Israel--A Special Section - The Inner Life of Religious Zionism

...They saw the two wars as proof that they were living in Messianic times and should seize the moment, before it disappeared, by translating Rabbi Kook's metaphysics into direct action...

...Their nationalism naturally appealed to the Likud Party...

...The privatization of religion common in the U.S...

...Gush Emunim was a spent force...

...Only then will God be healed and the universe redeemed...

...Among the few discordant voices warning that this path was strewn with moral and spiritual snares, one of the strongest belonged to the late Yeshayahu Leibo-witz, an iconoclastic and madly eccentric Orthodox theologian...

...For decades prior to its Rightward shift, the NRP embodied a liberal consensus that advocated active Orthodox participation in the building of the state and a benign capitalism...

...In addition, Kook's philosophy guided the Kibbutz Hadati movement, an avowedly Socialist religious project that wedded the vision of the prophets with the legal strictures of the rabbis...

...Faced with Rabin's relentless pragmatism, Gush Emunim had virtually nothing to say...

...It sometimes seems they are practicing an Israeli brand of Conservative Judaism, a characterization they would find appalling...

...In 1983, arguing that neither faith nor force nor good intentions was a sufficient answer to Israel's dilemmas, he presided over the founding of Netivot Shalom...

...The religious Zionists were splintered beyond recognition...

...And that anguish was exacerbated by the prodding of American sympathizers who, from the ease and affluence of the United States, indulged in the luxury of a proxy pursuit of their fantasies...

...A member of the "Palmach generation" through and through, he was utterly devoid of historical romanticism and uninterested in intellectual controversies...

...The newly revered heads of the yeshivot were unencumbered by communal responsibilities, and were usually funded by private supporters...

...Actually, those young men are part of a varied group of inheritors of one of the more fascinating, lesser-known aspects of recent Jewish history: the attempt by successive generations of activists and thinkers to synthesize political dynamism and religious continuity...

...This led him to see the ferment of Zionism as part of a spiritual search...

...Rabin's stoic realism promised to bring about the "normalization" of the Jewish people the early Zionists hoped for—whatphilosopherEmil Fackenheim has called the "Jewish return into history...

...Our story begins in the late 1800s...

...Amital's \974boak,Hama'alotMima'-amakim ("The Ascent from the Depths"), is the most lucid and sophisticated statement of Gush Emunim's ideology...

...The difficulty has been that as far as many religious Zionists are concerned, the purpose of re-entering history is to transform it...

...The majority of Israel 's Orthodox rabbis, alas, rely on the apparatus of government not only to fund their institutions but to secure their place in Israeli life...

...Those young men reacted to modernity with an intensity that can scarcely be comprehended a century later...

...Nonetheless, these discussions do underline the degree of dislocation attending Israeli society, where the kibbutzim now play the stock market and Judaism has been caricatured—wittingly by opponents and unwittingly by proponents—as nationalism on the one hand and obscurantism on the other...

...Ultra-Orthodox adherents are sublimely indifferent to the mores and notions of the modern world...

...The Orthodox rabbinate has been granted a monopoly by the government, and like monopolists everywhere it pursues its own ends and lets the public be damned...

...This regression of exiles, Luria postulated, resulted from an obscure primordial tragedy, a fracturing of God's inner light, referred to as "the shattering of the vessels...

...A succession of intellectually-minded chief rabbis preached an essentially tolerant Orthodoxy, fought against the death penalty, and attempted to square halacha (traditional Jewish law) with technological and social realities...

...He arrived in Palestine in December 1944, completed his yeshiva studies in Jerusalem, and fought in the Haganah during Israel's War of Independence...

...The official Orthodox community's undoubted success at shoring up its own battlements has involved a kind of unilateral intellectual disarmament, a deliberate disengagement from discourses on philosophy, theology or history...

...That the enterprise has come to a sad pass, at least forthe moment, ought not blind us to the sheer interest and promise of its origins...

...Although schooled in socialism in their youth, Rabin and Peres seemed perilously close to committing the materialist fallacy of thinking prosperity alone would foster social and cultural cohesion...

...Thus he set about reinterpreting Kabbalistic doctrines with an eye toward uncovering the interplay of light and dark that, tradition taught, would accompany the coming of the Messiah...

...Most rabbis of the time, though, understandably viewed Zionism as at best a distraction and at worst a dangerous heresy, an act of self-assertion sure to anger both God and the Gentiles...

...the rigorous intellectualism of Lithuanian Mitnaggedism, or opposition to Chasidic practices...

...as it turned out, to profound identity struggles...

...Those few rabbis who supported it from the outset tended to be geographically and culturally marginal, rather than major rabbinic figures in their own right...

...both are rather too thin and obviously American for most Israelis' tastes...

...He knew, too, that their critiques of conventional Orthodoxy's complacency and passivity were not far off the mark, and that their nationalism was not xenophobic but directed toward liberation from Tsarist, Ottoman and other despotisms...

...Leibowitz tells of David Ben-Gurion saying to him in the 1950s: "I shall never agree to the separation of state and religion...

...Yet establishing a Ministry of Religion as if it were a Ministry of Tourism or Finance has been counterproductive and an affront to Judaism...

...With the disastrous and unexpected Yom Kippur War in 1973, euphoria quickly gave way to a new fear of apocalypse...

...A religiously-based peace organization, it aimed to be an alternative to both Gush Emunim and the determinedly secular Peace Now...

...An indigenous form of religious observance has to be given the space to emerge and to flourish...

...Kook's powerful, complex and frequently esoteric teachings, couched in an idiosyncratic, lyrical style, are not easily captured in a few sentences...

...Rabbi Kook observed that "just as there are laws governing poetry, so poetry governs laws...

...The most prominent defector was Rabbi Yehuda Amital, today a minister without portfolio in the Peres government...

...Following the miraculous 1967 victory, a broad range of Israelis believed the Jewish state was now poised to fulfill its Biblical destiny...

...They cracked under the weight of their dreams...

...Shortly after the Six Day War he set up the Har Etzion yeshiva on the West Bank...

...This is not as far-fetched as it appears if one realizes that Kook acutely sensed the energies and passions surrounding him...

...Their rigidity appears to have less to do with their perquisites than with a genuine fear that the Judaism they seek to protect would not fare very well in Israel's marketplace of ideas...

...As the rabbis of the Talmud understood, the Jews have to go on talking and talking, reading and rereading, inventing and reinventing...

...As a young man Kook studied at the Volozhin yeshiva in Lithuania, the first and most highly regarded of the Talmudic academies...

...Rabin, and especially Peres, explicitly linked the peace process and Israel's soaring economic growth?to the dismay of those citizens who are troubled by capitalism's gleeful soulless-ness...

...This arrangement has worked mostly to the benefit of religious functionaries and of the state itself...

...It was then that the modern world's centrifugal forces caught up with the masses of Eastern European Jewry and whirled apart the mix of rabbinic and mercantile control that had held Jewish communities together for centuries...

...Rejecting Kook's approach, he called for open rebellion against bourgeois Orthodoxy and the creation of communities wholly structured around a strict interpretation of halacha...

...To be part of the movement in its heyday was a rush, a high, very similar to the feeling Communist Party members and their fellow-travelers experienced before the revelations about Stalin...

...Amir's desperate and vicious act was an attempt to restore a Messianic sweep to the increasingly quotidian Zionist project...

...He envisioned the Messiah not as a personage but as a historical process that would enable Zionism to introduce the world to a redemptive synthesis of sacred law, socialist universalism and benevolent nationalism...

...In his scenario, the exile of the Jewish people from the Holy Land reflects God's own exile from the world, manifest in the depressing state of the human condition, which in turn reflects God's exile from Himself...

...A bewildering array of beliefs and ideologies competed for the hearts and minds of these young men: the mystical ecstasies of Chasidism...

...Even the ultra-Orthodox have been spectacularly coopted by government largess...

...Distancing religion from Israel's political machinery would be an important first step in the right direction...

...I want the state to hold religion under its control...

...In rejecting the Oslo accords on security grounds alone, it was merely echoing many politically moderate Israelis—a fact lost in most press coverage—and in effect conceding that its redemptive notions had to at least be laid aside for another day...

...More to the point, both the ultra-Orthodox and Sephardic rabbis are not troubled by the issue of territorial compromise because they ascribe no religious significance to Zionism...

...He knew from personal experience that many early Zionists were driven by the same idealism animating revolutionary movements all over Europe, with added impetus provided by Judaism's concern for social justice...

...close with the thoughts of two exemplary modern Jews, historian Gershom Scholem and Rabbi Kook, both students of the Kabbalah...

...In the hands of mortals armed with guns and certitude, the longing for transformation can be a pitiless and terrible thing...

...The one note of Gush Emunim's Kul-turkampf that struck a chord in larger circles of Israeli society was its criticism of galloping consumerism...

...Not literally damned, of course: A good deal of what the rabbinate does is meant to gain non-Orthodox Jews entry into heaven, but leaves their hearts and minds far behind...

...One of the more creative responses to these developments was the establishment of Eastern Europe's great yeshivot, or Talmudic academies...

...He also reminded us that "the Holy Land is sticks and stones...

...Luria elaborated a religious mythology that portrays the cosmos as the setting for a grand drama of divine longing and eventual restoration...

...To Kook, the f in-de-siecle explosion of scientific knowledge, nationalism and political radicalism was the penultimate act of the divine drama—the period when intellect, identity and moralism would engage in full-blown dialectical combat with their respective antitheses, en route to a final raising of the Lurianic lights...

...But the complications of Emancipation and Holocaust and Diaspora and Statehood make returning to a simpler past out of the question—and besides, it was never really that simple...

...The solution to this problem is not importing Conservative or Reform Judaism wholesale from the United States...

...In the yeshivot, where prayers invoking a return to Zion were recited thrice daily, it had an especially strong appeal...

...At the same time anti-Semitism, no longer restrained by the Church, took on virulent forms as the Jews became both symbols and beneficiaries of the unsettling new order of things...

...ush Emunim's remaining hard core received an unanticipated boost when Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir's Likud government agreed to participate in the 1991 Madrid peace conference—and Yitzchak Rabin's government, elected in June 1992, pushed the process with alarming dedication...

...Figures like Rabbi Amital and Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, who are no less firmly committed to halacha, are confident of being able to hold their own without the imprimatur of the state in dialogues with secular intellectuals...

...Nonetheless, here goes...

...He takes off from the mystical views espoused by Rabbi Isaac Luria, an immensely influential and innovative 16th-century Kabbalist...

...The ostensibly "non-Jewish" ideologies resonated deeply, for the traditional Jewish communities the students came from were deeply-knit amalgams of ethnicity, faith and an ethic of common provision that in many respects resembled the modern welfare state...

...the Mu-sar movement, with its focus on ethical introspection, often in group therapeutic sessions...

...Sadly Kook, who was born in Latvia in 1865 and immigrated to Palestine in 1904, is best known today for the political uses made of his work by some of his current disciples in the settler movement...

...The question has become fairly common since the assassination last November 4 in what is now Tel Aviv's Yitzchak Rabin Square...

...They blend Orthodox law with Sephardic customs that are noticeably more relaxed than those of theirEuro-pean, or Ashkenazi, counterparts...

...Encouraged by Kook's son, Zvi Yehuda, who had taken over as head of his father's yeshiva and attributed redemptive significance to Israel's recapturing the Biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria, they founded Gush Emunim in 1974...

...Nor have they hesitated to try to gain political and material advantage from their stance amid Israel's fluctuating fortunes during the last three decades...

...As the first Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land from 1921 until he died, Kook set a standard for the post that made it a moderating force through the Six Day War in 1967...

...Its very emergence, though, did signal declining support for Gush Emunim's far-reaching Messianic dreams...

...But more profoundly, Israel's contradictions?the tensions between the particular and the universal, the sacred and the profane, material progess and spiritual decline?are the contradictions of Jewish history and show no signs of abating...

...Not, however, for a small group of young religious Zionists...

...It was a Western European liberal nationalist initiative, akin to Giuseppe Mazzini's campaign to unify Italy under a republican government...

...His writings are a fascinating combination of Talmud-ism, mysticism, poetic sensibility, and social and political analysis...

...As the years of occupation wore on, Israelis were exhausted and demoralized by the intifada, intrigued by the possibilities for a new order in the Middle East after the Soviet Union collapsed, and reminded of their vulnerability while huddling in sealed rooms wearing gas masks because Saddam Hussein's scuds might rain down upon them...

...Unfortunately, the incumbent rabbis have proved unwilling, or unable, to take that leap of faith...

...The losers have been the roughly 80 per cent of Israelis who are denied the opportunity for a religious expression that would be meaningful to them...

...Major policy shifts do not automatically bespeak rupture, and Zionism is capacious enough to absorb a number of stages...

...And that, as the Marxists were fond of saying, was no accident: Gush Emunim had picked up the mantle of Labor Zionist idealism and run with it...

...Gush Emunim's members, meanwhile, were driven to desperation by the government's studied inattentiveness to their cries of dissent...

...Less than a decade later its practical application had alienated him...

...These widened when the Lebanon adventure begun that summer demonstrated the bloody wages of hubris and the impossibility of ever finding a military solution to the problem posed by the Palestinians...

...In one sense, Yigal Amir's bullet may be seen as completing a peculiar trajectory from the fevered yeshivot of Eastern Europe...

...Though Kook briefly flirted with forming his own movement, he never joined an organized party...

...Some of his other followers, notably academics, identified with his deep moralism and univer-salism...

...Emancipation offered tantalizing new possibilities...

...Born in the Carpathian mountains and steeped in rabbinic learning, Amital survived a Nazi forced labor camp by reading a smuggled anthology of Rabbi Kook's writings...

...Nor should it be forgotten that the outcome depends not a little on the actions of the Palestinians and the other peoples of the Middle East...

...That strikes me as a bit of overkill...

...Pursuing his metaphor, he declared that "sparks" of holiness from the shattered vessels were scattered throughout the material world and flicker in the dark...

...Theology alone fails to do justice to Gush Emunim's allure...

...Journalists tend to depict them as Bible-thumping homesteaders or fanatical Arab-haters or similarly dismissible characters...

...Israeli intellectuals have been much given lately to discussions of "post-Zionism," by which they mean Israel after the peace process has rendered its founding ideology obsolete...

...Recognizing his intellectual depth and psychological virtuosity, the yeshiva had him serve as guidance counselor to his intense fellow students making their way through the thickets of belief and doubt...

...Their settler ranks were largely made up of students from hesder yeshivot, where Talmudic study is combined with active military duty in a youth culture all its own...

...Distanced from the conventions of the religious bourgeoisie, the nascent scholars devoted themselves to the prodigious intellectual gymnastics of traditional Talmud study—and...

...The peace process will survive Rabin's assassination...

...The ideologies they generated eventually took on unanticipated lives of their own—sacred and secular, Left and Right—with one producing the murder of an Israeli Prime Minister...

...The settlements were increasingly populated by distinctly nonideological middle-class couples motivated by nothing more than government-backed mortgages and an easy commute to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem...

...Though the Jews have freed themselves from the mythic webs of others, they must still, being human, create myths of their own for their country to live by—with the emphasis on "live...

...In their century-long competition, the Jewish bourgeoisie has clearly gained the upper hand over the avant garde throughout much of the world...

...After his death in 1935, Kook's ideas were carried forward in different ways in different quarters...

...Unlike other contemporary Orthodox thinkers who contended with this or that element of modern thought, he tackled the felt experience of modernity—the radical newness of revolutionary politics, of urban life and communications, of personal liberation...

...This permitted their institutions to be an early battleground for the conflict between the bourgeois and avant garde elements in Orthodoxy—which, as we shall see, persists to the present day...

...Modeled on the great universities of Europe, they attracted talented young men away from the families and local rabbis who had governed their lives...

...His judgment was focused and blunt: Occupation of the territories was no longer strategically necessary and entailed un-acceptably high moral, political and economic costs...

