BOOK BLOG: Yair Ettinger's Frayed: The Disputes Unraveling Religious Zionists

 

It is all connected. Mizrachi (merkaz rehani) was founded in 1902 in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a religious faction in the World Zionist Organization. In Palestine, the movement spearheaded the establishment of a Rabbinate under Rabbi Abraham Issac Kook. In 1952, after dissolving its relationship with the non-Zionist Orthodox parties, Mizrachi and Ha-Po'el ha-Mizrachi created the National Religious Party and a daily newspaper, Hazofeh. Ha-Kibbutz ha-Dati is Mizrachi's kibbutz movement. Mekor Rishon subsumed the newspaper, and the NRP went defunct in 2003. Followers of Religious Zionism are known as Dati Leumi, though many have turned haredi-leumi or Hardal.

Religious Zionism is a stream of Orthodoxy with a pronounced political ideology. How is it connected to Modern Orthodoxy in the Diaspora? That is one of the questions I was thinking about as I read journalist Yair Ettinger's Frayed: The Disputes Unraveling Religious Zionists (278 pages, Toby Press, $29.95). Ettinger, a kipa-sruga wearer, has perceptively covered the religion beat in Israel for Haaretz and Kan (Israel Broadcasting Authority), so he is well-positioned to launch readers into exploring the various shades of Religious Zionism.

Religious Zionism is rooted in a triad: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel, and the Torah of Israel, as Ettinger explains. For literate Jews, regardless of religiosity and ideology, the Covenant that anchors Jewish civilization is the connection between the land and the people as described in the Torah – Ettinger's triad. Whether you take this literally as Religious Zionists do or as a sacred foundational myth, Jewish civilization is rooted in the land. The attachment to the land manifested by other ancient civilizations, such as the American Indian tribes, the Aboriginals of Australia, Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and the South American Incas, is also an attribute of our civilization.

All that Theodor Herzl and his modern political Zionism did was revive this element of our civilization. A short while later, the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook gave Orthodox Judaism its roadmap into political Zionism. After 1967, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook provided Gush Emunim's settlement movement with its messianic marching orders, and its energy consumed religious Zionism.

Ettinger's book identifies disputes that divide Israel's Dati Leumi world. These no longer involve settlements over the Green Line. Gush Emunim's triumph resolved the issue, making settling Judea, Samaria, and Gaza the First Imperative. Nowadays, to my knowledge, no national religious figure who can draw a crowd opposes the primacy of the settlement enterprise.

What's left to unravel? Plenty. For instance, the role of women in the synagogue and the IDF, the reception of male homosexuals in the synagogue, and whether to shake off the influence of the patronage-laden state-funded Rabbinate (which today has only a thin Zionist veneer), including over marriage and kashrut. Should Religious Zionists commit to building the Third Temple? 75% of them support Temple Mount pilgrimages, though the Kooks (father and son) were opposed. And how should Religious Zionists relate to the non-Jewish world?

Take the issue of women in the IDF. Rabbis Zvi Yehuda Kook and Shlomo Goren were not thrilled with the idea, Ettinger tells us. Yet Zionist Religious girls did go into the army in numbers. Today's Hardal position, as enunciated by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, is uncompromising. "A girl who enlists in the IDF claiming that she wants to contribute is indeed contributing – she is contributing to the destruction of the state." Other rabbis add that women who go into the army are potentially compromising their "modesty" and are likely to emerge "damaged." The rabbis also do not want their boys distracted and, therefore, oppose gender integration in combat units. Only the Religious Kibbutz movement representing the non-Hardal remains of the Mizrachi stream takes pride in sending its girls to the army, according to Ettinger. My impression is that only a minority of national religious women now do IDF service. Some girls do other forms of national service, but since the goal is to maintain "modesty," the alternatives can be pretty parve. 

In a parallel universe, a minority camp within Religious Zionism is pushing the envelope on egalitarianism for women. Some have pressed for partnership minyans, which give women a role in conducting the services. Should women give homilies during davening from the women's side of the partition dividing all Orthodox synagogues? Should they serve in top synagogical leadership roles? Since many women are Torah scholars, and some qualify as Yoetzet Halacha (essentially unordained rabbis), what weight should their legal rulings have?

Women can push the envelope only so far, partly for cultural and aesthetic reasons but primarily because of Halacha and the stare decisis approach male Orthodox rabbis take toward interpreting Jewish religious law.

Going back to politics. The ill-fated 1993 Oslo Accords with the PLO and Israel's 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza solidified the Hardal political ascendency within Religious Zionism. Hardal is ultra-Orthodox in religion and hyper-nationalist in politics. Under its influence, young men are sporting knee-length tzitzit, extra large skullcaps, and payot. Women are dressing more and more in the hyper-modest ultra-Orthodox fashion, albeit with color. Those who identify as Hardal would also lean conservative regarding women's participation in the synagogue. Further, Hardal folks desire to rebuild the Temple on Mount Moriah where the Dome of the Rock now stands, disregarding the prospect of an apocalyptic confrontation with the Muslim world, which also considers the site holy. Ettinger offers a rosier scenario in the "exceptionalism" of Yehuda Glick, who thinks rebuilding the Temple while leaving the present Al-Aksa Mosque in place would be possible and pave the way for a "religious utopia."

The role of the clergy is another point of contention within the Religious Zionist stream. In the non-Zionist Haredi world, which is ultra-Orthodox and insular from non-Jewish society, grand rabbis are held to be oracles, and their guidance is sought on matters ranging from medical procedures to voting in elections. Hardal Religious Zionists also relate to their clerics as sainted. When Naftali Bennett challenged this attitude, Ettinger writes, things did not end well for him.

Ettinger chooses not to use the term Hardal in his book. He does refer to today's leading Hardal politicians, Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the Kahane-lite Otzma Yehudit Party, and Bezalel Smotrich, the National Union/Tkuma Party leader. Before the most recent elections held in November 2022, Likud Party chief and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was adamant that Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Avi Maoz of the Noam Party run under a single rubric to unite the entire Hardal and dati leumi camp. It worked. The bloc won 14 Knesset seats, briefly becoming the third-largest faction. Once sworn in, Ben-Gvir and Maoz broke away from Smotrich (though they have no fundamental differences) and returned to their respective parties. At the same time, Smotrich rebranded his as the National Religious Party.

About 22 percent of Israelis identify as Religious Zionists of all hues, according to  Ettinger. He says he can't predict whether a politically and theologically moderate NRP/Mafdal-like religious Zionist party will rise again. Its agenda was heavily weighed on education and social issues. As far as I know, today, national religious Israelis who are not Hardal must seek political expression through one of the non-parochial parties such as Benny Ganz's National Unity. There are not enough of them to form their own religious party. The last attempt was made in 1988 by rabbis Yehuda Amital and Michael Melchior.

Ettinger writes that the Mizrachi Party dominated dati leumi politics back in the day. The NRP was the dominant political institution alongside just a few religious-cultural gatekeepers, such as Mercaz Harav. His thesis is that today, there are no gatekeepers or controlling agenda-setters. Along with the ascendency of the settlement movement and political Hardalism, many contending yeshivot, rabbis, and powerbrokers have emerged. So, Religious Zionists can revel in not having a magisterium and in decentralized decision-making. Ettinger terms this state of play "privatization." Non-Hardal Religious Zionists mostly follow their consciences. Those in the Hardal camp are pressed to "listen to their rabbis." Lots of different rabbis.

Especially since October 7, 2023, the already complicated attitude of Religious Zionists toward non-Zionist Haredim who refuse to do any form of national service or send their sons to the army has only become more fraught. The two share an Orthodox theology; their prayer services are practically interchangeable. Yet, Religious Zionists have made disproportionate sacrifices for Israeli security. Meantime, haredi youth are now on their pre-Passover recess, fumfing around as if the country had not just buried over 600 soldiers. The Haredi alibi of insularity is wearing a wee thin.

Yet the dominant Hardal wing of Religious Zionism is well-disposed toward Haredi society. They share an aesthetic for close-mindedness. To the chagrin of haredi rabbis – twitchy haredi adolescents or shababnikim feel drawn to Ben-Gvir's religious chauvinism tinged with political extremism. If I am right that for some of their constituents, Haredi draft-dodging is becoming intolerable, Ben Gvir and Smotsrich will have to "do a Netanyahu" to maintain the alliance. They will need to obfuscate the haredi refusal to serve or, at the very least, kick the issue down the road. The best way to change the subject would be to channel the wrath of their electorate at the "leftists" who have, undeniably, been calling for ending the October 7 War at any price.

How does all this look from 6,000 miles away? A difference between Diaspora Modern Orthodoxy and Israeli Religious Zionism is the latter's ongoing commitment to the Land and IDF service (including nowadays relentless stints of reserve duty). At the same time, non-Hardal Religious Zionists and Modern Orthodox Diaspora Jews may be drawing inspiration from one another on the role of women and other social issues. Non-Hardal Religious Zionists are finding workarounds to the Haredi-dominated Rabbinate when they want to marry. Against the wishes of Hardal clerics like Dov Lior and Zvi Thau, they are turning to national religious Tzohar rabbis who are of a tolerant bent. They are also looking to bypass the Rabbinate on conversion and kashrut. America's Modern Orthodox manage to marry and eat kosher without a tax-payer-funded Rabbinate, so why shouldn't dati leumi Israelis enjoy the same privilege?

The two communities are not identical. A difference between the Diaspora and Israel is that Religious Zionists are more willing to think independently about the place of religion in society. They are keen to explore artistic, literary, and cultural expression and to stake out religious boundaries. Whereas in the Diaspora, centrist-leaning Modern Orthodox feel constrained to live within normative parameters, or so say academic observers such as sociologist Shlomo Fischer, who is cited in Yehuda Mirsky's introduction to the Ettinger book.

I confess to finding the nomenclature of Modern Orthodoxy misleading. The "modern" in Modern Orthodoxy should not connote leading anything less than a Halachic lifestyle. One of the characteristics of Orthodoxy is perforce insularity from the non-Jewish world – in terms of food, culture, friendships, and other non-utilitarian relations. Each sub-group within Orthodoxy finds its place along the insularity continuum from fully acculturated to completely inward-looking.

Whatever their intramural differences, Religious Zionists of all stripes and Modern Orthodox in the Diaspora appear united in opposing concessions to non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, including at the Western Wall Plaza, according to Ettinger.

I sense that Ettinger is not downhearted about any unraveling within religious Zionism, seeing the disputes as a sign of vibrancy. He assesses liberal Religious Zionism as alive and well, perhaps because he identifies with this more moderate wing. Maybe there is a dichotomy in Religious Zionism: politically monochromatic while synagogically kaleidoscopic.

Based on years of field reporting, Ettinger's strength in this book is his mastery of the subject. With Shmuel Rosner and, more lately, Yair Cherki, Ettinger helps render the multifaceted Orthodox world to Israel's non-Orthodox majority. Here, I feel he shies away from taking positions that could lead him into controversial territory, except when he blames Bennett for fragmenting Religious Zionism's Big Tent. Yet by the time Bennett reinvented himself to appeal beyond the Religious Zionist world and, in May 2021, as head of the Yamina Party, joined a unity government with Yair Lapid, the bulk of Religious Zionists were already in the Hardal Camp. Benett was simply giving the camp's non-Hardal remnant a soft landing.  

Frayed: The Disputes Unraveling Religious Zionists has been expertly translated by Eylon Levy and Mitch Ginsburg, making it a smooth and accessible read. There are not a lot of sparks here, and no new analytical ground is unearthed, but this is a solid primer on the struggles and place of Religious Zionism in Israel.

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A Half a Year of War and a Fateful Week to Come

Israel is a country on edge. We are waiting for an Iranian retaliatory attack. Our northern and southern communities continued to come under enemy fire over the weekend. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been dislocated from their homes for the past 184 days. A barbaric enemy is holding some 130 of our men, women, and children hostage in Gaza. We have suffered 1,490 confirmed killed soldiers and civilians since October 7, 2023. Many wounded soldiers have life-changing injuries, from burns to lost limbs.

The historically bloody month of Ramadan is not over. Eid-al-Fitr, which marks its conclusion, will be on Tuesday evening, April 10. Last night, Arab youths slept in tents near the Aksa mosque atop the Temple Mount, hoping to instigate a violent response from Israeli police.

In synagogues of almost all hues throughout the country, the liturgy of daily and Shabbat prayer services have been amended to include High Holy Day-like pleas for salvation.

Today's morning news brought more heartbreak. Four IDF commandos were ambushed by Hamas guerrillas overnight in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Terror attacks up and down the land of Israel incited by influencers on Palestinian social media continue unabated.

We seem to be treading water in Gaza with no implementable strategy on how to defang Hamas. An assault on Rafiah, where Hamas has its last major stronghold, has been kicked down the road.

We irrationally acquiesced to Gaza's humanitarian and public health crisis, which has so demonstrably sabotaged our overall mission. What did we think would happen if we allowed anarchy, hunger, and pestilence to reign? Pointing out correctly that the fault lies with Hamas does not offset images of ruin and suffering beamed across the globe and reverberated on social media – pictures that practically shout, "Blame Israel!"

Yes, the world is hypocritical. We knew that. In conducting the war, Israel is being held to standards imposed on no other country. The US might accidentally blow up a wedding party in Afghanistan. UK soldiers may have executed unarmed detainees. France may have committed war crimes in the Central African Republic. Russia has demonstrated a complete disregard for the rules of war in Ukraine. Chinese crimes against human rights are undisputed. All these render some brief chagrin, and then the pages are turned.

Not so with Israel. Granted, the IDF has made mistakes that have cost innocent lives, sometimes out of reckless disregard. Yet only Israel has been so unanimously pilloried and held in collective opprobrium as if our crimes were one of a kind in 21^st-century warfare. We, of all people, are charged with genocide when Hamas is explicitly committed in writing to genocide against us.

***

 "Together we will Win" public transportation announcements notwithstanding, Israelis are fragmenting back to our October 6 lines. Last night, we witnessed big rallies against the Netanyahu government, the largest in Tel Aviv, insisting that he meet whatever demands Hamas is making to bring home our captives. In effect, such self-inflicted pressure calls for our unconditional surrender. Why would Hamas negotiate when all it needs to do is sit back and watch Israelis join the "international community" in demanding the Islamists get their way?

My desire to see Netanyahu go is second to none, but not at any price. Last night, an enraged Tel Aviv driver (a Bibi supporter?) apparently caught up in the anti-Netanyahu protest plowed into some of the demonstrators, leaving several people injured and at least one requiring hospitalization. Like, we need to start killing each other now...

Netanyahu has always been a master at the illusion of momentum, sometimes by talking tough (on Iran and Hamas, for example) while procrastinating on hard decisions.

He took the country to the brink before October 7 with a judicial putsch mainly designed to keep him out of prison and deconstruct the system that first put him at legal risk. So, yes, he can conflate his interests with Israel's. Likewise, regrettably, the world also thinks of Bibi and Israel as one.

His management of the war has been ham-fisted. Neither his bloated cabinet nor inner war cabinet seems to be operating systematically. From the outside, it looks like he and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are making all critical decisions. And that Benny Ganz gets to know about them at some stage. I imagine Ron Dermer probably plays the role of Netanyahu's Freudian peripheral id). The fact that Netanyahu, Gallant, and Ganz struggle to be civil with each other does not instill confidence in the essence of their decision-making process.

Plainly, we need a new government led by a different prime minister. But Netanyahu won't go, and his ruling Likud Party (the only mechanism for getting rid of him without new elections) is a hollow shell with no one left to stand up to him and certainly no one of a caliber capable of replacing him.

We do need elections even in wartime – America held elections, including for president, during WWII.

However, raucous rallies against Netanyahu in wartime have melded disparate issues: opposition to Haredi draft-dodging, support for caving into Hamas on a terrorists-for-hostages exchange and demanding new elections. All this while the country is literally under enemy fire. It is confusing, divisive, and counter-productive. 

If Benny Ganz wants new elections, he should withdraw from the government. 

For now, disorderly anti-Netanyahu rallies have only solidified support for him, maybe because they are transparently not spontaneous. Granted, neither were the anti-putsch rallies before October 7, but then I figured the ends justified the means.

Not coincidentally, the New Israel Fund is spending heavily (including on a booklet distributed in the weekend papers by its latest front group, "The Israeli Initiative") to use this war to push for a Palestinian state. The problem is that polls show that the Palestinian Arabs have no interest in a demilitarized state alongside Israel and no desire to recognize the right of the Jewish people for a national homeland.

Haaretz, the post-Zionist newspaper that punches way above the weight of its minuscule circulation, carried a valuable article this weekend by Shlomi Eldar. The piece was full of color and insights into the Palestinian mindset. He traveled to Cairo to interview Gazan elites who found refuge in Egypt's capital after October 7. About a week before the war broke out, rumors were circulating in Gaza that something big was afoot. Israeli intelligence would have picked these up, too, but likely discounted their import since they ran contrary to the accepted idea that Hamas did not want war. A few Hamas-connected Palestinians got out of harm's way just in time. Those who had no advance warning (mainly Fatah people who maintained a transactional relationship with Sinwar) but still made their way to Cairo (a costly and challenging feat) are understandably embittered at Israel. But what is revelatory is what they told Eldar about Yahya Sinwar: If he emerges from this war in a position to fight again – he will organize another October 7 because a messianic apocalyptic vision drives Sinwar. In other words, if a stake is not driven through this devil's heart, many more will yet die.

If you are marching for a unilateral and unconditional Israeli ceasefire, your interests and his are strangely aligned.

***

Israel is basically alone, divided, and at war. Our fair-weather allies have deserted us. Lord Cameron, the British Foreign Minister, let it be known that UK support for Israel is not unconditional, a risible statement coming from Whitehall, which, if I'm not mistaken, has not voted with Israel at the UN in the Securiy Council since the war began.

The Biden administration is struggling with itself. Its "progressive" elements, backed by Democratic Party leftists, are chomping at the bit to throw Israel under the bus. I sense that the president and Secretary of State Anthony Blinkin understand that America will be the big loser on the international stage if Israel can't defend itself – if Iran and Hamas can reasonably claim victory in the war that began October 7. Still, this is an election year. It is easier to jump on the Hamas pickup truck and make "Netanyahu's Israel" your scapegoat than do some soul-searching about your own policies. I am thinking about the open border with Mexico.  

Also in Washington, "Pro-peace and Pro-Israel" (LOL)  J Street, which consistently toes the PLO line, has helped to orchestrate Jewish support for an arms embargo on Israel. The New York Times and Washington Post are serving as J Street's enablers with breathless revelations presenting America's arms "pipeline" to Israel.

In the face of all this, much of the pro-Israel American Jewish community, save for the modern Orthodox vanguard, is hunkering down. US Jews seem bewildered by what they read in the media outlets they trust (foremost the NYT) and bedeviled by the tsunami of anti-Israelism and antisemitism that has swept through American cities and campuses. It is easy to blame Netanyahu, everyone's bogeyman. While he may be blameworthy for vandalizing Israel's image, his essential decision to take away Hamas's capability to attack us again enjoys broad support in Israel. 

So, after half a year of war and with a fateful week ahead of us, Israel is on edge. As ominous as the week ahead looks, this much I grasp: No Israeli wants it to end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran seen to have won the war.