Religious Renaissance-Can It Happen in Israel?
PELI, PINCHAS H.
Apopular Zionist song asks mi y'malel gevurot yisrael, "Who can express the mighty acts of Israel?" Few recognize that this is actually a paraphrase, not a quotation, from Psalm 106:2:...
...Most synagogues confine their Shabbat services to an hour and a half, quite early on Saturday mornings...
...He saw their turn against religion as an inevitable element in a desirable revolution in Jewish life, as a way of discarding the galut mentality...
...Jewish studies are flourishing in every Israeli university...
...The Zionist revolution that gave birth to the State of Israel contained a paradox: On the one hand, it strove to bring the Jewish people back to its ancient homeland, the Holy Land, and back to its ancient language, the Holy Tongue...
...So they, too, were happy with the arrangement...
...people gave their children biblical names...
...At one time it had offices in London, Brussels, Zurich and New York...
...Rabbi Kook attempted to institutionalize his Yerushalayim movement...
...Unfortunately, this kind of religion looms heavily on the Israeli horizon...
...The change of a single word speaks volumes...
...The rabbi is not connected with a synagogue or community, but serves as 'a government functionary whose livelihood rests solely in the hands of the politicians...
...It requires two things: faith and a program of action...
...Fate intervened, however...
...What does it mean to be involved in the fight for the Jewish people...
...If we believe that we live in a unique time in Jewish history, marked by the Holocaust on the one hand and the birth of the state of Israel on the other, if we believe that Judaism still has something valuable—perhaps vital—to offer a troubled world, then we should be ready to start working for Yerushalayim, just as we did for Zion...
...Of course there was always a small but vigorous observant population, even among the yishuv, the pre-1948 Zionist settlement of Palestine, fortified by a multitude of institutions, ranging from schools and yeshivot to Chassidic centers, financial and economic enterprises, and special housing projects...
...Today, religion in Israel is no longer looked upon as alien or even hostile to the formation of the ideal new Jew...
...Sabras never held a sefer Torah (Torah scroll) in their hands...
...More than 60 years ago Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was then the rabbi of a congregation in London, issued a call for the establishment of a movement in Jewish life to be named "Yerushalayim" (Jerusalem), which would operate in parallel to the Zionist movement...
...Since 1977, Aguda has spoken bluntly as an ideology in the name of Torah...
...The foundations of the Jewish state were laid by its founders upon the religion of secularism...
...While the state of Israel is of little importance to the ba'alei t'shuva movement, the state is of primary importance for another group...
...This movement actually came to Israel from outside—brought by a few young American Jews, some stopping over on their way to India, who were disenchanted with Western culture...
...Perhaps the time has now come to revive Rabbi Kook's dream...
...Agudat Israel, the Aguda, is a nonZionist Orthodox political party established about 60 years ago in Europe...
...The more funds one can extract from the state, the belter...
...Against this depressing picture arc some more hopeful signs...
...The rabbi as a religious leader is almost nonexistent...
...It became the vernacular...
...From time to time so-called religious issues stir up public dispute in Israel...
...The return to Zion would make us equal to all other nations...
...He envisioned a religious renaissance to accompany the physical revival...
...The crisis that non-religious Zionist youth underwent as a result of their search for a Jewish identity served as fertile soil for the growth of this movement...
...This arrangement met and meets certain basic needs of both partners, the secular majority and the religious minority...
...A network of adult education in judaic subjects offers classes to thousands of religious and non-religious Jews alike, where they acquire a better understanding of theirjewish heritage...
...Hundreds aiyeshivol and kolUlim* are * Learning insmutiuns ihaT provide stipends Tor married men id continue iheir.pefAttvJ educations...
...As a result, the Zionist renewal of the age-old Jewish culture was less a continuation of an older tradition than the beginning of a new one, notwithstanding its claims to the contrary...
...Your God is as poor as you are," declared Chaim Nachman Bialik, the leading poet of the Zionist renaissance...
...In this view, the Israeli army is holy, as it was entrusted to carry out the divine designs of the geulah...
