Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.

04

Fundamentalist or Romantic Nationalist?: Israeli Modern Orthodoxy

Shlomo Fischer June 13, 2004

In the past generation or so, social scientists have placed resurgent religion, and

especially religion with a political and/or totalistic character, in a central place in their

research agendas. Sivan, Jurgensmeyer and other writers have stressed that this

religion involves a far-reaching rejection of Western modern culture. According to this

conception the activity of much resurgent religion has either been to construct

enclaves or zones of purity from which Western values and culture have been

banished or to attempt to gain control of the public arena and order it solely according

to religious laws or principles. Very often terms such fundamentalist or “enclavist”

have been used to denote such a religion. These terms refer to a mode of life in which

religious leaders and religious texts are the sole ultimate sources of authority and that

religion makes normative claims regarding the totality of personal and social life.

I would like to suggest that such an approach to resurgent, political and even

extremist religion will often not capture certain crucial features of these phenomena. I

argue that in certain instances, at least, political, radical or totalistic religion

incorporates within it important modern cultural themes and orientations that play an

important part in shaping its character and the behavior of its members. An approach

which stresses the total rejection of modern culture will, at least in a certain number of

cases, miss these features and hence will render a picture of contemporary extremist,

toltalistic or political religion which is inaccurate.

The late Yaakov Katz, in his seminal studies of the origins of modern Jewish

Orthodoxy, and contemporary scholars such as Nancy Ammerman and Lynn

Davidman have written about how modern fundamentalism has incorporated elements

of modern consciousness. They have pointed out that these religious movements

1
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

involve self conscious choice on the part of their adherents and self-conscious

ideological struggle against modern Western culture. I would like to go beyond these

insights and argue that, in certain cases at least, the content of the religion itself, and

not only the mode of adhering to it, incorporates modern themes and cultural values.

This paper provides a case study of the benefits of a more nuanced view of

radical, political and totalistic religion by analyzing the Israeli radical religious

Zionist community or as they call themselves, the Emuni community1, which literally

means, “of the faith.” This is the community that has initiated and led the settlement

movement on the West Bank and Gaza in the past generation. This community has

been analyzed by political scientists and sociologists in terms of the fundamentalist

conceptual framework . I argue that this framework does not satisfactorily account for

important aspects of this movement, especially those that have developed in the past

ten or fifteen years. Instead, I shall propose a different framework: that of organic,

romantic nationalism with a strong expressive dimension. This nationalism

incorporates significant aspects of modern western cultural themes and orientations.

The Emuni ideology emerged as the hegemonic force in the national religious,

or religious Zionist community from the 1970s on. As indicated, this is the ideology

that has been associated with Yeshivat Merkaz Harav and its satellites, with Gush

Emunim and with the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza

(YeShA’=Yehuda, Shomron and A’za). Ultimately it became dominant in the National

Religious political party (NRP= MaFDaL) and in the various factions and parties that

split off from it (HaTichiya, HaIchud HaLeumi and contemporaneously, the Manhigut

Yehudit faction in the Likud.) It also became dominant in the Bnei Akiva youth

movement and its cognates and split offs (Ezra and Ariel) and also in much of

1
I use this term in its generic sense. I am not using it in the sense that Motti Karpel and his
followers in Manhigut Yehudit use it, that is, as a label for their specific ideology.

2
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

National Religious secondary and even primary education. Over the years with

increasing institutionalization and hegemony that gave it a more routine and taken for

granted character, it has become more pluralized and variegated and its institutional

loci have somewhat changed and shifted. However, its basic identity has remained the

same, both to its adherents and to outside observers.

What characterizes the Emuni ideology and the wing of religious Zionism that

adheres to it? First and foremost it is attachment to the idea of the Greater Land of

Israel – that the Jewish state must exercise sovereignty over and settle the whole of

the Biblical Land of Israel. Accordingly, it has initiated and led the settlement

movement in the West Bank and Gaza which today numbers 225,000 settlers. This

Emuni ideology is evident in the very name of the organization that led the settlers

movement in the 1970's and 80's – Gush Emunim.It has given recent evidence of this

commitment to the Greater Land of Israel in the mobilization of the Emuni camp for

the referendum of Likud party members over unilateral withdrawal from Gaza held on

May 6, 2004. Emuni settlers and their allies organized so as to canvass every single

member of the Likud and solicit his vote against withdrawal. This dedication,

combined with their organizational skills, enabled them to be victorious in this matter

over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The other distinguishing trait has been a greatly increased religiosity from that

which characterized the religious Zionist community in the first decades of the state.

Every observer, scholarly or journalistic, of this community, has noted the changes in

dress, especially women's dress which has accompanied adopting the Emuni culture

and joining the Emuni community. Starting in the 1970's young married religious

Zionist women started to cover their hair and to make sure that their sleeves reached

their elbows. They stopped wearing pants and they made sure that their hemlines

3
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

covered their knees. Similar changes occurred in regard to changes in patterns of

higher education. Very many young men began preferring higher yeshiva education to

studies in the university. Similarly, we have witnessed a change in terms of army

service. Whereas until the 1970's most young men did regular IDF service of 2.5 or 3

years, or served in the Nahal framework (which combined kibbutz work with Army

service), from the late 1960's we have seen the rise and increasing popularity of a new

framework: the Hesder yeshivot which combine army service with torah studies.

Above all the Emuni neighborhoods and communities have exhibited a new

intensified religious ambience and new patterns of leisure. Torah classes in the

evening for adults replaced more 'secular" forms of leisure consumption, there was

greater observance of synagogue and communal prayer, and in some communities,

televisions started to disappear from homes.

Researchers since the late 1970's and early 1980's have been grappling with

how to make sense of all of these changes.. Are we talking about a religious

phenomenon or a political one? Is the Emuni phenomenon to be described as a group

of Orthodox Jews who somehow have developed a commitment to right-wing politics,

or are we witnessing a renewed commitment to an increased religiosity, perhaps a new

fundamentalism? If it is a commitment to an increased religiosity how could we

describe such a religiosity? Is it the same as Haredi or traditional religiosity with just

an add on of Eretz Yisrael or is it an entirely different phenomenon?

These questions have at least been partially answered by several studies.

Liebman and Don Yehiya have preferred to view it as a fundamentalist phenomenon.

Don Yehiya has claimed that the guiding orientation of the Emuni group is strict

observance of the Torah law. The commitment to the Greater Land of Israel has come

about because radical religious Zionism views Jewish sovereignty and settlement as

4
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

religious values which must be strictly fulfilled. Liebman and Don Yehiya have

argued that Emuni religious Zionism has adopted a fundamentalist strategy of

expansionism vis a vis institutions and values of the modern world. It has interpreted

these in such a manner that they can be brought under the domination of religion.

Thus a modern nation-state and the national territory have become components in the

process of Redemption.

Gideon Aran in his comprehensive study of Gush Emunim and its culture has

also argued that the radical wing of religious Zionism represents a far reaching

intensification of religious commitment. He asserts that Emuni religious culture has a

special character or nature, which is "Mystical Messianism" and argued that the Land

of Israel and the State of Israel derived their religious value from their place in the

Mystical-Messianic vision. Aran encapsulated his understanding of Gush Emunim in

the title that he gave to his study: From Religious Zionism to Zionist Religion. By this

title he meant to convey that whereas once religious Zionists were partners in the

national and political project of building a modern nation state, in the Emuni radical

version, building the Jewish state and settling the entire Biblical land of Israel sub-

serves a religious mystical and messianic project of Redemption.

Nevertheless, certain phenomena associated with radical religious Zionism,

especially those which have emerged in the last 10 to 15 years undermine this

conceptualization of it as a fundamentalist religious movement. The first of these is

the persistent partnership with secular nationalist Jews. From its very inception, the

Emuni wing has engaged in meaningful partnerships with secular Jews. The very first

Emuni settlement, Keshet, founded by Yeshivat Merkaz Harav in the spring of 1974

on the Golan Heights was founded as a mixed settlement of Orthodox and secular

Jews. Indeed, the warm meeting between R. Zvi Yehuda Kook, the aged charismatic

5
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

leader of Merkaz Harav and Yehuda Harel, the earthy secular kibbutznik, which

resulted in the Golan Heights settlements is now part of Gush Emunim mythology.

Despite the tensions that ensued in the day to day life of Keshet, the deliberate attempt

to construct joint secular-religious communities continued and today, important

settlements such as Tekoah and Kfar Adumim are still mixed according to a deliberate

ideological basis.

However the most important manifestation of religious-secular partnership has

been political: Every one of the right-wing break away parties of the radical camp has

involved meaningful partnership with secular Jews. These include Hatichiya, the

important extreme right wing party of the nineteen eighties and the Ichud Haleumi

party and the Manhigut Yehudit faction in the Likud today. Some of the figures most

identified with intense and extreme religiosity such R. Waldman of Kiryat ‘Arba, R.

Benny Alon and Hannan Porat have been part of these mixed political groupings.

These figures have consistently chosen not to set up sectarian, extreme religious

groupings but broad political partnerships that in their words, represent “the spirit of

the nation.” In this respect the icon of the Techiya party was especially significant: a

heroic and handsome portrait of the late secular Hebrew poet, Yaacov Shabtai.

The predictions, on the part of social scientists such as Charles Liebman z”l

that the Emuni wing would become more and more fundamentalist or more and more

Haredi simply have not been fulfilled. If anything, quite the opposite has happened.

One of the most noteworthy developments in the past fifteen years has been the

growth of the Mechinot at the expense of the Yeshivot Hesder. The Mechinot are

programs in which students study Torah for a year or two (generally not Talmud but

bible, halacha and Jewish thought) and then go off to do regular army service of three

or more years. Most mechina students serve in top combat units and a very high

6
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

percentage become officers, thus extending their service to four or five years or more.

From modest beginnings fifteen years ago, there are today about 13 religious

mechinot and four mechinot which admit both religious and secular students for men

and three mechinot for women. A greater number of graduates of yeshiva high

schools today go to mechinot than to yeshivot hesder (1300 and 900 respectively,

Iggud Yeshivot Hahesder). It must be stressed that the mechinot are part and parcel of

the Emuni world. Almost all of them are located on religious settlements and at head

of many of them stand leading Emuni rabbis such as Eli Sadan and Rafi Peretz who

are closely affiliated with Mercaz Harav.

Within the yeshivot hesder significant changes have occurred. Those yeshivot

(such as Kerem B’Yavne and Sha’alavim) that bore a haredi orientation are the least

popular and have the fewest Israeli students. While strictly religious institutions such

as those affiliated with Merkaz Harav and its split off, Har HaMor, certainly

continue to exist, the most burgeoning and popular yeshivot are those who proclaim

an openness to modern culture and enter into dialogue with it such as the Yeshivat

Hesder of Petach Tikva and Yeshivat Hesder of Otniel.

Connected to these changes in higher education is what has been called a

crisis in the study of Talmud. It has been widely reported in the religious press and

media that today’s national religious students do not want to study Talmud, they are

not interested in it or proficient at it. This has been reported of both the yeshiva high

schools and even the Hesder Yeshivot. This situation has given rise to much

consternation in Orthodox educational circles, becoming the focus of various

conferences and articles in Orthodox educational journals and even inspiring an

official government commission, the Ariel Commission, whose report and

recommendations have just been published.

7
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

Another very significant development from this point of view has been the

emergence of a new “spirit” or ambience in Yehuda and Shomron. This might be

characterized as a militantly nationalist bohemianism. Which has many manifestations

and expressions. One is an efflorescence of creative arts as reflected in, for example,

the many workshops in poetry and creative writing that are being held in the yeshiva

high schools and even more so in the Yeshivot Hesder and the settlements. Similarly,

classes and workshops in sculpture, drama and modern and creative dance also dot the

settlements. Poetry journals and small arts magazines have also started to appear. In

these works religious people explore some of the most sensitive themes concerning

the body, erotic and sexual orientation and personal identity.

Together with this surge in the creative arts, a new kind of settlement has

begun to dot the landscape, especially in the inner hilltop reaches of the Shomron,

deep in the densely populated Palestinian territory. These are the ”illegal” outposts

and farms. These settlements are the result of personal initiative and are not linked to

the sponsorship of the Regional Council of Judea and Samaria, the religious Zionist

Amana settlement organization, the Ministry of Agriculture or the Jewish Agency and

they in large part do not receive subsidies from them. A good many of the younger

members, especially, are alienated from the state and its symbols and structures

including the educational system and the IDF. They do not accept normative

rabbinical authority either. Many of these outposts are engaged in endemic violent

conflict with their Palestinian neighbors and violence is part of their ethos. The men

and women of the outposts and illegal settlements have a counter-cultural and anti-

structural (in the sense used by Victor Turner) ambience about them. Many of them

farm organically, they tend to wear homespun clothes noteworthy for their simplicity

and build their own homes from materials locally available. Very many of them

8
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

eschew electrical sources of energy, using wind or solar power. A few more

established settlements such as Bat Ayin also interweave these themes of creative arts,

counter-cultural ambience, ecology and unmediated contact with nature, the earth and

its elements and as is alleged by the security services, violence.

Some of these phenomena involve the new generation, that is, those born since

the 1970’s and they reflect the processes of institutionalization both of the Emuni

ideology and the settlements themselves. Undoubtedly they involve creativity and

reinterpretation of Judaism and of the Emuni tradition. Yet no creative process or

reinterpretation takes place in a vacuum, thus we need to ask whether an alternative

conceptual framework would help us to think more clearly about Emuni religious

Zionism as a whole.

I would like to briefly propose the framework of organic, integral or Romantic

nationalism. In my proposing such a framework I mean integral nationalism as a

cultural and religious and not only as a political phenomenon. Indeed, as many

authors have shown, Romantic nationalism in Europe itself must be understood as a

simultaneous cultural and political phenomenon. In what follows I would like to

schematically present some aspects of the integral nationalist religious Zionist

worldview. This presentation will stress some of its philosophical Romantic and

Idealistic underpinnings. This presentation will also have general implicit and explicit

reference to the thought of the great thinker and theologian of romantic religious

Zionism, R. Abraham Isaac Kook.

Romantic nationalist religious Zionism, like other forms of romantic

nationalism is a protest against the atomistic individualism that constitutes the "main

theme" of modern Western culture. The Romanic nationalist religious Zionist culture

conceives of the individual Jew as realizing his true being when he realizes himself as

9
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

part of the Jewish nation. The Jewish nation is accordingly conceived of as an organic

unity, which, to utilize the famous phrase of another romantic thinker, Edmund Burke,

"unites the living, the dead and those yet unborn." Thus members of romantic

Orthodox culture experience a heightened sense of being when acting within the

collective, on behalf of it and in accordance with its General Will.

The entire Jewish nation is thus in a certain sense conceived of as a single

living thing whose members, the individual Jews, all have an organic relation to the

whole and to each other. The fact that it is a single living thing implies that the various

dichotomies of human existence: matter and spirit, thought and feeling, reason and

imagination, mind and body are conceived as being integrated both the individual and

on the national level. An individual human being is not an animal with a mind

attached, rather it is conceived as a totally different indivisible entity. Similarly, on the

national plane, the spiritual aspects of the nation – its culture and religion are

conceived to be wholly integrated with the material aspects, such as territory, political

and social institutions.

In Romantic thinking, a very important manifestation of this integration of

mind and body and material and spirit is language. Language clothes a concept in a

material embodiment, a sound and a string of letters. As Johann Gottfried Herder, one

of the spiritual fathers of nationalism put it, language enables the specifically human

consciousness to emerge; it enables the distinct, focused awareness of things. Herder

taught that all entities that bear language, that is, individual human beings and nations

or peoples, have an essence that must be expressed. They must be rendered in a

medium outside of the person her/himself such as words, paint, social institutions. It

is only by thus expressing their inner selves through language, art, literature, mores,

laws and political and social institutions that peoples's essence, both collectively and

10
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

individually, can achieve determinate shape and indeed come into being. Through this

idea of self-expression, Romantics (and Philosophical Idealists) share in the crucial

modern concept of the self-defining subject.

After this heavy philosophical introduction, I can come to the main point. On

the highest philosophical and ideological level, Rabbi Kook and romantic religious

Zionist ideology believes that the Jewish people and the Jewish individuals that

constitute it, must achieve self expression and self realization by realizing the

sovereignty of God in the political, social and cultural orders of this world. The

Jewish people and the individual Jews will express their authentic selves by realizing

a full national existence that embodies the sovereignty of God. On the highest

theological level this constitutes, as it were, the self-expression of God in the world.

Thus the Jewish people on the collective level, and individual Jews realize themselves

through political, social and cultural action in the world - by the construction of

political institutions, economic production, settlement of the Land of Israel, military

action and religious and cultural production in the service of building a nation state

under the regulation of God and his Torah.

This conception, on the one side, breeds a nationalism which is very specific.

Since everything consists of one organically connected structure, perfection must be

reached on all levels – territorial, political and religious in order for the Zionist project

to be fulfilled. Zionism is about the construction of the perfect Jewish nation-state,

satisfaction with anything less than that is ultimately a betrayal of the project. On the

other side it brings about a unique religious sensibility. Ideologically, at least,

mitzvoth as well as nationalist action are not to be experienced as something

heteronomous, but rather, they are understood as the authentic expressions of one’s

autonomous self. In a manner akin to that of Rousseau, the individual realizes his/her

11
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

inner nature by identifying with the General Will, first of the Jewish nation and then

of God's cosmos. Torah study and mitzvoth are manifestations of the identification

with this national and cosmic will and they are undertaken with the enthusiasm of

such identification. This is a very different subjective experience than the Haredi

submission to the external will of God. Here the performance of mitzvoth is

ideologically constructed as deriving from the individual’s authentic and autonomous

self. Emuni culture is thus characterized by a preoccupation with authenticity and the

authentic self and its proper realization. At the same time, this experience of

autonomy and authenticity is not a purely secular experience. When the "I" (and this

"I" refers to both the individual and the collective "I") is as its most authentic, is most

"itself," then it becomes an expression of the divine will throbbing throughout the

universe.

Put simply, in the foundational period of Gush Emunim, in the 1970’s and

1980’s, almost all the emphasis was put on the collective national self its realization.,

and how the individual realizes himself by immersion in it. In almost all the inner

Emuni publications of the period, we find the call to return to the true inner self, to the

true fountains of one's being and to reject all artificiality and false outside influences.

But, speaking generally, these calls almost always refer to the national self and its role

in grounding individual authenticity. In the last ten or fifteen years the discourse has

shifted so that the individual and his/her needs, drives and the particularities of her/his

personality and body are given more weight and consideration. The more avant-guard

streams of Emuni culture advance the notion that individuals can fulfill the national

General Will specifically by emphasizing their own individuality and particularity.

It appears that this shift has happened for a variety of reasons , the two main

ones being processes issuing from the institutionalization and routinization of the

12
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

original Emuni vision in the extraordinarily successful settlement project and religious

Zionist culture in general, and the increased presence of Western individualist ideas in

Israel at large.

It is this emphasis upon individual romantic self-expression that can explain

much of the new phenomena which I had described earlier in this paper: The interest

in poetry and other creative arts, the counter-cultural ambience and the violent

anarchism of some of the new farms and “outposts” and the desire for unmediated

contact with nature and the drive to express or realize the “natural” aspects of one’s

own human existence – one’s body, sexuality and aggression. The new interest that

some of the new Yeshivot have in dialogue with Western modern and “post-modern”

culture is motivated, at least in large part, by their interest in Western techniques and

motifs of self-expression. Within this broad orientation we can also include

phenomena which I have not mentioned, such as the participation of religious and

even Emuni youth in travels to India and Goa and the budding interest that Emuni

educators have in open and Rogerian (in the sense of Carl Rogers) education which is

perceived as providing existentially meaningful learning experiences.

In order to further clarify the distinctiveness of this romantic religious

Zionism, I shall briefly contrast it with the alternative stream of Israeli religious

Zionism. This stream has been termed "liberal". Since the early 1940’s, it has adopted

humanistic, liberal values and attempted to attribute to them religious value. Initially,

This approach attempted to implement, a sort of humanist religious socialism on the

level of the kibbutz, and humanist social democratic policy on the national level. The

leadership of this wing was located in the leadership of the Religious Kibbutz

Federation and included figures such as Moshe Unna and in urban intellectuals such

as Akiva Ernst Simon and Yeshayahu Leibowitz (until 1952) who drew their

13
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

inspiration from figures such as Gustave Landauer and Martin Buber. To a certain

extent, they envisioned a Torah regime in terms of social legislation inspired or

determined by the Torah. An example of such legislation is the Law for the Protection

of Wages -1958 (‫)חוק הגנת השכר תשי"ח‬, which was introduced by Moshe Unna, whose

provisions were based upon Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14-15. Today, one

of the major issues that this wing deals with are that of feminism and gender equality.

Those few Batei Knesset, in Jerusalem and in other places that grant leadership and

liturgical roles to women are firmly ensconced within this stream. Similarly, to the

extent that “dovish” or “leftist” political orientations exist within the religious Zionist

community, they are associated with members of this stream. The institutional loci of

this orientation remain the Religious Kibbutz Federation, Neemanei Torah V’Avoda,

the Meimad political party and the Shalom Hartman Institute.

In terms of its intellectual orientations, this stream supports open-mindedness and

unrestricted contact and confrontation with modern Western culture and values and

continual synthesis of modern cultural and Torah values. Various observers and

researchers, including ideological opponents, have characterized this stream as

having adopted “modern ways of thinking” (R. Shlomo Aviner) or as having re-

interpreted Judaism so as to adapt it modern western ideas and values (Liebman and

Don Yehiya.). More specifically,. I would say that in contrast to the collective

organicism that characterizes the Emuni way of thinking, the liberal wing adopts a

way thinking that focuses upon the individual and his rights and benefit. Similarly,

in contrast to the Emuni emphasis upon expressiveness and authenticity, the liberal

wing emphasizes rationality and rational thinking. Thus this wing thinks of moral

issues is terms of the prevailing individualist, rationalist liberal ethos of the West. It

approaches gender issues in terms of the rights of women and their claim to equality

14
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

and in not terms of the “Good of the Nation” or the Family (see Yehudit Shelat’s

remarks in Haaretz, onn June 12.[last Shabbat] regarding religious women who do

not marry and have children through artificial insemination.). Similarly they

approach the issue of Eretz Yisrael and the conflict with the Palestinians through the

lenses of the security needs of the Israeli state and individual Israeli citizens, the

desire to avoid bloodshed and the rights of the Palestinians, not through the lens of

the realization of Collective National Destiny.

In recent years, though the avant-guard stream of the Emuni community has

come to resemble somewhat liberal, humanist religious Zionism. As we have seen,

they too value the individual. Despite this important differences remain. The Emuni

avant-guard values the expressive individual while the liberal stream continues to

endorse the ideal of rationalist individualism. The following example can illustrate the

difference between them. There is a very popular and important avant-guard Emuni

yeshiva high school in the south of Israel. It encourages student choice and

responsibility in regard to such matters as students shaping and choosing their

curriculum and class attendance. Yet it has adopted a policy of banning all secular

newspapers from the grounds of the Yeshiva, including the dormitory. Such a

development would be unthinkable in such liberal religious Zionist educational

institutions such as Pelech or the Himmelfarb High School in Jerusalem. Such schools

emphasize the development of the cognitive facility of being able to contend with

alternate points of view and sources of information. In contrast, the individualism that

is emphasized in the Emuni Yeshiva high school is expressive. It is concerned with the

individual student choosing a learning style and daily routine that suits the

particularities of his personality and situation. (This difference should not be

underestimated. As emerged from my interview with his parents, a student was

15
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

expelled from the Emuni school because he did not understand the difference between

expressive and rationalist individualism.)

In research upon the Israeli religious Zionist community conducted according

to the fundamentalist paradigm, the liberal wing is something of a residual category.

This paradigm to a certain extent involves Orientalist discourse. Labeling someone as

“fundamentalist” also implies that that person is irrational and fanatic. As a result,

there is a need to explain fundamentalism (hence the Chicago project), but there really

is no need to explain non-fundamentalist religion, it is “normal.” Instead of labeling

one wing of religious Zionism “fundamentalist” and one wing “normal” or “Western,”

I would prefer to view both wings as having incorporated dimensions of modern

Western civilization. The liberal wing has incorporated the main theme of

individualist rationalism which we can associate with the Enlightenment. The Emuni

wing has incorporated the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment and its thought and

sensibility have important affinities with work of Rousseau, Herder, Hegel and Marx

on the one hand and with that of Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Blake, Conrad and

D.H. Lawrence on the other.

One last important caveat. The two ideological streams that I have portrayed

are to a certain extent intellectual constructions. In reality the boundaries between

them are somewhat porous. This is especially true in recent years and for the younger

generation. Despite the differences between them, the adherents of expressive

individualism and rationalist individualism often find common ground upon which to

base common social interaction

I myself am of American Jewish modern Orthodox background. I have lived in Israel

for over 25 years. Initially, I found liberal rationalist religious Zionism easy to

understand and congenial. Indeed, it was very close to my own religious and

16
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

ideological orientations when I arrived in Israel. In contrast I found Romantic

nationalist religious Zionism alien and opaque. I don’t think that this has to do only

with personal idiosyncrasy. I suggest that my own personal situation reveals a cultural

divide between American Jewish Modern Orthodoxy and Israeli Modern Orthodoxy

which may be of general interest.

I propose that the Romantic nationalist Emuni approach is in a fundamental

way alien to the American Jewish sensibility and cultural premises. The prevalent

American theory of the state (enshrined in Jefferson's preamble to the Declaration of

Independence) is highly individualistic and not organic-collective at all. The point of

departure for the formation of society and state is the individual and his rights and the

purpose of erecting the machinery of the state is precisely to preserve the individual

and his rights. Hence, Americans, including Jewish Americans lack the underlying

cultural assumptions to sympathize with, or even comprehend Emuni Romantic

nationalism.2

Furthermore in regard to the Jewish aspects of this issue, this is precisely the

kind of Romantic, integral nationalism which in the not so distant past has been

involved in the persecution and exclusion of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe (and

in France – the Dryefus Affair!). Even today, romantic nationalism which is heavily

connected with religion, either Catholicism as in Hungary or Orthodoxy as in Russia

or Serbia, often carries anti-Semitic overtones. American Jewish culture, including

American Orthodox culture is still heavily biased toward the type of rationalist culture

that characterized the Jews for centuries as an urban minority specializing in

commercial and financial occupations. There is little possibility in American

2
See however, the recent book, Romantics at War by George Fletcher who is currently
resident, here, in the Institute for Advanced Studies. Fletcher suggest that in America too,
there is an undercurrent of Romantic conceptions which shape attitudes towards such things
as national identity and national membership.

17
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

Orthodox Jewish life for appreciation of a culture oriented towards land, nature and

spontaneous expression of natural feelings including those of aggression and revenge,

and violence.

It is true that in the American Orthodox community there is much support for

right wing positions in Israeli politics. It is my impression however, that this is mainly

connected to the xenophobia that one finds in certain traditional Jewish communities3

(and that also finds expression in the Haredi world) rather than the sophisticated

romanticism of the Emuni world view.

Since the Emuni approach is by far the dominant one on the Israeli modern

Orthodox scene, I would say that the relations between Israeli and American non-

haredi orthodoxy are somewhat problematic. While their does exist significant

instrumental cooperation between the two sectors which expresses itself, particularly,

in American financial and political support for their Israeli counterparts, I would

suggest that Israeli religious Zionism in its current form is largely incomprehensible

to Americans. Perhaps this is connected to the absence of American yeshiva students

in those Israeli Zionist yeshivot which are characteristically Israeli. Whether we are

speaking about the ferociously religious and nationalist Har HaMor in which the spirit

of the Merkaz Harav of the 1970’s still lives or in the much more avante garde or

contemporary Yeshivot of Otniel, Tekoa, Petach Tikva or Ramat Gan, there are almost

no American foreign students. American yeshiva students from modern Orthodox

background concentrate in the quasi-haredi yeshivot of Kerem b’Yavne or Sha'alavim,

in yeshiva programs designed especially for them or in yeshivot that are frankly

haredi . The only exception is still Yeshiva Har Etzion where we find the comforting

presence of R. Aaron Lichtenstein who still continues to uphold the familiar

intellectualistic cultural values characteristic of Diaspora Jewish culture.

3
See Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance.

18
Conference on Dynamic Jewish Belonging 17.6.04

I would suggest then, that we consider the existence of another significant

division within Orthodoxy. In addition to the familiar divisions between Haredi and

modern orthodoxy, I would suggest that we also consider that there is a significant

difference between the rationalist Orthodox culture of the American Jewish Diaspora,

which in many ways continues the traditional social and economic patterns of

minority Jewish Diaspora life, and the Romantic nationalist religious culture of an

Orthodoxy which is part of a landed Jewish majority, in a Jewish sovereign state,

which is engaged in bloody ethnic and territorial conflict. An appreciation of this

division, I submit, would further our understanding of the variegated and dynamic

nature of contemporary Jewish belonging.

19