Congratulations, Israel Is Still Yours

The greatest achievement of Israeli democracy may yet be persuading the lambs that moving Passover forward is a reform enacted entirely for their own benefit.

The good news is that Israel still belongs to the Jewish people. The less good news is that the Knesset appears to be adding footnotes explaining which Jews, under what conditions, and during which hours. The country has not been stolen in the night. That would be vulgar, inefficient and, above all, insufficiently legal. Instead, it is being redistributed in daylight, one coalition agreement, one exemption and one “temporary arrangement” at a time. By the time the citizen notices that another room has disappeared, someone is already inside it explaining that the mezuzah proves it was always his.

Consider the legislative farewell gift of the outgoing Knesset. At almost the same moment, lawmakers extended mandatory military service for those who serve and protected tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders from arrest. They declared Torah study a foundational value of the state, expanded gender-segregated higher education, restored the Chief Rabbinate’s control over kosher certification, weakened the attorney general and increased political influence over the media. One could call this a legislative program. One could also call it a coalition dividing the silverware before leaving the house. The remarkable thing is that the house still belongs to the public, which is apparently expected to applaud the efficiency of the removal company.

The central principle is wonderfully simple. Some Israelis are asked to give more to the state, while others are being given more of the state. One family is told that military necessity requires another month of service, another reserve call-up and another interruption of ordinary life. Another is told that the arrest warrant can wait because Torah study protects the nation in ways mysteriously unavailable to the manpower department of the IDF. Perhaps the army should revise its recruitment posters: “Be all you can be, unless your coalition negotiator can arrange something better.”

This is not an argument against Torah study. Jews have managed to value Torah for several thousand years without requiring a parliamentary majority to certify that the Almighty has met the constitutional threshold. Torah does not become holier because sixty-three politicians press the correct button. Nor does it become less holy when a student shares a lecture hall with a woman. The issue is not whether Torah sustains Jewish life. The issue is whether Torah may be turned into a state-issued receipt proving that one citizen has paid his share before he has actually carried any of the common burden.

The distinction matters because religious freedom and political privilege are not the same thing. Religious freedom protects a person’s right to study, pray, dress, eat and organize a community according to religious conviction. Political privilege begins when that conviction becomes a reason for other people to serve longer, pay more, travel less freely or accept reduced access to public institutions. It becomes domination when the beneficiaries of the exemption acquire the power to define the exemption as the Jewish identity of the state. At that point, disagreeing with a coalition transaction can be presented as disagreeing with Judaism, which is an admirably economical way of avoiding an argument.

Gender segregation follows the same path. It begins as a narrowly defined accommodation for a community that claims it cannot otherwise participate. Soon the accommodation expands into master’s programs, doctoral programs, public events, buses, sidewalks and the general discovery that the female half of the population is a logistical difficulty. Women may command soldiers, treat the wounded, teach at universities and support families during reserve duty, but apparently their physical presence can still constitute an administrative emergency. Israel has therefore achieved a theological innovation: a woman may be sufficiently visible to defend the Jewish state but excessively visible while receiving an education inside it.

Again, the problem is not that Haredi parties represent Haredi voters. That is what parties are supposed to do. The problem is that no comparable party represents the unorganized citizen who serves, pays, waits, compromises and is told that creating a crisis would be irresponsible. Organized minorities arrive at coalition negotiations with lists. The majority arrives with patience, which politicians correctly identify as a resource that can be extracted indefinitely. Every concession is described as small, technical or temporary, and the citizen is advised not to become hysterical. Jewish history, after all, has taught us many things, among them that when someone tells you not to be hysterical, it may be time to check what he is carrying out through the back door.

Benjamin Netanyahu did not invent these tensions, and he did not need to become a Haredi ideologue to exploit them. His distinctive contribution was to discover that every unresolved contradiction in Israeli society could be assigned a coalition price. Military equality had a price. Public transportation had a price. Rabbinical monopoly had a price. Women’s equal presence had a price. The independence of legal institutions had a price, as did the ability of the press to scrutinize those institutions. Israel remained the state of the Jewish people, but increasingly in the manner of an apartment that remains yours while the tenants revise the contract.

This is why the familiar language of “religion and state” is no longer adequate. It makes the controversy sound like an old Israeli argument over whether a restaurant should open on Shabbat or whether a wedding ceremony satisfies the rabbinate. The present issue is more fundamental: who possesses equal standing in defining the common state, and who merely lives under definitions negotiated by others? A state may contain deep religious commitments and still remain common. It ceases to be common when one group’s religious commitments become another group’s legal restrictions, while the first group remains selectively protected from public obligations.

The phrase “the Jewish state” is doing dangerous work here. It is used as though “Jewish” named one political theology, one rabbinical hierarchy and one answer to every question of public life. Yet the Jewish people include secular Jews, traditional Jews, Orthodox Jews, Reform and Conservative Jews, women who study and teach Torah, converts whom the rabbinate refuses to recognize, and millions of Diaspora Jews who are repeatedly asked to defend a state that treats their Judaism as a charming foreign custom. They are Jewish enough for fundraising, advocacy and emergency solidarity. Whether they are Jewish enough to define Jewish public life inside Israel is apparently a more technical question.

No faction owns Jewishness. The Chief Rabbinate does not own it, the Haredi parties do not own it, and a prime minister cannot place it in escrow until coalition negotiations are completed. Israel was created as the political home of a people, not as the enforcement division of one interpretation of that people’s tradition. The difference is not semantic. A state of the Jewish people must remain answerable to the plurality, contradictions and arguments of the Jewish people. A state governed in the name of one authorized Judaism requires everyone else to enter as a guest, even when they built the house, defend it and pay the mortgage.

The legislative blitz therefore tells a coherent story. Protection from conscription, constitutional honor for Torah study, broader segregation, rabbinical monopoly, weaker legal restraint and stronger political influence over broadcasting are not identical measures, but they share a direction. Each transfers another portion of common authority from the citizen to a coalition-dependent institution. Each tells the public that the latest transfer is too narrow to justify outrage. Together they produce an Israel in which obligations remain universal in rhetoric but privileges become increasingly particular in law.

Israelis should be angry, although preferably in the traditional Jewish manner: with evidence, several objections and someone interrupting before the conclusion. They should be angry not because religion is present in public life, but because “religion” is being used as a respectable name for an unequal distribution of duty and power. They should be angry because those asked to carry the state are steadily losing the right to define it. Most of all, they should be angry because this transfer is presented as the fulfillment of Jewish sovereignty rather than its corruption.

Jewish sovereignty was supposed to end the condition in which Jews lived under rules written by others. It was not supposed to reproduce that condition inside Israel, with one group of Jews writing the rules and another summoned to defend them. A country cannot remain equally yours when your obligations grow while your authority shrinks. It cannot ask you to sacrifice more and then explain that another citizen’s exemption expresses the true Jewish character of the state. That arrangement may be a coalition. It may even be legal. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to call it the state of the Jewish people without first asking which Jewish people the speaker has in mind.

Nobody will announce the day Israel ceases to belong equally to its citizens. There will be no ceremony, because the rabbinate would first have to decide who may attend and where the women should sit. The country will continue to look familiar. The flag will remain, the anthem will be sung and the politicians will assure the public that nothing essential has changed. Only the citizen will discover, piece by piece, that the state still belongs to him in precisely the same way that the bill belongs to the customer after the meal.

Congratulations, then. Israel is still yours. You are merely being asked to serve it longer, finance it more generously and surrender another small part of it to people who will explain, with complete sincerity, that they are doing so in your name.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig