The Unpublished Writings of a Pioneering Religious Zionist Thinker

In 1884—twelve years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, and thirteen before the First Zionist Congress—the Russian rabbi Shmuel Mohilever joined the secular Jewish physician Leon Pinsker in founding the Ḥibat Tsiyon, an organization dedicated to building a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. But it was Mohilever’s disciple, Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, who laid the foundations for religious Zionism as it is known today. Channa Lockshin Bob describes Reines’s thought in light of newly discovered unpublished manuscripts:

Rabbi Reines brought together the sacred and the profane in many areas of his life. He founded a yeshiva that combined traditional talmudic study with secular subjects, an innovation at the time. His scholarship combined talmudic virtuosity with broad interests including mathematics, philosophy, and logic. So he was perfectly cut out to initiate close cooperation between traditional Judaism and secular Zionism.

Rabbi Reines first got involved in the Zionist movement in 1899, when he participated and spoke at the Third Zionist Congress in Basel. In the coming years he continued to participate in Zionist Congresses. He met Herzl and corresponded with him until Herzl’s death in 1904. In 1902 Rabbi Reines founded the Mizrahi movement—a religious faction within the Zionist movement—with Herzl’s support.

Reines’s lectures from the years 1908 to 1911 are collected in a manuscript titled Yalkut Arakhim. . . . [One] of these lectures, [delivered on the anniversary of Herzl’s death], examines the topic of immortality. Surprisingly, Reines presents a fairly [rationalistic] view of life after death: “When we see that even after one’s death, his achievements are recognized, that is a sign of his immortality.” Later in the lecture, he adds that “those whose help is recognized even after their death have been made to be like God.” The last words of the speech are: “All signs of mourning are signs of immortality.”

Could it be that Reines’s final sentence about signs of mourning is not only a general statement, but also a reference to himself, as he continues to mourn the loss of Herzl even years after his passing?

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Religious Zionism, Theodor Herzl

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