The Radicalization of Orthodoxy

The revival of Orthodoxy has not been evenly distributed between the various traditional alternatives examined in the third chapter. The yeshivah and chasidic communities are experiencing rapid growth. Samson Raphael Hirsch’s philosophy of Torah im derekh eretz is currently out of favor. R. Avraham Kook’s religious Zionism has been taken in new and unexpected directions by the Gush Emunim. As elsewhere, so with Orthodoxy: events in the last two decades have been ironic. The two broad movements within Orthodoxy that welcomed modernity – Hirsch’s and Kook’s – have been outflanked by modernity. The strategy that most consciously resisted the spirit of the age – that of R. Moses Sofer – has emerged as the approach that best captures the spirit of the age.

To be sure, we speak of a mood rather than a majority. In Anglo-Jewry, for example, some 70 percent of synagogue members belong to the mainstream, moderate Orthodox congregations, while only 5 percent belong to the so-called right-wing or ultra-Orthodox communities. In Israel, the charedi presence is somewhat larger and more politically prominent. In America, where Orthodoxy as a whole is only a small section of Jewry, the yeshivah community has a proportionately larger influence on its attitudes. Nonetheless in both countries, the majority of Orthodox Jews are participants in secular society along the lines envisaged by Hirsch. They see religious significance in the State of Israel along the lines suggested by R. Kook. But mood is significant. It suggests a disenchantment with, or a failure of confidence in, the philosophies that inspired an earlier generation.

That sense was recently expressed by the British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits. “Personally,” he wrote, “by upbringing and by conviction I am deeply committed to the philosophy of Torah im derekh eretz. It is my way of life, my ideology. But I am realistic enough to appreciate that such a religious-secular fusion as a movement is not likely to prevail in our generation for a whole variety of reasons, certainly not by juxtaposition, or in opposition to the rest of the Torah camp…. We must recognize the growing ascendancy of these yeshivah/chasidic worlds and come to terms with them.”

This view is widely shared. The journal Tradition published a symposium in 1982 on “The State of Orthodoxy.” While most of the contributors agreed that “the vigor as well as the image of Orthodoxy has been completely revitalized,” they were equally struck by what they termed the “move to the right.” The yeshivah and chasidic communities were buoyant. “Modern” Orthodoxy was not. This consensus was all the more remarkable for the fact that its authors were all broadly within the modern or centrist camp, even if they were unhappy with these labels. The journal’s editor, Walter Wurzburger, spoke of the “religious inferiority complex” felt by the moderates or modernists. In another context, R. Aharon Lichtenstein noted that the “right-wing faction has aggrandized even more than it has grown.” Its profound self-confidence and “at times, excoriation of [its] opponents” was having an effect on Orthodoxy as a whole. It was “increasingly dictating Orthodox life-style and axiological norms [even] for many not affiliated with this camp.” Its influence was out of all proportion to its numbers.

As a result, certain attitudes associated with modern Orthodoxy are in eclipse. They include the idea of a synthesis between Judaism and contemporary culture; a commitment to religious tolerance and to at least some cooperation with other groups; the value of moderation as a religious ideal; and a positive approach to Zionism. Other views, more rejectionist in their approach to secular culture, the non-Jewish and non-Orthodox world, and the State of Israel, are in the ascendancy. How and why has this occurred?

Torah and Secular Culture

Hirsch, we recall, believed that Jewish and secular studies should be combined. “We maintain,” he asserted, “that a familiarity with all those elements which lie at the root of present-day civilization, and a study of all those subjects required for such an acquaintance, is of the highest necessity for the Jewish youth of our day as it was in fact in all times, and should be looked on as a religious duty.” Truth, he believed, was unitary. There could be no conflict between history and science on the one hand and Torah on the other. To the contrary: a knowledge of science would deepen religious understanding of creation, while a sense of history would increase awareness of the Jewish role in civilization. Two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, had been the educators of the world. The Greeks had given mankind aesthetics, Jews had taught it ethics. The two cultures were therefore complementary.

Hirsch formed his views in the 1830s. Common to his and R. Kook’s understanding of secular culture was the view that Torah was sovereign among the disciplines. The secular was in itself neutral. It could be given shape and direction by Judaism. It was not intrinsically hostile to or destructive of Torah. Judaism, for Hirsch, would give the secular ethical content; for R. Kook it would give it unity and sanctity. But by the 1960s, R. Soloveitchik was suggesting that, far from being neutral, the secular approach was now actively infiltrating Judaism and recreating it in its own image. Secular studies actively secularized.

The implication was that the ultimate harmony of human knowledge assumed by Hirsch and R. Kook did not exist. R. Soloveitchik did not document the thesis in detail. But we can infer something of what he may have meant. Secular history is resistant to the idea of revelation and miracle. Post-Darwinian natural science does not lend itself easily to the idea of purposive creation. Sociology tends to relativize religious belief by seeing it in terms of context and function. Secular ethics tends to be either Kantian or utilitarian, built, that is, on rational rather than revealed foundations. None of these disciplines is incompatible with religious faith, but none is obviously harmonious with it. Each, as R. Soloveitchik pointed out elsewhere, incorporates a different perspective on reality. They cannot be combined into a single unified vision. Just as one cannot view an object from several different points of view simultaneously, so one cannot view the world secularly and religiously at the same time. The most one can do is oscillate between them. This creates tension and ceaseless dialectic, not harmony.

