From the time Zionism was born in the nineteenth century, nearly all Traditionalist Jews rejected it as a secular heresy. Yet today, Haredi Traditionalists make up 12.6 percent of Israel’s population. The political parties that represent them play an outsize role in determining the direction of Israeli domestic politics. During the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, when Israel for the most part found itself at the global cutting edge of mandatory imposed restrictions and contact tracing, a Traditionalist named Ya‘akov Litzman, a follower of the Ger Hasidic sect, was the country’s minister of health. Asked in March 2020 about the possibility of a national shutdown in the run-up to the spring festival of Passover, he replied, “We pray and hope that the messiah will come before Passover; I am certain he will come and save us as Moses brought us out of Egypt and we will be freed.”1
With Litzman’s tacit or express approval, the Traditionalist community refused to subject itself to the Covid prevention standards that applied to the rest of Israel’s population. Yeshivas stayed open. Funerals of rabbis, with thousands of Traditionalists in attendance, took place as though there was no pandemic. Religious services continued to be held in many Traditionalist synagogues without legally mandated social distancing. The simple explanation for this permissive Covid exceptionalism was that the coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu depended on the active support of Traditionalist political parties. That is, the Traditionalists held power by virtue of their participation in the apparatus of the state of Israel.
To hear this description, you might think that Traditionalist Jews had become belated Zionists. If Zionism were defined in totally nonideological terms and restricted to participation in the life of the state of Israel, then that would be at least partially accurate. Zionism, however, cannot really be defined in nonideological terms, because Zionism in its essence is an ideology, defined as a set of beliefs and ideals that undergird a specific social or political system.
Traditionalist Israeli Jews who participate in the political, economic, and social life of the state are therefore not Zionists in any ordinary sense of the term. But neither are they anti-Zionists, as many Traditionalists were from the nineteenth century until late in the twentieth. Today, a handful of Traditionalists still recite from the script of the anti-Zionist past. But the overwhelming number of Traditionalist Jews today are non-Zionists of a new type: they are self-proclaimed non-Zionists who nevertheless identify in some ways with the actually existing state of Israel.
In this chapter, I am going to explain how even Traditionalists, the community of Jews historically most skeptical of Zionism, have had their worldview transformed by Israel over the last thirty-plus years. The core of my argument is that Traditionalists in Israel and the Diaspora have come to identify with the state of Israel in two ways: by identifying with Israel’s military might, and by pushing the state to implement Jewish law and the viewpoint of the Torah (daas Toyre).
I will argue, too, that both aspects of this identification pose tricky problems for Traditionalism. The vast majority of Haredim refuse to serve in the IDF, so identification with the state’s military prowess calls for a lot of creativity.* As for lobbying the Israeli government to apply Traditionalist values and Jewish law, it places Traditionalism in the position of advocating for a specific Jewish vision of the Jewish state, which sits uncomfortably with its official pose of non-Zionism, and it goes even further than the position of most Religious Zionists. Simultaneously, that effort puts Traditionalists into direct conflict with secular Israelis, not to mention Progressive Jews abroad, who want Israel to be inclusive and liberal.
Demonstrating this new Traditionalist identification with Israel is a subtle business, because Traditionalists don’t like to talk about it directly. Their broader worldview, after all, depends on never admitting that anything in their practice and belief has ever changed. Consequently, Traditionalists in Israel have shifted their beliefs about their relation to Israel without developing an explicitly stated theory for why their deepening participation in the life and politics of the Zionist state is religiously permissible, much less desirable.
The essence of their identification can be glimpsed in the public answer made by contemporary Traditionalists when secular Israelis complain about their ongoing refusal to serve in the military. In the past, the main Traditionalist explanation for the refusal was that military service constituted bittul Torah, a prohibited waste of time that ought to be spent studying the Law. Traditionalists sometimes added that the IDF was by design a secularizing social force and that it would threaten the religious fervor and commitment of young men if they were obligated to serve alongside secular Jews.
Today, in contrast, Traditionalists are much more likely to assert that by studying Torah in yeshivas, Traditionalist young men are defending the state of Israel. By the merit of their learning, they are earning the divine protection without which the Israeli military would fail. This idea is encapsulated in a proposal to the Knesset, advanced by the Traditionalist United Torah Judaism party, to adopt a new Basic Law (Israel’s closest thing to a constitutional amendment) titled “Basic Law: Torah Study.” The proposed law formally declares that “Torah study is a basic value in the heritage of the Jewish people” and that those studying Torah full-time must be seen “as performing meaningful service to the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
What makes this idea a form of identification with the state of Israel is that it directly allies the interests and actions of Traditionalists with the interests of the state. An anti-Zionist who believed that the state of Israel was itself an illegitimate effort to break Jewish law and tradition would not be likely to depict yeshiva students as spiritual fighters in the service of that state. A Traditionalist anti-Zionist would answer the charge of dereliction of duty by explaining that there was in fact no duty for a Jew living in Israel to defend a state whose very existence flouts God’s will. To say that the yeshiva student is fulfilling a duty to protect the state is to acknowledge not only that the state exists but that there exists a moral duty to defend it, or at least the people in it. One must identify with the state to some limited degree in order to express pride in defending its borders, spiritually or otherwise.
Although today’s Traditionalists wouldn’t like to admit it, this perspective can actually be traced back to Rav Kook, the spiritual father of today’s Religious Zionism. In a 1917 letter to the then-chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rav Kook urged his colleague in London to use his influence to get yeshiva students exempted from being drafted into the British army during World War I. In an addendum to the letter, he wrote, “The success of the country in its war depends upon scholars toiling in Torah. By their merit, the war will be won. They help the country more than combat troops.”2
Kook was not speaking of the state of Israel, which would not exist for another thirty years. He was arguing that Torah study would help the British Empire win the war. But understood along this spiritual dimension, Traditionalist study in Israel today is a form of service to the state. Its value is not merely the good of fulfilling the divine command to study Torah day and night. Its value lies, too, in its contribution to the safety of Israel. Traditionalists, in this analysis, are not shirking their duty as soldiers. They are performing the duty of being spiritual soldiers.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Traditionalist Jews, beginning in the 1990s, have increasingly developed much closer ties than before to Israel. Nearly all Yeshivish young men who can find the means study Talmud in Israel for a year or two after the age of eighteen before returning to the United States to continue their advanced Talmud studies. Many of them learn (that is the preferred verb) at the nine-thousand-student Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. A more select group learns at the Brisk Yeshiva in Jerusalem, an institution where admission is so selective that attendance is treated as a marker of real intellectual distinction in Traditionalist circles.†
As a result of this time studying abroad, a fair number of American Traditionalists now speak excellent modern Israeli Hebrew and are conversant with the realities of contemporary Israeli life. They are far more inclined to travel to Israel regularly and to buy property there than were their grandparents. Lest there be any confusion, these Yeshivish Jews could not be mistaken for Modern Orthodox. They are black-and-white Traditionalists through and through. They dress and speak and act differently from Modern Orthodox Jews. If asked, they would say that they are not Zionists, whereas Modern Orthodox Jews would say they were.
American Jewish Traditionalists also hold views about Israeli politics—and domestic American politics with respect to Israel—that reflect their identification with the state. They tend to support the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. They reject the idea of land for peace. They vote Republican in U.S. elections and supported Donald Trump partly because of his pro-Israel stance. What is noteworthy about these political positions is that they make sense only in the context of identification with a particular type of American Jewish support for right-wing Israeli governments. Where prior generations of American Jewish Traditionalists might have thought of secular Israeli politicians as irrelevant or orthogonal to their concerns, today’s American Jewish Traditionalists are knowledgeable about Israeli politics and feel solidarity with right-wing Israeli secular politicians. American Jewish Traditionalists have, in short, taken on some of the aspects of right-wing American Jewish Zionist support for Israel, all without committing themselves to Zionist ideology.
In previous decades, the Traditionalist non-Zionist theory was that they ought to treat the state of Israel the same way that their Diasporic ancestors once treated the European states in which they lived. This point of view, however, has been superseded as Traditionalists gain greater political power in Israel and set their sights on more ambitious religious-political objectives like enforcing some provisions of Jewish law on the entire population. At the same time, Traditionalists do not embrace the Religious Zionist project of treating the state as a stage in the process of messianic redemption. Traditionalists do not say that the Jewish people must be a nation in the full modern sense or that Israel is a legitimate manifestation of a justified nationalist project. It is not that they have consciously replaced their historical anti-Zionism with a new ideology of non-Zionist identification with Israel. Rather, their attitude toward the state of Israel is mostly unstated and implicit. Within their community, no one much seems to mind.
FROM ANTI-ZIONISM TO ACCOMMODATION
How did this transformation happen? Like so much about Traditionalism, the backstory lies in nineteenth-century Europe. From the dawn of classical Zionism, Traditionalists recognized the antireligious, atheistic, radically secular aspects of the movement and were horrified by its whole enterprise. They (correctly) saw Zionism as a modernist project bound up in modern ideology. The Traditionalists of the time were antimodern, or at least against the modernization of Jewish life.3
One strand of Traditionalist anti-Zionism went further, condemning Zionism as a violation of a teaching known as the “three oaths.” The three oaths are, in their origin, three parallel verses from the Song of Songs. In each, the speaker tells the “daughters of Jerusalem,” in poetic language, “I have adjured you: do not awaken or arouse love until it please.” The Talmud offers an allegorical reading of the three adjurations:
Whence these three oaths? First, that Israel should not go up [to the Land of Israel] in a wall [or, shall not scale the wall]. Second, the Holy One adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world. Third, the Holy One adjured the nations that they not oppress Israel over-much.4
The key oath is the first one, the one about the wall. It is also the most obscure. For the most part, medieval and early modern authorities interpreted the oath to mean that Jews must not go to the land of Israel en masse (as it were, in a wall of people) or by force (more or less: over the wall). This interpretation did not necessarily contradict medieval authorities who believed the Law commanded that every Jew try to settle in the land of Israel. That command could be interpreted as an individual duty, whereas the oath was a ban on collective action. This distinction between individual and collective immigration explains why it was considered appropriate for Traditionalists, both before Zionism and after, to move to the land of Israel. They understood themselves to be permitted or even obliged to do so individually, but not as part of a self-conscious effort at the movement of all Jews to the homeland.
The theology of the three oaths translated into a definitive rejection of the Zionist project, not a mere objection to its secularism. If authoritative rabbinic teaching prohibited the Jews as a people from attempting to settle the land of Israel, then (in theory) nothing, not even the desecularization of Zionism, could cure the Zionist project of its heretical qualities. The very objective of returning the Jewish people to their homeland without miraculous divine intervention was itself a violation of Tradition.
The three oaths loomed large in Traditionalist writing about Zionism until some fifty years ago.5 The most important anti-Zionist Traditionalist of the twentieth century was the Transylvanian-born Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), who established his Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He made the oaths the centerpiece of his magnum opus, a collection of his writings that, among other things, treated Zionism as the sin for which the Holocaust was divine punishment.6 The small number of Traditionalist leaders who were open to Zionism had to address the oaths to explain their apparent deviation from them.‡ Sometimes they offered clever explanations for why Zionism had not in fact violated the oaths. Other times they urged Zionists not to violate the oaths as they interpreted them.
Today, in Traditionalist circles, the three oaths are rarely discussed. The main reason is surely that the state of Israel is now an accomplished fact. Any prohibition that might have existed on settling the land en masse and trying to create a state there has now been violated. The practical question facing Traditionalists is therefore not whether to move to Israel or support Zionism but rather how to interact with the existing state. A tiny fraction of Teitelbaum’s Satmar followers and fellow travelers refuse to interact with the state at all because they deny its divine legitimacy. But this sort of after-the-fact intransigence is not characteristic of Traditionalists, who as a historical matter have largely taken political affairs as they find them rather than demanding revolutionary change. Indeed, the second of the two oaths—adjuring Jews not to rebel against the nations of the world—amounts to a kind of basic theology of political quietism, one that would reject revolutionary action against even a Jewish state.
Traditionalist skeptical accommodation of the state of Israel was set in place first by Rabbi Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz (1878–1953), known as the Hazon Ish, the first of the giants of Traditionalist Torah to bring eastern European Traditionalism to the Holy Land. The Hazon Ish was born in the town of Kosava, then part of the Russian Empire and now part of Belarus, territory that for the Jews of the time was characterized culturally as “Lithuania.” A gentle man of extraordinary piety and genius, he appears under a different name as a main character in Chaim Grade’s masterpiece The Yeshiva, the greatest Yiddish novel ever written, one of the few that can stand alongside the masterworks of Russian literature. (The novel’s English translation is now inexplicably, outrageously, out of print.) While living in Vilna (modern Vilnius), the Hazon Ish became close to the other leading gedolim of Eastern European traditionalism, who recognized his greatness. But his personal modesty precluded him from taking a public position while still in Europe. He moved to Palestine in 1933 and emerged as the major public leader of Traditionalist Jews only after the Holocaust destroyed the world of the Lithuanian yeshivas from which he had emerged.7
The Hazon Ish moved to Israel for reasons of individual faith, not as a Zionist. Once in Palestine, he self-consciously avoided giving direct political advice to the Agudat Yisrael party, the political party that had represented Traditionalist Jews already in Europe and continued to do so in Palestine. He preferred to express his reservations about the possibility of a Jewish state obliquely. Once the state of Israel emerged, however, the Hazon Ish did engage in an intense political fight over the military conscription of women, a crucial piece of Zionist-socialist modernism that he rejected.
In a famous meeting with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the Hazon Ish was asked how religious and secular Jews should live together. In response, he referred to a Talmudic passage in praise of the value of compromise (in Hebrew, pesharah). As a model of compromise, the Talmud gives the example of two camels simultaneously approaching a narrow path up the hill at a place called Beit Horon, where there was no room for both camels to walk side-by-side. If one camel is bearing a load and the other is not, the Talmud says, the load-bearing camel should go first. The Hazon Ish told Ben-Gurion that observant Jews were burdened by the load of Torah and the commandments and that secular Jews should therefore “clear the way” for them.8
Ben-Gurion may have been a secularist, but he replied, in true Talmudic form, with a question: “And non-religious Jews are not carrying a load? And the settlement of the land is not a heavy burden?” In the ensuing debate between the two men, Ben-Gurion asserted that even the radically socialist, antireligious youth of the Shomer ha-Tza‘ir (Young Guard) movement were “protecting you.” The Hazon Ish replied, “They are sustained because we learn Torah.”
The exchange reflected two disparate worldviews: “If those young men weren’t protecting you, the enemies would have destroyed you,” Ben-Gurion rejoined. The Hazon Ish answered, “On the contrary, because of our Torah learning, they can live and work and guard.” Ben-Gurion tried again: “I do not discount the Torah, but if there are no living humans, who will study Torah?” The Hazon Ish answered, “The Torah is the tree of life, the elixir of life.”
It has sometimes been thought that the Hazon Ish was advancing a theological view of the superiority of Traditionalism to secularism. Ben-Gurion may have believed something of the sort, given his testy response. A better interpretation of the Hazon Ish’s invocation of the Talmudic passage about the two camels is that he was suggesting the value of compromise between the state of Israel and its Traditionalist population, which was then extremely small. Compromise was the point of the Talmudic passage about the two camels. The Hazon Ish was proposing compromise as a mode of coexistence.
Implicit in this proposed compromise was mutual accommodation. If the state of Israel were to accommodate Traditionalist Jews, then those Jews would impliedly not impair the state. The Hazon Ish was not offering any formal recognition to the state of Israel or its prime minister. But he was acknowledging that the state was an entity with which compromise could legitimately be effectuated.
As for his suggestion that because of Torah learning, secular Zionists were able to “live and work and guard,” the Hazon Ish was articulating a point of view importantly different from Rav Kook’s view that scholars studying Torah win wars. He was expressing (in response to Ben-Gurion’s insistence on the primacy of human agency) the view that the Torah, as the tree of life, provides a reason for humans’ being. God’s protection of all the Jews of Israel was meant to protect the continuity of Torah. In the Hazon Ish’s formulation, the point of Torah study was not to protect the state. Rather, Torah study was the basic element of human value and worth. This was the Traditionalist belief in a nutshell.
The compromise the Hazon Ish was proposing subsequently came into being, notwithstanding Ben-Gurion’s instinctual skepticism of it, as a result of Israel’s form of parliamentary government. Israelis elect the Knesset by proportional representation, voting for parties rather than individual candidates. Then the parties form coalition governments. As a result, even when there were few Traditionalist voters and the Haredi parties held only a handful of seats in parliament, those parties were able to achieve an outsize influence by joining whatever coalition government needed them—at a price. Israeli Traditionalists started by demanding exemption from military service. Ben-Gurion and his allies grudgingly agreed, both because the Haredi community was so small and because, as secularist-nationalists, they could not imagine that Traditionalism would grow so much so fast.
Over time, as the numbers of Haredi voters increased, Traditionalist parties multiplied and their influence expanded. These parties gained state subsidies for housing, welfare, child care, and religious education. These all matter vastly for a community that has many children and nearly half of whose adult male members study Torah rather than working full-time. By serving in ministerial posts, Haredi politicians get access to patronage jobs and the power to target government aid to their neighborhoods and institutions.
By the 1990s, Haredi engagement with the state of Israel through political participation and patronage had drastically reduced the number of anti-Zionists among them. Traditionalist politicians initially avoided serving as government ministers, which was a mild symbolic sign of refusal to legitimate the state. But that taboo was broken because the power associated with controlling ministries was too valuable to be passed up. As Traditionalists gradually became full participants in Israeli political life, they began to use political rhetoric that sounded more like mainstream Israeli democratic discourse, asserting their own rights as equal citizens and occasionally even calling for national unity.9
Yet political participation in government and identification with the state are not the same, particularly for non-Zionist Traditionalists who had tried to think of the state of Israel as a nonsacred entity akin to the government of a Diaspora state. Identification came later than participation, not alongside it. Its unlikely originator was a Russian-born Hasidic master who came into his full flourishing in the United States and never visited Israel in the entirety of his long, productive life.
THE REBBE, THE STATE, THE MESSIAH
Traditionalist identification with the state of Israel is entirely distinct from Religious Zionism. Its origins lie with the most fascinating, important, and controversial figure in post–World War II Traditionalism: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the seventh successor to the leadership of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, known in his lifetime and beyond as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or, for short, “the Rebbe.”
Schneerson inherited the Chabad dynasty after marrying the middle daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. Steeped in Talmud and Hasidic thought from his Russian childhood, Schneerson deviated from the usual path of a Hasidic master by attending lectures at the University of Berlin between 1928 and 1933 and by earning an engineering degree in Paris while living there with his wife before 1940. His erudition, piety, and charisma, combined with his descent from an earlier Lubavitcher Rebbe, led to his installation at the head of Chabad in 1950 after the death of his father-in-law, who had no son.
In a public career that spanned the time of his installation to his passing on the third day of the Jewish month of Tammuz in 1994, Schneerson made three transformational contributions to Traditionalist Judaism in general and Chabad in particular. First, he established what might be called “outreach Traditionalism”: an institutionalized practice of sending emissaries (in Hebrew or Yiddish, shluhim) to locations throughout the world. Once in post, they would buy a house, form a small congregation to pray in it, and attempt to draw local non-observant Jews into a rudimentary religious community by the force of kindness, charisma, and convenience. The outreach movement further included public performances of the commandments such as lighting large Hanukkah menorahs in public places, waylaying passing pedestrians and inviting them, if Jewish, to don tefillin, or urging them to wave the palm frond on the festival of Sukkot. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chabad emissaries also took up official rabbinical positions in various eastern European countries, enmeshing them in complex governmental and intergovernmental politics, including, in one case, a close connection to Vladimir Putin, and in another, a strong public advocacy of Ukrainian resistance to Russia. Chabad schools, established wherever sufficient demand could be identified or created, were another important aspect of the outreach.
All this outreach represented a radically new direction for Traditionalist Jews. Since the nineteenth century, Traditionalists had occupied a position of conservative defensiveness relative to nonobservant Judaism. The Rebbe’s emissaries, in contrast, were undertaking an enthusiastic, optimistic, and as it were “offensive” mission to bring Jews back to the fold of faith. The Merkos Shlichus campaign that sent young rabbis to far-flung places began as early as 1942. Gradually it extended to countries around the world, so many that a pair of scholars has associated Chabad outreach with the Peace Corps created under John F. Kennedy’s presidency.10 Whatever Schneerson’s influences, the conceptual foundations of Chabad’s global strategy are wholly original. Although today some other Traditionalist groups, in particular Yeshivish Traditionalists, have begun to emulate the Chabad outreach model in part, Schneerson deserves credit for its invention.
The second transformation associated with the Rebbe was his unbridled messianism. Throughout his career, Schneerson developed a complex religious-philosophical theory of a potential messiah who existed in all generations and would become manifest in the era that merited his unveiling. This theory, on which volumes have been written, drew on earlier trends in Jewish messianic thought. And as we shall see, it joined the profound mysticism of earlier Hasidic masters, including those of the Lubavitch dynasty, to Maimonides’s essentially political, rational account of the messianic age.
For now, the crucial point about the Rebbe’s messianism is that at its core lay the idea of the potential king-messiah and the possibility of his actualization. That actualization was in turn captured in a Hebrew-Yiddish word, mamash. The word can mean “actually” or “literally” or “definitively” or “really.” And it is spelled with the three Hebrew letters that made up the Rebbe’s monogram, MMSh.
Following the Rebbe’s teachings, his followers began, quietly in the 1970s and then with growing fervor through the 1980s and early 1990s, to believe and assert openly that Schneerson himself was the potential messiah of his generation. Through pursuit of his spiritual program, they could bring about his unveiling and actualization. The public appearance of the immanent messiah was imminent.
The resulting wave of overt Chabad messianism crested after the Rebbe’s death. Many followers insisted that the revealed messiah had not died but had only gone into occultation in anticipation of an eventual spiritual return. Nearly the entirety of the Traditionalist world outside Chabad rejected Schneerson’s messianic status, both before and after his death. His most important “Lithuanian” (i.e., non-Hasidic) Traditionalist contemporary, Rav Elazar Man Shach (1899–2001), went so far as to warn that Chabad messianism might cross over into idolatry. Yet the pervasive and continuing influence of Chabad messianism represented the introduction of immediate messianic speculation and discussion into Traditionalist Jewish life and thought for the first time since Traditionalism itself began to coalesce almost two hundred years ago.
The third, related transformative aspect of Schneerson’s worldview was a radically different Traditionalist attitude toward Israel. The Rebbe’s teachings repositioned the state of Israel in Jewish life. The state was not a human-driven step in messianic redemption, as the Religious Zionists would have it, nor a wholly profane nationalist project, as most Traditionalists had long believed. Under the influence of Schneerson’s thought and actions, it became possible for Traditionalists to view the existing state of Israel as a partial blueprint for a potential messianic actualization. That messianic actualization would take place through the miraculous emergence of a king-messiah who would rule Israel as a religious state, marking the ultimate manifestation of the messianic promise.
Although to a casual observer this vision might not sound so different from Religious Zionist messianism, in fact it differed substantially. Unlike Religious Zionism, Schneerson did not collectivize the messiah. He did not treat Zionism as legitimate. The fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe (Sholom Dovber Schneerson, the Rebbe Rashab) had openly opposed secular Zionism. His dynastic successor, the seventh in the line, could not have explicitly disagreed. He did not hold that the state of Israel was a necessary stage in the fulfillment of the messianic process. In his view, the state did not have any inherently sacred qualities. Rather, for Schneerson, the state of Israel was an unmentioned—almost unmentionable—occasion for the gathering of Jews in the land of Israel in readiness for a miraculous messianic intervention.
The jumping-off point for this remarkable idea was Maimonides’s rationalist interpretation of a Talmudic dictum, “There is no difference between our days and the days of the messiah other than the [salvation of Israel from] subordination to the kingdoms [of the world].”11 For Maimonides, the messiah was not a wonder worker or a resurrector of the dead but rather a kingly political leader capable of enforcing the laws of the Torah and defending Israelite sovereignty. By embracing this vision, laid out in Maimonides’s code of Jewish law, Schneerson connected the messianic age with the reign of Torah law in an independent Jewish state. From this perspective, the state of Israel could be understood as a kind of messianic entity in potentia, having achieved a measure of independence and sovereignty while still lacking a legal system based upon the true Law and a messiah-king to enforce it.
Schneerson’s attitude toward Israel could not be called a full-blown theory of the Jewish state or its role in history, because Schneerson assiduously avoided articulating such a theory. For a highly systematic creative genius who spoke and wrote prolifically for some fifty years, this absence cannot have been accidental. Schneerson did not articulate a grand theory of Israel because he did not want to. Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct the steps that led through his well-articulated theory of outreach and his even better-expressed theory of potential messianism to his distinctive views about Israel. From there, it is possible to glimpse the ways that Schneerson’s beliefs about Israel have come to influence the rest of Traditionalist Jewish thought, even as non-Chabad Traditionalist Jews reject the Rebbe’s messianic theology and much of his approach to outreach.
Chabad outreach as conceived by the Rebbe interacts in a complex way with the establishment of the state of Israel and the three-oaths idea that preoccupied Traditionalist anti-Zionists like Schneerson’s Hasidic nemesis, the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum.12 Sending emissaries wherever Jews might be found throughout the world implied that the Jews had not all collectively chosen to immigrate to Israel, and so were not violating the oath against scaling the wall. If Jews still existed in the many places where Chabad emissaries went, that was, in a certain sense, evidence that the ingathering of exiles had not yet occurred.
