strategy. If the secular state installs its own rabbis and produces its own halakhic rulings that stick, then Haredi rejectionism concedes the field. Standing outside the Rabbanut<\/a> means letting the state’s rabbis define Jewish life for the majority of Israelis. That is a losing position.
\nYosef<\/a> offers the alternative. Build a Sephardic Haredi political vehicle. Use the Mizrahi vote. Use coalition leverage in the Knesset. Capture the Rabbanut<\/a> from inside. Stack the chief rabbinate, the city rabbinates, the kashrut authorities, the conversion courts, the marriage registries. By the 1990s and through the 2000s, the capture is largely complete. The institution Goren<\/a> served and helped legitimate becomes the institution Haredi political coalitions control.
\nThe beliefs follow the coalition position. While the Haredi world stood outside the Rabbanut<\/a>, the Rabbanut<\/a> was illegitimate. Once the Haredi world holds the Rabbanut<\/a>, the Rabbanut<\/a> is the seat of halakhic authority for the State of Israel and its rulings carry weight. The doctrinal content of the Rabbanut<\/a> has not shifted enough to explain the change. The coalition position has shifted, and the doctrinal content tracks it. Yosef’s<\/a> own migration is the case in miniature. Apply the four questions<\/a> to him in 1968 and 1975 and the answers shift across all four. In 1968 his status comes from the secular state and the religious Zionist<\/a> apparatus, his allies are the Sephardic communities still oriented toward the Rabbanut<\/a>, the beliefs marking his coalition include Rabbanut<\/a> institutional loyalty, and switching sides costs him his position. In 1975 his status comes from the emerging Haredi public and the political vehicle that becomes Shas, his allies are the Haredi gedolim who must accept him, the beliefs marking his coalition include opposition to Goren, and switching sides this time gains him the gadol hador status he could never have held inside the Rabbanut<\/a>. Same Torah. Different coalition. The Sephardi conversion crisis and the voiding of conversions that follow are downstream of this single migration.
\nR. Moshe Botchko<\/a> writes to Shach<\/a> in 1973 with the prediction the framework confirms. Botchko distinguishes between disagreeing with Goren on the merits, which he allows, and degrading Goren as a rabbi, which he does not. He says the worst consequence is what the language teaches the students. If the gedolim use this language about Goren, the talmidim will use it about anyone. Once the destroying angel is loose, it does not distinguish between good and bad. The same epistemic violence the formation used against Goren in 1973 has been turned outward continuously since. Modern Orthodox poskim, religious Zionists<\/a>, Haredi figures who would not toe the line, eventually the rest of Agudas Yisrael<\/a> when the Eda Haredit<\/a> cared to assert against them. R. Meir Mazuz<\/a> was the contemporary specimen. The Tunisian-trained Sephardic posek with serious independent learning becomes Yitzhak Yosef’s<\/a> weekly target for years. Yitzhak Yosef<\/a> inherited his father’s coalition position and uses it as coalition position is used. The Yalkut Yosef parody scandal exposes the production opacity the formation depends on. A satirical passage from Kuntreis Tichla D’Pilazon<\/a>, mocking the Sephardic Haredi rejection of Murex tekhelet<\/a> by escalating its textual reasoning to the absurd conclusion that there were two Avrahams and two Yitzchaks, ended up printed in the new edition of Yalkut Yosef as if it were serious Torah. The editors did not catch it. The reader who flagged the incident<\/a> notes that for a moment he was ready to attribute the wit to Yitzhak Yosef<\/a>.
\nTurner’s good-bad theory<\/a> frame names the structural weakness. The Haredi position on the Rabbanut is bad theory in the technical sense. One cannot derive it from first principles of Haredi halakha. It is a coalition product. It serves coalition needs. It changes when coalition needs change. The same holds for the religious Zionist<\/a> position, the Labor<\/a> secular position, and Goren’s own rulings. None of it reduces to halakhic reasoning operating in vacuum. All of it is halakhic vocabulary running on coalition logic. Hafka’at kiddushin<\/a> (rabbinic annulment of a marriage) is the cleanest specimen. The Maharsham’s mechanism<\/a>, staging<\/a> an oness situation (forced or coerced) in gittin (the laws of divorce) to retroactively<\/a> annul a marriage<\/a> and remove mamzer status, sat available to Goren<\/a> as a backup argument inside the heter and he chose not to use it because his primary argument sufficed. Tzvi Pesach Frank invoked it after the Holocaust at Ponevezh. Various poskim have used it in agunah and mamzerut cases through the twentieth century. The formation that expelled Goren in 1973 for halakhic flexibility maintained the public position that such mechanisms were illegitimate while individual poskim in the same coalition continued to invoke them in particular cases. The expulsion stays in force. The mechanism stays in use. The two facts coexist because the formation has long since stopped operating on coherence.
\nA dayyan asked R. Zolty<\/a> the question that compresses the entire matter. How are the Langer children guilty? Are they your ammunition? The two young people disappear from the discourse as soon as the case becomes a coalition fight. Twelve dayyanim ruled them mamzerim before Goren. Goren<\/a> freed them. The opposition did not produce a counter-heter that freed them differently. The opposition closed the case and treated the closure as a virtue. That is what coalition pressure looks like when it overrides the substantive question. The children were ammunition because the formation needed them as ammunition. The formation needed a high-profile case where a posek operating from substantive halakha could be expelled from coalition position. The children’s ruined lives gave the formation what it required. The formation absorbed those lives into its constitutive ritual and emerged on the other side as the Haredi public that has dominated Jewish institutional life for fifty years.
\nThe arc from Goren<\/a> through Yosef<\/a> to the present Haredi-controlled Rabbanut<\/a> is a textbook Alliance Theory<\/a> case. A coalition installs an agent. A rival coalition attacks the agent. The attack succeeds in tarnishing the agent but fails in dislodging the institution. The rival coalition shifts strategy from rejection to capture. The institution endures and changes hands. The halakhic vocabulary stays constant. The coalition controlling the vocabulary changes. Underneath the vocabulary, the substantive halakha favored Goren<\/a>, the leading authorities of the era privately recognized it, and their public silence was the cost the coalition required. <\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/p>\n

* A kol koreh<\/em> (\u05e7\u05d5\u05dc \u05e7\u05d5\u05e8\u05d0, literally “a voice calling out”) is a public proclamation or open letter signed by rabbis, typically posted on walls in religious neighborhoods or printed in Haredi newspapers, that announces a collective rabbinic ruling or denunciation. The format is old, going back at least to nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and remains the standard mechanism by which Haredi rabbinic leadership communicates coalition positions to the public.
\nThree things make the kol koreh<\/em> function as a coalition tool rather than a halakhic document.
\nFirst, it works by signature accumulation rather than substantive argument. The text is usually short. The signatures are long. The persuasive force comes from the prestige of the names attached, not from the reasoning. A kol koreh<\/em> against Goren would list dozens of rabbis declaring his ruling invalid without engaging the four halakhic grounds he gave for it. Engagement happens elsewhere, if at all. The kol koreh<\/em> just says: these rabbis, collectively, have ruled against this person.
\nSecond, signatures get gathered through pressure as much as through persuasion. A junior rabbi whose son needs a yeshiva placement, whose daughter needs a shidduch, whose synagogue depends on Haredi communal infrastructure, cannot easily refuse to sign when the Steipler<\/a> or Shach<\/a> asks him to. The signatures accumulate because the cost of refusing is unacceptable, not because every signatory has independently studied the case and reached the conclusion stated in the document. Auerbach signing the Goren kol koreh<\/em> while privately telling Ben Mayer that Goren could be relied on for army halakha is a textbook specimen of how this works. The signature is real. The substantive endorsement is not.
\nThird, the kol koreh<\/em> creates social facts on the ground that are hard to reverse. Once a figure has been declared outside the camp by a kol koreh<\/em> signed by a hundred rabbis, the burden shifts to anyone defending him to explain why all those rabbis were wrong. The document becomes a piece of communal infrastructure. It hangs on walls. It gets cited in subsequent disputes. It tells everyone in the community what the coalition position is. The Goren kol koreh<\/em> from 1972-73 did this. It declared his rulings unreliable, declared him outside the camp, and licensed the language that produced everything from the Naharia funeral attack to the letter bombs to the fifty-year suppression of his halakhic legacy.<\/p>\n

* The scholarship on Goren has three phases. Each phase serves a different coalition. Interest is rising, and the coalition logic explains why.
\nFirst phase, 2006 to 2010. The hagiographic recovery. Shalom Freedman’s Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Torah Sage and General (Urim, 2006) frames Goren as a Religious Zionist hero. Mishloff’s 2010 Bar-Ilan dissertation<\/a> gives the archive-based biographical foundation. Both work from inside the Religious Zionist orbit. Both are sympathetic. Both stay in the family-friendly register. Mishloff got the Goren family archive on those terms. Coalition served: Religious Zionism rehabilitating a foundational halakhic figure after fifty years of Haredi caricature.
\nAviad (Yehiel) Hollander<\/a> completes his PhD dissertation in 2011 at at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Talmud: “The Halakhic Profile of Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Studies in the Adjudicatory Deliberations and Modes of Substantiation in his Halakhic Writings<\/a>.” The work examines how Goren reached his halakhic decisions \u2014 the internal reasoning processes (\u201cshikulim\u201d \/ adjudicatory deliberations), the sources and arguments he used to justify (\u201cbisus\u201d \/ substantiation) his rulings, and the overall \u201cprofile\u201d of his halakhic thinking. It draws directly from Goren\u2019s own extensive published halakhic writings and responsa.
\nScholars who cite it (in journals on Jewish law, religion & state, IDF halakha, etc.) treat it as the major academic reference for understanding Goren\u2019s jurisprudential approach, especially on topics like military halakha and the role of the IDF rabbinate (which Goren founded), balancing strict halakha with the needs of a modern Jewish state (\u201cdual loyalty to halakha and the state\u201d \u2014 a phrase Hollander himself uses in later published work based on the thesis), and the specific controversial rulings (e.g., the Langer children mamzerut case, conversions, Shabbat observance in the military, international law in wartime, etc.).
