Of Synagogue And State

Religious plurality comes in many shapes and sizes. Take the case of Israel, often dismissed by foreign observers as simply ‘the Jewish state’. The lion’s share of international focus on Israel stems from conflict between the Jewish majority and an Arab minority.
Yet outside mixed-ethnic areas like Jerusalem and the Upper Galilee, most Israelis don’t deal with Jewish-Arab problems on a daily basis. Rather, the schism on everyone’s mind is playing out between a secular Jewish majority (Israel is considerably more atheist than the US) and a vocal Orthodox Jewish minority – two full-fledged sectors of society. Besides having different concepts of God and the Jewish tradition, they tend to live in separate neighborhoods and cities, vote for different political parties, and have totally different ideas for the civilizational identity of Israel.
As interest in the peace process wears down, the secular-religious divide is making a media comeback. With PM Netanyahu’s coalition dependent on the cooperation of religious parties, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party is attempting to pass through Knesset a $30 million worth of stipends for students at yeshivas – religious institutes of Torah and Talmud study. And secular university students are up in arms.
Coming on the heels of a court ruling that provided for equality of funding, the stipend bill led on Monday to a general strike of students and professors at Hebrew University, Israel’s premier secular university. To the surprise of many demonstrators, university president Menachem Ben-Sasson offered his support for protests, offering, “the university management shares the students’ concern.”
The Hebrew University protests remind us that within Israel, the ethnic Jewish community is cloven between some who think that yeshiva study is a waste of resources, and some who believe that it’s the only way to keep God on the embattled country’s side.
America isn’t totally foreign to this dichotomy, but a key difference is in play: unlike the US government, which is uninvolved in religious matters, Israel’s government maintains an official status on religion. Though all of Israel’s prime ministers, left or right, have been secular, they’ve participated since a 1949 compromise in a system that recognizes Orthodox Judaism as the state religion. Political quid pro quo at its finest, no doubt. The Orthodox give up their dreams of a theocracy in exchange for a theocratically-inflected democracy. But over the past half-century, the consequences have been devastating for all but the most extreme on both sides.
First, the government essentially recognizes the secular and the religious as separate social classes – constructing different welfare policies, school systems, and military obligations to suit each. To its credit, it allows atheists to imagine they live in Northern Europe and gives Hassidic Jews the illusion of personal theocracy. But it’s tragically polarizing. Over the past few decades, religious Jews have fled Tel Aviv and secular Jews have fled Jerusalem, creating two opposite cultural poles only 36 miles apart. That’s less than the distance between San Francisco and San Jose: imagine if they were that starkly different!
As a result, the two sides are essentially able to create two very different cultural landscapes on the face of the same land.

Neither has to deal with the other very often. Predictably, this can entail a great deal of misunderstanding and mutual resentment. Religious Israelis often blast secular Israelis for ignoring the reality of living in the Middle East, and secular Israelis have been known to lambast religious Israelis for not participating in a twenty-first-century economy.
Unlike the Israeli-Palestinian divide as envisioned by Jimmy Carter, this sounds like state-supported apartheid to me. And more, though it’s actually well-meaning, it needs to go: Israel can’t afford any more polarization.
While no answer is perfect, the first step is clear to a majority of Israelis and Western observers alike: separate church and state! In a society where most Jews are not Orthodox at all, it makes little sense for all marriages and divorces to be conducted through an Orthodox Jewish civil legal system. Separating it from the government would do nothing to change the lives of believing Orthodox Jews – with the possible exception of making secular Jews less resentful of them.
Moreover, the very acknowledgement of a state religion instigates all sorts of undemocratic behavior on behalf of the religious minority. Ofrit Liviatan, a professor of government at Harvard, notes “Orthodox legislative success on the question of ‘who is a Jew’, the placement of non-Orthodox individuals on religious councils, the importation of non-Kosher meat, [and] the distribution of funds to non-Orthodox religious institutions.”
Functionally, these decisions have meant that religious moderates, a la America’s Conservative Jews, have been shut out of the social dialogue. As a direct result of government policy, most Israelis have to choose between religious and secular, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, theocracy and democracy. The society that grows up is fragmented, unsure of its identity, and decidedly not what the first Zionists envisioned.
It has even reached the point where ultra-Orthodox Jews, expecting the entire country to abide by their social dictates, have rioted against parking garages that stay open on the Sabbath. This is a society that a majority of Israelis are unhappy to countenance. As a secular Jew, I would be, too.