Crucially, the Chabad emissaries were not setting up shop at the four corners of the earth to convince Jews to move to Israel. To the contrary, by their presence, Chabad Houses (as they are called) are designed to enable Jews to live anywhere while still performing the commandments. While this goal of facilitating Jewish existence everywhere on earth was not inherently anti-Zionist, it certainly undercut the Zionist aspiration to universal voluntary immigration. Even as Zionism was declaring that all Jews all over the world had only a single homeland, namely Israel, Chabad emissaries were suggesting that Jews belonged wherever they wanted to live and could prosper in those places, with the emissaries functioning as the glue that would hold local Jewish communities together. In a remarkable development that demonstrates how the Chabad emissaries sustain the Diaspora, today at Passover or Yom Kippur one can find Israelis on their postmilitary service wanderjahr congregating at Chabad Houses in places like Kathmandu, Mumbai, and Shanghai.§
Chabad’s emissaries all over the world paralleled the state of Israel’s own diplomatic outreach through its official diplomatic corps. In a real sense, the emissaries even competed with Israeli diplomacy. Where the government of Israel might have expected that its diplomatic representative was the only representative of the Jews in a given far-flung place, in fact the Chabad emissaries, with their distinctive Traditionalist garb and their own diplomatic pretensions, might well be seen by locals as more emblematic representatives of world Jewry. The network of Chabad emissaries functioned as a competing alternative to or refutation of the Zionist claim to be the Jewish state speaking on behalf of Jews. While the Rebbe lived, he—not the president or prime minister of Israel—was arguably the Jewish leader with the greatest global visibility, especially in places where the Chabad House was the only Jewish institution to be found.
Once this outreach is taken into account, Chabad messianism emerges as a competitive messianism—competitive, that is, with the secularized nationalist messianism of the Zionist state. The classical, secular Zionist state sought to embody the ingathering of exiles and the expression of Jewish sovereignty. Religious Zionism desecularized that self-consciously secular version of Jewish messianism and hence ascribed redemptive, messianic religious meaning to the state as national collective. Chabad messianism showed Israel not to be the messianic state, while hinting at the possibility of integrating the Jewish state into an eventual, actual messianic age with the Rebbe as messiah-king.
Here lies the core of Schneerson’s unique attitude to Israel: the presently existing state can be construed as a potential precursor of the genuine messianic state to come. To create it would take a miracle, the miracle of universal Jewish embrace of Jewish Law, and hence of the messiah-king. That miracle, however, might occur by what would outwardly appear to be natural means. Chabad never ruled out the possibility of more obvious miracles, like the magical translocation to Jerusalem of the Rebbe’s home at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But in case the miracle should not take that form, Chabad built an exact replica of 770 (as the home is called) in the Israeli village of Kfar Chabad, close to Tel Aviv.13
Thus, as the Rebbe’s followers speculated, not about when the messiah would come, but about when the messiah who had already arrived would reveal himself, they were picturing their messiah-king, the Rebbe, taking the reins of the existing Israeli state as its king. They expected him to replace Israel’s governing structure with divinely validated kingship and its laws with the Torah as interpreted by the rabbis. The state of Israel was, in other words, part of their messianic imagination, even though they did not attribute sacral or redemptive character to the existing state, as Religious Zionism does.
In congruence with this vision, Schneerson’s attitude toward the state of Israel amounted to identification, even as he never said anything formally Zionist. Instead, the Rebbe expressed support for the state’s military undertakings by praying openly for the success and the safety of IDF troops who were sacrificing on behalf of the Jewish people.14 He argued that Jews had a Torah obligation to defend themselves from external physical threat, wherever they might be. This obligation extended to Jews living in Israel, who must defend themselves collectively against their foreign enemies. The IDF was the entity fulfilling this obligation.
In this way, Schneerson created a mechanism for identification with the state of Israel through its military character. This was a doubly radical innovation for Traditionalism. Traditionalists like the Hazon Ish had rejected the IDF root and branch as the secularizing force of a secular Zionist state. The exemption from mandatory conscription was constitutive of Israeli Traditionalism. The Rebbe not only reversed this view. He used his praise of the IDF as a point of identification with the state—a state very much self-identified with its own citizen-conscript military. Subtle though it might seem, the transformation aligned and identified Chabad Hasidim with the state of Israel, all without a stated theory about Zionism or the character of the Israeli state.
Equally important, as Israel-Palestine negotiations progressed, the Rebbe publicly opposed the exchange of land for peace and insisted on God’s grant of the whole land of Israel to the Jewish people.15 This development mattered because by taking a stand on the single most important issue in Israeli politics, Schneerson was further identifying with the state of Israel. He was offering his opinion about the course the ship of state should steer. Crucially, he was doing so not as an outsider but as a self-identified participant in a global Jewish conversation about the future path of the Zionist state.
To this extent, if to no other, the Rebbe was implicitly accepting the Zionist claim to act on behalf of the Jewish people as a whole, and even to rule legitimately in the land of Israel. He cared what the state would do because the state was, at a minimum, the entity assuring the safety of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Moreover, by objecting to the cession of Jewish sovereignty over any part of the divinely gifted land, the Rebbe was acknowledging that the state of Israel was already exercising Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel. By implication, that sovereignty was in some sense legitimate. If and when the king-messiah-Rebbe would assume his throne, the sovereignty would be his—and God’s.
What the Rebbe left unanswered was what to make of the state of Israel if it turned out that he did not actualize his potential as the king-messiah by assuming rule over it. When the Rebbe died, his followers were left without guidance on how to proceed. The third of Tammuz, his death day, became a central event in their spiritual lives. It is the newest recognizable date to be added to the Jewish calendar, commemorated only by Chabad Hasidim but familiar to all Traditionalist Jews, regardless of their opinion of the Rebbe.
Following the Rebbe’s death, a divisive messianist crisis gripped Chabad. But both factions, those who accepted the Rebbe’s death (in some sense) and those who supported the theory of the Rebbe’s occultation, retained his identification with the state of Israel. A growing percentage of male Chabad Hasidim in Israel accept conscription in the IDF rather than obtaining exemptions. Those who do can plausibly be termed Zionists, even if they are Zionists without a theory of Zionism.
IDENTIFICATION WITH ISRAEL WITHOUT THE MESSIAH
In contrast to Schneerson’s identification with the state of Israel, Traditionalist anti-Zionism long held that if the secular Zionist state is wholly illegitimate, then there is no reason for the state to wield sovereignty. Today a tiny number of Traditionalists, some followers of the Satmar Rebbe and some members of a group called Neturei Karta (Aramaic for “Defenders of the City”), embody that anti-Zionist position by expressing symbolic sympathies with entities like the government of Iran or even Hamas. Neturei Karta in particular looks for public opportunities to appear in anti-Israel political postures. Thus one of its spokesmen, Rabbi Dovid Feldman, addressed a rally in Montreal in the aftermath of the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, wearing Traditionalist black and white with a green and red Palestine scarf over his shoulders. He told the crowd that the very existence of the state of Israel was “criminal” and “forbidden” according to Jewish law. A TikTok video of his remarks had more than half a million likes as of this writing, surely the most viewed Neturei Karta speech of all time.
The numbers of such radical anti-Zionist Traditionalists are minuscule. Their importance lies in their isolation, even from other Traditionalists. By their radical anti-Zionism, they unintentionally hold out to mainstream Traditionalists the possibility of identifying with Israel. Mainstream Traditionalists have thus been able to refine their relationship to Israel as against various options without defining it. Unlike the Satmar/Neturei Karta version of anti-Zionism, they do not consider the state of Israel an enemy. That leaves them with the question of what their relationship to the state in fact should be.
Increasingly, for Traditionalists in and out of Israel, the answer corresponds to the answer developed by the Rebbe, without his explicit messianism. Increasingly, Traditionalists identify with the IDF’s military successes. Unlike some Chabad Hasidim, most have no desire to serve in the IDF. But they do not see the IDF as necessarily sacrilegious. (The increasing prominence of Religious Zionists in senior officer ranks makes this perspective more plausible than it was when the IDF really was dominated by secular, antireligious officers.) These Traditionalists do not pray in synagogue for the safety of the IDF’s soldiers. But their children might dress up as IDF soldiers on Purim, the Jewish Halloween/Carnival. This is a sign of identification, however mediated by the topsy-turvy theme of the holiday. The Traditionalists’ children are not dressing up as U.S. Marines or as professional athletes.
Beyond identification, Traditionalists, especially in Israel, increasingly think about how the state of Israel may be governed by Jewish law. They don’t discuss this future in specifically messianic terms. They prefer not to speculate too concretely about the coming of the messiah, lest they fall into the Chabad trap. But in the current Knesset alone they have proposed and advocated for laws that enforce observance of the Sabbath, that prohibit the consumption of bread and other leavened products in public hospitals on Passover, and that would enforce sex-segregated bathing at public pools and in national parks.
The proposed quasi-constitutional Basic Law: Torah Study, mentioned above, further demonstrates the Traditionalists’ interest in the legal order of the state. The practical effect would be, at a minimum, to make the exemption from conscription for Torah study permanent. More fundamentally, such a Basic Law would mark the embedding of Haredi ideology into the state of Israel’s formal constitutional structure. This constitutionalization of Haredi belief would exemplify the gradual process whereby Rav Kook’s idea that Torah study protects the state has worked its way into Traditionalist discourse. It is almost impossible to imagine the Hazon Ish seeking such a law, despite his opposition to conscription. To seek constitutional status for Torah study would have been—and would be—to acknowledge the state of Israel and its laws as fit and proper vehicles for enshrining Torah values.
Another example: on the assumption that pedagogy is a guide to cultural self-conception, consider Just Imagine! COVID-19, a 2021 graphic novel produced in Israel in Hebrew and English. Printed in a large-format hardback suitable for kids, the comic explores the counterfactual of how the Covid crisis would have been handled by a government in Israel guided entirely by Jewish Law.16 In the book, policy decisions are made by a government that takes its lead from the authoritative Torah giants, the gedolim. They in turn address the most difficult questions using daas Toyre, the view of the Torah, the practical wisdom inspired by and embodied in the leaders’ Torah knowledge. How the imagined Torah state came to be is not discussed, nor are the halakhic underpinnings of such a state theorized. The scenario of Traditionalist rabbinic control is, rather, taken for granted. There is no mention of elections, but also no mention of a messianic king or prince.
The purpose of the graphic novel is, on one level, to offer an account of desirable Covid policy from the perspective of Jewish law. The book’s approach is informed by the primacy of Torah study and prayer and faith in God. Simultaneously, it also recognizes the value of medical science and the halakhic duty to preserve life by relying on the best medical advice.
At a deeper level, the book aims to present the worldview and framework of Traditionalism as adequate and appropriate to the government of a functioning modern state in Israel. Its message is that if the Traditionalists were in charge, the Covid crisis would have been handled smoothly, not only by the grace of God but by a well-run, God-fearing state. (Recall that a Traditionalist was the minister of health when the Covid crisis began, but he was not the final authority, as the gedolim would be in the book’s utopia.) That was definitively not the approach taken by earlier non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Traditionalists. They saw Jewish law today as restricted to the limited spheres of ritual law and the law of private property. They did not anticipate expanding it into areas of regulatory policy such as those implicated by public health measures taken during a global pandemic. The Traditionalist authors of the book may not at present have a comprehensive program they would like to see implemented by legislation in the Knesset. But they can picture the circumstances in which the existing influence of Haredi politics on Israeli law would expand into total legislative control.
Without the influence of Schneerson’s speculation about a state governed by a messiah-king under the Law of the Torah, it is unlikely that Traditionalists would be writing about a Torah state with this much descriptive detail. To be sure, the rest of Traditionalism rejected and rejects the Rebbe’s form of messianism. And there can be no doubt that rising Traditionalist political power contributes to the imaginative possibility of Traditionalist rule under Jewish law. Yet the imaginative leap from today’s state of Israel to a state governed by Jewish law need not require supernatural divine intervention. All it takes is to imagine a Traditionalist majority assuming power and enacting its own constitutional revolution in the existing state of Israel. What is historically significant about this picture is that Traditionalists are increasingly picturing how they would govern Israel if they came to power. And this is happening in a world where Traditionalist parties made up the second-largest bloc in Netanyahu’s 2022 government, larger even than the bloc of Religious Zionist parties.
Seen against the backdrop of the old Traditionalist anti-Zionism or non-Zionist quietism, this development marks a victory achieved by Zionism in relation to Traditionalism. Traditionalists who once rejected the state are now aiming to insert their values into it and govern under it. Yet secular Zionists, past and present, must surely see this victory as Pyrrhic, or rather as a defeat. To secular Zionism, Traditionalism was a dead end of Diasporic history, to be supplanted by nationalism. Instead, Traditionalism—if it continues on this course—proposes to supplant the very nationalism that created the state of Israel. In terms that would have made some sense to Rav Kook, the ideologue of Religious Zionism, secular Zionism would then turn out to have been an unwitting vehicle for the ultimate victory of the Jewish spirit contained in the Law itself. God would remain enthroned and would be recognized as the ultimate authority, having acted through apparently secular historic forces. The result would be, let us say, non-Zionist Zionism: a nonmessianic Traditionalist state governed by Jewish law.
THE DEVIATIONISTS—AND THE FUTURE OF POST-ZIONIST ZIONISM
I have been arguing in this chapter that mainstream Traditionalist Jews, both inside and outside Israel, have significantly shifted their attitudes to Israel in recent decades. Notwithstanding their official non-Zionism, Traditionalists identify with Israel, especially its military undertakings. Traditionalists increasingly imagine the possibility of Israel transformed into a state governed by Jewish law. To underscore this mainstream transformation, I would like to end the chapter by considering a marginal, fascinating, and terrifying deviation from Traditionalism and Religious Zionism. The people I am about to describe are extremists even to other extremists. Repudiated (or at least criticized) by mainstream Traditionalists and Religious Zionists alike, they nevertheless reveal what can happen when different messianisms converge and recombine in new and frightening ways.
Their movement represents a fusion of two mystical messianisms, that of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and that of Religious Zionism, into a single radicalism that has already occasioned acts of terrorism and murder. This movement as yet has no conventional name. But it does have a recognized spiritual leader: Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, born in St. Louis in 1944. He is revered by an inchoate group of young Israelis referred to as “hilltop youth,” named after the relatively isolated West Bank hilltop settlements where they grew up or went to live.
Ginsburgh was raised in the United States by Zionist but not particularly religious parents and showed an early affinity for mathematics and music. At fifteen, after spending a year with his parents in Israel, where he studied at a well-established secular high school in Jerusalem, the Rehavia Gymnasium, Ginsburgh declared his intention to become an observant Jew. He went to college at the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, then earned a master’s degree in math from the graduate school of Yeshiva University. He moved to Israel in 1965 at the age of twenty-one, and from that time on immersed himself in Traditionalist Torah study, with a special emphasis on mysticism. He enrolled in the leading Chabad yeshiva in Jerusalem in 1967, after the Six-Day War, and came to see the Rebbe as his leading spiritual influence.
I have provided this background because it shows how, in many respects, Ginsburgh was typical of his generation of American ba‘alei teshuvah—second- or third-generation American Jews whose parents had moved away from Traditionalism and who themselves discovered and embraced either Modern Orthodoxy or Haredi orthodoxy as a conscious choice. Many of these “returnees” to Traditionalism were intellectuals of one sort or another, and, like Ginsburgh, they sought after different paths until they crafted a spiritual-intellectual direction of their own. Ginsburgh himself appears to have considered himself a fully committed adherent of Chabad Hasidism from 1967 until 1987, when he became head of a five-year-old yeshiva founded near a pilgrimage site traditionally identified as Joseph’s Tomb. The yeshiva, Od Yosef Chai, “Joseph Still Lives,”17 was then on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Nablus in the northern part of the West Bank that Israel refers to as Samaria.18
Under Ginsburgh’s leadership, Od Yosef Chai became a center for the development of a new fusion of Chabad messianism and Religious Zionist messianism, alongside a powerful turn away from the familiar forms of both. It was not a Chabad yeshiva. Although Ginsburgh himself continued to dress in the distinctive Chabad style (wearing the oversized fedora that is Chabad’s answer to the sable or mink Hasidic shtreimel), the students in the yeshiva mostly did not dress that way, nor did they identify as hasidim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Rather, most of the students were (and are) hilltop youth, born into the Religious Zionist–settler milieu that inherited the legacy of Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the students of Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook. Today, the yeshiva’s website describes it as a “Hasidic” yeshiva, and it would be fair to characterize it as neo-Hasidic, with Ginsburgh himself, styled the “prince of the yeshiva” as its spiritual leader, the closest thing to a Hasidic master or rebbe for its students.19
The original location of the yeshiva, in the shadow of a Palestinian city known for its anti-Zionist resistance going back a century, essentially guaranteed that the only students who would attend were those with a special interest in settling every inch of the historic land of Israel. The possibility, or rather the probability, of conflict between yeshiva students and the local Palestinian community was ever-present, particularly during the first intifada. And indeed, students associated with the yeshiva were alleged to have rampaged in the nearby Palestinian town of Kifl Haris in 1989, causing an incident in which a Palestinian boy was killed and two others were injured.20
Ginsburgh served as day-to-day head of the yeshiva until 2001, when the IDF withdrew its protection from Israeli settlers at the Joseph’s Tomb site and the yeshiva moved to the settlement town of Yitzhar. (The yeshiva building in Yitzhar was taken over by the IDF for a time in 2014, after students were involved in violent attacks on Palestinians as well as on IDF soldiers.21) He was succeeded by one of his leading students, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who would become a public exponent of some of Ginsburgh’s most radical teachings. While at the yeshiva, Ginsburgh continued to compose mystical, philosophical, and psychological works. He has published over a hundred books, with more than twenty translated into English. Consistent with his mathematical background, many address topics in gematria, the Jewish tradition of mystical numerology.
As a student of the Rebbe, Ginsburgh necessarily participated in the speculation surrounding Schneerson’s potential messianic unveiling. After the Rebbe’s death in 1994, however, Ginsburgh did not associate himself with the Chabad faction who believed Schneerson had gone into occultation. Instead, slowly but perceptibly, his followers began to interpret his teachings as indicating a different possibility, namely that Ginsburgh himself was now the potential messiah of his generation, as Schneerson had once been.
Ginsburgh has never, to my knowledge, expressly described himself as the potential king-messiah. But then, neither did Schneerson. The Rebbe’s followers assiduously interpreted their teacher’s words as leading to the inevitable conclusion of his messiahship. The Rebbe never openly assented. The closest indications of his possible acquiescence came when young Chabad Hasidim would sing their favorite song in Schneerson’s presence: “Long live our master, our teacher, our rabbi, the king-messiah, forever more.” As Schneerson aged, his students reported seeing him acknowledge their fealty by waving his hands in time to the music. Conservatives within Chabad quietly suggested that the aging Schneerson may not have understood what his gestures meant to his followers. But that objection carried no weight for the energized and motivated messianists. In any case, they had an entire body of Schneerson’s thought and work to support their speculation. What was more, the Rebbe never denied his status as a potential messiah.
Although not themselves veterans of this era of Chabad messianism, Ginsburgh’s students have followed a similar path. They have reportedly sung the “Long live” song in his presence, apparently without being discouraged from doing so. Like Schneerson, Ginsburgh has not, it would seem, rejected the suggestion that he is a potential messiah awaiting unveiling.22
Schneerson’s vision of Jewish law governing the land of Israel was abstract, rather than concrete. It depended on a messianic advent to trigger it. Ginsburgh and his students have gone further, articulating a blueprint for governance under Jewish law in the immediate future. In Ginsburgh’s view, Israel should be ruled by a monarch or prince who would govern according to Jewish law. His followers created an organization called Derech Chaim, “The Way of Life,” which on its website (now defunct) laid out their constitutional program in detail, leaving little doubt that Ginsburgh was their candidate for prince.
