The effect of the State of Israel on the Jewish religion

Bad and, well, just bad.

Jewness levels in this post are off the charts. This is not for the goyim

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As we have discussed in previous articles, the purpose of Zionism as a movement was not to provide a safe place for the Jewish people to live in. There were, it is true, Zionists who believed that it was, and some of them were even important at various stages, but, at the movement level, this was hashed out at the sixth and seventh Zionist Congresses where the orthodox Herzleans were marginalized. From then on, those whose primary concern was getting Jews out of harm’s way were confined to the fringes of the movement or left altogether. Zionism, after Herzl’s death, was not about safety, or at the very least not just about safety in the short to medium term, but about something else, namely bringing to an end the condition of the Jews as a stateless, wandering people in exile by bringing them home.

As to what the Jews should become once they had a state in their own land, there was a great diversity of opinion. One relatively minor strain, which has become increasingly common in recent years in the wake of inexorable demographic change brought about by differential birthrates, is the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel as the vehicle for a religious revival, a place not to replace rabbinic Judaism, but to reinvigorate it, both by purging the corruptions and depredations of exile, and also by creating a truly pan-Jewish center of culture that contains all of its different branches, and thus can fully develop them into a greater whole.¹ I recently came across this view expressed quite persuasively by Maia Zelkha in Yad Mizrah magazine.

Already, the identity of diaspora is fading away, whether we like it or not. Languages of exile are vanishing, and perhaps with the exception of Yiddish, will be gone within a single generation. My father’s first language, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, was never transmitted to my generation. The same goes for my husband and his parents, who never knew or spoke Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Malayalam. We each know a few words— his brother knows a song— but the languages are gone. The same is true for food, music, and rituals. They were already cultural fragments when we inherited them, and each generation becomes more fragmented.

…

And yet, for all their beauty, the traditions rooted in our diaspora can entrap us in an illusion. When we Jews shape our national self-perception through categories and differences, we fracture our collective soul and chain ourselves to the mental slavery of separation, superiority, judgement, racism, and ego. We’re not the first to experience it within the history of our peoplehood; even while enslaved in Egypt, not all Jews chose to leave when presented with liberation. They were too attached to the familiarity of Egyptian culture, routine, and society, even while under oppression. That said: a very real attachment to our diasporic identities still exists, perhaps because we cannot yet imagine what it means to be Jewish outside of them. That is for the next generations to imagine, because sooner or later, that will be their reality as Jewish cultural and ethnic distinctions fade into memory. A huge turning point in Jewish civilization is happening as we speak.

…

The great Rav Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh: “Just as this occurs in an individual, so it occurs with the nation as a whole: when the spirit of Israel gathers inward beautifully within its depths, it feels a supreme wholeness within itself.” That “gathering inward” doesn’t necessarily need to look miraculous; I think more realistically it looks like two Jews from vastly different regional and ethnic backgrounds falling in love and making babies. Rav Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, understood this clearly. He argues in Mishpetei Uziel that ethnic separation within the Jewish people was unnatural, even dangerous: “Just as we are commanded to be one unified body (agudah achat), we are also sternly warned: Do not make yourselves into separate factions — Lo ta’asu atzmechem agudot agudot.”

If that is true, then perhaps marriage and families that span across Jewish ethnic lines isn’t just a sociological transformation, but part of the slow, natural healing process of our remaining fractures of exile.

In a strange way, we move backwards as we move forward in our history, returning to a moment before our identities were split into Iraqi, Ashkenazi, Cochini, Moroccan, or Yemenite. The last time Jews lived together in one place, with a shared sense of peoplehood unmediated by exile, was before those divisions ever existed. The age of exile gave us extraordinary cultural diversity. But now begins a new transformation, one that we don’t have a name for now but that our children and grandchildren certainly will: the early formation of a post-diasporic— a truly post-diasporic— Jewish identity.

The view is attractive, and it’s not exactly wrong. Jewish civilization is turning a corner and there’s not much anyone can do to stop the process in which one dominant Jewish center composed out of all the others comes to increasingly dominate over the diaspora from which it grew. The problem is it sucks. The purpose of this article is to flesh out that claim, which I will do by comparing like with like, something that Israel simps never do. Some things I’ve already written about, some will be new. Let’s gooooooo!

Charedim

This part I don’t really need to explain. There’s an entire genre of Israeli discourse which is just ‘how can we get Charedim in Israel to be less messed up like the Charedim in America are?’. There are two aspects of this. The main one is the barmy idea that men not working so they can study all day should be the norm for an entire community of hundreds of thousands of people as it is among the yeshivish in Israel. The second one is just that a lot of Charedi neighbourhoods around here have litter everywhere, are dilapidated, and the inhabitants act as if they just don’t care at all about not resembling a bad bit of a third-world country. I was once on a bus from Jerusalem to Beitar Illit, and two chalmers with black hoisinzocken and big white cappelach got on and sat across the aisle from each other loudly schmoozing. That’s just normal in Israel, but what was not normal is that after five minutes the one on the right hocked up a big ball of phlegmy spit and then lobbed it into the middle. Then he did it again five minutes later, then again, then again; seven times in total. There in the aisle sat a puddle of the stuff, which everyone else had to step over because, y’know, the floor of a bus isn’t made of mud you disgusting retarded ape.

Anyhoos, like I say, we don’t have to justify the claim here, though Ash has a good compilation of Israeli Charedim acting like gutter trash in a way that is literally inconceivable anywhere in the diaspora if you’re interested. What I will point out, in passing, is that, as is generally typical, the normie Israeli perspective on this whole issue is diametrically wrong because it’s based on the idea that Charedim need to be made to integrate more into Israeli society. Precisely the problem is that Israeli Charedim are already much more integrated than Charedim are anywhere else in the world, as made most spectacularly evident during the Covid years when diaspora Charedim realized a few months in that it was ridiculous and made a big kiddush Hashem, showing everyone you could just ignore it and it was totally fine, while Israeli Charedim beclowned themselves with stuff like this:

There are three ways in which greater integration makes Charedim worse. The first is that when Charedim assimilate, they never pick up anything good from the surrounding culture, only bad things, and in Israel there are an awful lot of bad things to pick up. Charedim are exposed very little, if at all, to respectable middle-class Israelis, and so absorb the worst traits of the worst parts of the country. Secondly, the lower degree of cultural and practical day-to-day separation from the rest of society leads Israeli Charedim to double down on their ideology as a source of group identity, but their ideology is just a bit mad. In America, it’s OK because people don’t really believe it that much. It’s probably a good thing for your average Jewish businessman making bank to hear one or twice a week that it’s pointless trying to earn money and only learning Torah matters, but it’s definitely not good for some broke guy in Bnei Brak who spends 12 hours a day failing to learn gemara because he’s not smart to hear that over and over until he decides to up it to 14. Thirdly, their integration allows them to pursue a political strategy inconceivable in the diaspora, the harms of which do not need to be elaborated here.

Before we’ll close this section, it’s well to mention that, though the State of Israel gave the heirs of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement the ability to fulfil their dreams and create a cradle-to-grave education system of pure talmudic learning with no secular studies to impinge upon it (the system American Charedim profess to want if only the government would allow it), it completely fails even on its own terms. The Rosh Yeshiva of Chevron is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Slabodka is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir inherited the position but his father was American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo is American. All of them received an education that would be considered chazer treif in Israel, but it is they who are consistently front and center of the campaign against the draft because, despite none of them even being especially proficient in spoken Hebrew (their third language), they are nevertheless better equipped to stand up and say consecutive sentences than anyone else in the Israeli yeshiva world. Prominent Israeli Roshei Yeshiva are, excepting the ones who inherited their position, older than the system they preside over and so literally too decrepit to do much more than whisper. Hence their representatives are Yankees and sound like this:

Or like this

(The whole channel is … illuminating)

