The State of Israel’s founding transformed the Religious Zionist discussion. Underlying practical questions about riding buses on the Sabbath and selling bread on Passover were deeper questions about this new state’s meaning and Judaism’s new opportunities to thrive back home in its natural habitat, the Land of Israel. Even for secular Jews, the debate about the Jewishness of the state pitted the Zionist quest for normalcy against the Jewish mission seeking universal justice. And, if Religious Zionists first tried explaining how Jewish tradition justified creating a modern Jewish state, after 1948 they tried interpreting the state’s spiritual significance, especially following the Holocaust.
Many rabbis reexamined the nature of God’s covenant with the Jewish people while rethinking God’s role in human affairs. Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, among others, deemed the Holocaust a time of hester panim, literally the hiding of the face. God was obscured from humanity as people exercised their free will, even to do evil.
The miracle of 1967, with the switch from fearing destruction to celebrating Jerusalem’s liberation, intensified the debate about Israel’s spiritual meaning as even many secular Jews treated the triumph as a modern miracle. Religious Zionists focused on settling the biblical lands now under Israel’s control. In non-Orthodox circles, many liberal Zionist rabbis reexamined their movement’s relationship with Zionism. Most dramatically, Reform Judaism Zionized, embracing the great modern Jewish peoplehood project in ways that would have scandalized the Reform movement’s founders.