was even possible, his ideas were taken up centuries later by late- 19th century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. He wrote: “We are obligated to follow the ‘well-trodden paths of our ancestors and early leaders,’ who never mentioned any obligation for us to encour- age the redemption by developing Eretz Yisroel. They mention as the path toward the Redemption only that we become better Jews, repent, and look forward to the redemption.” How, then, do Haredim navigate the reality on the ground, namely the fact that, though no messiah has arrived, a Jewish nation-state does exist in the Land of Israel? Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of pub- lic affairs for Haredi umbrella group Agudath Israel of America, describes a delicate balancing act. “Once the state became a fait accompli,” he summarized in an email, “most of the Haredi world… opted to embrace, if not the Zionist philosophy, at least the fact of Israel, including citizenship. Which is why there are Haredim in Israeli government service and Haredi parties in the Knesset.” He describes current Haredi thinking as, if not reconciled to the exist- ence of Israel, something like agnostic, calling it a-Zionist. This is not fully borne out. As recently as January, a study conducted by Nishma Research found that Haredim are still much less support- ive of Zionism than other Orthodox and non-Orthodox populations: in their survey of approximately 1,300 respondents, 28 per cent of Haredim felt strongly pro-Zionist and another 23 per cent felt some- what Zionist—a combined 51 per cent. By comparison, 94 per cent of modern Orthodox Jews identified as somewhat or strongly Zionist. Among the comments from Haredi survey respondents: “Zionism en- rages the nations of the world” and “I see how people put the army, its power and weakness before G-d and believe in that first.” If Haredim are officially a-Zionist and unofficially divided, Chabadniks are most consistently clear in their rejection of the current Jewish state. In 1900, the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, wrote a widely circulated letter on the matter: “Even if the Zionists were G-d fearing Torah true Jews, and even if we had reason to be- lieve that their goal is feasible, we are nevertheless not permitted to join them in bringing our redemption with our own strength. We are not even permitted to force a premature redemption by showering the Almighty with insistent entreaties.” Schneersohn went even fur- ther: for him, the issue was not that Zionism was incompatible with Jewish faith but that it stood in direct opposition to it: “The Zion- ists’ true desire is to sever the hearts of the Jewish people from the Torah and mitzvos… We will not accept their promises. Even if they have some good to offer, we must throw it back to their faces.” More than a century later, despite Chabad having launched many campaigns that “shower the Almighty with insistent entreaties” in the form of myriad children singing “We Want Moshiach Now,” and despite Chabad accepting the concrete benefits they receive from Israeli state coffers, there has been no real theological change of heart. Some materials currently available on the movement’s web- site explain that, politically, Israel is a land of darkness; others de- scribe the state as the result of a Jewish inferiority complex. Most congregations around the world recite a prayer for the State of Israel. There is a line in the prayer that refers to Israel as reshit tzmichat geulatenu —the beginning of the flowering of our redemp- tion. Some Religious Zionist congregations add shetehe —that it should be—at the beginning of the phrase, to temper the strength of that claim. Others omit the phrase entirely, choosing to divorce the idea of the redemption from the idea of Israel itself. Haredi and Chabad congregations refuse to say the prayer at all.
Like the adherents of most ideologies, most Religious Zionists temper their beliefs based on prevailing realities: they want to live in the land, not wage a holy war. They follow in the footsteps of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Jews of the British Mandate, and his students. Kook died before the Holocaust and the founding of the state, but he left behind a legacy of idealism. He maintained that the lesson of exile was that power is a dangerous tool, and that if and when Jews succeeded in their national ambitions, they needed to be careful how they wielded it. Jewish politics could be different, Kook believed, and Jews did not need to exert power over others. He approved of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund but not the taking of land by force. This reflects the view of many Religious Zionists today. They send their children to hesder yeshivot—a sys- tem of religious institutions in which young adults study in yeshiva while pursuing a parallel track of army service—and genuinely want peace with the Palestinians. As with most ideologies, there are extremists: adherents who are so fervent in their beliefs that they will wish for or cause harm to anyone—Jewish, Palestinian, or otherwise—who impedes their pur- suit of Jewish sovereignty in the full terrain of what they consider the Land of Israel. These are the Religious Zionists we are accustomed to seeing on the news, who assert Jewish supremacy and, increas- ingly, wage violent attacks on their Palestinian neighbours. In an article in The New York Times Magazine this spring, Ron- en Bergman and Mark Mazzetti profile the rise of the Hilltop Youth, whose commitment to Jewish sovereignty is so extreme that it does not actually countenance the nation-state that currently exists. “Their objective,” the authors write, “was to tear down Israel’s in- stitutions and to establish ‘Jewish rule’: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims world- wide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.” A t the other end of this axis are religious Jews who also have a strong belief in messianism but with a weak commitment to political self-determination. These are the originalists—the ones who refused to modulate their messianism in response to the Zion- ist aspirations for a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel, and who persist in that refusal, to varying degrees, even long after that nation-state was born. This is the view that defines much of Haredi and Chabad Judaism. Unlike Religious Zionists, these movements understand Jewish tradition as precluding any possibility of the human pursuit of na- tional self-determination. They reject the notion that Jews can bring about the messianic era themselves, by becoming a political power among the nations. Rather, the only available path is for Jews to study and follow the commandments to the best of their abilities, thereby spiritually redeeming the world. Rabbi Moses Sofer, the leader of Hungarian Orthodoxy in the 17th century and one of the architects of Haredi theology, did not shy away from the consequences of such a position. “It is worthwhile for the people of Israel to suffer prolonged exile, in order to attain such redemption in the end,” he wrote in his commentary on the Torah. “The full messianic claim does not permit the Jew to follow such heart promptings [for a restoration of the ancient past] and accept such existential options… It cannot be satisfied with a part, but only with the whole, the appearance of the Redeemer of Israel in all his power.” While Sofer lived and wrote long before Zionism
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