Autograph Letter Signed in Hebrew, to an unnamed recipient. Impassioned objections to the proposed Constitution of the State of Israel

HERZOG, ISAAC HALEVI.

(Jerusalem)

c. 1950

Isaac Halevi Herzog (1888-1959) was the first Aschkenazic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel. A man of immense scholarship and broad humanity, Herzog was held in reverential respect by almost the entire spectrum of Jewry, both in Israel and abroad. See EJ, Vol. VIII, cols. 422-424. In 1950, there was an intense debate concerning the proposed Constitution ("Hukah") of the State of Israel. The religious parties objected to a Constitution not clearly reflective of the religious character of the Jewish nation. This opposition was vocal enough to prevent the enactment of a comprehensive written Constitution. In this draft of a letter to an unnamed party, the Chief Rabbi lodges his vigorous protest to several paragraphs of the proposed Constitution: "The Sabbath and the Jewish holy days will be official days of rest" (Page 4, Paragraph 15-4). Herzog found the neutral language ("day of rest") a desacralization of the Shabbath and Yamim Tovim. The Rabbi proposed this be emended to "days of rest according to the law of Torah, written and oral, as defined by the recognized Torah authority." Equally objectionable in the Rabbi's eyes was the effective marginalization of the Rabbinic Beth Din, and its relegation (on p. 11, chap. 5, par. 71-5) to equal footing with the religious courts of the Christian and Muslim communities. At the bottom of f.10r., Rabbi Herzog makes a point of saying that he has no personal animus toward the man responsible for drafting the Constitution, Dr. L. Cohen, whom he personally esteems. Rabbi Herzog closes by praying aloud that just as eventually, after much difficulty, the Jews were able to bring the Ark of the Covenant into Solomon's Temple (see Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 30a), so too the Ark of the Law (Torah Law) will finally be ensconced in the modern Temple, which is to say the reborn State of Israel.