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Aug. 19, 2011
A 21st-century update
Young rabbi writes an Ethiopian Shulchan Aruch.
SAMUEL SOKOL
Rabbi Sharon Shalom is a quiet man is his late thirties. Dressed casually, with a knitted kippah on his curly hair, he looks more like one of his young students than a rabbi and lecturer in Ethiopian custom and practice at Bar-Ilan University. Sitting in a small synagogue on the university’s Ramat Gan campus in central Israel, Shalom and I are discussing his latest endeavor – a complete rewrite of the Shulchan Aruch, the 16th-century code of Jewish law followed by Orthodox Jews the world over.
The young scholar is following in the footsteps of such talmudists as the Rema and the first rebbe of the Lubavitch Chassidic movement, who modified the original code to better represent the differing legal mores of their respective communities, in this case that of the Ethiopian immigrant population in Israel. Shalom is trying to create, in his words, “a new way, a halachic way” for the Ethiopian Israeli community.
Ethiopian Jewry has customs and laws that differ substantially from those of other Jewish communities, as their forebears left ancient Judea during the period of the first temple, more than 2,500 years ago, prior to the codification of the oral law in the form of the Mishnah and Talmud.
When Ethiopian Jews first started arriving in Israel in the early 1980s, Shalom said, they were shocked by what they perceived as the lax standards of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi sectors of the Orthodox world. Mainstream rabbinic Judaism’s allowance of hot food on Shabbat, the permissibility of physical contact with non-Jews and what was considered to be an overly permissive attitude towards relations between the sexes all contributed to the Ethiopians’ sense of disquiet, according to Shalom. This sense was further bolstered by the fact that Israel’s chief rabbinate demanded that the new arrivals undergo a giur l’chumrah, a conversion undertaken as a stringency in cases of doubt regarding a person’s Jewish identity, he added.
Among the rules of Ethiopian Judaism, enforced by kesses, the community’s analogue to the position of rabbi, is a total ban on physical contact with Christians, leading the Ethiopians to consider themselves ritually “clean.” This emphasis on ritual purity, unprecedented in the rest of the Jewish world since the times of the Temple in Jerusalem, is currently unique to Ethiopians, he explained.
The Ethiopians, whose laws are based upon an expanded Bible that includes almost 70 canonized books, including the Apocrypha, forbid women from remaining in the same house as their husbands following childbirth and, depending on the gender of the infant, women are required to live in a small hut called a beit niddah (house of the menstruant) for up to 80 days post-partum. Moreover, a man who has come into contact with a corpse is required to live outside the community for a week,” Shalom added.
According to Shalom, following their arrival in Israel, the kesses requested the use of trailers for this purpose from the Ministry of Religious Affairs for use as batei niddah, but were refused.
In his opinion, while it is important to maintain the community’s traditions, some things must be modified to enable the community to transition from a splinter group to the mainstream brand of Pharisaic Judaism dominant today.
The Ethiopian community “must continue their mesorah [tradition], but [they] can’t integrate into contemporary Jewry if they do it exactly,” he said. My goal is “to take in honor and respect to the Ethiopian mesoret and honor to the orthodox mesoret and create a new way for avodat Hashem [serving God].”
He is now in talks with the Yediot publishing house in Tel Aviv regarding a possible book deal.
Working in consultation with prominent kesses and rabbis, including Kiryat Gat Kess Burhan Yehiyes and Bar-Ilan University’s professor of Talmud Daniel Sperber, Shalom will walk a fine line between two traditions, with the attendant risks of alienating both constituencies. Should he succeed, however, he will have made himself one of the most influential religious leaders of Ethiopian Jewry.
Samuel Sokol is the Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent for Zman magazine and the Five Towns Jewish Times, and news director at Koleinu, a newspaper serving English-speaking communities in Israel. He has reported from all over Israel and from areas under Palestinian Authority control.
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