“The status quo on matters of religion and state is imaginary, but that’s also its advantage,” says the editor of the forthcoming research, Shuki Friedman, the director of the Center for Religion, Nation and State at the Israel Democracy Institute, who is also a member of the law faculty at the Peres Academic Center. “Each side can see in it what it wants, so over the years, the status quo has become a magic term that politicians and even the court have relied on to describe the relationship between religion and state,” Friedman says. “The arrangement between religion and state in Israel, which is included in the imaginary status quo, has constantly changed in every field. The service provided by the state is becoming increasingly superfluous and the arrangement establishing it is becoming emptied of content.” [...]
It is the secular side, at least the study asserts, that is behind the status quo’s erosion. Perhaps the best example is the Shabbat observance issue. Although public transportation in Israel on Shabbat is very limited, there has been a major shift regarding everything related to what is open on Shabbat. There has been a certain distinction in most of the country between places of entertainment, many of which have remained open, and retail establishments, which have traditionally been closed. The study found that 98 percent of movie theaters, 65 percent of museums, and 83 percent of cultural institutions are open on Shabbat. But the study also found that 20 percent of shopping malls are open. [...]
When it comes to Shabbat, not only entertainment complexes have changed but also the street scene. Over the years, Jerusalem’s Bar-Ilan Street had been closed to vehicular traffic on Shabbat. After a bitter battle in the 1990s, the High Court ordered it opened to traffic. The right of the individual and freedom of movement took precedence over religion. “The ruling in the Bar-Ilan Street case constitutes an important landmark in casting aside the value of Shabbat, eroding the status quo, and preferring liberal values,” writes Friedman. “It’s a sign indicating what the trend is.” [...]
So, for example, the high court has accorded recognition to civil marriages performed abroad. The Central Bureau of Statistics reported that by 2013, about 20 percent of couples registered as married had had civil ceremonies abroad. That is in addition to couples who arrange their own private weddings in Israel and forgo state recognition that they are married, though they can be recognized as partners in a civil union (“yeduim batzibur,” in Hebrew).
In addition, in recent years, Israelis have increasingly married abroad in non-Orthodox Jewish ceremonies. In Israel, a breach in the rabbinate’s monopoly on Orthodox weddings was opened through organizations such as Tzohar. “The power of the marketplace is working,” says Rabbi David Stav, Tzohar’s chairman, who acknowledges that the status quo has dramatically eroded. Stav doesn’t view that as necessarily a bad thing. “The idea that we need to get into the veins of secular people over everything and that in the process we are serving Judaism, I think is a mistake.”
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