[An address given at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Spring 1988, in a series on Fundamentalism.]
A while ago I was sitting in the little reading room of the Department of Hebrew Studies, when a lady came in to ask me a question. That is not unusual, but in this case the question seemed unusually easy. She said: "Can you show me a translation of the Bible?" I turned round to the shelves behind me and handed her a translation. "Oh, I don't want that," she said. "I want a translation which has the real meaning." I said to her: "The only suggestion I can make to you is that you learn the original languages of the Bible, and then you can decide for yourself what the real meaning is." I was not, to use the Talmudic expression, pushing her away with a broken reed. For starters, there are Jewish, Christian, and even though it may not be widely known, Islamic, interpretations of the Bible, and vastly different ones within the first two. The Hellenistic Jew of the first century Philo believed that the entire Bible is an allegory, and thus when Abraham travels from Ur, this is not a flesh-and-blood man making a physical journey, it is the hungry soul seeking the knowledge of God. And for Philo, that is the real meaning. If for the devout Christian the Hebrew Bible, when cut, runs with the blood of Christ, we need not be surprised if some devout Jews find in it instructions relevant to the current boundaries of the land of Israel. A book by Kathleen C. Boone, just published by the State University of New York Press and entitled The Bible Tells them So, declares that the authority of fundamentalism is ultimately an authority of the text and of the interpreter, equally. Without the Bible, the preacher is powerless, but without the preacher's interpretations, the text loses its binding authority.
Let us consider first what is fundamentalism in general terms. The word appears to have been applied initially to Protestant Evangelical Christians who accepted the five fundamentals of the faith, as they defined them. [These are: 1) Inerrancy of Scripture; 2) Virgin Birth; 3) Substitutionary atonement; 4) Bodily resurrection; 5) Authenticity of miracles.] Persons who did so were called fundamentalists. The word, however, has come to have a much broader significance, and fundamentalism now means an undeviating and uncompromising belief in a religious tradition based on a literal interpretation of Scripture, although it must be understood that "literal" can have surprisingly different meanings in different traditions.
Now Judaism is a religion firmly based on the Hebrew Scriptures. The scriptures are, in the Pharisaic tradition on which all modern varieties of Judaism, however far they may have strayed, are based, subject to the interpretation of the Oral Law passed down since time immemorial and encased in that remarkable monument of Jewish civilization, the Babylonian Talmud. It was a tenet of Pharisaism that on Sinai not one, but two laws, were given to the Jewish people, one in writing enshrined in the Pentateuch and one purely oral which was only finally written down and organized some fifteen hundred years ago. In some instances the morality expressed by that oral law is precisely equivalent to New Testament morality, although it reaches it by a different route. Thus Jesus' rejection of the law of talio -- an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, is echoed by the rabbinic interpretation of that law, which declares that its real meaning as the lady in the reading room said, is compensation. J.H. Hertz in his commentary published in 1935 entirely in the spirit of the Pharisees of old declares:
...It is evident (!) that physical injuries which are not fatal, are a matter of monetary compensation for the injured party. Such monetary compensation, however, had to be equitable, and as far as possible equivalent. This is the significance of the legal technical terms "life for life, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth."
In this sense even a movement like Conservative Judaism which, if it is not as American as apple pie, is at least as American as Levy's rye bread, is fundamentalist, for it takes its mandate clearly from the Bible, and still relies on a traditional Jewish interpretation of that Bible, albeit more liberal than that of the orthodox. With fundamentalists like this though, who needs modernists? So long as fundamentalists keep their viewpoints within their own group, speak in their places of worship, pass on their ideals to their families and friends and those who voluntarily join with them, they are of no great interest to the media or the public at large whom the media serve. They do become interesting, noticeable, threatening, dangerous -- you chose the adjective according to your viewpoint -- when they move into the political arena and their agenda begins to affect those who may not share their views.
Let me consider then some movements in Israel which do bring attention to themselves, and I suppose it is on account of these that I have been asked to speak this evening, and to which my remarks so far have been by way of preamble.
Let me speak first of a group which does not entirely fulfil these requirements, but is nonetheless of interest since it exhibits some interesting characteristics. The Neturei Karta words which mean "Guardians of the City", are a small group of ultra-orthodox Jews living mostly in Jerusalem and Bnai Brak in Israel who broke away from the orthodox Agudat Israel movement in 1935 in order to stay separate from Zionists and preserve traditional Jewish education. The Neturei Karta hold that there should be no secular Jewish state, but the Jewish quietism, which prevailed before nineteenth century nationalistic fervor gained ground, should be continued. Jews should wait for the salvation and restoration which will come about in the messianic age. It is worth pointing out that for centuries both Jews and Christians were in the grip of interlocking myths which served both well, and tended towards the preservation of the status quo. For the Christian, the Jew was under a curse of God for his rejection of Christ, and his lowly state was well deserved. But the Jew served a very important purpose, namely to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. The Synagogue was represented in art as a beautiful woman with eyes veiled. Her beauty is compromised by the Truth which stares her in the face, but which she cannot see. At the same time, the Jew or the abstract representation, the Synagogue, is the living proof of the antecedents of Christianity, and the token of that on which its claims are based. Therefore, declared Alfonso the Wise of Spain, we must not hurt the Jews. For they have the book, and with it, the truth. And though they understand it not, they show it in their book to those who do understand. The Jews possessed an interlocking myth. They agreed with the Christians that they were under a curse, but not for the same reason. They saw their dispersion and their lowly state as a punishment for their failure to observe the Law which God graciously gave them, and the fulfilment of the dreadful words of scripture Deut. 28.58 et seq
If you fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching that are written in this book ... you shall be left a scant few ... The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other ... Yet even among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest ... The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival ... because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see.