\nHollander (who served as an IDF military chaplain and has written extensively on religion & state \/ religion & the IDF) approaches Goren as a Religious Zionist decisor who developed a distinctive \u201cZionist-messianic\u201d halakhic style. This style prioritized the value of Jewish sovereignty, the state, and the army as halakhic factors. Where Haredi rabbis appear in the picture, it is usually as the contrast or source of criticism: Goren\u2019s innovative or lenient rulings (especially when they clashed with traditional Haredi positions) frequently led to rejection or ostracism by parts of the Haredi world. Hollander\u2019s earlier 2010 paper discusses this dynamic using the Langer case as an example: Goren\u2019s refusal to back down from peer criticism contributed to his isolation from the broader rabbinic (especially Haredi) establishment.
\nThis is a methodological study of one major decisor\u2019s thought and is typical of Bar-Ilan-style academic Talmud\/halakhah research. Hollander\u2019s later writings (e.g., the article \u201cDual Loyalty to Halakha and the State: Rabbi Goren\u2019s Ruling as a Test Case\u201d) continue this analytical line rather than turning polemical.
\nSecond phase, 2014 to 2017. The academic respectabilization. Aviad Hollander and Ilan Fuchs, “National Movements and International Law: Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Understanding of International Law” (Journal of Law and Religion 2014). Robert Eisen’s chapter on Goren in Religious Zionism, Jewish Law, and the Morality of War (Oxford 2017). Yoel Cohen’s “The Temple Mount in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Goren” (Israel Studies Review 2017). Arye Edrei’s Tel Aviv University work on Goren and military ethics. Goren positioned as a serious halakhic mind whose work belongs in international academic discussion. The English-language autobiography With Might and Strength (Maggid 2016, edited from late-life recordings by Avi Rath) gives the Anglo-Modern-Orthodox public direct access to Goren’s voice. Coalition served: Modern Orthodox academic establishment reclaiming halakhic seriousness from Haredi monopoly.
\nThird phase, 2019 to present. The structural reframing. Yair Halevy’s 2019 Bar-Ilan dissertation, “The New Haredism Revolution in Israel in the 1970s,” makes the Langer affair constitutive of contemporary Haredi society rather than an episode within it. Eitam Henkin’s (1984-2015) posthumous Studies in Halakhah and Rabbinic History (Maggid 2021, after his murder by terrorists during Sukkot 2015) recovers his great-grandfather Yosef Eliyahu Henkin’s private support for Goren that the Hamodia coverage suppressed. Marc Shapiro’s lecture series, delivered publicly at Queens Jewish Center in May 2022 and on multiple platforms since, presents the substantive halakha and the suppression mechanics to an Anglo-Modern-Orthodox audience. Coalition served: an alliance of independent halakhic recovery, Religious Zionist counter-history, and Anglo-Modern-Orthodox skepticism of Haredi narrative monopoly.
\nThe scholarship is rising. Counted in publications it has roughly tripled since 2006. Counted in the seriousness of the analytical claims it has become more pointed, less hagiographic, more willing to name the coalition forces behind the kol koreh.
\nApply the four coalition questions to the scholars themselves.
\nWho provides them status, income, and protection? Bar-Ilan University. Tel Aviv University. Yeshiva University. The University of Scranton. The English-language Modern Orthodox publishing houses, especially Maggid, Urim, and Koren. The American Modern Orthodox magazine ecosystem. Religious Zionist institutional Israel. Not the Haredi yeshiva world. Not the Eda HaCharedis. Not Shas.
\nWho do they risk angering by speaking plainly? The Haredi establishment. The Shach-lineage Lithuanian Haredi camp. The Shas leadership invested in Yosef’s hagiographic story. The Eda HaCharedis whose constitutive ritual was the Goren expulsion.
\nWho benefits if Goren scholarship wins? Religious Zionism reclaims a foundational figure at the moment its institutional position weakens. Modern Orthodoxy gets a serious halakhic precedent. The IDF rabbinate gets historical legitimation. The Chief Rabbinate critique movement gets evidence. The state’s claim to host its own halakhic authority recovers historical depth. The conversion-crisis reformers get a precedent. R. Meir Mazuz and the independent Sephardic halakhists get a parallel hero whose career shows what happens when one defies the coalition.
\nWhat truths cost these scholars their position? Documenting suppression of supporting voices. Naming pressure on signature gathering. Identifying that Ovadia Yosef privately supported the heter for years before reversing under pressure. Showing that Soloveitchik privately backed Goren. Showing that the Steipler comparison to Aharon Chorin was historically false. Each of these costs Haredi-side relationships. Mishloff handled it by writing in measured Hebrew academic prose with the family archive as cover. Halevy framed it through the rise of New Haredism rather than as a defense of Goren. Henkin handled it by writing close to the texts and letting the reader draw conclusions. Shapiro speaks most freely because he has American academic tenure and an Anglo audience. The asymmetry of who can say what tracks coalition position.
