The Jewish Power Blog: The Power of Authenticity
We keep telling ourselves and anyone who will listen that Judaism and Zionism are somehow the same thing. However, a century ago that was by no means intuitively obvious, as tens of thousands of Jews were sure that Herzl’s proposal to create a Jewish state was a bad idea. Many Western European and American Jews, struggling toward emancipation and integration into their environments, did not identify with the claim that the Jews were a nation entitled to their own nation-state, and feared that that claim would undermine their efforts at integration. And in Eastern Europe (and America) the members of the Jewish Socialist Bund similarly pursued a universalistic vision of redemption – an egalitarian socialist utopia in which the Jews would be able to maintain their cultural autonomy (in Yiddish), anywhere. But perhaps the largest sector of the Jewish population who opposed Zionism were the masses of Orthodox Jews who saw the attempt to redeem the nation by creating a Jewish state in the land of Israel as a blasphemous usurpation of God’s prerogative. The Talmudic texts are clear: we are not to try to “force the end” or even to calculate when it might occur. We are to wait patiently, do the mitzvot, and pray for God to forgive our sins and “renew our days as of old” when God is ready.
However, given the misery of Russian Jewry at the turn of the century, it was hard to resist the attraction of escape and empowerment. While most Orthodox Jews remained firm in their rejection of Zionism, two workarounds were found to “permit” it:
- Many rabbis accepted the possibility of simply moving to the land of Israel, living there, working there, escaping persecution there – but with no messianic implications. This was not “the end time,” no judgement day was approaching; we would just migrate to Israel and be safe and productive there; indeed, statehood was not the point – we might be just an autonomous community within the Ottoman empire. Thus, when, frustrated by the difficulties of colonizing Palestine, Herzl proposed Uganda as a temporary refuge, it was the Orthodox Zionists (the Mizrahi party) who supported him; their perspective was practical, not mystical.
- In 1905 Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (1865-1935) immigrated from Lithuania to become the chief rabbi of Yafo. Scholarly yet charismatic, both a kabbalist and an activist, Rabbi Kook developed a revolutionary concept harmonizing Orthodoxy with Zionism: he taught that the Zionist effort to create a Jewish polity in the land of Israel can be seen as “the first sprouting of our redemption.” That is, the messianic process has started, and Zionism is part of it. Not only, according to his view, could an Orthodox Jew be a committed Zionist, but even secular Zionists should be seen as contributing, by their efforts, to the messianic redemption.
Rabbi Kook opened the way to the integration of Orthodox Jews into Zionist state-building and was the founding father of what we call religious Zionism. As we’ll see (in a future post), this happy synthesis has had perhaps unintended consequences; it turned out that Rabbi Kook’s understanding could be interpreted, as his main disciple did, in a utopian/universalistic direction – or, as his son did, in an apocalyptic, “now is the end-time!” direction. It is the latter that stands behind Israel’s current policies vis a vis the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, large numbers Orthodox Jews were not convinced by Rabbi Kook’s creative solution, but continue to believe Zionism and Orthodox belief to be incompatible. For them, the state of Israel is just another secular state. While it may be better to live in the holy land than elsewhere, still, the state itself is at best neutral, at worst a sinful usurpation of God’s authority. Thus, for many of these Jews (haredim = “God-fearing”), who constitute around 15% of Israel’s population, the institutions of the state are not holy, not messianic, but purely instrumental – to be “used” when possible to support the effort to preserve their communities and way of life. Serving in the army is seen as both supporting Zionism’s false messianic claim and as an assimilatory danger. If their leadership can use their electoral clout to obtain benefits like draft exemption, and subsidies for their private education system, just as they might attempt to do in any state anywhere, why not?
So if 85% of the Jewish population have to send their children to the army, and to under-resourced schools teaching subjects like math and English intended to integrate them into a modern economy, while seeing their taxes go toward subsidizing haredi exceptionalism, why don’t they rebel?
The simple answer is that in Israel’s fragmented electoral system, no party has ever been able to form a governing coalition without “buying” the support of the haredi parties by accepting their demands.
The more complicated answer is that despite the underlying Zionist assumption that Judaism is a nationality, not a religion, and that now that we have a nation-state, Jewish religion is “optional,” the separation has not been clean at all. Despite the proud, even defiant, secularism of many Israelis – and the alienation and resentment they feel toward the haredim, nevertheless, it is possible to discern a usually unspoken surrender: a feeling that with respect to Judaism, it is the haredim who are the real deal, the authentic bearers of the tradition, without whom we would lose our Jewish bearings. They are the keepers of the flame, the ones who keep the Jewish state Jewish. Can’t live with them – but can’t live without them.
We have never resolved the old debate between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am: a Jewish state? Or a state of the Jews? For over a century, the liberal movements in Judaism have been quietly offering a resolution, but for the most part that voice has been drowned out in the strident power struggle rooted in the secular majority’s lack of a coherent answer to the question, “What makes a Jewish state Jewish?” Maybe it’s time to listen.
