The new Zionists: Ultra-Orthodoxy has effectively surrendered to the Zionist idea
One hundred and twenty years after declaring it
Judaism’s ‘Enemy No. 1,’ ultra-Orthodoxy has effectively surrendered to
the Zionist idea.
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| Health Minister Yaakov Litzman of the United
Torah Judaism party sits with other ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s
coalition government during a Knesset session, November 23 |
WITH ORGANS installed in synagogues, German
inserted into prayer books, Jewish scholars disowning the messiah, and
Jewish schools teaching history, philosophy and math, a flabbergasted
Rabbi Moshe Sofer (1762-1839) ruled: “All that is novel is forbidden
from the Torah.”Two centuries on, ultra-Orthodoxy’s resistance
of religious change remains as fierce as it was when its revered
founder consecrated the slogan that still remains its emblem, rallying
cry and mission statement. However, in the war that his successors
initiated generations later – the war on Zionism – ultra-Orthodoxy is
in the throes of a grand retreat.
The
ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) war was declared the morning after Zionist
prophet Theodor Herzl published in 1896 his own mission statement, “The
Jewish State,” the platform for the Jews’ political resurrection, which
most rabbis rejected as blasphemy.
On the Hasidic end, Rabbi
Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn (1860-1920) ruled that even if the Zionists
had been observant, and “even if there had been room to believe they
will achieve their aim,” observant Jews “should not listen to them”
because the Talmud forbade the Jews to undo their exile, and a Jew’s
hope is that “our redemption will be brought about by God himself.”
Anti-Hasidic sages went a step further and ordered their followers to boycott Zionism.
Jews
must avoid “connecting with what amounts to religion’s destruction and
an obstacle to the house of Israel,” wrote Lithuanian sage Rabbi Chaim
Soloveitchik, while the chief rabbi of Lodz, Eliyahu Meisel, wrote
that “anyone with God’s fear in his heart shall distance himself from
them [the Zionists], will not walk with them, and will keep his legs
from their paths.”
One hundred and twenty years on, a Hasid is a
minister in the Zionist government; thousands of ultra-Orthodox men
serve in the Zionist army and a plethora of ultra-Orthodox colleges
lead thousands into the Zionist state’s economic beehive and social
mainstream.
Reform Judaism, which also originally opposed
Zionism claiming the Jews had already been redeemed when Europe
emancipated them, humbly changed its mind after Hitler’s rise to power,
and in 1937 formally adopted the Zionist idea.
Ultra-Orthodoxy
delivered no such note of surrender; not after Hitler’s rise to power,
not after the Holocaust, not after Israel’s establishment, and not even
after the 1967 Six Day War, which other religious Jews interpreted as
proof that Zionism was God’s will.
Addressing his followers in
the summer of 1967, Lithuanian-born and Bnei Brak-based Haredi leader
Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach (1899-2001) accused a victory-drunk Israel
of having “completely deviated from the manner and the course in which
we have walked throughout our exile.”
Like the rabbis of Herzl’s
time, he still saw in Zionism a reincarnation of Judaism’s great
messianic trauma, the Shabtai Tzvi affair, when most rabbis accepted a
17th century Ottoman Jew as the messiah only to eventually see him
convert to Islam.
Moreover, Shach resented the very marriage of
Jews and power. Recalling longingly the days when the Jews were “one
sheep among 70 wolves,” the Haredi sage claimed that the newly warring
Jews had suddenly emerged as “the arbiter between the wolves.”
Alarmed
by the euphoria about him, Shach reiterated ultra-Orthodoxy’s original
dismissal of the Zionist quest to transform the Jews into an active
nation. “Things have turned around,” he said lamentingly, “and the
people of Israel enters a situation whereby it is a factor among the
nations, and who knows what this situation’s results might be.”
Unimpressed
with Israel’s military victory, he preached, “There is neither
redemption nor the beginning of redemption here… we remain in exile,
which remains as bitter as it ever was.” The Torah, he noted on another
occasion, was given in the desert. “We didn’t have the Land of Israel
then, or ‘territories,’ yet we were an eternal nation.”