\nWhat is suppressed by the same coalition logic? Pure Haredi scholarship on Goren does not exist. The Haredi domain has not produced a single biographical work examining Goren as a halakhic figure. Hamodia covered him during his life as polluted ground. The Yated and the Mishpacha press maintain that posture. Yosef Eliyahu Henkin’s actual position would be unknown without his great-grandson’s same-day note. R. Yaakov Nissan Rosenthal’s signature on the Goren bet din would be suppressed in his obituary if not for the offhand Matzav comment about “Zionist tendencies” that gave the game away. Eitam Henkin’s archival recovery work was cut short at age 31 by a terrorist attack in 2015 that no coalition asked for or used, and the loss to Goren scholarship is real.
\nThe trajectory is coalition-readable. Goren scholarship rises when Religious Zionism’s institutional position weakens. The Haredi takeover of the Rabbanut, the conversion crisis, the agunah crisis, the voiding of Sephardic conversions, the IDF rabbinate’s loss of stature, the Mazuz versus Yitzhak Yosef fight, all create demand for an alternative halakhic precedent. Goren is the available figure. Recovering him means recovering a Religious Zionism that operated halakhically on the assumption that the state was halakhic ground and that the Rabbanut was a real institution. That is the position Religious Zionism is fighting to retain in 2026.
\nThe Haredi side carries a structural disadvantage in this scholarly contest. Its scholars cannot say what their archive contains because the archive contains material that contradicts the public position. Auerbach’s letters to Ben Mayer. Yosef’s 1999 statement to Shitrit. The Pinchas Menachem letter at Ger. The Soloveitchik private encouragement. Each piece of recovered evidence weakens the formation’s legitimacy further. The formation’s defense is to keep the archive closed and the scholars in line. That defense holds for now. It holds less well each year.
\nWhere this goes next. Halevy and his cohort will keep producing structural histories that center Langer as a formative episode. Henkin’s documentary recoveries will keep surfacing through his family. Anglo-Modern-Orthodox magazines will keep running pieces that might not have been printable twenty years ago. Mishloff’s family-archive cover will turn out to have been the door. Hollander, Edrei, Fuchs, and the Bar-Ilan halakhic-history cohort will keep writing in measured academic prose that does the heavy lifting. The Haredi side will continue to produce nothing on Goren and lose ground because of it.
\nThe substantive halakha favored Goren. The leading authorities of the era privately recognized it. Their public silence was the cost the coalition required. Halevy, Mishloff, Henkin, Shapiro, and the rest are recovering a record the coalition closed in 1972 and 1973 and now cannot keep closed.<\/p>\n

* R. Menachem Yehuda HaLevi Aushpizai (1905-1999). Chief Rabbi of Ramat Gan for decades and chairman of Mafdal’s Council of Rabbis. Born in Va\u0161kai, Lithuania, original surname Kratchmer. Studied at Novardok and other Lithuanian yeshivas. Made aliyah in 1925 at age twenty and studied at Merkaz HaRav under R. Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook (1865-1935). Founded a youth division of Merkaz HaRav in 1935. Rav Kook sent him to Nachalat Ganim as rabbi, and from there he rose to the Ramat Gan chief rabbinate. He was a Mafdal pillar.
\nIn the November 1972 Rabbinate Council session, his response to Yosef’s proposal that fateful halakhic questions go to gedolei torah outside the council was sharper than I rendered in the paragraph. The Hebrew reads: “I do not know what this concept of ‘gedolei torah’ is. The council has placed upon itself two gedolei torah, who are the chief rabbis of Israel.” A flat dismissal of any halakhic authority external to the Rabbanut. He was the council voice that articulated the sovereignty position against Yosef’s proposal to defer outward.
\nTwo further things from Mishloff connect him to the Langer story.
\nHe appeared on Goren’s joint candidate list with Yosef for the 1972 Rabbinate Council elections. Goren and Yosef ran a shared slate, and Aushpizai was on it.
\nHis son, R. Moshe Ben Tzion Aushpizai, was rabbi of Ramat Gan alongside his father. The son officiated one of the two Langer weddings on November 19, 1972, with R. Mordechai Piron (1921-2014) officiating the other. The son died in July 1993, six years before his father.
\nThe senior Aushpizai won the Yakir of Ramat Gan title in 1982 and the Rav Kook Prize for Torah Literature in 1990. He died on the first of Cheshvan 5760, October 11, 1999.
