Last Sunday, the 28th of Av (September 1, 2024), at the heart-wrenching funeral of the murdered captive Uri Danino, former Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared that the remaining hostages must be freed “at any cost.” We have already heard this refrain from Charedi Knesset members, at which my father, a proud Bnei Brak resident, once expressed his astonishment: “Don’t they know the halacha that one does not redeem captives for more than their value?”
Rabbi Yosef’s words, however, reminded me of an earlier declaration he made: “If they [the secular] force us [the Charedim] to enlist in the army, we will all emigrate abroad.” The answer to my father’s puzzlement seems to emerge from the intersection of the two statements.
An Anti-National Pact
We recently witnessed a rare case of collaboration between the Charedim and the Israeli left regarding the issue of ascending to the Temple Mount. As reported after the mass ascent on Tisha Be’Av, Aryeh Deri announced that the Shas political party would support Yair Lapid’s bill to prohibit Jews from ascending Har Habayit.
The case echoes an older partnership between Charedim and the Jewish left, dating back to 1918. In October of that year, following the chaos that engulfed the region after World War I, the independent Republic of Hungary emerged and requested a declaration of loyalty from its minorities. In response, the leaders of the Neolog Jewish community called for an assembly, which declared that the request itself was outrageous. The degree of “Hungarianness” among the Jews, the assembly asserted, was no different than that of their Christian counterparts. These were “Hungarians of the Christian faith” and those “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith.” All were Hungarian to the same degree.
These were “Hungarians of the Christian faith” and those “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith.” All were Hungarian to the same degree
For assimilated Hungarian Jews, this declaration is nothing novel. Those who did not convert to Christianity proclaimed everywhere that they belonged to the local nationality—German, Polish, Hungarian, and so forth—while also belonging to the Mosaic faith. The novelty was the Orthodox community’s agreement to join the declaration, at least tacitly. In a rare display of unity, representatives from both sides of the divide asserted that they were Jews in their faith and Hungarians in their nationality.
This provoked the ire of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glazner, the Rabbi of Klausenberg. In a fiery article (translated into Hebrew as part of a compendium on “Torah and Sovereignty,” 1961), he sharply criticized his brethren “who are called Charedim” and stated that they were “renouncing their Jewish nationality for political reasons and collaborating with the assimilated.” According to the article, official Orthodoxy chose “to uphold the shameful lie that Jews are merely a separate religious sect.” In the typical fashion of Hungarian extremism, he even asserted that such a declaration “is akin to absolute heresy” and would be forbidden even under the threat of death.
The Charedi-left alliance against ascending the Temple Mount rests on similar foundations. Although the act of ascending the Mount is the matter of a halachic dispute, the current legislative proposal is not a halachic matter—halacha does not interest Yair Lapid and (for better or worse) and isn’t the purview of Knesset members—but a national matter. Like the case of Hungarian Jewry, the proposed bill banning Jews from the Temple Mount is anti-national.
[By] means of legislation, we seem to be ready to grant our enemy an absurd victory without firing a single shot. Al-Aqsa, of course, is only the beginning of the struggle
“Har Habayit must be closed,” shouted a ‘Yated Ne’eman’ headline the day after Tisha Be’Av, “and not just in words but with locks and legislation.” One might add that the keys should be handed over to the Jordanians—for safety’s sake. Hamas refers to the October 7 pogrom as “the Al-Aqsa flood.” But by means of legislation, we seem to be ready to grant our enemy an absurd victory without firing a single shot. Al-Aqsa, of course, is only the beginning of the struggle.
Shall we begin looking for places to move abroad?
Israelis of the Mosaic Faith?
The State of Israel emphasizes the unity of religion and nation: a Jewish-Israeli individual is a Jew in both religious and national terms. This is integral to the Jewish state, in which every Jew in the world is a potential citizen. For Jews, the Israeli passport fuses Jewish religion with Jewish nationality. However, some seek to unravel the bond between the two.
On the one hand, the ruling in Shalit (1970) dealt with a petitioner who wished to register his non-Jewish child (born of a non-Jewish mother) as non-Jewish in religion yet Jewish in nationality. The court granted the petition, arguing that religious parameters are not the defining standard for purposes of registration (alone). As far as Israel is concerned, you can be a member of the Jewish nation without being fully Jewish.
On the other hand—the more important one for our discussion—a range of petitioners (Tamrin, and recently Ornan) claimed to be Jews in the religious sense but Israeli, rather than Jewish, in the national sense. Not unlike the Hungarian example, they saw themselves as “Israelis of the Mosaic faith” and requested that their nationality be registered as Israeli rather than Jewish.
There is no merit to the appellant’s claim—not even hypothetically—that Israel involves a detachment from the Jewish people and that a separate Israeli nation has emerged
The denial of Jewish nationhood—the second of the two cases—challenges Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Those who deny this identity, hailing universally from the far left of the political spectrum, seek to sever Israeli identity from Jewish identity and view the state as the establishment of a new, independent identity. In response to these claims, the Tamrin ruling (delivered by Justice Agranat) stated that “there is no merit to the appellant’s claim—not even hypothetically—that Israel involves a detachment from the Jewish people and that a separate Israeli nation has emerged.” We are, indeed, a Jewish state.
Even here, parts of Charedi society concur with rejecting Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people: a state that is not insubordinate to Torah law and sages cannot be considered a “Jewish State.” The state, to use an expression often cited from the Chazon Ish, is a “building committee.” Furthermore, modern nationalism, which emphasizes elements such as territory, language, and culture, is fundamentally inappropriate for the Jewish People. In the words of R. Saadia Gaon, “Our nation is only a nation by its Torah.”
The Charedim, in the words of Yated Ne’eman editor Yisrael Friedman, thus “carry two passports in their suit pocket”—a Jewish-religious passport on one hand and a national passport on the other. The national passport can be British, French, or Israeli. It is of no matter. Moreover, there is no connection between the two passports, and certainly no advantage of bearing the Israeli one over any other country. You can be “British of the Mosaic faith” and “Israeli of the Mosaic faith.”
A Deal At All Costs?
From here, the path that leads to “a deal at all costs” is straightforward.
Like the matter of ascending the Temple Mount, striking a deal with Hamas has a distinct national dimension: what national price are we willing to pay for the hostage release? In admittedly overly simplistic terms, this is why left-leaning individuals, who minimize national identity and emphasize an individual-universal identity, will push for a deal at all costs, while right-wing individuals who predicate the national over individual identity will warn against a reckless deal, despite the unbearable personal pain involved. And this is why Charedi representatives tend to identify, on this matter, with Israel’s left.
And what of halacha? According to this perspective, halacha has nothing to say on the matter since the state is not “Jewish.” The Torah laws governing the redemption of captives and the concept of redeeming “beyond their value” are relevant to a Jewish community when a tyrannical kingdom imprisons members of the community. They are not relevant when the questioner is not the Jewish community but the State of Israel. For the state, the principle does not apply.
[H]alacha recognizes the principle of “it is good to die for our country” (or, as one alternative goes, “it is good to have a country worth dying for”), but only when we’re fighting for “our country.”
In other words, halacha recognizes the principle of “it is good to die for our country” (or, as one alternative goes, “it is good to have a country worth dying for”), but only when we’re fighting for “our country.” If it isn’t “our country”—if one can exchange an Israeli passport for a British or French one because it makes no difference—then the principle does not hold. If we don’t have a country worth dying for, we revert to the general rules of pikuach nefesh. Or, in the unfortunate words recently spoken by a since relieved army officer, Jews with a national disposition become “Death Eaters.”
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Despite his anti-Zionist past, Rav Eliyahu Henkin wrote in 1959 that we must support the state: “The articles I published prior to the establishment of the state attest to the fact […] that I opposed the very idea of a state. However, it is our duty to support the state against its external foes and to proceed to guide it according to the ways of the Torah.” In other words, Charedi Judaism opposed the designation of the State of Israel as the political and state representative of the Jewish people. Nonetheless, once this became a reality, we had to accept it and act accordingly.
Many within the ultra-Orthodox community—especially among the youth—would deeply resonate with these words. Indeed, they would take them a couple of steps further. For them, there is no place to speak of “Israelis of the Mosaic faith.” They possess one passport alone in their pockets and have left the tension between religion and nationality behind in the lands of our dispersion. They feel profound discomfort with both Rabbi Yosef’s statements—the one about emigrating abroad and the one supporting a deal at all costs.
Over time, there is no doubt in my mind that they will be properly represented, too, in a manner echoing the sentiments of Rav Henkin.
An earlier Hebrew version of this article was published in the Shabbat supplement of Mekor Rishon, available here.
Picture: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30066666
You might say the exact opposite – that whilst “ain podin” would apply for the limited-sovereignty communities of the mishna/gemara, the ideals of a nation-state demand the saving of its captives even at the cost of more lives than would be saved (in the same way as a state might send people to die for national glory)