That, in
brief, was the mindset with which a bloodied, minuscule and humbled
Haredi community struggled to build itself in the shadows of the
Zionist enterprise that its founders derided as heresy.
The
result would be an improbable journey into a joint future, a political
voyage and social odyssey during which Israeli ultra- Orthodoxy grew in
numbers, space and sway until its formula of accommodation with the
Jewish state became the victim of its own success.
Numbering
hardly 30,000 in 1948, the young Jewish state’s Haredi community was on
the defensive – ideologically, socially and politically.
Ideologically,
it had to explain its thinkers’ failure to see the approach of
calamity, a rabbinical blindness that contrasted Zionism’s foresight
and was morbidly symbolized in the Warsaw Ghetto’s last Seder. Held
with the Zionist-led uprising’s fire exchanges already audible outside,
the Seder was led by Rabbi Eliezer Meisel, one of the ghetto’s last
deportees to Auschwitz and grandson of Rabbi Eliyahu Meisel, who had
boycotted Zionism.
In addition to this moral burden, Israel
Orthodoxy had to rehabilitate from the Holocaust’s blow to its
demographics and reach an accord with the Jewish state that would
somehow help its restoration in the shadows of Zionism’s victory and
demands.
THE HOLOCAUST was explained away as God’s will. “There
is an account in all this,” said Shach in a sermon titled “And a Storm
Rages.” God, he explained, “conducted a one-on-one account, a long
account spanning centuries until the account accumulated to six million
Jews, and that is how the Holocaust happened. That is what a Jew
should believe, and if a Jew is not wholesome in this faith then he is a
heretic.”
While Zionists, both secular and observant, dismissed
this narrative of guilt as escapist and denialist, all ended up
saluting ultra-Orthodoxy’s political maneuvering opposite the Jewish
state. Launched unassumingly in 1948, it was based on the formula that
was revolutionized in 1977 and is now coming undone.
The
undeclared aim was to restore the proverbial ghetto, where thick and
tall social walls would keep rabbinical authority unquestioned and
modernity’s temptations at bay.
The key to such social
resignation lay in the Jewish state’s leading social welder – the army.
If Haredi men joined the army, they might cease to be ultra-Orthodox.
If exempted, their distinctiveness would be preserved and, in fact,
deepened.
Haredi rabbis, therefore, met with David Ben-Gurion
while the War of Independence was still raging and requested that the
IDF not conscript their young men. Hitler, they said, burned Europe’s
network of Talmudic academies and they were out to rebuild it. Though
himself a deeply secular man, Ben-Gurion was moved by the argument and
agreed to grant deferments from military service. He had, however, some
conditions.
First, he extended only 400 deferments, which even
in 1948 was but a fraction of one percent of the newborn IDF’s 115,000
conscripts. Second, Ben-Gurion demanded that the undrafted indeed study
Torah, as the rabbis said they would.
It was a modest
beginning, memorably animated by Ben-Gurion’s meeting four years later
with the ultra-Orthodox leader of the time, Avraham Karelitz, better
known as “the Hazon Ish,” or “a man’s vision,” as he titled one of his
books of Talmudic exegesis.
Unlike subsequent meetings between
secular and Haredi leaders, that one was not about political horse
trading. Initiated by the intellectually curious Ben-Gurion, it was
about ideas. “If two camels meet on a narrow path,” said the rabbi,
“one burdened with a cargo and the other carrying no cargo, the one
without cargo is supposed to make way for the one with the cargo.”
Borrowed
from a Talmudic ruling, the parable’s moral was that those not
burdened by the demands of Jewish law should make way for those who
choose to bear this burden.
Though insulted by the comparison,
and though later noting that the rabbi had no recipe for a Jewish
state’s attitude toward freedom of conscience, Ben-Gurion left intact
his deal with the ultra-Orthodox. The ghetto’s slow but steady
construction now proceeded unopposed. By 1968, the 400- man quota had
doubled, and by 1977, an aggregate 25,000 Haredi men had already
avoided full military service since Israel’s establishment.
