No More Lying in State
In a place that defines itself as the Jewish state, the natural address for rejuvenating the national purpose is the Jewish religion itself.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Friday, August 21st, 1998
Israeli schoolchildren in public schools are taught to revere nothing save the enormity of the Holocaust, which was an historic event, not a set of abstract values. It does, however, lend almost cosmic depth to what has been the central element of Israeli education: Zionism (Israel is the Jewish homeland and all Jews should move here). But while the simple ideology of Zionism was sufficient when the country was struggling for survival, by the 1980’s it was clear to all that the world’s comfortable Jews were not going to be moving to Israel. Simple Zionism could not continue to be the bedrock of the education system, and indeed, much time had been wasted focusing on the “why” as opposed to the ongoing “how” or “what” of Israel. The education system had missed the opportunity to create a civics from which the founders of the state had backed away in their fear of defining Judaism’s role in the state, and passed the buck back to parents and to the army, leaving these two bodies alone to inculcate civilized behavior in the population.
Ten years later, nothing has replaced Zionism in the schools. Today, Jewish Israelis have two sources of guidance, neither of which is administered by the government nor sufficient to educate a population capable of functioning as a democracy. One is a retreat into Jewish Orthodoxy, which haughtily ignores politics except to promote its own narrow interests and simple-mindedly legislate ideas in religious vogue, such as banning public transportation on the Sabbath. The other path is saturating one’s self in foreign television, trying to grasp from Melrose Place and Seinfeld how to live as a citizen in one’s own land. Apart from the army, there is no other national way to learn how to be a decent, contributing citizen; the Knesset is a foul-mannered embarrasment. This vacuum of civic guidance is the most dangerous problem facing this increasingly fragile democracy.
In a place that defines itself as the Jewish state, the natural address for rejuvenating the national purpose is the Jewish religion itself. But rather than being a golden goose laying golden eggs for the people, the religious establishments in Israel are laying no eggs for the people but getting very fat by being the only goose in the kitchen. The people who feed the goose are naturally angry at it, but killing it is unthinkable, for they have a sign outside the door advertising goose eggs for sale, and indeed, still consider themselves goose farmers.
But are they? Once the Jews are living on the land promised to them within their religion, don’t they revert back from being Jews into Hebrews or Israelites? That is to say, Israelis? Israelis may retain a vestige the wandering spirit, but it seems to me that as they acquire a certain grace and self-confidence in feeling so at home on their own compact land, they lose a certain angst and feeling of dislocation that has galvanized and intellectualized Jews for centuries. It seems a little ridiculous to pray “next year in Jerusalem” when one could be there within the hour.
But Israelis don’t have to be Jews in order to be Hebrews, in order to take the five books of Moses and really learn them inside out at school, using this literary source literally as their Bible.
In the west, religion is doomed because it reached too high. Christianity was the body for the European drive to construct grand edifices to explain the entire universe. When it was confronted by its own child, science, it refused to abandon the high ground of cosmic explanation, which doomed it. Instead of dispassionately studying Galileo’s conclusions, then rejoicing in this newfound revelation and embracing the man as a saint, they rejected him. The church lost its eminence 350 years ago, and has never regained much of a place in society’s debates.
But in Israel, the opportunity exists for a new balance between the church and the state. Rather than the state tolerating all churches, this state could have one religion and tolerate all others. Even today, Israelis yearn for Judaism to play a special role in the state. Its degeneration into a justification for building a political faction may have been inevitable due to the lack of planning by the socialist founders at the beginning, but these things can be changed.
The Tibetans take one person and exalt him throughout his life so that he becomes what they wish him to be: their society gracefully personified. Israel could do this with its religion, so that the people are sovereign, electing their representatives, but are informed on one hand by the investigative press, and on the other, by the state’s independent religion. How? Through art, debates, the press, whatever. The raison d’etre of the rabbis would be to use their Talmudically trained brains to publicly debate the issues facing Israel, springing their arguments from the Five Books, which the entire electorate would know inside out. It would be a class of ordained intellectuals speaking a language in which the people have been educated by the state — surely a delightful new development in modern democracy.