Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism
By Aviezer Ravitzky. Translated by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman
(University of Chicago Press, 303 pp., $17.95)
When it emerged as a political program for the Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism was a phenomenon for which traditional Jewish life was completely unequipped. It was new and it was perplexing, a movement that eluded categorization in the religious terms and the religious images of the past. It promised a political solution that was neither redemption nor exile. The sovereign Jewish state that was to be established by means of human action was radically different from the tradition al Jewish script of the messianic ingathering of the exiles that would be marked by a transformation of the Jewish condition and the human condition as a whole. And Zionism posed another perplexity to the community of the believers. It was, and it still is, a powerful vehicle of secularization. It attempted to shape Jewish identity by means of such worldly instruments as a shared language, a group loyalty, a land, and a common memory, which would together usurp the foundations of the traditional identity of Jews, the old identity based on commitment to Torah and Jewish law. Yet Zionism was not like the other secularizing forces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For all its secularity, Zionism was reinforcing particularistic loyalties, and in its way it was allying itself--objectively, you might say--with the Orthodox camp in the war against assimilation. And so Zionism presented a more ambiguous phenomenon than the other rivals of tradition. The Orthodox leadership had to improvise a relationship to a movement that rejected its definition of the community and was nonetheless dedicated to its well-being, to its revival.
The religious community has been deeply divided in its reaction to Zionism since the beginning of this century, ranging from a complete rejection of Jewish nationalism as a satanic rebellion against God to its acceptance as a fulfillment of generations-old messianic expectation. This fascinating and rich spectrum of responses is analyzed in Aviezer Ravitzky's profound and important book. Ravitzky's book is a thorough study of the complicated ways in which a tradition is responding to a crisis that it did not foresee, with creative and contested re-readings of its categories of nationality, history, and messianism. In addition to its contribution to modern Jewish thought, Ravitzky's book is vital to the understanding of the current Israeli predicament.
One of the bitter ironies of Israel's history is that the Orthodox community, which was once an antagonistic observer in the heroic effort of state building, or at best a marginal participant, has become a major actor in Israeli policy. They once despised Zionism, but now the haredim--the ultra-Orthodox who constitute 5% to 7% of the Israeli population--are enjoying its fruits; their institutions are subsidized by the state and their leadership is attempting (and succeeding in its attempt) to influence Israel's public life. At the other extreme, the portion of the religious constituency that embraced Zionism as a messianic event gave birth to the settler movement known as Gush Emunim, or the Bloc of the Faithful, which has played a decisive role in Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and the Arab world. A community that is animated by a messianic understanding of Zionism is determining the future of a state that was created in part to break away from the mythic bind of exile and redemption.
Zionism was opposed by the Orthodox on two grounds. The first was their belief that exile from the land of Israel is the historical destiny of the Jews until they are redeemed by God. Thus Zionism was considered a Promethean rebellion, an attempt t o replace divine agency with human agency. It represented a failure in withstanding the trial of exile. The Talmud reads the verse from the Song of Songs--"I adjure you, O maidens of Jerusalem, by the gazelles and by hinds of the field: do not wake or rouse love until it please [to come of itself]"--as an oath administered by God to Israel that the Jews not "hasten the end" and not force redemption; and this reading became the credo of the anti-Zionists in their advocacy of political quietism. In a typical passage, Rabbi Shalom Dov Baer Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe at the turn of the century, wrote that "we must not heed them [the Zionists] in their call to achieve redemption on our own, for we are not permitted to hasten the End even by reciting too many prayers, much less so by corporeal stratagems, that is, to set out from exile by force." And in its attempt to replace the court Jew with the statesman and the soldier, Zionism was scorned, on more practical grounds, as a reckless adventure that risked the future of the nation.
Prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, there was a small migration of haredim to Israel; but such settlement of the Holy Land had only a religious meaning, and was proudly indifferent to a political meaning. Rabbi Amram Blau, one of the most extreme opponents of Zionism in the ultra-Orthodox world, declared in Jerusalem in 1947 that "our Holy Torah teaches that we should take no interest in the political realm while in exile, until the coming of the Messiah, may he come speedily and in our own day, and there is nothing in this position to antagonize our Arab neighbors....We have no interest in living in our Holy Land except to imbibe its holiness and to fulfill the commandments which can only be fulfilled here." This statement was mad e right before the establishment of the Jewish state. It suggested also that, unlike the Zionists' quest for political sovereignty, the haredi conception of the Jewish presence in the land would not agitate the neighboring Arabs and not jeopardize the community of Israel.
