Israel--A Special Section - For the Sake of the Land
LORBERBAUM, MENACHEM
For the Sake of the Land Jerusalem Yitzchak Rabin's assassination was intimately connected with, indeed climaxed, another Israeli tragedy: the 20-year transformation of religious Zionism into what...
...Zionist religion's declaring the precedence of land over state has also meant an indifference to regional politics...
...It has earned Jews everywhere a new dignity through its cultural, social, economic, and military achievements...
...they are skeptical of Palestinian sincerity and still smart from the pain of terrorism...
...Unwittingly, they laid the worldly foundations for a nation that will flower as a religious and spiritual center...
...It must spark a resurgence of the theology of complexity and help provide the scholarship and creativity that will be required if Israel is to draw its strength and individuality from classic Jewish teachings...
...If religious Zionism is to be revitalized, it must put Messianism on hold and once more deal with day-to-day reality...
...The settler movement it gave rise to, for example, did not pause to ponder how Israel would absorb hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without becoming abinational state...
...By coping with difference it symbolized the potential for developing a unique culture that combined the invigorating effects of political independence with the ingrained sources of Jewish religiosity and moral sensibility...
...Israel has learned, too, that there are other limits to military prowess...
...Instead, the Palestinians were conveniently ignored for decades...
...Many involve issues Jews have not had to contend with for centuries—or ever before...
...All this clearly suggests that the debate about religious legitimacy carried on in the initial years of the Zionist movement is no longer relevant...
...Rabbi Yehuda Amital, leader of Meimad and now a member of Prime Minister Shimon Peres' Cabinet, asserted that "there is no halacha in politics...
...The audience consisted of educators, professors, rabbis, and activists representing the entire religious spectrum: from Gush Emunim on the far Right to Netivot Shalom, the religious peace organization on the dovish Left...
...In doing so it rejected a role that desperately needs to be filled here...
...As "a critic from within," Bin-Nun has warned since the 1980s?when a group of mostly Gush Emunim members formed the so-called Jewish Underground and committed acts of terrorism against Palestinians—that the settler movement has been losing its moral claim to the land...
...it turned its back on its responsibility to the society for the sake of the Land...
...The intifada demonstrated that the Palestinian problem can't be solved by the Army?not because it lacks the firepower to crush uprisings, but because the societal cost is unacceptable...
...The Six Day War risks the same fate, unless it ultimately yields agreements with the Palestinians and Syria paralleling those reached with Egypt and Jordan...
...Is it possible for a Jewish nation to devise a viable democratic system that can accommodate every segment of its citizenry...
...Yet they are aware of the damage the occupation has been doing to Israel's soul...
...For a generation of religious youth educated in Israel, exercising power thus poses no problems...
...Not until the assassination, though, did several Orthodox Israeli rabbis counter individuals propagating seriously distorted interpretations of halacha by unequivocally defending democracy and natural morality...
...The numerous small settlements dotting the West Bank and Gaza today do not make up any coherent map Israel could sustain...
...It is a birthright...
...Election in this case is not conceived of as a calling or a shared destiny...
...Zionist religion sees the State of Israel as the vehicle for the redemption of the people of Israel...
...What they discovered confirmed what they already knew...
...The task can be expected to assume increased urgency as the peace process advances and permits a focusing of attention on the secular-religious discord that has until now been overshadowed by the business of survival...
...Such veneration of the Land not only precludes compromise, it excludes any data that do not conform to the purity of its ideal...
...Israel's significance has to be seen in the light of its accomplishments and the challenges that remain to be met, not in the context of an a priori scheme...
...Zionist religion has gradually eroded those attitudes...
...National policy, he maintained, can only be made by the sovereign and legitimately elected government...
...It cherished full participation in the rebuilding of Israel...
...Democracy, they submit, is not a Jewish principle...
...An entire Orthodox generation has been taught that territorial compromise of the Holy Land is as grave a transgression as idolatry, incest or murder, and is subject to the injunction yehareg v'al'ya'avor?suffer death rather than commit these crimes...
...The meeting was arranged jointly by the Right-wing National Religious Party and the Centrist Meimad movement...
...Many Israelis, to be sure, doubt the feasibility of coming to terms with the Palestinians...
...But the Messianic conception of Zionism falsely inflates the state's importance and fails to take into account the problems that have to be confronted in an as yet unredeemed universe...
...The contention ignores as well the large contingents of Arabs who in the past were regular National Religious Party voters...
...According to its Messianic theology, the divine historical plan cunningly manipulated the secular Zionists to end the disembodied existence of exile...
...It espoused a theology of complexity that affirmed the possibility of joining hands with secular Jews in a common national enterprise...
...In the eyes of some of Zionist religion's rabbinic authorities, democratic procedures in any event are hardly of paramount importance...
...The existence of the State of Israel is a fact...
...That they do not believe in this process is immaterial...
...Ardor for the Land has made it the foremost advocate of occupation...
...In contrast, Gush Emunim would seek to reassert ancient Jewish sovereignty throughout the conquered territories by initiating a settlement policy that has proved, at the least, to be shortsighted...
...The religious constituency in Israel has long been split on these questions...
...The fading away of religious Zionism has been a profound loss for the country at large...
...Their differences were not primarily about the peace process...
...Total insensitivity to that toll has been the greatest lapse of Zionist religion...
...It is the major center of Torah study, and may be the main Jewish population center in a few decades if assimilation in the United States continues at its current rate...