The Jews had good reason to see in themselves the fulfilment of that prophecy. Yet they remembered too the other side of the coin:
Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, annulling My covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God. I will remember in their favor the covenant with the ancients, whom I freed from the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God: I am the Lord. Lev 26.44-45
It is said in the Talmud that one sage beholding a fox on the Temple site laughed. On being asked why he laughed instead of wept at seeing the Temple site given back to Nature, he responded: "It was prophesied that foxes would walk here. Shall I not then believe in the promises of restoration?"
The Neturei Karta then, do not see in current events the "dawn of deliverance" but rather an impious attempt to force the hand of the Creator and dictate to Him when that deliverance should come. The Neturei Karta are few in number, probably a few hundred at the most, and of no great significance because their orientation causes them to opt out of current political processes in Israel. Since they are further from recognizing the State of Israel at this moment than is Yasser Arafat, they have no influence on it. Like the Amish in this country, they have chosen deliberately to isolate themselves from the mainstream and carry on their ancient habits in their own closed circle, providing a minor tourist attraction and grabbing a headline when occasionally they conflict with the authorities whom for the most part they avoid.
Quite different is the movement in Israel known as Gush Emunim. The name means the block of the faithful, or perhaps the block of faith, or quite probably both at the same time. In languages which have an entrenched native set of scriptures, words tend to be redolent of passages in those scriptures and this is certainly true of Hebrew. The word emunim can be both an abstract noun faith, and the plural of a concrete noun, the faithful ones. It carries with it the implication of steadiness and firmness. The word "Amen" is from the same root. When Moses' hands were steady till the going down of the sun, a related word is used. The same word as is used for Moses' hands is applied in Scripture to God himself who is emuna, steady, firm, reliable, unchanging. This group was formed in 1974, and was described as a non-partisan, extra-parliamentary organization to foster what they called the Zionism of Redemption. This term itself is highly charged emotionally. Zionism began in the nineteenth century as a movement to make available to Jews the kind of national expression and self determination that was being sought by so many small, oppressed peoples, Greeks, Armenians, ethnic Germans in Russia, you name it. It held that Jewish problems, or to use the term favored by antisemites, the Jewish problem, were due to the unnatural status of the Jews in their exile. If they could become a nation like the other nations, their insecurities and their propensity to attract to themselves a demonic image would disappear. Many who espoused these ideas were much influenced by Socialist, Marxist ideals. They dreamed of a Jewish state in which Jews could not only have self-determination, but fulfil the best Jewish traditions of the prophets who preached concern for all men and women, and attacked the carelessness and self- involvement of the rich. But traditional religious observance, rooted in the Jewish experience in the lands of their dispersion was not part of the agenda. Golda Meir, for whom the building, in which we are now, is named, was a good example of this trend. It is said that when she visited the White House she was told: "Of course Mrs. Meir we shall arrange kosher food for you." She replied: "Not at all. No kosher food." Eating kosher food deliberately for Golda would have given the wrong impression to her followers. She had outgrown the opium of the people, and it was her hope to bring near the final triumph of the Socialist dream. Initially many rabbis opposed this movement. It made strange bedfellows of highly assimilated, reformed Jews in this country who feared that Zionism would somehow compromise their devotion to America, and their slice of the American pie, on the one hand, and traditional Jews who believed in mourning the destruction of the Temple and waiting patiently for the arrival of the Messiah on the other. Ben Gurion is said to have commented: "For thousands of years Jews waited for the Messiah. The Messiah did not come. God wants us to be Messiahs." Mrs. Evelyn Margolis, the widow of a famous Jewish scholar Max Margolis, once told me how they came to go to Germany early in this century. Her husband at the time was a young member of the faculty of the Reform hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. One sabbath it was his turn to preach in the College chapel and he gave a mildly Zionist sermon from the pulpit. After the service he went to wish the President of the College a good sabbath. The President turned his back on him. Seeing the writing on the wall, Max took a fellowship in Germany. And the Neturei Karta maintain an attitude that was once not uncommon on the other end of the religious spectrum. Gush Emunim represents a movement that is overtly Zionist and therefore rejects the quietism. But it espouses too a full belief in the traditional Messianic hope, and its consequences for the national situation of the Jewish people. Their ideology was deeply affected by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who in 1921 became one of Palestine's two Chief Rabbis. Kook had a strongly mystic trend, tapping into currents that are extremely old in Jewish tradition. He believed that the secular, socialist pioneer had a special divine spark in his heart which was an offshoot of that divine fire which guided the Jewish people through the long years of exile. He held that secular Jews had a part in the redemptive process. His son Tzvi Yehuda Kook took his father's views further, stressing the ultimate resettlement by Jews of the complete land of Israel. On Israel Independence Day 1967, he was asked by his students if they could see the military parade. He is said to have replied: "Know that this is the army of Israel that will liberate the land of Israel." Three weeks later the Six Day War broke out which gave huge areas of territory to Israel rule, and his words were taken as prophetic. When a decade later Menachem Begin, the leader of a right wing group which in the days of the British the Socialist Jewish establishment had bitterly opposed, won the parliamentary elections he sought an audience with Tzvi Yehuda, and to the astonishment of the students standing by knelt in obeisance to him. Subsequently a strong link was forged between Israel's rightist parties and the redemptionist religionists. The result has been substantial Jewish settlement on the West Bank, and doubtless many of the consequences flowing from this are well known to you.
One of the most extreme results of this tendency has been the party of Rabbi Meir Kahane, which has received minimal support in Israel, but has garnered much publicity. Kahane espouses an openly racist policy, recommending wholesale deportations of Arabs and other similar measures. On a visit he made to Milwaukee some time ago he was pointedly shunned by the Jewish establishment of this city. Permission was declined to have him speak in buildings owned by the Jewish community, and when his local sponsors took him for a token visit to Jewish leaders they had found reasons to be out of town.
When such extremes are reached there tends to be a swing of the pendulum, and there are indications that this is already taking place. Among those who have demonstrated their devotion to the notion of the complete land of Israel are two men of especial interest, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and Rabbi Yehuda Amital. They are the joint leaders of an elite Yeshiva in the settlement of Allon Shevut in the West Bank. A Yeshiva is an academy of higher Jewish learning in the direct chain of the millenial academic tradition of the Jewish people. It is nothing like a university, although the Universities in which, if current studies are to be believed, 90% of the students are bored out of their minds, could perhaps learn something from its methods. There are no courses, no fixed syllabus, no grades and no respite from learning, day and night. Students learn in small groups, and if "No Talking" is the rule in our classrooms and libraries "Talk" is the watchword of the Yeshiva, where the students fight again the intellectual and spiritual battles of the sages of Sura and Mahoza and Pumbeditha in the ancient land of Babylon. The talmudic dialectic engaged in there is held to sharpen the mind and soothe the soul of the students, bringing both close to the author of their being. It was this Talmud that the Christian theologians rightly saw as the greatest barrier to the conversion of the Jews, yet the burning of twenty-four cartloads of Talmudic texts in Paris in the Place de L'Hôtel de Ville in 1240 did not dull the Jews' devotion to this repository of that second law of the Pharisees. And its study continues in Allon Shevut on the West Bank.
Lichtenstein and Amital have a legendary reputation for intellectual power and personal piety and humility. But their views on territorial issues have made some of the more extreme believers suspect their devotion to the cause. The question is a legalistic one: does the removal of debris principle apply to territorial issues. The Mishna in Yoma 83a et seq declares that if debris falls on someone, and it is doubtful whether or not he is there, whether he is dead or alive, whether he is an Israelite or a heathen, in whatever case one should open the heap of debris even on the Sabbath for his sake. This has been extended to mean that the saving of human life nullifies any commandment in the law. Accordingly it is argued, that if the surrender of territory will save human life, even though the Jewish people are enjoined to settle the entire territory of the biblical Land of Israel, then such surrender is justified. Lichtenstein and Amital appear to hold this view, and though they may be fundamentalists, it makes them very moderate fundamentalists.
There are some very important developments occuring right at this moment. Israel has an election in November just as we do, and Rabbi Amital has created a new religious party declaring that it is time to act. If I say "it is time to act" or you say "it is time to act" we mean what we say, neither more nor less. But when Rabbi Amital says it, he invokes all the history and interpretion inherent in the phrase in Hebrew. In Psalms 119.126 there is a phrase for which the "real" translation (with a bow to the lady in the reading room!) is: It is a time for the Lord to act; for they have violated Your teaching. This is a prayer to God to rise up and thwart the designs of those who violate the law. But the traditional interpretation of the verse is different. It is translated: When it is time to act for the Lord, i.e. on his behalf, they violate your Law! That is to say that necessity knows no law. It is permissible to violate the law even that of settling the whole land of Israel when a pious need calls for it. Amital has offered to surrender his own house and that fine complex of buildings that buzzes day and night with the sounds of Jewish study and was in the hands of Jews before Jordan conquered it in the war of 1948 if it would lead to true peace. He has constantly stressed that souls are more important than soil, that the people of Israel takes precedence over the Land of Israel, however defined, and you must remove debris to save a life whatever the cost. This move may perhaps break the connexion of recent years of redemptionists with rightists. The left wing parties must well be considering an alliance with this movement, whatever may be their differences on religious ideology. Perhaps we shall see in less than a month the removal of some of the debris of war, infighting, racism, extremism; and the exposure of the hope that lies at the bottom of this pandora's box which is the middle east of the present day.