\nHis function in the November 1972 protocol is structural. He gives Goren the Mafdal old-guard backing on jurisdictional sovereignty against Yosef’s gedolei torah deference. That backing held until the 1974 Law of Return fight, when the same Mafdal old guard around Burg flipped against Goren on the political question and never came back.<\/p>\n

* David Zvi Hoffmann<\/a> (1843-1921), head of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, wrote the most influential lenient teshuva of the modern era on conversion in Melamed L’Hoil Yoreh Deah. The case Hoffmann addressed: a non-Jewish woman married to a Jewish man, often civilly, who wants to convert. The Lithuanian-Hungarian baseline says such a conversion is invalid if the convert will not observe mitzvot fully, and especially invalid if the underlying motive is to legitimize a marriage that already exists. Hoffmann breaks the baseline. He rules that the convert’s commitment can be assessed pragmatically. Living among Jews, raising Jewish children, observing what one can, all weigh on the kabbalat mitzvot side. The motive of legitimizing an existing relationship does not invalidate the conversion. The protection of the children’s status carries halakhic weight on its own.
\nFor Goren in 1970, Hoffmann is the textual cover. Helen Seidman lives on a secular kibbutz. She wants to marry a kohen. The standard baseline says no on multiple grounds. Hoffmann’s framework lets Goren say yes. The fit is imperfect because Seidman is not in a civil marriage to a Jewish man. The framework is close enough.
\nChaim Ozer Grodzinski (1863-1940) of Vilna, the leading Lithuanian posek of the interwar generation and author of Achiezer, did not write a permissive ruling on conversion. He wrote a hesitation. His teshuvot on conversion in Achiezer refuse to invalidate prior conversions retroactively even when the converts did not observe afterward. The reasoning: once the bet din has accepted the convert and performed the immersion, the conversion stands halakhically even if the convert lapses. Chaim Ozer did not perform such conversions himself on pragmatic grounds. He refused to undo them after the fact.
\nFor Goren, the hesitation is an opening. The strictest Lithuanian posek of the modern era did not apply the strictest possible standard to conversion ex post. If Chaim Ozer can hesitate to invalidate, a sitting bet din can hesitate to refuse. The argumentative weight is asymmetric but real. It says: even in the Lithuanian camp, there is room.
\nMishna Eduyot 1:5-6<\/a> preserves the principle that minority views are recorded so that a later bet din can rely on them when circumstances require. The Mishna asks why the words of the individual are mentioned alongside the many, since the halakha follows the many. The answer: so that a court that sees the individual opinion can rely on it if the time and the case demand. The principle is a license. Minority views are not dead law. They are reserve halakhic capital available to a posek who needs them.
\nFor Goren, the Mishna is the meta-warrant. Hoffmann is a minority view in the Lithuanian-Hungarian world. Chaim Ozer’s hesitation is a minority position even among Lithuanians who refuse to invalidate. The Eduyot principle says that does not disqualify the move. A bet din can draw on minority views when the case calls for it. The Seidman case calls for it because the political stakes are coalition-survival level. Hold the conversion and Labor backs off civil marriage. Refuse the conversion and Labor pushes through legislation that ends rabbinic jurisdiction over personal status. The Mishna’s principle gives Goren the textual permission to treat minority views as binding for his bet din.
\nThe three sources stack. Hoffmann supplies the substantive permission. Chaim Ozer supplies the precedent that even strict Lithuanian poskim refrain from extreme severity. Eduyot supplies the methodological warrant for using minority opinions as authoritative ground. A reader trained in halakhic argument sees a careful three-layer move. A reader trained in coalition theory sees a careful three-layer move that arrives where coalition logic required it to arrive.
\nThe citations legitimate a move already required by coalition logic. That is the claim. The coalition needs the conversion. Goren needs the halakhic cover. He recruits Hoffmann, Chaim Ozer, and Eduyot. He recruits them because they fit. He recruits them because the alternative is to refuse the conversion and watch the secular Zionist coalition push through legislation that ends rabbinic jurisdiction over Israeli marriage. The citations are not fake. The citations are real halakhic sources. The point is that the citations were recruited to do coalition work, not the other way around. A different posek with a different coalition position, looking at the same Seidman file, might have cited the same Lithuanian-Hungarian baseline against the conversion that Hoffmann himself was responding to. The decision came from coalition position. The sources came from the library.
\nThis is what Stephen Turner names with his good-bad theory frame<\/a>. The argument is not derivable from first principles of the halakhic system. The argument is a coalition product that uses halakhic vocabulary. Goren acknowledged this in his letter to Yechezkel Abramsky<\/a> when he laid out the political stakes directly. He was telling Abramsky: this is what the case requires; here is the cover; you will not invalidate it because you understand what is at stake. Abramsky’s reading is part of why the explosion came on Borokovsky two years later. He saw what Goren was doing. He marked Goren as a man who handles halakha to serve political ends. The Langer ruling in 1972 confirmed the diagnosis. Seidman was the rehearsal. <\/p>\n

* The secular politicians are the second coalition Goren depends on. They drive the timeline. They set the political stakes. They protect him when the Haredi camp opens fire. They withdraw the protection when he stops delivering.
