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Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Point of Contention, Part Three

In the previous post, we began to explore the origins of Zionism, both religious and secular.  We identified that the primary clash in Israeli society--and between Jews in the world in general--essentially is the clash between religion and secularism. 

Just as Yiddish was viewed as a figment of the Old World--and the Old Jew--so was the entire structure and form of the traditional society of religious Jewry.  The poet Shaul Tschernikhovsky (1875-1943) voiced this idea in his poem, “Facing the Statue of Apollo”:

I come to you, forgotten god of the ages,
god of ancient times and other days
ruling the tempests of vigorous men,
the breakers of their strength in youth’s plenty!

I bow to all precious things – robbed now
by human corpses and the rotten seed of man,
who rebel against the life bestowed by God, the Almighty
the God of mysterious wildernesses,
the God of the conquerors of Canaan in a whirlwind –
who then bound Him with the straps of tefillin.

The “god” referred to in the first stanza quoted is the Greek mythological deity Apollo, who represented both physical beauty, as well as reason, order and harmony.  These attributes were at the core of the Enlightenment ideal, and several secular Jewish writers have made reference to him in their works.  This poem, written in 1899, expressed Tchernikhovsky’s disenchanted perception that the religious Jewish world--the “human corpses and the rotten seed of man"--had rebelled by turning its back on true spirituality (mysterious wildernesses), binding G-d “with the straps of tefillin”.  The image of the unmoving statue is also intended to convey the idea that the Jewish world had somehow ground to a halt.  The message is clear: Tchernikhovsky as well as his contemporaries yearned to create the Jewish Apollo, unbound by his tefillin, who could encounter “all precious things” without interference by tradition or religion. 

The secular Jew, by the end of the 19th century, was a weary traveler, saved from oblivion by the new drive for settlement in Palestine, having been rejected by European society and denied equality.  His forebear, the maskil of the 18th century, had failed in his attempt to assimilate against the juggernaut of anti-Jewish hatred.  But with the rise of Jewish nationalism, the dream of being a member of an enlightened, secular nation was revived.  However, the vision shared by secular Zionists, although it referenced the Biblical connection of the Jews to the land of Israel, did not include a resurgence of Torah, or, necessarily, Torah-observant Jews in the land of Israel. 

Nor, to be fair, did religious Zionists--until Rav Kook--anticipate the Redemption being preceded by the governance of secular Jews.  Nor did those Jews of the Old Yishuv, i.e. who had been in the land of Israel since the end of the 18th century, look with favor upon their irreligious counterparts or their efforts to create an ardently secular nation on holy soil.

Today, I attended an end-of-year banquet for the Netsach Program, where I function as therapeutic director.  The banquet was held in the Reich Hotel in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood of Jerusalem.  Beit HaKerem was founded by Jews in 1922 under the British Mandate; its original neighborhood charter prohibited the establishment of any religious institutions.  The hotel had a Jerusalem restaurant guide.  As I thumbed through it, I was surprised--perhaps naively so--to see how many restaurants were unkosher and “open 7 days a week”.  But then I realized that the restaurants’ proprietors probably had no context in which to make the decision for their restaurants to be kosher.  More than that; in 2007, treife food and the absence of Shabbos is somewhat of a heritage for secular Israelis whose great-grandparents threw off the yoke of Judaism.  Why should the restaurant be kosher?  And yet, 98 per cent of doorways in this country have mezuzos, the buses in Jerusalem do not run on Shabbos, and certain areas require that building be constructed with Sukkah porches.

To be sure, it was the secular Jews who ultimately managed to organize the requisite details into the Jewish State, and the State reflects that fact.  And then, there is another world in Israel, heirs to the pioneering spirit of those religious Jews who have braved the impossible to set foot in the land of Israel, to glimpse the Western Wall, to retrace the footsteps of the forefathers and foremothers--and to carry their mission forward.  And while it is a minority, it is not a small minority.  According to a study by the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research, published in 1993 the religiously-observant population in Israel is probably 30 per cent of the population, with another 55 per cent who cover the entire range of Jewish practices called “traditional”.  That leaves 20 per cent of Israeli Jews as secular, and, according to the study, only 5 per cent who are “die hard” secularists.  Other statistics, such as those from the Central Bureau of Statistics, contradict these findings, but not by much.  What is interesting is that, no matter which of these spheres one lives in, when he or she observes the other one, he or she wonders how or why it exists and if it can coexist with his or her own.  We barely recognize each other any more. 

Protests are being held these days to prevent the Gay Pride parade from happening on June 21st in Jerusalem; I imagine that the participants of both must look at each other like aliens from distant planets.  This is the ultimate secular/religious issue.  It’s so obvious to a religious Jew why you can’t have a Gay Pride parade here; Jerusalem is a holy place, and homosexual behavior is outlawed by the Torah.  On the other hand, for those who identify as gay--or their supporters--it is so clear why the parade must take place; democracy and free expression must be protected.  As you can see, the point of contention makes the proposal of a Jewish state not a simple one

Still, the land of Israel remains holy.