Jews Surely Deserve a Potboiler Based on a Talmudic Legend

Like his previous nine novels, Steven Pressfield’s 36 Righteous Men is action-packed, ready-for-Hollywood genre fiction. But at the heart of the plot is the rabbinic tradition that at any given moment there are 36 righteous men in the world, whose identities are hidden. The twist: some powerful person is systematically killing them off, and Pressfield’s heroes must stop him. Adam Kirsch writes in his review:

Christian writers have long since woken up to the crowd-pleasing potential of the religious action-thriller. The popular Left Behind series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, spun sixteen novels out of the book of Revelation. . . . Dan Brown sold 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code by imagining a millennia-old Vatican conspiracy involving the Holy Grail and the true identity of Mary Magdalene. What do Jewish readers have to compete with that? A handful of arty novels about golems. Surely we deserve at least one book where the hero unravels an ancient Jewish mystery and staves off the end of the world by shooting an RPG at the devil to knock him back through the portals of Gehenna.

It’s often been observed that environmentalism serves many secular people today as a substitute for religion. But this has seldom been more explicit than it is in 36 Righteous Men. For what, in the year 2034, [when the novel is set], is a righteous person? It turns out that all of the [36 righteous] victims are, in one way or another, fighting against climate change; and the end of the world that [the villain] wants to bring about will take the form of our own destruction of the planet. Goodness is no longer a religious concept but an ecological one.

Yet at the same time, the genre in which Pressfield is working demands that the denouement involve explosions, not carbon-sequestering pilot demonstrations. And so 36 Righteous Men tries to have it both ways. [The heroes], equipped with shoulder-launched missiles and giant “Zombie Killer” shotguns, do battle . . . in Megiddo, the Israeli site of the biblical Armageddon; in doing so, they hope to protect . . . a climate scientist whose inventions will help stave off global warming.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Eschatology, Fiction, Global Warming, Talmud

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society