\nMoshe Dayan (1915-1981), Defense Minister. The Langer siblings appeal to him in 1970 because they served under his command. He goes to Goren in early 1971 and asks for a halakhic opinion. Goren produces the opinion in Adar 5731 (March 1971). Dayan takes it to the cabinet. He announces that if a halakhic solution cannot be found, he will push to amend the Marriage Law to let mamzerim marry outside rabbinical courts. Mafdal threatens to leave the coalition. Coalition crisis stands at the door. Dayan does not back down. Sitting Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim (1896-1981) tries to assemble a court to apply Goren’s opinion and fails under Haredi pressure. Dayan’s calculation: he has political capital from the Six Day War, his personal popularity stays high, and he can carry the threat credibly. His leverage exceeds any other minister’s. He uses it for the Langer siblings because they were under his command and because the case is winnable.
\nGolda Meir (1898-1978), Prime Minister. Meets the Langer siblings personally. Asks them to drop further legal proceedings until the next Chief Rabbinate election. Tells them she expects Goren will win and will assemble a court. They agree. Three months before the 1972 election, she tells the religious and liberal parties: “Give a chance to Rabbi Shlomo Goren who may be elected as Chief Rabbi, that he might find a solution within the rabbinate framework. I place all my trust in Rabbi Goren. He has stood in tests in the past. There is room for hope” (HaTzofeh, July 7, 1972). Meir’s calculation: she has to keep Mafdal in the coalition and the Independent Liberals from forcing the marriage-law amendment. Both can be done if Goren delivers. She brokers the timing. She personally guarantees the outcome to the siblings. She bets her political credibility on his halakhic ability.
\nThe Independent Liberals. The wedge. They had been pushing for civil marriage as a coalition condition. The Langer case is their lever. Goren meets their leadership immediately after his October 1972 election and asks them to freeze the bill for a year while he works on a solution. They agree. Their stated reason: Goren has committed to solving the problem of those barred from marriage, and pushing the bill would look like obstruction. The freeze gives Goren runway.
\nPinchas Sapir (1906-1975), Finance Minister. Goren’s friend of 27 years. Calls Goren in fury during the 1974 Law of Return fight: “I have been your friend for 27 years. How can you take a decision that would lead to the destruction of religion and to hatred?” Sapir’s outburst marks the inflection. Up to Langer, Labor used Goren and protected him. After Goren rules against Mafdal entering the coalition without a Law of Return amendment, Labor’s political center starts to break with him.
\nYitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), incoming Prime Minister. Reopens negotiations on amending the Law of Return after Meir resigns in April 1974. Tries to get Goren to compromise. Goren proposes a national unity government with Begin instead, calculating that a unity government can pass the amendment. Rabin proceeds with a narrow government, takes Mafdal in over Goren’s ruling, and the rabbinate’s standing collapses inside the political establishment.
\nMenachem Begin (1913-1992). Backs Goren on the 1980 term-limit law and on extending his tenure in 1983. Sees Goren as a Religious Zionist asset. Cannot move the Mafdal old guard around Burg. Loses.
\nMafdal politicians. Two camps. The old guard around Yosef Burg (1909-1999), Yitzhak Raphael (1914-1999), and Michael Hazani (1913-1975) joins the 1974 coalition without the Law of Return amendment, defying Goren’s ruling. From 1974 onward they want him out. The Young Guard around Zevulun Hammer (1936-1998) and Yehuda Ben-Meir (b. 1939) backs Goren’s hold-out position in 1974, then flips against him by 1980.
\nReligious Affairs Minister Zerach Warhaftig (1906-2002), Mafdal stalwart, defends Goren publicly in HaTzofeh on December 15, 1972: “The campaign against Chief Rabbi Goren is not against the ruling but against the rabbis of Israel who identify with the State of Israel. Those who call themselves gedolei torah debase Torah. Is it conceivable that they would disqualify a great Torah scholar without bothering to read his halakhic reasoning?”
\nThe pattern is symmetric. Up to and including the Langer ruling, the secular Zionist coalition gets what it needs from Goren and protects him in return. Labor’s center praises the November 1972 ruling and reaffirms suspension of the civil marriage bill. Cabinet discusses cutting budgets to yeshivas leading the campaign against Goren. Meir raises the possibility of denying draft exemptions to yeshivas leading the incitement. Nothing comes of it. The Haredi camp absorbs the threat and presses on.
\nAfter the Langer ruling, the coalition begins to recalculate. The Haredi response was harsher than expected. Letter bombs. Arson. Cross-border kol koreh. Meir worries the attacks will deter future leniency from Goren and other rabbis. The cabinet considers structural pressure on the yeshiva world and pulls back. The political cost is too high.
\nThe 1974 Law of Return fight is where the coalition turns. Sapir’s furious phone call signals the break. Goren has stopped delivering what the secular coalition needs. He now insists the coalition deliver what he needs. The asymmetry secular politicians could afford in 1972 they cannot afford in 1974, partly because the political map had shifted (Yom Kippur war, Mafdal’s weight) and partly because Goren’s halakhic position now costs the coalition more than it gives.
