Four questions for religious Zionists, and the answers that can save Israel

“Even an ancient vision has its moment of birth,” wrote Israeli national poet Natan Alterman. The same holds true for old and familiar truths; they too have moments of birth, or rather rebirth, in which we suddenly recognize what they mean and how deep their meaning is. This year, the old and well-worn idea that Israel is and must be a Jewish-democratic state is having such a moment. It is a simple and almost ideologically uncontentious truth, that Israel will either be simultaneously Jewish and liberal-democratic or cease to be.

The perception of this idea as axiomatic has eroded in recent years, and it is now somehow perceived as controversial. Staring each other down across a deep political and cultural divide are those who support a Jewish state predicated solely on a majority rule system of government and supporters of a liberal democracy with a Jewish majority.

As if there is a way, within the hostile Middle East, in the Holy Land of Israel, to maintain a non-Muslim state without some profound, unifying, and confident Jewish-national identity enabling it to stand firm in the face of those who would seek its destruction, that would galvanize soldiers to charge into battle, to leave their families and put their lives on hold for nine months.

Or as if there was a way to survive as a tiny state surrounded by hostile actors in the unforgiving Middle East without a liberal humanist culture of liberty, progress, economic success, and academic research, when in fact it is only such a culture that can drive technological superiority, alliances with and support from the free world, and sustainable economic growth.

The last nine months have reminded us of the unspoken message of our Declaration of Independence: These elements cannot be separated and prioritized one over the other, despite the great tension between them because the state cannot exist without either of them. Either Israel will be Jewish and liberal-democratic, or it will simply cease to be.

And on this question, for better or worse, the religious Zionist public has an outsized influence.

For many years, the religious Zionist community lived in relative comfort within the competing tensions of its name as well as between holiness, nation, and humanity. These are the three forces that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the leading light of religious Zionism, declared vital to all human existence, and whose tensions and harmonies are felt so acutely among Jews. Rabbi Kook offered a vision of connection, of balancing tensions, not leaning to the extreme on any of them, but being committed wholeheartedly, with the deepest passions of commitment and faith, to holding everything together.

Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, 1865-1935 (Central Zionist Archives)

With the general trend of polarization coursing through Israeli society, here too a sense has been growing that it is no longer possible to hold these tensions, and a choice must be made one way or the other. And just like that, the longstanding National Religious movement, with its commitment to the trifecta of the Land, the Torah, and the People of Israel, that long lay down as a bridge in an attempt to hold everything together, has been replaced by ideological camps that are far more coherent and sharply defined: Nationalist Haredi and liberal religious.

In a recent survey, pollster Dr. Menachem Lazar found that 28 percent of those in the religious-Zionist sector self-identify as Nationalist Haredi (known by the Hebrew acronym “Hardal”), and a further 20 percent as religious liberals. The rest identify as “mainstream religious,” a majority that currently finds itself politically powerless, with the party’s political power and much of its educational influence now in the hands of the Nationalist Haredi stream.

This same process happened in different ways to the traditional Mizrachi voters. Their worldview too is based on balancing inner tensions, living them, without fully defining, elaborating or explaining them in clear ideological terms. They too have caught the polarization virus currently raging in the West.

The result is that groups that once helped hold Israeli society together, embodying Israel’s secret formula of tradition alongside progress and East meets West, have become part of the malaise tearing it apart from within. The decline of this once-influential moderating presence has heightened the conflict between nationalism and liberalism, between Judaism and liberal democracy, jeopardizing Israel’s ability to continue to exist.

To be part of the solution and save the country, the mainstream religious community faces decisions on four key issues: Whether its fundamental alliance is with the Zionist public or with the Haredi bloc; the nature of its messianic yearning; whether Israel is part of the family of nations; and whether sectoral interests override national interests.

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Decision number one: Is its fundamental alliance with the Knesset and voting public’s Zionist bloc or with the Haredi bloc?

This is not about whether it is possible to be both Zionist and religious, but about whether your political affiliation, your political bloc, is with the Haredi public or the Zionist public. This will determine whether a Zionist coalition takes the reins here, one that works doggedly and even aggressively to expand the pool of military recruits needed to man the 15 additional battalions the IDF requires, or a religious coalition (“Israel of believers”) that continues to push for exemptions without a clear plan for how to defend the country.

Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines (1839-1915) (PD/Wikimedia)

This question of political alliance is the exact question that led to the founding in 1902 by the great Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines of the Mizrachi movement, forerunner of the National Religious Party after statehood. Reines and his colleagues took this decision despite being part and parcel of the Haredi community, and despite the extraordinary personal prices they paid through boycotts and denouncements, and despite the vocal and fierce disagreements with the secular society of the time about the character of the Zionist movement and its education – disagreements no less fierce than the ones between the secular and religious communities today. And still, Rabbi Reines decreed that the effort to build a refuge for the Jewish people and to establish a Jewish state required a partnership with all those committed to the cause, even at the cost of breaking up the partnership with their fellow devout Jews. While Rabbi Kook is the better-known figure and a towering influence in many ways, he never participated in party politics. It was Rabbi Reines who laid down the fundamental template for productive cooperation between religious and secular Zionists.

