And now, halfway through the book, we come at last to the messiah. Not the messiah as a man or a king: he will have to wait for the next chapter. (Or we will have to wait for him, every day, for so long as he takes to arrive.) The messiah in this chapter is, instead, the messiah of Religious Zionism. This messiah is not a specific, single person, or not necessarily one. This messiah has undergone a process of allegorical interpretation at the hands of Evolutionist Religious Zionists.
The messiah depicted in the Bible is a literal, anointed king of the House of David, selected by God to rule the Jewish people. Evolutionists of a Religious Zionist persuasion made the coming of this messiah into a collective, depersonalized event, expressed in the achievement of total Jewish sovereignty over the entire historical Land of Israel. They did so, as we shall see, by rejecting the Traditionalist view that God had forbidden the Jews from establishing a Jewish state without miraculous messianic intervention and by consciously evolving classical Jewish beliefs about the messiah in the light of modern, nationalist, Zionist ideals. The messianic age as ultimately conceived by Religious Zionism is one in which the Jewish people are safe and free and rule their own land, inspired by God and his Torah. To simplify a bit: for Religious Zionism, the messiah is the state of Israel itself.
The origins of Religious Zionism can arguably be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Prussian-born rabbi named Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), seen now as a kind of proto- Zionist, began arguing that messianic salvation and the return to Zion must occur through human effort. In midcareer, Kalischer shifted from the writing of scholarly Talmudic commentaries to raising money for Jewish agricultural settlements to be built in Palestine. His efforts led to the establishment in 1870 of a single settlement, Mikveh Yisra’el, which still exists. He is counted as a forerunner to Theodor Herzl, the secular journalist usually considered the founder of modern (secular) Zionism.
Kalischer is mostly ignored or forgotten by Religious Zionists today. Instead, the intellectual origin story of Religious Zionism as told by Religious Zionists often starts with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935).1 Kook, to whom I am about to turn, had few followers in his lifetime. Yet through the legacy of his son, himself a key Religious Zionist thinker, and the posthumous influence of his writings on contemporary Religious Zionism, Kook has become one of the most important thinkers in modern Jewish history.
This chapter tells the story of what Religious Zionism is and what it has become. That story matters centrally for this part of the book’s account of Israel in Jewish thought and life, for two different, interrelated reasons.
First, over the past twenty-five years, something remarkable has occurred. The Religious Zionist idea of Israel has so infused the mainstream of Evolutionist Jewish thought, in Israel and the United States, that it has come to dominate it almost completely. In the process, this version of the idea of Israel is becoming the meta-halakhah of Evolutionism: the deeper reason for obeying the Law that infuses all Evolutionist Jewish life and thought.
Second, as secular Zionism has faded as an ideological force within Israel, Religious Zionism has gradually replaced it as the most energized, active type of Zionism, even though it was secular Zionism, not Religious Zionism, that actually built the state of Israel. Religious Zionists influence Israeli politics and public life far more than they ever have before in the country’s history. In Israel’s 2022 election, Religious Zionist parties far outperformed their historical numbers, winning, as we’ve seen, fourteen seats in the Knesset, the third-highest total of any bloc, and gaining prominent cabinet posts. After years of dedicated, self-conscious planning and preparation, Religious Zionists now also and increasingly serve in important roles in the IDF.
The transformed Religious Zionism that has become so important in Israel today is pervasively messianic. It operates by interpreting contemporary events as evidence of God’s hand in history and forming policy on that basis. As a result, messianism, in its Evolutionist, Religious Zionist form, itself influenced by secular Zionism, has come to pervade Zionist ideology and belief. The God whom secular Zionists eschewed has found His way back into Zionism, and He is transforming Israel itself in His image.
THE MESSIAH AND THE TWO KOOKS
The first Rav Kook, as he is today reverently called by Religious Zionists, was born in Russia and was an heir to the great Lithuanian Talmudic tradition. Recognized as a boy genius, he was educated among other places in the yeshiva of Volozhin, the near-mythical origin point of today’s great yeshivas. Alongside his elite Talmudic training, Kook also assimilated the mystical teachings of Hasidism. On his mother’s side, Kook was descended from a Hasidic master, the rebbe of Kopust, who traced his spiritual lineage to the founder of Chabad Lubavitch Hasidism. Kook’s intellectual formation was thus a hybrid of the two leading strands of Traditionalism, namely rationalist Lithuanian Talmudism and mystical Hasidism.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Kook began to develop a rich, idiosyncratic set of theories about the relation between Zionism and Jewish traditional belief. He moved to Palestine in 1904, spent World War I in Switzerland and in the United Kingdom, and returned to Palestine in 1919, where he was appointed the Ashkenazic (European-origin) chief rabbi of Jerusalem and then of Palestine. In this role he further developed his worldview, which is recorded in a series of dense, personal manuscripts, most of them edited and published by his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook (1891–1982).
Kook’s most profound and important teaching was that the secular Zionists then settling Palestine were unwitting instruments of God’s will. Most Traditionalists of his era condemned the classical Zionists’ radical secularism and rejected Zionism outright. A few sought various forms of arm’s-length détente with the movement. Kook, in contrast, believed that secular Zionists must be treated with respect and love. Their secularism was certainly misguided, he thought, and he hoped gently to reframe it. But he sacralized the fundamental undertaking of secular Zionism as well as the secular Zionists who were carrying it out. His brand of mysticism differed markedly from other kinds of Hasidic mysticism because, as Kook put it, “I am building the nation.”2
In his lifetime, Kook’s then-outlying worldview gained few adherents. All his life he retained warm personal relations with the European Traditionalist giants of the Torah who were his colleagues and contemporaries. And he interacted on friendly terms with secular Zionist leaders. Yet he was far too Zionist to influence Traditionalists, and far too religious for secular Zionists. He never had a large following of Evolutionist support in his lifetime, in Israel or elsewhere. His influence turned out to be generation-skipping, in a way that is unusual but not unheard of in religious history. It began to reach fruition starting in the 1970s, through the activism of the students of his son, Tzvi Yehudah, students who became the ideological progenitors of today’s Religious Zionism.
The context for Tzvi Yehudah’s transmission of his father’s teaching was very different from the one in which the elder Rav Kook had initially written. In Rav Kook’s lifetime, secular Zionism was a movement that had not yet created a state. In Tzvi Yehudah’s lifetime, secular Zionism succeeded in creating a state. A movement devoted to national self-determination typically loses steam when that self-determination has been accomplished. As a result, by the late 1970s, secular Zionism had begun to seem like a spent ideological force. Once Israel existed, and once its continued existence seemed relatively secure, the psycho-emotional intensity associated with pioneering, settling land, and giving material existence to the abstract reality of the nation inevitably declined for its most active practitioners, namely secular Israelis. (In the United States, by contrast, Zionism was gaining ground at the time.)
The terrible losses of the 1973 war also contributed to a decline in Israelis’ public faith in the institutions of secular Zionism that had, up to that point, managed to deliver almost unimaginable levels of success in creating the state. When Menachem Begin and his right-of-center Likud coalition came to power in 1977, the event was broadly interpreted as a rebuke to the socialist, secularist labor Zionism that had governed the country since its inception.* Begin belonged to a branch of Zionism known as “Revisionist” Zionism, defined by its maximalist claims to Jewish sovereignty over the entire historical land of Israel. Revisionist Zionists were not themselves religiously observant. They were hard-core nationalists who believed it was naïve folly to think that any accommodation was possible with Palestinians given that settlement of the land was a zero-sum game.3 But they ordinarily did not express the classically antireligious views of the secular socialist Zionists. If Israel’s earliest prime ministers liked to talk about “Israelis,” Begin made a point to speak often of “Jews.” The ground was ready for the surprising emergence of Religious Zionism as a force within Zionism.
Until then, Religious Zionists had been perceived by mainstream secular Zionists as relatively minor actors in the Zionist drama. There were a handful of well-known Religious Zionist politicians associated with the small National Religious Party, founded in 1956. There were a handful of Religious Zionist kibbutzim at the edge of the larger, highly secular kibbutz movement. The chief rabbis of Israel were sometimes Religious Zionists, most prominent among them Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917–1994), famous for blowing a ram’s horn at the Western Wall in June 1967 while in military uniform as chief rabbi of the IDF. Religious Zionists were perceived in Israel as betwixt and between, people who did not fit into the secular or Haredi categories and were largely harmless and even irrelevant to political life.
At exactly the mid-1970s moment when secular Zionism had begun to fade as a self-consciously effective ideological motivating force for secular Israelis, Tzvi Yehudah’s students took Religious Zionism as it then existed and effected a startling transformation of its role and character. From being perceived as a peripheral ideology, at the margins of the larger Zionist project, Religious Zionism became a vanguard movement. In its vanguard form, Kookian Religious Zionism exemplifies the living possibilities of Zionism and seeks to define its future, all the while claiming to embody the true heritage of Zionism as a whole.
This self-transformation, encouraged by Tzvi Yehudah, amounted to a kind of leveraged buyout of mainstream, secular Israeli Zionism by Religious Zionism. It had, and still has, two parts: the direct, unapologetic claim that settling the whole land of Israel is the ineradicable essence of Zionism, commanded by God; and the declaration that the Jews’ return to Zion is the divinely sanctioned fulfillment of the messianic vision of the prophets.
The reason it was so transformative for Religious Zionists to insist that the real goal of Zionism is to settle the whole historical land of Israel according to God’s command is that classical, secular Zionism never said as much. As secular nationalists, classical Zionists didn’t want to talk about God having given the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Their argument for why their state should be in Palestine was that the Jews had a long-standing historical connection to the land and that as a nation, the Jews deserved their own state. They preferred to define the goal of Zionism in nonreligious terms as the creation of a Jewish state, not the fulfillment of God’s will.
Without a doubt, mainstream classical Zionists hoped to create their state in as much of the historical land of Israel as they could get, ideally the whole of it. But mainstream Zionist leaders were always prepared to compromise as necessary on the extent of Jewish territory in order to secure a state, as evidenced by their acquiescence to the United Nations partition plan. The Camp David Accords also underscored this pragmatic willingness to compromise, as Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty.
In the years between 1973 and Camp David, the prospect of eventual Palestinian sovereignty over the West Bank became for the first time politically conceivable. To Religious Zionists, such an outcome would betray the core objective of divinely sanctioned Zionism. They began to assert openly that the God who commanded settlement of the land had also prohibited retraction from that settlement. In this religious conception, no pragmatic accommodation, however necessary it might appear, could ever justify giving up Jewish sovereignty over any part of the biblical land of Israel.
In effect, the Religious Zionists turned the secular, Zionist, nationalist logic of settlement upside down. The purpose of settling the land was not to deliver the Jews a national state. To the contrary, the ultimate purpose of the national state was to facilitate Jewish settlement of the land. The God of the Bible did not, in the first instance, command the people of Israel to create a sovereign entity. He commanded the Israelites to enter, conquer, and settle the land, and to eliminate or subjugate its inhabitants. Ancient Israelite sovereignty was (in the biblical account) a side effect of fulfilling this divine command, not the aim of it. Secular Zionism made settlement of the land subordinate to the state. Religious Zionism made the state subordinate to settlement of the land.
In practical terms, this meant that Religious Zionists must undertake their own settlement project. This they began to do in 1974, when some of Tzvi Yehudah’s students formed an organization known as Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful. Its members, believers in the divine command to settle the land of Israel, established the strategy that would become the cornerstone of Religious Zionism for the next fifty years and counting. Not only did they seek to establish new settlements with the sanction of the government, but without permission from the state or its institutions, they started to set up small communities in the West Bank, then sought to regularize those settlements and make them permanent by staying put.
The Israeli name for this practice is establishing “facts on the ground.” The basic political logic is that once Jewish families have put down roots, the cost to an Israeli government of removing those Jews from their homes becomes high enough to deter the elimination of the settlement. That logic depends on the Religious Zionists’ premise that the mainstream secular Israeli public still maintains a deep if residual belief in the Zionist project of settlement, and that they, the vanguard, are effectuating that Zionist objective.4
Tzvi Yehudah typically presented himself as a humble and loyal perpetuator of his father’s teachings, not as an original thinker in his own right. Yet his reception and interpretation of his father’s complex body of thought, perhaps more than the thought itself, became the basis for today’s Religious Zionist ideology. Tzvi Yehudah took the view that the state of Israel, which his father did not live to see, was the real-world manifestation of the divine processes that had acted through secular Zionism. The state of Israel therefore itself had a sacred, religious character insofar as it continued to serve the objectives of God’s will.
Consequently, Tzvi Yehudah’s students were of two minds about the actually existing state of Israel. On the one hand, that state had functioned as the engine of God’s will. It was therefore religiously appropriate to devote oneself to it, serving in the IDF, participating in Israeli politics, and praying not only for the state’s well-being but for its role in the messianic redemption (about which more in a moment). At the same time, when and if the state faltered in supporting the divine objective of settling the land, Tzvi Yehudah’s students were willing to disregard its authority. Gush Emunim felt little compunction about disobeying the IDF or the Israeli government to create new settlements. An offshoot of Gush Emunim, known as the Jewish Underground, reacted to the Camp David Accords by becoming full-on terrorists. The Underground exploded bombs that maimed the mayors of two Palestinian cities. They attacked an Islamic college in Hebron, killing three students and injuring thirty-three. The same group plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, hoping to precipitate a crisis that, they anticipated, might lead to regional or even global war and hasten the apocalypse.
This turn to violating the laws of the state of Israel in order to advance the objective of settling the land of Israel points to the other aspect of the elder Kook’s mystical theology of Zionism. That aspect was messianism. Specifically, Rav Kook held the belief that the settlement of the land of Israel constitutes a crucial step in the unfolding of the historical process of the coming of the Jewish messiah and the redemption of the Jewish people. That all-important belief came to motivate the students of the second Kook and their students, who are today the leaders of Religious Zionism.
THE EVOLVED MESSIAH
The history of Jewish thinking about the messiah is complicated, the subject of a whole body of scholarly literature.5 Probably the most important thing to know about it is that for most of recorded Jewish history, the messiah has not been of day-to-day practical interest to most Jews most of the time.
Of course, the eventual coming of a messiah descended from David is indicated in the Bible, discussed by the rabbis, and invoked daily in Jewish liturgy. The rabbis associated the messianic age with the ingathering of the exiled and the return to Zion. Mystical Jewish thinkers paid somewhat sporadic attention to the messiah. Systematic Jewish theology spent relatively less time exploring the timing, nature, and qualities of the future messiah, except to specify that the messiah would be a successful redeemer, a king who actually ruled the Jewish people under conditions of sovereign independence.6 One reason for the neglect of the subject may have been a long-standing need to distinguish Jewishness from Christianity, the offshoot of Judaism whose self-definition begins with the idea that the messiah (Christ is Greek for messiah, meaning the anointed one) has already come and will return. Another is the rabbis’ this-worldly, pragmatic bent, which sits uneasily with imagining an idealized future when everything will be the way it should be.
The rabbis had also been burned by messianism. According to the Talmud, during Bar Kokhba’s ultimately unsuccessful revolt against Roman rule (132–136 CE), Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest of the early rabbis, proclaimed the rebel leader to be the messiah. To the rabbis, the failure of the rebellion and Bar Kokhba’s death showed that he was not in fact the messiah. The Talmud warned against messianic speculation of the sort that involves figuring out when the end of days is coming.
Notwithstanding the warning, Jews have, at various moments in their history, been tempted by Rabbi Akiba’s path and have entered into intense periods of messianic speculation. A series of shadowy figures in Jewish history declared themselves to be messiahs. Some of the best known, such as Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791), briefly gained thousands of followers over a wide geographical expanse before they disappointed them by not actually becoming kings of a Jewish commonwealth. Others had more limited reach, like the would-be messiah (whose name we do not know) who inspired Yemen’s Jews in the twelfth century. We know of this messiah mostly because he was the subject of an important letter by Maimonides warning the Yemenite Jewish community not to validate a false messiah or be seduced by his ideas.
Classical Zionism took the history of Jewish messianism and secularized it, recasting the religious ideals of messianism as manifestations of a political, nationalist aspiration to sovereignty in the land of Israel. This metaphoric, nationalist rereading of messianism fit perfectly with secular Zionism’s aim of reimagining the Jews as a nation, not a religious group. Zionism took its very name from the act of secularizing the traditional Jewish, messianic yearning for return to Zion. In the secular Zionist reinterpretation, the Jewish nation would not be redeemed miraculously by a messiah sent from God. The nation would redeem itself.
Inevitably, the successes of the secular Zionist enterprise—the immigration of many Jews to Palestine, the establishment of the state, the conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem—raised messianic questions for religious Jews. Religious Zionism used the tools of Evolutionism to reconcile modern, secular nationalism with biblical and rabbinic messianism. It assimilated the Zionists’ secular nationalism while retaining and developing a spiritual-religious vision of messianic redemption. Religious Zionism followed secular Zionism and deviated from Traditionalist Jewish messianism in embracing the idea that the Jews as a people could take political action that would encourage or hasten the messianic redemption, rather than waiting for God to choose the timing. At the same time, Religious Zionism parted ways with secular Zionism in believing that God was necessarily immanent in the redemptive process. Following the path of Rav Kook, Religious Zionists hold that the settlement of the historic land of Israel and the creation of a nation-state there is part of the divine plan to redeem the Jewish people in a messianic age.†
The key Evolutionist element in the Religious Zionist reconception of the messiah was the interpretation of the messiah not as a single man but as a collective. Some hints that aspects of the messianic narrative might not be literal could arguably be gleaned from older Jewish sources.7 The major development toward a collective messiah for Religious Zionists seems to have occurred when Rav Kook associated secular Zionists as a group with a figure the Talmud calls Messiah son of Joseph, a precursor to Messiah son of David who fights the wars of the Jewish people and prevails over evil.8 This suggestion, made in a eulogy for Theodor Herzl, collectivized the pre-messiah. Kook was not saying that a particular secular Zionist person, even Herzl himself, was Messiah son of Joseph, but that the whole secular Zionist movement fit into the mystical-messianic paradigm that corresponded to this figure. By implication—although Rav Kook said so only obliquely—the ultimate messiah, the Messiah son of David, could also be a collective entity: presumably, the community of Jews who would govern in the land of Israel in the light of God’s Law.
