October 9, 2005

On the eve of Tisha B'Av, 5765 (the fast of the Ninth of Av, 2005), the handwriting was on the wall. The State of Israel's decision-making, approving and executive arms were thrust toward the operating switch of the huge evacuation machine, which was standing on the threshold of Gush Katif. Tens of thousand of soldiers and policemen trained for the task stood alert and ready to carry out the will of the sovereign. The fate of the Jewish settlement enterprise in the Gaza Strip was sealed: From the sand it had grown and flourished, and to the sand it would return and wither within a few days.

In light of this situation, several rabbis and community leaders, few in number but influential, decided to take a particularly daring gamble: They promised publicly, by dint of their religious and public authority, that the evacuation would not take place. The rabbis were not satisfied with pleas, with prayer, or with a cry to the heavens; an emotional request or a strident demand from the community of believers not to cooperate with the imminent evacuation was not enough for them. They claimed to foresee the future, in the name of their faith. For them, failure to carry out the evacuation was not only a wish, but a clear statement that predicted the future. This is a manner of religious action that is irregular, to put it mildly, and many will catalog it, even in the religious world, as illegitimate. What motivated them to gamble against all the odds?

In their view, the ingredients that went into the chronicle of the evacuation - decisions by the government, the Knesset and the courts; signed agreements of the State of Israel; international expectations; and the like - are only pieces of reality, parts of history that only the shortsighted and those lacking faith and vision, consider the be-all and end-all. Beyond the observable facts there is an overall picture, a broad context, into which the facts must be fitted. The reported reality is only the external and marginal part of the real story: In their opinion, the settlement enterprise in Gush Katif was not designed to advance political, security or social goals, whose days could be prolonged or shortened, according to the will of the sovereign government.

Settlements such as Morag, Gadid, Shirat Hayam were earthly milestones in the fulfillment of "sacred history," which would end in the messianic redemption of the Jewish people in our generation. What disguised itself as a settlement bloc built on physical sand was, in fact, a vision planted on metaphysical sacred land. The divine plan was not to send people away: The capital has a master, and he promised not to abandon his people or to leave his land. His promise - which is thousands of years old, as the rabbis and their followers knew - referred directly to the present struggle of the Jews against the Israeli evacuation machine. From here the way was short "to push the Holy One blessed be he into a corner" and to state, out of complete knowledge: "It will not happen."

Based on the fact that they knew the future, many of the residents of the Gush refrained from preparing spiritually and practically for the upcoming change. Their personal disaster became more profound unnecessarily. Worse than that: The naive belief of a broad public is now undergoing a difficult test. If part of the messianic story has proved to be mistaken, perhaps the entire story is defective? If the crescendo has been silenced, perhaps the entire piece is off-key? Herein lies the most frightening catch: The level of internal conviction regarding the fulfillment of the concrete forecast - not some time in the future, but here and now - was so great, that they dared to gamble on the thing most important to them: faith itself. God was enlisted to the mission of prevention, and he let them down.

The wild gamble of the past summer is only a dramatic example of the results of a messianic viewpoint among one group in Israeli society. But religious Zionism is not a rare exception. The instances of messianism in Jewish society in Israel are far broader and more profound than what is revealed in public discourse. A messianic viewpoint is not necessarily religious; it can be secular and universal. Not only can some of the members of the Lubavitch (Chabad) movement from Brooklyn be found together with the messianists from the beit midrash (study hall) of Jerusalem's Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. The messianists also include personalities such as the enlightened Viennese - Theodore Herzl, the practical man of the Negev - David Ben-Gurion, the rational Haifa resident - A.B. Yehoshua, and the analytic Lithuanian - Rabbi Shalom Elyashiv.

Profound partnership

It would seem that the relationship among the people we have mentioned is one of total opposites. Any search for a common denominator among them seems delusionary. Nevertheless, there is a profound partnership among them in the basic construct of their worldview. They posit an absolute preference for an ideal future, over the present. The present is seen as a temporary situation, a way station en route to the good beyond it. They experience a primed anticipation of future fulfillment, which accelerates their surrender of the present, of actual existence. They long for a radical change, in which the future good will erase the evil that actually exists. Moreover, the face of the utopian future is clear to them, even if each one draws an entirely different portrait of it from that envisioned by the other.

All of Jewish history is charged and full of messianic urges, which became an integral part of life in a defective reality. The motivating factor is the tremendous gap in Jewish consciousness between the marvelous, mythical past, such as the kingdom of the House of David and the Temple in its glory, on the one hand, and the contemptible and tempest-tossed existence in the prolonged present.

In that, the Zionist stage in the life of the nation is not exceptional. The messianic core entered revolutionary Zionist discourse. Herzl's utopian work, "Old New Land," is nothing but a sketch of a messianic era in which the supreme good, heralded by him, will be fulfilled. The blindness of the Herzlian work to basic questions of identity and to the practical difficulties of the future Zionist enterprise, can be understood in light of the messianic view that motivated it. Like the visionary of the state, the founder of the state also tended toward messianic views: Researcher David Ohana has already demonstrated that secular messianism lay at the foundation of the political and social thought of David Ben-Gurion.

The Zionist messianic syndrome has clear characteristics: "the new Jew" who emerged from the sea, free of historical ballast, the negation of the galut (exile), the desire for social improvement, the ambition to create an "exemplary state," the romantic cultural leap to the days of the Bible, while skipping over the real history of the Jewish people, etc. Moreover, the Zionist revolution, climaxing in the creation of Jewish sovereignty, enabled messianism to emerge from the confines of a personal wish to the public-political realm; it transferred the hope for redemption from the innermost feelings of the individual to the practical world: politics, organizations, budgets. The state is a messianic organ. Just as the nation awakened to activism, so did its tendency toward socialist, revisionist, religious or post-Zionism messianism.

Yehoshua's revolution

In recent years there has been a decline in Zionist tension, but that has not dimmed the messianic tension. For example, not long ago, author A.B. Yehoshua, clandestinely, and even openly, called for a radical revolution in Jewish existence that would shed the specific religious component from Jewish nationality. This is a view permeated with messianic fervor, because it is not anchored in actual Jewish existence: Although secularism has been a widespread phenomenon for the past 200 years, and although the "death of God" exists in the consciousness of many members of the Jewish people, only few of the "secularists" want to sever from Jewish existence the traditional element embodied in the specific religion. As opposed to accepting the real Jewish world, Yehoshua yearns to begin Jewish history anew. He finds a miraculous way toward absolute tikkun (repairing the world), through which the "riddle of the structure of Jewish identity" will be solved.

On the other hand, the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) present a stable messianic viewpoint, which stands out like a lighthouse above the turbulent sea of reality. They wait passively for the Messiah, and behave in the real world like someone who is forced to endure a test on the way to the moment of revelation. From their point of view, sovereign Israeli society intensifies the defectiveness of reality: "Jewish goyim (non-Jews)" are more dangerous than goyim. In another corner of the messianic marketplace of ideas, the post-Zionists spread their wares; they reject not only the "religion" of the Haredim, but the "nation" of Yehoshua as well. Instead, they offer the civil utopia where, in public, people shed their concrete identity and their historical memory entirely. The state is supposed to undergo a civilian "undressing," which promises freedom, equality and justice for all, in exchange for surrendering hopes, dreams and visions.

Religious Zionism offers a combination of human activity and religious intention. It joined the building of a true reality with all its might, because it identified in that reality a messianic transcendental significance. Unlike the Haredim, who await the Messiah while rejecting reality, religious Zionism offered a combination of total messianic faith and a positive attitude toward reality. It claimed to have succeeded it its messianic prophecy: The country's response to building, the establishment of the state, the expansion of the borders after the Six-Day War, the economic and security success of "a small country with a mustache," as the song goes, that became an empire - all these were interpreted as a profound and clear expression of the correctness of the messianic interpretation of the real world.

However, in the absence of theological twists, the profound implications of the events of this past summer are liable to make it clear that the partnership of religious Zionism and the Zionist enterprise is only conditional. If the secular return to Zion does not operate according to the messianic meta-script - messianic religious Zionism is liable to turn its back on it.

Magic cave

As mentioned, religious Zionism is not the sole possessor of the torch of messianism. All of Israeli society, which is torn between the ills of the present and the desire for tikkun and change, is being buffeted by messianic waves that are motivated by a desire to fulfill one great dream, which is the one and only bearer of the absolute good: The secular community adopts the modernist ethos of the sovereignty of man. They impose the task of progress toward the messianic age on human beings - individuals and societies. The Haredim place their hope in God - and are "waiting for Godot," until he comes. Religious Zionism wants it both ways. All of them together share the realization that the present Jewish situation must undergo a total change. They do not see the ideal future as only a hypothesis, one possibility among many for changing a defective reality. They "know" that they have the key to the magic cave where lies absolute good.

This absoluteness does not leave room for irony or criticism in relation to reality. It makes it difficult to be open to suggestions and alternatives. Those with messianic views are not open to dialogue with those who reject their viewpoint. The shared messianic pathos silences the marketplace of ideas. The only possible discourse is a prolonged monologue, and an invitation to the "other" to accept the true faith. The profound conviction and awareness of being chosen affixes those who share in the monologue as bearers of a message, rather than as critical intellectuals.

However, it is important to be precise and to make distinctions. The messianic urge contains a positive component: a desire for change and tikkun. People are not enslaved to the reality into which they were "thrown." They have the power to go beyond it, to shape their lives and to recreate them at any time. The possibility of change is a profound and important expression of human freedom. Therefore, we must pay attention to the nature of the required change: A viewpoint that negates the present entirely or sees it only as a stage on the way to an ideal future, is messianic. On the other hand, a viewpoint that does not flee from the responsibility for the present and for confronting it, but desires to repair and improve it, to live one rung above it rather than two, is not messianic.

The fine line that separates the two relates to their attitude toward reality: The messianic approach is interested in replacing reality, and in that sense, is located outside it. The non-messianic approach exists entirely within reality, even if it desires to repair it. Religious Zionism is walking on this fine line like a tightrope walker about to fall: It has forces that are working to repair reality while accepting it. But the messianic fire that has been raging in it recently heightens the flames in such a way that it damages its ability to function in the present.

Israeli society is varied, multicultural and dynamic. The players who are competing for control over the agenda and the resources of the society that is coming into being sometimes wear messianic garb. Their desire for tikkun is replaced by a demand for transformation of the present into an imaginary future. Can we get rid of the messianic foundation and begin the Sisyphean journey of confronting the injustices and evil in reality? The way to social, political and ethical tikkun in the real world will be open to us if we succeed in freeing ourselves from dreams of an overall tikkun of reality.

SOURCE: Haaretz