The following is a transcript of Episode 128 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi, and this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 256. And our theme for today, we didn’t really know what to call it, but its essence is the paradox of religious Zionism.

So many things that we have spoken about over the last year, two years, even a major part of your own intellectual major work has been looking at the negative impact of religious Zionism on Israeli society. And both of us come from the religious Zionist community, and so we’re deeply sensitive, and we’re also very aware of all of its mistakes, and where we think it’s abusing, and, you know, as it is, when it’s personal, you’re much more attuned to everything that’s going wrong.

Yossi: And it’s almost as if it’s, we’re not criticizing from the outside, we’re being self-critical.

Donniel: Yeah, or, we’re frustrated more. There’s also a deep frustration. And a lot of our moral agenda and agenda for hope, for peace, et cetera, the people who are our ideological adversaries are very often from within the religious Zionist community. And for both of us, the people who personify very often the worst of Israeli political life, the Ben Gvirs, the Smotriches, the Rotmans, all come from the religious Zionist community.

But this week, we can’t start there. This week, casualty-wise, was a terrible week. Eleven soldiers died in two events and then another one, who was injured a week beforehand. Twelve soldiers, it’s one of the more deadly weeks of the war. In one day there were eleven funerals. And close to half of those people who died came from the religious Zionist community. And we don’t know exactly, and I think it’s good that we don’t know exactly, even though I’m sure somebody does, the estimates are that possibly close to 30 percent of those who’ve died in the war in Gaza came from the religious Zionist community. Their level of willingness to serve and sacrifice and stand up for the Jewish people and be there is something that we have to note and we have to understand it.

You can’t understand a community just by pointing out its failures. What are its strengths? What is producing a people with such strength of character, such bravery, such willingness, you know, to be at the head of the camp?

So I want to talk lovingly and I also want to talk critically today. But it’s their role in Israel is not just in the numbers of casualties, their impact is now disproportionate to their size in the population, which is roughly 10%, 10% of the country in political life and leadership life. So this is a community, if you want to understand Israel, both for the good and the bad, they are, you know, we toyed with the, with the title, the best of us and the worst of us at the same time. But over the last six months, eight months in the army, they’re the best of us. In political life, we feel that they’re the worst of us. Let’s try to understand. So Yossi, you go first. How do you understand? Let’s talk about the best first. Where is the best of us coming from within the religious Zionist community?

Yossi: Well, I am, just listening to you Donniel reminded me of the enormous debt that the Jewish people owes the religious Zionist community. And for me, it goes back 50 years to the origins of the Soviet Jewry protest movement. There would not have been a Soviet Jewry movement if not for religious Zionism. They initiated it. They organized. They reached out. And in those early years, they were a voice in the wilderness. And eventually the rest of the Jewish people joined.

And so I experienced religious Zionism really at its best as a boy. And for me, that’s always been the model of what that community should be. And the reason that the Soviet Jewry movement was successful is because the religious Zionists, first of all, saw themselves as being completely dedicated to the well-being of the Jewish people, and they reached out to all parts of the Jewish community. And only the religious Zionists were able to do that. They could speak religiously to the Orthodox. They could speak nationally to the secular Zionists. At its best, the community is animated by an unconditional love for the Jewish people. Unconditional. And when you see that expressed, and when you, when you experience it, there’s nothing more powerful.

Donniel: I want to give a conceptual framework for what you just expressed, which I also experienced. At the best, we don’t, we’re going to try not to be simplistic. We’re not going to talk about all or some, we’re talking about groups. But at its best, this sense of deep commitment of being there gets translated into a remarkable ideological move. which was instituted by the religious Zionist community, which prior to them, nobody made this move.
Jewish law is divided, as you know, between laws between one human being and another human being, and laws between you and God. Those are, you know, the 613 commandments. Some of them are things that God wants us to give to God ostensibly, and some of them are to regulate our social life. Religious Zionism understood that with our return to Israel, we need a third category. And that’s a category of mitzvot, of commandments, between the individual and the community, that Zionism wasn’t just another space in which we were going to interact as individuals or interact with God, that there was a community that had to obligate us.

And I’m very grateful to my daughter, Michal, who’s writing a Ph.D. on this. So I thank her. I’ve learned this, I’ve learned this from her, and I’m not going to go into all the complexity of it, but just think for a second, Yossi, of that idea of someone recognizing that my people obligate me. It’s the people who are, qua people. And so when serving in the army, standing up, being there for people is such a deep part of that community. That notion of, to be Jewish is to be obligated by the people.

Yossi: There was an implicit radical move in doing that. And the people who understood that the most were the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox.

Donniel: That’s correct.

Yossi: They understood that what religious Zionists were doing was subtly placing their religious responsibility to the Jewish people above their responsibility to the precise letter of the law. And, look, usually the religious Zionists were able to finesse any contradiction, and certainly they lived their lives according to halacha, Jewish law. But when push came to shove. They would make subtle choices where they were ready to compromise on the strict interpretation of halacha in favor of what they saw, as you just put it, as a higher halacha. And that is my responsibility to the unity of the Jewish people.

Donniel: An example of that is service in the army versus studying in yeshiva. Which the, you know, we’re not getting into that issue, but this was one of the major breaking points between religious Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy. Because our tradition says, Talmud Torah k’neged kulam, the study of Torah surpasses them all. This is the number one commandment of all 613 commandments. The ultra-Orthodox community turns this into, not just to a commandment, into a way of life, a community dedicated to Torah. And the religious Zionist community says, if the mitzvot, if the commandments to the community are the most important of all commandments, then serving in the army is more obligatory than studying in yeshiva.

Yossi: I once heard from Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, who’s one of the more interesting theologians in the religious Zionist community, an explicit hierarchy of values placing peoplehood above the strict fulfillment of religion. And he said the reason for that. It’s that we were a people before we received the Torah. And he said we were already a people that received the Torah. And he said so the needs of the Jewish people have to come first.
Donniel: You know, it’s interesting. I didn’t know he said that. That’s part of my book. We’re not talking about the book now.

Yossi: Well maybe we should.

Donniel: No, not today. Today, we’ll do it another time.

Yossi: It’s a great book.

Donniel: Thank you. But that’s the whole idea of the Genesis Covenant, of being part of a people that’s, Exodus is,

Yossi: Say more about that.

Donniel: Nah, I don’t want to. No, no. Not in the mood.

Yossi: You can’t tease the audience. Yes, I can. You just said, you just threw out Genesis, Exodus, give it, give it, give it two minutes.

Donniel: Not today. Not today. But, not today. I don’t want to. By the way, I hope the audience appreciates my humility. It’s impressing me very deeply right now. But that’s true. It’s a very core essence of Judaism. It’s really a deep, deep part of our story.

And it goes back to this famous Talmudic text, which I remember my father teaching me, when my Haredi teacher in grade nine told us we shouldn’t serve in the army, we’re part of God’s army. And I came home and asked my father, what’s going on here? He said, you’re the tribe of Levi. And my father opened up Tractate Brachot, and he said, Donniel, let’s learn together. It was late at night. And there’s this statement where God says to Moses, go down, go down from the mountain. And the rabbis say, what do you mean go down? This was, the whole Torah was leading to the giving of, of the Torah at Mount Sinai. And God basically stops it and says, do over, get down, I don’t want you here.

And the rabbis say, what really went on at that moment? And God said to Moses. I have given you greatness, this is what the rabbis say, only for the sake of the people. And now that they have sinned, what need do I have of thee? God basically says, I’m not giving you a Torah if there isn’t a Jewish people. We’re not a people because we, around the Torah. We’re first a people and the Torah has to serve that.

Now religious Zionism deeply understood that and that’s why they didn’t go in the direction of ultra-Orthodoxy, which really creates parts of them, with the exception of Chabad, Lubavitch, who are also very much to serve the Jewish people qua people. Much of ultra-Orthodoxy creates an alternate people. They’re the people of Israel. This is, either ,whether you call yourselves the people, the only ones whom God loves, or the remnant. Religious Zionism didn’t do a remnant story. I’m obligated, and that’s why where the Jewish people are, I’m going to be.

Yossi: The whole people is the remnant of Israel.

Donniel: I’m there. And that’s, and you see it in so many interesting ways, by the way, not only in serving in the army, which is a beautiful thing and a challenging paradox, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, of any particular community in the world, I don’t know if you know this, in religious Zionism has the highest percentage of kidney donations. It’s today a standard thing in the religious Zionist community, you know, we, people speak about settlers, I hate that term. Because, you know, what people think are settlers aren’t religious Zionists, it’s a small subsection of a community, and not everybody who lives in Judea and Samaria is a settler.
Yossi: You mean the fanatics? When people hear the name settlers, they immediately think of the most extreme subset of settlers.

Donniel: But most people who live in Judea and Samaria are living there because that’s Israeli law, and it’s just, it’s a cheaper place to live. They’re not this great ideologue. So like, we use the term so inaccurately.

But this group, even, even amongst the, actually amongst settlers, there’s this standard today. If you have two kidneys, donate one. Could you imagine? Like, someone says to me, donate a kidney. Like, do you want me to donate a kidney to my mother, to my wife, to my children? They just donate.

And by the way, Jews and non-Jews, they don’t designate who the kidneys go to. The highest percentage of kidney donation in the world is in Israel, voluntary, and the highest percentage of people within Israel donating is in the religious Zionist community, to the extent that even some secular critics of religious Zionist community claimed that they were doing it to morally shame, you know, you’re doing it, you want to make us feel bad, you’re not even doing it because you care, you’re just doing it out of self, you know, self-righteousness. Is that called gaslighting?

Yossi: I don’t even know what that means.

Donniel: I don’t know what that’s like. I just know that’s one of the terms that’s being used right now. So I wanted to,

Yossi: I hate, I hate the whole new language.

Donniel: I wanted to be, I wanted to be current for a moment. So I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing, but whatever it is. So this is a community which feels obligated, obligated by the Jewish people, obligated by their Torah, obligated to serve, obligated by moral principles, even at the expense of tremendous sacrifice.

Now again, because there’s confusion about this, I’m not claiming that because religious Zionism, 30 percent of the casualties, today everybody is serving. Everybody is serving, and people serve in different units, and the religious Zionist community is serving in particular units who are at the front of the fighting in the war in Gaza.

Yossi: Well, that’s not a coincidence either, they volunteer for those units.

Donniel: They volunteer for those units. And Israel needs multiple, the whole country is volunteering, everybody showed up, but still 10 percent this community, today, this week, I think, you know, there’s a deep sense of gratitude, of appreciation, of a community who, by the way, in the midst of tremendous alienation from a lot of Israeli society, just got up and said, I’m responsible, I’m responsible, and if I could have one last thing that I want to point out, remember that when we withdrew from Gaza, the religious Zionist community did not declare war on Israel, they did not secede. At the end of the day, they didn’t want to create that break, again, because of the responsibility of the community. So, we have all of this beauty, this commitment, these values.

Yossi: So if things, if, if things are so right, why are things also so wrong?

Donniel: That’s, what’s going on here? How does this community produce their leadership, which is really the Smotriches and the Ben Gvirs, even though not everybody votes for them? That’s the paradox. You want to try the other side of the paradox?

Yossi: When you’re so committed to your understanding of what’s best for the Jewish people, when there are those who disagree. who have a very different understanding of where we need to go, whether it’s on the future of Judea and Samaria, the future of the territories, our relationship with, with several million Palestinians who are in our borders, whether it’s question of relations of religion and state, what do we mean by Jewish state, democratic state, the issues that have really torn us apart in the last few years, then the temptation is to say, well, I’m giving everything. I’m sacrificing for this people. You are the enemy within, and there is a tendency to actually hate your political opponent even more than the enemy without. This is the enemy with it. And you hear that language on the far right. The greatest danger that we’re facing is internal. So that’s one part of it, but it’s not the whole problem.

For me, the bigger problem is the silence of most of the religious Zionist community in the face of the growing radicalization of what we used to call a fringe but is no longer a fringe. It’s becoming more mainstream, and the silence of the rabbis, the silence of the educators, this is what I find so hard.

Donniel: But where does that come from, that silence? I agree with you, that’s the most, the religious Zionist community is not a monolithic community, it’s actually divided into multiple sections and the extremes are maybe 30 percent of the religious Zionist community. But why the silence? Why do the extreme voices get such a prominent place?

Yossi: There’s a tendency to protect the tribe. And where much of the religious Zionist community is going wrong is in confusing the well-being of the tribe for the well-being of the Jewish people. And so you can’t weaken the tribe. And okay, maybe there are some hotheads, but they’re guilty of excessive devotion to the Jewish people. And how can you compare that to, quote, “the left,” who are guilty of a deficient devotion to the Jewish people? And so there’s a tendency to protect and to defend the indefensible. How do you see it?

Donniel: First of all, I want to stay with what you were saying for a moment, if we can. When you know what’s best for the people, so the Haredim say, I know what’s best and I can keep it and therefore I’m going to build my own community. When you’re invested in working with the community, and you still think that you have it right, that you have the vision. I think that’s what you were talking about, like, that’s when there is this, a dichotomous, the left, the Tel Avivi, the vilification of that group of people that comes from when you have that truth, and you actually, precisely because you feel committed to them, you need to change them in order to win.

I think there’s another part which is actually connected, and this is the paradox, to what’s the best of them. They’re committed to Jewish peoplehood. In essence, Jewish nationalism has become a religious value for them. Jewish nationalism is not a secular movement, it’s a religious movement. And it’s precisely in the association of religion with nationalism that nationalism loses some of its core boundaries and protections. Every group creates distinctions between members of the group and those who are not members of the group. And the challenge is to have loyalty to your group, but to be able to transcend it. Because there’s people both in your group, but all human beings are created in the image of God. So your group claims you, but it doesn’t exhaust all claims of you.

