Friday, February 3, 2006
Avraham Shmuel Lewin quotes Aaron Klein on being a yarmulke-wearing Jew in Israel in, Orthodox and Israeli: When the Two Don't Mix:
Asked to explain the institutionalized anti-religious practices he's encountered, Aaron replies, "It's the new nature of the cultural war in Israel. The great divide used to be the so-called right wing versus the so-called left wing. Essentially, whether or not to give up land to the Palestinians. Now the mask is coming off and the real battle is starting to be waged openly – religious nationalism versus anti-religious post-Zionism.
"More simply, is Israel supposed to be a Jewish state based on religious ideals or will it be a state like all others that just happens to be comprised mostly of Jews? At its core, it is what all the land withdrawals and proposed land withdrawals are about, and it's what my 'yarmulke problems' are about. That is the fight I am witnessing here. The victor will determine the future of Israel and the Jewish people."...
(H/T: mal)
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Klein has got this exactly right. However, recent Jewish history - especially American Jewish history, but also that of European, Russian, and other Jewish communities - makes the answer clear: without Judaism, no sufficient basis remains for a national identity.
This explains the morbidly fascinating self-immolation of Israel's founding secular elite - it explains their total alienation from the imperative of national rebirth that was so immediately, naturally felt by their parents (to the point that they demonize and despise the settler movement that carries on those ideals), and it explains the venomously hateful attitudes towards the religious that is expressed on the pages of "cultured" journals like Ha'aretz.
All this is capped by the furious knowledge that Israelihood based on one-world socialism has failed as an alternative Judaism - just as socialism has failed around the world.
This all has strong, and painful - yet precise - parallels with the flameout of shame and fury that often characterizes the relationship between secular and Orthodox American Jews.