This
social nucleus of the emerging ghetto incubated in the secluded
neighborhoods where the ultra-Orthodox lived with their rabbis close to
their schools, yeshivas and shops. This self-segregation was further
cemented by the men’s failure to acquire vocations, in line with their
commitment to spend their time studying Torah, all of which reduced to a
minimum their daily contact with the rest of society.
Economically,
since breadwinning was left to the women, who in turn worked mostly as
underpaid teachers, ultra- Orthodox households soon counted among the
country’s poorest.
This formula, of maximum piety alongside
minimum livelihood, service and social integration, allowed
ultra-Orthodoxy’s growth during the early years. By the Six Day War,
major Hasidic groups like Gur and Belz, which were decimated in the
Holocaust, were back on their feet, while Shach’s Ponevezh Yeshiva, the
Harvard of ultra- Orthodoxy, had already produced a generation of
Israel-born Talmudic scholars.
By the mid-70s, there already
were some 200,000 ultra-Orthodox Israelis, representing a more
confident community, but still one on the social margins where it might
have remained but for a political earthquake that rattled the outside
world, and whose many aftershocks included an offer that
ultra-Orthodoxy’s politicians could not refuse.
The earthquake
was Labor’s loss of power in 1977, and the offer that came from the
winner of that seminal election, the Likud’s Menachem Begin, was as
simple as it was sincere: unlimited draft deferments, generous budgets
and senior government positions in return for a long-term alliance
between ultra-Orthodoxy and the right.
Ultra-Orthodoxy embraced
the deal that became a pillar of the political order, unaware that from
the viewpoint of its founders’ war on Zionism it would prove a
Faustian bargain.
The upside, from the Haredi viewpoint, was
that what began with an annual 400 draft deferments quickly mushroomed
to thousands, while government funds flowed directly into the budgets
of yeshivas, seminaries, elementary schools and kindergartens, and
assorted tax breaks and incentives helped ultra-Orthodox households
increase their available income.
MOREOVER, THE deal included
unprecedented power, highlighted by an ultra- Orthodox politician’s
appointment as chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee.
Hoping
to stick to its guns in its war on Zionism, ultra-Orthodoxy avoided
taking cabinet positions ‒ benefitting from the Zionist enterprise was
one thing; legitimizing and accepting responsibility for its actions
was another. And so, the original formula of minimum service for maximum
piety made way for what critics now derided as maximum authority for
minimum responsibility.
At the same time, Haredi women were
bearing more than twice as many babies as secular women while their
households were developing a dependency on the state’s child
allowances, which, thanks to formulas concocted by ultra-Orthodox
politicians, could reach a monthly $2,000 for a family with 10 kids.
This was besides a plethora of budget transfers and tax breaks
custom-tailored for Haredi beneficiaries.
By the turn of the
century, the annual number of ultra-Orthodox men avoiding full IDF
service had crossed 7,000 ‒ enough to man two combat brigades.
Besides
provoking the middle class, where many felt they were financing a
celebration of draft-dodging and voluntary unemployment, this
arrangement also perverted the Jewish tradition that, while cherishing
lifelong study, had never financed it for more than a select few.
It was an anomaly that had to explode, and it did.
The
first setback to the formula of 1977 came in 1999, when
ultra-Orthodoxy’s political deal fueled the rise of a political party
dedicated to this formula’s eradication.
Led by outspoken journalist Tommy Lapid, it won six Knesset seats that year, and 15 four years later.
Lapid’s
electoral success both expressed and fanned popular anger in the
middle class that serves in the army, fuels the economy, pays taxes and
feeds the budget that, in his view, ultra-Orthodoxy abused.
While
this electoral dynamic pressured the ghetto walls from outside,
economics would pressure them from within following new legislation in
2002.
With the Treasury fearing that the budget would soon be
unable to finance the growing number of non-working Haredi men, a bill
written by a public panel allowed ultra-Orthodox men to go to work at
age 23 in return for shortened military service.
On the face of
it, this acceptance of reduced service further bolstered Haredi
privilege, as Lapid indeed charged and the Supreme Court later agreed,
prompting the Knesset to rewrite what is known as the “Tal Law,” named
after its formulator, Justice Tzvi Tal. Yet, this legislation signaled
to ultra-Orthodoxy that its deal had exhausted itself: if their
community were to survive, its men would have to work.