And when religion is associated with nationalism, it becomes, or has a tendency, or can become ultra-nationalist and fascist. It’s here, the nation above all, because now this is what God wants of us. There’s all the commandments, I’m commanded. And where religious Zionism goes wrong, they love the Jewish people as a religious value, and that creates service, but their love of the Jewish people as a religious value also creates ultra-nationalism and fascism.
And my biggest problem with religious Zionism is not on issues of state and religion, where they’re usually pretty much more moderate. It’s precisely in their attitude towards non-Jewish citizens of Israel, in their attitude to the world, in their attitude towards those who don’t share their nationalist perspective. Nationalism and religion, when they’re together, is a toxic cocktail.

Yossi: It’s an interesting thing because there’s a built-in paradox here. If your overriding commitment is to the unity of the Jewish people and to a relentless tribalism, what do you do with the significant numbers of Jews who feel connected to universal values, who feel connected to the non-Jewish world?
And so the paradox is that in order to really embody Jewish unity, you have to make space for those who have universal values. But that’s not what we’re seeing happening in religious Zionism. We’re seeing the opposite trend in large parts of religious Zionism.

Donniel: I think you even saw when Bennett was prime minister, he gave a different expression of what religious Zionism was.

Yossi: Yes, he really rose to,

Donniel: He goes to a conservative synagogue in America after it was attacked, something that in his community would be more problematic. But there is this feature, this deep divide in the religious Zionist community between those who are able to transcend it, and those who are angry at the Jewish people who are underperforming.

Yossi: And they’re betraying the Jewish people. And there’s a growing contempt in parts of the community for what the Western values and humanistic values, as if those were antithetical to Jewish values. And there’s one more issue here that I think we, we really need to factor in, and that is the rise of the politics of fantasy, the return of a strain of messianism, which I had thought really was waning. It’s back.

I just heard a rabbi from one of the leading military yeshivas in Judea and Samaria.

Donniel: Explain what a military yeshiva is.

Yossi: It’s a program that is sponsored by the army, where instead of serving for three years, you’re in a five-year framework, and one and a half years, I think it is, is devoted to military service, yes, one and a half, two years, and the rest is to Torah study.

Donniel: The other version of these are places where you go study for a year or two,

Yossi: Before the army. Which is extraordinary.

Donniel: And then you do full, actually. When I grew up, the first one was the standard, after the Yom Kippur War, when I went into the army. The average religious Zionist went to these combined yeshiva military service.

Yossi: And that’s where you went.

Donniel: That’s where I went. That’s, yeah, no, that’s where everybody went. That’s what you did. But it didn’t provide the opportunity for service in the most elite units because they take a year and a half just to train. So instead of these amalgamated institutions, they created these one or two year pre-army programs where you got your ideology straight, and then you serve three, four, five years.

Yossi: Okay, so that’s the nice side of it. So I, the story that I was starting to tell you is a less nice side of it, which is one of the leading rabbis in one of the leading yeshivot, military yeshivot, was giving a talk to his students, and he said, you know, these demonstrators in Tel Aviv against the government, they’re interfering with the rebuilding of the temple.

And I heard that, and I said, halavai. I said, yes, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, is to stop the rise of the politics of fantasy and to ground the state of Israel in the classical Zionist vision of living in the real world, protecting the interests of the Jewish people in the real world. Yes, that’s what we’re, and that defines the divide between Zionism, let’s say people like us, Donniel, who were raised in that community, but maybe are no longer really part of it, and a growing element within religious Zionism that have adopted the politics of fantasy.

Donniel: You know, the politics of fantasy and the words of religious Zionism, sounds to me like you have a book in you called Like Dreamers, but,

Yossi: Well, like, you know, it’s interesting you’re mentioning that because I was thinking of that book before our conversation. That book is about the meeting points in the paratroopers of 1967 between the Kibbutz movement and religious Zionism. And it’s really about the changing of the guard, how religious Zionism eventually took over in the army, for example, as you were saying before.

But there’s a note of caution that that book taught me. The experience of immersing in that story taught me. And that is one of the reasons I believe that the Kibbutz movement declined. And don’t forget that the Kibbutz movement was the avant garde of Israeli society. The casualty rates in the army were comparable or maybe even higher among young kibbutzniks in those years as to religious Zionists today.

