External Symbols or Commitment to Moral Values
External Symbols or Commitment to Moral Values
Religious symbols may become the primary criterion by which individuals are judged, outweighing the significance of their actual conduct. A person may be regarded as trustworthy or morally worthy solely because they display visible signs of religious affiliation, even when their behavior toward others contradicts fundamental ethical principles. When the ostentatious display of a symbol becomes more important than the values it is intended to embody, a rupture emerges between the symbol and what it symbolizes. The philosophy of religion identifies such a situation as a form of idolatry: the veneration of the symbol comes to replace the meaning it was originally meant to convey.
The widespread phenomenon of public tefillin stands—located in railway stations, shopping malls, marketplaces, and military bases—likewise illustrates the transformation of an intimate religious practice into a conspicuous public performance. Many secular young Israelis put on tefillin not out of religious conviction but as part of a public ritual of belonging. Mere participation in the act is often interpreted as an expression of voluntary identification with, or sympathy for, the religious camp, even though its theological significance may remain marginal to the participants themselves. For the organizers of these stands, inviting passersby to don tefillin in secular public spaces constitutes an assertion of religious presence that extends beyond the boundaries of the observant community. Similarly, the visible wearing of tsitsit outside one’s clothing has become a highly codified visual marker, frequently associated with young settlers and the so-called Hilltop Youth (No’ar HaGva’ot), groups that are often involved in physical confrontations with secular or left-wing activists.
Another striking example concerns attitudes toward the rule of law and civic norms. Although Jewish tradition abounds with injunctions against theft, exploitation, moral corruption, and harm to others, recent years have witnessed a proliferation of political and verbal violence, acts of vandalism, and assaults against members of the security forces or civilians perpetrated by extremist groups generally associated with radical sectors of Religious Zionism. The phenomenon of certain yeshiva students, whose study of the Torah is ostensibly regarded as their supreme vocation, highlights a profound paradox: the conspicuous display of signs of piety may coexist with behavior that stands in direct contradiction not only to universal moral values but even to explicit religious commandments governing interpersonal relations.
Within certain sectors of both the ultra-Orthodox community and Religious Zionism, one can observe a growing tension between the emphasis placed on external religious symbols and adherence to fundamental ethical values. The commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” together with the principle of human dignity, is at times relegated to a secondary position in favor of hostility toward other social groups: secular Jews, Arab citizens, women, LGBTQ+ individuals demanding equal treatment in the public sphere, or adherents of other Jewish denominations, including Reform Jews and women rabbis. Discourses of exclusion, boycott, and delegitimization are not uncommon precisely within circles that place particular emphasis on the public affirmation of religious identity. In such cases, it becomes difficult to avoid asking whether the religious symbol continues to serve a moral universe of values, or whether it functions primarily as a clan marker delineating the boundary between “us” and “them.”
From this perspective, it becomes possible to understand the criticism frequently directed at religious institutions in Israel, namely that they privilege the symbolic and external dimensions of religion at the expense of its substantive content—that is, the beliefs and values religion is intended to express. In such a context, the symbol no longer represents religious principles; it replaces them. Religion thus becomes more visible than ever in the public sphere, even as its ethical and spiritual substance gradually recedes.
The growing divergence between religious symbols and the values they are supposed to embody is not merely a matter of theoretical reflection. In many instances, societies in which religious signs become especially prominent also appear to experience an erosion of some of the very ethical principles that religion itself claims to uphold. This observation should not be understood as applying exclusively to religious communities, nor as implying that all believers are implicated. Rather, it points to a broader social tendency that deserves careful attention and critical discussion.
The problem, therefore, does not lie in the existence of symbols as such, but in the moment when they become detached from the substance they were intended to represent. When the kippah replaces humility, when the mezuzah substitutes for moral responsibility, when the portrait of a self-proclaimed messiah serves as a guarantee of trustworthiness, or when the rhetoric of human rights takes the place of genuine human compassion, the symbol ceases to function as a gateway to meaning and instead becomes a surrogate for both identity and morality. At that point, the signifier absorbs the signified.