Hirsch and R. Soloveitchik do not necessarily disagree. They speak to different ages. The idea of a unified body of knowledge with which Hirsch was familiar had been replaced, by the time R. Soloveitchik came to study at the University of Berlin, by a far more complex and fragmented culture. The Galilean-Newtonian view of nature had been supplanted by non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. Philosophy and science no longer spoke the same language. Academic study had split and parceled knowledge into a multiplicity of subjects and methodologies. As Stephen Toulmin put it, “The broad and general questions about ‘cosmic interrelatedness’ which were the focus of earlier debates about nature have been superseded by other, more specialized, disciplinary questions.” R. Soloveitchik’s thought, with its conflicts and disharmonies, mirrors this disintegration. Science did not, as Hirsch hoped, teach one to see nature “with the spirit of David.” Nor did academic study reveal, as R. Kook wished, the essential unity of creation.

So it became and remains unclear as to what a Jewish approach to secular study might be. The point was made in a significant remark by Rabbi Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, an institution dedicated to Torah u-Madda, a synthesis of Torah and secular knowledge. Speaking at its fiftieth anniversary, he recalled that as a student he had complained to the president, “Why don’t you tell me how to combine the two worlds?” He was told, “Our job is to give you the materials, your job is to let them interact within you.” Rabbi Lamm added: “I disagreed then. But I agree now.” The synthesis, in other words, could not be made programmatic. It was personal. It did not take place in the curriculum. It took place in the mind of the student. There are numerous institutions which teach both Jewish and secular studies, but none – despite many experiments – where the two are fully integrated. Nor is it hard to see why. Academic study is detached; Torah study involves commitment. Academic study is value-free; Torah study is value-laden. The one is universal, the other particular. These dichotomies do not always exist. Maimonides, for example, was able to integrate science, philosophy, ethics, theology, and halakhah into a single system. But with such dichotomies is how our culture is presently organized.

Educational Models

There is more to the eclipse of Torah im derekh eretz than this, however. The retreat from the Hirschian position began in his own community almost immediately after his own death. Torah im derekh eretz, it was argued, had been advocated only as a temporary emergency, or only for the specific circumstances of German Jewry, or only as a means of preparing oneself for a career. Hirsch himself had argued otherwise. But his successor and son-in-law, R. Solomon Breuer, had been influenced by the Hungarian model of Orthodoxy. He had studied under R. Moses Sofer’s son Avraham at the Pressburg Yeshivah. That model, quite different from Hirsch’s, was to exercise its influence over successive generations of German Jews, as it has done more recently to American Jewry.

The question was not so much intellectual as practical. What, to put it at its simplest, was the best way to train Jewish character? Was it in an institution in which Jewish and secular studies were taught side by side? Or was it in a yeshivah, where secular studies were totally excluded? In a yeshivah the student was immersed, at a critical stage in his identity formation, in an intense, exclusive atmosphere of talmudic learning and piety. Even when he left the yeshivah and entered the secular world, the memory of his days there would be a constant reminder of Jewish authenticity. Having once felt the full intellectual and spiritual grandeur of a complete Jewish environment, he would find the world outside pale and untempting in comparison. His mind and body might be elsewhere, but his heart would still be in the yeshivah.

Hirsch and those who adopted his educational philosophy believed otherwise. The student had to be prepared from the very outset to meet the intellectual challenges of the outside world. Otherwise he would be overwhelmed. The new culture with which he was confronted would seem to him to conflict with everything he had learned at yeshivah. He would be forced to make a choice. And the secular world was seductive. It offered success and excitement. If the choice was all or nothing – Judaism without secularity or secularity without Judaism – Judaism would be the loser. It was necessary from the very start of schooling to train children to combine rather than make a choice between the two worlds.

As a practical question, it had a practical answer. Which system worked? In fact, both had their successes and failures. It depended on the individual, the place, and the time. In Frankfurt, Torah im derekh eretz was attractive in the 1860s, less so in the 1930s. In America, “synthesis” was popular in the 1960s, out of favor in the 1980s. When secular culture is highly attractive, the Hirschian model seems appropriate and necessary. When it is less so, the yeshivah model is more powerful. In general, a Jewish sense of isolation – induced by the antisemitism of the 1930s and the anti-Zionism of recent decades – leads to a search for a total Jewish identity which distances the non-Jewish world. That is found, par excellence, in the yeshivah, and it is this that has made it so powerful a presence in contemporary Jewish life.

It is not, then, that there has been a move away from secular study. To the contrary. Most American yeshivot accept de facto that the majority of their students – 86 percent, according to William Helmreich’s researches – will go on to a university. But secular study is seen as purely instrumental, a career qualification. And, according to Helmreich, yeshivah leaders tend to prefer their students to attend secular colleges rather than a Jewish institution like Yeshiva University “precisely because they believe that the distinctions between the Orthodox lifestyle and that pervading the college are so clear that the student will not be tempted or confused by them.” The important thing, from this point of view, is contrast rather than synthesis. One “learns” Talmud; one “studies” economics or medicine. College teaches a student a technical skill. The yeshivah teaches him who he is.

Integration or Compartmentalization

More, though, is at stake than the best way to form character. For the question is: What kind of character does one seek to form? The Hirschian ideal was Mensch-Jissroel, “man-Israel,” an integrated fusion of ethical citizen and religious Jew. The yeshivah ideal tends to be somewhat different. The ultimate aim is “to sit in the house of God all the days of my life.” Perfection is a life of study, unencumbered by the need to make a living. Clearly this is possible only for a few. But a career is not an end in itself. It is a necessary distraction. For Hirsch, just as secular study was part of Torah, so secular involvement was part of the service of God. For the yeshivah alumni, both tend to be seen as bittul Torah, neglect of the primary duty of Torah learning. Hence both, if possible, should be kept to a minimum.

