Rav Avi: Hi, welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, speaking with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Hello!
Rav Eitan: Hi Avi, how are you?
Rav Avi: I'm great, how are you?
Rav Eitan: Doing great.
Rav Avi: We have a really interesting question, and I'm excited to share with you and hear what you think. "Are there rules that are appropriate for non-Jews to play in services? For example, can they recite a prayer for our country, could they open the ark, et cetera? And which things should we be taking into consideration when making these decisions?"
Rav Eitan: It's a really interesting question. Probably the most interesting part of the question when it comes up is something I think we probably can't really deal with in the scope of this conversation, which is you could imagine so many contexts where this might come up, and they might be very different. What kind of non-Jewish person are we dealing with here? Are we dealing with a government official, neighbors from the community who are stopping in, someone who's on the path to conversion, someone who's civilly married to a Jewish member of the community? I think there's a lot to talk about there, which we can't really get into, and it would lead to potentially very different answers and responses on the ground. But I think that while acknowledging that the context really matters and you can't just address this on a technical plane alone, you can sketch out, I think, some key texts and values that really shape the conversation here.
Maybe let's start with the Bible, because I think it's actually interesting that this goes way back. I mean, it sounds like a sort of vintage 21st century question, but the notion of our spaces of prayer and worship being potentially broader than just Jews is actually very old. And it's interesting, when you go back to the Bible, I would point out two verses that I think are really sort of universally oriented in this way. You have an amazing scene when King Solomon, Shlomo Hamelekh, is dedicating the First Temple, and he's going through -- this is in Melakhim Aleph, the book of First Kings -- he's going through all the different people who might connect to this new sanctuary that he's setting up, and talks about different people who might pray and offer sacrifices. And he says, and also the foreigner, the nokhri, that is not from the people Israel and comes from a faraway land because he hears about all the amazing things that G-d has done, and wants to pray in this house, You, Shlomo says, addressing G-d, You should hear him up in heaven, and You should do whatever it is that he asks You, that he prays to You for.
And you have this sort of image at the founding moment of the Temple, before it's even been dedicated, that the Temple is supposed to be a place that will and ought to draw in people of all backgrounds. And that vision, I would say, really culminates, at least in the Biblical sense, in the vision of Isaiah, which comes again and again back in our liturgy in all kinds of places, ki beiti beit tefilah yikarel l'kol ha'amim, a vision that My house, says G-d, should be called a house of prayer for all nations. And that's a real universalist vision of this very particular Jewish space as having a kind of reach and access to people of all different kinds of backgrounds.
Rav Avi: Wow. That's really striking, especially because at least I tend to think of the Temple as the most restrictive of participation of various people, that even services within the Jewish community, you know, struggle today with how much do you keep the restrictions or not the restrictions. So it's really interesting to hear that image of the Temple as inviting and assuming all people would be a part of this.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, I think your surprise is well-founded in that there's always another side to the coin, and here the other side to the coin in the Biblical record is that there are some verses that seem to indicate a very clear, much more parochial perspective. Actually in the Book of Eicha, in the Book of Lamentations, when the poet there, traditionally understood to be Jeremiah, is wailing over the loss of the Temple and the horrible things that happened during its destruction, one of the things that it says there is that Jerusalem witnessed nations coming into her sanctuary about whom it was commanded they should never come into the community or the holy space. And you there seem to have an image of hey, the Temple was sort of the Jewish building par excellence that was really supposed to be restricted to G-d's people and G-d's convenental relationship with the Jewish people, and one of the horrific dimensions of its destruction was people just kind of walking in who were not a part of it.
And you have kind of practical consequences of this later on in the Book of Ezra, where the early returning exiles rebuilding the Second Temple are approached by a bunch of Samaritans, people who were living in the Land of Israel who are not really any longer exactly part of the Jewish people, and they seem to have some other non-Israelite allies with them, and they say hey, we want to contribute to building this Second Temple. And Zerubavel and some of the other leaders say very clearly, lo lachem v'lanu livnot bayit lelohenu, it's not a joint project of you and us to build a house to our G-d. And here I think you really feel a much more parochial vision of what's going on in the Temple. And of course, as you alluded to, Avi, even in that more universalist vision of who's coming into the Temple and who is potentially praying there, of course everyone agrees that only the priests performed the kind of critical functions and the core work of the institution is quite clearly national and covenantal. So I think with many things, here we've just begun with the Biblical background; the real question is how do the universal and the parochial play off one another here, and what's the kind of balance that emerges out of them in terms of practice?
Rav Avi: Okay, so this is all telling us about the Temple, but how does all of that translate into the synagogue?
Rav Eitan: So, let's get there. I want to stick with the Temple a little more, because playing out this balance between these competing values in the Temple or at least in our sort of vision and memory of the Temple really becomes the basis for any later rabbinic discussion of how to deal with the synagogue, which in its own way is a kind of minor sanctuary, a sanctuary in microcosm. And so it becomes a really important extrapolation of that. So, here we have to go back to a verse, not necessarily so well-known, in Vayikra, in the Book of Leviticus, which says that it is forbidden for gentiles to bring sacrifices to the Temple that have some kind of blemish, that have something wrong with the animal that makes it unfit to offer on the altar. Now, this is a really interesting verse, because first of all, it assumes that gentiles can bring sacrifices in the Temple. Not only can they come and admire it and pray, but they can actually bring a sacrifice.
Rav Avi: Yeah, that's really surprising! I'm surprised to hear that.
Rav Eitan: Yeah! So, it's a direct statement that, again, it's not even a statement; it's an assumption of the verse that of course part of the vision of this institution is anyone can bring this kind of offering. Now, of course they're not actually sprinkling the blood on the altar and doing all the ritual pieces that the priests do, but they, like any Jew it seems, can come and bring a sacrifice. The question is what exactly does that mean, that gentiles can bring a sacrifice, that non-Jews can come in and participate in the worship. And here you've got a really fascinating debate between the schools of Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva.
These two very early sages from the time of the Mishnah who often had very different world views on interpreting the Torah. And the view of Rabbi Yishamel has recently been kind of excavated and unearthed by a great contemporary Israel scholar named Menachem Kahana, who studies a lot of the early texts of the Mishnaic period. And he found a kind of passage of an early midrash, an early interpretation of this verse, that says gentiles are excluded from offering blemished animals, but they can even contribute to the tamid offering, to the perpetual offering that was given twice a day, which is a core responsibility of the Jewish people. In other words, when you think about basically the operating expenses of the Temple, actually gentiles can -- of course voluntarily -- but nonetheless can totally contribute to that as equals to Jews.
That sets up a model where you would essentially say gentiles can be full members of the prayer and worship communities of Jews, controlling for, you know, requirements of obligation and performance -- like, let's say, you know, to lead something you need to be obligated in that ritual in order to fulfill the obligations of others in the community, so someone who's not Jewish and not part of the covenantal community wouldn't be able to do that, because they don't have that obligation, but anything that doesn't present that kind of concern, you would be able to include those who are not Jewish as equals, right? Also things that say, like, counting in a minyan, where there's verses and traditions that are very clear about the specific need for a Jewish quorum, that might also be parochial. But I would dare suggest that according to the model of Rabbi Yishmael, you might even be able to imagine someone who was not Jewish who was competent in the language of prayer getting up and leading something like kabbalat shabbat.
Rav Avi: Wow! So, we can have a whole different kind of partnership minyan!
Rav Eitan: It would take us to quite different places, yeah. I think that's right.
Rav Avi: So I'm guessing that that's not gonna be the mainstream position.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, that's essentially a lost voice, the scholarship has sort of unearthed that. I think it is important to understand how you can see that voice sprouting very organically from one of the strands of the Biblical vision of the Temple, but the Mishnah, by contrast, preserves the view of the school of Rabbi Akiva. And he read the verse very differently, to suggest that no no no, we don't just have a problem with blemished animals from gentiles; gentiles are not supposed to, in the Temple, be offering the bread of G-d. That is to say, the mandatory daily sacrifices.
And Rabbi Akiva's school extends this to saying all other communal obligations offered in the Temple have to be brought only by Jews. So, here's the Mishnah in Shekalim, the way it sums this up very effectively, when it's explaining how when you're collecting the half-shekel tax which was sort of the basic financial obligation for keeping the Temple running, you can't accept it from gentiles. You could only accept Jewish funds into that coffer. It's because kol shenidar v'nidav mekablin miyadan koshe'ein nidar v'nidav ein mikablin miyadan. Anything that is voluntary, that can be donated, that you can accept from people who are not Jewish. But anything that is not fundamentally voluntary or a donation, but is something that is statutory, required, part of the core operations, that must come from Jews alone.
Rav Avi: Okay. So, I'm still figuring out how this applies to the synagogue.
Rav Eitan: Okay. So if you followed this second model of Rabbi Akiva, then you would still have a total opening for gentiles to donate things to synagogues. We actually have a rich history talked about in the Talmud Yerushalmi, there's an example of a menorah in a synagogue that bore the name of the gentile who donated it, and in that sense sort of giving freewill offerings to Jewish synagogues is fine. And the overall framework of this, which becomes a much more dominant rule, would be thinking about what are the essential pieces of the service, as opposed to additions or added readings? So, let's go back to our kabbalat shabbat example. To the extent that that's become a statutory part of the prayer experience, right, even if it's not something where you're fulfilling an obligation or doing it for someone else, but it's part of what a synagogue, a shul, expects itself to do, it doesn't treat itself as optional, then someone Jewish needs to be leading that in this model.
The liminal things would be the kinds of things that this questioner asked about: things like prayer for the government or opening the ark, right? I think here is where those with a more universalist bent might come out differently than those more focused on the particularist role of the synagogue. The universalist would say, well, the prayer for the government is really just an expression of people who are citizens of the United States or wherever they live offering a prayer, and anyone who shares that common citizenship should be able to pitch in for that. Or opening the ark -- there's no technical obligation involved, if there's someone who's not Jewish who wants to come and honor the Torah in that way, why is that any different than King Solomon's gentile who comes in order to pay homage to G-d? I think by contrast, those valuing the more particularist role of the synagogue would say yeah, but those things too are sort of essential functions. We don't think of the prayer for the government or even the technical task of opening the ark as a sort of optional piece of the service that we're putting in there, and we want the Jewish community to own its full responsibility for all of those rituals and actions.
So I guess here, kind of if you were to pin me down to a bottom line, there in those liminal spaces I think some of the contexts might matter, and you might really depend on what is the reason the question is being asked, or what kind of effect will it have or not have to either put that person in this role or not? But that following in the tradition of Rabbi Akiva and really the whole halakhic tradition since the Mishnah, the right question to be meditating on is, which are the pieces of the service where we're saying whether or not anyone is coming in voluntarily to kind of be a part of this service, this is something that the Jewish community has a responsibility to do, and those are things that need to be kind of focused on the Jewish core, as opposed to which pieces can we imagine essentially being kind of sitting around that core, even potentially in a very important way, but that potentially we can see as more analogous to the freewill offerings and the free prayers that are already talked about in those earlier sources.
Rav Avi: So I think you've given us some really helpful framework in terms of thinking about this question, as you said, not as a question of the moment that we're living in; I think we sometimes think of the presence of people of other religions in our synagogues as an assimilation question, which is a fully modern, you know, maybe specifically American phenomenon. And you're telling us that actually all the way back to the Temple and throughout history, we've always lived among and with other people and they've been a part, even, of our tefilah, even of our prayer services, which I think all in all, starts us off on a really interesting and different frame for this question. And I think your second point, when you're telling us about these two poles, really does bring in the question of what are the specifics of the scenario, it makes me want to know how much is this person joining our community as a visitor, and how much is this person a part of our community, and makes me think maybe the answer could be different also depending on that.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to reflect -- in the passage in Melakhim Aleph that we started with, with King Solomon, it says a gentile who comes from a faraway land. And in that sense, there's sort of a presumption of the person really coming in a deep way as a visitor. And yes, the question of course becomes potentially different when you're dealing with a different set of relationships. I think again, part of what to me is sort of compelling about this question as something that ought not to be approached from a perspective of fear, but from a perspective of the underlying values, is I find both sides of this to have very powerful pull. The universalist piece is powerful for kind of grounding what the point of these institutions are, which is on some level to increase knowledge of G-d in the world and appreciation of what the Jewish tradition brings to the world, and on the other hand powerful institutions are in part anchored by a sense that you get to be a part of them because you're really kind of all in and part of the covenantal framework that they're sustaining. And the fact is that you can't entirely maximize both of those at the same time, and that's what I think is interesting about the attempts to find some kind of rules for balancing them in some way.
Rav Avi: Thanks. It's a very helpful framework, and I like that you gave us a framework instead of yes or no answers on any given activity, because it acknowledges that different parts of the service feel core or feel adjunct or additional in various communities and in various structures and in various moments, probably, within the life of a prayer community. Think that's really a helpful way to think about it.
Rav Eitan: Always glad to be helpful.
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