Lubavitch

Usually, when I rag on Chabad, someone will chime in that my perspective is distorted because I live in Israel. Well, yes, I live in Israel, but the point is valid enough. In America, the split is, if we’re charitable 40-60 meshichist non-mechichist (though, in fact, the latter group also believe MMS is or will be the moshiach).² In Israel, it’s 80-20 at the very least. In most diaspora countries, it’s possible with a bit of artful lying to maintain plausible deniability for the ‘I love Chabad, but I reject their tiny minority of extremists’ line, but in Israel you have to be an exceptionally clueless Anglo dipstick to still say this. A neat indication of just how off the rails Israeli Chabad can be found in a brawl that happened on Rosh haShanah in America’s center of idolatry and general weirdness, 770 Crown Heights. In the states, this is the stronghold of the extreme of the extreme, but in Israel they are considered moderates, allied with the old-school meshichist yeshiva of Tzfat. This more extreme faction, centred around the yeshiva in Rishon leTziyon are waging a (racially inflected) campaign to take over 770 from the ante-nicene meshichists, as part of which they affixed a picture of MMS on the aron before prayers. The old-school guys are still embarrassed about stuff like that and took it down, so the Israelis started throwing tables at them.

What is even worse is that the off-the-chain levels of extremism of Chabad in Israel are not compensated by their being relatively marginalised. In fact, they are even more mainstream and accepted than in the diaspora. I remember in Jerusalem at the local park, each week on shabbos two shluchim would hand out sweets to neighbourhood children in return for saying various pesukim. Everyone let their children join in, seculars and religious and in between. They ended with (note well) יחי אדוננו אלהינו בוראנו מלך המשיח לעולם ועד, but obviously I’m the weirdo for objecting to this. Here’s another example that’s relevant mostly because I saw it this morning. There’s a relatively new YouTube channel by a guy called Tamir Dortal who people point to as evidence against the claim that right-wingers are illiterate subhumans. It’s very thoughtful and stuff. He talks to Ben Shapiro about how the right can fight against the Left Wing media through alternative platforms, and they bond over judicial philosophy and not liking postmodernism (the other week he had a similar convo with Dave Rubin). Anyway, here’s what he put out for Gimmel Tamuz.

Abolish. This. Country. I want to smash up my computer now and walk away, but this article has barely got started.

Breslov

There’s not a whole bunch to add about Breslov that I didn’t write already. The difference between the case of Breslev and Chabad is that, while Chabad outside Israel is still massive but less bad, Breslov outside Israel is barely a thing at all. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Over here, it’s really impossible to overstate just how big Breslov is. Unless you live in a very elitist Charedi community, or a very elitist secular community, you really can’t escape one of the hundreds of branches of a movement that was universally condemned as an insane heresy even by all the other chassidim because it’s that bad. And it’s even worse now than it was then. How bad is Breslov?

Item: The most influential Breslev leader for two decades was Eliezer Berland, a man who declared himself God to his followers, taught that he was more righteous than Moshe Rabbeinu and present in the room at all times with those who believed, and who shagged hundreds, maybe thousands of other people’s wives, then, after getting out of clink, got his operation back off the ground by selling mentos and tic tacs as kabbalistic remedies for chronic disease.

Item: In Lod, a guy called Netanel Deri set up a Breslev branch and had a thriving community until he was arrested for multiple counts of sexual abuse against minors.

Item: Some French immigrant dude called Daniel Ambash set himself up as cult leader in Jerusalem and married a bunch of women. When he got pinched, charges included locking children in cages, forcing them to eat faeces and mandatory intercourse with animals.

Item: A younger son of a prestigious Satmar-affiliated Rav in the States got depressed and found Breslev cheered him up. He set up a community in America, but realised Israel was way more fertile ground and eventually his followers turned up in a nice secular yishuv and started wrecking it. Unlike other Breslov leaders, he was basically on the level and not some crazed pervert, but the whole thing is nevertheless a big disaster. To stop all the feral children in his utopian community shagging and raping each other, he started having them get married off at 14, but then they just started doing wife swapping instead. There’s a whole documentary about sundry goings on.

Item: Yosef Shovali is the Breslov leader in Meron and also a medium-level YouTube influencer retard. Earlier, this year he got arrested too. It’s the usual menu, but apparently he’s more into men.

Item:

Then, of course, there’s the hilltop youth guys, who for many years now have all been Breslov with various degrees of Chabad admixture. They particularly like to do arson on Shabbos, because, don’t ask me, probably some wanker from Arutz 7 can explain how it’s pIKUACH nEFESH.

