12

Whose Country Is This, Anyway?

Riding a bus down King George Street in Jerusalem recently, I hadn’t particularly noticed the young woman in the back of the bus who sat down next to the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] Jew since he, in his black hat, black coat, and long beard, and she, in her sandals, skirt, and sleeveless top, were part of a typical scene that included soldiers on leave, a babushka-capped grandmother, five-year-olds with knapsacks, and an occasional American-looking rabbi late for an appointment. It was only after the young woman quietly asked the Haredi to please close the window that I lifted my eyes out of the newspaper and watched him turn to her rather matter-of-factly with the words “Would you please lengthen your sleeves?”

“Mister,” the woman said, her voice rising to match her indignation, “the open window is bothering me!”

The Haredi seemed nonplused.

“Madame, the bare arms are bothering me,” he responded.

Her face was now grim and determined as she slowly extracted every single syllable from her mouth and planted them into every ear on the bus: “Are they my arms or your arms?”

—Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
in the JERUSALEM POST,
May 20, 1988

Back in the 1930s in Tel Aviv’s Mughrabi Square there used to be a big clock with no glass covering the face. Legend has it that one day Mayor Meir Dizengoff ordered that the clock be removed. When residents of the area asked him why, Mayor Dizengoff explained that it was because every Jew who walked by the clock reset it according to his own watch.

I heard that story shortly after I arrived in Jerusalem, but I understood how true it still was only after living in the country for a while. Israelis, I discovered, cannot decide what their nation should stand for not only politically, for all the reasons I outlined in the previous chapter, but also spiritually.

Indeed, the most amazing thing about the world’s only Jewish state is that it managed to be built, and hold together, despite the fact that there are deep and fundamental disagreements among its citizens as to what exactly a Jew is and what kind of Jewish life a Jewish state should represent. I used to meet many Jews from America and Western Europe who told me that they had come to Israel to “find” themselves as Jews. I always told them that Israel was probably the most confusing place in the world to do so. It is the place to lose yourself as a Jew, because if you don’t know who you are before you arrive, you can get totally lost in the maze of options that present themselves as soon as you plant your feet on the land.

Like most American Jews, I was raised on a Judaism without land—the same Judaism Jews have practiced since they were expelled from Palestine by the Romans two thousand years ago. This is a Judaism that revolves around the synagogue, around the holidays, and around communal get-togethers. Spiritually speaking, Jews in the Diaspora are differentiated from one another only by how they relate to ritual observance, that is, whether they practice Judaism in the Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform manner—Orthodox being the most observant and Reform the least.

Not so in Israel. Jews in Israel are not differentiated by synagogue affiliations as much as by how they relate to the land of Israel and to the state. The Jewish people’s reconnection with their land and their building of a modern state there have opened up a whole new set of options for defining oneself as a Jew—some of which were totally unknown in the Diaspora.

Those myriad options can be broken down into four broad schools of thought. The first and largest is made up of secular and nonobservant Israelis, men like Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir—those who really built the new state of Israel. The secular Zionists came to Israel in part as a rebellion against their grandfathers and the Orthodox synagogue–oriented ghetto Judaism practiced in Eastern Europe. For the secular Zionists, being back in the land of Israel, erecting a modern society and army, and observing Jewish holidays as national holidays all became a substitute for religious observance and faith. In Israel, they said, the sky is Jewish, basketball is Jewish, the state is Jewish, and the airport is Jewish, so who needs to go to synagogue? For them, coming to the land of Israel and becoming “normal” meant giving up religious ritual as the defining feature of their Jewish identity. Science, technology, and turning the desert green were their new Torah.

These secular Israelis, who make up roughly 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish population and send their children to state-run secular schools, were convinced that they were the wave of the future and that tradition-bound Jews were a passing episode in Jewish history. They were ready to allow any Jew in the world who wanted to live in their new state to become a citizen immediately, because they were certain that within one generation of being reconnected with the land those ultra-Orthodox Jews who were living in self-imposed ghettos either in Europe or Jerusalem would throw off their black hats and coats and join the Zionist revolution. After all, why would Jews want to re-create a medieval Polish ghetto inside a modern Jewish state, these secular Zionists asked themselves. More than one secular Israeli told me that when he was a young boy his father took him to Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, and told him something like this: “Look at these people while you can. They are relics from the past, dinosaurs from the basement of history. Behold them now, because in another generation they will be gone.”

The second major school consists of religious Zionists. These are traditional or modern Orthodox Jews, who fully support the secular Zionist state but insist that it is not a substitute for the synagogue. They see the state and the synagogue and a way of life according to the precepts of the Torah as all being compatible. They believe that the creation of Israel is a religious event, and that Judaism, when reinterpreted for the twentieth century, can flourish in a modern Jewish state. Religious Zionists, who make up roughly 30 percent of the Jewish population, serve in the army, celebrate Israel’s Independence Day as a new religious holiday, and send their children to state-run religious educational institutions.

The third school is also made up of religious Zionists, but of a more messianic bent. These messianic Zionists, who make up about 5 percent of the Jewish population, form the backbone of the Gush Emunim Jewish settler movement in the West Bank. For them the rebirth of the Jewish state is not simply a religious event; it is the first stage in a process that will culminate with the coming of the Messiah. The state, in their view, is a necessary instrument for bringing the Messiah, and Israel’s politics, defense and foreign policies should all be devoted to that end. That means, in particular, settling every inch of the land of Israel.

Finally, there are the ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim, “those filled with the awe of God.” They constitute about 15 percent of the Jewish population. The Haredim, although they are highly observant, do not see in the reborn state of Israel an event of major religious significance. They believe that a Jewish state will be worth celebrating religiously only after the Messiah comes and the rule of Jewish law is total. In the meantime, they are content to live in the land of Israel, no matter who is in charge—the secular Zionists or the British—because they feel closer to God there, because they can fulfill more of the Jewish commandments there, and in order to be on hand when the Messiah arrives.

The Haredim believe that since the beginning of the Diaspora two thousand years ago, the pinnacle of Jewish life and learning was that which was achieved by the great eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century yeshivas and rabbinic dynasties in the Jewish towns and ghettos of Eastern Europe, which were largely isolated from the Gentile world surrounding them. They have tried to re-create that life in Israel. That is why their menfolk still dress in the dark coats and fur hats worn by eighteenth-century Eastern European gentlemen. They even name many of their yeshivas in Israel after the towns in Eastern Europe from which they came. They also prefer to speak Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews, not Hebrew, and most of them neither send their sons and daughters to do army service nor celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. They have been ready to serve in the Israeli parliament purely for the purposes of advancing their own campaign to make Israeli society more religious and in order to obtain state funds to support their own private educational network of yeshivas.

Forty years ago, when the secular Israeli fathers were taking their sons down to Mea Shearim to show them the Haredim before they supposedly disappeared, what they didn’t know was that the Haredim were taking their sons over to the secular neighborhoods of Jerusalem and telling them: “Behold these empty secular Jews! In another generation they will realize that the Jews’ return to their land is not a political act but a spiritual one—and one which demands a spiritual response. Forty years from now, they will all be like us.”

In fact, each of the four main schools in the great Israeli identity debate was so convinced that the others would wither away that as a group they were never willing, or able, to sit down and hammer out a consensus about the meaning of the state of Israel and the land of Israel for the Israeli people. As a result, the different visions grew side by side. Israel became more secular and more Orthodox, more mundane and more messianic, all at the same time. Far from having built a “new Jewish identity,” or a “new Jew,” Israel seems to have brought out of the basement of Jewish history every Jewish spiritual option from the past three thousand years; the country has become a living museum of Jewish history. That is why Israel today has more Lithuanian-style Haredi yeshivas under its roof than the Jews ever had back in Lithuania, at the same time as it has the only Jewish gay bar and the only Jewish surfing shop.

Nothing better dramatized the radically different Jewish trends that have grown in the Israeli hothouse in the last forty years than the November 1988 national election campaign, which involved twenty-seven different parties competing for 120 Knesset seats. During the runoff, the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who resides in Brooklyn, threw his backing behind the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael Party. The rebbe indicated his support with a series of full-page advertisements in Israeli newspapers inviting voters to fill out a coupon swearing that they had voted for Agudat and to send it to him. In return, the rebbe promised to make a blessing in the voter’s name—a blessing that the voter should have “health, a long life, happiness, and success in all endeavors.” Meanwhile, one of the rebbe’s main rivals, former chief Sephardic rabbi Ovadia Yosef, took out a television advertisement promising blessings and “many sons” for anyone who voted for his Shas Party. Part of Rabbi Yosef’s advertisement, however, was censored by the election board—the part in which he warned, “Whoever does not vote Shas—will be punished by the Holy One blessed be He.” Not to be outdone, Agudat Yisrael printed postcards with the picture of a dead Moroccan Jewish holy man, the Baba Sali, an Israeli equivalent of Father Divine, revered for his powers of healing and prophecy. On the back of the postcards was printed: “There is no doubt that from the heavens Baba Sali is blessing all those who support and vote for Agudat Yisrael.” Two other ultra-Orthodox sects vowed not to eat fruit until after the elections in order to bring bad luck on their rival party, Degel Hatorah, whose symbol was a fruit tree. From the other side of the political spectrum, the secular, liberal Shinui (Change) Party published a full-page advertisement showing the not particularly appealing head of an ultra-Orthodox Jew, with long sidelocks, above the headline: HE IS FREE FROM ARMY SERVICE AND HARASSING YOU AT THE SAME TIME.

Watching these campaign advertisements, I began to understand what an Israeli friend of mine meant when he said, “It is a lot easier to pray for the ingathering of the exiles than it is to live with them.”

I also began to understand why it is literally exhausting at times to be an Israeli Jew. One afternoon in June 1988, I sat in the Ramat Aviv home of Israeli historian Ya’acov Shavit, trying to figure out just what time it was in Israel. While a light breeze fanned us through the open door and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Noga, prepared lunch in the kitchen, Shavit discussed the strains of living in a country where all the clocks still had open faces.

“I must tell you,” he confided, “I just came back from two years in Germany. It was paradise. It was Germany, but it was paradise. No news. No one waiting for the Messiah. It was so relaxing. Here, you live in a very dynamic state. You are always involved in everything. Always listening to the news. You can’t escape the utopian aspirations of the left or the messianic expectations of the right. You can never relax. People are always arguing about your identity. People are always asking you to decide. Are you a Jew? Well, what kind of Jew? Are you a Zionist? Well, what kind of Zionist? You turn on the television and people are arguing about the borders, about the boundaries between religion and state—nothing is ever settled here. You just can’t relax.”

At that point Noga stuck her head out of the kitchen, where she had been quietly peeling potatoes, and shouted across the room to her father, “Dad, that’s the fun of the place.”

“Yes, fun,” mused Shavit, rolling his eyeballs upward with the look of a man who could do with a little less fun.

“Anyways, Dad,” added Noga, just to nail down the point, “don’t you know they commit suicide in Switzerland more than anywhere else in the world?”

Israel need never worry about suicidal boredom. In order to get a better understanding of the four main visions competing for Israel’s Jewish soul, I asked four Israeli acquaintances of mine—all of them once Americans, all of them drawn to Israel for totally different Jewish reasons—Just whose country is this, anyway?

If the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Tel Aviv—Israel’s first and only university for rock ’n’ roll—had a school crest, the motto running across the middle would say in fancy Hebrew characters: “Jews just wanna have fun.”

The Rimon School is the physical embodiment of a vision of Israel shared by many secular Westernized Israelis, which is to be free of all religious obligations and to be normal the way Frenchmen are normal—blessedly normal, boringly normal, goto-the-beach-and-pop-open-a-beer-every-weekend kind of normal. What those who share this vision enjoy most about Israel is the warmth and familylike security of living in a Jewish community, but they want the warmth of the ghetto without its isolation, without its constantSturm und Drang, and, most of all, without its rabbis. They want the Rimon School.

The Rimon campus looks like an army base gone to seed—low-slung barracks with peeling white paint and a lawn that has needed cutting for months; it was once a school for the mentally handicapped. Some ultra-Orthodox Israelis think it still is. The classroom for rehearsing rock music consists of an underground concrete-and-steel bomb shelter that is known around campus as the “heavy-metal department.” There, on the day of my visit, I found a pickup band shaking the two-foot-thick walls, belting out “Johnny B. Goode” and a few strains of an old Israeli favorite, “Me and My Surfboard,” which is said to be the first Hebrew surfing song since Moses crossed the Red Sea with the Children of Israel singing in his wake. The pickup band was pure rock ‘n’ roll Zionism: the dark-eyed lead singer wearing an oversized sweatshirt and red high-top sneakers had immigrated from Tunisia; the saxophonist’s family had come from Argentina; the lead guitarist had immigrated from Long Island; and the electric organist traced his family roots to Poland. The Rimon School is where the spirit of Elvis Presley meets the vision of Theodor Herzl.

Started in 1984 by four Israeli jazz and rock stars intent on providing a serious program for Israeli youth interested in studying contemporary music, Rimon offers classes in music composition, voice, jazz guitar, rock, and arranging, to name but a few. By 1988, it had 25 faculty and 135 students and had already graduated the first class from its three-year program. It was also being subsidized in part by the Israeli Ministry of Education. Who said Israel has lost its soul? People just don’t know where to find it. Yuval Nadav Haimovitz, a voice student and a member of the school’s traveling a cappella group, told me he was convinced that the Rimon School represented the essence of what Zionism was supposed to be about.

“I think Herzl would have been very pleased,” said Haimovitz, with real conviction. “I think that he wanted this to be a country like any other country. If we can have such a school, then Israel has become just what Herzl had in mind.”

It’s certainly what Ze’ev Chafets had in mind. It was Ze’ev who first told me about the Rimon School. If Theodor Herzl and Janis Joplin had had a child together, it would have been Ze’ev; he even looks like a cross between the two. A native of Detroit, Chafets has that dockyard philosopher’s sense of what makes the ordinary man tick and the finely tuned ear of a frustrated rock star who knows what makes men dance. I first got to know Ze’ev back in the early 1980s, when he headed the Government Press Office for Prime Minister Menachem Begin; today he makes his living writing books. Over some Goldstar beers at his favorite local, the Bonanza Bar off Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street, Chafets, now in his early forties, puffed a fat cigar and talked about his own Israel, the one for Jews who just wanna have fun.

“I came in 1967,” said Chafets. “I was at the University of Michigan. On one level, I came to be a student, and to learn Hebrew. I was thinking of becoming a rabbi, you know, all that stuff. On the American level, it was the sixties and everybody was going someplace. Some of my friends dropped out, some of my friends went to Canada, some went to the Peace Corps, and some went out to the desert and smoked dope all of their lives. I traveled like everybody else, and happened to land here. That was the Easy Riderside of it.”

While that explains how Chafets got to Israel, what held him was something more intangible, he said, something actually tribal. It is the same feeling that prompts American Jews to applaud when their El Al plane lands safely in Tel Aviv. They applaud for the crazy notion of a Jewish airplane landing on a Jewish landing strip at a Jewish airport. Who ever heard of such a thing before 1948? That is the glue that binds many Israelis to the land—not Bible, and not religion, but the poetry of a Jewish airport.

“What really holds this place together at bottom,” explained Chafets, as other customers in the bar shouted their greetings to him, not all of which were fit to print, “is not democracy. It’s not Zionism. It’s not any ideology or any system. It is that tribal Jewish sense of solidarity. For two thousand years, all these people have been crying and pleading and begging God to give them a country. I wanted to see it, but when I came here I found out that Israel resonated for me. I quickly realized I felt at home here, even though these people were not like people I had grown up with. When the Moroccans first came to Israel, there was this thing that Moroccans always used to walk in the road. And people would ask why. Didn’t they have sidewalks in Morocco? No. The reason was that this was their country. There’s no plantation owner around. Now they can walk in the fucking street if they want to. I had a little bit of that feeling myself. Israel is how Jews behave when they are off the plantation—when there are no Gentiles around watching over them. All the things here that Americans complain about I liked. I liked the bad manners. I liked the directness, I liked the excitement, the adrenaline. I felt comfortable with these people. I never really articulated it, but on some unconscious level I got off the airplane and thought to myself, This is the place. I belong here.”

So what do you do for fun?

“I have great fun; for example, getting together with some of the top musicians in Israel and playing rock ‘n’ roll, and playing for big parties from time to time. Why? Because it’s something that in America I could never do. Before Yom Kippur every year, Shaul the bartender and I and a few other people go sit on Dizengoff Street and we drink beer and eat hummus, and as people come by—if we know them and, as we get progressively drunker, even if we don’t know them—we stop them and say, ‘If I did something wrong to offend you this year, I apologize. Please forgive me.’ It’s great fun and people smile and laugh and say, ‘Yeah, me too, brother. Forgive me, too,’ and they just walk along. I like getting up on Saturday mornings and hanging out on the beach with some friends at this shack owned by a Tunisian woman. You feel the Mediterranean part of this country. The slow pace, the sensuousness of the women, the warmth, the colors. Israel is the only country where the Puerto Rican girls are all Jewish. Fun was watching the Israeli basketball team beat the Russians in 1977. Not just because it was great, but because it was us against them. On one level it was Tal Brody [the Israeli team star player] and all these guys beating the Russian team, which is from a big country, remember, and on another level it was my grandfather beating them. It was our retroactive victory over the Cossacks. And we all understood it that way. Nobody had to say it. It would have sounded corny to say it to each other, but we understood it that way.”

One of the things I always liked about Chafets, one of the reasons he is typical of a certain, very popular strain of Israelis, is that he always has a sense of humor about Israel. He always appreciates that most Israelis are not heroes, let alone holy men, nor do they even want to be, but people just struggling to get through the month, eke out a little happiness, make love—not always with their spouses—and visit America at least once every three years. The extent of their ideology is their recognition that they are doing all this in a Jewish state, serving in the army and saluting the flag.

“Now, you could say, Well, if you wanted to have fun so much, why didn’t you move to California?” Chafets continued, anticipating my question. “Why live in Israel? I wanted to have fun and I also wanted to live in a Jewish country—to participate in that. It is fair to say that my goal as a Zionist was to live in a Jewish state, and it wasn’t ever to live in a particular kind of Jewish state. It is enough for me to be in a country that is owned and operated by my family. And if my family decides it wants to be in the fur business instead of the drug business, that’s fine. That is why it never really made a critical difference to me what government there is here. You often hear people saying, If Sharon is going to be Prime Minister, I am leaving. My feeling is that under no circumstances am I leaving, any more than anyone would leave a country where he belongs. I think it was in The French Connection when Popeye Doyle was talking to this French cop and the French cop was bragging about Marseilles and Popeye says, ‘I’d rather be the lid on a garbage can in New York than the mayor of Marseilles.’ Not to be offensive about other countries, but I’d rather be the lid on a garbage can here than live anywhere else.

“Having grown up in America I was very much aware of the gap—in what I think is a good country—between rhetoric and performance, between ideology and reality. So I didn’t think this country had to become perfect in order to be enjoyable. It’s like the guy who says, ‘I can’t live with a woman unless she’s perfect,’ and another guy who is more easygoing and says, ‘You know, maybe she’s a little fat and maybe she’s a little stupid, but you know, what the heck, I love her.’ That’s kind of how I feel about Israel. Twenty years ago, when I first came, people here still had this sort of grandiose image of the country, but that was too austere, too demanding to last for long for most people. What you see now is a loosening of the bonds of discipline and ideology. It’s like a woman taking off her girdle after the party is over. People sacrificed for a long time, they want to have some fun. One of the great lessons to me about Israel is that Jews are real people. We’re not stereotypes, we’re not creations of Bernard Malamud.

“This is what we are,” pronounced Chafets, cocking his thumb toward the now packed bar. “How many times have you seen a bar with only Jews in it?”

But how can living in a Jewish state resonate so deeply for you, while at the same time you are totally nonobservant as a Jew? I asked. You seem to agree with those who say that because the sky in Israel is Jewish, once there you don’t have to observe at all anymore.

“Well, there’s something to that. One of the great things about Israel for me is that it allows me not to be Jewish, not to be observant,” answered Chafets. “It is like the difference between someone who has to pay his rent every month and someone who buys the house. This is mine now. I don’t have to go on being religiously Jewish to distinguish myself from the Gentiles. When I’m here, I don’t have to think, Is the woman I meet Jewish? I don’t care if she’s Jewish, because if I met her here, and she’s able to speak Hebrew and live in this society, she’s Jewish enough for me. I don’t have to worry about eating Jewish food to demonstrate culinary solidarity. I don’t need a delicatessen to show that I am Jewish. And for the same reason, I don’t need a synagogue. The whole country’s my synagogue. The part of the synagogue I always liked was the social hall, and the kitchen—you know, not the sanctuary. And so being here is a relief. I can be myself and Jewish but without having to think about it all the time. If you want to be a Jewish guy in America, you really have to agree to play by the American Jewish rules—which means that you have to be a nice boy. Israel is the only country where you can be Jewish but you don’t have to be domesticated. If you don’t want to be an ophthalmologist and you don’t want to be a lawyer and you still want to be Jewish—this is the place to do it.”

Just don’t try to have a newspaper stand in the wrong neighborhood.

Shimon Tsimhe used to have the hottest-selling Hebrew newsstand in B’nei B’rak—before the bombing. Now he scratches out a bare living selling falafel sandwiches.

B’nei B’rak is an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, populated solely by Haredim. It is only twenty minutes’ drive from the Bonanza Bar—twenty minutes and about two hundred years, that is, since Jewish life in B’nei B’rak today has much more in common with Jewish life in eighteenth-century Lithuania than anything happening in north Tel Aviv. If they had wanted to film the movie Hester Street here, they would not have needed to bring in many props or costumes.

My first visit to B’nei B’rak was prompted by a small item in the Jerusalem Post about Tsimhe. A tiny band of B’nei B’rak’s Haredim decided to purify their neighborhood of all newsstands selling non-religious, pro-Zionist Israeli newspapers. The religious community in Israel has its own newspapers, which not only concentrate on news important to them—such as which rabbi is taking over which yeshiva or advertisements by matrimonial matchmakers—but also print only the most puritanical advertisements and take a rather dim view of news about the secular state.

Tsimhe learned that the hard way. “I used to sell lots of newspapers—lots,” he told me one afternoon, while plopping mashed chick-pea balls into a deep-fat fryer and nervously looking back and forth to make certain none of the black-coated ultra-Orthodox men waiting for the bus were eavesdropping on our conversation. “I was the biggest in the whole area, not just B’nei B’rak. Every Friday I would sell five hundred copies of Yediot Achronot and Ma’ariv. I made 15 percent on each one.”

“But then the threats started,” said Tsimhe, a rail-thin man with a black yarmulke resting uneasily on his head. Then there was a bomb—just a small one. Someone placed it right up against the kiosk. It didn’t totally destroy the newsstand but was powerful enough to send debris and shrapnel flying across the street, breaking the window of the tailor’s shop. The tailor was not amused. Tsimhe was terrified. On the back of Tsimhe’s kiosk, into which a group of Haredim also locked him one day to help persuade him that it would be best not to sell Israeli dailies like Yediot and Ma’ariv, someone bluntly scrawled in spray paint: STOP OFFERING NEWSPAPERS.

Didn’t you complain to the municipality? I asked him incredulously.

“They said it would be better if I didn’t sell newspapers anymore,” said Tsimhe. “They said it would be better if I sold falafels.” (The municipality is also run by Haredim.)

Then, putting on a smile like a Halloween mask, Tsimhe turned back to serve one of his ultra-Orthodox customers with an abruptness that said to me, “Please go away. I have had enough troubles.”

As I walked down the main street of B’nei B’rak, distancing myself from Tsimhe’s stand, I decided to conduct a little sidewalk experiment. I stopped a modern-looking Orthodox man who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the knitted yarmulke of the kind preferred by religious Jews who are also Zionists.

“Excuse me,” I asked in a loud voice, “do you know where I can get a copy of Ma’ariv around here?”

The man’s eyes flashed wide, as though I had inquired where I might find a prostitute for the evening. He kept walking, but motioned me closer with a nod of his head so that he could speak to me in a whisper.

“Don’t you know what is happening in B’nei B’rak?” he hissed. “It is terror, ultra-Orthodox terror.”

Then, still without breaking stride, he used his eyes to direct my attention down toward the thin manila folder he was carrying in his briefcase. He opened the top of the folder just a sliver, like some pusher offering me a whiff of cocaine. The opening revealed a copy of Yediot, Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper, sandwiched into the folder. He smiled a sly grin and then quickly strode away, swallowed by a stream of black hats and coats.

I found this whole affair troubling for what it said about the rising power of the extremist elements within the Haredi community, and I used it as the basis for a long story in the Times about the struggle within Israel between Haredim and secular Jews. Shortly after I wrote this article, I was flooded with hate mail from ultra-Orthodox Jews in America and Israel who felt that I had maligned their community, only a small portion of whom, they said, were of the type who turned Tsimhe from a newspaper salesman into a falafel maker overnight. I responded by asking why, if the majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were so moderate, more of them—any of them—didn’t rush to defend Tsimhe’s right to sell Israeli newspapers. I got no answer. One of the complainants, though, wouldn’t let go. He was polite, even engaging, but relentless in his determination to educate me on the merits of the Haredi community.

I was not Rabbi Nota Schiller’s first project. Schiller is the director of Jerusalem’s Ohr Somayach yeshiva, an ultra-Orthodox institution which specializes in bringing Jews who have drifted away from Judaism back to Torah learning. Some have accused him of running a factory for brainwashing Jews, but Schiller vehemently denies this charge, although not without adding, tongue in cheek, that some Jews could use having their brains washed. Ohr Somayach is probably the most liberal face of Haredi Judaism in Israel; its moderation and openness to dialogue do not typify the Haredi community. Nevertheless, when Schiller invited me to spend a day at his yeshiva in order to prove to me that the Haredim had a vision for Israel that was as dynamic, compelling, and noncoercive as any Zionist one, I decided to take him up on it.

I quickly discovered that the Brooklyn-born rabbi, with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and psychology from Johns Hopkins, brought a certain endearing Madison Avenue quality to selling Orthodox Judaism. We began our talk at his yeshiva— which was founded in 1972 and is situated in a modern apartment block in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood—with Schiller explaining why his community was being slandered.

“The Jews never would have made it here to these shores,” began Schiller, who first came to Israel himself in 1961 as a twenty-four-year-old student, “if it were not for the learning that went on in the yeshivas of Eastern Europe and for the fact that the grandfathers of the secular Zionists who founded this country lived the way I do. The Israelis are still here as Jews only because of the Orthodox life-style their grandfathers led. It is as though their grandfathers deposited money in the bank, and now this generation is writing checks on it. So secular Jews have a debt to that life-style. Therefore, when we are presented as retrogressive, primitive madmen, it is simply not true. We are just saying, Let us live the way we want to live. I am not asking you to live like me, but I am asking you to appreciate that there is a certain sanity and consistency rooted in Jewish history in my position and that you have a debt to that position, and that debt may allow me to ask you to make certain compromises that we can negotiate together. There is in the code of Jewish law a case in which the rabbis were asked what happens if two ships are coming through a narrow strait at the same time from opposite directions. One ship is laden with cargo and the other is empty. Who has to give way? One of Israel’s first great rabbis, Reb Avram Yeshayau Krelitz, used this case when arguing with Ben-Gurion for greater sensitivity to the needs of the Haredi community. Krelitz told Ben-Gurion that the rabbis decided that the empty ship must give way to the one laden with cargo. He then went on to tell Ben-Gurion: ‘Look, we are carrying a few thousand years of cargo with us; you are still an empty ship. You have to give way for us.’”

When I observed that the Haredim did not show much sensitivity to Tsimhe’s way of life, Schiller retorted that this was because they had had so many years of being abused by the secular community.

“The secular Israeli community looks at Haredim in one of three ways,” explained Schiller. “The ultra-secularists say that the Haredim should be asked to leave—they are an anachronism, an embarrassment, and are frustrating the growth of the country. We should amputate this sick limb. Another group sees us as their Fiddlers on the Roof. These are the secular Israelis, who are sentimentally attached to the ghetto image of the Jew. America has its Disneyland theme park, so Israel has its theme park in Mea Shearim. They view it as charming and interesting, and it can bring in a few tourist bucks for the country, and it reminds them of their grandfathers—but let’s not take it too seriously. Then there is a third response: just as there was the concept of the Shabbos goy—the Gentile who came into the synagogue and put out the lights on the Sabbath for the Jews—so there is the concept of the Shabbos Jew. Secular Israelis want someone to keep Shabbos for them—us—so that their grandchildren, who are nonobservant, will be exposed to enough real Jewishness in order to maintain even their secular Jewish identities.”

Okay, I conceded, maybe you are right—without Orthodox Judaism keeping the Jewish people and its traditions alive for all these centuries, Judaism would never have survived. But what I am wondering is whether with Orthodox Judaism alone the Jewish people will be able to survive the next fifty years. None of your women and virtually none of your men serves in the Israeli army; virtually none of your yeshivas recognizes Israeli Independence Day as a holiday on which it should be closed for celebration; and maybe most important, you totally reject the validity of the Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism, without which thousands upon thousands of Jews would have drifted away from Judaism altogether in the twentieth century—since they are repelled by your interpretations and life-style. So what makes you such a bargain anyway? I asked. And furthermore, what is that picture of a baseball player doing by your desk?

“That is Cal Abrams, who was the first Jewish baseball player for the Brooklyn Dodgers,” explained Schiller, taking last things first. “He played left field in the 1950s. I was a teenager in Brooklyn then. The Dodgers always had a problem in left field. After he was called up, for the first half of the season he hit .477. It was clear to me and my friends that Cal Abrams was going to be the Messiah. That was the only way to explain how a Jew could hit .477. He was a lefty and he hit only to left field, so the opposing teams would put this super shift on for him. Well, midway into the season he went into a slump and could not buy a base hit. So what did we decide? We decided that the Messiah will come only when the generation is ready. Cal Abrams was supposed to be the Messiah, but the generation did not deserve him. We were not ready.”

Fine, but what does that have to do with Israel? I asked.

“Hopefully, the state of Israel will not turn out to be a Cal Abrams,” said Schiller, rubbing his salt-and-pepper beard. “But if it does, it won’t be the end of the Jewish people. I am going to do everything I can to make sure the state makes it—but my Judaism won’t hinge on that.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, I said. Why isn’t the secular Zionist state of Israel essential for you?

“We want a Jewish state, run by Jewish law,” said Schiller. “The secular Zionists want a state for Jews. That is the difference. I want a Jewish state, but I am ready to live and argue with all the secular Labor Zionists of the world today, because by keeping the discussion going with them, I am convinced that their children or grandchildren, disciples or fellow travelers, will one day pitch up at Ohr Somayach, or somewhere like, it. They will eventually enter into the fold of Torah Jews. Jews can survive and have survived for two thousand years without Israel and without a Temple. If we have our druthers, we want Israel, we want the Temple, and we want the preferred boundaries. But there is only one thing we cannot survive without and that is Torah. We survived all of these years as a people, thanks to Torah. Had we depended on the land and the land alone, we would have disappeared the way other cultures disappeared.”

Yet surely there is some special significance for you as a Jew in the fact that the state does exist here? The land, at least, has special meaning for you?

“Of course,” said Schiller. “When the Jewish people stood before God at Mount Sinai, they were commissioned to fulfill their genius as a nation in this land. The Jews are not just a collection of individuals, they are a nation, and every nation must have its ball park, its field. It is as if this is Yankee Stadium for the Jewish people, and we are the Yankees. You just can’t play without a ball park. You can’t play all your games on the road and hope to be a successful team—otherwise you never get to bat last. You cannot have the ideal fulfillment of Torah without living in this land. There are certain mitzvot [commandments]—observing the sabbatical year,⁸ for instance—which can be performed only here in the land of Israel. But the advantage of being here is not just that you can fulfill more commandments. There is a total Jewish experience here that cannot be found elsewhere. The Jew who is living abroad is a weekend Jew. He can take a time-out whenever he wants. Here there are no time-outs. The clock is running because you are always on the court. To throw garbage on the streets of Jerusalem is a spiritual transgression, not just a municipal violation.”

Well, if the land is that important, then why have 20,000 Haredi men arranged for draft deferments excusing them from army service? Don’t you feel you have a responsibility to protect this land with your life?

“Anyone within our community who does not recognize the importance of what the secular Israeli is doing to protect us is an ingrate,” answered Schiller. “But anyone who doesn’t recognize the contribution of yeshiva boys is ignorant. I think it is legitimate to postpone serving in the army as long as someone is productive and learning in a yeshiva, because I think there are too few people who are aware and learned enough to fight the enemy of assimilation. Our survival in the next generation will depend on that, too. It is not like our young men are going to the beach each day instead of serving in the army. The rigid intellectual discipline and life-style of a yeshiva boy is not a casual conscientious objection. It is not like going to Canada. There are much easier ways to get out of the army.”

If the land of Israel has spiritual value for you, I asked, why is it that many prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are doves when it comes to giving back the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—in contrast to the Zionist Orthodox Jews represented by the Gush Emunim Jewish settler movement, who believe that occupying all the land of Israel is the necessary first stage for Jewish and universal redemption?

“A Torah society always comes before a specific territory,” answered Schiller, explaining where his Haredim part company with many religious Zionists. “It is only through a return to Torah—not a specific place—that there can be a redemptive process. Redemption comes when we earn the privilege, not because we sit in a certain location. Being in Israel is part of earning that privilege, but there is no urgency today to institute the ideal biblical boundaries. That will happen at a time when it is supposed to happen, and I don’t have to precipitate the process at the cost of Jewish lives. We need the courage of humility, and Gush Emunim lack that. If I can secure the continuity of this state by giving back some land to the Arabs, then it is my responsibility to do so. Some people are fighting for the land and some people are fighting to ensure that the land is worth protecting.”

But for which Jews? The Haredi community is at the forefront of the fight to delegitimize Reform and Conservative Judaism, just because they offer a less stringent interpretation of Torah. How can you be for the survival of the Jewish people and against Jewish pluralism?

“I have no problem awarding a Reform or Conservative Jew a certain status as a person and a Jew,” answered Schiller. “If that is pluralism, then I am a pluralist. But what I reject of pluralism is the idea that we are all equally right. We are not. There was a revelation at Sinai. A message and a code for interpreting that message were passed down through the generations. The boundaries of interpretation were delimited from the start. Within those boundaries, there is an opportunity for discussion. But not outside those boundaries, and that is where Reform and Conservative Judaism has gone. It is as if you have a baseball team and someone comes along and says, Why don’t we do some football exercises? Well, we’re not playing football, we’re playing baseball. If someone starts to pluralize that way, he loses the point of the whole activity. In baseball you can throw curveballs, fastballs, and strikes, but not forward passes. That’s a different game. But Reform and Conservative are calling it all the same game, and it is not. My argument is not with the Reform Jew. That he is Jewish I acknowledge. My argument is with Reform Judaism.”

Before leaving, I took up Schiller’s offer to sit in on one of his yeshiva’s Torah-study sessions. It turned out to be highly revealing, although not for the Torah portion. There were about twenty young men in the class, all of them between the ages of nineteen and thirty-nine. They all seemed to be either Americans or Western Europeans. At least half of them were wearing LaCoste sport shirts with crocodiles on the breast, which left me wondering whether I hadn’t walked into a fraternity meeting. Their appearance reminded me in every way of the kids with whom I’d first come to Israel twenty years ago to live on a kibbutz for a summer and play pioneer. But this was no kibbutz, and no one here was interested in picking tomatoes, as I had been.

“What are you doing here?” I asked them all point-blank. “You’re not supposed to be in a yeshiva. That’s not why Americans come here. Where’ve you been? You’re supposed to be on kibbutzim, draining swamps, dreaming about being an Israeli fighter pilot, chasing girls down on the beach. What is this?”

The answer came as if from one man: “Mr. Friedman, that was your generation—not ours.”

Suddenly all those statistics published by the Ministry of Absorption indicating that immigration to Israel by secular American Jews interested in the pioneering Zionist dream was slowing to a trickle were staring me in the face. Maybe Schiller was right—there are not that many more Ze’ev Chafetses out there, into rock ’n’ roll Zionism. As long as everyone was devoted to building the country, said one of Schiller’s recruits, there was enough excitement around for the secular to drain the swamps and for the Orthodox to do their thing—and plenty of Jewish immigrants for both. But when it came time for an end, he said, it turned out that the secular had no end and the Orthodox did. They had something to offer once the swamps ran dry, and that is why practically the only Jews coming to Israel these days from America and Western Europe are ultra-Orthodox or their recruits.

Ya’acov Asher Sinclair, a thirty-eight-year-old Englishman who decided to take a break from his cosmopolitan life in London to investigate religious life in Israel, put it to me straight. “Unless you have some other agenda going on, to come here and be a hero, well … I don’t think it’s got that romantic image anymore,” said Sinclair, with no hint of regret. “What were the figures last year? Some 8,000 Jews came and 24,000 left. Who are the ones leaving? They are the people who grew up with the secular side of Zionism, which has proven vacuous, unfulfilling, and nonsustainable. There was a certain kind of romanticism to their attachment to Israel, and now they are undiscovering Israel for the same reason. It is not romantic enough for them anymore. It was transitory. It was an infatuation. What is lasting, attractive, and compelling is the Torah. I came here several times for visits, but only when I became religious did I really want to be here, because I felt it was the only place I could really learn at the level I wanted. I’m not here to fly an airplane, I’m not here to be a doctor, I’m not here to work the land, I’m not here to feel taller or freer, and I am not here to go to the beach or get a tan. I am here to learn exclusively about Judaism. I am here to learn Torah only. If Torah were better in the States or South Africa or Madagascar, that is where I would be. But it’s better here.”

It sounds seductive when you are inside the yeshiva walls, and block out three-quarters of Israel and 90 percent of the Jewish people, who are totally alienated by this religious vision. As I walked the Tel Aviv beachfront a few days later, though, I wondered to myself, How can Schiller’s vision ever flourish in the long run, when what it tells Israelis is that they will survive as Jews only to the extent that they imitate their grandfathers. How long can he tell dignified and self-confident Israelis, who built a whole state from scratch, that they are surviving as Jews because of the investment of eighteenth-century rabbis? How long can he tell Israeli high-school students that they must put their bodies on the line so that yeshiva students can study in peace? I can’t resist calling Schiller a few days later and asking whether he really isn’t fighting a lost battle. As always, he is ready with an answer and a story.

“I studied in a yeshiva in New York under Reb Isaac Hutner,” said Schiller. “He came on a visit to Israel once and went to Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. At one point during his discussion with the kibbutz elders he told them, ‘Ben-Gurion thought that time was in his favor because as the country becomes more materialistic it cannot help but drift away from its shtetl origins and become less sentimental about the attachment to the old-time religion. Therefore, Ben-Gurion avoided a direct confrontation with the religious and instead chipped away at them wherever he could. He figured they would fall into his lap eventually. Ben-Gurion was wrong. We can trace the peaks and valleys in Jewish history, and always just when it looks as if our way of life is going to evaporate, there is somehow a resurgence and the thing comes to life again. You people here on Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, I can tell you one thing: your children will either end up in Los Angeles or in Ohr Somayach. They won’t be in Yad Mordechai. Or your grandchildren, for sure.’

“I can’t help but feel that there is a deep truth ringing in those words,” said Schiller, with the firmness of a man who feels the wind at his back. “And as each day and hour goes by, it is ringing more and more true.”

But not every Jew in Israel is ready to wait for that day when the Messiah will come forth out of the blue riding a donkey, to usher in a complete Torah society. Some devised a plan to bring him sooner.

It was a simple plan, really. The small group of West Bank Jewish settlers would steal explosives from an Israeli army camp on the Golan Heights, place their homemade bombs at the base of the Dome of the Rock—the third-holiest shrine of Islam—and then blow the blue-and-gold mosque to smithereens. The Dome of the Rock is situated on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the site of the first and second Jewish Temples, and the Israeli plotters were convinced that the Messiah would come only once this Muslim “desecration” was cleared from the very throne of God on earth, the focal point of Jewish national sovereignty. This was their way of dusting off the throne and making it more inviting for the Messiah. Or, as Yehuda Etzion, the messianic settler behind the plan, told his colleagues, “This act will be an incomparably appropriate opening move in pursuing our cause. We must view ourselves as messengers who bring the kingdom [of God’s] good tidings.”⁹

Fortunately for Israel, and the world, this plot to prod the Messiah was never realized, but not for want of trying. The explosives were already prepared when the Israeli police uncovered the cabal and, in June 1984, brought charges against twenty-seven men alleged to have been part of a Jewish terrorist underground based in the West Bank. The crimes for which these Jewish terrorists were later convicted included not only the plot against the Dome of the Rock but also the 1983 murder of three Palestinian students at Hebron’s Islamic College, in revenge for the killing of a yeshiva student in the same town, the maiming of two Palestinian West Bank mayors, Bassam Shaka and Karim Khalef, and an attempt to sabotage Arab buses in Jerusalem.

I was not in Israel when the Jewish terrorists committed their crimes, but I was on hand in the Jerusalem District Court on July 10, 1985, when most of them were sentenced to varying prison terms, from life to a few months—almost all of which have since been reduced by Israel’s President Chaim Herzog. As I watched these young Jewish terrorists in their yarmulkes and long beards walking around the courtroom, I could not help but be struck by their self-confidence and self-righteousness. The way they strutted about, chatting with their wives, chomping on green apples, and almost literally turning up their noses at the judge, was galling. I had seen the same arrogance among members of Hizbullah, the Party of God, in Beirut. These were simply the Jewish version. While they were being sentenced by the judge, I kept wondering to myself, What dark corner of Jewish history did these people crawl out of? Are we really members of the same religious community? Nobody told me about Jews like this when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah back in Minneapolis.

In order to figure out where they came from, I paid a visit to Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, one of the founding fathers of the West Bank settler movement, and a man to whom some of the terrorists had turned for spiritual guidance. Although Rabbi Waldman was not involved in the Jewish terrorists’ plots, he was steeped in the religious vision which stirred them. As noted earlier, Rabbi Waldman was among the Mayflower families of West Bank Jewish settlement—the group that rented out Hebron’s Arab-owned Park Hotel for the week of Passover 1968 and really opened the West Bank and Gaza for settlement based not on security rationales but in order to fulfill biblical visions. Born in Israel but raised in America from the age of three, Waldman now resides in Kiryat Arba, in Hebron, where he splits his time between running a yeshiva and working for the ultra-nationalist Tehiya Party, which is dedicated to annexing the West Bank. Now fifty-one, Rabbi Waldman has the beard of Santa Claus, the featherlight voice of a dove, and the delicate hands of a violinist—all in stark contrast to the seemingly untamed messianic visions dancing in his head. What struck me most about his book-lined apartment in Kiryat Arba was how badly the paint in the hallway had peeled and how tall the trees were in the front yard. Those trees thick with the rings of twenty winters and those paint fragments dusting his doorstep seemed to mock the Israeli—and international—debate about whether or not Jews should settle the West Bank. Waldman has been here a long time already. His walls say so. His trees say so. His Bible says he is going to be here much longer.

I began our discussion by asking Rabbi Waldman why, when he came back to Israel from America at the age of nineteen, he did not go to a regular ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, of the kind Rabbi Schiller attended, but chose instead to go to the Mercaz ha-Rav yeshiva, which was founded in 1924 by Abraham Isaac Kook, a mystical rabbi who believed that the return of the Jews to the land of Israel marked the beginning of a process of Jewish, and ultimately universal, redemption—salvation from a life of sin, and the introduction of a reign of perfect peace and justice. After Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war, the teachings of Rabbi Kook, and his son Rabbi Zevi Judah Kook, were adopted as spiritual and political guidelines by the Gush Emunim Jewish settler movement.

