THE TORAH OF REDEMPTION
WHEN YOEL BIN-NUN was twelve years old, he confided to a girl his deepest longing. “I want the Temple to be rebuilt,” he said. The year was 1958, and they were walking home from a meeting of Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement. “With animal sacrifices and blood and all of that?” she asked, incredulous. “That’s what is written in the Torah,” he replied.
Yoel, named for a grandfather killed in the Holocaust, sensed that his life’s purpose was linked to understanding the mystery of Israel’s resurrection. What was the meaning of the juxtaposition of destruction and rebirth, either of which would have been sufficient to define Jewish history for centuries to come? And what role was he, a part of the first generation of sovereign Jews since the destruction of the Temple, meant to play in his people’s destiny?
Yoel offered his passion to Bnei Akiva, the Children of Akiva, named for the rabbi martyred by the Romans and whose emblem was the Ten Commandments, a sickle, and a sheaf of wheat—religious and socialist. The symbol of a Bnei Akiva boy was the knitted kippah, or skullcap. Unlike the traditional black skullcap, the knitted kippah wove two colors together, a relative vivacity.
Wearing a kippah on the streets of Haifa, where Yoel grew up, was not self-evident for a religious boy. “Red Haifa” was Israel’s most secular city. City hall fought the creation of religious schools and buses ran on the Sabbath; it was the only city with a Jewish majority to officially desecrate the holy day. Most Bnei Akiva boys wore berets in public—an ineffective disguise, since only religious boys wore them. Secular children taunted them with a nonsense rhyme, “Aduk fistuk”—pious pistachios.
But Yoel and his friends insisted on wearing kippot in the streets. Surprisingly, they were not harassed. If you respect yourself, Yoel discovered, others would respect you too.
Still, young religious Zionists suffered from an inferiority complex. Israel’s pioneers and military heroes were almost all secular. The secular youth movements dismissed Bnei Akivaniks as Zionism’s rear guard, more suited to becoming accountants than farmers and fighters. As members of the Haifa Bnei Akiva branch hiked up to the desert fortress of Masada, they were taunted by secular youth: “When Bnei Akiva go up Masada, they say Shema Yisrael”—the prayer recited by religious Jews at the moment of death. Even worse than being wimps, religious Zionists were a threat: their political leaders forced government coalitions to adopt religious laws, like ensuring rabbinic control over marriage and divorce.
And yet ultra-Orthodox Jews resented religious Zionists for validating heretical Zionism. In ninth grade, Yoel’s Talmud teacher, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Moshe Rebhun, told his students he wouldn’t be celebrating Independence Day. Zionism, he explained, had inverted the meaning of return to Zion, which was supposed to bring the Jewish people closer to God. Instead, the secular Zionists had uprooted Torah from the people. “You Zionists should ask yourselves why the holiest parts of Jerusalem aren’t under the control of the Zionist state,” taunted Rabbi Rebhun. “We have to go up to Mount Zion just to get a glimpse of the Temple Mount. And why? Because the Zionists don’t deserve it.” The Torah, he concluded triumphantly, was given in the Sinai Desert, outside the land of Israel, to teach Jews that the law was more important than the land.
Yoel entertained his friends by mimicking the rabbi’s German-accented Hebrew: “Why was the Taurah given in Sinai?” But Rabbi Rebhun’s challenge weighed on him.
AT BNEI AKIVA meetings they were debating whether to separate the sexes during folk dancing. Bnei Akiva hardly encouraged promiscuity: when members went on overnight hikes, they strung blankets across trees between the boys’ and girls’ areas. But “mixed dancing” was a Bnei Akiva tradition, a link with secular Zionist youth movements. Proponents warned that a total separation of the sexes would shift Bnei Akiva closer to ultra-Orthodoxy.
Yoel sided with the opponents. Just as we are scrupulous about kosher food, he argued, we should be scrupulous about the laws of sexual modesty.
Yoel’s friends gave him a nickname, at once mocking and respectful of his longing for purity: Tasbin. It was the name of a laundry detergent.
YOEL MIGHT HAVE become even more deeply drawn to religious stringencies were it not for his parents. His mother, Shoshana, was studying the ancient Hittites while raising four children. His father, Yechiel, was founder and principal of a religious girls’ high school and teachers’ seminary, an innovator in bringing advanced religious education to women.
Tough and resourceful, Shoshana had immigrated to the land of Israel in 1938, but then volunteered to return to Nazi Germany and lead a group of Bnei Akiva girls across the border. On the train, a suspicious Nazi officer pointed a gun at one of the girls; Shoshana, blond and able to pass as Aryan, indignantly exclaimed, “Is that the German education you received?” The confused officer let them go. Shoshana and her girls arrived in the Port of Haifa two days before the start of World War II.
Yechiel had come, destitute, to the land of Israel, and intended to send for his parents and sister once he settled in; but the war intervened, and it was too late. A pedant about the Hebrew language, he would glare at an unlucky student who happened to make a mistake in diction and force her to repeat the sentence until she corrected herself. That insistence on Hebraic precision was, for Yechiel, a spiritual mission. Language, he lectured his students, was the most sacred value, the mother of all values. And how much more so the Hebrew language, in which God and men had once conversed and which the exiled Jews had preserved in a cordon of study and prayer.
Yechiel constantly corrected Yoel’s Hebrew, and even that of his friends; he refused to return the cap of a boy visiting the Bin-Nun home until he corrected a grammatical mistake.
Yoel wanted to be a hero like his mother, a rescuer of Israel; but also an educator like his father, a refiner of his people. Yoel too began correcting the linguistic mistakes of his friends, but quietly, almost to himself.
IT WAS IN his parents’ home that Yoel discovered Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook—one of the great Jewish mystics, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Israel. An Orthodox weekly to which the Bin-Nuns subscribed was serializing a biography of Rabbi Kook, called The Man against the Stream. As soon as the newspaper arrived on Friday, Yoel would turn to the latest installment, captivated by Rabbi Kook’s personality. Ultra-Orthodox in his observance, he anguished about the Holy Land being built by secularists. Yet he celebrated Zionism as a harbinger of the messianic era and once danced with secular pioneers for hours, exchanging his black clothes for pioneering khaki.
Rabbi Kook, Yoel read, insisted on defining his own way. He was denounced in street posters as a heretic; ultra-Orthodox Jews snatched a body at a funeral to prevent him from delivering the eulogy.
In his mother’s library, Yoel found a booklet with excerpts of Rabbi Kook’s writings. She had considered the booklet precious enough to include among the few belongings she took on her flight out of Nazi Germany. Yoel read Rabbi Kook the way other young people read poetry, sensing himself expanding into language he didn’t yet fully understand.
Rabbi Kook was offering not just a more mystical version of religious Zionism but a unique philosophy. All of existence, he wrote, was in a state of divine becoming, and the enemy of the good was constriction, smallness, exile—of the Jews from the land of Israel, of humanity from God. He strained against the limits of conventional religion: false piety and conformism impeded human growth and freedom, diminished God’s grandeur. He so celebrated progress as the deepest expression of divinity that he saw the Creator Himself as “evolving” toward ever greater states of perfection, through the moral and intellectual progression of His creatures. And he embraced Darwinian evolution as the closest scientific analogue to the kabbalistic worldview. By enhancing the human, we enhance the divine. Asked to sum up his teaching, he replied, “Everything is rising.”
For Rabbi Kook, Zionism was far more than a political movement, an attempt to provide mere safe haven for a persecuted people. The Jews had been chosen as catalysts of human evolution; but only by ending the exile would their spiritual genius be freed, and world redemption begin.
Encountering Rabbi Kook, Yoel felt exhilaration but above all relief. Here at last was a rabbi who fearlessly confronted the spiritual meaning of this time. And in his embrace of paradox—Darwinian and pietist, Zionist and ultra-Orthodox, universalist and Jewish particularist—he offered Yoel a model for embracing his own conflicting longings between religious stringency and openness to the world.
YOEL GRADUATED FROM high school in 1963 at age seventeen, skipping a grade. With a year to go before the army, he decided to study in the Jerusalem yeshiva founded by Rabbi Kook and which now bore his name: Mercaz Harav, known to its students simply as Mercaz—the Center. And that is how they perceived its role: as the spiritual center of the Jewish people, and so of the world.
Yet even within the religious Zionist community—which numbered about 10 percent of Israeli society—Mercaz and its messianic theology were hardly central. The elder Rabbi Kook’s memory was revered, but few religious Zionists were actively awaiting the Messiah’s arrival. They dutifully recited the religious Zionist prayer asking God to bless the state of Israel as “the first flowering of our redemption,” but they were hardly preoccupied with the redemption process. For most religious Zionists, the creation of a refuge for the Jewish people was redemption enough.
Yoel’s parents wanted him to become an academic. But after encountering Rabbi Kook, academia seemed small. Instead, Yoel would become a rabbi, a teacher. What could be more vital than helping Jews understand the spiritual significance of this time, when their wildest fears and dreams had been fulfilled?
In the fall of 1963, just before Rosh Hashanah, Yoel left his parents’ home and went off to Mercaz, in search of the Torah of redemption.
THE STUBBORN DISCIPLE
THE MERCAZ HARAV yeshiva was located in an alley near Jaffa Road, West Jerusalem’s main street, a stone building with arched windows and high-ceilinged halls. The entrance was a crenellated stone gate that recalled the wall around Jerusalem’s Old City—barely a ten-minute walk from the yeshiva but inaccessible, blocked by barbed wire and Jordanian soldiers. The building had been the home of Rabbi Kook, and its meager furnishings reflected his modesty. In the rabbi’s den, his desk was preserved exactly as he had left it, with fraying volumes of Talmud open to the pages he had last studied. The kitchen was a drop-in center for Jerusalem’s beggars.
Yoel spent his days in the combined study hall and synagogue. Two rows of dark brown pews faced a Torah ark, beside which a sign urged students, “Know before Whom you stand.” A marble plaque commemorating a donor ended with the prayer for rebuilding the Temple, “on the holy mountain in Jerusalem, in our day.”
Walking into the study hall where Rabbi Kook had taught, Yoel felt haunted by holiness. Students were encouraged to devise their own curriculum, and Yoel decided to focus on Talmud and on Rabbi Kook’s writings. That combination would provide him with the grounding in Jewish law necessary to become a rabbi, and with the vision to transcend the conventional rabbinate. Often he found himself in the study hall until late at night, oblivious to time, lost in the talmudic past and Rabbi Kook’s messianic future. His two chosen areas of study struggled within him. It was like trying to define reality simultaneously through a microscope and a telescope. The talmudic sensibility cautioned patience, its leisurely arguments unfolding through the centuries: If you are planting a tree and you hear that the Messiah has come, said the rabbis, continue planting. But the Kookian sensibility was restless with anticipation, straining against limits. If this wasn’t the time, then when would it ever be?
The focus of holiness in Mercaz, the living embodiment of Rabbi Kook’s teachings, was his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. His deeply lined face was at once kindly and fierce, committed to protecting what he loved. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah didn’t allow students to call him Rabbi Kook. That title, he said, belonged to his father alone. I am a fellow student of the rabbi, he insisted. Though he met with students in his father’s study, he sat not in the armchair but on a footstool.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, as disciples called him with an intimate reverence, seemed typically ultra-Orthodox—wide-brimmed black fedora, long white beard, long black jacket. But this appearance was deceptive. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s soul despised the quietism of the ghetto, longed for the God of split waters and revelation.
Childless, he regarded his students as surrogate sons. He personally delivered the mail to them every morning, savoring the chance to bring them joy. They were his sabras, his native Israelis; some of them had already served in the holy army of Israel, warrior-scholars combining physical and religious vigor. One day, the rabbi believed, his students would help lead Israel back to holiness, to wholeness.
Like his father, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah was convinced of the divine impetus behind Zionism. How could the Jewish state possibly be a mere political entity devoid of spiritual significance? Was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of return to Zion—under apocalyptic circumstances no sane person would have believed possible—intended to merely create another Belgium?
This state was not just a miracle: it was, in its essence, sacred. Flag, government, army: holy holy holy. The Jewish state was the instrument for the restoration of Israel’s glory, and so of God’s glory. The Mercaz sensibility was summed up by the prayer that students sang on Friday evening with particular devotion: “Arise, shake off the dust / wear your glorious garments, my people . . . Rouse yourself, rouse yourself, for your light has come.”
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah practiced his father’s unconditional love for all Jews, especially the secular, who had a key role to play in the messianic process. Judaism and religion generally, Rabbi Kook the elder had taught, had become corrupted by small-minded religionists; and so, however painful, a rebellion was necessary to purify the faith. The return to Zion had to be led by the secular because religious Jews lacked the spiritual vitality to implement Judaism’s great dream. The Kookian dialectic: the spiritual failure of the religious provoked the rebellion of the secular who, however inadvertently, were preparing the way for the next, higher stage of religious evolution by restoring the holy people to the holy land.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, keenly aware of their redemptive role, treated secularists not only with the love due to fellow Jews but with respect. He insisted that secular men visiting his home feel comfortable and remove the head covering they wore in his honor. He rebuked one visiting kibbutznik: Do you expect me to remove my kippah if I visit your kibbutz? Leaders of the League against Religious Coercion, who campaigned for separation of religion and state, sought him out, intrigued by the rabbi who respected their longing for freedom—even for freedom from religion—as a sign of spiritual vitality.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah especially loved the kibbutzniks. When a secular kibbutznik appeared at Mercaz, seeking to study Talmud, the rabbi treated him with the honor reserved in other yeshivas for a scholar; students vied for the privilege of being his study partner. Beneath their pork-eating, Yom Kippur–violating veneer, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah discerned in kibbutzniks holy Jews. They were working the land of Israel, defending the people of Israel. The kibbutz’s very utopianism negated its professed commitment to “normalizing” the Jewish people. What other nation had been founded by voluntary communes seeking to purify human nature of selfishness? The kibbutz confirmed Mercaz’s essential insight on secular Zionism: that the return to Zion was a utopian venture, masquerading as a mundane political movement.
To support his radical Jewish ecumenism, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah cited the rabbinic comparison of the Jewish people to the “four species,” four plants that Jews bless on Sukkoth, the harvest-time Festival of Booths. Each of those four plants—citron, palm branch, myrtle, willow—is said to represent another kind of Jew: on one end of the spectrum the citron’s pleasing scent and taste represents the saint, whose inner life and deeds are equally pure; on the other end, the willow, without odor and inedible, represents the Jew bereft of redeeming qualities. But the blessing can only be recited if all four plants are bound together, the willow along with the citron. So too the Jewish people, said the rabbi, each of whose components has a unique role in redemption.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah could perhaps afford such magnanimity because he was, like his father, convinced that secular Zionism was a temporary aberration. Secularism was necessary to revitalize the nation after centuries of disembodied exile, but eventually it must yield to the longings of the Jewish soul for God. Rabbi Kook the father had compared secular pioneers to the workmen who built the ancient Temple: during the period of construction, they were permitted to enter the Holy of Holies at will; once the Temple was completed, though, only the high priest could enter that consecrated space, and then only on Yom Kippur. Secular Zionism was preparing the way for the rebuilt Temple, and for its own disappearance.
UNLIKE THE OTHER students, who gathered around Rabbi Zvi Yehudah after morning prayers on their way to breakfast, Yoel observed him from a distance. How far should he go in entrusting himself to the rabbi’s guidance? Was he really a worthy successor to his father?
Yoel was skeptical about the rabbi’s uncritical embrace of every Jew, no matter how far removed from the faith. Yes, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s father loved all Jews, but he’d also anguished over their religious violations. Yet Rabbi Zvi Yehudah seemed far more upset by the anti-Zionism of the ultra-Orthodox than by the heresies of the secular.
Yoel attended a weekly class on the Torah reading in Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s apartment, which was so modest it lacked a telephone. Yoel was troubled to see, hanging on the wall of the rabbi’s study, a photograph of Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, beside photographs of venerable rabbis. It was one thing to appreciate Herzl’s contribution to Jewish national renewal, but to venerate him as a holy man?
“K’vod harav”—honored rabbi—Yoel said after class, “I don’t understand what Herzl’s picture is doing there.”
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah appeared bemused. He appreciated his clever student who challenged him in class and whom he affectionately called ha’akshan, the stubborn one.
“Herzl was God’s emissary to save the Jewish people,” the rabbi replied.
But why, persisted Yoel, did God allow antireligious leaders to preside over the Jewish state? Why had God allowed the central religious vision of the Jews, the return to Zion, to be co-opted by those who rejected religion?
The rabbi responded with a question. “Is Ben-Gurion as evil as Ahab?” he asked, referring to the idolatrous king of ancient Israel.
“No, Ben-Gurion is not as evil as Ahab,” replied Yoel.
“Elijah ran before Ahab’s chariot,” the rabbi concluded.
The prophet Elijah had honored Ahab because he was king of Israel, representative, however flawed, of God’s will on earth. Surely, then, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah could honor Herzl, who had initiated the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.
Yoel wasn’t convinced. How could Rabbi Zvi Yehudah gloss over the secular assault on religion, the state’s history of secular coercion? Yoel’s father had had to fight the Mapai-led Haifa municipality for the right to establish a religious girls’ high school. As a Bnei Akiva activist, Yoel had gone into the immigrant camps around Haifa to convince parents to send their children to religious schools. One father told Yoel that he’d been warned by bureaucrats of the all-powerful Histadrut trade union that if he didn’t send his children to a secular school, he wouldn’t find work in the centralized economy. Yoel couldn’t forget the fear in the man’s eyes; what, then, was redemptive about secular rule?
One day Yoel got up the courage to knock on the door of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s home. “May I walk the rabbi to the yeshiva?” Yoel asked. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, delighted to see “the stubborn one,” took Yoel by the arm and walked the streets of his ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, appropriately named Geulah, “Redemption.” Yoel walked slowly, in time with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s heavy steps.
They came across a campaign rally for an ultra-Orthodox party. An activist was addressing a crowd of black-hatted men, whom he referred to as “the community of holy citrons.” By comparing the ultra-Orthodox to the citron among the “four species,” the speaker was in effect calling them the saints of the Jewish people. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah tightened his grip on Yoel’s arm. “The altar is not wrapped in citrons!” he said vehemently.
“What?” said Yoel, uncomprehending. He bent closer to hear the rabbi’s words. Yoel had difficulty understanding Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, who often spoke in a hurried mumble as though to himself, and whose Yiddish-accented Hebrew was filled with fragments of biblical and rabbinic phrases that formed a private theological language.
The rabbi’s pace quickened, energized by anger. He pulled at Yoel, as if to remove him from a place of sin. Yoel was surprised by the strength of the old man’s grip. “The altar is not wrapped in citrons,” he repeated to himself. “The altar is wrapped in willows!”
Finally the rabbi explained: in the Jerusalem Temple, the altar on which sacrifices were offered was wreathed with willows, because Israel’s sacrifices would be acceptable to God only if all parts of the Jewish people—and not just the saints, the citrons—were included. “There is no holy community of citrons!” Rabbi Zvi Yehudah repeated, outraged. “Only the holy community of Israel!”
Yoel understood: there is no holiness for Israel without its flawed souls, the willows. Jewish unity wasn’t merely a political but a spiritual imperative: a holy people bringing the message of God’s oneness to the world must be in harmony with itself, must be whole.
Yoel felt a love for Rabbi Zvi Yehudah that he had never felt, perhaps, for anyone before, and sensed that he had found his spiritual father.
ROMANCE ON MOUNT GILBOA
YOEL’S YEAR IN MERCAZ ended. Reluctantly he left the study hall, and in January 1965 he put on the khaki uniform of Nahal, which combined military service with agricultural work, and which settled remote areas, intending to found kibbutzim. Because it trained recruits in parachuting, Nahal was considered a paratrooper unit—though hardly as elite as the “real” paratroopers.
Yoel did well enough in basic training. He had stamina for running up hills and marching long kilometers while carrying soldiers on stretchers. But he had discovered the point where Jewish history and cosmic intentionality intersect, and army life bored him. Sometimes on leave he went straight to Mercaz, rather than to his parents’ home.
Following basic training, Yoel’s Nahal group—fifty male and female recruits from Bnei Akiva—was assigned to an outpost on Mount Gilboa, bordering the northern West Bank. They arrived just before the late spring festival of Shavuot. Five prefab buildings—including a synagogue and a library—clustered high above the valley, white boxes on a stony slope. There were no adults to supervise the recruits; the commanding officer, hardly older than his nineteen-year-old soldiers, had been sent to jail after his jeep overturned and military police discovered he had no driver’s license. Still, this was Bnei Akiva: even the couples that quickly formed maintained their modest ways.
At night, Yoel and his friends sat around a campfire and gazed at the sporadic lights beyond the border. Samaria, the biblical northern kingdom, was so close. There wasn’t even a fence, only a stone marker placed by the Jordanian authorities. Members of a previous Nahal group had sometimes driven to the nearest Arab village on the Jordanian side. But such casual violation of the border was no longer possible: Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah group had begun attacking Israeli targets from Jordan and the soldiers were now on permanent alert.
The Nahal outpost was intended to eventually become part of a small network of religious kibbutzim, and so the soldiers not only guarded and patrolled but worked in chicken coops and fishponds. They woke with dawn and worked until the heat of midday.
Manual labor bored Yoel. Friends considered him lazy. In an evaluation of group members prepared by an official of the religious kibbutz movement, this curt note appeared beside Yoel’s name: “A serious boy, but not for kibbutz.” Yoel would serve the Jewish people in his own way.
In the absence of an army chaplain, Yoel volunteered to organize religious life on the mountain. He assembled prayer quorums three times a day and read from the Torah in his deep, melodic voice. But when he tried to insert Kookian ideas into his weekly Torah class, friends said to each other, There he goes again, drifting off into the clouds.
The group was assigned the task of planting pine trees along the Gilboa, to mark the border and prevent encroachment by Jordanian villagers. The saplings required constant attention; only shrubs grew easily here. The ancient curse, group members said. King Saul and his son Jonathan had fallen in battle on Mount Gilboa; and David, in his eulogy, had damned the land: “Mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you.”
Yoel didn’t think they should be planting at all, but not because of David’s curse. This is a shmitta year, he noted, the last year of the seven-year cycle during which the land of Israel must remain fallow. How, he asked, can we violate shmitta, a commandment from the Torah? Friends cited Rabbi Kook: Didn’t he permit planting during the shmitta year to prevent Zionist agriculture from collapsing? That lenient rule, countered Yoel, was meant for farmers, not for soldiers planting trees.
Yoel took his argument to the government official in charge of the area’s forestation, a religious Jew whose daughter happened to be a member of the Nahal group. “There is no justification for planting trees during shmitta,” insisted Yoel.
“We’re at war to protect our borders,” the forester retorted, annoyed. “Just as it is permitted to fight on Shabbat when necessary, it is permitted to plant here during the seventh year.”
WHAT FIRST ATTRACTED Yoel to the forester’s daughter was that she wasn’t like the other girls in the group, didn’t laugh recklessly or gossip. Esther Raab was inward but not aloof. Warm, generous, above all serious: the qualities Yoel was hoping for in a wife. Esther, for her part, had become intrigued by Yoel when she heard about the Mercaz student who had come to the army with a suitcase filled with books. Yoel, like Esther, seemed incapable of frivolity.
Yoel also happened to be deeply handsome. Beneath light brown curls was a face of gravitas. He spoke with quiet confidence, and Esther was drawn to his precocious capacity for wisdom.
Esther had grown up in a town near Haifa. In the 1948 war, her father had been one of the defenders of religious Zionist settlements known as the Etzion Bloc in the Judean Hills outside of Jerusalem, and was taken prisoner by the Jordanians when the bloc fell, just before the state of Israel was declared.
When the Nahal group gathered in the evening for folk dancing, Yoel and Esther slipped away. They walked for hours on the mountain, their footsteps the only sounds against the wind. They didn’t hold hands.
Yoel told Esther he intended to devote his life to tikkun olam b’malchut Shaddai, repairing the world through the kingdom of God. I’m going to become an educator, he said, help to bring young Israelis closer to Judaism. Esther said she wanted to live in a kibbutz, but was concerned about collective child-rearing. Children belong with their parents, she said; it’s no wonder that so many kibbutz children run away from the children’s house.
“How many children do you want?” Yoel asked.
“Twelve,” she answered.
Yoel laughed.
IN MARCH 1967, on the eve of the holiday of Purim, Yoel’s Nahal service ended. Having participated in Nahal’s parachuting course, Yoel was assigned for future reserve duty to the 55th Paratroopers Brigade.
But reserve duty was the last thing on his mind. After a brief stop at his parents’ home, he returned to Mercaz, where he was honored with the role of chanting the book of Esther—the ultimate Mercaz story, destruction reversed into redemption.
The yeshiva was thriving. While Yoel was away, it had moved to a new building, and the student population had grown from barely forty students to nearly two hundred. Yoel noted that Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had begun to speak more clearly, his mumble replaced by an emphatic tone. Some said that the rabbi’s clarity, along with the yeshiva’s expansion, were portents: history was quickening, the messianic dénouement approaching, the Kookian worldview about to emerge from obscurity.
