A judicial review of the decision by the Jewish Free School to refuse a place to the Lightmans’ daughter will have to look not just at secular law on school admissions, but also at halacha. This is the body of Jewish law by which members of the community run their lives, and includes biblical, rabbinic and Talmudic law and oral tradition.
Mrs Lightman’s problem is not her conversion as such. Conversion in Israel, as hers was, is regarded as “kosher” around the world. The problem is the person she went on to marry.
Members of the modern Jewish community trace their descent to three of the original twelve tribes of Israel, the Cohen, Levi and Israeli tribes. Mr Lightman is a Cohen. In other words, he is from the priestly line on which special rights and responsibilities are placed under Jewish law.
Orthodox Judaism frowns upon marriages between Cohanim and converts. Should a Cohen marry a convert, he forfeits his right to pass on his priestly status to any of his sons. Such marriages are valid: according to Jewish law, it is the husband who must be punished, not the wife or children. One source said that if the strict law were upheld, Mr Lightman should be whipped.
But the rabbis in Israel who authorised the conversion of Mrs Lightman have taken no action against the couple, even though they are aware of whom she married.
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Legally, a convert can only be “unconverted” by the Beth Din, or Jewish court, that authorised the conversion in the first place. A marriage authorised by one Orthodox rabbi cannot be repudiated by any other. So a further complication is that among some in the community in the UK and Israel, the actions of the Chief Rabbi in Britain in refusing to accept Mrs Lightman’s conversion as valid are seen as an insult to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
There are other Jewish schools where Mrs Lightman’s daughter would be accepted with no problem. The difficulty for her is that, if she accepts that her Jewish status is halachically open to question because of whom she married, the status of her children and all their descendants within the community is also an issue.
The only answer for them would be themselves to convert and then, of course, not to marry a Cohen.
Then there is the biblical precedent used by would-be converts to Judaism for many centuries past. Judaism is not like Christianity. It has been known for rabbis to change their minds on teachings, but it is not done without a lot of debate and argument, and always involves a “development” of an existing law rather than a direct reversal.
The Bible describes how a woman called Ruth, a Moabite, fell in love with Boaz and said: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Ruth’s son, Obed, was father to Jesse, who was in turn father to the great King David. There is no record of any school refusing admission to Obed or Jesse because they were descended from a convert, and the legitimacy of David’s subsequent Jewish line is beyond question.
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A secular legal team might consider it has the power to override halacha. To expect the Chief Rabbi to do it would be like expecting the Pope to reverse decades of Catholic teaching on birth control. But then, within Judaism as in Christianity, with God, anything is possible — even a miracle.