Ideas and Opinions of Religious Leaders on the Disengagment

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Let’s Be One Nation Again - Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (English) Entered: 6/Sep/2005

 

The Gaza disengagement or expulsion has ended. But is this also the end of religious Zionism? I believe there are lessons we must learn that may enable us to emerge strengthened from this difficult period.

We've learned that we are indeed one nation, neither segment of which desires to sever itself from the other. Hence only a very small number of soldiers refused to carry out orders, despite the charge to do so from some major rabbinic voices. There was no real violence. There was majestic fortitude and an exaltation of spirit displayed by many Gush Katif settlers and leaders. Soldiers and police behaved with incredible sensitivity and restraint throughout their very difficult task. It was a heart-wrenching period in which I was both tear-filled and pride-filled to be an Israeli Jew.

So is this the end of religious Zionism? Only if the definition of religious Zionism is Greater Israel, and only if "We want Messiah now" has become not merely a wish but the description of our present historical reality.

Let us remember that Maimonides developed a position of "normative Messianism," teaching that "no one ought imagine that the normal course of events will be transformed during the messianic era, or that there will be a change in the order of creation; the world will continue in its normal course."

From this perspective no one had the right to declare, for example, that God would never allow Gush Katif to be dismantled, as some important religious leaders did; or that if we all pray together at the Western Wall our prayers must be answered. The only guarantees the Torah gives are that the Jewish people will never be completely destroyed, and that there will eventually be world peace emanating from Jerusalem.

As far as everything else is concerned, pray and work to achieve the best, but prepare to accept the worst. The Talmud teaches that "even when a sword dangles at your throat you must not despair of Divine Mercy;" nevertheless our sages also declare: "It is forbidden to rely on miracles."

A MAJOR part of working to achieve the best is by living a life of dialogue and engagement with our secular brothers and sisters. Religious Zionism from the early years of the state until the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War was based on compromise regarding land. We accepted the Partition Plan. We accepted the withdrawal from Sinai in 1956. It was our modest belief that our era was merely "the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption." We understood we were in a lengthy process fraught with advances and regressions, achievements and setbacks.

It was this attitude of compromise that prevented us from a collision course with Palestinian fundamentalists. We also differed from our own "not one inch" nationalists. And it was this spirit of compromise that fostered our ubiquitous presence in one government after another.

It is only this kind of spirit that will enable us to live together in a democratic state - even when a prime minister pushes democracy to its limits. Because we must prevent the fire of internal enmity, such as destroyed the SecondCommonwealtheven before the Romans touched the HolyTemple, to consume us today.

IT WAS after the Yom Kippur War that car-stickers began advertising "Israelhas confidence in God" - in contrast to the stickers proclaiming "All glory to the IDF" seen in the wake of the Six Day War. A significant portion of national-religious Israelis began to feel that the Messianic Age had already arrived, that Greater Israel was an unstoppable phenomenon, and that we must place settlement-building throughout Judea, Samariaand Gazaat the top of our agenda.

It was as though the Almighty had entered into a covenant with our generation: We were to build the settlements, and God would guarantee their permanence.

And we did build glorious settlements, model communities based on idealistic love of the Land, as well as spiritual and intellectual love of Torah. But, in the process, we left the rest of the nation behind.

Most of our settlements had screening committees which set up conditions for acceptance - mainly Orthodox conditions - and during the last three decades more and more national religionists chose to live in separatist communities, apart from their secular brethren. Two nations began to emerge, two nations that rarely interfaced.

We also created magnificent educational structures, from day care centers for six-month-olds to "different strokes for different folks," yeshiva high schools - running the gamut from Talmud-intensive to music- and art-intensive, from hesder yeshivot of varying philosophies to mechina, one-year prep schools for the IDF, and for life.

BUT THESE schools were all Orthodox. We did not take seriously many of the social problems plaguing the larger society - from trafficking in women to exorbitant bank interest rates to corruption in the highest places to the ever-climbing poverty graph. Although we were deeply involved in our own educational institutions, we were uninterested in what was happening in their secular counterparts.

The state's founding fathers - though hardly scrupulous about observing Shabbat - were deeply committed to the Bible and in love with the land to which they returned. They wanted to build and be built (livnot ulehibanot).

A.D. Gordon, Ahad Ha'am, H.N. Bialik, David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol were all a far cry from Yossi Beilin, who wrote that his grandfather made a mistake in not voting for the Uganda Plan at the Zionist Congress; and Shimon Peres, who claimed that the New Middle East required us to aspire to join the Arab League and that Rachel's Tomb and the Machpela Cave were merely unimportant pieces of real estate.

No wonder we have all grown so far apart.

SO WHAT must be done? We - all of us - need to engage in some soul-searching. For us the main lessons of the disengagement must be our return to normative messianism and the critical necessity of establishing a common language between the Orthodox and non-observant based on Jewish culture.

There must be a Jewish culture for the entire populace of Israel, one that permeates our music, our art and theater, our communal self-help
organizations, our schools, our TV and our radio.

We need more and more mixed neighborhoods to increase opportunities for interpersonal dialogue.

We must resurrect the original flag of religious Zionism - our three joined ideals: The Land of Israel, the Torah-culture of Israel, and the people of Israel. Never again must we allow ourselves to forget the majority of our people in our enthusiasm for the land and Torah.

I am convinced that by so doing we will, at the very least, learn to respect each other and even perhaps create the kind of shared culture and values that can transform our state into a "light unto the nations."

We can go from mirroring a decadent Western society to being a model of peace and mutual respect.

The writer, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, is rabbi of Efrat and dean of the Ohr Torah Stone colleges and graduate programs.

 

 

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