Zoharism

I’ve written a lot about Zoharism³ and I shall be writing more. When I do, I usually get an American telling me to chill out. “If you don’t like kabbalah, just don’t practice it; no-one’s forcing you”. I don’t think that’s really true even in America, but it is sort of true at a day-to-day level. Here it’s not. You can escape it, but it takes ongoing daily effort. Apart from the religious issues involved, this means - even leaving aside the Breslov guys - there’s always some Goel Ratzon hypnotizing women and forcing them to work for him. Even completely-secular rapist Likud-Knesset-member genocidal- freaks are somehow also members of New Age kabbalah cults.

bUT tHAT’S nOT rEAL kaBBALAH. OK, well does being a Rosh Yeshiva whose seforim have haskamos by two chief Rabbis of Israel plus R. Dov Lior and R. Yakov Ariel make you a real kabbalist? Because I have bad news for you.

Why, though, is Zoharism so much bigger in Israel than elsewhere? It’s actually really simple. Starting with founder of the Hurva synagogue, the Sabbatean Yehuda heChassid, in 1697, there had already been two centuries of mystical aliyah by Zoharists before Pinsker and the gang got in on the act. Many of these were legit schizo maniacs and they were responsible for setting ‘minhag Eretz Yisroel’. As we have discussed from time to time, the Zionists were totally wrapped up in their own Russian world of dreams, resentments and internal torments, and put precious little thought into how to approach the existing inhabitants of Palestine until it was too late. This applied to the Jewish population no less than the Arab one. Tzfat was ethnically cleansed of its Arabs in 1948 (Mahmoud Abbas is famously sore about it), but, in retrospect, the whole cursed city should have been burned to the ground and mined so no-one could ever go there again. And not just there. There’s no good reason for Meron to exist. If you want to find out what the Zionist plan, though, was to deal with all the madness before it grew like a cancer into something out of control, you’re flat out of luck. They just figured everyone would become a moshavnik by magic in a decade or two.

Rabbinical sex scandals

Jews are not perfect because no-one is perfect, and men of the cloth of all faiths sometimes let their lusts get the better of them. It’s striking, though, when reviewing scandals involving Rabbis in the ‘impure exile’ just how plain vanilla they are in comparison to the incomprehensible freak shows in this country. There’s the unfortunately countenanced Hasmo boy who learned well and became a Dayan and then couldn’t handle getting attention from a sheitelbird in the mansion her accountant husband bought for her to be bored in. There’s the nepo baby of Chasssidishe Rov who found his USP in providing couples therapy to messed up people, always willing to have middle-of-the-night counselling sessions with emotionally fragile wives, which went how you might expect. There’s the conversions Rabbi who fitted up the mikveh with cameras because he hasn’t heard of porn maybe? All of it terrible, of course, and in the last case genuinely pretty weird, but it’s essentially inconceivable that the annual Israeli event of a prominent kabbalist and/or Breslevor being exposed for running a cult with dozens of women and/or boys who were told to bend over so the sephiros could be rectified to happen anywhere else but here.

Gerrer Chassidim

The largest Chassidic sect in Poland was Gur, and they were known for being relatively intellectual and generally nice to other Jews within the broad orthodox umbrella, co-ordinating with German neo-orthodox proefssionals who knew how to balance the books to build the Agudas Yisrael. Today, outside of Israel, they are almost-normal Chassidim. They wear an inferior-looking version of a shtreimel called a spodik, they daven stupidly fast, and they tuck their regular trousers into regular socks, so they look a bit ridiculous. They also have a general reputation for being a bit too interested in tznius, and like to join miscellaneous school boards they have nothing particular to do with so they can measure wigs and skirts with a ruler. However, with that said, they’re OK. Don’t marry your daughter off to Gerrer, but don’t freak out about having one for a neighbour.

