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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
All varieties of Judaism--ultra-Orthodoxy, neo-Orthodoxy, the
Reform and Conservative forms--together counted as their formal
adherents only a minority of Jewish Israelis. Yet religion was a
potent force, and increasingly so, in Israeli society. Traditional
Judaism has exerted its influence in Israel in three important
ways. First, traditional Judaism has influenced political and
judicial legislation and state institutions, which have been
championed by the various Orthodox political parties and enshrined
in the "preservation of the status quo" arrangements through the
years. Second, religion has exerted influence through the symbols
and practices of traditional Judaism that literally pervade
everyday life. Saturday is the sabbath
(Shabbat--see Glossary), the
official day of rest for Jews (although the majority do not attend
synagogue), and most enterprises are closed. Jewish holidays also
affect school curricula, programming on radio and television,
features in the newspapers, and so on. Minority traditionalists,
who extol halakah even if they do not observe all rabbinic law,
also observe many folk customs. Through the years, much of the folk
religion has taken on an Oriental-Jewish flavor, reflecting in part
the demographic preponderance of Oriental Jews since the 1970s.
Such customs include ethnic festivals such as the Moroccan
mimouna (an annual festival of Moroccan Jews, originally a
minor holiday in Morocco, which has become in Israel a major
celebration of Moroccan Jewish ethnic identity) and family
pilgrimages to the tombs of Jewish holy men. The latter have become
country-wide events. Traditional Judaism has influenced Israeli
society in yet a third way: Israel's political elite has
selectively co-opted symbols and practices of traditional Judaism
in an attempt to promote nationalism and social integration. In
this way traditional Judaism, or some aspects of it, becomes part
of the political culture of the Jewish state, and aspects of
traditional Judaism are then enlisted in what some analysts have
called the "civil religion" of Jewish society. Thus, Judaism speaks
to Israelis who may themselves be nonreligious, indeed even
secularist.
Of all the manifestations of religion in Israel, civil religion
has undergone the most profound changes through the years,
specifically becoming more religious--in the sense of incorporating
more traditional, Orthodox-like Judaism. In the prestate period,
the civil religion of Jewish society was generally socialist, that
is, Labor Zionism. Labor Zionists were hostile to much of
traditional Jewish life, to the concept of exile, and to what they
viewed as the cultural obscurantism of traditional Jews. They
actively rejected Orthodoxy in religion and considered it to be a
key reason for the inertia and lack of modernity of exiled Jews.
Labor Zionists sought to reconstitute a revolutionary new form of
Jewish person in a radically new kind of society.
After 1948, however, new problems faced Israeli society--not
only military and economic problems, but also the massive
immigration of Jews and their assimilation. First came the remnants
of East and Central European Jewry from the detention and
displaced-persons camps; then came Jews from Africa and Asia
(see Ingathering of the Exiles
, ch. 1). Social integration and
solidarity were essential to successful assimilation, yet Labor
Zionism neither appealed to nor united many sectors of the new
society. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s--roughly the period
of Ben-Gurion's preeminence--a civil religion was fashioned by some
factions of the political elite (led by Ben-Gurion himself), which
sought to stress the new Israeli state as the object of ultimate
value.
Israelis have called this the period of mamlakhtiyut or
statism. The Jewish Bible was the key text and symbol, and secular
youths studied parts of it as the Jewish nation's history and
cultural heritage. Religious holidays, such as Hanukkah and
Passover, or Pesach, were reinterpreted to emphasize nationalist
and liberation themes, and Independence Day was promoted as a
holiday of stature equal to the old religious holidays. The
archaeology of the Holy Land, particularly during the Israelite
(post-Joshua) period, became a national obsession, first because of
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and later because of Yigal
Yadin's excavations at Massada (a site of fierce Jewish resistance
to the Romans after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). At the same
time, the two thousand years of Jewish history that followed the
Roman destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish cultural life in the various
diasporas (Ashkenazi as well as Sephardi), and Jewish religion of
the postbiblical eras (rabbinic Judaism, exemplified in the
Talmud--see Glossary) were rejected or ignored.
For many reasons, the statist focus of Israeli civil religion
did not continue after the June 1967 War. These reasons ranged from
the greater traditionalism and piety of the Oriental immigrants,
who were never satisfactorily engaged by the more limited scope of
statism; to the exhaustion of the Labor Alignment, which, after the
October 1973 War, had sought to embody socialist Zionism and
Israeli modern statism as a manifestation of its own identity and
agenda; to the rise of Begin's Likud Bloc with its populist appeals
to ethnic traditionalism and an irredentist territorial program as
a challenge to Labor Zionism's fading hegemony. Begin and his Likud
championed a new civil religion to embody its identity and
agenda. This new right-wing civil religion affirmed traditional
Judaism and denigrated modernistic secularism--the reverse of the
earlier civil religion. Unlike the statist version of Ben-Gurion's
time, which focused on the Bible and pre-exilic Jewish history, the
new civil religion was permeated by symbols from the whole of
Jewish history. It gave special emphasis, however, to the Holocaust
as a sign of the ultimate isolation of the Jewish people and the
enduring hostility of the gentile world.
The new civil religion (which in its more political guise some
have called the New Zionism) has brought traditional Judaism back
to a position in the Jewish state very different from that which it
occupied twenty, forty, or eighty years ago. After the June 1967
War, the New Zionists linked up with the revitalized and
transformed neo-Orthodox--young, self-assured religious Jews who
have self-consciously connected retention and Jewish settlement of
the West Bank, the biblical Judea and Samaria, with the Messiah's
advent. The rise of messianic right-wing politics gave birth in the
mid-1970s to the irrendentist, extraparliamentary movement Gush
Emunim, which in turn led to the Jewish terrorist underground of
the 1980s
(see Jewish Terrorist Organizations
, ch. 5). When the
underground was uncovered and broken by Israeli security in April
1984, it had already carried out several attacks on Arabs,
including, it was thought, Arab mayors, in the West Bank and was
planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem. Even
before the June 1967 War, however, Orthodox Judaism had been able
to exert influence on Israeli society simply because its religious
institutions were so historically entrenched in the society.
Data as of December 1988
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