...More often than not, its claims are voiced by politicians who differ from their secular colleagues not in their outstanding ethical or moral conduct, but merely in the wearing of a kippah on their heads...
...The state is of divine substance...
...In one of the most remarkable feats in history, the Hebrew language was revived to become the tongue of a living people, but it no longer was a holy tongue, lashon hakodesh...
...For a while, it seemed that the earlier generation had good reason to be happy with what had evoked as the new Jew, By the efforts of the earlier generation, the sabra was freed from negative gatul traits...
...It is for the sake of the state and religion that many of the settlements in Judea and Samaria came into being...
...At the very least it can share with Israel the creative religious thinking that has developed in the Diaspora...
...the Zionist movement strove to bring about a renaissance of Jewish statehood...
...But the opposition from Zionism's political arm was too much...
...proliferating...
...The state is, at most, the executive arm of the Torah sages...
...Ahad Ha'am proclaimed that it did not matter if God ex-iked or not—-the essential element in Judaism, he said, was the folk spirit, the sum total of Jewish ethics and civilization...
...It was taught in all Israeli schools...
...The contention of Ahad Ha'am, a late 19th and early 20th-century Zionist essayist and thinker, that modern Zionist culture was a natural outgrowth of, and a legitimate heir to, historic Judaism collapses when viewed from within traditional Judaism...
...Over the years, the young Israelis found themselves fighting battles in which they were called upon not only to defend the borders of the homeland, but also to fight for the name Jew, to redeem it from the connotation of despair it had acquired in Auschwitz...
...This, however, hardly influenced the secular leaders who shaped the image and life of Israel during the early formative years of the state...
...Unfortunately, they do not bode well...
...The image of the typical Israeli rabbi was not that of a religious or spiritual leader, but rather as a mezuzah on the doorpost, an irrelevant decoration, an amulet against evil spirits, a relic from the past...
...At this stage in its development the ba'alei t'shuva movement is no longer limited to a handful of eccentrics...
...Zionism's negative attitude toward the galul extended to the Jewish religion, which was associated with the old world of the ghetto...
...A kind of unholy concordat exists between the rabbinate, dominated by the old style Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox rabbi and the rabbinate's protector, the religious politician...
...Remember, for example, the great debate that took place in 1948 over whether to include the name of God in Israel's Declaration of Independence...
...When Aguda joined the Begin coalition in 1977, something changed...
...after a two-year struggle, Kook gave up the attempt and the movement died...
...Against this background, new religious developments are emerging...
...But this ideology simply ignores Zionism and the state...
...The synagogue itself is not accepted as a very important institution...
...The voice of the politician and deal-maker is almost the only voice of religion that is heard in the land...
...If its own leaders do not see it as such and are not taking advantage of the enormous redemptive possibilities it offers, the job has to be done for them, according to the messiah-izers: No one can stop the Messiah now that he is on his way, ready to bring about the geulah shleima, the perfect, complete redemption of the Jewish people...
...Working with the state is necessary in order to milk it for the needs of Torah, as this concept is understood by the Aguda...
...On the other hand, the less one can give the stale in military service or taxes, the better...
...Never in modern times has Judaism been more in need or more ready for a spiritual renewal, with Jerusalem again its spiritual fountainhead...
...modern Hebrew literature drew inspiration from the bottomless well of Scripture...
...Zion, the site of David's royal palace, he argued, symbolized Jewish political independence...
...on the other hand, it joined the forces of modernity that propelled the Jewish people from its traditional religious life to the secular world...
...What form this religious revival will take— or even whether it will develop further—no one can say...
...Moreover, they often found themselves isolated from the rest of the world, with only one loyal ally at their side—Diaspora Jewry...
...What has kept us alive...
...Israel is still the world's largest and most vibrant center of Torah learning...
...For the early Zionists, the galul was a deplorable and humiliating existence...
...The religious community builds another fence around its self-contained ghettos...
...They wish to ignore more than a century of Jewish history, including the Holocaust and Israel's independence day...
...The secularists were able to shift all problems concerning religious issues to their Orthodox partners, without facing the challenge that historic Judaism presented to the Jewish state...