“When I came to Mercaz ha-Rav in 1956, there were only thirty-five boys,” recalled Waldman. “It was located in an old house near the center of Jerusalem, near Zion Square. I went there because I knew that its ideology was the direction I wanted. It was the only yeshiva that understood that the phenomenon of Jews being awakened to come back to Israel, to establish settlements and build the land, was all part of the godly decision to begin the process of redemption.”

What do you mean by redemption? I thought that was a Christian notion, I asked.

“The Christians took the redemptive idea from us,” explained Rabbi Waldman. “Our sources say it means the Jewish people coming back to their land, renewing their life as a Jewish people and independent nation, and living according to Jewish values. Only in that way can they continue toward the achievement of their goals of spiritual and moral perfection and be what they were ordained to be—a light unto the nations that will show the way to spiritual and moral perfection for the whole world.”

So what you are saying is that returning to the land of Israel implies certain Jewish obligations?

“That is correct,” said the rabbi. “The prophets said that only when we are an independent nation and responsible for ourselves will we arouse respect from the nations of the world. Anyone who has read the Bible knows and understands that for the well-being of the peoples of the world the Jewish people must return to their land and their glory and their spiritual values. The Jewish religion is the only one that obligates both the individual and the nation to live up to certain spiritual and moral ideals in everyday life. It is not just a matter of going to a place of prayer one day a week. True Jewish holiness means expressing spiritual values in the everyday life of the individual and in the everyday life of the nation. Therefore, a spiritual people which is disconnected from the everyday life of a nation will not be a light to other nations. Some Jews—the secular Zionists—came back to Israel and declared that Torah and the commandments were there just to keep the Jews together in exile, and that now that we have returned to our land we don’t need these tools of exile any longer. I tell them it is just the opposite. Only when we have returned to the land can we fully play the role which God assigned us.

“In exile we lived as individual Jews. We could express our spiritual values only in personal life, in family life and synagogue life—but the key to our role in world history is expressing those values in public life! That requires us to be living on our land as a nation. A suppressed people can perform all the commandments of the Torah, but a suppressed people cannot project a spiritual life. For hundreds of years we lived in exile with our spiritual morals. Were we respected for our spiritual morals? We were not. We were trodden upon. And you know what they say: ‘The wisdom of the downtrodden is belittled.’ It’s just like a teacher before a class—if you can shout at him, he is not going to be respected. It is like that with nations, too. The return to the land is necessary as a base for Jews being a light unto the nations and projecting their values for all the peoples of the world.

“This is mentioned to Abraham, when God first told him, ‘Go, leave your father’s house and go to the land which I will show you.’ God doesn’t finish his first words to Abraham without adding, ‘All the families of the world will be blessed by you.’ And how will all the families of the world be blessed by you? By you reaching a certain stage of completion. You cannot bless others until you reach such a stage. That doesn’t mean that all the non-Jews will convert, but that the general values, the belief in one God, spiritual values, and values between man and his fellow man, and goodness and kindness—those general values will be exemplified by the Jews and this will bring about redemption.”

And when will the Messiah come?

“The Messiah will come as the final stage of this redemption,” said Waldman. “The only way for us to hasten the coming of the Messiah is by proving ourselves worthy of him by redeeming ourselves as much as possible. What we are doing here in redeeming the land of Israel is hastening the coming of the Messiah.”

How is it that Rabbi Kook understood all of this while the rest of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community did not? Most ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism, and even today feel ambivalent about the state of Israel, which they see as a secular enterprise.

“I believe it is because they have not delved deeply into the subject according to the sources of redemption in the Torah and among the teachings of our sages,” said Rabbi Waldman, as if stating the obvious. “It was a great mistake for them not to understand what was happening. They should have understood. Why did they not understand the greatness of the hour? Because this matter of redemption, this deep subject, was not learned from the sources by the multitudes of Orthodox Jews.”

How could so many Orthodox rabbis be so wrong for so long? I asked.

“For many centuries Orthodox Jews when studying the Talmud and the law books did not study laws pertaining to life in the land of Israel because they were not here,” said Rabbi Waldman. “They studied laws pertaining to life in exile. All those laws pertaining to Israel were not studied by them because it was a farfetched matter. For this reason they did not study the subject of redemption and the relationship between religious Jews and nonreligious Jews. You know what they called a nonobservant Jew in exile? They would call him a goy. A goy! They looked at Zionism and said, ‘If we join this movement we may become nonreligious.’ They said this cannot be a godly made effort if it is led by secular Jews. The Haredim believe that redemption comes only when the process is complete—when all the Jews have repented and the leadership has become observant. They say that as long as we are not at that stage we are nowhere. There is no redemption. They believe that this is a godly land, but until the Messiah comes and men have achieved spiritual perfection, the secular state of Israel in the land of Israel has no real religious significance. That is why they don’t celebrate Independence Day. But Independence Day was always something special at Mercaz ha-Rav yeshiva. We were practically the only ones in the yeshiva world who celebrated it. We see redemption as a process. Even though it is incomplete, one must recognize the value of each stage in the process. The secular Jewish state built primarily by secular Jews is one stage in that process. Israel’s liberation of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in 1967 is another stage. They are all steps on the way—great steps on the way to redemption. We see Zionism as a godly phenomenon and Theodor Herzl as a godly shaliach [envoy], a messenger sent by God to arouse the Jewish people. God knew that if He sent an Orthodox Jew to arouse the Jewish people, all the secular Jews would ignore him. So he chose Herzl, a nonobservant journalist. Zionism was like a lifeboat. First you get all the Jews to hang on, and after we get them all on, all involved, then we will teach them and explain to them about Torah and redemption. That was God’s idea.”

But even if all that is true, I say, why can’t you redeem the Jewish people within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel? Why do you need all the land of Israel?

“It is a commandment of God to the Jewish people that we settle all the land of Israel,” said Rabbi Waldman, somewhat indignantly. “That means that as long as we don’t have all the land, we are not going to be complete spiritually and total redemption will not be possible. Judea and Samaria are the heart of the land of Israel, so they must be settled in order for the Jewish people to be redeemed. You need a base and that is our base. Remember, our sages always described this mitzvah of settling the land of Israel differently from other mitzvot. They put it in a central position. The mitzvah of settling the land of Israel, they said, is weighed against all the other mitzvot. This is said about only seven mitzvot. Why? Because a majority of the 613 commandments can be performed only in an independent land of Israel, by an independent Jewish nation. Only a minority of the mitzvot can be performed outside Israel—the mitzvot related to family life, private life, individual life, and certain rituals. But a lot of mitzvot are concerned with national life—with the Temple, with the land, with the sabbatical year. They are the national mitzvot. We cannot be a complete Torah society without them. We did not invent the value of the land of Israel. It is in all the sources. Our sages tell us that godly inspiration is to be felt only in the land of Israel. Prophecy is possible only in the land of Israel. It means that to reach the highest spiritual levels you can do it only here.”

You mean to tell me that you, Rabbi, felt incomplete as a Jew before the 1967 war?

“Yes,” answered Rabbi Waldman. “Before 1967 my friends and I figured that we had sort of missed the boat with regard to our contribution to the renewal of Jewish national life. During the 1948 war of liberation, I was ten. But when the Six-Day War came, we had a feeling: Now’s our chance. God has given us the privilege to participate in this great phenomenon. Because we saw the results of the Six-Day War as something more godly, and an even greater step forward, than the war of liberation. Why? Because what we had after the war of liberation was not the heart of Israel. We had the outposts of Israel. Our parents and grandparents and previous generations, when they dreamed about the land of Israel, what did they dream about? Tel Aviv? Haifa? The coastal plain with its sand dunes? No! They dreamed about Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, Hebron, Shechem [Nablus], Jericho, the Jordan River. This is where the Jewish people grew up. Since 1967, I feel that I have come home. If there is any meaning to coming home in Israel it’s being in Hebron—not Tel Aviv. Hebron is where it all started. This was the first capital of the united Israel and this is where the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried. We didn’t make a territorial compromise in 1948 to give up half the land of Israel. We had no choice. We didn’t have anything. They offered us part, and even then it was painful to accept just part, but okay, we said, we’ll take a part and then see what happens afterward. We saw the Six-Day War as God opening the gates of the heart of Israel before us, and therefore we felt that He was telling us our obligation is to settle and to build. To turn our backs on that is to turn our backs on the whole redemptive process.”

Are you sure that God would not prefer that you give some of the land back in return for peace with the Palestinians?

“Why did it take forty years for the Jews to get from Egypt to Israel?” said Rabbi Waldman, always ready to answer a question with a question. “Moses sent spies to see what was the best way to get into Israel. [Almost all] the spies came back and said, There are giants in the land and we will not be able to overcome them in war, and they described the land as a land ‘that devours its inhabitants’—meaning it was difficult to get the fruits out. These spies frightened the Jewish people not to continue on to Israel. When that happened we find in the Bible the most extreme expressions of rebuke by God. He says, ‘For how long will my people provoke me in disbelief after everything I have done for them? I took you out of Egypt, you received the Torah, you are receiving bread from heaven and you still disbelieve me.’ So God said, ‘You don’t want Israel, you won’t get it. Your carcasses will fall in the desert and remain there. Only the next generation, your children, will understand and believe,’ and that is why the Israelites were in the desert for forty years, and only their children came into Israel. After two thousand years of exile, a Holocaust, a war against 50 million Arabs, I believe that God has done for us at least as much as He did for the generation coming out of Egypt. If we could hear God’s words today, wouldn’t He say the same thing to us as He said to them? Can you imagine us going back to God and saying, ‘Okay, you gave us all of Israel, thanks a lot. We really appreciate it. But you can take part back. There are too many difficulties involved. I don’t want problems. I want an easy life.’ What would God say? Tell me, what would He say?”

The last stop on my journey of spiritual discovery in Israel began at the bar mitzvah of my gentle Israeli cousin Giora. The ceremony was held at a small synagogue in the coastal city of Ashkelon, not far from the secular, Labor Party-supported collective farm where he was born and raised. Following the bar mitzvah, my aunt and uncle invited the immediate family to lunch at a nearby restaurant known for its hearty country-style fare. When the waitress came by to take our orders, I was anxious to see what the bar mitzvah boy would choose on this special occasion. A sirloin steak? Fried chicken heaped with french fries? Maybe a pizza with all the toppings? Giora would have none of these. He knew what he wanted, and when the waitress turned his way he did not hesitate over the menu.

“I want white steak,” he declared, using the Hebrew euphemism for pork chops.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. We hadn’t been out of the synagogue more than fifteen minutes before the bar mitzvah boy was sinking his teeth into pig meat, strictly forbidden by Jewish dietary law. I wasn’t offended. I don’t keep kosher myself. I was simply struck by the irony of the moment. I thought about the meaning of Giora’s pork chops for several days. They seemed to contain a larger message, and in order to decipher what it was, I consulted my own rabbi, David Hartman, founder and director of the Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, whom I have quoted elsewhere in this book.

It is a short drive from the Ohr Somayach yeshiva to the Shalom Hartman Institute, but don’t look for a shuttle bus to take you. David Hartman and Nota Schiller actually attended the same yeshiva high school in Brooklyn, Chaim Berlin. Hartman was a basketball legend in his day, and Schiller often used to watch him play. Today basketball may be all that the two of them have left in common. Although they are both Brooklyn-born, American-trained Orthodox rabbis—Hartman studied for ten years with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Yeshiva University’s renowned Talmudist—they were attracted to Israel by radically different Jewish visions of what the place was, and should be, about. Hartman is viewed by Israel’s Orthodox establishment as a dangerous radical—far more dangerous than any Reform or Conservative rabbi—because he comes out of the very heart of the Orthodox yeshiva tradition. He was a prominent Orthodox rabbi in Montreal from 1960 to 1971, during which time he also obtained a doctorate in philosophy from McGill University. He emigrated to Israel with his family in 1971 and opened a center for advanced Jewish studies, which aimed to produce a new cadre of Jewish thinkers and educators who would integrate the best of Western thought with the classical Jewish talmudic tradition. The institute attempts to discover innovative ways for Judaism to renew itself and to establish foundations for pluralism within the Jewish community and sources of tolerance among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The institute’s motto, in effect, is: Not only must Jews physically leave the ghetto, but their whole intellectual and spiritual heritage must leave it as well.

I often discussed anomalies I came across in Israel with Hartman, so it was natural for me to go to him to make sense of Giora’s pork chops. In answering my question, he laid out the vision which he, a religious Zionist, felt Israel should represent. It is a vision shared by many of those who came to Israel because they were observant Jews, but at the same time wanted to play an equal part in the secular Zionist state—without claiming to be redeeming the world.

I began our discussion by observing that Israelis were constantly telling me that in two more generations all American Jews were going to assimilate and disappear, so they had better move to Israel to save themselves as Jews. But, I wondered aloud, if emigrating to Israel means eating pork chops after bar mitzvahs, how will immigration deter assimilation?

“Let me answer your question with a question: Can you assimilate speaking Hebrew? The answer is yes,” said Hartman. “In America, most Jews want to be Jewish at least three days of the year—two days on Rosh Hashanah, one on Yom Kippur; many Israelis don’t even want that. The secular Zionists who founded this country were rebelling against their grandfathers and the whole universe of Eastern European ghetto Judaism. They wanted to make building the nation, serving the state, flying an Israeli flag, joining the army, and speaking Hebrew substitutes for any conventional spiritual identification. This was their Judaism. A bar mitzvah for them was not a religious affair but an expression of national affiliation—like some tribal headdress you put on—but it is an expression devoid of any Jewish religious content or significance.

“Have you ever been to a wedding at a kibbutz? Like all Israeli weddings they are officiated over by the state Orthodox rabbinate. The state sends a rabbi, and he says all the prayers and fills out all the forms, and through the whole ceremony all the guests just stand around and talk to each other, or joke or eat from the smorgasbord. There is no sense of sacredness, no sense that this is a moment for spiritual reflection. The rabbi might as well be a justice of the peace, for all the Jewish content he provides. There is a spiritual emptiness, an alienation from the Jewish tradition. If the actual Jewish content of the average Israeli’s personal life were transplanted to Los Angeles, or anywhere else in the Diaspora, it would never sustain the Jewish people. What your porkchop story shows is that no matter how we would like to project ourselves to the outside world, no matter how spiritually central we would like to feel we are for the future of Judaism, this is how most Israelis, who are nonobservant, really live. This is how many Israelis really relate to Judaism: I will go into the army. I will serve. I will make heroic sacrifices in battle. But that’s it.

“The Labor Zionists built a country with a Judaic void in its heart,” Hartman continued. “Ben-Gurion thought that having a Weizmann Institute of Science would sustain the excitement of the pioneer era. I have enormous respect for the creative achievements of those who built this state. The kibbutz is a marvelous experiment in social justice and communal living. The growth of Hebrew literature and culture is a profound revolution. The transformation of the Jew from student to soldier and farmer cannot be underestimated. But I deeply believe that the Jewish people cannot be sustained by literature and science alone. You can’t build a Jewish state on the basis of national pride alone. The Jewish soul requires spiritual nourishment. Any political leader in Israel who thinks he will capture the imagination of the Jewish people by promising to make Israel the Silicon Valley of the Middle East is gravely mistaken. People need significance in their personal lives. They need to feel that their families and lives are built around a Judaism that can live with the modern world.”

What you are saying, I remarked to Hartman, is that the secular Zionists built a nationalism without reclaiming Judaism. They simply abandoned religion to the Haredim. A friend of mine once told me about an Israeli woman she knew who lived on Kibbutz Yodfata, near Eilat, at the southern tip of the Negev Desert. After the Six-Day War, the kibbutznik took her seven-year-old daughter to Jerusalem to see the Western Wall. It was her daughter’s first trip to Jerusalem. While they were standing near the wall, they were naturally surrounded by Haredim dressed in their long black coats and fur hats. This Israeli woman’s daughter tugged at her mother’s sleeve and exclaimed, “Look, Mom, there’s a Jew.” It was the first time she had ever seen a Haredi, and for her that was a real Jew.

“I’m not surprised,” answered Hartman. “Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists thought they could build a state and turn over the question of Judaism to the last remnants of their grandfathers—to the Haredim and the Orthodox rabbinical establishment, which had the narrowest, most retrogressive Eastern European view of religion. It was like building a house and leaving a little room in the basement for Grandpa, where he can read and walk his dog and be quiet. Then one day, forty years later, Grandpa comes up from the basement, resurrected. It turns out he has not been walking his dog but has been busy having children, and he starts telling you that he wants to set the rules for the house. He wants to take over the kitchen and the bedroom and, above all, tell you how you are to use your leisure time. Because the Labor Zionists themselves had not bothered to build an interpretation of Judaism that could live with the modern world, they had no alternative spiritual vision to offer Israelis.”

So Gush Emunim and the Haredim are right that draining the swamps is not enough, that carrying an Israeli passport is not enough. Many Israelis are hungry for some spiritual content. Isn’t that what they are giving them?

“I may agree with some of their diagnosis about the spiritual emptiness here, but not with their prescriptions for what to do about it,” said Hartman. “Gush Emunim say there is an emptiness here, so let’s take a messianic trip into the future. The Haredim say there is an emptiness here, so let’s not worry about the state and the national framework, let’s go back to a passion we once had when we were all living like Fiddlers on the Roof in the ghettos of Eastern Europe—nice and isolated from the goyim. One offers a politics of fantasy and the other offers a politics of regression.

“What I say is, I am not living in the future, and I don’t want to live in the past. I want to offer Israelis a present—a now—that gives relevance to daily life.”

But how? Is there really an interpretation of Orthodox Judaism that can appeal to the many nonobservant Israelis, without losing the traditional, truly observant Jew?

“Let’s start at the beginning,” said Hartman. “First of all, I am a religious Zionist. What does that mean? It means I have made my commitment to live and interpret my Judaism in a state in which many Jews do not share my religious ideology. I have chosen to build my spiritual life together with Jews who totally disagree with me as to the meaning of God and what the Jewish people should be. It is not that I accept the secular person’s position as equally valid to my own, but I have accepted the permanence of our differences. I don’t look at them as potential converts waiting to be brought back to their heritage. I see them as dignified people who have a different perception of what it means to be a Jew. Therefore, I believe religious pluralism must be a permanent value for Israeli society—because spiritual diversity will be forever part of the political landscape here. Furthermore, because I have chosen to place my existence within a collective framework called the state of Israel, I have an obligation to that framework. I have no right to say that secular women have to serve in the army and my daughters, who are observant, don’t have to. Because what I have said is that you and I share together in the flourishing of this political entity. I cannot live parasitically off you. To be a religious Zionist is to share in all aspects of this enterprise.”

But how can you ask Orthodox Jews to be so tolerant of secular Jews? Or vice versa? The Haredim say that there is only one legitimate way of life and that is theirs.

“What I say to them is that there is a level of mutual commitment that is more important than our differences,” said Hartman. “There is a sense of my being part of a Jewish nation that comes before my having received the Torah. My point—Soloveitchik’s point—is that we share a common Egypt. We were all together as Jews in Egypt before Moses led us out into the desert to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Jews in Egypt were pagans. They were not a religious community, but the sojourn in Egypt is still an essential part of our history and memory because it was there we became a nation. We shared a common yearning for political freedom, we shared a common sense of suffering, we shared a common sense of peoplehood, we shared a common political fate—before we discussed the content of our religious community. Never forget, Egypt precedes Sinai. Passover precedes Shavuot [the anniversary of the giving of the Torah by God to Moses at Mount Sinai]. The Haredim often forget this. For them the world begins and ends with Sinai—and their own interpretation of Sinai. It defines everything for them. When they ask, Who is my brother? the answer is, The one who shares my covenant and form of observance. They know Jewish law says that a nonobservant Jew is still a Jew, but they don’t know how to relate to him, because they have no concept of the Jewish people without Sinai. My view is that first you have to become a people before you can come to Sinai. No one would have made it to Sinai alone.”

Fine, but how does this relate to Israel today?

“It means I am ready to accept that despite the diversity of religious views here, we are a nation,” answered Hartman. “Now, who are the players in this nation? Who’s on this team? Everyone who lined up with me in Egypt, everyone who lined up with me in Auschwitz, everyone who says, I want Jewish history to continue, no matter how vague his or her commitment or how different an interpretation he gives to that history. That’s my team. I’m playing on that Jewish team. Okay, next. Now, how are we going to play the game? What are the rules going to be? That’s Sinai. Sinai is where we established the rules.”

But from what I have seen of Orthodox Judaism in Israel, the official interpretation of the rules doesn’t mix too well with the modern world. How does your interpretation of what happened at Sinai differ from that of the Haredim or Gush Emunim?

“Let me begin by saying I believe we are still battling about what we heard at Sinai,” Hartman responded. “Sinai symbolizes for me that the Jewish people have to ask content questions. Shared destiny and shared suffering and shared oppression without a content are not enough to sustain a community. That is what the secular Zionists did not understand. The secular Jews who founded the state of Israel cared only about the experience in Egypt that made us a nation, and they ignored the content offered at Sinai. For me Judaism should be a way of life not just for the individual, but should offer some deeper value guidelines for politics, economics, and social policy, and in all the issues that surface in the collective life of a nation. What does that mean? It means I have to interpret my tradition in a way which can flourish in a political sovereign state. Now what kind of state do I want? I want a political sovereign state that respects freedom of conscience. How do I know that? Does Judaism say that? Some Orthodox rabbis here say democracy is not a Jewish value. I say I don’t care if Judaism says democracy is a value. This is a new political value that I have acquired. Liberty is an important political value. Autonomy and personal conscience, too, are important values which America has taught me. I see the work of our institute as trying to find ways in which classical Orthodox Judaism can absorb these new very important political values into itself without destroying itself.

“In our institute we have Christians coming to study, some of the best New Testament scholars in the world, some of the best political philosophers in the world,” Hartman added. “We read each other’s texts together. Why? Because I haven’t got it all. I have left the ghetto. In the ghetto, I had it all, because I didn’t see anything else and I didn’t read anything else. When the Jews finally left the ghetto, some of them thought the goyim had it all, so they gave up their Jewish identity. My view is: Wait, I’ve got a home. I have an identity. I have roots. I have a family. I have a history. I have a Torah. I don’t deny any of that. I love it, but my history, my family, my roots, and my Torah are not the only show in town. My Sinai is not a closed book. My Torah lives in dialogue with the world. I learn from Aristotle. I learn from Kant. I say all the wisdom of the world was not found in Sinai. Sinai is my point of departure, but I don’t remain there. From Sinai I learn from the world and I absorb the world into Sinai. That is the difference between modern religious Zionists and the Haredim. They say, ‘Everything is in the Torah. I have nothing to learn from the world. I live in the world, but I don’t value the world. It has nothing to offer me. I don’t have to rethink my position on Torah because of what Kant wrote or Kierkegaard or Freud. What do the goyim have to teach me? They are goyim.’ That is not how I see it. For me Israel, and Judaism, should be the foundation from which Jews can absorb the best values of the world and learn from them—without losing their particularity. We can’t afford to give the keys of our tradition to people who repudiate modernity. Otherwise the ghetto will take over Israel. You can never forget the past living in Israel. It haunts you from the ground, from every street corner. That is why if you don’t reclaim your past, if you don’t reinterpret it in a way that makes it compatible with the modern world, it will claim your future.”

You mentioned Egypt and you mentioned Sinai, but after Sinai there was the Promised Land—Israel. What do you see as the significance of the land?

“The significance of the land is that it allows you to see Judaism as a way of life. Coming back to the land of Israel is a way of saying that Judaism was never meant to be just a synagogue-based framework, centered around prayer and the holidays, which is what some Haredim seem to feel. Judaism was to be a total way of life that could provide answers for how to deal with hospital strikes and with the exercise of power. In other words, for me, you come back to the land in order to implement Sinai. I came back to the land not to rebuild the synagogue Judaism of European ghettos. I came back to the land to get back to the beginning—Judaism as a total way of life, not just ritual.”

So you see the land as a corrective to the Haredim and their obsession with ritual. But what about Gush Emunim and their mystical interpretation of the role of the land in redeeming the Jewish people and the world?

“The land, in my view, is also a corrective to Gush Emunim,” said Hartman. “The land says that Judaism is not about salvation and redemption of the soul, which is central to Christianity. It is not a religion trying to get you to heaven. The land says that the crucial place you have to be is on earth. You have to build community. You have to build a reality. You have to build a national existence in the present. That is why even when we did not live in the land, the land was an important symbol. We kept on saying, ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ because that was the definition of Judaism. Judaism was never supposed to turn into some sort of faith of salvation. It was always meant to be a way of life for a people. It was always a stepping-stone to today, not to another world. This is what Gush Emunim fails to understand. For them the land is a stepping-stone to redemption and a messianic kingdom, which will be run according to Torah. I say to Gush Emunim that I have no blueprint as to how the Lord is going to redeem Israel or the world. The significance of Israel is not that it is going to lead to the messianic triumph of the Jewish people in history. That is a grandiose mythology which I reject. It overblows the whole role of Israel and the Jewish people for world history.

“For me, the land, the stones, are not what will create the redemptive quality for this society,” said Hartman. “The important thing is what kind of human love and what kind of daily life I live. Gush Emunim believe that if they redeem the land then God will redeem the people. My view is that you have to redeem the people, period. Where the redemption of the people will lead I don’t know, but it can’t be bad. I believe tomorrow will be better than today if today I treat my barber and my grocer and my taxi driver better, not because I sit on a hill in Hebron. I believe tomorrow will be better than today if I expand ethics, expand morality, expand coexistence among people of diverse cultures, expand the quality of life—but not by expanding boundaries. I can’t bring the Messiah by abusing 2 million Palestinian Arabs today. I can’t say that what I am doing now is going to bring universal redemption. That is what Stalin said, so he killed 20 million people. All people who think they are redeeming the world don’t see the evil that they are doing every day. If your eyes are on eternity you can be blind to the person sitting next to you.

“Remember,” concluded Hartman, “the holiness of the people precedes the holiness of the land. There is no mystical significance to land. There is only a significance to what human beings do. Holiness in Judaism does not come from stones or books. It comes from you and me and how we live here and now.”