Needed: A New Path To Our J ewish Roots

Too many religious Israelis are in denial of the realities of the modern state.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem. Michael Datikash

by Bambi Sheleg
Special To The Jewish Week

Just 63 years after World War II, and the Jewish people must look back in
wonderment: After 2,000 years of diaspora, a large proportion of its people returned
to Zion and established a state that has become a major focus of international
attention. The Jewish people have returned to history and taken it by storm.

The interval that has elapsed since the Holocaust ended is really very short; in historic terms, we are just coming out of the birthing room. The greater part of our rehabilitation process is still ahead of us and it will take many generations to complete. However, Israel’s establishment has transformed the nature of the Jewish people’s existence.
Were we to attempt to define the essence of the

intertwined crisis and challenge of the Jewish-Israeli existence, we would have to conclude that it is essentially a cultural one: How do we transform a culture that evolved in the diaspora, absent of any sovereignty, into one whose focus of development is sovereignty? The State of Israel was formed on the model of a European country: The majority of its founders had come from Europe, imbued with the nationalist and civic concepts of those societies. They sought to combine these concepts with socialism and Zionism, and for a few decades were quite successful.
The historic Mapai movement assumed overall responsibility for Jewish survival, as well as the establishment and running of the state in the first few decades of its existence. This assumption of responsibility, which was fundamentally nationalist rather than religious, gave the Mapai movement enormous political and cultural power. However, the monumental nature of the Zionist endeavor, which combined the establishment of the state with the running of a governmental system, in addition to the colossal cultural change, was beyond the capability of that movement. The wars and waves of immigration, along with the need to adapt Zionist and socialist ideas to a constantly changing reality — on top of the demand for unwavering collective idealism — all began to take their toll over time.

True, the state’s Zionist-nationalist foundation still stands strong despite unbridled attacks on it from within and without. The vast majority of the Israeli population remains completely faithful to it. However, the cultural-social path taken by the Zionist movement is being eroded and its Jewish and socialist values are being worn away and destroyed.
This has led to an insight now shared by many in Israel: the fact that the generation born into the reality of the state distanced and detached itself from our deeply rooted Jewish culture is what led to Israel becoming a “global” state, one whose Jewish and Zionist lifestyle and values are constantly and continually assailed by powerful and assimilatory forces from outside.

And because the Jewish diaspora culture was one whose linchpin was Judaism itself, there is a good argument for examining the “religious solution” — especially because of the general consensus that the withdrawal from our Jewish roots is what lies at the core of the identity and values crisis of Israeli society.

If we focus for a moment on the observant and haredi (or fervently Orthodox) communities living in Israel, we will immediately note an amazing duality: on the one hand, their unswerving devotion to Jewish continuity, expressed by their uncompromising Jewish-traditional and halachic lifestyle, their many children and their increasing involvement in numerous areas in the life of the state. On the other hand, the majority of the haredi community and part of the Religious Zionist community is characterized by absolute fealty to a worldview that denies major aspects of Israeli reality.
For example, the large haredi community, which represents about 8 percent of the Jewish population in Israel, does not participate at all in the mandatory military service required of all Israeli adults from the age of 18, and its male population is vastly underrepresented in Israel’s job market. Some of the few that do work do so unofficially, in order to evade income taxes, as well as National Insurance and health insurance payments, which are deducted from all Israeli paychecks.

What this means is that the sizable haredi public, which draws considerable benefit from the state and Zionism — for example, the yeshivas that the state has established for it — in practice repudiates the national and personal effort required of every young man and woman who enlists in the Israel Defense Forces along with partnership in the workforce and the taxes that serve as the main revenue for the national budget.

How is this possible? It is not — but at this point in time, the ideology is stronger than the reality. The destructive, irresponsible dimension of this policy and behavior is not taken into account by the haredi leadership, trapped as it is inside its own view of reality in which the state belongs to the secular public, whose role is to serve as the scaffolding upon which the world of Torah, of which the haredi public is the true representative, will be built.

Among the Religious Zionist community, the situation is somewhat more complex. The Religious Zionist public is split between the approach taken by the ultra-Religious-Zionist faction and the classic Religious Zionist one. The ultra-Religious-Zionists of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva school of thought, of which Gush Emunim was an excellent representative, remains devoted to the idea of the Greater Eretz Israel as an expression of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: “Unto thy seed have I given this land.” This is a religious national approach, but it is one that intensely rejects central values of modernity, especially the principle of equality for women.

And why is this approach characterized by denial of reality? Mainly because the entire effort undertaken by Gush Emunim and its successors ignored overall responsibility for the people and the state as a whole. In other words, the entire course of action involving the settlement of Jews in the West Bank and Gaza was conducted in a romantic fashion suited to a youth movement struggling against the Mandate government.

The existence of renewed Jewish sovereignty was not completely internalized by those who sought to settle those areas without providing a realistic political solution for the millions of Arabs who would remain devoid of civil rights there. The Jewish settlers often related to the sovereign government of the Jewish people as if it were a foreign government or one that has not yet seen the light, and consequently, the role of the “faith-based public” was either to defeat that government or show it the true path.
Similarly, those settling the West Bank and Gaza did not have a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli situation or offer a view of national leadership. As proof, the Religious Zionist public has yet to propose a candidate of its own for prime minister and has never come up with a relevant economic, social or cultural solution appropriate for all Israelis, one that would reflect the values of those who view themselves as the representatives of the Torah on earth.

The other faction of religious Zionism, the older one, remains faithful to the concept of Torah Va’avodah [Torah and service], which in practice accepts the modern world and the positive values it has to offer. This philosophy tries to create a synthesis between the traditional world of Jewish values and modernity, and it is characterized by a pragmatic approach towards political reality, despite the fact that some of its adherents themselves live in the settlement communities of the West Bank and Gaza.

How should one understand the profoundly problematic nature of the first two religious positions presented here set against the realpolitik and socio-cultural reality of the Jewish state? The approach taken by the haredi and ultra-Religious Zionist worlds to the modern Western reality can perhaps be likened to one that is patiently waiting for the collapse of this civilization. In this respect, both of these movements resemble other current fundamentalist religions, absent the Islamist murderousness. By taking this approach, they by definition have turned themselves into Messianic movements that have nothing to offer the actual, current Jewish Israeli reality.

And this brings us back to where we started: The question of the attitude towards our Jewish sources and the ancient heritage of the nation in the diaspora is an important key to the future of the Jewish state. However, it is clear that, for the most part, religious Israeli thought has not yet matured to the point where it can contend with the immensity of the challenge that history has laid at our doorstep.

What exactly should be the relationship between our heritage and the concrete reality in which we live? What is the metamorphosis that Jewish traditional thought needs to undergo in order to realistically contend with Jewish sovereignty and all its many and sundry challenges? The challenge facing the Jewish state today is to formulate an approach that is true to the Jewish past as well as the present — a present that demands real solutions rather than mythic ones.

We must find a way to run a state that is an ingathering of exiles and which includes a large Arab minority, while renewing our roots in the East, where our nation and culture were born.

Bambi Sheleg is the editor of Eretz Acheret (A Different Place), a bimonthly magazine that probes the complexities of Israeli and Jewish identity.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization