American Jews, who have been running away
from Judaism for the past three generations, are upset that Israel has embraced
the normative Judaism they worked so hard to suppress...
I should like
to advance a conjecture which I lack the qualifications to adequately develop:
The global Left, and the Israeli Left most of all, perceives that the clock is
running out, and has worked itself up into a froth of hysteria against Israel.
The world of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” where there are no countries and no
religions, is about to dissipate like last night’s marijuana fumes. The
demographic time bomb that worries the Left is not the relative increase of Arab
vs. Jewish populations between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River,
speciously cited by John Kerry and a host of other errant utopians: it is the
growth of the Jewish population itself, and Israel’s transformation into the
world’s most religious country.
According to our Central Bureau of Statistics, 43% of
Israeli Jews are secular, 9% are haredi, and the remaining 48% are somewhere
between masorti (traditional) and dati (religious): 23% the former, 10% the
latter, and 15% smack in the middle. These five groups do not parallel the five
groups identified by Pew, e.g. Orthodox is a denomination, while dati is a
declaration.
57% of
Israelis, that is, practice a form of Judaism that for the most part Americans
would call “Orthodox,” in that it recognizes normative Judaism in the rabbinic
tradition (the presence of the “progressive” Reform and Conservative movements
is almost imperceptible and largely limited to transplanted Americans). Many
Israelis who are dati are far from completely observant, but there is a
great gulf fixed between a semi-observant Jew who knows what observance is, and
a “progressive” who asserts the right to reinvent tradition according to
personal taste.
This majority
seems to be expanding fast. I spent the second half of December in Jerusalem
promoting the Hebrew translation of my book How Civilizations Die and was
struck by the increase in commitment to religious observance, including among
people who were steadfastly secular. Almost half of Israel’s army officers are
“national religious” and trained in pre-Army academies that teach Judaism,
Jewish history, as well as physical training and military subjects. The
ultra-Orthodox are going to work rather than studying full time, little by
little, but the little adds up to a lot. Naftali Bennett’s national-religious
party “Jewish Home” has created a new political focus for the
national-religious. Outreach organizations like Beit
Hillel are bringing once-secular Israelis back to observance. Beit
Hillel’s spiritual leader Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth was in New York recently
lecturing about Israel’s religious revival.
Anecdotally,
I see this in my own small circle of Israeli acquaintances. A musician friend
told me that he attends a Talmud class every Shabbat — he can’t stand praying,
but he is hungry for Torah. A journalist friend dresses her young boys in the
tallit katan, the fringed undergarment of the very observant. It is becoming
normal in Jerusalem restaurants to wash hands before bread and to recite the
Grace after Meals.
This is a
crucial, counterintuitive story: Israel is swimming against the secular current,
becoming more observant as the rest of the world becomes more secular. Perhaps
the explanation lies in the observation of the Catholic sociologist Mary
Eberstadt, who argued in a brilliant 2007 essay that it is our children who bring us to
faith. Last year Mary expanded the essay into a book which I had the honor to discuss in Claremont
Review of Books. It is a commonplace of demographers’ correlation that people of
faith have more children: Mary argues that the causality goes both ways, that
having children reinforces our faith. Israeli is a standpoint in the modern
world with a fertility rate of 3.0 children per woman (the closest second is the
US with just 1.9). Excluding the ultra-Orthodox the number is 2.6 children per
woman, still outside the range of the rest of the industrial world. Secular
Israelis are having three children. Not only does that defuse the much-touted
“demographic time bomb.” It ultimately changes the character of the country. It
validates the hundred-year-old argument of Rabbi Isaac Kook, one of the founders
of religious Zionism, that identification with the Jewish people eventually will
lead Jews back to Judaism.
This national
religious revival is not occurring at the expense of Israeli or West Bank Arabs.
On the contrary, the Arab population between the River and the Sea is
flourishing as no modern Arab population ever did. A fifth of Israel’s medical
students are Arab, as are a third of the students at the University of Haifa.
Ariel University across the “Green Line” in Samaria, the “settler’s university,”
is educating a whole generation of West Bank Arabs. The campus is full of young
Arab women in headscarves, and the local Jewish leadership reaches out to Arab
villages to recruit talented students. Israel’s expanding economy has a
bottomless demand for young people of ability and ambition. The Left calls
Israel an “apartheid state” the way it used to call America a “fascist state”
back in the 1960s.
The Israeli
Left, with its soggy vision of univeralist utopianism, may be at a point of no
return. It is becoming marginalized and irrelevant. The Europeans, whose
experience of nationalism has been uniformly horrific, are equally aghast. Liberal Christians who abhor the Election of Israel
because they abhor Christian orthodoxy cannot suppress their rage. And
“progressive” American Jews, who have been running away from Judaism for the
past three generations, are upset that Israel has embraced the normative Judaism
they worked so hard to suppress. American “progressive” and unaffiliated Jews,
one should remember, have the lowest fertility rate of any identifiable minority
in the United States. Even if most of them did not intermarry (and the
intermarriage rate in the past ten years approaches 70% according to the October
2013 Pew study) their infertility would finish them off in a few generations.
Meanwhile 74% of all Jewish children in the New York area live in
Orthodox families. The center of gravity of Judaism will shift decisively to
Israel in the next generation, and the segment of American Jewry that most
identifies with Israel–the Orthodox–will set the tone for American Judaism and
eventually become the majority in a much smaller American Jewish population.
It is up to
the Israelis, to be sure, to draw out the implications of these trends. But I am
encouraged by the perceptions of religious leaders like Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth,
who perceive this revival in their daily work.
This is good
news for Christians as well as Jews. The secularization thesis is refuted: a
country with the world’s greatest record of high-tech innovation is also
becoming the industrial world’s most religious country. It is devastating news
for Lennonists as well as Leninists. The “Imagine” world turns out to be
imaginary. Israel, as Franz Rosenzweig said of the Jewish people, is there to be
“the paragon and exemplar of a nation.” For all its flaws, the State of Israel
stands as a beacon to people of faith around the world. It is honored by its
list of self-appointed enemies. Will Israel prevail against the unholy coalition
against it? As we say, b’ezrat Hashem. (With G-d's help)
Thanks NG
Thanks NG
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