What the Collapse of the Western Wall Compromise Means for Israel, and for Zionism

For the past eighteen months, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties have succeeded in holding up the implementation of a compromise approved by the Netanyahu government that would create a mixed-sex prayer area at the Western Wall. Yesterday, ḥaredi members of the cabinet, with minimal opposition, managed to “freeze” the plan by threatening to leave the governing coalition. Yossi Klein Halevi comments:

[T]he government’s initial compromise over the Wall was a bold attempt to uphold Jewish unity while still granting Orthodox preeminence. [It] was destroyed by ḥaredi politicians for whom the unity of the Jewish people is secondary to upholding the most rigorous interpretation of Jewish law.

For all the ḥaredi accommodation to the state of Israel in recent years, the ideological argument between Zionism and the Ḥaredim remains profound. Ḥaredim are willing to risk Jewish unity to uphold what they see as the integrity of the halakhic process. Zionists see maintaining the basic and fragile unity of the Jewish people as their primary commitment—indeed the core of their Jewishness.

Zionism was never only about creating a Jewish state; it was about defining Jewish identity. Zionism’s definition is peoplehood. The noun is “Jew”; all other identities—religious and secular, Orthodox and Reform, left and right—are adjectives. In an era when the most basic consensus about Jewish identity is unraveling, Zionism’s purpose is to uphold peoplehood as the neutral binding ground of Jewishness.

From its inception, mainstream religious Zionism implicitly agreed. It reconciled its commitment to peoplehood and halakhah by emphasizing the religious imperative of peoplehood. Because Judaism is a particularist faith intended for a particular people, unlike the universal faiths of Christianity and Islam, strengthening peoplehood is a religious category, a precondition for the fulfillment of Judaism. . . .

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel & Zionism, Judaism, Judaism in Israel, Ultra-Orthodox, Western Wall

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