Where Ginsburgh’s messianic vision converges with that of Religious Zionism is his apparent belief that there is no need to wait for any miraculous events to bring about such a state of affairs. Simply by creating a monarchic Jewish state in the land of Israel, the messianic situation will have arrived. The administration of Jewish law will be both a feature of that situation and a proof of genuine messiahship. The state in question would undoubtedly operate in continuity to the existing state of Israel. It would be Israel under new leadership, with a new, monarchic constitution derived from Jewish Law.
Where Ginsburgh differs from Religious Zionism is in his critical view of the actually existing state of Israel. For most Traditionalists, what is wrong with Israel is its secularism, a critique derived from the early Traditionalist critique of classical Zionism. For Ginsburgh and his followers, the problem with the state of Israel is that it has failed to remain true to the settlement project with which it began. Most Religious Zionists believe that by taking up the settlement project themselves in the aftermath of the 1967 war, they became the vanguard of Zionism. Ginsburgh’s followers believe that by signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Authority, the state of Israel lost its legitimacy as the entity chosen by God to implement the settlement project.
The hilltop youth, from whose ranks Ginsburgh’s followers mainly come, exist in a state of conflict not only with the Palestinians around them but also with the IDF, as the anthropologist Assaf Harel has shown.23 As the Israeli military seeks to shut down their illegal settlements and prevent their violence against Palestinians, the hilltop youth have become increasingly alienated from the state of Israel. Ginsburgh and the leading exponents of his ideas provide them with a mystical-messianic worldview that places them still at the vanguard of redemption. But they are no longer the vanguard of Zionism, which as a movement has now been discredited by the actions of the state and overtaken by the potentiality of a messianic state ruled according to Jewish law.
The culmination of this ideology—and the occasion for the state of Israel’s (partial) turn against Ginsburgh and the hilltop youth—took place in July 2015 in the Palestinian village of Duma. Masked men, one later identified as Amiram Ben-Uliel (then twenty years old), and the other a teenager unnamed in the press, firebombed two houses. One was empty. The other held the Dawabsheh family. Ali Dawabsheh, eighteen months old, was killed at once. His parents later died of their wounds. Around the burnt-out houses, the attackers spray-painted graffiti associated with Ginsburgh’s worldview. It included the words “Long live the king messiah,” from the song originally composed in honor of the Lubavitcher Rebbe but in this instance evidently devoted to Ginsburgh. The graffiti also featured the Hebrew words for “revenge” and “price tag.”24
The attacks focused public attention on a work of legal theory and mysticism composed by two of Ginsburgh’s followers, Torat ha-Melekh: Dinei Nefashot bein Yisra’el la-‘Ammim, roughly: The Torah of the King: Laws of Life and Death Between Israel and the Nations.25 The main body of the work is a legal treatise offering new interpretations and applications of traditional Jewish legal sources regarding rules of engagement and the use of force against civilians. Interspersed in six “appendices” throughout the book is a distinct work of mystical philosophy devoted to explaining the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish souls. Its views are mostly drawn from the teachings of Ginsburgh.
The most widely discussed, horrifying passage in the book, and the one with chilling connections to Duma, concerns the killing of children: “There is an argument for killing them because of the future danger that will be caused if they grow up to be evil like their parents.” In a more expanded discussion of “revenge”—one of the words written in graffiti at the site of the Duma attack—the writers explain that “according to this calculus, children aren’t killed because of their [inherent] evil, but rather because there is a general need for revenge against evildoers, and the children are those whose death will satisfy that need.”26
In response to the attacks and their association with Ginsburgh’s teachings, the Israeli government shuttered the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva for a time. After Israeli prosecutors declined to charge the authors of the book with incitement to violence or incitement to racism, both of which are crimes under Israeli law, moderate Religious Zionists asked Israel’s high court to compel the prosecution. The court declined, in a 2-1 judgment that emphasized the importance of free speech even as it repudiated the teachings of the book as “anti-Jewish.” In dissent, Israel’s lone Arab justice argued that the book was intended to set rules of engagement for settlers killing Palestinians and called for the prosecutors to reopen the case. The official state of Israel had, after a fashion, expressed its condemnation of Ginsburgh’s beliefs, even if he remained free to express them.27
From the standpoint of his followers, the Ginsburgh worldview remains in place. The state of Israel is, for them, the entity that once fulfilled the divine command to settle the land. But now it must be transformed into the true container for messianic rule via the adoption of a Jewish constitutional monarchy. It is this combination that leads some analysts to call Ginsburgh’s followers post-Zionists, “post” in the sense that their perspective would not be possible without Zionism as a precursor, yet no longer adheres to the existing state of Israel.¶ To his followers, Ginsburgh is still a potential messiah. When he dies, unrevealed, they may find another candidate—or perhaps it will suffice for them to pursue the goals of settlement and Jewish constitutional monarchy without a specific prince in mind.
Ginsburgh and his followers matter. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist who is now Israel’s minister of national security, shares a good deal of Ginsburgh’s worldview. Each month on the eve of the new moon, thousands of hilltop youth gather in the Old City of Jerusalem and circumambulate the city’s gates, singing songs and asserting Jewish sovereignty.28 Each year at Passover, a few Jews are arrested for trying to sacrifice a lamb somewhere near the Temple Mount. Though not all followers of Ginsburgh, the people participating in these activities belong to a milieu in which Religious Zionist messianism and settlement are closely aligned to the aspiration for a state ruled by Jewish law—and not democratically. The hilltop youth are less on the periphery of both Religious Zionist and Traditionalist Jewish life in Israel than they have ever been.
What matters about Ginsburgh’s ideas is that they refract trends of Zionism and mystical messianism that have also affected much of the rest of Traditionalist and Evolutionist Jewish thought. The state of Israel, coming into existence in the wake of the Holocaust, has precipitated deep transformations in Jewish ways of seeing the world. Zionism did not supplant or replace Jewishness, as it aspired to do. But it has changed Jewishness by pervading the Jewish religious beliefs that it expected to render obsolete. Thankfully, the overwhelming number of Jews in the world reject and repudiate the violence embraced by Ginsburgh’s followers. Yet they, too, must reckon with the meaning of Israel for their Jewish theology and for their beliefs in redemption, in whatever form it may take.