Yoel settled into Mercaz’s new study hall, several times larger than the old one. He chose a new area of study: the talmudic tractate that deals with the priestly service in the Jerusalem Temple. Yoel craved knowledge of the ancient time when Jews had been intimate with God’s presence—when the purpose of the Jews, to bring heaven to earth, was manifest. Since the destruction of the Temple, Jews had studied its service in the hope for its eventual restoration. If Jewish sovereignty had been restored and the ingathering of the exiles begun, then even a rebuilt temple no longer seemed beyond the reach of dreams.
“THEY DIVIDED MY LAND!”
THE EVE OF Israel’s nineteenth Independence Day, May 14, 1967. In the Mercaz dining room, several hundred young men wearing white shirts and knitted skullcaps and black polyester pants and sandals with socks were crowded around long tables. Before them lay the remnants of a festive meal, half-eaten challah rolls, empty bottles of malt beer.
“This is the day that God made, we will rejoice in it,” read a banner on the wall, quoting Psalms. Independence Day was claimed by the secular and rejected by the ultra-Orthodox for the same reason: as a celebration of human effort rather than divine intervention. For Mercaz, though, this was one of the most sacred moments of the year: the founding of the state against impossible odds, immediately after the Holocaust, meant that the God of Israel could no longer bear the humiliation of His people.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah rose to speak. The young men stood, an honor guard. Though seventy-six years old, the rabbi moved with vigor.
“We must make more of an effort and become accustomed to opening our eyes to discover the endless wonders of God’s deeds,” he said, his voice strong even without a microphone. Students crowded toward the front of the room, eager to hear every word.
“There were times,” he continued, “in the early years of the state, when the celebration [of Independence Day] in the yeshiva had not yet been established, and I would wander for one, two, or three hours in the streets of Jerusalem. Needless to say we don’t want to encourage promiscuity in Jerusalem, but I felt obliged and commanded to be at one with the joy of our people, with the masses, with the boys and the girls.”
Students looked at each other appreciatively: What other venerable Orthodox rabbi would celebrate with boys and girls together?
The rabbi continued: “One matter, which borders on the desecration of God’s name, caused me deep sorrow. Where are the elders, the guides of the community, the great [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis, when our people are celebrating in the streets of Jerusalem?”
And yet, he confessed, there was one occasion when he too couldn’t join in the dancing, and kept aloof from the people’s celebration. It happened on the night in 1947 when the UN voted for partition of the land of Israel into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. “The whole nation flowed into the streets to celebrate its feelings of joy,” he said. “[But] I couldn’t go out and join in the rejoicing. I sat alone, and burdened. In those first hours I couldn’t make my peace with what had happened, with the terrible news that the word of God in the book of the Prophets had now been fulfilled: ‘They divided my land!’ ”
And now he suddenly cried out: “Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem—have we forgotten it? And where is our Jericho—have we forgotten it? And where is the other bank of the Jordan River? Where is every clod of earth? Every piece of God’s land? Do we have the right to cede even a centimeter of it? God forbid! . . .
“In that state, my whole body was stunned, wounded and severed into pieces. I couldn’t celebrate. ‘They divided my land!’ They divided the land of God! . . . I couldn’t go outside to dance and rejoice. That is how the situation was nineteen years ago.”
Total silence. The students had never heard such grief, such outrage, from their rabbi.
“A day or two later the sage Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Harlap came to my house. . . . We sat together . . . stunned and silent. We communed for a few moments. We recovered and we said together as one, ‘It is God Who did this, it is wondrous in our eyes.’ ”
Yoel sat toward the back of the room, pulling at his short brown beard. What, he wondered, was the meaning of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s outburst? For nineteen years, the rabbi had encouraged his students to celebrate God’s generosity to His people without equivocation, had suppressed his pain over the brokenness of the land. Why the sudden cry now? And what a cry! As if the wound had just been inflicted. For Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, nothing was random. What was he trying to tell them?
THE NEXT EVENING, as Israel was concluding its Independence Day celebrations of family barbeques and the annual Hebrew song contest and military parade and Bible quiz, the radio reported that Egypt’s president, Nasser, had begun mobilizing troops. The Israeli government responded with a partial mobilization of the reserves.
Yoel went to see Esther. She was working as house mother in a school for blind children, practically next door to Mercaz. Esther had rarely seen Yoel so agitated. What did the news portend? Were we heading for war? And was Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s outburst the night before somehow connected to today’s news? “Esther, you should have heard him: ‘Where is our Hebron? Where is our Jericho?’ I’ve never heard such a cry in my life. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah wasn’t speaking. He was roaring.”