Collectivizing the messiah changed the game for Religious Zionist messianism. It meant that the Jews need not wait for an identifiable individual who would reveal himself as the king-messiah. By their own efforts they could produce a collective state, ruled by Jews as collective sovereigns under God. That state’s flourishing existence would constitute the messianic age. The messiah, correctly understood, would be revealed through the process of such a state emerging. The students of Tzvi Yehudah identified that process as occurring in real time. They did not say it had been completed, to be sure. Tzvi Yehudah and his students taught that the messianic age was presently underway.
What does it mean, practically, for Religious Zionists to say that they (and the world) are living through the unfolding of the messianic age? The short answer is that it’s complicated and varies for different people within the movement. It’s common ground for Religious Zionists that the return of Jews to the land of Israel marked the beginnings of a new moment in history, one foretold by the prophets. It’s common ground that the full utopian accomplishment of the messianic ideal hasn’t yet occurred but is ongoing. And it’s common ground that current events in Israel should be understood in terms of how to guide the messianic process toward its ultimate goals.
Religious Zionists do not all agree, however, on where we are in messianic history. Some think the ultimate revelation of the messiah is imminent or even has already occurred, and that the Temple will soon be rebuilt. They are preparing to sacrifice animals and craft golden vessels for cultic use. Others think that the climactic event of restoration lies some time off. Religious Zionists do not all agree on how to acknowledge the messianic redemption in their religious practices, liturgical and otherwise.9 Most striking, Religious Zionists do not even all agree about whether the Jewish messiah will be an actual human king or whether the biblical messiah is best understood allegorically, following Rav Kook, as the whole people of Israel ruling itself collectively as an independent sovereign.
This messy messianism expresses itself most powerfully in the inward religious experiences of Religious Zionists. Their daily experience is transfused, transfixed, and transported by their messianic experience of the vicissitudes of the state of Israel in the land of Israel. The condition of living in a messianic age heightens the significance of each and every action a person takes. It can encourage or require doing things that would be strange or wrong in ordinary circumstances, including lawbreaking and sacred violence. Living in a semipermanent condition of heightened messianic awareness and sensitivity is by turns exhilarating, motivating, reassuring, risky, and crazy-making. The constant prospect of transcendent fulfillment must coexist with the ever-present fear of bitter disappointment and disillusion.
To understand daily life this way, through the prism of messianism unfolding in real time, is to transform Jewishness itself. Historically, Jews have almost always talked about the messiah as potentially coming, not already arrived. My teacher, the late great philosopher Robert Nozick, once remarked lightheartedly to me that maybe Jews could be defined as people who are always skeptical of messianic claims. After all, they rejected the idea that Jesus was the messiah. As the Sabbatean movement shows, some Jews have sometimes embraced here-and-now messianism. But, to Nozick’s point, they have done so briefly, in punctuated moments. Communities who persisted in believing in a messiah after those moments were over have typically come to be seen no longer as Jews, but as members of new religions.
Religious Zionist messianism breaks that mold. It is a living, enduring Jewish messianism. It has been around for some half a century, longer if you date it back to Rav Kook himself. Its followers have created durable, unquestionably Jewish communities and institutions, all the while negotiating their relationship to the state of Israel. Measured by their numbers and influence, they are growing, and growing fast. Their worldview requires that messianic meaning be made of Jewish life at all moments, and that is what they are doing.
RELIGIOUS ZIONISM TODAY
What does Religious Zionism look like in Israel today? If you were to observe it from the perspective of an anthropologist from, say, China, with no prior knowledge of Judaism or Jewish practices, you would immediately notice the ways that its practitioners and proponents engage with the idea and reality of Israel in their religious lives. Religious Zionist schools in Israel teach Jewish law and Jewish history through the framework of Israel. Religious Zionist young men serve in the IDF, increasingly in elite units and the senior officer corps. Before their service, many spend a year in special preparatory programs that teach the ideology of Religious Zionism even as they ready their students for the physical and intellectual challenges of military life. Some continue to study in yeshiva even as they serve in the military, through a special program called Hesder that lets them alternate Torah learning and active duty. Young Religious Zionist women either serve in the army or, much more frequently, perform alternative national service within a Religious Zionist institutional framework.
Religious Zionist yeshivas and seminaries train and produce religious intellectual leadership that directly engages the subject of the state of Israel. Many Religious Zionists vote as a bloc, supporting Religious Zionist politicians. Religious Zionists acknowledge the state of Israel in their prayers and their songs and their sermons. Official Israeli state holidays, such as Independence Day and Jerusalem Day, assume religious forms alongside traditional Jewish holidays, and so on and so forth. In short, Religious Zionists’ observed and observable Jewishness is pervasively shaped by the idea of Israel.
Settlement of land is a crucial aspect of daily life for the Religious Zionist movement. To Religious Zionists, the act of settlement is first and foremost a religious duty necessary to effectuating the fulfillment of the messianic ideal. Religious Zionists fulfill the obligation to settle the land of Israel by living in the country, and often by populating West Bank settlements.
The centrality of West Bank settlement to the movement is captured by the special position in the Ministry of Defense demanded and received by Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionism Party, after his party’s unprecedented success in the 2022 Israeli elections. Smotrich, who separately became the country’s finance minister, was also given authority within the Defense Ministry over Israeli civilian settlement in the West Bank. That includes not only planning new settlements and blocking Palestinian development but power over military enforcement of settlement activity that Israel would historically have considered illegal.10 In other words, as long as he holds the post, Smotrich has the authority to determine whether to remove Religious Zionist settlements created without permission. He can be expected to exercise that power to allow such settlements to persist, and to approve new ones. No other power could be more important to the Religious Zionist settlement project.
For today’s Religious Zionists, settlement has a further symbolic component: it is a way to claim the legacy of secular Zionism and present their movement as the true manifestation of Zionism itself. The Religious Zionist practice of creating facts on the ground resonates with the old secular Zionist settlement project dating to the decades before the creation of the state and indeed the early years of the state of Israel itself. Secular Zionists also established what they, too, called facts on the ground, first with the objective of guaranteeing the state, then with the objective of expanding it, and finally with the objective of Judaizing as much as possible of the state of Israel after 1948. As much or even more than the Religious Zionists, secular Zionists acquired land by any means necessary, whether purchase from absentee landlords or pressure or conquest. As much as or more than the Religious Zionists, secular Zionists built Jewish settlements in place of Palestinian villages, near them or on their ruins. Secular Zionists, not Religious Zionists, invented the custom of naming their settlements after biblical place names that were theorized to be the original sources of the Arabic names of Palestinian hamlets, hills, towns, and cities.11 Religious Zionists acknowledge all this, and with pleasure. It fits into their narrative of being the true inheritors of the secular Zionist project.
Today’s remaining Israeli secular Zionists, especially those on the center or the center-left of the political spectrum, are often uncomfortable with Religious Zionists’ claim that their Zionism is the true heir to classical Zionism. In opposition to the Religious Zionists’ attempt to take over Zionism itself, these secular Zionists insist that their kind of Zionism was always pragmatic. They maintain that the settlement imperative of Religious Zionism runs counter to Israel’s pragmatic interests and endangers Israel as a state. They believe that secular Zionism achieved its fundamental objectives and that the task of modern Israelis is to protect those objectives from being eroded or destroyed.
This criticism of Religious Zionism is less convincing to contemporary secular inheritors of Revisionist Zionism, like Benjamin Netanyahu. Maximalists themselves with regard to settling the land, they tend to value the Religious Zionists’ maximalism even if they themselves still hold a secular nationalist conception of the Jewish state, rather than a religious one. And crucially, the pragmatic-secular argument against Religious Zionist settlement has little weight for anyone who believes, consciously or unconsciously, that the Jewish claim to the land of Israel is based on a divine right of ownership. For the vast majority of believers, to accept the divine right to the land of Israel is to concede that the God who gave the land to the people of Israel has commanded them to settle it.‡
TWO EVOLUTIONISMS OR ONE? RELIGIOUS ZIONISM OUTSIDE ISRAEL
From my account of Israeli Religious Zionism, it should be clear how the idea of Israel has transformed this strand of Evolutionist Jewish thought and how, in turn, Religious Zionism is transforming Israel. What remains in this chapter is to show the transformative effect that Religious Zionism has had on Evolutionist Jewish thought outside Israel, in particular on Modern Orthodoxy in the United States.
For most of the twentieth century, Israeli Religious Zionism and American Modern Orthodoxy were two separate movements, sociologically and spiritually. Both were examples of Evolutionism. But Israeli Religious Zionism set out to evolve Jewish tradition to reconcile it with Zionist nationalism. American Modern Orthodoxy aimed to evolve the tradition to reconcile it with science and 1950s-era American cultural values. The primary objectives were different even as the Evolutionist method was common to both. Two different slogans capture the similar method and the contrasting emphasis. The youth movement of Religious Zionism, called Bnei Akiva (the children of Akiba, the rabbi who thought Bar Kokhba was the messiah), uses the slogan “Torah and Labor,” the Zionist labor of building a nation. Yeshiva University, the flagship Modern Orthodox institution, uses the slogan “Torah and Knowledge,” the general scientific and scholarly knowledge of modernity.
Today Israeli Religious Zionism and American Modern Orthodoxy are converging, a development with major consequences for how Israel is transforming Jewish life and thought. Really, convergence is too mild a word. The ideology of Religious Zionism is gradually coming to dominate American Modern Orthodox Judaism. In the process, Zionism, in its religious form, is becoming the meta-halakhah of Modern Orthodoxy: the deeper idea or belief that underwrites halakhic observance. I am about to try to demonstrate how this is happening. To do so, I need to tell you a bit more about American Modern Orthodoxy’s historical attitude toward Israel.
Officially, Modern Orthodoxy in the United States always espoused a form of what might be called sympathetic theoretical Zionism. The most important spiritual exponent of Modern Orthodox Zionism was Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993), who was also the intellectual father of American Modern Orthodoxy as a whole. Soloveitchik, known in American Modern Orthodox circles simply as “the Rav,” was a scion of the Brisker dynasty, a unique Traditionalist line of brilliant Talmudic scholars. The Brisker scholars, originally from the city of Brest-Litovsk,§ gave their name to an especially creative form of conceptual Talmudic analysis; to a number of important yeshivas all called “Brisk”; and to a highly conservative worldview that included confirmed non-Zionism.
Soloveitchik, the Rav, maintained the Briskers’ rigorous Talmudism but otherwise parted from his family’s tradition in a number of crucial ways. He earned a PhD in philosophy from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1932 (now Humboldt University), writing a thesis about neo-Kantian epistemology and metaphysics. He endorsed the Evolutionist, Modern Orthodox undertaking of reconciling Torah and modern thought and became the head of the rabbinical school of Yeshiva University in 1941. And he deviated from Brisker non-Zionism by embracing a moderate Zionism. His classic essay, Kol Dodi Dofek, “Hark! My Beloved Knocks,” was first given as a lecture in 1956 as part of an Israel Independence Day celebration at Yeshiva University. It depicted the state of Israel as a divine proffer to the Jewish people to embrace God’s offered salvation.12 Yet Soloveitchik himself never moved to Israel and never even visited after 1935, when he had campaigned for the position of chief rabbi of Tel Aviv but had not been chosen.13
At the level of theory, following Soloveitchik, Modern Orthodoxy welcomed the establishment of a Jewish state as an indication of the ongoing divine presence in the world. The Modern Orthodox school I attended was also founded by Soloveitchik. There we recited the Hallel prayer without its formal blessing on Israel’s Independence Day, as I mentioned earlier. But under our Brisker-conceptual form of moderate Zionism, we recited the Hallel prayer with the blessing on Jerusalem Day, which celebrated Israel’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. The Talmudic distinction had to do with the legal categorization of what sort of miracle had occurred on each of these days. The conquest of Jerusalem counted as an overt miracle, meriting the recitation of the blessing; Israel’s independence was in contrast at most an implicit miracle, which might not count.
This hair-splitting legal ambivalence about the divine nature of current events can stand in for the disconnected, largely theoretical nature of most Modern Orthodox Zionism before the 1990s. The Zionism of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States was part of what made it different from non-Zionist Traditionalism. Nevertheless, in practice, Modern Orthodox American Jews before the 1990s rarely had close personal or familial ties to Israel. We visited Israel as tourists, like other American Jews. But our political and personal identities were bound up in being “modern” Americans, not in spiritual Zionism. The movement aspired to produce a Joe Lieberman—a homegrown American U.S. senator who observed Jewish law and was the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000—not a Naftali Bennett, the son of Modern Orthodox American immigrants to Israel who went on to become prime minister of the country.
Thus, despite certain parallels, American Modern Orthodoxy and Israeli Religious Zionism remained fairly uncoordinated with each other until the 1990s. American Modern Orthodox schools taught modern Hebrew, a function of their theoretical commitment to Zionism. To do so, they employed young Israelis who had come to the United States on teaching missions, sent by specific Israeli Religious Zionist institutions like the Bnei Akiva youth movement. In my experience, these Israeli teachers—many of whom I loved—conveyed a sense of Religious Zionist culture. They were not, however, in any way central to the ideological self-definition of American Modern Orthodoxy. Their prestige was lower than that of our American rabbis. They were visitors, welcomed and respected but understood to be fundamentally different.
The respectful but somewhat distant relationship between Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism began to change markedly in the 1990s. The change was, in retrospect, driven by two factors, one sociological, the other ideological. We did not recognize it at the time, but the change would become foundational for Modern Orthodoxy.
The sociological driver was the rapid uptick in the number of young Modern Orthodox American Jews, male and female, who began to study in Israeli Religious Zionist institutions for a year after high school, beginning in the middle of the 1980s. This development reflected the increased economic success of Modern Orthodox American Jews, who could afford to pay for what was essentially another year of college. In response to growing American demand, Religious Zionist yeshivas (for boys) and seminaries (for girls) in Israel began to create year-abroad programs specifically for graduates of Modern Orthodox day schools in the United States. This change was crucial, because only a small number of elite day school graduates could speak modern Hebrew well enough to immerse themselves in a full year of study at an Israeli institution where the language of instruction was Hebrew. The year-abroad programs broadened access.
The American day schools that sent their graduates to Israel were not, at first, doing so with consciously Zionist motivations. Rather, the primary goal was to deepen their graduates’ Jewish knowledge in anticipation of their arrival on secular American college campuses, where they would have to confront the temptations of giving up religious orthodoxy. Had study-abroad been marketed to parents as a mechanism to drive eventual immigration to Israel, that would have been poor salesmanship—at the time. Modern Orthodox American Jews until the 1990s theoretically considered emigration to Israel (‘aliyah, “going up,” to use the Hebrew term favored by the Modern Orthodox) religiously desirable. But precious few Modern Orthodox Jews actually did emigrate in that era. The professional skills they were obtaining at American universities were not particularly valuable in Israel before the technology startup era of the Israeli economy. Unlike in the United States, doctors in Israel were poorly paid participants in a system of socialized medicine. U.S.-trained lawyers were not able to find jobs in Israeli law firms, where in any event their pay and status would have been considerably lower than in the United States. During my twelve years in a Modern Orthodox day school, 1976–1988, a handful of families from the school moved to Israel, and several moved back home after realizing the difficulty of the transition.
Although mostly unintended, at least on the American side, the systematic exposure of eighteen-year-old Americans to a year of intense study and spiritual-emotional growth in Israel had a transformative effect on relations between Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism. When it came to studying Traditional Jewish texts, the year typically functioned as an advanced opportunity to enhance students’ skills and knowledge, substantially improving but not necessarily transforming their abilities. Not so with regard to the spiritual project of Religious Zionism, conceived as fulfilling the messianic, Torah ideal of settling the land of Israel.
Here the ideological aspect of the transformation of Modern Orthodoxy enters the picture. In the Religious Zionist institutions they attended in Israel, Modern Orthodox American Jews encountered—and still encounter—Israeli rabbi-teachers motivated by deep and sincere religious commitment, married to an intense and spiritually infused political ideology. Nothing remotely of the kind existed in the day schools from whence they came. In the United States, the project of Modern Orthodoxy was conceived as coolly rational and intermingled with typical upper-middle-class American high school objectives, from sports to music lessons to competitive college admissions.
In the Israeli Religious Zionist institutions attended by Americans, Israeli students were either preparing for or already participating in national service, usually in the IDF. The Israelis were shaped by an ascendant, charismatic, increasingly triumphant Religious Zionist theology, the worldview on the basis of which they were preparing to live their lives, a worldview that was coming into its own for the first time in the history of Israel. At a historical moment when Modern Orthodoxy was ideologically moribund (Soloveitchik died in 1993 after a long, impairing illness), its future leaders were exposed to a Religious Zionist movement approaching its historical apogee.
The ideological problem for Modern Orthodoxy, beginning in the 1990s and continuing today, was that the movement’s successes have rendered its central spiritual project of reconciling modernity and orthodoxy insufficiently challenging to motivate its members at the level of meta-halakhah. From being a tiny movement in the post–World War II era, when all Jewish orthodoxy seemed to be on the brink of collapse, Modern Orthodoxy has gone on to become institutionally rich, successful, and self-confident. Its schools are flourishing. Its synagogues are full, much fuller than its American Jewish Conservative and Reform competitors when measured by how much of the membership actually turns up on a weekly basis.
Ideologically, Modern Orthodoxy appears to have solved the theological challenges it initially set out to address, which were the challenges of modernity. Today most people in the Jewish world (except some Traditionalists) accept that one can be an observant Jew and also acknowledge Darwinian evolution and the multibillion-year antiquity of the earth. Modern Orthodox Jews attend university and work as professionals and participate fully in American society without in any meaningful way compromising their religious beliefs or observance. They are fully accepted by modern American society and are treated as completely typical upper-middle-class citizens.
All this success tends to make the underlying motivation of Modern Orthodoxy seem too weak to generate a deep answer to the question, “Why follow the Law in this way?” If everyone takes it for granted that your undertaking is possible and can be easily achieved, then there is nothing especially extraordinary about undertaking it. Of course, believing Modern Orthodox Jews could still be motivated by the spiritual objective of fulfilling God’s will and following his Law. But that objective today appears insufficient to motivate the entire community. This might be because the faith of Modern Orthodoxy is to a significant degree attenuated relative to the literal, authoritarian beliefs of the Traditionalists. More likely it is because, like Jews from time immemorial, Modern Orthodox Jews need a meta-halakhah, a spiritual framework of motivation that justifies and transcends following the Law. Regardless, Modern Orthodoxy, at the height of its institutional success, experienced a subjective need for some new spiritual motivation, and found the idea of Israel to provide it.
In the past decade, a further ideological factor has pushed Modern Orthodoxy toward the idea of Israel: the looming danger of a renewed theological crisis with regard to reconciling Jewish law with contemporary life. Modern Orthodoxy solved the theological problems it set out to confront in the twentieth century. But it has fewer or weaker answers to the theological problems of the twenty-first century, which are focused on the compatibility of Jewish tradition with liberal values, not its compatibility with modern science or the social mores of the Baby Boomer generation. When it comes to those challenges, Modern Orthodoxy finds itself caught between vanguard Evolutionists like Rabbis Rahel Berkovits and Steven Greenberg on the left and Traditionalism on the right, unable to pick a side without losing its own reason for being. Modern Orthodoxy gave Jews a way to be modern and Orthodox. It does not seem poised to give them a way to be postmodern progressive and still Orthodox.
Faced with this potential for ideological failure, Modern Orthodoxy again needs a spiritual focal point that can keep its adherents motivated and committed. In Religious Zionism, its cousin, Modern Orthodoxy saw and sees a movement that is utterly committed and existentially motivated. So it borrowed the core of Religious Zionism as its own motivator, out of fellow feeling, influence, and admiration. Of course, it only borrowed the essence of Religious Zionism to the extent it was able to do so in its own national context. But that borrowing is nonetheless foundational and transformative.
This set of ideological challenges helps explain why today, the idea of Israel functions as the primary spiritual underpinning of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States. As the astute legal scholar and cultural critic Chaim Saiman puts it, “Israel has come to define Judaism … for [Modern] Orthodoxy, which increasingly views the State of Israel as its spiritual center and normative core.”14 Fostering identification with the state of Israel is now treated as an important, formal component of the mission of Modern Orthodox American educational institutions.¶ Instead of preparing students to remain Orthodox while at university—once a preoccupation of Modern Orthodoxy—yeshiva day schools consciously prepare their students to engage in Israel advocacy on their future college campuses. In Modern Orthodox synagogues, liturgical tunes, always an important part of Jewish religious self-expression, often derive from Israeli Religious Zionist sources, far more so than they did thirty years ago.
Politically, Modern Orthodox Jews have become overwhelmingly, almost monolithically Republican. Progressive or Godless American Jews remain as Democratic as nearly all Jewish voters were half a century ago. The reason is Israel, which has played a crucial role in the Republicanization of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community. The perception that the Republican Party is more pro-Israel has made affiliation with the Democratic Party almost unthinkable for prominent Modern Orthodox leaders. Even Donald Trump did not displace Modern Orthodox support for the Republican Party. He may actually have intensified it: Jared and Ivanka Kushner remain among the most prominent Modern Orthodox Jews in the United States.
When it comes to supporting Religious Zionism, Modern Orthodox American Jews are, on the whole, fully committed to the settlements of Israeli Religious Zionists. It is often Modern Orthodox American Jews who fund those projects. Some of the Religious Zionist vanguard in Israel are themselves American-born.
To take a spiritual example from the synagogue service, consider the prayer for the Israel Defense Forces, composed by Rabbi Shlomo Goren.** This prayer began to be recited in a growing number of Modern Orthodox American synagogues in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. Although I am not aware of a study documenting the process, I believe that the relevant context was the one in which special prayers were instituted in some of the same synagogues for the safe return of some six IDF soldiers who had gone missing in action and were thought to be held by Hamas or Lebanese Hezbollah.15 Praying for the return of those soldiers in turn created the impetus to institute a special prayer for all IDF soldiers.
Once the IDF prayer was added to the Modern Orthodox American Jewish liturgy, it took on a remarkable and distinctive pride of place. In the large Modern Orthodox synagogue where my parents pray, congregants rise for the IDF prayer and recite it aloud, alongside the prayer leader, with great fervor and intention. No other prayer in the Saturday morning liturgy in this urbane Upper East Side synagogue setting gets similar affective treatment. The IDF prayer matters spiritually to the congregants because it is a manifestation of support for the state of Israel, specifically for the state of Israel in its military aspect.
In Religious Zionism, Israel is the concrete and ever-present messianic redemptive reality, the beating center of the whole enterprise, without which the undertaking would be incoherent. For Modern Orthodoxy, Israel has moved to the religious center (under the influence of Religious Zionism). The idea of Israel is functioning as the solution to a question of practical religious life, namely, what motivates our faith? At one time, in the not-too-distant past, the answer for Modern Orthodoxy was that its faith was motivated by the imperative to be both modern and also fully committed to the Law. Now that objective, while still present, has far less motivating power than it once did. Today Israel fills Modern Orthodoxy’s need for deep spiritual motivation.
EVOLUTIONISM AND ZIONISM: THE FUTURE
Is there a necessary connection between Evolutionism and Zionism? As a historical matter, the answer might well appear to be yes. The earliest Jewish Evolutionists were always interested in Zionism, and for good reason. Evolutionism in Judaism begins with the authority of the tradition, then self-consciously interprets the tradition to match the felt necessities of the moment, moral or spiritual or otherwise. Zionism was a product of modern nationalism, itself the very archetype of a modern moral, spiritual, and political phenomenon. Naturally, Evolutionists would want to see if Jewish tradition could be interpreted to match nationalism.