...In a more immediate sense, 20th-century Jewish weavings from the Holocaust to statehood to encirclement to triumph to near-apocalypse and back—compounded by the mind-bending paradoxes of a Jewish army of occupation, of returning Biblical homelands to advance the Jewish state, and of secular Jewishness itself—were all finally too much for some religious Zionists to bear...

...Yet they won the admiration of many Laborites too—including, initially, Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres—for they seemed the last idealists in an increasingly materialistic post-Socialist country...

...Netivot Shalom has never enjoyed a big following...

...On the political front, they were most apparent in the policies of the religious Zionist Mizrachi Party, progenitor of the National Religious Party (NRP...

...is, as sociologist Charles Liebman has noted, a distinctly Protestant phenomenon not readily transferable to a Jewish state...

...One is ultra-Orthodoxy, whose doctrines were explicitly formulated by Rabbi Isaiah Karelitz, known as the Chazon Ish...

...In the spring of 1982, the spectacle of Gush Emunim activists battling Israeli soldiers at Yamit during the Sinai evacuation opened cracks in the religious Zionist facade...

...The second grew out of the immigration of Jews from the Arabian Gulf and North Africa...

...The youthful trend toward ideology was furthered by the displacement of the influence of the historically moderate local rabbis...

...To be sure, there are no easy answers here...

...Moreover, the incomparable mixture of piety, charisma and personal tolerance he exuded—like the fusion of modern and classical Hebrew in his writings—offered a glimpse of a traditional Judaism that could somehow resolve the antinomies of 20th-century life...

...A 1910 essay of his, for instance, constructed an argument out of Talmudic and Kabbalistic sources for what now would be called "animal rights...

...It is the task of the Jewish people, he concluded, to discover those seemingly lost sparks, to reach into the sludge of Creation and, as it were, return them to their transcendent source through good works guided by holy intentions...

...He then became an educator and developed the concept of yeshivot hesder...

...On the contrary, they may worsen as generations of Jews grow farther from the feeling of shared fate and belief that has held them together...

...Speaking several days before the assassination, the renowned novelist A. B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's premier secular intellectuals, urged moderate religious Zionists to join forces with secularists in forging a Jewish-Israeli culture that points up the emptiness of consumerism...

...For openers, it should be unequivocally accepted that Judaism has a unique, if still poorly defined, place in Israel...

...Since Israel is a Jewish state, it has to come to terms with Judaism's conceptions of law, spirituality and, lest we forget, God...

...Its participants saw themselves as not simply extending Israeli sovereignty but as literally ushering in the Messianic era?forming a new halachic society that would unite the sacred and the profane in the Holy Land and, in so doing, ultimately save the human race...

...Shimon Peres' penchant for high-flown pronouncements makes him a somewhat easier, albeit still slippery, ideological foe...

...Alongside religious Zionism, two other kinds of observance surfaced in Israel and eventually came to have a considerable impact...

...Clearly, some new cultural reckoning is necessary to integrate ongoing change...

...But as Herzl himself shortly understood, it drew its demographic heft and moral force from the suffering of Eastern European Jewry...

...and of course, socialism, liberalism and nationalism in a broad range of permutations...

...Scholem once said: "Zionism means that the Jewish people refuse to go on being a symbol in somebody else's myth...

...Their personal identity struggles sought to reconcile desires for justice, Jewish fulfillment and engagement with the outside world...

...So will the doubts and divisions it has led to that extend beyond Gush Emunim...

...Large numbers of well-meaning Israelis question the direction the demarche has taken on strictly prudential, nonideological grounds, and will become embittered if they do not receive a respectful hearing...

...Anyone who has witnessed the disenfranchise-ment of non-Orthodox Israelis at their own weddings and funerals will know what I'm talking about...

...Although such cliches contain a germ of accuracy, they paint a grossly inadequate picture...

...But Rabin presented a cultural challenge that Kook's teachings had left Gush Emunim singularly unprepared to meet...

...The conflict went into high gear in the mid-1890s, when the well-known Viennese feuilletonist and Messiah manque, Theodor Herzl, launched Zionism as a political movement...

...Religious Zionism did not find its herald until it was embraced by Abraham Isaac Kook, a towering Talmudic authority and one of the extraordinary spiritual personalities of the 20th century...