Gleanings
Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis and faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Yehudah Mirsky continues our new series on recent publications in the field of Israel Studies.
Ultraorthodoxies
Crises, shape us though they do, come upon us as we are. COVID-19 has brought, literally, a world of problems, but those problems’ characters differ from place to place, forcing themselves onto, shaping, and perhaps reshaping, complicated processes and unresolved questions.
COVID has forced the dynamics, and problems, of Israel’s Haredi (Ultraorthodox) sector dramatically to the surface, especially its Ashkenazi half. A mix of large families in small, densely populated living spaces; ambivalent attitudes towards modern science, medicine and technology (accepted in practice but not seen as any source of moral authority); power struggles among the sector’s splintered leaders, and layers of mistrust towards surrounding society, compounded by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s deep political dependence on Haredi politicians and their voters, have come together in terrible death rates, violent and near-deadly rioting in Bnei Brak as well as Jerusalem, and communal chaos all around.
The Complexities of Ultraorthodoxy
Yet, as so often happens, Haredi society is far more complex and nuanced than either its partisans or critics proclaim. On the one hand, it does seem fair to say, as put forth in a brand new study by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, that the structural dynamics of Haredi political and communal relations with municipal institutions, structures and other communities may not in the end be changed by COVID. Yet there are all kinds of things going on beneath the surface worth noting.
The academic study of Haredi Jewry, pioneered by the great historian Jacob Katz and his student the late Menachem Friedman, now carried on by a newer generation of scholars, like Kimmy Caplan, Adam Ferziger, Nissim Leon, Nurit Stadler, and Lee Cahaner, to name a few is thriving. Their works show that, like so many modern religious movements centered on fidelity to tradition, Haredi society is itself novel in many ways and never standing still.
Just a few weeks ago the Schusterman Center published the latest volume in its book series,Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel. In this work, Michal Shaul of Herzog College, carefully traces the history of Israel’s Ultraorthodox political, communal and educational institutions postwar reconstruction and powerfully gives voice to individual Haredim and their struggles.
One of her striking narrative threads is how Haredi Holocaust memory went in the decades of Israel’s existence its own separate way from more hegemonic forms of Holocaust memory, by emphasizing spiritual, rather than physical, resistance, and weaving the Holocaust into the broader fabric of Jewish historical suffering – against which Zionism itself had first arisen in revolt. At the same time, she notes the more complex shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel as a whole over time. In other words, here as elsewhere scholarly investigation of Haredim casts light onto all kinds of dynamics at work in Israeli society.
Recent years in particular have seen the slow, steady emergence of so-called “New Haredim” making their way, gingerly and not without controversy into university education, the marketplace and the army.
New Ultraorthodoxy – Integration or New Ideological Contest?
While some see these developments as harbingers of Haredi liberalization, and even potential assimilation into broader Israeli society, the picture is not at all simple; enthusiasts of these shifts, a recent, much-discussed essay suggests, should be careful what they wish for.
Writing in the Van Leer Institute's vibrant online journal Ha-Zman Ha-Zeh (The Present Time), Itamar Ben-Ami, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Hebrew University, educated in Haredi yeshivot, provocatively argues that these new Haredi experiments in selective adaptation, may signal less a merger into broader society than a distinctively Haredi challenge to liberal society’s assumptions, and character.
Ben-Ami’s essay challenges the familiar assumption that Haredim entering academia, the army and the work force is signal a lessening of their and their community’s identity, a descent from the ramparts to enter into, and culturally, more or less, submit to, mainstream, hegemonic secular Israeli society culture. To the contrary, he argues, these developments are better understood not as a surrender of Haredi identity, but a reframing and redirection. Ben-Ami interestingly draws on Max Weber’s notion of “inner-worldly asceticism,” made famous in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Weber and other observers, the Reformation’s collapse of the walls separating the Catholic Church from the world, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and more, led to what leading contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor has called, “the affirmation of ordinary life.” In this newly made world, religious callings once pursued in the monastic cloister were now to be sought in the workaday world, in the marketplace and in the workings of another entity created by the Reformation, the nation-state. 
Ben-Ami detects a similar impulse at work in the writings of Haredi intellectuals articulating new stances towards hitherto-shunned participation in academia, the IDF and the work force. Rather than surrender to Israeli society, they seek to remake it, through its crucial institutions. Not to accept secularism but challenge it on its own turf. Not to concede to market capitalism’s demand for economic productivity, but, taking a leaf from American neo-conservative institutions (some of which, like the New York-based Tikvah Fund, actively support such initiatives), but endorse it itself imbued with religious value.
Ben-Ami doesn’t mean to contend that all of the “new Haredim” see themselves as a vanguard on the march (though, he submits, a number the intellectuals do). They do, though, add yet another more challenge to the receding certainty of late 20th-early 21st century neoliberalism and globalization, that entry into the free market, open society and its allied intellectual institutions is a one-way street.
A lively follow-up symposium responding to Ben-Ami's essay featured a range of responses. David Myers of UCLA noted the similarities between Israeli and American Haredim and their growing assertiveness not only regarding their sectoral interests but as challengers of the liberal order as a whole. Yosef Kaminer, part of the burgeoning Haredi intelligentsia, argued that the developments Ben-Ami describes were at work for decades all along. Iddo Harari pointed out that Haredim aside, liberalism is well on the ropes in Israel (as we recently noted here). Yochi Fisher noted parallels to Islamic social movements and their own reworkings of secular and sacred. And a number of respondents pointed out that Haredi women have for some while been entering the broader work force and their place in these developments cannot be ignored.
Nationalist Ultraorthodoxy?
Something largely unmentioned in the Symposium was the role of Religious Zionism, which has been hard at work on these questions of mixing tradition and modernity for decades. 
Among other things, it has brought forth a Haredi Judaism of its own, known as “Hardalim,” which is to say, Haredim Leumiyyim (“Nationalist Ultraorthodox”), now chronicled in a new book a by veteran journalist and commentator Yair Sheleg of the Israel Democracy Institute, Sulam Mutzav ba-Shamayim - Ha-Chardaliyut: Historiyah, Ideologiyah, Nokhechut (A Ladder Standing in Heaven – Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy: History, Ideology, Presence). This is perhaps the first full-length study of this numerically small but very consequential development.
Despite the Hardal moniker, he writes, many prefer to refer to themselves as Torani-Leumi. Like the mass of Religious Zionists, they serve in the army, participate in the workforce and professions, and embrace the nation-state of Israel as itself a step in the messianic process, its institutions imbued with sacred meaning. Like Haredim, however, they reject secular culture as a source of values, especially on questions of gender, devalue secular learning (though, unlike Haredim, mandate it, for purposes of earning a livelihood), and maintain highly essentialized views of Jews and non-Jews, and men and women.
They see Zionism not as one among many nationalist movements in world history, but as itself the realization of Torah, and secular Zionism as a chimera. The Land of Israel is not one feature of Jewish nationalism, alongside others, but at its heart.
Here as elsewhere, much of this is rooted in the legacy of the towering thinker and leader Abraham Isaac Kook. The foundational thinker of Religious Zionism, he was at one and the same time jurist and mystic, theologian and poet, nationalist and universalist, pietist and revolutionary – and the multiple, conflicting dimensions of his personality and teaching have proved fissile and explosive in the hands of generations of his disciples. 
Today’s Hardalim embrace Kook’s pietism and nationalism, while rejecting his universalism and embrace of general culture and thought. Their ideology presents several challenges – rejection of liberal democracy, as well as liberal norms of gender; essentialist nationalism; principled objection to any territorial compromise; to secular judiciary; and dismissal of secular education. Sectarian though this may seem, Hardali ties to Religious Zionism make it a player in the shaping of Israeli society in general. What’s more, unlike the Haredim they seek leadership over the country as a whole.Religious Zionists in general are 11% of Israeli society, and of those, only 12% call themselves Hardal - in other words, about 1.3% of Israeli society. Numerically small, yes, but well represented among rabbis and educators, not least in pre-military programs grooming young people for leadership.
They are a crucial part of the newest right-wing grouping newly-formed hard right parliamentary slate formed with Netanyahu’s encouragement; its name “Religious Zionism Party” seeks to lay claim to the entirety of Religious Zionism as an ideological program, delegitimating Naftali Bennett, not to mention more liberal Orthodox Jews on the whole.
That party’s electoral fortunes will be decided at the ballot box and, more importantly, in the post-election horse-trading of coalitions. But no matter those outcomes, the Hardal presence in education, society and culture, is likely to endure.
Looking ahead, Sheleg notes that on the one hand, many of those raised as Hardalim move closer to mainstream Religious Zionism as they mature, while others adopt closer stances towards Hardalim, especially regarding gender and the status of women. Crucially, Hardali stances increasingly influence Religious Zionist politics, and in particular deep suspicion of the judiciary, and other civic institutions.
What is to be Done?
Sheleg notes that Hardal ideology must be dealt with on its own, ideological turf. And here as elsewhere this means liberals, religious liberals most certainly included, need to dig more deeply to dig more deeply into their own moral commitments and ideological – and theological – foundations. At the same time, declaring war on Haredi ideology and culture is sure to fail. People in Israel as elsewhere need to learn to listen.
Some Israelis have tried to do just that. The book is dedicated to the memory of the author’s late wife, Bambi Sheleg, crusading journalist and founding editor of the sadly-defunct, but remarkable journal Eretz Acheret, (“Another Country,” taken from the lyric recently made famous in the US by Nancy Pelosi). Bambi’s journal penetratingly explored a range of Israeli voices who rarely reach the media, and its demise was a profound cautionary tale about the future of independent Israeli journalism. The magazine’s online archive is a treasure trove of astute, and remarkably diverse, commentary and analysis.
In her journal, Bambi Sheleg gathered a remarkable coterie of writers – Jewish, Arab, secular, religious, Ethiopian, Russian, Ashkenazi, Sephardi – all dedicated to the proposition that Israel’s best future lies precisely in the most passionate commitments of its members, if they respect each other to the fullest and let each other speak their minds. It is a faith sorely tested these days, but may indeed still be the country’s best hope.