Israel: How Far Can Religious Exceptionalism Go?
Israel, a Jewish State and a Democracy: How Far Can Religious Exceptionalism Go?
In Israel, the debate over the ultra-Orthodox is often portrayed as a clash between religious and secular Jews. That reading is too simplistic. The conflict is primarily between two competing forms of legitimacy: that of a community determined to preserve its identity, and that of a state that funds, protects, and mobilizes the population as a whole in the name of shared obligations.
Behind the controversies over education, public funding, and military service lies a more fundamental question: What place should religion occupy in a country that remains, despite its imperfections, the leading pluralistic democracy in the Middle East, while defining itself as a “Jewish state”?
Public Funding and Educational Freedom
The first confrontation concerns ultra-Orthodox schools.
The civic argument seems straightforward: An institution funded by the public must be accountable to the public. The state may verify how public money is used, but it may also require schools to teach a basic curriculum that enables children to become independent adults.
That reasoning is met by an equally serious objection: Financial oversight does not necessarily justify ideological control. The state may monitor how funds are spent without deciding what children should believe, think, or become.
The disagreement begins when the “core curriculum” is no longer perceived as a set of essential skills, but as an instrument of assimilation. The question is then no longer how many hours should be devoted to mathematics or English. It becomes far more profound: Who has the right to define a child’s future identity?
The ultra-Orthodox position becomes difficult to defend, however, when it combines substantial public funding, almost complete educational autonomy, and a refusal to accept the obligations that accompany state support.
Can the state be expected to remain present when it pays, but absent when it exercises oversight? Can a community seek protection without obligations, recognition without supervision, and autonomy without separation?
Conversely, the state must show that teaching basic subjects is intended to give children the means to choose their own future, not to lead them away from their identity.
Conscription as the Breaking Point
The issue becomes more serious still when it concerns military service.
For decades, Israeli governments postponed a decision in order to preserve their coalitions and avoid a confrontation with religious parties. But war, the military’s growing manpower needs, and the prolonged mobilization of reservists have made that compromise increasingly difficult to sustain.
Religious students believe that Torah study contributes to Israel’s spiritual protection. That conviction is coherent within the framework of faith. A democracy has no authority to rule on the existence or effectiveness of divine assistance.
The difficulty arises when that conviction becomes a legal argument allowing one category of citizens to avoid an obligation imposed on others.
A soldier provides a contribution that is identifiable, compulsory, dangerous, and supervised by the state. A religious student claims a spiritual contribution defined by his own community, impossible to evaluate publicly, and potentially extended without a fixed limit.
Both commitments may be valuable to those who undertake them. They do not, however, have the same material consequences. Faith may guide personal conduct; it cannot easily require another citizen to risk his life in place of the believer.
The spiritual argument also conceals highly practical concerns: fear that military service will distance young people from their community, fear of secularization, the preservation of rabbinical authority, and the maintenance of a closed educational system.
Divine assistance then appears less as the sole basis of the exemption than as the sacred formulation of a strategy of communal preservation.
Two Categories of Citizens?
The divide becomes particularly acute when some citizens interrupt their education or careers, risk their health or lives, and finance through their taxes the institutions of those exempted from service.
This is no longer merely a cultural difference. Two forms of citizenship threaten to emerge: that of protected citizens who also contribute, and that of protected citizens who remain permanently exempt.
A democracy may recognize different ways of life and establish suitable forms of civilian service. It is much harder for it to justify permanent differences in education, taxation, or national defense.
Religious parties may, of course, invoke their electoral legitimacy. Yet a parliamentary majority does not automatically make every decision just. In a coalition system, a minority party may exercise influence far beyond its numerical strength because its support is indispensable to the formation of a government.
There is a difference between having the votes needed to pass a measure and possessing sufficient legitimacy to make other citizens bear the lasting cost of an exemption.
What Does a “Jewish State” Mean?
The debate nevertheless extends beyond the status of the ultra-Orthodox. It forces Israel to define what the word “Jewish” means in the expression “Jewish state.”
It may refer to a state that guarantees the security and self-determination of the Jewish people; a country founded on Jewish history and memory; a society whose language, calendar, and symbols express Jewish culture; or a state whose laws should be inspired by religious Judaism.