...Everywhere in Zionist ideology the plural we replaced the singular He: If we do not do what has to be done, He, upon whom Jews relied during hundreds of years of galut, will not do it for us...
...The modern sabra (native-born Israeli) could name in Hebrew all the parts of a tractor but did not know the meaning of kiddush hashem (sanctification of God's name), mitzoah (commandment) or t'shuva (repentance or return), and remained unfamiliar with a mezuzah, the Shema, and the birkal hamazon (grace after meals...
...On the contrary, most people in Israel now feel a desire they never felt before to introduce more religious tradition and culture into their lives...
...its counterpart, Jerusalem, would preserve our uniqueness among the nations...
...This phenomenon, combined with the low activity level of establishment religion, provides fertile ground for a true religious revival in Israel...
...In the words of the American rabbi Norman Lamm, who heads the seminary of Yeshiva University, the largest institution for the training of Orthodox rabbis in the Western world, "The religious situation in Israel is aggravated by the fact that most of the religious leadership has not really gone through the modern experience...
...And the ideology of Aguda-izat ion has spread to the Shas faction (Orthodox Sephardim), with 6 seats, up from 4; the Mafdal (National Religious Party), with 5 seals, up from 4; and the new Degel haTorah party, with 1 seat...
...The absence of the sermon means that it is possible for Jews to pray week after week and not hear one d'var Torah or one suggestion on how Torah can be made relevant to modern Israel and contemporary life...
...the non-religious are pushed further and further away from any interest in religion...
...With this, Israelis have been left at a crossroad, embarking on a new search for Jewish identity, but confused as to where to turn...
...Finally, a "neutral" compromise was reached...
...Paradoxically, this "new" Jew, the child of a radical break with the past, was an orthodox non-believer, as intolerant as any Orthodox believer...
...archaeologists and generals eagerly uncovered the secrets of the biblical past...
...The views of the messiah-izers also gave rise to the wild growth of a Jewish underground which, by acting against the laws of the state, tried to force Israel to take actions it did not want to take...
...This generation is growing up wondering about its identity...
...But the banner of Yerushalayim cannot be raised by Israelis alone nor by Diaspora Jews alone...
...God was driven out of the Bible in modern Zionist education...
...Super-nationalism and staunch religious faith thus join together in the world of messiah-izers...
...The Orthodox parties wage holy wars on issues that in fact have no real bearing on religion or on the spiritual life of the people...
...Rabbi Kook added, however, that Zionism—with its emphasis on an earthly and physical renaissance—was not enough...
...For Judaism, in which every aspect of life is tied to God and religion, such an approach was a significant break with the past...
...In the meantime, there is much A Religious Renaissance continued from page 31 that Diaspora Jewry can do to help...
...Many indications suggest that a religious revival is already happening in Israel at the grass-roots level...
...A reference was included to the "Rock of Israel," which can be given a religious or secular interpretation...
...To become a normal nation again, he argued, Jews would have to give preference to physical above spiritual needs...
...The women usually do not come to pray...
...Israelis can hardly identify with the traditional concept of kiddush hashem, but they understand in their hearts that, in a world that kept silent while millions of Jews were murdered, they arc engaged in what may be the last decisive battle for Jewish survival...
...To Aguda, the state itself has no intrinsic value...
...This feeling or "a people alone" and the deep identification of world Jewry with Israel's struggle have driven Israelis back into themselves, to ponder the problems of existence: Who am I? What does this aloncness mean...
...Few recognize that this is actually a paraphrase, not a quotation, from Psalm 106:2: miy'malelgevurot Adonai, "Who can express the mighty acts of the Lord...
...He settled in Palestine and joined the early pioneers of the Second Aliyah, despite their negative attitude to religion...
...Looking down Tram the mountain nearly 3,000 years ago, the pagan prophet Balaam described Israel as "a people that dwells alone" (Numbers 23:9...
...It is expressed in the writings of some of Israel's leading authors, in the quest for Jewish studies in the universities and in a renewed interest among Israelis in their roots...
...On the other hand, Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, symbolized holiness, that which makes the Jewish people a "priestly kingdom and a sacred nation...
