A New Judaism?

It is New Year for the Jews. All over the world this week, families come together to pray and wish each other "Leshanah tobah tikkatheb (may you be inscribed [in the book of life] for a good year)"; the shofar sounds, and the year 5714 (since the Creation) begins. All over the world, Orthodox elders shake their heads at the careless young for whom the high holidays mean nothing more than some time off from their jobs. But in Israel this week many of the young ones, too, are shaking their heads--at the sterile secularism of their elders the Zionist pioneers, and at the dogged conservatism of their elders the rabbis.

Shabbos Goyim Goats. In Tel Aviv recently, a young Orthodox Israeli went to his rabbi. He had just been offered a good job on the police force, he said, but it would mean that he would have to work on the Sabbath. What should he do? The learned rabbi was silent for some minutes, then he dismissed his visitor. He would send for him, he said, when he had come to his decision. Several weeks passed and the young man heard nothing. Anxiously, he asked the rabbi again for a verdict. The rabbi sighed deeply and looked into his beard. "Ah, my son," he said, "in Europe I was never faced with such problems."

The orthodoxy of the ghetto did not have to cope with the maintenance of a modern state, and the religious laws that nourished and protected the Judaism of the Diaspora can be an embarrassment once Zion has been attained. Yet the rabbinate, while recognizing that such basic services as electricity, water, telephone and telegraph must be maintained seven days a week, cannot bring itself to give the necessary dispensation to Orthodox Jews. Said one of them last week: "Jews are permitted to work on the Sabbath if the security of the nation is threatened, or to save human life. But a Jew who puts in a trunk call from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv for a girl who wants to wish her boy friend happy birthday would be breaking the Sabbath."

The result, both observing and non-observing Jews complain, is a rabbinically sanctioned division of the population into "observing sheep and shabbos goyim-goats."

Benzedrine Letdown. Fearful of wrenching the new-made state apart at the seams, the parliamentarians of the Knesset have been egg-walking through a series of compromises between the secular and sacred. The rabbinate has even made a few tactical concessions (most recent: rescinding the rule that before marriage all brides must produce a "certificate of purity" given after a visit to the ritual bath). But for the most part, Polish-born Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog and his fellow rabbis have dug in their heels and refused to budge, confident in the prophecy of the great 12th century philosopher, Maimonides, that "in the end Israel will return to God."

Certainly, the native-born young Israelis, the "sabras" (nicknamed from an edible cactus that is prickly on the outside, soft and sweet within) who fought for their land like lions under the inspiration of Zionism, have been searching for a new source of inspiration. The intense Zionist ideology of heroic manual work in an atmosphere of collective equality looks to them more & more oldfashioned. The slogans have disappeared; their leaders have become government bureaucrats with American cars at their disposal; mailmen and railway clerks seem to be just as valuable to the state as "pioneers" who are willing to swelter in the Negev desert to grow tomatoes which could be more cheaply produced in Galilee. Said one young Israeli: "It seems as if Zionism was a sort of Benzedrine which isn't working any more. And we don't know what to take in its place. But we do feel that the state has failed us -- without exactly knowing why."

The bitterness of the disillusioned sabras was increased by the immigrants from Europe's cities, with their preference for selling ice cream at street-corner stalls to clearing rocks from the hillside. Splinter groups began to form: the intellectual "Canaanites" who urged severing all relations with non-Israeli Jews and wrote anti-religious poems; the would-be expatriates who wanted to leave the country and live among non-Jews; the aggressive nationalists who sneered at the "spinelessness" of those who had marched unresisting into Hitler's gas chambers.

Bible Principles. But in the past year a new positive attitude has been evident. Says Pedagogy Professor Karl Frankenstein of Hebrew University: "This has been most striking in their changed approach to new immigrants . . . Cynicism and sterile nationalism are on the way out."

The young men and women of Israel are reaching for religious forms to give meaning to their new nationhood. Parents who belong to the old secular-socialist tradition of Zionism are finding that their children demand observance of religious festivals; even in the collective farms, which have been called "hotbeds of atheism," young people feast and fast in accordance with the Jewish calendar.

But the young people make it clear that the law-bound Judaism of the Diaspora is not what they are looking for. Said one of them last week: "In the teachings of the Bible there are principles of ethics and morals on which can be constructed a way of life more satisfying than the rabbis' interpretations with which our grandparents had to be content." Added another: "Every nation needs its traditions, but we modern Israelis can't accept the traditionalism of the Torah-soaked ghettos."

* Orthodox Jews of the Diaspora have often hired non-Jews (goyim) to perform household tasks that are forbidden on the Sabbath (shabbos).

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