The Question That Deserves an Answer

First in a new series, "The Kippah and the Flag," on religious Zionism and how it fits, or does not fit, into the Jewish religion.

This publication has spent months arguing one point: Zionism is a modern nationalist movement, born in nineteenth-century Europe, built by men who rejected the Jewish religion, and it is not Judaism. The evidence has come from the founders' own writings, from the historical record, and from the rulings of the rabbis of that generation.

A careful reader will have noticed a problem. Turn on the news. The men ascending the Temple Mount behind an Israeli cabinet minister wear kippot and prayer fringes. The settlers in the West Bank hills include bearded men with large families who keep the Sabbath strictly. Some Israeli soldiers pray in uniform at the Western Wall. Many synagogues in America display the Israeli flag beside the holiest object in the building, the ark that holds the Torah scrolls. If Zionism and Judaism are opposites, why is so much of the visible Zionist world so visibly religious?

That question deserves a straight answer. It is the strongest objection to everything this publication argues, and this series will answer it.

Start with respect

Let's begin with what the answer is not. The religious Jews in those news photographs are not pretending. They keep the Torah's commandments with devotion, study the sacred texts, raise their children in observant homes, and many of them would give their lives for their faith. Whatever this series concludes about the ideology they carry, their sincerity is not in question, and no argument here relies on doubting it.

The dispute is about a doctrine, and about where that doctrine came from. A sincere person can hold a mistaken belief, especially a belief he was never taught to examine. Most of this series is about how that happened to a portion of a very devout world.

Two answers, not one

The full explanation has two layers, and both are needed.

The first layer is a movement. Religious Zionism is not simply "Judaism plus support for Israel." It is a specific ideology with a birthdate, a founding generation, and a doctrine. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a faction within the Orthodox world accepted the new nationalist movement's central idea, that the Jews are a modern nation whose identity and destiny run through a state, and grafted that idea onto traditional practice. They kept the commandments and added the nationalism. The coming articles will describe that graft in detail: what it teaches, what its proponents claimed about the state and the end of days, and what it produces in the world today.

The second layer is an atmosphere, and it may matter more. The average religious Jew has never formally studied the question of Zionism. The subject sits in no standard curriculum. His attitudes toward Israel and the state came to him the way most people's political attitudes come to them, absorbed from the surrounding culture, the community, the dinner table, the Jewish street. And that street has been saturated for a century by one of the most successful messaging campaigns in modern history, a campaign whose explicit goal, documented earlier in these pages, was to fuse Jew and state in every mind on earth. Jews were not exempt from the campaign. They were its first audience.

So when the world sees broad Zionist sentiment across the religious Jewish world, it is seeing two different things wearing one costume: a minority movement with a worked-out ideology, and a much wider population that inherited a mood it never examined. Neither one tells you what Judaism teaches.

What the camera selects

There is also a distortion in the sample. News photographs are not a census. The man at the political barricade gets photographed; the man at the study table does not. Whole communities of intensely observant Jews reject Zionism on religious grounds or hold themselves apart from it, in Jerusalem, in Brooklyn, in London, in Antwerp, and the cameras find them only when they appear as a curiosity. Readers of this publication's recent coverage have already met them once: when a Jewish man was being celebrated for ascending the Temple Mount, the Jews most devoted to Jewish law were the ones who stayed at the bottom, and when a rally gathered to denounce New York's mayor as an enemy of the Jews, Orthodox Jews in long coats stood outside it in protest. The visible sample is skewed toward exactly the phenomenon this series sets out to explain.

Tradition and street

All of this points to a standard, and the standard is the real subject of this series. A religion's position on a question is found in its authoritative texts and in the rulings of its recognized authorities across the generations. It is not found by counting sentiment in a crowd, any more than a church's doctrine can be discovered by polling the politics of its congregants. Sentiment can be manufactured; it has been, on this subject, for a hundred years, and it is genuinely hard to quantify how far the manufacturing reached. Texts and rulings cannot be manufactured after the fact. They sit in libraries, dated and signed.

And on this question, the record exists. When religious Zionism appeared a century ago, the leading Torah authorities of Europe examined it while it was happening and rejected it, in writing, in unusually strong terms, with striking unanimity. One of the most revered of them, upon seeing a poster in Vilna advertising the new Religious Zionists' school, tore it from the wall in front of his students. Late in life, the movement's own leading authority in America worried aloud that the nationalism had displaced the Torah in his community's heart. Those documents and testimonies have simply never been shown to most people, Jewish or not.

The next article opens that record. What the greatest rabbis of the modern era said about religious Zionism, at the moment of its birth, in their own words.