How a yeshiva boy found religion as a Reform rabbi
Former Jerusalem deputy mayor Tamir Nir lived as an Orthodox Jew for 20 years, and for the next 20 as a secular Israeli; in his current role, he feels he lives the best of both
Deputy Editor Amanda Borschel-Dan is the host of The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing and What Matters Now podcasts and heads up The Times of Israel's Jewish World and Archaeology coverage.
Three days before Tamir Nir’s father died, the elder man expressed regret that his son wasn’t going to become a “real rabbi.” At the same time, he was glad that Nir, after spending 20 years as a secular Israeli, had found his way back to religion.
Just before his death, Nir’s father told his son that he “should be a little bit more — be authentic and full, not only ‘half,’ like he felt about the Reform Movement,” said Nir, who was ordained as a Reform rabbi by Jerusalem’s Hebrew Union College in November.
Nir said he doesn’t always find even this partial acceptance in the broader Israeli society.
Nir, a co-founder of the “Yerushalmim” party and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, was raised in an Orthodox home, first in Jerusalem, and then, at age 10, in the Etzion bloc Orthodox settlement of Alon Shvut. Before his required Israeli army conscription, Nir studied at Yeshivat Birkat Moshe in Ma’ale Adumim, under the Montreal-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi and posek (legal decisor) Rabbi Nahum Eliezer Rabinovitch.
His former Zionist-religious world has little patience for Reform Jewry.
“I feel many times like they are denigrating me, telling me I’m not the real thing, that I’m cutting corners and it’s not the right way to do it. Worse than that, the more fanatical people feel hate,” he said. To the very religiously observant, “it is better to be hiloni [secular] than Reformi.”
Luckily, however, his broader family is not angry about his choices; rather, they are “curious.” At the recent wedding of a nephew, he said, he found himself moving from table to table talking “about the crazy idea of being a Reform rabbi… I spent the whole evening working,” he laughed.
Just after an off-road cycle in Jerusalem, Nir told The Times of Israel that while he began to have religious doubts while studying in the yeshiva and during his army service, it was only after he was demobilized that he began life as a secular Israeli.
“To leave the religion is not easy: you have to deal with God and with His anger — that’s the way they educated me at least,” said Nir. “It was somehow frightening to drive on Shabbat or eat non-kosher food, and so on.” Becoming secular, said Nir, was not an overnight decision.
‘I was looking for the right way for me to make peace in myself to find a path back to Judaism’
“It was actually during the years at the yeshiva that I was asking myself and rabbis and friends about their feelings about questions that appeared to me. It took me five years to make that decision.
“I lived about 20 years as religious Orthodox and 20 years as secular,” the 49-year-old said.
About a decade ago, Nir began a slow return to practicing Judaism through classes at the Humanistic Judaism school, Kerem, and the open Beit Midrash Elul. At the same time, he began leading a small “environmental-spiritual havurah,” or small learning group, called Achva Ba’kerem in Jerusalem’s secular Beit Hakerem neighborhood, which linked working in the community garden with a brief musical service on late Friday afternoons to welcome Shabbat.
Popular among the young families, Nir quickly became seen as a communal leader in the neighborhood, as well as a pastor of sorts to aid in organizing life cycle events through alternative and, increasingly, Reform frameworks.
“Looking back, I understand that the day that I established a community garden, I entered into local politics,” he told an HUC publication. “The garden, like many other initiatives within the community such as communal compost or Shabbat gatherings, are all actually political decisions and require political action.”
The garden and fledgling grassroots Reform community “was the beginning of my way back somehow. I was looking for the right way for me to make peace in myself to find a path back to Judaism,” he told The Times of Israel.
As opposed to many Reform rabbinical students, Nir has a firm basis in classical Jewish texts, something critical to Orthodox rabbinic authority. While a central part of the Reform rabbinical curriculum, said Nir, it is not its only anchor, which causes many Orthodox to consider Reform rabbis as ignorant of Jewish learning.
“The main question is what is important for us to learn,” said Nir. “Some say, ‘You are not a real rabbi because you don’t know the rules of niddah [menstrual ritual impurity].’ I say, I don’t want to know the rules of niddah!”
His breadth of knowledge — and refusal to live a normative Orthodox life — is why many in the Haredi world, including its media [Hebrew], see him as a threat, a dangerous Trojan horse who can influence from within.
“I can speak about the rules and mitzvot [religious commandments], right and wrong, what’s not allowed. I know, I was there, I know what they’re talking about,” he said.
