Rav Yaakov Ariel: Wrong Halachic Ruling is No Police Matter

Arutz Sheva ^ | 28/6/11 | Gil Ronen

[Eleutheria5]

Rav Ya’akov Ariel, the Rabbi of Ramat Gan, said Tuesday that while he disagrees with the opinions expressed in the book Torat HaMelech, they are not a matter for the police.

Police stopped Rav Dov Lior’s car Monday morning as he was driving in Gush Etzion and took him to questioning, in an act that has caused extreme pain and anger in the religious public. Rav Lior, a highly respected sage and the Rabbi of Kiryat Arba, was questioned regarding the halakhic approbation he wrote at the beginning of a book called Torat HaMelech, which was written by another rabbi. The book discussed the theoretical attitude of Jewish Law toward killing a non-Jew in wartime.

“It is no secret that I oppose the book and I think Rav Dov Lior should not have given the approbation [to it]," Rav Ariel told Arutz Sheva in Hebrew, but that is another plane: an internal Halakhic one. Even if this or another Halakhic edict is wrong, it is no police matter. [The authorities] could have turned to the Chief Rabbinate and it could have published an opinion disavowing the Halakhic soundness of The King’s Torah. .....

[Eleutheria5]

The police and AG, however, are worried that Rav Lior was going to incite mass murder and terrorism, which for anyone who knows him (I do), is ridiculous. But as long as they're going to question people who express Halachic views which the government fears might lead to violence, why not call in Imams and Sheikhs who openly advocate warfare and genocidal murder. Hell, why not just arrest them and have done?

[wideawake]

The problem here is that frum Judaism and the Israeli government are officially and legally intertwined to an extent unknown in the US.

It's more analogous to the status of Anglicanism in England in the 1800s than to current American experience.