Yesterday's meeting in the Knesset's law committee (vaadat hukah) was an extremely important one. It was the first meeting devoted to religion and state in the constitution. RG is in charge of all the sections dealing with "principles" and her approach was to begin the discussion at a high level of abstraction. (BTW, I'm using initials not because this information is secret -- it's a matter of public record -- but simply to prevent casual ego-surfers from quickly finding my thoughts about their work. Anybody who cares to make any effort can easily determine whom I'm refering to.) Very quickly, though, the discussion got quite concrete.

The two MKs who have been most consistent in attending the meetings and contributing are RC of Shinui and AR of Yahadut HaTorah and they both immediately began sparring. Both are very decent and fair-minded people who genuinely wish to find common ground. (This is not true of the other Shinui MK on the committee who is a Shulamit Aloni wannabe; last week, when the issue of kibbutz galuyot (ingathering of exiles) arose, she began to shout "That's so passe, passe, passe!". Even the far lefties' jaws dropped.) Anyway, when it was my turn to speak I revealed the true fact that in my separate conversations with AR and RC, they had in fact pretty much agreed on all the difficult issues. I outlined the compromises that need to be made for some reasonable consensus to be possible.

The main points are these:

1. We need to avoid speaking about principles and restrict ourselves to concrete issues. People can't compromise their principles; they can agree on practical arrangements.

2. We also can't get too detailed; the constitution ought to set the guidelines for finding solutions, not provide the solutions themselves.

3. The anti-clericalists will have to concede that religion is a legitimate basis for advocating legislation. Legislators can, of course, choose to reject such legislation but they can't appeal to freedom from religion to disqualify it. They can appeal to considerations of equality and other constitutionally protected rights to disqualify legislation -- or, rather, to appeal to the Court to disqualify it -- but there will be no blanket protection from religion. On the contrary, the preservation of Jewish tradition will be enshrined in the constitution as a national value.

4. The power of the religious establishment needs to be limited. In particular, the rabbinic monopoly on marriage and divorce is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Russians whose self-identity is Jewish but who are not halachically Jewish can simply not get married. In a nutshell, the proposed solution is to retain (orthodox) rabbinic control of gittin for those who are married al pi halachah. For marriages, other options -- civil unions -- can be explored (at the statutory, not constitutional, level).

Predictably, the last item provoked the most intense debate. The Mafdal is understandably opposed to the whole idea of civil unions. But in the end there will be no choice. The real battle lines will be drawn around the questions of intermarriage and homosexual marriage. Those will be bloody battles. My bet is the Mafdal will win on homosexual marriage (I certainly hope they do) but will lose on intermarriage because they have no solution for the Russians.

On the other hand, I never thought I'd live to see an MK from Shinui practically jumping over the table to defend me against a Reform Rabbi attacking me for not writing civil marriage into the constitution. But that's exactly the way it was.