The
following year, the 1977 deal was dealt its most devastating blow when
Ariel Sharon left the ultra-Orthodox out of his coalition ‒ the first
time the right had done such a thing. The long-term deal signed with
Begin proved to have an expiration date, and it had arrived.
Faced
with a harsh recession, Sharon and his finance minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, cut in half the child allowances that had become central in
many ultra-Orthodox families’ livelihoods. Prodded by Lapid, who was
now deputy prime minister, they also trimmed government funding for
yeshivas and other Haredi causes.
Ultra-Orthodox politicians felt choked.
With
65 percent of ultra-Orthodox males unemployed and their average income
less than half that of the rest of the population, Haredi rabbis
realized they needed a new deal with the Jewish state.
The ideal
of non-work was, therefore, quietly abandoned. Ultra-Orthodox
vocational schools began to sprout in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak,
initially training plumbers, mechanics, electricians and nurses, and
then spreading to computer engineering, accounting and law.
A
decade after the passage of the Tal Law, 12 mainstream universities and
colleges were offering special programs in which 7,000 students were
enrolled and 8,000 had already graduated. It has since become a
groundswell. Last year, the Council for Higher Education reported that
9,000 ultra-Orthodox students were studying for an undergraduate
degree, following the previous year’s 8,300.
At the same time,
the IDF opened special units for ultra-Orthodox men, who increasingly
realize that proper military service is the best entry ticket into the
workplace.
What began with a lone infantry battalion, soon
became three, and then spread to the air force and navy where former
yeshiva students are now mechanics; to intelligence, where they became
analysts; to computers, where they became programmers; and to human
resources, where they became personnel clerks.
Last year, a
record 2,400 ultra-Orthodox men enlisted out of 8,000 called, and the
numbers keep rising. Meanwhile, the Israel Police last year trained and
hired 15 ultra- Orthodox criminal investigators. This is besides the
hundreds who are doing National Service at first aid stations, old age
homes, hospitals and charities.
Most symbolically, following a
Supreme Court ruling that deputy ministers cannot function as de facto
ministers, ultra- Orthodoxy’s Council of Sages approved its senior
politician, Yaakov Litzman’s acceptance of a full cabinet membership as
Health Minister.
The rabbis’ longstanding refusal to let their
representative swear allegiance to the Zionist government and to become
responsible for its deeds – was thus abandoned, reflecting the steady
retreat from the historic formula of maximum authority and minimum
responsibility.
This is not to say, however, that the previous reality is now history.
Ultra-Orthodox
Israelis still live in separate neighborhoods; most Haredi men still
don’t serve, work or study to acquire a profession; some in the units
the IDF opened for them are not fully ultra-Orthodox; the laws that
ease Haredi men into the workforce are still unfair to the rest of the
population and remain a political bone of contention; ultra-Orthodox
schools still refuse to teach a core curriculum of secular studies; and
a hard core of diehard fanatics is fighting to uphold
ultra-Orthodoxy’s seclusion.
Still, the walls of the
ultra-Orthodox ghetto have been breached and thousands are pouring out,
much the way the Jews of Germany, Austria and Hungary did when their
own ghetto walls fell between the times of Moshe Sofer and Herzl.
Back
then, it took hardly two generations before the newly freed Jews
became lawyers, doctors, dentists, scientists, publishers, journalists,
bankers, and tycoons.
The same process is underway in Israel –
the Zionist creation where more than half a million ultra-Orthodox Jews
now speak no language other than the Hebrew that Zionism revived; the
Jewish state where thousands of ultra-Orthodox men now hold rifles and
swear on the Bible that they are prepared to die in its defense; the
Jewish state where Haredi young adults increasingly mesh daily in the
workplace with the secular majority; the Jewish state where every
Sunday morning a broad-bearded Gur Hasid removes his fedora while
taking his seat around the cabinet table and joining the business of
realizing what started off as Theodore Herzl’s dream and most rabbis’
nightmare.
http://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/The-new-Zionists-436827