Both positions have their precedent in Jewish tradition. Indeed Maimonides himself could be cited on both sides of the argument. Again, though, which model is the more compelling depends on the time and place. A number of developments have made the Hirschian paradigm increasingly less convincing. From Moses Mendelssohn onward we find Jewish thinkers of all shades assuming the idea that ethics are universal. “Jews may have a special way of actualizing ethics in their lives, or a special ethical mission, but what is right and good is essentially the same for all humanity.” So long as this is believed, the idea of Mensch-Jissroel makes sense. The “moral revolution” of the 1960s, however, broke this assumption for a generation. Ethics were not universal but individual. “Doing your own thing” became the existential imperative. There were experiments with sex, drugs, and cults. This offended and frightened many Jews. Jewish ethics were not the same as, they were the antithesis of, secular ethics. In the backlash that followed in the 1970s, it became important that Jews should be insulated from, not integrated with, the “new morality.”

This was the popular expression of a deeper development that has been charted by philosophers and political and social theorists. The liberal state draws a sharp distinction between public and private life. The public domain is ethically neutral. The state does not legislate morality; it merely prevents harm. Ethics becomes the free and private choice of individuals. “Modernization,” as Peter Berger puts it, “has entailed a progressive separation of the individual from collective entities, and as a result has brought about a historically unprecedented counterposition of individual and society.” When this occurs, public involvement comes to seem less close to identity than private life. A job is less who one is than what one does. Relationships become roles. Activities become functions. Meaning is provided by the private, not the public sphere.

This leads to compartmentalized identities. And as Charles Liebman has noted, “Orthodox Jews, by and large, do not search for consistency between their Jewish and non-Jewish life. On the contrary, they make a virtue of their inconsistency.” This, he argues, is their great strength in contemporary society, their “survival strategy.” They “have retained their ritual tradition and belief system virtually intact and at the same time have acculturated in language, dress and education to American styles because they have been able to separate these two aspects of life so that they impinge on one another as little as possible.” This approach to identity sees only Jewish contexts as “real”; work, socializing, and secular culture are concessions to necessity. This is closer to the yeshivah ethos than to Hirsch. The point is that contemporary culture supports and even demands compartmentalization.

To be sure, Jews who live in two worlds tend to feel uncomfortable about their lack of integration. Samuel Heilman concludes his study of a modern Orthodox congregation in America, Synagogue Life, with the perception that the members “are forever trying to engage in ‘passing’ behavior.” To their more traditional Orthodox friends “they must appear strictly Orthodox.” To their colleagues at work they must “seem to be completely engaged with the present and with downplaying their Orthodoxy and the anachronism it connotes.” This is the prosaic equivalent of the kind of conflict which R. Soloveitchik elevated to the level of philosophical drama in The Lonely Man of Faith. It was precisely this that Hirsch, and in another way R. Kook, sought to avoid. But what are the alternatives?

The Vacation Paradox

One is to follow R. Soloveitchik and see tension, or what Adin Steinsaltz calls “strife of the spirit,” as a religious experience. But, their powerful argument notwithstanding, most modern Jews turn to faith for security, not inner struggle. The other alternative is indeed to search for synthesis. But synthesis in the late twentieth century is not what it was in the early nineteenth. It would have to incorporate, among other elements of “modern consciousness,” the idea that morality is chosen, not given; that religious truth is a function of history, society, or the individual mind; it would have to present within an Orthodox framework what Mordecai Kaplan called “Judaism without supernaturalism.” But “modern Orthodox” thinkers of the 1960s, most notably Eliezer Berkovits and Emanuel Rackman, were controversial. Their successors in the 1980s, David Hartman and Irving Greenberg, are several degrees more radical. The synthesis of two lifestyles may simply not be available.

An amusing illustration was provided by a recent scholarly exchange in the journal Tradition. Across twenty-five pages of dense argumentation two modern Orthodox thinkers debated whether taking an exotic Club Mediterranean holiday away from other Jews – careful nonetheless to observe the laws of kashrut, daily prayers, and so on – was an example of synthesis or compartmentalization. One argued that it was the epitome of synthesis. What, after all, could be a better example of “the creative blending of the best elements of Jewish tradition and modern culture” than saying Minchah on a sun-soaked tropical beach? The other argued that it could only be considered synthesis if it was evidence of an integrated life and was conducive to spiritual growth. This in the circumstances seemed unlikely.

The problem is, of course, that the concept of a vacation is a peculiarly modern one, dating from the 1870s. And as Michael Walzer notes, “What is crucial about the vacation is its individualist (or familial) character.” Central to the idea is that vacations are “individually chosen and individually designed.” Walzer notes that the vacation is in a sense the exact opposite of the idea of Shabbat rest which is “enjoined on everyone, enjoyed by everyone.” Shabbat is an institution of law, vacations are a matter of choice. Shabbat is communal, vacations are personal (hence the appeal of “getting away from other Jews”). The vacation is a phenomenon of modern consciousness, part of its rich emphasis on private as opposed to public life.

Hence the place of a vacation in an “integrated Jewish life” becomes impossible to solve. One side of the argument sees it as synthesis, thus incorporating into Judaism an individualism entirely foreign to tradition. The other side rejects this and instead defines synthesis as a unified life. But what proof-text establishes that “a unified life” is a Jewish value? The author derives his proof from the nineteenth-century Christian existentialist Kierkegaard: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Both sides are driven many miles from tradition.

