As we prepare to celebrate 67 years of Israel’s independence next week, religious Zionists will use particular forms to show their appreciation for the state. There will be special synagogue services. Many congregations will recite Hallel. The restrictions of the Omer period will be suspended to make way for parties, dancing and barbeques.
The religious Zionist camp is united in seeing the state of Israel as a gift from God, to be recognised and celebrated in religious ways. But there are also deep divisions among religious Zionists. One difference is about what exactly the state means in Jewish terms. This question goes to the core of what Zionism is, and indeed what Judaism is. The leading diaspora spokesmen for two important schools of thought were Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits.
Rabbi Soloveitchik was the chairman of Mizrachi, the religious Zionists of America. One of his most famous speeches was delivered in 1956 and later published as Kol Dodi Dofek, “The Voice of My Beloved Knocks”, a quotation from the Song of Songs.
Soloveitchik pointed to six “knocks” which he believed God had rapped on the door of history in the creation of the state of Israel: the vote by the United Nations to establish the state; the military victory in 1947-9; the refutation of the Church’s claim that God had abandoned His covenant with the Jewish people; the inspiration of Jewish youth; the demonstration that Jewish blood was not cheap; the creation of a safe haven for Jews everywhere. He argued that, unlike the maiden in the Song of Songs, the Jewish people should listen to these knocks and realise that the state was no happenstance, but a divine intervention in history and a testament to God’s care for His people.
This stance led him to criticise those who denied that the state had any religious significance, or opposed it on religious grounds (including his own cousins). But it also meant that he disagreed with radicals who saw it as a messianic institution. He argued that we should “be positively inclined toward the state, and express gratitude for its establishment out of a sense of love and devotion, but not attach [to it] excessive value to the point of its glorification and deification”. Further, as Israel was a real-world state with real-world problems, it fell to religious Zionists to work to improve it, in the light of Torah values and principles.
For Soloveitchik, although the state of Israel had great religious value, it did not change the nature of Judaism itself. Jews were better off once Israel existed, but Judaism remained essentially the same. Rabbi Berkovits took a much more radical position. Berkovits based his whole philosophy of Judaism (expressed in books such as God, Man and History) on the idea of the “Holy Deed”. He believed that ideals have to be actualised in practice and that is why Judaism is based on a system of mitzvot. Furthermore, mitzvot are not simply private affairs, to be carried out by individuals; they are designed to be implemented by a whole society. If that is to happen effectively, the society has to be free to live as it sees fit, in other words, it has to be independent.
For Berkovits, Judaism in exile was defective, because it was not serving its purpose of creating the ideal society. To do so, it has to be involved in every aspect of life — war and peace, law and order, health, education, finance and everything else. A nation that does not deal with the gritty realities will not be taken seriously and cannot serve as a model.
This all led Berkovits to the conclusion that “the Torah in exile lacks the life-sustaining challenge of the confrontation [with reality]. It is stunted in its vitality and, for lack of possibilities of Torah-realisation, it is greatly impaired”. He sketched out an alternative: “the Torah is alive when it meets the challenge, struggles with the problems, seeks for solutions.” In his understanding, Zionism was much more than good for the Jews, or even a sign of divine favour; it enabled the full flourishing of Judaism itself and released the bonds placed on it by the exile.
Although they approached the religious significance of the state of Israel in different ways, both Soloveitchik and Berkovits placed creating a good society at the centre of their Zionism. For them, the purpose was not to hasten the Messiah, or even to create a larger state, but to foster a national and religious community that lived up to the highest values of the Torah.