Religious Zionism was for decades a creative, complicated movement of different currents and streams of thought. Today, the political party that bears the Religious Zionism title has taken the opposite view. Its alliance is with the non-Zionist Haredim, an alliance it maintains even as the war rages on, with the sons and daughters of the Religious Zionist movement paying a huge personal price for the dire lack of fighting personnel. This pact is upheld even when it means funding and expanding the isolationist Haredi education system and even on questions of the identity and character of Israel’s rabbis and religious services available in Israel.

In all of these, the Religious Zionism Party is acting as a full partner in the separatist, isolationist, and draft-dodging Haredi position. The future of the Chief Rabbinate may not be a life and death question, but there are two other matters where the stakes for Israel are existential: education, with its ramifications for the economic integration of the ultra-Orthodox community, and military enlistment. We seem to be right back at that same fork in the road where Rabbi Reines once stood more than 120 years ago, with the future of the Zionist project at stake. The same fork, just making the opposite choice.

In the wake of the Simchat Torah massacre, with the existential meaning of these questions brought into sharp relief, it is up to the Religious Zionist mainstream to decide whether it supports this decision by the Religious Zionism Party to fortify its alliance with the Haredi parties or whether it chooses to pursue a political alliance with those who sit alongside them in their tanks on the frontlines, in the workplace, the universities and the shared cultural spaces. Perhaps it is precisely because it is clear that the enlistment process for a new generation of young Haredim will be long and arduous, demanding steely resolve and difficult decisions alongside sensitivity and a delicate touch, that the question of a political alliance is so crucial. Only a Zionist coalition that is not dependent on the Haredi parties will be able to pursue enlistment and end the funding of education networks with severe irregularities, exploitation of teaching staff and no teaching of core subjects. And it is only if the religious Zionist community demands involvement in such a Zionist alliance of its leaders that such an alliance can exist.

Decision number two is between a fundamentalist zeal for Messiah and a pragmatic yearning for Messiah.

Are we on a divine one-way road, guided inexorably from above towards perfect and complete redemption, or on a path, yes, of faith, yet paved with possibility, probability, diplomatic relations, economic considerations? Do we work to balance messianic faith with political realism or does messianic purity demand that we go for broke and trust in God to make it all work out?

Messianic faith itself, that yearning for Messiah that has sustained us for thousands of years, is not the problem. Perhaps the opposite. Zionism is a movement of messianic proportions: Messianism is a driving force, an inner strength without which the Zionist project could scarcely exist. But when not balanced with clear-eyed assessments of national interests, messianism becomes fanatic zeal that puts the entire project at risk.

David Ben-Gurion stands as an example of powerful messianic energy and faith balanced by firm pragmatism. In his article “There’s No Zionism Without Messianism,” retired general and commentator Gershon Hacohen rightly argues that Ben-Gurion’s definition of the end goal of Zionism as “nothing less than the full and whole redemption of the People of Israel in the Land of Israel, the Gathering of Israel, a people’s sovereignty,” is an expression of messianism. A text such as the one Ben Gurion wrote during the First World War leaves no room for doubt:

From the abyss of this darkest night that envelops our people in this time of crisis, a light is peeking through. The aspiration for salvation is carving a path through the hearts of the people. ‘The dead shall rise and the dead shall be shaken.’ The terrible catastrophe, the worst to have befallen us in the days since the fall of Bar Kochba, has finally woken the people, and from within the tempest comes the call of Messiah.

But at the same time, it is impossible to ignore the staunch pragmatism that guided the very same Ben-Gurion. The decision to accept the Partition Plan in the face of opposition from others who saw it as an acceptance of impossible borders and an unacceptable concession of the ancient dream. Accepting reparation payments from Germany at a time when the acrid stench of the gas chambers still hung heavy in the air and the scars were still fresh, despite harsh and justified ethical protestations against normalizing the Nazi devil and seemingly trading on the blood of the Jewish people. Despite it all, he decided in favor of the pragmatic economic necessity to build the state and rehabilitate the survivors.

The man who once declared the “Third Kingdom of Israel” from the podium of the Knesset, who wrote to IDF soldiers, “We will once more be able to sing the song of Moses and the Children of Israel of old: ‘…all the inhabitants of Canaan melted. May dread and fright fall upon them. Eilat shall once more be the main Israeli port in the south, and Yotvata, known as Tiran, shall return to be part of the Third Kingdom of Israel’,” was also the pragmatist who decided the following day on withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, recognizing the risk that the profound crisis in relations with the United States and France would harm the nascent state.

Here too, the political party that leads the Nationalist Haredi stream and claims the mantle of Religious Zionism as a whole chooses the fanatical stream of messianic belief that is without balance or moderation. Economic considerations, diplomatic calculations, troop numbers, arms, sanctions; all of these are seen as “the vanities of this world” that are dwarfed by the belief that “the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind.”