And so where did, why did the Kibbutz movement begin to decline? I think there are many reasons. Obviously, socialism is part of it and the decline of socialism, but there’s something else that I encountered in that story, in writing that story, and that is that the Kibbutz movement became insular and arrogant, and it continued to see itself as the avant garde of Zionism while losing touch with the rest of the people. And there are parts of the religious Zionist community today that are in danger of going in that direction.

Donniel: I want to, as we wind up a little bit, go back to the messianic point, because I think it also connects to this, some of the things we were speaking about from the beginning. One of the ways that religious Zionism was able to integrate Zionism into their religious ideology was through a notion of messianism, that Israel was the first stage of the coming of the Messiah.

And so, even if Israel didn’t embody everything that they wanted, even though they were secular and it wasn’t always perfect, they were committed to the Jewish people, and by doing so, religious Zionism bought into supporting the state because in doing so, they were bringing about the ultimate redemption of the world.

And so, Zionism becomes part of God’s plan through Messianic language. Now, when messianism enters into your consciousness, realpolitik becomes secondary. What was the word you used?

Yossi: Politics of fantasy.

Donniel: Fantasy. You used the word fantasy. Right. Zionism is the Jewish people returning to history, which is returning to reality.

But at the same time, Israel is such a miraculous existence. It’s both realistic and transcends reality at the same time. And religious Zionism, or parts of religious Zionism, become a force for evil when their messianic fantasy enables them to completely ignore current realities, current pressures, current issues. You have your own, you spoke about insulation, you’re not just culturally insulated, you’re ideologically insulated because you, you’re working in a world in which God is the ultimate power. And it’s not America, it’s not other countries in the world, and so there’s a break with reality that occurs within the religious Zionist community, and you see it in Smotrich in particular, a break, and then, that’s when it gets very, very scary.

So you have this group serving in a war, they’re there. What’s more realpolitik than a willingness to go under the stretcher? And at the same time, you have politicians whose calculations have nothing to do even with the war, with Israel tomorrow. They’re fighting a completely different war, a war of the Jewish people against the forces of evil. And ultimately, when the Jewish people are strong, God will return and redeem the world.

Now, you can’t have a political debate with that. And if I, the reason why I’m most uncomfortable calling myself a religious Zionist, I call myself modern Orthodox, is precisely because of this messianic impulse. Even though so much of me respects the commitment, the values, the sense of standing up for our people, and proving it day in and day out within the religious Zionist community, closing the,

Yossi: Well, today, today I call myself religious and a Zionist. I don’t call myself a religious Zionist because I’m not a member of that tribe. I feel a part of Klal Yisrael, of the Jewish people in its messy entirety and not part of any one segment.

But I think, Donniel, just to get back to the question of messianism, for the religious Zionist imagination, a certain amount of messianism is unavoidable, and especially, you know, you said a moment ago that the circumstances in which the state was created, the ways in which the state has grown, the gathering of the exiles, there are messianic elements that are unavoidable here. The question is, how central is messianism, in one Zionism, and does it usurp the practical political approach of Zionism?

And I love the prayer that we say on Shabbat, the religious Zionist prayer, the prayer for the state of Israel, and calling the state the first flowering of our redemption. What I love about that language is its ambiguity. The first flowering of redemption, well, when do we see the full flowering? Maybe this year, maybe in 500 years. And the moment that you start letting go of ambiguity, the moment you know a timetable, and you’re second-guessing God’s intentions, that’s where messianism becomes lethal.

Donniel: Right. You know, in our tradition, there’s an old, long debate about whether messianism transcends nature or not, or whether messianism is itself, it’s just the end of a natural process, and for Maimonides, the laws of nature aren’t transcended. It’s just, it’s a time when the Jewish people will be at peace, will have, will have defeated our enemies. Religious Zionism is picking the supernatural dimension of Messianism and losing that ambiguity or losing that balance. And so, it’s a,

Yossi: Big sigh.

Donniel: It’s a sigh, it’s like, you know, we’re so angry, we’re frustrated, but this is a beautiful community. And again, they’re not monolithic. There’s some who embody the paradox, and there’s some who are on different sides of it. There are moderates, modern Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox Zionists, it’s, there’s so many spectrums and so I don’t want us to pretend as if we’ve classified one group, but like most of Israel, we could have called this the paradox of the Israelis, the paradox of Israel, the paradox of our reality, the religious Zionist community does reflect the best of us and also some of them reflect the worst of us.

And which side is going to win? Even within the people themselves, because there’s also, it’s not just different parts of the community, there’s different parts of people’s souls, it’s going to determine in many ways where we’re going as a people.

Yossi, pleasure as always.

Yossi: Wonderful.

Donniel: This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 256.

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