...Religious Zionism ceased to be a formative force in Israel once it let itself be overtaken by those who started preaching that only loyalty to the Land could meet the country's existential challenges...
...This holds that halacha is the command of the divine sovereign, and all personal autonomy must give way to the dictates of God's recognized representatives...
...The religious community in Israel today is unevenly divided between democrats and antidemocrats...
...The Allon Plan proposed new borders for Israel that would take into account both the existence of Palestinian population centers and the country's defense requirements: "maximum security for the State of Israel with a minimum of Arab population...
...It has learned that military victories are of little value if they cannot be translated into new political realities accepted by the international community...
...Complexity has been overwhelmed by ideological rigidity...
...Their mind-set isolated many settlers and much of the religious youth from a maturation the nation has undergone over mm the past decade...
...It was the first time in years that many of these people found themselves in the same room...
...Mow Israel faces questions critical to determining its future...
...And its position is buttressed by what might be described as the "command model" of halacha (traditional Jewish Law) and of rabbinic authority...
...On the Wednesday following Rabin's death, the leadership of the fragmented religious Zionists gathered in Jerusalem for an evening of communal introspection...
...It means the votes of non-Jewish citizens do not count in making a valid majority, because only a Jewish majority can determine Jewish policy...
...What should the relationship between synagogue and state be...
...But the days of the pioneering immigrants of the Second Aliyah have passed, and the attempts to recapture their ethos have at best had limited success...
...It has no inner moral compass and lacks the sagacity to negotiate differences...
...Zionist religion, for instance, was predicated on flaunting power...
...Cumulatively persuasive for religious Jews was the sequence of events that began with the signing of the Balfour Declaration at the end of World War I, continued with the creation of the State of Israel, and culminated in the breathtaking 1967 conquests of the Old City of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria...
...For Eretz Yisrael is singularly capable of generating prophetic inspiration, the true goal of sacral history...
...When Likud takes the same stance it ignores the fact that there is a Druze Knesset member in the party...
...But nowhere has the rift been as sharply delineated as it was by the speakers on the stage that Wednesday night...
...Can it again be made a vital component of the nation's fabric and a genuine option for religious youth...
...The seduction of the Zionist religion proved irresistible to many religious young people enamored of the romantic nation-building period...
...they were about democracy and about morality...
...Furthermore, the wholeness of the Land of Israel is not merely a matter of secure borders but of spiritual integrity...
...Certainly the bourgeois villas in suburban settlements like Kedumim or Karnei Shomron do not evoke the bygone era...
...For the Sake of the Land Jerusalem Yitzchak Rabin's assassination was intimately connected with, indeed climaxed, another Israeli tragedy: the 20-year transformation of religious Zionism into what Hebrew University anthropologist Gideon Aran has termed "Zionist religion...
...Israel needs to articulate criteria for wielding power in the contemporary world...
...It has afforded them a national identity they craved during centuries of exile...
...Zionism succeeded in its mission of re-establishing a Jewish homeland...
...The conversion was spearheaded by Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, an authentically Zionist avant garde movement that has gone from the center of Israeli life to the fringe and become a sect...
...The invasion of Lebanon may have been a military success, but it was a political failure...
...it is stronger than their individual desires or intentions...
...For me, perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the meeting was the democratic pronouncements it allowed...
...In this struggle religious Zionism—or its remnants—has a crucial role to play...
...revival reverberated in their souls...
...military control of the Palestinians is not an issue...
...Can religious Zionism be resurrected...
...Following the Six Day War, then Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon attempted to spur diplomacy in the Middle East...
...Modern statehood generates problems whose solutions cannot be found in a tradition that has never had to deal with them...
...But the distance between what one is willing to die for and what one is willing to kill for, the young assassin Yigal Amir has shown us, is dreadfully short...
...Election means standing beyond judgment by others and possessing values that outweigh theirs...
...When they launched the intifada and could no longer be disregarded, occupation was justified as a necessity: ein breira—there is no choice...
...At the same podium Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a prominent voice of conscience in Gush Emunim, argued passionately that democracy is the best form of government...
...It follows, therefore, that if the elected government of Israel pursues a policy endangering the realization of redemption—especially by severing the organic connection of the people to the Land—it must be stopped at all costs...
...Israel has experienced the limits of power...
...They came to see if the religious Zionism they had all been brought up on still exists...
...It needs to develop an indigenous posture that combines the moral insights of Judaism with present-day political life and theory...
...It emerged originally from a debate among the Orthodox over whether the Zionist movement was a legitimate Jewish undertaking...
...Beyond serving as a haven, what should the form and function of a Jewish state be at the end of the 20th century...
...Developments during the present century added to the appeal of the fundamentalist view (even though it neglected the enormity and ferocity of the Holocaust in its historical appraisal...
...For many Jews reared on centuries of looking forward to redemption, this became Zionism's primary justification...
...Meanwhile Israel continues to confront the enormous task of fashioning a worldly society capable of achieving internal harmony, and of molding a national character that can withstand the external vicissitudes of life in the Middle East...
...The country is home to a vibrant and diverse Jewish community...
...Proponents presented a number of responses, including one that saw the Jewish national reawakening in the fin-de-siecle as a Messianic harbinger...
...Similarly, Zionist religion's notion of Jewish chosenness, or election, has come dangerously close to being a doctrine of supremacy...
...It is a generation that is out of touch with the life and hopes of the larger Israeli society...
...It began to conflict with democratic government the moment certain rabbis deemed themselves competent to issue halachic rulings on matters of national policy...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 9