Neither scholar quotes Maimonides, who deals with the issue in the fifth of his Eight Chapters as something quite self-evident. All of man’s conduct should be directed to a single goal, the service of God. In this way all his deeds will be “for the sake of heaven.” Since he cannot serve God while exhausted or depressed, he may sometimes need to take a break “by walking in gardens and fine buildings, by sitting before beautiful forms and by things like this which delight the soul.” Leisure is thus dealt with under the rubric of medicine which is part of the perfection of the body which is needed for perfection of the soul. For Maimonides, leisure is part of a unified world. For moderns, a vacation is an escape from a pluralized world.

Faced with such philosophical conundrums, chasidim take vacations en masse, refusing to admit individualism into the social structure. For the modern Orthodox Jew getting away from it all, it is just another insoluble problem of synthesis, to be agonized over or ignored according to temperament. Compartmentalization is the victory of fact over theory. It is a way of life that seems to work even if it cannot be philosophically justified. Thus, many observant Orthodox Jews live a life that is Hirschian in practice but not in principle. They study both Torah and secular disciplines. They attend yeshivah and university. They keep halakhah and have professional careers. Their dual life is neither a noble conflict nor a creative synthesis: it is just what one has to do in the modern world. Torah im derekh eretz is widely practiced but rarely preached. This is troubling to many modern Orthodox Jews. But that is the dilemma. Orthodoxy cannot be translated without remainder into modern consciousness. This is one of the unsolved problems of contemporary Orthodoxy, and why there has been no clear intellectual heir of either Hirsch or R. Kook.

Religious Zionism and Wittgenstein’s Ladder

It was precisely this kind of problem that led R. Kook to believe that a full and consistent Jewish life could only be lived within a Jewish land. He stated his objections to diaspora Judaism in somewhat mystical terms, but we can put the case more prosaically. Judaism is more than a ­religion. It embraces the totality of life. But if most of life is conducted on non-Jewish terms, there are only three alternatives: segregation, compartmentalization, or “synthesis.” Segregation artificially restricts Jewish life. Compartmentalization artificially restricts Judaism. And “synthesis” is simply not available. Judaism is natural only in Israel, where it can shape a total culture. This, expressed non-mystically, is the core of R. Kook’s religious Zionism.

However, religious Zionism is currently undergoing the same eclipse as Torah im derekh eretz. In the early 1980s, R. Aharon Lichtenstein noted that “twenty or thirty years ago the overwhelming majority of the Orthodox community, its yeshivah component included, was suffused with pride in the State and identified with its character and symbols.” This frame of mind was today receding. In 1985 Bernard Rosenzweig could write that religious Zionism is “at the crossroads of its existence, threatened with extinction organizationally, or at best with being consigned to a marginal role in the scheme of things.” Reuven Bulka spoke of the growing influence of the extreme anti-Zionist attitudes of Neturei Karta within the yeshivah world and its consequent impact on Orthodoxy as a whole.

Why? Again the reasons are complex. One way of focusing on the problem is to ask what religious Zionism actually is. The phrase “religious Zionist” can mean two things. It can refer to someone who is two separate things, religious and a Zionist. Or it can refer to someone who is a Zionist on religious grounds: who sees Zionism as an essentially religious phenomenon. R. Kook was a religious Zionist in the second sense. For him, Zionism was atchalta di-ge’ulah, the beginning of the process of redemption. The events that led toward the messianic age began with the ingathering of exiles and the return of Jews to their land. This had been the view, too, of earlier religious Zionists like R. Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and R. Yehudah Alkalai.

But this was bound to be a highly contested position. After all, surely redemption was something brought about by God, not man. Had Moses not said, “Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and will bring you back.” Moses seemed to speak of a miracle brought about by Heaven, not a political process engineered by man. What is more, the Talmud in Ketubot had spoken about two oaths taken by Israel in exile, not to return en masse to the land, and not to rebel against the nations of the world. In return the nations had agreed “not to oppress Israel excessively.” This seemed to suggest that the task of the Jewish people was to wait passively in exile and rely on prayer and piety to bring the promised return. Hirsch himself had said that “actively to accelerate” the end of exile “is prohibited to us.” Zionist activism looked suspiciously like an attempt to preempt Providence. Moreover, the Zionist movement was led by notoriously assimilated Jews like Nordau and Herzl. Could one associate with non-Orthodox Jews in general, let alone in so sacred a task? Even in the early days of the movement, there were many Orthodox Jews who argued that, if it aimed at bringing redemption, Zionism was heresy.

In response to this challenge, a new type of religious Zionist emerged. The most prominent figures were R. Isaac Reines (1839–1915) and R. Samuel Mohilever (1824–1898), and they were religious Zionists in the first sense. They were religious and they were Zionists, but they argued that the two were independent. The attempt to create a Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael had nothing to do with bringing the redemption. It had to do instead with pikuach nefesh, the command of saving lives. Jews throughout Eastern Europe were suffering from a wave of antisemitic attacks. They were fleeing in their millions to America. A refuge could and should be built in Israel.

This approach countered the two objections to Zionism in R. Kook’s sense. Firstly, it separated Zionism from the question of the messianic age. Secondly, it provided a basis for working with nonreligious Jews. As R. Reines put it: religious intention is required only for commands between man and God. But saving life is a command between man and man. If an irreligious Jew gives to charity, he has fulfilled a mitzvah. So too if he helps to rescue Jews from oppression by building a land for them to inhabit. R. Mohilever put it similarly: “Our attitude toward those among us who did not observe the religious precepts must be, as it were, as if fire had taken hold of our homes, imperiling our persons and our property. Under such circumstances, would we not receive anyone gladly and with love who, though irreligious in our eyes, came to rescue us?”

The movement which emerged from their efforts was Mizrachi. To be sure it did not confine itself to the task of settlement only. It was committed to the idea of “the land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.” But its great strength, in contrast to the views of R. Kook on the one hand and the religious anti-Zionists on the other, was its demystification of the idea and program of Zionism. To create a state, it was necessary to work with nonreligious elements. To create a religious state, it was necessary to influence the Zionist movement from within, rather than criticizing it from outside. But therein, too, lay its weakness once statehood had been achieved. For here we confront a problem common to both religious Zionism and Torah im derekh eretz, what might be called the “Wittgenstein’s ladder” syndrome.

Wittgenstein once spoke of philosophy as a ladder on which one climbed to clearer perceptions. The ladder could be thrown away once the objective had been reached. Whether or not this is true of philosophy, it is the fate of certain legitimating ideologies. Torah im derekh eretz provided an ideological basis on which Orthodox Jews could participate in the secular world. Religious Zionism of R. Reines’s and R. Mohilever’s kind allowed them to participate in a global movement to establish a Jewish state. So long as these objectives had not been achieved, the ideologies were important motivators. But once they have been realized, so securely that they can be taken for granted, legitimation is no longer so important. A second phase ensues.

With the objectives realized, the next stage becomes suddenly less clear. Synthesizing Torah and secular culture turns out to be highly complicated and not fully realizable. Shaping Israel into a state and society “according to the Torah of Israel” is also a slow and tortuous process. It suffers occasional setbacks. It calls for tact, diplomacy, accommodation, and a long-range strategy that seems to yield few short-term gains. Instead of ideology representing a simple and dramatic goal, it now dictates a measured realism, an engagement with recalcitrant facts. Slogans that once inspired come to seem to stand for compromise and “the art of the possible.” The promised land is always more promising in the wilderness than in the arrival.

Hence religious Zionism has come to suffer the same fate as Torah im derekh eretz: having become reality it has ceased to be ideology. ­Orthodox Jews are more likely than others to live or study in Israel, to speak Hebrew, to make aliyah, and to defend unpopular Israeli government actions. At the same time they are more likely to be highly critical of the very idea of a secular state and to refuse to attach religious significance to such celebrations as Yom ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day. Pragmatic religious Zionism has suffered the failure of success. Having seen the achievement of its first objective, “the land of Israel for the people of Israel,” it has lost momentum on the slow and less dramatic route to the second, “according to the Torah of Israel.”

Anti-Zionism

What then has happened to Zionism within religious circles? The question is complicated by the extraordinary variety of approaches to Zionism within Orthodoxy. This variety, which at times generates violent conflict and mutual delegitimation within yeshivah and chasidic circles, is all the more surprising given the impressive amount of common ground shared by almost all Orthodox Jews, Zionist or anti-Zionist.

Israel is the promised land, the land to which Jews turn in prayer and to which they long to return. Settling in the land is a religious duty. A home outside Israel is only a “temporary dwelling.” Orthodox authorities were universally critical of the deletion of prayers about Zion and the ingathering of exiles from the liturgy of the Reform temple in Hamburg in 1818. Orthodoxy rules out anti-Zionism in the sense of an affirmation of the diaspora as home.

It is equally unanimous in its rejection of Achad ha-Am’s “cultural Zionism”: the attempt to see in Zionism the basis of a new and secularized Jewish peoplehood. Orthodox Jews are agreed in believing that nationalism is not an end in itself, that there must be serious reservations about working within the framework of secular organizations, and that ultimately Israel must become a society organized along religious lines. The common ground is substantial. The ultimate vision is the same. But within this framework deep divisions are possible and have become pronounced in recent years.

There have been two broad developments. The first is an increasingly negative attitude toward the state. What had been forgotten in the turbulent years between the 1930s and 1950s is that the consensus of Central and Eastern European Orthodoxy before then had been resolutely opposed to the Zionist movement. This has been the stance of the coalition of Orthodox leaders, Agudat Yisrael, formed in 1912, which brought together yeshivah heads, chasidic leaders, and the successors of Hirsch in Germany, R. Solomon Breuer and his son Isaac. The opposition to Zionism was consistent with a positive attitude to settlement in Israel. Isaac Breuer (1883–1946), for example, believed that the Balfour Declaration had messianic significance and that Orthodox Jews should work toward making Israel a national home. He nonetheless vehemently opposed their participation in the secularist-dominated Zionist movement, which he saw as a rebellion against the sovereignty of God.

The literature of the early twentieth century contained denunciations of Zionism by an extraordinary array of gedolim, outstanding Torah sages. R. Meir Simcha ha-Cohen of Dvinsk (the Ohr Same’ach, 1843–1926) spoke of the “conspiracy” of Herzl and Nordau and their “abominable movement.” R. Meir Israel ha-Cohen (the Chafetz Chayyim, 1838–1933) denounced Mizrachi, declaring that “our healing will not spring from them nor will their glory be for ever.” R. Joseph Rosen (the Rogachover, 1858–1938) condemned the work of R. Reines as “an abomination and a desolation.” R. Aryeh Leb Alter, Rebbe of Ger (the Sefat Emet, 1847–1905), spoke of Zionism as the result of the “confusions of Satan.”

Collectively they argued that political activism to bring about a state was an attempt to “force the end” and frustrate the oaths by which Jews had agreed to wait patiently in exile. Redemption would come by God, not man. Zionism was worse than Enlightenment, for instead of offering an alternative to Judaism it offered a substitute. It redefined Jewish identity. It substituted nationalism for the life of Torah. It was, said Isaac Breuer, “collective assimilation.” Though these views lost their salience after Hitler’s rise to power, they were bound eventually to resurface, for they represented virtually the entire spectrum of the Torah world and its leading rabbis, men of unquestioned influence and authority.

The man who carried the argument into recent times was R. Joel Teitelbaum (the Satmarer Rebbe, 1888–1979). A powerful writer and religious leader, and himself a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he restated the classic objections to Zionism and raised them to a new level of cosmic significance. The secular government of Israel, composed as it was of sinners and heretics, could yield no blessing. Orthodox Jews should have no part in it. Religious Zionists, in calling the state “the first flowering of our redemption,” were aiding a false messianism.

Zionism had been the cause of the Holocaust. Jews had taken an oath to not rebel against exile, and the nations had taken an oath not to “persecute Israel overmuch.” Since the Zionists had broken the first, they left the nations free to break the second. Indeed, argued R. Teitelbaum, Zionists had a vested interest in stirring antisemitism, for it made diaspora life difficult and supported the claim that Jews were only safe in Israel. Indeed Israel’s “arrogance” and “aggression” had provoked the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars and had heightened antisemitism throughout the world. If Jews would only give up their state and government “they would undoubtedly remove thereby the wrath of God and all of these hardships would vanish.”

These views, representing as they did the extreme Neturei Karta position of principled opposition to the State of Israel, were widely regarded as unrepresentative, even fanatical. A not dissimilar position, though, has come recently to be widely shared in yeshivah circles. R. Isaac Hutner, for example, head of the Rabbi Chaim Berlin yeshivah and an influential presence in American Orthodoxy, argued in 1977 that the Final Solution had been influenced by the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had met Hitler in 1941. The Mufti had become a fierce opponent of Jews under Zionist pressure for a Jewish state. Zionism thus brought about for the first time a coalition of Christian West and Islamic East to destroy the Jewish people. The implication was that Zionism had been responsible for the Shoah*.*

The continuing secularism of Israeli life, dissatisfactions within Israeli society, and the oppressive sense of unending conflict between Israel, Arab states, the Palestinians, and world opinion – all these lend momentum to a disillusionment with secular Zionism that can be expressed, in religious circles, in terms of sharp oppositions. Zionism comes to seem to be the cause of all evils afflicting Jews. Politics leads to corruption and decay. The essentially apolitical stance of Judaism since the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century C.E. is turned into a powerful critique of the Zionist politicization of Jewish history. Among Israeli baalei teshuvah this view is particularly strong. These views coexist, we must recall, with a strong dedication to the land itself and living within it. Indeed, both the yeshivah and chasidic communities have, in recent years, been highly active and organized in the political arena, a fact lamented by supporters of Neturei Karta. Once again we are struck by the conflict between existential reality and religious ideology.

Messianic Politics

If anti-Zionism, mild or militant, has been one motif of Orthodoxy in the last two decades, messianic Zionism has been the other. Here we return to the ideas of R. Avraham Kook. R. Kook, we recall, believed that the return of Jews to their land would set in motion a messianic process. The rift between religion and the secular would be mended. There would be a new flowering of religious creativity. From Israel would radiate forth a Divine light which would heal the tensions between Jew, Christian, and Muslim. In the wake of the Six-Day War it became clear that none of these things had happened. But something else had. Jerusalem had returned to Jewish hands. So had Judea and Samaria. Israel’s army had proved victorious against its assembled Arab enemies.

Throughout Israel there was a mood of religious fervor. As Eliezer Schweid, himself a secularist, noted at the time, the “storytellers and poets of the War of Independence” in 1948 “did not dare employ religious symbols or the language of religious experience.” In 1967 they did. Religious symbols were “consciously perceived and fraught with meaning.” There was “no sense of recoil from using them.” The mood dissipated among the general population, but it was preserved among a small group of religious Zionists, who now found inspiration in R. Kook’s son, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook (1891–1982). Though there were direct continuities between the thought of father and son, there were differences of emphasis also.

R. Avraham Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, lived and worked prior to the creation of the state. His son spoke to new realities. In R. Avraham Kook’s writings, the emphasis is on aliyah, national rebirth, and literary renewal. No political program can be extracted from it. In R. Zvi Yehudah’s speeches, by contrast, there was an intense ­identification with the realities of statehood: the army, the boundaries of the land, and the necessity of war. One speech in particular proved decisive. It was delivered at Merkaz Harav Yeshivah on Israel’s Independence Day, 1967, before the start of the emergency that eventually led to the war. In it R. Zvi Yehudah spoke of his longing for those parts of the land that were currently in Arab hands: “Where is our Hebron? Do we let it be forgotten? And where are our Shechem and our Jericho?... Can we ever forsake them? All of Transjordan is ours…. Do we have the right to give up even one millimeter?”

Within less than two months these areas were back within Jewish control. In retrospect, the speech was seen as an inspired and inspiring prophecy. Gush Emunim began on its program of settling the territories, beginning in Hebron the next year. Religious messianism had become an active political force. R. Zvi Yehudah was clear on the meaning and imperative of the hour. The transformations foreseen by his father would come in due course. In the meanwhile, redemption must proceed along the axis of conquest and resettlement of the land. “Everything connected to it, all forms of weapons, whether produced by us or by the gentiles…all is holy.”

It is thus paradoxical, but it has nonetheless happened, that messianism has led to opposite extremes. Neturei Karta and Gush Emunim share the view that the messianic idea is central to Judaism and that the State of Israel can only be understood in relation to it. For Neturei Karta the messianic process has not yet begun; therefore the state is a heresy. For Gush Emunim the process has begun; therefore the state is, wittingly or otherwise, holy and the instrument of redemption. Extreme anti-nationalism and nationalism flow from the same concepts, even the same texts. Between these two radical alternatives, the voice of religious moderation, expressed in a variety of movements – Oz ve-Shalom, Netivot Shalom, and Meimad – has lacked widespread support.

The significance of religious nationalism has gone far beyond the boundaries of Gush Emunim and embraced a wide section of the religious Israeli public. One of the key problems is the application of religious texts, halakhic and aggadic, to immediate political decision-making. The verse in Deuteronomy 7:2, “You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them,” has been variously interpreted to mean that no territory should be ceded by Israel as part of a peace settlement, or that all non-Jews should be expelled from Jerusalem. Translating halakhah directly into a non-halakhic state creates precisely those conflicts that religious moderates had hoped to avoid. The point was made bluntly by Meir Kahane: “There is an absolute and irreconcilable contradiction between the State of Israel…and the modern nation-state that sees all of its citizens as possessing equal rights…. There is a potential confrontation…between the Zionist state…and modern ideas of democracy and citizenship.”

Orthodox thinkers of distinction – among them, in their different ways, R. Nachum Rabinovitch, R. Aharon Lichtenstein, and R. Yehudah Amital – have argued otherwise. They stress the importance of religious education as against religious legislation, of peace as against territory, of the broad imperatives of social justice and concern for minority rights. They argue the significance, ethical and political, of international opinion. Halakhah functions in concrete social and historical contexts, they insist, not in the vast abstractions of messianism and apocalypse. Similar views have been taken in different directions by Lord Jakobovits, Mordecai Breuer, and Uriel Simon. The most sustained and controversial attack on religious nationalism has come from the idiosyncratic Orthodox intellectual, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

But the mood of the times has been against them. The conflicts with which Israel is faced have seemed insoluble; their enemies implacable; world opinion systematically hostile. Apocalyptic images speak more directly to Israeli hopes and fears than the language of diplomacy or moderation or subtle halakhic interpretation. Messianic Zionism and messianic anti-Zionism are the result. Israel seems caught in the grip of vast forces. Providence is palpable, though opinions are divided as to whether it is endorsing or negating the state. In this climate, moderate religious Zionism comes to seem too complex, defensive, and weak to chart a lucid future. Argued by intellectuals, it hovers above the storm of political passion and fails to win either votes or hearts.

Ideal as Moderation or Extreme

So, while the Jewish people as a whole has moved toward traditional attitudes, tradition has not moved toward the Jewish people. To the contrary, it has moved further away. Orthodoxy has become radicalized. The connections once made between it and secular culture on the one hand, and the collective Zionist enterprise on the other, have grown attenuated and thin. The ironies of the religious situation continue to abound. In the previous chapter it was argued that Jewry outside Orthodoxy has become more traditional attitudinally but not existentially, in terms of its beliefs, not its lifestyles. In this chapter we have suggested a similar discrepancy within Orthodoxy itself. Torah im derekh eretz and religious Zionism are Orthodox realities but no longer ideologies. They exist de facto but are not defended de jure. This does not make relations between Orthodoxy and the rest of the Jewish world easier. For attitudes generate conflict; and conflict has increasingly dominated the Orthodox agenda.

At this stage a tantalizingly simple question comes to the fore. Which is the more authentic, the more mandated by tradition: religious moderation or religious extremism? Accommodation to a real world or the dedicated pursuit of a utopian ideal? There is, of course, no answer. For R. Saadia Gaon the ideal religious personality was marked by harmony, balance, and integration. For the chasidei Ashkenaz, the thirteenth-century German-Jewish mystics, it was one who lived at the very edge of human experience, in constant consciousness of martyrdom. Jewish thought is a constant dialectic between world-affirmation and world-denial.

In the pages of the Talmud, we meet R. Jose ben Kisma arguing for political compromise with the Romans, and his colleague, R. Chananiah ben Teradyon, insisting on defiance unto death. R. Ishmael argues for a combination of Torah, work, and citizenship. R. Shimon bar Yochai insists on Torah exclusively and at all times. Maimonides sees halakhah as the perfection of society. Jewish ethical treatises, from Chovot ha-Levavot (“The Duties of the Heart”) in the eleventh century to Mesillat Yesharim (“The Path of the Upright”) in the eighteenth, see it as the perfection of the self. The argument as to whether moderation or extremism was the religious ideal has been a recurring theme of Jewish deliberation. Maimonides saw, with characteristic insight, that the tradition idealized both types: he called them the “sage” and the “saint,” respectively.