These meanings can coexist, but they do not lead to the same political system.
Israel can be Jewish in a national, historical, and cultural sense without becoming a theocracy. It can make Hebrew its language, celebrate Jewish holidays, observe Shabbat as the collective day of rest, and guarantee refuge to persecuted Jews, while protecting civic equality and freedom of conscience.
But if the state’s Jewish character means that religious authorities should determine marriage, conversion, education, or military obligations, the issue changes in nature. It is no longer simply about preserving an identity. It becomes a question of who has the authority to interpret that identity and enforce the consequences.
Who Can Speak for Judaism?
Judaism is at once a religion, a culture, a collective memory, a lineage, and the basis of a national claim. It cannot therefore be confined entirely to the private sphere according to a strict conception of secularism.
Yet recognizing this dimension does not mean handing public life over to religious authorities.
The Jewish world includes the ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, traditional, liberal, Conservative, and secular Jews who define themselves through history or national belonging without observing religious commandments.
When an ultra-Orthodox party claims to defend Israel’s Jewish character, it is therefore defending one particular interpretation of Judaism. Its electoral representation gives it the right to participate in government; it does not give it the right to determine what Jewish identity must mean for all Israelis.
Does the Jewish character of the state belong to the Jewish people in all their diversity, or to religious institutions that claim to provide its authentic interpretation? That may be the debate’s central blind spot.
Jewish and Democratic
The terms “Jewish” and “democratic” are not necessarily contradictory.
Israel can be Jewish because it embodies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and democratic because it guarantees equal civil and political rights to every citizen.
The contradiction arises when one principle absorbs the other. If democracy required the erasure of every historical and national identity, Israel would lose part of its reason for being. But if the state’s Jewish character allowed religious affiliation to determine different rights and obligations, democratic equality would be seriously weakened.
The challenge, therefore, is to distinguish the identity of the state from the power of religion within the state. A country can protect a tradition without subjecting all its citizens to those who claim the exclusive right to interpret it.
This distinction also affects Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze, and other minority citizens. The state’s national purpose may be Jewish, but citizenship must remain equal and religious belief free.
The more the Jewish character of the state is given a binding religious definition, the more non-Jewish citizens may feel that they belong legally to the state without fully belonging to the nation it proclaims.
What the World Hears in the Words “Jewish State”
Outside Israel, the expression does not have a single meaning.
For much of the Jewish world, it refers first and foremost to a refuge: the guarantee that, after centuries of persecution, expulsions, and the Holocaust, Jews have a country capable of receiving and defending them.
For Israel’s allies, recognizing its Jewish character generally means recognizing the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. It does not imply approval of every policy pursued by its governments.
For Palestinians and parts of the Arab world, however, the same expression may be understood as a denial of their own national narrative, a threat to the equality of Israel’s Arab citizens, or an attempt to close the debate over the return of Palestinian refugees.
The formula that many Israelis understand as a guarantee of their survival is thus perceived by others as the institutionalization of their exclusion. The same words carry two opposing memories: for one side, the end of Jewish vulnerability; for the other, the confirmation of dispossession.
How Far Can the Exception Go?
The religious position is legitimate when it asks for respect for a faith and a way of life. It becomes far less legitimate when it transforms that faith into a permanent right to make others bear the material burdens of the nation.
The non-ultra-Orthodox majority is legitimate when it demands a common contribution. It would be far less so if it used that demand to dissolve a religious identity.
Israel must therefore reconcile three dimensions: a state of citizens founded on equal rights and obligations; the nation-state of the Jewish people founded on a shared history and right to self-determination; and a state shaped by a religious tradition that remains deeply alive.
These three dimensions can coexist as long as none seeks to eliminate the other two. Their balance becomes impossible when religious authority demands political privileges in the name of national identity, or when the civic majority treats every religious particularity as an anomaly to be removed.
The question, therefore, is not merely what place religion should occupy in the Jewish state. It is more precise:
Is Israel Jewish because it belongs to the history and self-determination of the Jewish people, or must it become increasingly religious in order to remain truly Jewish?
A second question follows:
Can a democracy accept that a community invokes divine protection in order to remain permanently exempt from the human defense of the state whose protection it nevertheless demands?
The nature of the state Israel intends to become will be shaped by how it answers these two questions.