Whose Country Is This, Anyway?
FRIEDMAN, THOMAS L.
Whose Country Is This, Anyway? Israel has become more secular and more Orthodox, more mundane and more messianic, all at the same time. THOMAS L FRIEDMAN Back in the 1930s in Tel Aviv's Mughrabi...
...I wasn't offended...
...5 J tlicy arc oil' the plantation—when there are no Gentiles around watching over them...
...Far from having built a "new Jewish identity," or a "new Jew," Israel seems to have brought out of the basement of Jewish history every Jewish spiritual option from the past three thousand years...
...His Bible says he is going to be here much longer...
...Waldman and his Gush Emunim (lowd say there is an emptiness here, so lot's take a messianic trip into the future...
...Excuse me," I asked in a loud voice, "do you know where I can get a copy of Ma'aiiv around here...
...Someone placed it right up against the kiosk...
...They constitute about 15 percent of the Jewish population...
...In America, most Jews want to be Jewish at least three days of the year—two days on Rosh Hashanah, one on Yom Kippur...
...I got no answer...
...What docs that mean...
...Some of my friends dropped out, some of my friends went to Canada, some went to the Peace Corps, and some went out to the desert and smoked dope all of their lives...
...If you don't want to be an ophthalmologist and you don't want to be a lawyer and you still want to be Jewish—this is the place to do it...
...Born in Israel but raised in America from the age of three, Waldman now resides in Kiryat Arba, in Hebron, where he splits his time between running a yeshiva and working for the ultra-nationalist Tehiya Party, which is dedicated to annexing the West Bank...
...The third school is also made up of religious Zionists, but of a more messianic bent...
...Does Judaism say that...
...My Sinai is not a closed book...
...Ze'ev Chafets Mendel Schneerson, who resides in Brooklyn, threw his backing behind the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party...
...But then the threats started," said Tsimhe, a rail-thin man with a black yarmulke resting uneasily on his head...
...There's no plantation owner around...
...Rabbi Nota Schiller is the director of Jerusalem's Ohr Somayach yeshiva, an ultra-Orthodox institution which specializes in bringing Jews who have drifted away from Judaism back to Torah learning...
...As long as everyone was devoted to bulding the country, said one of Schiller's recruits, there was enough excitement around for the secular to drain the swamps and for the Orthodox to do their thing—and plenty of Jewish immigrants for both...
...It is fair to say that my goal as a Zionist was to live in a Jewish state, and it wasn't ever to live in a particular kind ofjewish state...
...So Rabbi Schiller and Waldman are light that draining the swamps is not enough, that carrying an Israeli passport is not enough...
...Since 1967, I feel that I have come home...
...After two thousand years of exile, a Holocaust, a war against 50 million Arabs, I believe that God has done Tor us at least as much as he did for the generation coming out of Egypt...
...The part of the synagogue I always liked was the social hall, and the kitchen—you know, not the sanctuary...
...It turned out to be highly revealing, although not for the Torah portion...
...Rabbi David Hartman mers in the bar shouted their greetings to him, not all of which were lit to print, "is not democracy...
...I don't have to rethink my position on Torah because of what Kant wrote or Kierkegaard or Freud...
...I don't have to go on being religiously Jewish to distinguish myself from the gentiles...
...How do I know that...
...Israel need never worry about suicidal boredom...
...That is the glue that binds many Israelis to the land— not Bible, and not religion, but the poetry of ajewish airport...
...It would have mounded corny to say it to each other, but wc understood it that way...
...Shared destiny and shared suffering and shared oppression without a content are not enough to sustain a community...
...If there is any meaning to coming home in Israel it's being in Hebron—not Tel Aviv...
...Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists thought they could build a stale and turn over the question of Judaism to the last remnants of their grandfathers—to the haredim and the Orthodox rabbinical establishment, which had the narrowest, most retrogressive Eastern European view of religion...
...I took up Rabbi Schiller's offer to sit in on one of the yeshiva's Torah-study sessions...
...I used to meet many Jews from America and Western Europe who told me that they had come to Israel to "find" themselves as Jews...
...I was simply struck b) the irony of the moment...
...These secular Israelis, who make up roughly 50 percent of Israel's Jewish population and A selection from FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L Frudman, published by Fanar, Straus & Giroux...
...One of the complainants, though, wouldn't let go...
...People are always asking you to decide...
...many Israelis don't even want that...
...You're supposed to be on kibbutzim, draining swamps, dreaming about being an Israeli fighter pilot, chasing girls down on the beach...
...When the waitress came by to take our orders, I was anxious to see what the bar mitzvah boy would choose on this special occasion...
...That means, in particular, settling every inch of the land of Israel...
...The religious community in Israel has its own newspapers, which not only concentrate on news important to them—such as which rabbi is taking over which yeshiva or advertisements by matchmakers—but also print only the the most puritanical advertisements and take a rather dim view of news about the secular state...
...We hadn't been out of the synagogue more than 15 minutes before the bar mitzvah boy was sinking his teeth into pig meat, strictly forbidden by Jewish dietary law...
...There was a certain kind of romanticism to their attachment to Israel, and now they are undiscovering Israel for the same reason...
...Please forgive me.' It's great fun and people smile and laugh and say, 'Yeah, me too, brother...
...But when the Six-Day War came, we had a feeling: Now's our chance...
...I wanted to have fun and I also wanted to live in a Jewish country—to participate in that...
...It has nothing to offer me...
...he hissed...
...As a result, the different visions grew side by side...
...My first visit to B'nei B'rak was prompted by a small item in the Jerusalem Post about Tsimhe...
...They seemed to contain a larger message, and in order to decipher what it was, I consulted my own rabbi, David Hartman, founder and director of the Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies...
...today he makes his living writing books...
...Twenty years ago, when I first came, people here still had this sort of grandiose image of the country, but that was too austere, too demanding to last for long for most people...
...One afternoon in June 1988, I sat in the Ramat Aviv home of Israeli historian Ya'acov Shavit, trying to figure out just what time it was in Israel...
...His trees say so...
...Here, you live in a very dynamic state...
...Following the bar mitzvah, my aunt and uncle invited the immediate family to lunch at a nearby restaurant known for its hearty country-style fare...
...If they had wanted to film the movie Hester Street here, they would not have needed to bring in many props or costumes...
...Fried chicken heaped with french fries...
...Israel is how Jews behave when amtimwd on fiati...
...Those trees thick with the rings of twenty winters and those paint fragments dusting his doorstep seemed to mock the Israeli—and international— debate about whether or not Jews should settle the West Bank...
...What do the goyim have to teach me...
...Forgive mc, too,' and they just walk along...
...Tell me, what would He say...
...Those myriad options can be broken down into four broad schools of thought...
...It's like the guy who says, 'I can't live with a woman unless she's perfect,' and another guy who is more easygoing and says, 'You know, maybe she's a little fat and maybe she's a little stupid, but you know, what the fuck, I love her.' That's kind of how I feel about Israel...
...That is the difference between religious Zionists and the haredim...
...The coastal plain with its sand dunes...
...From Sinai I learn from the world and I absorb the world into Sinai...
...I want a political sovereign state that respects freedom of conscience...
...Copyright ©1989 by Thomas L Friedman...
...They were ready to allow any Jew in the world who wanted to live in their new state to become a citizen immediately, because they were certain that within one generation of being reconnected with the land those ultra-Orthodox Jews who were living in self-imposed ghettos either in Europe or Jerusalem would throw off their black hats and coats and join the Zionist revolution...
...I came in 1967," said Chafets...
...That is what the secular Zionist did not understand...
...Giora would have none of these...
...Behold them now, because in another generation they will be gone...
...During the 1948 war of liberation, I was 10...
...Didn't you complain to the municipality' I asked him incredulously...
...The state, in their view, is a necessary instrument for bringing the Messiah, and Israel's politics, defense and foreign policies should all be devoted to that end...
...What are you doing here...
...In the meantime, they are content to live in the land of Israel, no matter who is in charge—the secular Zionists or the British— because they feel closer to God there, because they can fulfill more of the Jewish commandments there, and in order to be on hand when the Messiah arrives...
...Over some Goldstar beers at his favorite local, the Bonanza Bar off Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street, Chafets, now in his early forties, puffed a fat cigar and talked about his own Israel—the one for Jews who just wanna have fun...
...I have great fun...
...But when the state-building than the war of liberation...
...I say I don't care if Judaism says democracy is a value...
...It is like the difference between someone who has to pay his rent every month and someone who buys the house...
...I fell comfortable with these people...
...You can't build a Jewish state on the basis of national pride alone...
...Having grown up in America I was very much aware of the gap—in what I think is a good country—between rhetoric and performance, between ideology and reality...
...They dreamed about Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, Hebron, Shechem [Nablus], Jericho, the Jordan River...
...Are you a Zionist...
...Schiller and the haredim say thei'e is an emptiness here, so let's not worry about the state and the national framework, let's go back to a passion we once had when we were all living like fiddlers on the roof in the ghettos of Eastern Lurope—nice and isolated from the C'yj'im...
...He wants to take over the kitchen and the bedroom and, above all, tell you how you arc to use your leisure time...
...For them, coming to the land of Israel and becoming "normal" meant giving up religious ritual as the defining feature of their Jewish identity...
...Some have accused him of running a factory for brainwashing Jews, but Schiller vehemently denies this charge, although not without adding, tongue in cheek, that some Jews could use having their brains washed...
...What I say is, I am not living in the future, and I don't want to live in the past...
...It is the place to lose yourself as a Jew, because if you don't know who you are before you arrive, you can get totally lost in the maze of options that present themselves as soon as you plant your feet on the land...
...From Sinai I learn from the world and I absorb the world into Sinai...
...Before 1967," Rabbi Waldman told me, "my friends and I figured that we had sort of missed the boat with regard to our contribution to the renewal of Jewish national life...
...Maybe a pizza with all the toppings...
...On the back of the postcard, the Agudat party had printed: "There is no doubt that from the heavens Baba Sali is blessing all those who support and vote for Agudat Yisrael...
...Legend has it that one day Mayor Meir DizengofF ordered that the clock be removed...
...We had no choice...
...the country has become a living museum of Jewish history...
...Some Orthodox rabbis here say democracy is not a Jewish value...
...I thought about the meaning of Giora's pork chops for several days...
...These are traditional or modern Orthodox Jews, who fully support the secular Zionist state but insist that it is not a substitute for the synagogue...
...I stopped a modern-looking Orthodox man who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the knitted yarmulke of the kind preferred by religious Jews who arc also Zionists...
...So what do you do for fun...
...There are too many difficulties involved...
...It didn't totally destroy the newsstand but it was powerful enough to send debris and shrapnel flying across the street, breaking the window of the tailor's shop...
...In Israel, they said, the sky is Jewish, basketball is Jewish, the state is Jewish and the airport is Jewish, so who needs to go to synagogue...
...From the other side of the political spectrum, the secular, liberal Shinui (Change) Party published a full-page advertisement showing the not particularly appealing head of an ultra-Orthodox Jew with long sidelocks, above the headline: HE IS FREE FROM ARMY SERVICE AND HARASSING YOU AT THE SAME TIME...
...Are you sure that God would not prefer that you give some of the land back in return for peace with the Palestinians...
...Tsimhe was terrified...
...They are relics from the past, dinosaurs from the basement of history...
...I must tell you," he confided, "I just came back from two years in Germany...
...But, I wondered aloud, if emigrating to Israel means eating pork chops after bar mitzvahs, how will immigration deter assimilation...
...The Jewish people's reconnection with their land and their building of a modern state there have opened up a whole new set of options for defining onself as a Jew—some of which were totally unknown in the Diaspora...
...He kept walking, but motioned me closer with a nod of his head so that he could speak to me in a whisper...
...For me Judaism should be a way of life not just for the individual, but should offer some deeper value guidelines for politics, economics and social policy, and in all the issues that surface in the collective life of a nation...
...Didn't they have sidewalks in Morocco...
...On one level, I came to be a student, and to learn Hebrew...
...All the things here that Americans complain about I liked...
...It turns out he has not been walking his dog but has been busy having children, and he starts telling you that he wants to set the rules for the house...
...Are you a Jew...
...On one level it was Tal Brody [the Israeli team star player] and all these guys beating the Russian team, which is from a big country, remember, and on another level u was my grandfather beating them...
...Science, technology and turning the desert green were their new Torah...
...No news...
...They said it would be better if I didn't sell newspapers anymore," said Tsimhe...
...The answer is yes," said Hartman...
...Who are the ones leaving...
...In fact, each of the four main schools in the great Israeli identity debate was so convinced that the others would wither away that as a group they were never willing, or able, to sit down and hammer out a consensus about the meaning of the state of Israel and the land of Israel for the Israeli people...
...As I walked down the main street of B'nei B'rak, distancing myself from Tsimhe's stand, I decided to conduct a little sidewalk experiment...
...My feeling is that under no circumstances am I leaving, any more than anyone would leave a country where he belongs...
...What really holds this place together at bottom," explained Chafets, as other custo"Sinai is my point of departure, but I don't remain there...
...Because we saw the results of the Six-Day War as something more godly, and an even greater step forward, community, and I used it as the basis for a long story in the Mew York Times about the struggle within Israel between haredim and secular Jews...
...People are always arguing about your identity...
...The reason was that this was their country...
...A sirloin steak...
...For two thousand years, all these people have been crying and pleading and begging God to give them a country...
...It is that tribal Jewish sense of solidarity...
...These spies frightened the Jewish people not to continue on to Israel...
...Chafets continued, anticipating my question...
...iji...
...I asked...
...The haredim believe that since the beginning of the Diaspora two thousand years ago, the pinnacle of Jewish life and learning was that which was achieved by the great 18th-, 19th-and 20th-century yeshivas and rabbinic dynasties in the Jewish towns and ghettos of Eastern Europe, which were largely isolated from the gentile world surrounding them...
...Israel became more secular and more Orthodox, more mundane and more messianic, all at the same time...
...I don't want problems...
...It was like building a house and leaving a little room in the basement for Grandpa, where he can read and walk his dog and be quiet...
...I belong here...
...I had a little bit of that feeling myself...
...We didn't make a territorial compromise in 1948 to give up half the land of Israel...
...Ya'acov Asher Sinclair, a 38-ycar-old Englishman who decided to take a break from his cosmopolitan life in London to investigate religious life in Israel, put it to me straight: "Unless you have some other agenda going on, to come here and be a hero, well...
...That is why their menfolk still dress in the dark coats and fur hats worn by 18th-century Eastern European gentlemen...
...He says, 'For how long will My people provoke Me in disbelief after everything I have done for them...
...The ceremony was held at a small synagogue in the coastal city of Ashkelon...
...And if my family decides it wants to be in the fur business instead of the drug business, that's fine...
...Spiritually speaking, Jews in the Diaspora are differentiated from one another only by how they relate to ritual observance, that is, whether they practice Judaism in the Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform manner— Orthodox being the most observant and Reform the least...
...The Jewish soul requires spiritual nourishment...
...If we could hear God's words today, wouldn't He say the same thing to us as He said to them...
...You can't escape the Utopian aspirations of the left or the messianic expectations of the right...
...We're not stereotypes, we're not creations of Bernard Malamud...
...Who ever heard of such a thing before 1948...
...It is enough for me to be in a country that is owned and operated by my family...
...What is this...
...Jews in Israel are not differentiated by synagogue affiliations as much as by how they relate to the land of Israel and to the state...
...They believe that a Jewish state will be worth celebrating religiously only after the Messiah comes and the rule of Jewish law is total...
...But how can living in ajewish state resonate so deeply for you, while at the same time you are totally nonobservant as a Jew...
...Meanwhile, one of the rebbe'% main rivals, former chief Sephardic rabbi Ovadia Yosef, took out a television advertisement promising blessings and ' 'many sons" for anyone who voted for his Shas party...
...I don't keep kosher myself...
...A native of Detroit, Chafets has that dockyard philosopher s sense of what makes the ordinary man tick and the finely tuned ear of a frustrated rock star who knows what makes men dance...
...I don't need a delicatessen to show that I am Jewish...
...You turn on the television and people are arguing about the borders, about the boundaries between religion and state—nothing is ever settled here...
...I also began to understand why it is literally exhausting at times to be an Israeli Jew...
...It was paradise...
...Like most American Jews, I was raised on a Judaism without land—the same Judaism Jews have practiced since they were expelled from Palestine by the Romans two thousand years ago...
...I responded by asking why, if the majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were so moderate, more of them-—any of them—didn't rush to defend Tsimhe's right to sell Israeli newspapers...
...Israelis, I discovered, cannot decide what their nation should stand for not only politically, but also spiritually...
...It was transitory...
...It was an infatuation What is lasting, attractive and compelling is the Torah...
...So I didn't think this country had to become perfect in order to be enjoyable...
...I asked them all point-blank...
...Now 51, Rabbi Waldman has the beard of Santa Glaus, the feather-light voice of a dove, and the delicate hands of a violinist—all in stark contrast to the seemingly untamed messianic visions dancing in his head...
...They have been ready to serve in the Israeli parliament purely for the purposes of advancing their own campaign to make Israeli society more religious and in order to obtain state funds to support their own private educational network of yeshivas...
...Nobody had to say it...
...Forty years from now, they will all be like us...
...It is the same feeling that prompts American Jews to applaud when their El Al plane lands safely in Tel Aviv...
...It's not any ideology or any system...
...This is mine now...
...I quickly realized I felt at home here...
...After all, why would Jews want to re-create a medieval Polish ghetto inside a modern Jewish state, these secular Zionists asked themselves...
...They also prefer to speak Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews, not Hebrew, and most of them neither send their sons and daughters to do army service nor celebrate Israel's independence day...
...It is only 20 minutes' drive from the Bonanza Bar—20 minutes and about 200 years, that is, since Jewish life in B'nei B'rak today has much more in common with Jewish life in 18th-century Lithuania than with anything happening in north Tel Aviv...
...It means I have to interpret my tradition in a way that can flourish in a political sovereign state...
...But I was the only one...
...Shortly after I wrote this article, I was fioorjed with hate mail from ultra-Orthodox Je%vs in America and Israel who felt that I had maligned their community, only a small portion of whom, they said, were of the type who turned Tsimhe from a newspaper salesman into a falafel maker overnight...
...I was thinking of becoming a rabbi, you know, all that stuff...
...People sacrificed for a long time, they want to have some fun...
...Haifa...
...That is why Israel today has more Lithuanian-style haredi yeshivas under its roof than the Jews ever had back in Lithuania, at the same time as it has the only Jewish gay bar and the only Jewish surfing shop...
...Rabbi Eliczer Waldman is one of the founding fathers of the West Bank settler movement...
...Every Friday I would sell five hundred copies of Yediot Achronot and Ma'ariv...
...For me Israel, and Judaism, should be the foundation from which Jews can absorb the best values of the world and learn from them—without losing their particularity...
...They are the people who grew up with the secular side of Zionism, which has proven vacuous, unfulfilling, and nonsustainable...
...You are always involved in everything...
...Alt rights reserved send their children to state-run secular schools, were convinced that they were the wave of the future and that tradition-bound Jews were a passing episode in Jewish history...
...Not so in Israel...
...A bar mitzvah for them was not a religious affair but an expression of national affiliation—like some tribal headdress you put on—but it is an expression devoid of any Jewish religious content or significance...
...God has given us the privilege to participate in this great phenomenon...
...I ask...
...I heard that story shortly after I arrived in Jerusalem, but I understood how true it still was only after living in the country for a while...
...Hebron is where it all started...
...Finally, there are the ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Jews, known in Hebrew as haredim, "those filled with the awe of God...
...You can never relax...
...Israel is the only country where the Puerto Rican girls are all Jewish...
...Then one day, 40 years later, Grandpa comes up from the basement, resurrected...
...They wanted to make building the nation, serving the state, flying an Israeli flag, joining the army, and speaking Hebrew substitutes for any conventional spiritual identification...
...They have tried to re-create that life in Israel...
...I liked the bad manners...
...Now they can walk in the fucking street if they want to...
...The growth of Hebrew literature and culture is a profound revolution...
...More than one secular Israeli told me that, when he was a young boy his father took him to Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, and told him something like this: "Look at these people while you can...
...Well, what kind of Zionist...
...Why live in Israel...
...Sinai is my point of departure, but I don't remain there...
...When residents of the area asked him why, Mayor DizengofF explained that it was because every Jew who walked by the clock reset it according to his own watch...
...And for the same reason, I don't need a synagogue...
...For them the rebirth of the Jewish state is not simply a religious event...
...Nothing better dramatized the radically different Jewish trends that have grown in the Israeli hothouse in the last 40 years than the November 1988 national election campaign, which involved 27 different parties competing for 120 Knesset seats...
...We saw the Six-Day War as God opening the gates of the heart of Israel before us, and therefore we felt that He was telling us our obligation is to settle and to build...
...I was at the University of Michigan...
...Moses sent spies to see what was the best way to get into Israel...
...Almost all] the spies came back and said, There are giants in the land and we will not be able to overcome them in war, and they described the land as a land 'that devours its inhabitants'— meaning it was difficult to get the fruits out...
...Liberty is an important political value...
...When that happened we find in the Bible the most extreme expressions of rebuke by God...
...Some 8,000 Jews came and 24,000 left...
...They applaud for the crazy notion of a Jewish airplane landing on ajewish landing strip at a Jewish airport...
...On the back of Tsimhe's kiosk, into -which a group of haredim also locked him one day to help persuade him that it would be best not to sell Israeli dailies like Yediot and Ma'ariv, somone bluntly scrawled in spray paint: STOP OFFERING NEWSPAPERS...
...They believe that the creation of Israel is a religious event, and that Judaism, when reinterpreted for the 20th century, can flourish in a modern Jewish state...
...The transformation of the Jew from student to soldier and farmer cannot be underestimated...
...Two other ultra-Orthodox sects vowed not to eat fruit until after the elections in order to bring bad luck on their rival party, Degel Hatorah, whose symbol was a fruit tree...
...B'nei B'rak is an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, populated solely by haredim...
...Where've you been...
...But You can take it back...
...When the Moroccans first came to Israel, there was this thing that Moroccans always used to walk in the road...
...At that point Noga stuck her head out of the kitchen, where she had been quietly peeling potatoes, and shouted across the room to her father, "Dad, that's the fun of the place...
...Waldman has been here a long time already...
...This was the first capital of the united Israel and this is where the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried...
...The secular Zionists came to Israel in part as a rebellion against their grandfathers and the Orthodox synagogue-oriented ghetto Judaism practiced in Eastern Europe...
...It is terror, ultra-Orthodox terror...
...Tsimhe learned that the hard way...
...The municipality is also run by haredim...
...The rebbe indicated his support with a series of full-page advertisements in Israeli newspapers inviting voters to fill out a coupon swearing that they had voted for Agudat and to send it to him...
...One of the things I always liked about Chalets, one of the reasons he is typical ol a certain, very popular strain of Israelis, is that he always has a sense of humor about Israel...
...The kibbutz is a marvelous experiment in social justice and communal living...
...Now he scratches out a bare living selling falafel sandwiches...
...The Labor Zionists built a country with a Judaic void in its heart," Hartman continued...
...One of the great lessons to me about Israel is that Jews are real people...
...These messianic Zionists, who make up about 5 percent of the Jewish population, form the backbone of the Gush Emunim Jewish settler movement in the West Bank...
...Not just because it was great, but because it was us against them...
...That was the Easy Rider side of it...
...The answer came as if from one man: "Mr...
...During the runoff, the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem "Israel is how Jews behave when they are off the plantation— when there are no Gentiles around watching over them...
...Because the Labor Zionists themselves had not bothered to build an interpretation of Judaism that could live with the modern world, they had no alternative spiritual vision to offer Israelis...
...I used to sell lots of newspapers—lots," he told me one afternoon, while plopping mashed chick-pea balls into a deep-fat fryer and nervously looking back and forth to make certain none of the black-coated ultra-Orthodox men waiting for the bus were eavesdropping on our conversation...
...I want white steak," he declared, using the Hebrew euphemism for pork...
...What struck me most about his book-lined apartment in Kiryat Arba was how badly the paint in the hallway had peeled and how tall the trees were in the from yard...
...The man's eyes flashed wide, as though I had inquired where I might find a prostitute for the evening...
...for example, getting together with some of the top musicians in Israel and playing rock 'n' roll, and playing for big parties from lime to time...
...For the secular Zionists, being back in the land of Israel, erecting a modern society and army, and observing Jewish holidays as national holidays all became a substitute for religious observance and faith...
...Their appearance reminded me in every way of the kids with whom I'd first come to Israel 20 years ago to live on a kibbutz for a summer and play pioneer...
...I don't think it's got that romantic image anymore," said Sinclair, with no hint of regret...
...I don't care if she's Jewish, because if I met her here, and she's able to speak Hebrew and live in this society, she's Jcwisii enough for me...
...In another generation they will realize that the Jews' return to their land is not a political act but a spiritual one—and one that demands a spiritual response...
...He opened the top of the folder just a sliver, like some pusher offering me a whiff of cocaine...
...I couldn't help but chuckle...
...Religious Zionists, who make up roughly 30 percent of the Jewish population, serve in the army, celebrate Israel's independence day as a new religious holiday, and send their children to state-run religious educational institutions...
...THOMAS L FRIEDMAN Back in the 1930s in Tel Aviv's Mughrabi Square there used to be a big clock with no glass covering the face...
...You feel the Mediterranean part of this country...
...It is not romantic enough for them anymore...
...A tiny band of B'nei B'rak's haredim decided to purify their neighborhood of all newsstands selling non-religious, pro-Zionist Israeli newspapers...
...Don't you know what is happening in B'nei B'rak...
...Now what kind of state do I want...
...They all seemed to be either Americans or Western Europeans...
...Because what we had after the war of liberation was not the heart of Israel...
...How many times have you seen a bar with only Jews in it...
...The haredim, although they are highly observant, do not see in the reborn state of Israel an event of major religious significance...
...You're not supposed to be in a yeshiva...
...This was their Judaism...
...While that explains how Chafets got to Israel, what held him was something less tangible, he said, something actually tribal...
...I want an easy life.' What would God say...
...it is the first stage in a process that will culminate with the coming of the Messiah...
...Isn't that what they are giving them...
...Fun was watching the Israeli basketball team beat the Russians in 1977...
...Friedman, that was your generation—not ours...
...The next stop on my journey of spiritual discovery in Israel began at the bar mitzvah of my Israeli cousin Giora...
...What were the figures last year...
...You just can't relax...
...They said it would be better if I sold falafels...
...I traveled like everybody else, and happened to land here...
...In return, the rebbe promised to make a blessing in the voter's name—a blessing that the voter should have "health, a long life, happiness, and success in all endeavors...
...Our parents and grandparents and previous generations, when they dreamed about the land of Israel, what did they dream about...
...who seemed to take special notice of his order...
...While a light breeze fanned us through the open door and his 17-year-old daughter, Noga, prepared lunch in the kitchen, Ya'acov discussed the strains of living in a country where all the clocks still have open faces...
...If Theodor Herzl and Janis Joplin had had a child together, it would have been Ze'ev Chafets...
...Maybe there are not that many more Ze'ev Chafetses out there, into rock V roll Zionism...
...I have nothing to learn from the world...
...His walls say so...
...Always listening to the news...
...What you see now is a loosening of the bonds of discipline and ideology...
...Now, you could say, Well, if you wanted to have fun so much, why didn't you move to California...
...Why did it take 40 years for the Jews to get from Egypt to Israel...
...If you want to be ajewish guy in America, you really have to agree to play by the American Jewish rules—which means that you have to be a nice boy...
...And so being here is a telief...
...Even though these people were not like people I had grown up with...
...They say, 'Everything is in the Torah...
...I wanted to see it, but when I came here I found out that Israel resonated for mc...
...My Torah lives in dialogue with the world...
...I say all the wisdom of the world was not found in Sinai...
...On the American level, it was the sixties and everybody was going someplace...
...Only the next generation, your children, will understand and believe,' and that is why the Israelites were in the desert for 40 years, and only their children came into Israel...
...Forty years ago, when the secular Israeli fathers were taking their sons down to Mea Shearim to show them the haredim before they supposedly disappeared, what they didn't know was that the haredim were taking their sons to the secular neighborhoods of Jerusalem and telling them: ' 'Behold these empty secular Jews...
...When I'm here, I don't have to think, Is the woman I meet Jewish...
...It was Germany, but it was paradise...
...Israel is the only country where you can be Jewish but you don't have to be domesticated...
...Not to be outdone, Agudat printed postcards with the picture of a dead Moroccan Jewish holy man, the Baba Sali, an Israeli equivalent of Father Divine, revered for his powers of healing and prophecy...
...I first got to know Ze'ev back in the early 1980s, when he headed the Government Press Office for Prime Minister Menachem Begin...
...he even looks like a cross between the two...
...They even name many of their yeshivas in Israel after the towns in Eastern Europe from which they came...
...The secular Zionists who founded this country were rebelling against their grandfathers and the whole universe of Eastern European ghetto Judaism...
...I began our discussion by observing that Israelis were constantly telling me that in two more generations all American Jews were going to assimilate and disappear, so they had better move to Israel to save themselves as Jews...
...That is why it never really made a critical difference to me what government there is here...
...Well, there's something to that...
...And people would ask why...
...I have enormous respect for the creative achievements of those who built this state...
...You often hear people saying, If Sharon is going to be prime minister, I am leaving...
...It was our retroactive victory over the Cossacks...
...We didn't have anything...
...The secular Jews who founded the state of Israel cared only about the experience in Egypt that made us a nation, and they ignored the content offered at Sinai...
...Can you imagine us going back to God and saying, 'Okay, You gave us Israel, thanks a lot...
...No one waiting for the Messiah...
...He smiled a sly grin and then quickly strode away, swallowed by a stream of black hats and coats...
...They are govim.' That is not how I see it...
...I like getting up on Saturday mornings and hanging out on the beach with some friends at this shack owned by a Tunisian woman...
...It's not Zionism...
...We had the outposts of Israel...
...That's not why Americans come here...
...But I deeply believe that the Jewish people cannot be sustained by literature and science alone...
...I found this whole affair troubling for what it said about the rising power of the extremist elements within the haredi period came to an end, he said, it turned out that the secular had nothing else to motivate immigrants and the Orthodox did...
...This is a new political value that I have acquired...
...The whole country's my synagogue...
...One of the great things about Israel for me is that it allows me not to be Jewish, not to be observant," answered Chafets...
...The first and largest is made up of secular and nonobservant Israelis, men like Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Shamir—those who really built the new state of Israel...
...I often discussed anomalies I came across in Israel with Hartman, so it was natural for me to go to him to make sense of Giora's pork chops...
...This is where the Jewish people grew up...
...One offers a politics olTantasy and the other offers a politics of regression...
...I liked the directness, I liked the excitement, the adrenaline...
...We really appreciate it...
...Shimon Tsimhe used to have the hottest-selling Hebrew newsstand in B'nei B'rak—before the bombing...
...And we all understood it that way...
...The second major school consists of religious Zionists...
...You seem to agree with those who say that because the sky in Israel is Jewish, once there you don't have to observe at all anymoie...
...I never really articulated it, but on some unconscious level I got oil" the airplane and thought to myself, This is the place...
...He knew what he wanted, and when the waitress turned his way he did not hesitate over the menu...
...Because it's something that in America I could never do...
...He was polite, even engaging, but relentless in his determination to educate me on the merits of the haredi community...
...I may agree with some of their diagnosis about the spiritual emptiness here, but not with their prescriptions for what to do about it," said Hartman...
...Then, still without breaking stride, he used his eyes to direct my attention down toward the thin manila folder he was carrying in his briefcase...
...It's like a woman taking off her girdle after the party is over...
...Ben-Gurion thought that having a Weizmann Institute of Science would sustain the excitement of the pioneer era...
...At least half of them were wearing Lacoste sport shirts with crocodiles on the breast, which left me wondering whether I hadn't walked into a fraternity meeting...
...I see the work of our institute as trying to find ways in which classical Orthodox Judaism can absorb these new, very important political values into itself without destroying itself...
...Your carcasses will fall in the desert and remain there...
...There were about 20 young men in the class, all of them between the ages of 19 and 39...
...Watching these campaign advertisements, I began to understand what an Israeli friend of mine meant when he said, "It is a lot easier to pray for the ingathering of the exiles than it is to live with them...
...I always told them that Israel was probably the most confusing place in the world to do so...
...He was among the Mayflower families of West Bank Jewish settlement—the group that rented out Hebron's Arab-owned Park Hotel for the week of Passover 1968 and really opened the West Bank and Gaza for settlement, based not on security rationales but in order to fulfil biblical visions...
...Well, what kind of Jew...
...I can be myself and Jewish but without having to think about it all the time...
...Autonomy and personal conscience, too, are important values that America has taught me...
...He always appre-< lates that most Israelis are not heroes, lit alone holy men, nor do they even want to be, but people jusi struggling to get through the month, eke out a little happiness, make love—not always with their spouses—and visit America at least once in three years...
...Yes, fun,"' mused Ya'acov, rolling his eyeballs upward with the look of a man who could do with a little less fun...
...The slow pace, the sensuousness of the women, the warmth, die colors...
...I want to offer Israelis a present— a now—that gives relevance to daily life...
...The opening revealed a copy of Yediot, Israel's biggest-selling newspaper, sandwiched into the folder...
...It was so relaxing...
...I took you out of Egypt, you received the Torah, you are receiving bread from heaven and you still disbelieve me.' So God said, 'You don't want Israel, you won't get it...
...In answering my question, he laid out the vision which he, a religious Zionist, felt Israel should represent...
...Then there was a bomb—just a small one...
...Part of Rabbi Yosef s advertisement, however, was censored by the election board—the part in which he warned, "Whoever does not vote Shas—will be punished by the Holy One Blessed be He...
...I don't have to worry about eating Jewish food to demonstrate culinary solidarity...
...They had something to offer once the swamps ran dry, and that is why practically the only Jews coming to Israel these days from America and Western Europe arc ultra-Orthodox or their recruits...
...I asked...
...The extent of their ideology is their recognition that they are doing all this in a Jewish state, serving in the army and saluting the flag...
...said Rabbi Waldman, always ready to answer a question with a question...
...Indeed, the most amazing thing about the world's only Jewish state is that it managed to be built, and hold together, despite the fact that there are deep and fundamental disagreements among its citizens as to what exactly a Jew is and what kind of Jewish life a Jewish state should represent...
...To turn our backs on that is to turn our backs on the whole redemptive process...
...I think it was in The French Connection when Popeye Doyle was talking to this French cop and the French cop was bragging about Marseilles and Popeye says, 'I'd rather be the lid on a garbage can in New York than the mayor of Marseilles.' Not to be offensive about other countries, but I'd rather be the lid on a garbage can here than live anywhere else...
...Suddenly all those statistics published by the Ministry of Absorption indicating that immigration to Israel by secular American Jews interested in the pioneering Zionist dream was slowing to a trickle were staring me in the face...
...I live in the world, but I don't value the world...
...They offered us part, and even then it was painful to accept just part, but okay, we said, we'll take a part and then see what happens afterward...
...This is what we are,'' pronounced Chafets, cocking his thumb toward the now-packed bar...
...Let me answer your question with a question: Can you assmilalc speaking Hebrew...
...Before Yom Kippur every year, Shaul the bartender and I and a few other people go sit on Dizengoff Street and we drink beer and cat hummus, and as people come by— if we know them, and, as we get progressively drunker, even if we don't know them, we stop them and say, 'If I did something wrong to offend you this year, I apologize...
...Anyways, Dad," added Noga, just to nail down the point, "don't you know they commit suicide in Switzerland more than anywhere else in the world...
...They see the state and the synagogue and a way of life according to the precepts of the Torah as all compatible...
...This is a Judaism that revolves around the synagogue, around the holidays and around communal get-togethers...
...Many Israelis are hungry lot some spiritual content...
...I made 15 percent on each one...
...That is the difference between modern religious Zionists and the haredim...
...I was the biggest in the whole area, not just B'nei B'rak...
...But this was no kibbutz, and no one here was interested in picking tomatoes, as I had been...
Vol. 14 • October 1989 • No. 6
