Religious Zionism’s Dangerous Euphoria
Sitting in a hotel lobby somewhere between Maine and New Hampshire as the sun set on a restful New England Shabbat vacation, I got to meet a family from Israel who happened to be in the same hotel for a vacation this summer. “Things in Israel are not the way you see them in the media,” the religious Zionist woman assured me. Yet the more I speak to members of the religious Zionist community in Israel, the more alarmed I am by how dangerously disconnected many of them have become from the reality in Israel and around the world. This disconnect between what is happening, enabled by the warmth and blessings of a closed community, is not just a threat to Israel’s very existence; it has already caused Israel and Jewish people incalculable harm.
Speaking in July of 2024, Religious Zionist MK Orit Struk has, now infamously, said we are living through a “period of a miracle–t’kufah shel nes,” She is not the only one saying that. While Jews in the diaspora are experiencing the worst wave of antisemitism and instability since the Holocaust, as countless Israelis face unspeakable hardship and loss, many in the religious Zionist community are living in an engineered euphoria that seeks to actively disconnect them from the reality we are all living through.
Already in 2024, a well-organized campaign trickled down to many religious Zionist institutions with slogans like “total victory” and “generation of victory” amidst Israel fighting a war on seven different fronts with none of the seven coming to a decisive conclusion.
That euphoria either continues to disconnect many religious Zionist Israelis to this day from reality, blinding them to the extremely serious challenges the Jewish people and the state of Israel face today. Sadly, this euphoria takes place even when reality is undeniable. In a way that is similar to the pre-Second Temple destruction days, many religious Zionist Jews and Israel continue to hold on to those beliefs even in the face of the most easily verifiable and demonstrable facts.
Those who subscribe to this worldview are not very aware of the fact that almost 300,000 Israelis have left Israel in the past 4 years since Israel’s current government has been elected; they are focused on the few hundred who are making Aliyah and see that as a trend of everyone coming to Israel.
The people subscribing to this way of life will tell you that the daily or weekly videos of Hilltop youth committing acts of violence, theft, and even murder are very few outcasts who have been widely condemned by the entire religious Zionist community with no state backing or communal tolerance for their behavior.
They do not see the videos viewed by millions of Christians around the world of religious Zionist Israelis spitting as they pass by churches and the Old City of Jerusalem, or the act of harassment and violence carried out by young Orthodox Jews on Yom Yerushalayim.
The urgent warnings of physicians saying that too many doctors are leaving Israel because they feel like religious parties are imposing restrictive laws that will de facto make Israel into a theocracy in which they cannot live are either ignored or believed to not exist.
Followers of this Tkufa Shel Ness – a time of miracles – doctrine do not believe that public opinion around the world matters at all.
The enormous and unprecedented sanctions package recently delivered by several countries on Israel is just like another meaningless UN resolution in their view. They see no need to tell Daniella Weiss to stop giving interviews to international media about her belief that Israel should conquer and occupy Syria, Lebanon, and other places she views as biblically mandated to be taken over by Israel. They are not bothered by one of the oldest and most respected TV shows in America, 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl, being told by a religious Zionist man in Israel that he is not worried about Israel losing the United States as an ally, or the scope and publicity of Hilltop Youth violence.
They see no problem or actual harm coming from Itamar Ben Gvir being the best content creator anti-Semites could ever have asked for or Smotrich telling Saudi Arabia, as it considers normalization with Israel: “no thank you, they can keep riding camels.”
Writing in 1194 to the Sages of Provence on the topic of astrology, Moses Maimonides famously attributes the destruction of the First Temple and our exile to the fact that the people of Israel believed in astrology, idol worship, and other nonsensical beliefs, disconnecting them from reality and taking them away from engaging in military strategy and planning their survival.
There is nothing more terrifying than looking at the religious Zionist community in Israel today and noticing the alternate reality in which people are living. The arrogance of thinking that Israel can easily survive the destruction of the US-Israel alliance, the absolute disregard for Israelis they identify as “the left” or “Tel Avivniks” who feel like they have no future in Israel, the disregard for the opinion of diaspora Jewry, the thought that Israel can easily survive European sanctions, nobody entertaining what might happen when a UN vote with no US veto will unilaterally create a Palestinian state on the entirety of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the belief that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah have all been dismantled, and so much more.
There are currently two religious Zionist parties running on a platform that promises Palestinian mass migration out of Gaza and the West Bank as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Putting aside the immorality, blindness to our history, and absolute disregard for the meaning of public opinion, the idea that a majority of religious Zionist Jews in Israel believe that they will get five million Palestinians to get up, find a place to go to, and leave is reflective of a terrifying mental state and disconnection from reality that endangers Israel’s very future.
It is beyond my understanding how a community that sees itself as following brilliant minds like Rabbi A.Y. Kook, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbi Samson Raphel Hirsch, Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg, and other brilliant and liberally minded figures has come to where it is today. The image of religous Zionist communities rooted in principles like Torah U’Mada and Torah Im Derech Eretz is slowly disappearing and being replaced by de facto Jewish Palestinians living a cowboy fantasy, arriving at weddings on camels and horsebacks and on the back of white Toyota pickup trucks–yes, the same kind we have seen on October 7th–where being ungroomed and unkempt are signs of high social status, and too many aspects of life borrowed from their Palestinian neighbors.
Just yesterday, the rabbis of Gush Etzion came out with a revolutionary Halachic ruling: you cannot steal the olives of your Palestinian neighbors. Sadly, anyone who knows the rabbinic landscape in Israel knows that these rabbis are the ones considered to be the more liberal and humanist ones, and I am guessing that our Toyota-pick-up-truck-riding, hoodie-wearing, horseback-riding, large pe’ot and all head kippah-gear-wearing brethren north of Gush Etzion might not follow the Halachic opinion of those rabbis.
Putting aside the moral shame and societal Halachic decompensation of this situation, what is perhaps most shocking about this is the thought that nobody sees this all, as if this footage of this moral collapse is not on the screen of hundreds of millions of people around the world, on the front page of the world’s most read magazines, and on prime-time legacy television screens around the world. On the occasion that we do discuss these things, we speak about them like they are some hush-hush problem of troubled youth, when in fact this has become the face of religious zionism to so many millions around the world.
To those living inside Israel telling us, “it isn’t like what you see in the news”, I say: check the news again. Sadly, it is very much like what we read in the news, and too many people going to the polls two weeks from today are missing that point. If you think that another four years of Smotrich and Ben Gvir, of the chaos on the hilltops, will have no real on-the-ground consequences, you haven’t read about November 1947 and how public opinion and the international process have very real consequences.