Ger in Israel, however, are an evil and violent cult. The extent of this became clear a few years ago when R. Shaul Alter set up a breakaway Ger splinter trying to go back to the OG version, doing big numbers in fundraising in America, and establishing a few schools and yeshivos. Some parents decided to affiliate with the breakaway, but were still working out logistical issues, and one day their daughters didn’t come home after school. It eventually emerged that they were living in a ‘home for orphans’ run by the Gerer Rebbes’ wife. There’s an almost infinite list of weird messed up stuff going on in Ger and a hell of a lot that hasn’t come out yet because of the police state. Gerer Chassidim literally teach their children that, if you are in trouble, you should close your eyes and visualise the criminal head of their movement and you will be saved.⁴

bUT iN oUR dAYS wE dON’T hAVE a yETZER hARA fOR aVODAH zARAH

This would be bad enough if Ger was just a successful religious movement, but, in fact, its leader has a personal fortune of roughly 250 million dollars and controls the Agudas Yisrael and so, in effect, has four MKs under his command, in particular Minister for Construction Goldknopf, perhaps the single most obnoxious advocate of the synthesis of dopey expansionist nationalism and fanatical hostility to the military draft. It almost goes without saying, at this point, that they are the most Israeli of all the Chassidic groups, having switched to speaking Hebrew in the 1950s.

Modern Orthodoxy

There are a lot more sections of this article I wanted to write when I started. A whole section on synagogue architecture, something about Carlebach, and, obviously, Kookism. But it’s getting late and I feel sick. I haven’t even mentioned Yitzchak Ginsburgh, Menachem Mendel Vizhnitz, the Yanuka, Abergel, or Yitzhak Shapira, but it’s too bad. I’ll close by saying two things. The first is that religious groups in Israel are good precisely in proportion to how much they don’t embrace a new Eretz-Yisrael form of Judaism. The best, obviously, are the Baladim, who do exactly what it says in the Tichlal neither a jot to the right or to the left and cannot be moved from this position by any argument or other form of inducement. The various runners up are different Asheknazi and Sephardi groups who stick stubbornly to Moroccan or Lithuanian or Iraqi identity (even a substantially imagined one), with its poems, tunes, foods etc. For various obvious reasons, I don’t find the ideological position of any of these groups persuasive at all. My siddur is Nusah Eretz Yisrael. But facts are facts, and the fact is that if you want to have anything good in this country at scale, then you need to get on board with fighting obstinately and dogmatically for an exilic identity, the more obstinately exilic the better.

The other point I want to make is about Modern Orthodoxy, which is probably where you’d focus if you wanted to argue in favour of Israel. It’s no secret that Modern Orthodoxy in America and elsewhere is perpetually unstable, with a new crop of young idealists popping up every three years asking whether now can we have gay marriage? In that sense, things are better here, but there’s a catch. All of Modern Orthodoxy abroad is strongly Zionist, usually in a pretty over the top way. They aren’t actually Religious Zionists, though they think they are, because they have no clue what Religious Zionism is (spending a year in the Gush doesn’t count, in fact it’s actively misleading). What this means, though, is that, in every generation, the most committed and dedicated members of the community, those who would have been a good gabbai, leave for Israel. This would be, from a national perspective, fine if the talents and energies they would have put into community building abroad were spent doing the same here. Generally, though, that’s not so and they just kind of go to waste. Some deal with this by becoming terrorists in the West Bank, some by sitting in silent despair as their children go OTD one after another, reading books about loving your son no matter what, some by finding a nice bubble of ex-Charedim in Bet Shemesh and kidding themselves into believing that’s Religious Zionism. I begrudge no man his cope if it works, but the negative-sum parasitism of aliyah is something the Modern Orthodox should think about if they are serious about this whole ‘religion fit for literate people’ thing being viable.

1. The classical Zionist thinker who is closest to this point of view is Ahad Ha’Am, but he would probably be regarded as an anti-Zionist today, if not a vicious blood-libelling antisemite

2. At most 5% of Chabadniks believe he is probably or definitely not the moshiach. The split is between those who believe that in order to achieve his messianic kingdom it is only necessary to go on as before by promoting mitzvah observance (non meshichists) vs. those who believe it is necessary for the general Jewish public to recognise and accept him as the messiah (meshichists). The former group would seem to be more ‘correct’, since while the late leader of Lubavitch clearly believed himself to be messiah and told his close followers this, he also opposed those in his lifetime who sought to publicise this message more generally.

3. The term ‘kabbalah’ should not be used because it was chosen to deliberately chosen to give sephirotic theurgy the status of a received tradition, that is to say precisely the thing it is not. To use the term is to participate in a lie.

4. Get a load of the worksheets in Ger schools paid for by the general taxpayer: