The Scrolls Of Independence, healing Israeli alienation

The false dichotomy

It is customary to read the Scroll Of Independence on Yom Haatzmaut, as it reminds us of our nation’s sacred moral as well as legal principles. However, we, the Jewish people, have another more ancient founding scroll, the Torah Scroll. This is partly why, early on, Israeli society has empowered the extreme Jewish religious right, seemingly Torah committed, to assume legal and cultural control over this cherished original document.

How did it happen? Then prime minister, David Ben Gurion, entrusted matters of legal Jewish status and law, such as marriage, divorce, burial, conversion, sacred text study, and more, into the hands of an Orthodox state rabbinate. The practical urgencies of building and protecting the new state dominated our leaders’ agenda. As a result, ensuring equal representation for the entire range of Jewish faith styles, and ideological world views where put on the back burner thus solidifying the Orthodox minority’s power over shaping Jewish identity and the Jewish character of the state. This choice has created deep alienation amongst us.

Let’s take a close look at the religious/secular alienation dynamics. 

• The first and most conspicuous is the alienation between the Orthodox and secularists in the form of mutual judgments and animosity. 
• The second is inter-secular. Secular persons seem alienated to a large extent from their very own Jewish identities. They have failed on the whole to fully and coherently blend their Jewish and universalistic values. In the secularist camp people are typically more fluent within the universal-values space but are too often ignorant about the Jewish-identity space. 
• The third is inter-traditionalist. Stuck in defending the Jewish traditions of the past, ultra-traditionalists are alienated from the seismic significance of the formation of the State of Israel.  They don’t seem to grasp the demand for change that goes along with this newfound sovereignty over our land and lives. Traditionalists seem alienated from modern Israel while cleaving to a diaspora past.

Moreover, most secularists, seduced by the material as well as intellectual temptations of modernity, fend off the seemingly restricting influences of Torah as they neglect to fully take responsibility for their own as well as their country’s Jewish identity. Most traditionalists, critical of, and scared by modernity invest much of their energies in fending off the seemingly negative influences of secularism while they attempt to shape Israel into a biblical fantasyland.

Secularism alone denies Israel’s Jewish roots and raison d’être.  Tradition alone can produce dangerously fanatical and isolationist fantasies. Both traditionalists and secularists are alienated from their inevitable interdependency. Each side needs the other, as together we are parts of a greater Israeli whole.

The sane center

Rambam (Maimonides) coined the terms “The Golden Mean”. He writes וְאָמְנָם יְשֻׁבַּח בֶּאֱמֶת הַמְמֻצָּע,וְאֵלָיו צָרִיךְ לָאָדָם שֶׁיְּכַוֵּן וְיִשְׁקֹל פְּעֻלּוֹתָיו כֻּלָּם תָּמִיד עַד שֶׁיִּתְמַצְעוּ. “And indeed the middle way is best, towards which a person should aim in his/her conduct always until it reaches the middle.”  (The Rambam’s Eight Chapters). He teaches that correct ideation and conduct is found in the center between the extremes. The Center of Israeli politics and Israel’s society is where Torah and universal values – rooted Jewish identity and the best of modern culture – are merging.

A far fetched vision?

On a warm and humid summer night back in Philadelphia in the early 1990s I had a long conversion with my neighbor, Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green. He, a published author, Jewish theologian, and professor of Jewish studies. I, a young secular Israeli and recent Yored (immigrant from Israel) with an enormous gap in Jewish knowledge and intense negative feelings toward Jewish religion and its Orthodox emissaries.

Rabbi Green, who used to spend a good portion of each year immersing in the Israeli zeitgeist, explained that “The future of Judaism is being shaped primarily by the secular community in Israel, not by the diaspora religious traditions. The old-time traditions are going to wither-on-the-vine while a new form of Judaism, authentic to our times, emerges” To me, Rabbi Green’s ideas were beyond comprehension at the time. I could not imagine a Judaism looking much different than the yarmulka bearing, black suited men, and Sheitel (religious head covering) wearing women I knew from back home. “Alienated secular Israelis with their wrenching identity conundrums and intense hate of the religious establishment, having a constructive role in Judaism’s future? Impossible!”, I thought.

Now, thirty years hence, Rabbi Green’s vision seems to be manifesting, bridging the Israeli alienation gap and reviving the Israeli center. Two radical assumptions are animating this “Masorti” center: 

• The first assumption is that Torah is not antithetical to modernism and secularism. To the contrary it is undeniably the core of our Jewish and Israeli identity. 
• The second radical assumption is that the long entrenched hegemony of Orthodoxy over Torah interpretation and over shaping Jewish lifestyles in Israel is categorically wrong. 

In a healthy center, Orthodox, Secular, Conservative, Humanist, Reform, and Other will collaboratively draw the contours of Israel’s Jewish and democratic identity.

Healing alienation

We, Israel’s “Masorti” center, have been awakened by the dangerously growing fission in our society. For Israel to be truly sovereign, we need to heal all three aspects of the alienation dynamics so sorely plaguing us. It is now time to rally around a new shared mission for modern Israel, which includes being an exemplary Western modern society that is strongly rooted in Torah.

Megilat HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Scroll Of Independence commits us to ensuring freedom and justice for all of Israel’s inhabitants, religious and secular, rightists and leftists, Jewish and Arab, and especially for the healthy majority in the center. Megilat HaAtzna’ut, the Scroll Of Independence, is but the second of two. The first scroll of independence, the Torah, marked Israel’s liberation from slavery and stated the people’s mission to build a society based on justice and freedom in our homeland over three thousand years ago. 

As we celebrate our 77th birthday let us resist the extreme rightwing religious hegemony while we reclaim Israel’s core common values that are articulated in both of our Scrolls Of Independence, the ancient one and the newer one. Our peace and security as well as our sense of purpose and continued thriving depend on healing our alienation dynamics both internal and external. We must reclaim both scrolls with vigor, with pride, and with love.