\nApply the four questions to the politicians directly. Who provides them status, income, and protection? The Mapai apparatus, the Labor establishment, the Histadrut, the IDF leadership. Who do they risk angering? Their secular base if seen as too accommodating to religious authority. The Haredi camp if seen as forcing halakhic solutions. Mafdal if they push civil marriage. Who benefits if their framing wins? Labor’s coalition stability. The Israeli secular consensus on personal status. Rabbinic jurisdiction maintained as the cover for state marriage law. The siblings get to marry. What truths cost them position? Acknowledging that they cut a halakhic deal in exchange for political stability. Acknowledging that they personally pressured a posek to deliver. Acknowledging that the religious-secular status quo was a coalition product, not a principled compromise.
\nThe Langer siblings disappear from the analysis once you read it this way. They were the occasion. They were never the subject. The subject was the secular Zionist coalition’s need to hold rabbinic jurisdiction over personal status while finding halakhic outcomes that worked for ordinary citizens. The Langer siblings happened to be the case where this need crystallized. Goren happened to be the rabbi the coalition could install to deliver. The whole architecture only makes sense at the coalition level. Once Goren stopped serving the architecture, the architecture stopped protecting him.<\/p>\n

* The Zionist project faced a problem from the start. Secular Jews wanted a Jewish state but lacked religious legitimacy. The masses included religious Jews who needed halakhic sanction for state actions. Foreign powers and Diaspora Jews expected Jewish authenticity. So the founders built an institution to supply rabbinic cover on demand: the Chief Rabbinate.
\nThe Ottoman millet system gave each religious community jurisdiction over personal status. The British Mandate kept this structure and in 1921 created the Rabbinate as a state body. Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) became first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi. Kook was a religious Zionist who saw secular pioneers as unconscious agents of redemption, which made him useful to a secular movement that needed rabbinic blessing.
\nKook had already supplied the founding model of accommodation. The shmita year requires letting agricultural land lie fallow every seventh year. For early Zionist farmers this meant economic ruin. Kook formalized the heter mechira around 1909-1910, a legal fiction selling Jewish-owned land to a non-Jew for the year so work could continue. Stricter authorities rejected the device as a sham. The farms kept running. The pattern set early: secular needs, halakhic cover, haredi rejection of the cover, state recognition of the lenient ruling as official.
\nDavid Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) extended the pattern in the 1947 Status Quo letter to Agudat Israel. The state would respect Sabbath observance in public institutions, maintain kashrut in state kitchens, leave marriage and divorce to the Rabbinate, and exempt yeshiva students from conscription. Religious authorities supplied legitimacy. The state supplied salaries, jurisdiction, and budget lines.
\nYitzhak HaLevi Herzog (1888-1959) became first Chief Rabbi of the state and worked with the Ben-Gurion government to keep haredi exemptions narrow. He wrote constitutional drafts blending Torah and democratic governance. None of this stopped Edah HaChareidis and Satmar from declaring the whole arrangement a desecration. The state did not need them. It needed rabbis who said yes.
\nShlomo Goren (1917-1994) shows the case at its sharpest. He founded the IDF rabbinate and ruled on the questions a Jewish army faces: fighting on Shabbat, field kashrut, recovery of fallen soldiers, freeing widows of missing soldiers. He freed agunot of the Yom Kippur War on testimony that more conservative authorities called insufficient. The state needed those women freed to remarry and rebuild lives. Goren delivered. His 1972 ruling in the Langer case, which permitted two siblings a rabbinical court had declared mamzerim to marry, made him Chief Rabbi but cost him standing in much of the haredi world.
\nOvadia Yosef (1920-2013) ran the same play from the Sephardi side with greater political skill. His 1973 ruling that Ethiopian Jews are halakhically Jewish opened the door to Operation Moses and Operation Solomon. The state wanted those Jews. Yosef supplied the ruling. He later ruled that returning land for peace falls under pikuach nefesh, which gave halakhic cover to territorial concessions. He built Shas as an independent political base, but his rulings often tracked state needs even when his rhetoric did not.
\nThe arrangement breaks down at the points where state and rabbinate disagree on outputs. Conversion is the live one. Russian olim arrived in the 1990s with Jewish ancestry but not always halakhic Jewish status. The state wanted them integrated. The Rabbinate, captured by haredi standards under Avraham Shapira (1911-2007) and his successors, made conversion harder. The state built workarounds: Nativ courses in the IDF, special conversion courts under Haim Druckman (1932-2022), Knesset bills to recognize alternative conversions. Each workaround drew haredi denunciation.
\nThe “Who is a Jew” question pushes the same fault line. The Brother Daniel case of 1962, brought by Oswald Rufeisen (1922-1998), the Shalit case of 1968, and the 1970 amendment to the Law of Return all turned on whether the secular state could define Jewishness against halakhic ruling for citizenship purposes. The Court ruled it could. The Rabbinate kept its grip on personal status. Two parallel definitions persist.
\nThe secular state needs rabbis who will rule that what the state wants is halakhically permitted. It pays them, gives them jurisdiction, protects them from competition. In return it gets a fig leaf of religious legitimacy and a tool for managing its religious population. The arrangement works as long as the rabbis the state employs stay aligned with state goals. When haredi influence grows inside the Rabbinate, the alignment frays. The state then pressures the Rabbinate, builds parallel institutions, or accepts the friction.<\/p>\n

* Goren’s career sits inside elite coalitions, but popular opinion applies at times.