“So, if the economy collapses, there will be rationing like there was after the Holocaust. We’ll just start over,” one Nationalist Haredi rabbi told me. “And Iran will simply wait for forty years until you rebuild a first-world army?” I asked. “G-d will provide” came the response.

International credit rating, the need for investment in growth engines and to cut payments that drive unemployment or even informed decisions regarding the debt-to-GDP ratio pale in comparison to the economy of hewing to a literal-minded interpretation of God’s law. And sure enough, international financial sanctions, International Court of Justice verdicts, are not taken into consideration when set against “the miracle of the past year.” Here too the mainstream will have to decide — can messianism and pragmatism coexist, or is it to be messianism alone?

Decision number three: Attitudes towards the West and the world in general

Are we blessed and destined to be “a people who live apart” or are we constantly striving to be a part of the family of nations? Seeing everything Western as tainted, as “Christian mores” and utterly rejecting the values of humanism as inherently opposed to Jewish tradition. Or do we see the values of human dignity and liberty, autonomy, and equality that are so fundamental to liberal culture as a foundation for what Rabbi Kook saw as the transition from a time of moral inebriation to the creation of “a kingdom without evil or barbarism?”

Yes, liberal democracies are currently experiencing a time of profound crisis, and yes, current progressivism threatens liberalism and brings with it a lot of hypocrisy and antisemitism in the way it addresses human rights. But that is exactly why we must decide: are we better served by separating the wheat from the chaff, finding a better balance between patriotism and liberalism (in its original connotation), or sealing ourselves away and rejecting everything that is Western and humanist?

This is a question with dramatic practical implications. Israel’s entire national security praxis is built on its alignment with the West. Ammunition, military pacts, extensive exports to Europe (a vast proportion of the Israeli economy). There has never been a leadership here that has told itself fairy tales about how little ol’ Israel can stand entirely alone – not until now. What’s more, the practical questions are not purely practical, they rest on an ethical bedrock.

People check a burnt car a day after an attack by extremist settlers on the village of Jit in the West Bank, on August 16, 2024. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP)

Today, the Nationalist Haredi leadership is pursuing an approach of isolationism and hostility towards the West. It can sometimes appear as though the model from which they are drawing inspiration is that of our neighboring countries. Reverence towards the land as a value in and of itself, the need to stand tough and “speak in a language the Arabs understand” have slid from a terrible necessity to ensure our place here down the slippery slope of embracing base ethical norms. These norms scorn the international laws of war, the rule of law, efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and tolerate looting, extrajudicial killing, and mob violence. They erase the repudiation of racism and long for a country “without the Supreme Court and without B’Tselem.” The question is not about the actions themselves — there have always been transgressors and there always will be. The question is about norms. Here too, the mainstream will have to choose. Here too, without a feasible alternative international alliance, the decision has existential implications for Israel.

The fourth decision, and perhaps the most difficult of them all: Are we a nation or a sector?

Do we continue to fight for “our institutions,” bigger education budgets for “our children,” eligibility for automatic deferral of service in favor of learning, for “our children” (as opposed to one in ten for graduates of state education broadly), or do we act out of a commitment to our society as a whole? Is it only religious children who are our children, or is it all Israeli children?

Here too, it is worth examining Ben-Gurion’s decision to break up his own Poale Zion movement, its education stream and its numerous institutions, turning it from “a class grouping status to a people.” The tradeoff was to have a less inward-looking community life and fewer privileges but with a broader influence and social-cultural presence. This is a difficult and scary decision because its price is high and direct, less in budgetary terms and more in terms of identity. It requires confidence in our ability to educate children in faith and fealty to a certain way of life without constantly categorizing and filtering into “us” and “them,” without sub-definitions to Jewish and Israeli.

Here too, the Nationalist Haredi movement has made its choice clear. I saw the clearest expression of this in a 2014 article by Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister. The headline was “The People of Israel Deserve to Receive More,” and in it he wrote that “the values being put into practice by the National Religious public are what guides the entire People of Israel, and so it deserves preferential treatment in the education budget. The religious Zionist worldview is what the People of Israel need today above all… It is almost the only thing that can save us from ourselves… It is a positive and constructive loftiness ….”

This perspective (reflected by many others) posits that an investment in the religious Zionist public would trickle down to the entire People of Israel and that it is possible to lead through loftiness and aloofness, and by turning political power to financial privilege. The opposing viewpoint would say that after the past year, the chances of such “positive loftiness” being well-received by the same “People of Israel” are incredibly low. So we can continue to barricade ourselves behind the fortifications of our sector, but the price we will pay will be in our ability to lead and influence. Either we attempt to take that holiness, the people and humanity, and use them as the guiding light of the people as a whole, or we opt out and look after “our children.”

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These are the four decisions to be made at what is truly an existential moment for the State of Israel. I am part of the religious Zionist movement, and I am an Israeli Jew who lives in fear of our destruction. To me, the decision to pursue a Zionist alliance, maintain a pragmatic yearning for Messiah, align with the free world, and concede our sectarianism can be a critical part of saving our country and preventing the destruction of the Third Temple.

We can do it.