To be sure, one could hardly call either Samson Raphael Hirsch or R. Avraham Kook “moderates.” Hirsch favored the complete secession of Orthodox congregations and rabbis from any Jewish organization dominated by non-Orthodox Jews. It was this philosophy, promoted by Hirsch’s successors through Agudat Yisrael, that increasingly today challenges any Orthodox involvement in community-wide bodies. R. Kook, ostensibly the most tolerant thinker in Jewish history, wrote that alongside any belief which is both certain and universal “goes a refusal to share with others in any collaborative pluralism.” The tolerance in which he believed was one which found “a place for every form of illumination, of life and of spiritual expression.” But Judaism determined that place. R. Kook would surely have agreed with Yeshayahu Leibowitz that Judaism is “totalitarian in the realm of values.” As Eliezer Schweid has pointed out, R. Kook and the secularists in whom he found “hidden sanctity” talked at cross-purposes. What he and they understood as tolerance were two different, diametrically opposed things.

In a sense, this has been one of the problems of contemporary Jewish thought: that the figures who most left their mark on posterity, Hirsch and R. Kook, left an unsuspectedly double-edged legacy. Hirsch could be quoted in favor of both Torah im derekh eretz and Orthodox segregation. R. Kook could be cited in defense of both moderate and radical politics. The same has proved true, in recent years, of R. Joseph Soloveitchik, who is standardly cited nowadays on both sides of controversies on the role of women, pluralism, and humanism in Jewish life. Those who spoke most forcibly for moderation, among them R. Azriel Hildesheimer, R. Yaakov Ettlinger, R. Isaac Reines, and R. Chaim Hirschensohn, were altogether less dramatic and systematic. They left no philosophy that could be summarized in a slogan and capture the imagination.

Secularization and Segregation

But the tension remains. Halakhah concerns both the individual and society. Judaism embodies a code of individual perfection on the one hand. But it remains, on the other, resolutely tied to the Jewish people as a whole. What moderated Jewish law in the past was the fact that it was the constitution of a complete society, from the righteous to the sinners and the great mass of intermediates between. The Jewish people was constituted by its Torah, said R. Saadia Gaon; but the Torah, equally, had to be interpreted in the context of the Jewish people. It was the law not of an elite, nor of a self-selecting community of those who chose to adhere, but of the biological “congregation of Jacob,” those who had been born into its covenant.

This mutual bond between the Torah and the collective entity of Israel split apart with European emancipation. The structures of Jewish self-government dissolved. The environing society was itself secularized. Jews became free to be Jewish in any way they chose. They had the option, unprecedented for many centuries, of ceasing to be Jewish without becoming, religiously, anything else. Modernity, as many social theorists have pointed out, is marked by the transition from “fate” to choice. Roles and identities are no longer things given by birth. They become things one chooses. The chaos this created for Judaism we have charted throughout this study. Jewish identity and its attendant duties and relationships are primarily given by birth. Modern consciousness could hardly have done other than have the effect of disintegrating tradition. That the Jewish people still survives in a state of real, if fragile, coherence is little short of miraculous.

In retrospect, the insight of R. Moses Sofer has been stunningly vindicated. It had already been adopted by chasidim. It came to be taken up by Samson Raphael Hirsch as well. Judaism would survive precisely if faithful Jews took advantage of the collapse of Jewish self-government and dissociated themselves from the rest of the Jewish world. In the protected enclaves of the yeshivah, or the chasidic community, or the Hirschian school-synagogue nexus, they could pursue a life of religious intensity strong enough to resist the tide of secularization and assimilation. The world of tradition was collapsing around them. What else could be done but conserve a “saving remnant”? The more independent they were of the general Jewish community, the more free they were to develop an elite that would eventually emerge, in an age more congenial to tradition, as heirs of the Jewish future.

It took almost two centuries. But that, in the last two decades, is precisely what has happened. To these heroic figures, who guarded tradition’s flame against the cold extinguishing winds of modernity, Judaism owes an eternal debt. But there was a price to be paid. The price was the atrophy of the concept of “the congregation of Israel” as an empirical reality. In the voluntary enclave, Jewish law could be interpreted strictly rather than leniently, for it was no longer bound to the constituency of all Jews. Most Jews did not observe Jewish law anyway, so whom could leniencies benefit? The more the enclave felt the need to be segregated from a secular world, the more oppositional images came to the fore. Instead of synthesis, there was dichotomy and choice. Where some had proposed an “and,” religious authenticity now demanded an “or”: Torah or secular culture, religion or Zionism, Judaism or the Jewish people.

Thus, as society drifted away from religion, religion drifted away from society. As the Jewish people moved far from Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy moved in directions that took it far from the majority of the Jewish people. The alienation was mutual and self-reinforcing. The two great attempts to span the divide – Hirsch’s and R. Kook’s – became increasingly untenable as the gap widened. And so the great paradox of the Jewish present was born.

Jewish peoplehood has rarely before seemed so desirable and so elusive. In the last twenty years the sense of global Jewish kinship has deepened, but so too has the sense of inner Jewish conflict. As the idea of peoplehood has become secularized, it has moved further away from Torah, the one basis on which it could be coherently constituted. Orthodoxy, the one group positioned to unify the Jewish people, has seemed to be the one group standing in the way of unity. Increasingly it has developed a confrontational stance toward secularism in Israel and Reform in America. Internally it has been riven by conflict between the various chasidic and yeshivah groups, and between both and modern Orthodoxy.

We have argued that only tradition has the power to shape the Jewish people into a coherent entity. But does it? When Judaism itself becomes a battleground, where do we seek the Torah that “was only given to make peace in the world”? Have there been other voices within Orthodoxy that have sought to bring it closer to the rest of the Jewish world? As Orthodoxy moves inward toward greater segregation from secular culture, have there been movements in the opposite direction? What is and should be Orthodoxy’s relation to the Jewish people as a whole?