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Torn between God and Country
Yossi Klein Halevi
It is a sunny, windy Jerusalem afternoon, and hundreds of chanting boys and girls in their early teens, members of the Bnei Akiva religious Zionist youth movement, sit on a grassy slope in a park near the Knesset. Though many of them are veterans of the right's anti-government demonstrations, today they've gathered not to protest but to cheer on their friends performing in a song competition.
One group after another mounts a makeshift stage - from the working-class Jerusalem neighborhood of Neveh Ya'akov, from the middle-class West Bank town of Efrat, from the militant settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron. The boys in knitted yarmulkes and girls in long denim skirts - some performing together, some in gender-segregated groups - sing to driving beats, twisting in abrupt but synchronized movements, while their friends in the audience wave their hands high over their heads. It could be a rock concert - except that the atmosphere is relentlessly wholesome; no one even smokes a cigarette. The lyrics to the songs reflect the competition's theme: "Derekh Eretz," decent conduct. "The world is made of all kinds of people," sings one group; "you have to learn to get along with them all." Classic religious Zionism: fusing modern and traditional cultures and creating young people who can function in both.
But that synthesis - the ability of "modern Orthodox" Jews to remain full participants in secular Israeli life - may be breaking down. Perhaps not since its founding in Vilna in 1902 has the religious Zionist movement faced such a fateful turning point as it does today. From the 1967 Six-Day War onward, the vast majority of religious Zionists - who constitute between 10 and 15 percent of the population - have increasingly mortgaged their political agenda to the single issue of West Bank settlement. Though over half of the West Bank settlers are secular, Orthodox Jews initiated and continue to lead the settlement movement; and its most enthusiastic support within Israel's pre-67 borders comes from the religious Zionist community, which over-whelmingly sees the settlers as its pioneering elite.
But now, much of the West Bank is about to be transferred to Yasser Arafat, leaving the settlers besieged and perhaps marginalized. Even as they launch a last-ditch effort to prevent the army's pullout, religious Zionists face this dilemma: Will they continue to view full participation in national life as a religious imperative, or withdraw into bitter isolation?
A major step toward the latter option was taken on July 12, when 15 leading religious Zionist rabbis, headed by former Ashkenazi chief rabbi Avraham Shapira, ruled that evacuating West Bank military bases posed a danger to Jewish life - in effect forbidding soldiers from participating in the army's partial withdrawal, in the next, imminent stage of Palestinian self-rule.
The same rabbinic group had previously ruled against dismantling settlements. But the consequences of the latest ruling are likely to be far more immediate: The army could face widespread refusal to carry out orders - what some government ministers call a "mutiny" - in a matter of weeks.
Several prominent rabbis have repudiated their colleagues' decision. They include Yoel Bin-Nun, a highly respected educator who lives in the West Bank settlement of Ofrah, as well as the current Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yisrael Lau - though Lau lacks authority as a serious Torah scholar and has little clout in the religious Zionist community.
The reaction of the rabbinic heads of the country's 20 hesder yeshivot - whose 4,000 students alternate between military service and religious study - has been ambivalent. Several signed the ruling,several others opposed it, and most remained silent. Privately, some hesder rabbis have told their students to obey all army orders.
No one can predict whether the moderate or the "refusal" rabbis will have greater influence on Orthodox soldiers and reservists. Settlers themselves are divided over the wisdom of threatening the army's unity on the issue of evacuating bases.
But the damage has already been done: Orthodox soldiers, regarded as among the most motivated, may now be seen as potentially disloyal,thereby affecting their military careers. Indeed, Energy Minister Gonen Segev has suggested that all Orthodox draftees sign a special loyalty oath - in effect turning them into pariahs.
The ruling reflects not just a political but a theological crisis for religious Zionism. Unlike ultra-Orthodoxy, which recognizes only the authority of halakhah, religious Zionism has invested spiritual significance in the secular state as harbinger of the messianic era. But now religious Zionists must decide whether to obey a secular authority whose territorial concessions are seen as violating that messianic scenario - and more to the point for most religious Zionists, as risking the country's survival.
Some critics see the rabbinic ruling as a theological counterrevolution, transforming religious Zionism into a kind of ultra-Orthodoxy by elevating rabbinic authority over government and military decisions and repudiating the religious value of Jewish sovereignty. "This could be the end of religious Zionism as we've known it," warns Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a religious moderate who lives in Efrat.
Supporters of the rabbinic ruling counter that a secular government has halakhic validity only if it rests on a Jewish majority. "This is a minority Jewish government whose survival depends on the support of Arab Knesset members," says Rabbi Benny Elon, a leader of the settlement movement. Elon's conclusion: Not only does the government lack halakhic legitimacy,but so do its orders to the army it commands.
Paradoxically, religious Zionism has never been more vigorous or self-confident. Its educational institutions are thriving: Over 20 percent of Israeli schoolchildren - 183,000 students - attend state religious schools. The modern Orthodox Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, has grown to 18,000 students and is the third-largest university in the country.
Even the movement's 16 kibbutzim, whose avant-garde role in religious Zionism was long ago ceded to the settlements, are thriving. And while the viability of many secular kibbutzim is threatened by debts and mass departures, the Orthodox kibbutzim remain solvent and haven't had to join the government's kibbutz bail-out program, and have kept a steady population of 8,000.
And then there is Bnei Akiva, the pride of religious Zionism. Ask Elchanan Glatt - the youth movement's 36-year-old head, whose voice is permanently hoarse from enthusiasm - how many members he has, and he replies, "I can only tell you for sure how many we had yesterday, because since then more kids have joined."
With some 50,000 members in 350 chapters, Bnei Akiva is the country's second-largest youth movement - an astonishing achievement for a religious organization. Bnei Akiva chapters exist at every temporary housing site for immigrants and in almost every poor development town; no youth movement sends more emissaries on educational missions to the former Soviet Union than Bnei Akiva.
In the early years of the state, religious Zionists often felt like second-rate Israelis: The "real" pioneers and military heroes were secular. But that inferiority complex is long gone; if anything, religious Zionists today exhibit excessive self-esteem, the conviction that they are, as a community, the country's last idealists. "The leftists are afraid of us, because we will be this country's last ideological survivors," says Zevulun Hammer, head of the National Religious Party (NRP).
Religious Zionists note that almost half of the 30 soldiers who've fallen in Lebanon in the last 18 months were Orthodox. So are up to 40 percent of new combat officers. Indeed, just as Orthodox settlers in the territories appropriated the symbols of pioneering Israel from the kibbutzim, so too are Orthodox soldiers replacing kibbutz youth as the army's idealistic elite - if the rabbis' ruling doesn't turn them into outcasts.
In fact, though, the ruling is only the most dramatic expression of a growing religious Zionist trend toward distancing from the secular mainstream. One expression of that trend is stricter religious observance. Married women, for example, now more commonly cover their hair with hats or kerchiefs - once almost exclusively an ultra-Orthodox custom. Bnei Akiva no longer allows boys and girls to swim together. Many state religious schools have instituted gender segregated classes; and a separate, smaller religious Zionist elementary school network known as Noam emphasizes not just high academic standards but religious stringency.
In part, the new halakhic strictness reflects a genuine spiritual deepening: Serious Torah study is now widespread in the community, whose scholars are beginning to compete in halakhic expertise with ultra-Orthodox rabbis.
But the religious rigor is also a way of repudiating a secular society seen as increasingly un-Jewish and hedonistic. "Secularists once wanted to create a serious culture here," says the NRP's Hammer. "Now, it's acid and alcohol. Why bother with the army anymore? We should sit on the beach and get tanned. The leftists are throwing everything out, even the War of Independence isn't justified anymore."
Some families have gotten rid of their TVs and stopped buying newspapers, offended by the excesses of popular culture. And religious educators, wary of sexual promiscuity among secular students, are less willing to send their own students to the four-day seminars sponsored by the Gesher organization, which brings together religious and secular high school youth for dialogue.
The mood is affecting even religious moderates, like Dr. Yosef Tobi of Haifa University's Hebrew literature department. Unlike most Orthodox Jews, Tobi has encouraged his daughters to serve in the army. But lately, he says, his attachment to the state is weakening. "The secularists used to build the Land of Israel, but now secularism is only destructive. I used to think it was better to be a secular Jew in Israel than a religious Jew in the Diaspora. I'm not so sure anymore."
The threat of imminent withdrawal from part of the territories has created a potent convergence of cultural and political alienation. For many religious Zionists, secular hedonism and the government's retreat from Judea and Samaria - and its failure to express any pain for that territorial "amputation" - are symptoms of the same illness: the loss of Israel's Jewish soul.
The Rabin government is widely detested among religious Zionists for its perceived hostility not only toward the settlement movement but Jewish tradition. Pronouncements by coalition Knesset members that Israel should be considered the state of its citizens rather than of the Jewish people, as well as left-wing efforts to legitimize homosexuality and other life styles anathema to Jewish law, lead many religious Zionists to characterize the government as "anti-Jewish."
Shulamit Melamed, head of the Orthodox settlers' popular radio station, Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), notes that some synagogues have made changes in the Shabbat morning prayer for the State of Israel; one change substitutes the words asking God to protect the heads of the state with a request for protection from those leaders.
Rabbi Simcha Hacohen Kook, chief rabbi of the town of Rehovot, goes further: Religious Jews, he insists, should replace the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah," with Psalm 126, Shir Hama'alot, thanking God for the return to Zion. "I want to send a shock through this country's system," he says. "I'm all for dialogue with the secularists. But not with a secularism that is destroying Jewish roots."
Kook's words hold a particular irony: For he is the great-nephew of Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, mystical philosopher of religious Zionism who laid the theological foundation for its decades-long partnership with secular Zionists by viewing them as Divine instruments for Jewish redemption.
It is no coincidence that the most radical separatists - like Simcha Hacohen Kook - emerge from the camp known as hardal, an acronym for haredi le'umi, or "ultra-Orthodox nationalist." The hardal camp, while sharing religious Zionism's embrace of the state, rejects any openness to Western ethics and insists that all answers to life's problems can be found in the Torah. And while still a minority in religious Zionism, the hardal camp has disproportionate influence: It controls Jerusalem's Merkaz Harav yeshiva, training ground for a generation of religious Zionist rabbis and settlement leaders.
Those who have decided to secede from a corrupt secular Israel have found an unofficial spokesman. Every Friday morning on Arutz Sheva, Adir Zik - a 56-year-old independent TV producer - broadcasts an hour-long program in a raspy and ironic voice, fast-talking but low-key. His message is that religious Zionism's traditional alliance with secular Israel is over. And he may well be Arutz Sheva's most popular broadcaster.
He says: "This government has decided that people like me and my family, who fought and bled and died for this country, are enemies of the state. You want to make me an enemy? Then to hell with you. The ultra-Orthodox were right. A million percent: Anything not built on Torah won't last. I beat my breast in penitence. We religious Zionists worshiped idols: a state, an army. All lies. What is the army today? Officers who care more about covering their behinds than protecting Jews. It's over, finished. If my youngest son wants to learn in a yeshivah instead of entering the army I'll say, `Great.' Today my partners are the ultra-Orthodox. My grandchildren and their grandchildren will meet in shul. Rabin's grandchildren won't know what a shul is."
Late one night recently, Zik went to a sheva brakhot, a post-wedding celebration at a synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak. A crowd of hasidic fans gathered around him, as though he were a rebbe; one man asked for his autograph. Their enthusiasm was understandable: The ultra-Orthodox have waited decades for an Adir Zik - a religious Zionist who would publicly confess the failure of his movement's alliance with secular Jews.
And yet, even as the separatist temptation grows, other powerful forces within religious Zionism are pulling in the opposite direction. At no time have modern Orthodox Jews been more integrated into Israeli life. Indeed, many modern Orthodox Israelis, however sympathetic to the settlers, are no more passionately ideological than other Israelis.
No phenomenon better embodies the integration of religious Zionists into the mainstream than the mekhinot - one-year pre-draft programs aimed at strengthening the religious motivation of future soldiers. Unlike hesder, the country's seven mekhinot offer no separate religious structure within the army; their graduates serve alongside non-Orthodox soldiers. And of the mekhinot's thousand or so graduates, most have entered either top combat units or officers courses.
Culturally, too, Orthodox Jews are penetrating areas they've rarely ventured into before. A group of young Orthodox poets has emerged, grouped around a magazine called Dimui ("Image"). The poets publish with leading Israeli houses, and envision a fusion of modern and traditional Hebrew literature.
Two Orthodox women in their mid-20s have formed a satirical team, "Noyah and Nurit," and perform before religious and secular audiences, mocking both secular ignorance of Judaism and Orthodox hypocrisies. In one skit, Noyah and Nurit crochet yarmulkes for their boyfriends - a virtually obligatory activity for teenage religious Zionist girls - while viciously gossiping about their friends. In another skit, the two young women attend a settlers demonstration, which turns into a giant social reunion; toward the end of the rally, they discover that they're holding Peace Now signs. "We've been heckled only once," says Nurit Hadar, who lives in Tel Aviv. "The response of religious audiences has been fantastic."
An Orthodox-run film school, Ma'aleh, founded six years ago and staffed largely by non-Orthodox filmmakers, has just graduated its third class. Students don't restrict themselves to Orthodox-related subjects, but are committed to the school's philosophy of infusing moral and spiritual values into Israeli culture. One student's documentary film, for example, portrays an emotionally closed young man who heals himself through meditation - not "Orthodox" but certainly "religious."
"We used to be marginal," says school director Yitzhak Recanati. "We attracted mostly newly Orthodox Jews or else Orthodox Jews on their way to secularism. But now we've become mainstream, and children of rabbis study here" - as does the son of NRP leader Hammer.
The competition between integrationists and separatists for the soul of religious Zionism has erupted in the pages of Nekudah, the settlers' monthly. A key question for Nekudah's writers is why "the people" haven't followed the settlers, who've seen themselves as a spiritual and political vanguard. Some writers simply dismiss secular Israel as hopelessly hedonistic and urge self-ghettoization. But others say that the settlers and religious Zionists generally isolated themselves - "failed to settle in the hearts of the people," as the expression goes - by ignoring the country's social issues and becoming just another special interest group.
In the short term, the approaching siege of the settlements will likely unite most separatists and integrationists in a common front. And the anger and anxiety across the religious Zionist spectrum are profound.
Bambi Sheleg edits a respected children's magazine called Otiot, aimed at both Orthodox and secular readers. Sheleg, who lives in Jerusalem, has in the past ruled out moving to the territories, not wanting to isolate herself from mainstream Israel in a closed religious community. But now she and her husband Ya'ir, a fellow journalist who works for the secular Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir, are considering moving to a settlement. "I feel I have to do something," she says. "The government's policy is a virtual death sentence for Jews in Judea and Samaria. I'm being eaten up by despair."
In the long term, though, the current crisis could lead to the strengthening of the integrationists. Says Gesher head Danny Tropper: "The tragedy of religious Zionism was to become identified with a militant political position, and to appear to much of the secular public as an enemy of peace. I think we'll emerge from this trauma more realistic, and start seeing religion not as a political but a delicate spiritual position. And then religious Zionism can again become a bridge between religious and secular Jews."
The alternative is a society polarized between secular Israelis severed from Jewish tradition and Orthodox Israelis barricaded within it,with no mediating force between them. Should that occur, the tragedy won't be religious Zionism's alone.
1995
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