In the case of Religious Zionism, the match could be made with relative ease. The return to Zion did, after all, exist in the tradition. All that was needed was for Evolutionists to explain away the idea that the Jewish people must wait for divine redemption and interpret the tradition to permit their active participation. Evolutionists also needed to allegorize the biblical messiah into collective national self-redemption. Secular Zionism had already done part of that work, so all Evolutionism had to do was insist that a similar move could be performed within the framework of authoritative tradition.
Today, it remains the case that nearly all Jewish Evolutionists are Zionists. This includes not only Modern Orthodox Jews but essentially all the left-Evolutionists who seek to achieve full gender egalitarianism within the bounds of Jewish law. Some important Evolutionist institutions, like Pardes (where Rabbi Rahel Berkovits teaches), are in Israel. In the American partnership minyanim where men and women worship on equal terms with equal participation in a mostly traditional version of the liturgy, the tunes show the marked influence of Religious Zionist yeshivot. The prayer leaders in the partnership minyanim mostly minimize the musical influence of mainstream American Conservative Judaism.
At the left edge of Evolutionism, however, conflict with Religious Zionism is brewing. Left-Evolutionists have lots of social and intellectual contact with other progressives, Jewish and otherwise. Those progressives have in recent years come to be troubled by the Religious Zionist program of settlement. Left-Evolutionists are worried about the rightward turn in Israeli politics and the high degree of difficulty in believing that Israel will remain a Jewish and democratic state. They recognize that Evolutionism itself can’t resolve the underlying political realities of where Religious Zionism has led and where it is likely to go.
One possible outcome of this emerging conflict is that some Evolutionists may increasingly begin to turn away from Israel altogether in their spiritual lives. Although this would not be easy for them, practically or religiously, it is conceivable, precisely because Evolutionists are willing to identify their liberal values and then consciously evolve their interpretation of the tradition to correspond to those values. If putting Israel close to the center of their religious and spiritual lives would lead Evolutionists into a conflict with their liberalism, then they can choose to interpret the tradition as requiring less engagement with the actually existing state of Israel and even the idea of Israel than they currently have.
Such an interpretive move within Evolutionist Jewish thought would involve self-consciously turning away from the Religious Zionism that predominates in Israel and has so influenced Modern Orthodoxy. It might lead to the interpretation of the tradition with respect to Israel that once prevailed among Traditionalists. That version of the tradition began as frankly anti-Zionist, reacting to the secularism that was characteristic of classical Zionism. It could conceivably be adopted by Progressive Evolutionists. Indeed, a few intellectuals who exercise an oblique influence on Progressive Evolutionism have already shown significant interest in the work of a prolific and influential anti-Zionist Traditionalist, the late Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, whom I will discuss in the next chapter. Daniel Boyarin, the most creative and controversial academic scholar of Talmud in his generation and a self-described anti-Zionist, is the most prominent example.16
Explicit anti-Zionism on the Boyarin model would be an extremely difficult position for the great majority of Evolutionists to maintain, not least for sociological reasons. Today almost no part of the organized Jewish world calls itself anti-Zionist. The central argument of this part of the book is that Israel has become utterly central to contemporary Jewish thought and spirituality. Left-leaning Evolutionism wants to be at the heart of Jewish life, not on the outskirts. The cost of anti-Zionism would, for now, be too great.
I feel the emerging conflict within left-Evolutionism particularly strongly, probably because I was raised both as an Evolutionist and as a liberal. As a young person, I was taught that Evolutionism offered the best way forward for Jewish life. Of all the belief patterns I knew, only it, I believed, could combine authentic Jewish tradition with the capacity to meet new moral, ethical, and intellectual challenges. Left-Evolutionists hold that view and are striving mightily to evolve Jewish law toward genuine equality for all Jews, regardless of sex or gender identity or sexual orientation.
Yet as I grew older, I came to understand how protean Evolutionism is, how capable it is of adapting to any modern idea, not just the liberal ideas I liked. Evolutionism had the capacity to evolve into the moderate-seeming Religious Zionism espoused by thinkers I admired and admire still. But it also had the capacity to evolve into extreme messianism. Extreme Religious Zionist messianism has given us Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and has contributed to the ideas of some even more frightening figures whom I will discuss in the next chapter. And that Religious Zionism hasn’t restricted itself to Israel. It has come to infuse American Jewish Evolutionism. The upshot is that Evolutionism need not lead to a form of Jewishness compatible with liberal democratic moral values. American Jewish Evolutionists, whether right-wing or left-wing, need to understand that Religious Zionism as it is presently developing in Israel is increasingly diverging from contemporary American ideals about how all people should be treated and what rights all people deserve.
Some American Evolutionists may find themselves perfectly willing to accept Religious Zionist politics, even if those politics become undemocratic. Israel is not the United States, they may feel, and the democratic principles they favor in their own country may not have to apply in the Jewish state. Some right-wing American Evolutionists may actually think the United States could do with being less liberal and egalitarian in its own government. That is their prerogative, and in my view it is perfectly legitimate for their Jewish beliefs to influence their beliefs about U.S. politics and about democracy more generally. To the extent they find their Jewishness pulling them away from democratic beliefs, they will be privileging their religious faith above their inherited political norms.
For left-leaning Evolutionists, the challenge is to acknowledge and admit that not all evolution of the Jewish tradition counts as progress toward the ideas they hold dear. Jewish tradition is capacious. Much—most—of Jewish tradition isn’t especially liberal or democratic. Ultranationalism and extremist messianism can be derived from the tradition, just as liberalism and democracy can be derived from it by the process of conscious evolution. The crisis facing Evolutionist Jews is how to balance those different possible interpretations of the evolving tradition.
For its part, Traditionalism over the past thirty years has come to offer a different model of engagement with the idea and reality of Israel than has old-school religious anti-Zionism. Traditionalist thinking about Israel has itself evolved, from rejection to accommodation to a distinctive mode of identification. The Traditionalists don’t acknowledge evolution, of course. They cannot call themselves Zionists and so cannot easily embrace the official positions of Religious Zionism. Nevertheless, their thinking about Israel is undergoing a sub rosa transformation. It is to that process of development—denied by Traditionalists—to which we must now turn.