Religious Zionism and its Discontents

It’s hard to overstate how incoherent the ideology of Israel’s religious right has become. Figures like Smotrich and Ben Gvir claim to stand for “tradition”—but what they promote is a bizarre fusion of biblical nationalism, medieval halachic formalism, and modern ethnonationalism. These elements are not organically continuous; they are radically disjointed, drawn from different historical strata and forced into a single, brittle ideological form.

On one hand, they demand a state governed by Halacha, but the Halacha in question is a codified system that only took shape in the 16th century under Rabbi Yosef Karo, designed for a people living in exile. On the other hand, they appeal to the restoration of biblical institutions—Temple, monarchy, sacrifice—which are entirely alien to the structure and intent of post-Temple halachic law.

They ignore that this very halachic tradition enshrines the Three Oaths, which prohibit mass return and the re-establishment of sovereignty without the messiah—once the backbone of Orthodox opposition to Zionism. They have come to police the boundaries of Jewish identity itself, imposing rigid definitions that block the organic evolution of Jewish national culture.

Zionism itself was, in many ways, a return to the biblical mode: the reintegration of Jewish peoplehood into history, the reclamation of national destiny in modern terms. Halacha, by contrast, was never intended as a framework for state power; it was a plural, recursive legal conversation that preserved coherence in exile. It offered not sovereignty, but continuity through dispersion.

What the religious right constructs today is not tradition, but an invented ideology masquerading as continuity. It is a “tradition” that never existed—an amalgam built on selective citation and pseudo-authority. But if such an invention is possible, then invention is not the problem. The question is what kind of invention we choose.

Jewish continuity does not lie in the reification of the past, but in thinking-with the past as an open archive—a living storehouse of forms, memories, and meanings. The task is not to impose halachic rule or replicate biblical structures, but to engage our inheritance as a generative resource. That is where true faithfulness begins—not in rigid restoration, but in the courage to take responsibility for the present as part of a people still becoming itself.