\nFirst, Goren’s IDF career produced mass popularity. He was on Israeli national television during the Six Day War. The shofar at the Kotel made him a hero figure. His leniency on personal status cases gave him an everyman following: agunot, Dakar widows, mamzerim, conversion candidates. By 1972 he had folk-hero status across the secular Israeli public. The “Chaim Shekacheim” episode in June 1972, months before the Chief Rabbinate election, was both a measure of his popularity and an amplifier of it. Producer Amos Ettinger only featured popular Israeli figures on the show. Goren’s appearance signaled where popular opinion stood.
\nThis popularity functioned as cover for Labor. Meir and Dayan could bet on Goren because the public would back the bet. Goren’s leniency on personal status did not trigger a backlash from the secular Israeli public; they wanted the leniency. Refusing it might have triggered a backlash, especially after the Langer story went public. The Langer ruling, when it came, was popular among ordinary Israelis. Newspapers headlined the wedding. Letters of support poured in. The public did real work in giving Labor political room to bet on Goren.
\nSecond, popular opinion constrained Haredi violence. Letter bombs and arson at Goren’s house caused public outrage. The cabinet considered cutting yeshiva budgets and denying draft exemptions to yeshivas leading the incitement. They pulled back, but the Haredi camp never crossed into assassination. The reason is partly internal Haredi discipline and partly recognition that murdering Goren might have produced a public reaction the coalition could not have absorbed. Popular opinion set an outer boundary on what the Haredi camp could do.
\nThird, the 1972 Chief Rabbinate election ran through a 150-member elected body. Eighty rabbis and seventy public representatives. The public representatives were mediated through party lists, but the popular electoral wave for Goren told the parties which way to point their delegates. Without popular favor, Goren does not get the votes. His popularity was a real input into the formal vote.
\nWhere popular opinion was bypassed.
\nFirst, the appointment to IDF Chief Rabbi in 1948. Ben-Gurion made the call. Herzog ratified it. The rabbinical establishment objected. Popular opinion was not consulted. Goren came in as a Mapai prot\u00e9g\u00e9 over standard establishment objection. Pure elite installation.
\nSecond, the Haredi expulsion ritual. Public opinion among Israeli Jews favored Goren. The kol koreh against him originated inside a coalition that did not need broad popular consent. The Steipler, Shach, the Edah HaCharedis. None of them needed Israeli public approval to issue the kol koreh. They needed approval inside their own community, and they got it. The ritual exclusion of Goren ran on subgroup coalition logic that ignored the broader public.
\nThird, the 1980 term-limit law. Knesset vote. The legislative procedure removed Goren regardless of his popular standing. The Mafdal old guard, Agudat Yisrael, and a slice of Labor lined up to pass a law that capped his tenure. Polling at the time might have shown Goren still popular. The law passed anyway. Procedure was elite-driven and the elite-driven procedure overrode the popular sentiment.
\nThe pattern is the alliance theory pattern. Mass opinion is mediated. It does not act directly. It enters through institutional channels that elites control. When elites need cover, they invoke it. When elites need to override it, they use procedural means (laws, kol koreh, term limits) that the public cannot easily resist.
\nGoren had two competing elite networks: the secular Zionist coalition (Labor, IDF, Religious Zionists) and the Haredi religious establishment (Lithuanian, Hasidic, Edah HaCharedis). His career rose because the first elite network had use for him. His career fell because the second elite network organized against him and the first network eventually withdrew.
\nPopular opinion never decided. It set the boundary conditions. Inside those boundaries, elite coalitions did the work. The Israeli public was supportive of Goren in 1972. They were still supportive in 1983 when he was forced out. The forced exit happened because elite coalitions had reorganized in ways the public did not see and could not resist.
\nThe Langer siblings tell the same story in miniature. The Israeli public sympathized with them. Twelve dayanim ruled them mamzerim anyway. Goren’s heter freed them. The Haredi establishment expelled Goren for it. The public could read the newspaper. The public could attend the rallies. The public could not assemble a beit din.
\nCoalitions are the actors. Coalitions recruit popular opinion when useful and bypass it when necessary. The institutional channels through which decisions pass (rabbinical courts, Chief Rabbinate Council, Knesset, kol koreh, party central committees) are not popularly controlled. They are coalition controlled. A figure popular with the broad public can be installed, used, sacrificed, and discarded without the public ever getting a vote on any of those steps. Goren had everything popular opinion could give him. He had everything elite coalition logic could take from him. Coalition logic won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R. Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) rises through the IDF chaplaincy because David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) needs a halakhic (Jewish law) authority who answers to the secular state. The standard rabbinical establishment objects. Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog (1888-1959) makes the formal appointment of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[598,23583,43117,43123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haredi","category-r-ovadia-yosef","category-r-shlomo-goren","category-r-shlomo-zalman-auerbach"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t