Neither Jewish Nor Democratic

All of Israel’s patches are sewn with two thin and fraying threads. On the outside, a perpetual war of which only a small part is justified, and on the inside, the illusion that there exists such a thing as “Jewish and democratic.” Much has been said about the falsehood of the war, though little of it has sunk in. About the hollow formula “Jewish and democratic” we speak far too little. Two words hold up the facade of Israel’s image of itself: Jewish and democratic. They are engraved in the Basic Laws, carried aloft in every state speech, hurled into every petition to the Supreme Court, and they have long since become a truism no one pauses to question. The test of reality is crueler than the declarations. A short journey along the new Jewish continuum that has formed here, from the hilltops to the cabinet, from the synagogues to the barracks, reveals a society stretched into a split that tears it open, striding away from both halves of the phrase at once. At the journey’s end wait two structural claims, and because of them the phrase collapses into itself.

At one end of the new Jewish continuum stand the criminals of the hilltops. Armed youths and irresponsible adults who, in the name of their Torah, set olive groves ablaze, drive toiling shepherds from their land, and abuse the weak for the sin of their weakness. Around them cluster rabbis steeped in sin, cruel to the other inhabitants among us, the very people the Torah returns to command us about more than any other commandment. They knowingly violate the essence of the teaching of Hillel the Elder: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” Their way in this land cultivates hatreds and hastens destructions. It is so nauseating, so defiling of reality itself, that the warning verse “lest the land vomit you out” feels nearer than ever. Because of them.

Beside them on the continuum stands Haredi society. Its world is ostensibly full of Torah and inner kindness, marked by a devotion that leaves some observers in awe. All of this is a thicket of brambles concealing the great Haredi forest, which is entirely about secession from the traditional solidarity of all Israel being responsible for one another and to one another. The mutual guarantee that was the secret of Jewish survival through two thousand years of exile has become, in their hands, a one way street. Their appetite is insatiable for wealth they did not make and budgets they did not create. All the favors and pleasures of power flow to them generously, and in return they look after themselves alone. In all the cemeteries of Israel there is not a single grave, not even one, of a person who killed himself in the tent of Torah. The military plots, meanwhile, keep growing, in part because of them. Those who claim to carry the burden of identity and responsibility of the “Jewish” are the most exploitative and lethal element among us, and the least responsible of all.

From there the continuum proceeds to the neo Jews, the newest phenomenon and the most dangerous of all. Their identity is assembled from shallow symbols: ostentatious ritual fringes worn on the outside, gilded Adidas or Puma sneakers, a rifle on the shoulder, a large kippah on the head, and a burning hatred in the heart, often for leftists and always for Arabs. Their Judaism is membership in a gang. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the normative system once called Judaism, which demanded of a person spiritual labor and an elevated ethical commitment. They take from the tradition its shallow husks and trample its binding core. Their love of Israel is hatred of everyone who is not them, and their fear of Heaven is the terrorizing of the land. In old words made new: terrorists with kosher certificates.

At the far end of the continuum, at its summit or at its bottom depending on where you stand, sit the politicians. They repeat the phrase Jewish and democratic again and again, without pausing even for a moment over the meaning of the words, as if it were a sorcerer’s incantation whose sense was lost long ago. They understand Judaism as little as they understand democracy, and the smaller their understanding, the louder their shouting. Their Judaism is demography, a counting of heads and a fear of the Arab womb, and their democracy is an arithmetic of sixty one. Whoever holds a majority is entitled, in their eyes, to trample the minority and empty the courts of their power. A majority may even purchase draft exemption deals paid for in the blood of others. Abraham arguing with his God over the justice owed to Sodom is a figure they have never heard of. The spirit of democracy, whose essence is the restraint of power rather than its glorification, they seek to banish from the land. Let it be said from now on: Israel’s formula is Jewish ignorance and democratic tyranny.

From this sociological portrait rises the first structural claim. A human organization of any kind, from the parents’ committee to the state itself, cannot survive over time with two contradictory and colliding sources of authority. The “Jewish” of Israel 2026 is no longer cultural or civic as it was at the founding of the state. It is religious, in the manner of one of the streams described above. Its authority is vertical, a chain of command descending from God through His Torah to His shallow rabbi interpreters and down to the solitary believer wherever he or she may be. In that world there is one who commands and one who is commanded, one who decrees and one who obeys. Democratic authority, by contrast, is horizontal, a single plane on which all human beings stand as equals, and government draws its authority from their free consent alone. These two geometries, the vertical line and the horizontal, cannot be united. Every point of friction, who is a Jew, who may marry whom, what is permitted on the Sabbath in the public square, who decides when halakha and law collide, demands a clear decision rather than a dubious compromise. The phrase Jewish and democratic is no blessed synthesis. It is an invitation to perpetual collision, nothing more than the postponement of the meeting between nitro and glycerin, and whoever keeps postponing will discover one day that the explosion cannot be avoided.

The second structural claim is harsher still. Relations between religion and state in Israel are in truth a war of religion and a cold civil war, conducted by two colliding currents. From above, the state moves toward Muslim models of fusion between religion and state. Religion has become an instrument of rule, religious law seeps into civil law, the clergy serve as officials of the sovereign and its long arm, and the reverse as well. The latest legislative offensive testifies to it: rabbis on the state payroll in every institution, a kosher certification system both coercive and corrupt, religious courts with ever widening powers, and public money flowing to enterprises whose whole purpose is coercion. From below, more and more Israelis move in the opposite direction, toward the Western Christian model of separation: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. They marry in Cyprus or in the backyard with officiants like me, and above all without the Rabbinate. They are buried in civil funerals, rely on independent communal kashrut, build prayer communities outside the establishment, live as equals in their partnerships and in raising their children, and bring up children whose Judaism is rich as culture and whose faith is free of coercion. The sovereign is Islamizing in its structure while the citizens are Christianizing in their habits, and between them the Israeli abyss opens its mouth and swallows.

A cold war of this kind ends in one of two ways, in bloodshed or in a new settlement. Bloodshed we have had enough of, so the new settlement demands a courage the current political system lacks: a full separation of religion from state, releasing each of them from the claws of the other. Democracy would be freed from coercion, and Judaism would be cleansed of the filth of political power’s corruption. A free, humanist Judaism, the Judaism of Abraham, Hillel, and the many others who embraced the other. A Judaism in which love of the stranger is a commandment weighed against the love of God Himself, Ve’Ahavta, and in which mutual responsibility is real. A hybrid identity of this kind can live in complete peace with democracy, for both set out from the same starting point: all human beings are created in the divine image, and human dignity precedes every dubious rabbinic robe. The Judaism that rules Israel today is as distant from this as heaven is from earth, and the democracy groaning beneath it empties out from year to year. Until we find the courage to decide, we will go on living in a state that recites Jewish and democratic while destroying both with its deeds.

And a word of postscript, since among us it is almost impossible to escape politics. The political bloc of the right “at full blast” divorced democracy long ago and carries the Jewish aloft as the crown of its celebration. The question is whether the bloc of change will find the spiritual and intellectual courage to commit to full democracy without the suspenders of the Jewish and democratic cliche. The Judaism of the right is incapable of containing a democracy of all of Israel’s citizens, whereas our democracy is capable of containing even their sick and distorted Judaism. Anyone?

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