...The Torah and religion also had to be cleansed of the decay and degeneration of Jewish life in the galut...
...Thus, there has been a shift in the general altitude towards traditional Jewish ness in recent years...
...Sadly, Meimad, a new modern Orthodox party, won no seats...
...Through the party-controlled Ministry of Religious Affairs and through other government agencies, the voice of the politician and deal-maker is almost the only voice of religion that is heard in the land...
...The first is the ba'alei t'shuva movement...
...Today, after four decades of Israel's existence, a new generation of Israelis is on its way to taking hold of the helm of state...
...More and more, they are coming to the realization that they are actually continuing the chain of generations of Jews wbtV were ready to sacrifice their lives for an ideal more valuable than life...
...Unfortunately, the gate to the ideas and practices of Jewish religion—from the viewpoint of the average non-observant Israeli— is locked, and the self-appointed "guardians of the faith" hold tightly to the keys...
...What do we live for...
...Most of the time it stayed in the opposition, but even when it joined the coalition its members would not accept cabinet appointments because their ideological principles did not permit them to share the collective responsibility of a Zionist-motivated government...
...They arc struck with amazement and wonder at Jewish existence throughout the ages...
...The party has been active in Israeli politics since the inception of the state, but has remained small, regularly electing only four or five members to the Knesset...
...No consideration is given to other needs, because Torah is the supreme and exclusive value...
...It is an accurate picture of Israel today...
...These battles secure the religious parties' positions of power, but inevitably reduce the stature and soul of the Jewish religion in the Jewish state...
...True, the Bible was one of the foundations A Religious Renaissance Can It Happen in Israel...
...But all this lacked the one central element that made the Bible the living wellspring of the Jewish people—God...
...Sabras shared little with Jews around the world, whom they saw as rootless carriers of an archaic religious-spiritual message...
...I call this group the messiah-izers...
...On the other hand, the Orthodox groups, which represented only about 13 percent of the national vote, wielded much more power and influence than their nominal strength would suggest...
...But there is no one to answer the average Israeli who cries out to understand tradition as a way of belief and religion as a way of life as well as a living link to Diaspora Jewry, Organized religious institutions, the rabbis and the synagogues, have failed to respond to the historic opportunity...
...The Aguda sages, and they alone, are qualified to decide in all spheres oflife without exception...
...The new Jew who became the founder of modern Israel was a child of secularism...
...For the messiah-izers, the present state of Israel is but a hint of a much higher purpose...
...The religious parties provided a balancing influence between left and right and thus arrived at an arrangement with the party or parties forming the government...
...The return advocated by the ba'alei t'shuva movement is a return to a shletl that does not exist...
...It will come about as a combined effort of both...
...There are many indications that this is already happening at the grassroots level, quite apart from the f'jfWa-izcrs, messiah-izers, and Aguda-izers...
...PINCHAS H. PELI of the new culture...
...During the last decade the movement has grown and now claims hundreds, if not thousands, of young men and women both from Israel and abroad...
...But he never gave up his dream of a Jewish religious renaissance, summed up in his motto: "The old shall be renewed—the new sanctified...
...The Israelis' daily involvement with Jewish Tate has opened a door to their souls...
...God belonged to the unattractive cast of characters represented by the ghetto and the galut...
...A third new trend is what I call Aguda-ization...
...In this arrangement, religion is rarely represented by religious or spiritual leaders...
...Who are the Jewish people...
...The arrangements for financial support of Aguda projects were no longer made under the table...
...The role of religion principally surfaced every time a new coalition government was formed...
...In Zionist thinking, the galul (Diaspora or exile) was associated with the closed world of the ghetto...
...All this, of course, in the name of religion...
...They came to seek the light in Jerusalem and found it in a type of yeshiva, also started by Americans, that opened its gates to returnees (ba'alei t'shuva) who wanted to become observant and study the traditional texts full-time...
...In the November 1988 election, Agudat Israel won 5 seats, up from 2 in 1984...
...Rabbi Kook himself was an ardent Zionist...
...Official politicized religion is simply not up to the task of teaching ll ¦¦ non-observant public...
Vol. 13 • December 1988 • No. 9
