Ovadia Yosef: Encyclopedia II - Ovadia Yosef - Controversy

Ovadia Yosef - Controversy

Among secular Israelis, Yosef is mainly famous for being the leader of the political party called Shas and for his fierce and sharp rhetoric, often combined with curses and ill-wishes to hated political leaders. Some argue that Yosef's quotes are hate speech.

Ovadia Yosef - Politics

Reactions to Yosef's "political" quotes have ranged from laughter to fury. The Hofesh movement has called for Yosef to be tried for incitement. Shas spokespeople and Yosef's followers argue that his quotes are taken out of context and that they include technical religious terms which the average person is not familiar with, and therefore, misunderstood.

A quote often cited by Yosef's opponents is:"The Lord shall return the Murderers' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world." However, this is in fact a quote from Obadiah 1:18, in reference to the descendants of Esau.

In a July 2001 speech Yosef called for Arabs to go to hell:

In the old city of Jerusalem they [Arabs] are swarming like ants. They should go to hell - and the Messiah will speed them on their way. ^[5]

In November, 2003, during a lecture about different customs of kashrut in Israel, Yosef accused Ashkenazi Jews of being the source of all evil:

all troubles from the Ashkenazim...You the Jewish Ashkenazim, you have been in the West, in hell. Why did you come here? What you say or do is of little importance. ^[6]

Despite them being reported by various media sources, eyewitness at the lecture later denied that the Rabbi had made such comments. Others have claimed that the statement was taken out of context.

In response to the alleged quotation, one National Religious commentator said, "I won’t accept excuses from spokespersons and spin doctors for Rabbi Ovadia. If his comments are being consistently taken out of context, then perhaps it’s time he stopped commenting in public."^[7]

In March 2005, Yosef made comments that were widely interpreted as praying for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's death:

"Let God strike him down... he is torturing the people of Israel... The Holy One wants us all to return to the Torah, and then he will strike him with one blow and he will die. He will sleep and never wake up.^[8]

Aides responded to the public outcry by explaining that Yosef had been criticizing Sharon's plan for Disengagement from Gaza, not Sharon himself.

Ovadia Yosef - Theodicy

Some of Yosef's theodicy-related pronouncements have also been controversial. In 2000 he described the Holocaust as God's retribution against the reincarnated soul of Jewish sinners:

the 6 million Holocaust victims were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things that should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.

In response to a storm of criticism, Shas chairman Eli Yishai commented that criticism of the rabbi was unjustified: Rabbi Ovadia weeps for every Jew who is killed ... but nobody, not even a saint, has not sinned. Everyone dies in a state of sin.^[9] Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 he blamed the tragedy on US support for the Gaza disengagement and on black Americans for not studying the Torah:

There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough Torah study...black people reside there [New Orleans]. Blacks will study the Torah? [God said] let’s bring a tsunami and drown them...Bush was behind the [expulsion of] Gush Katif, he encouraged Sharon to expel Gush Katif…we had 15,000 people expelled here [in Israel], and there [in America] 150,000 [were expelled]. It was God’s retribution ..God does not short-change anyone.^[10], ^[11]

Ovadia Yosef - Peace Advocacy

Ironically, despite the above comments which paint a picture of Rabbi Yosef as a bigot, he has long been the most distinguished rabbinical authority to advocate peace negotiations, and has done so since the late 1980s. His main justification is his Halakhic ruling that pikuach nefesh (preservation of soul, i.e. saving lives), takes precedence over all other obligations in the Torah, including those pertaining to the sanctity of land. Yosef says that, according to the Torah, every other commandment should be forfeited if a life is put in danger. Based on this, Yosef opposes the ideology of Religious Zionism, particularly in regards to its settlement program and confrontational manner. Yosef maintains that the settlements and the Arab-Israeli Conflict endanger Jewish lives, and if Israel doesn't make every effort to reach a peace settlement and enact defensive security measures, it is contributing to that danger.

However, in 2005, Yosef repeatedly condemned the Gaza Disengagement. He argued that while he supported withdrawal in principle, he was opposed to any unilateral action that occured outside the framework of a peace agreement. Yosef again cited the principle of pikuach nefesh, saying that empowering the Palestinians without a commitment to end terror would result in threatening Jewish lives, particularly in areas near Gaza in range of Qassam rocket attacks.^[12] In contrast to some of his rabbinical colleagues, such as Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, Yosef refused to entertain the idea of holding a referendum on the Disengagement, and instructed his MKs to vote against the plan when it came up in the Knesset.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Controversy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki