We often use metaphors from the biological sciences to describe the dynamic of our social life. For instance, in the previous sentence, I used the scientific term “dynamic” in a social context. In this spirit, one of the most common scientific metaphors used in Israeli discourse is the “melting pot.” Its metaphorical context is so familiar that its original meaning is all but forgotten.
A melting pot is an installation in which two important and distinct processes occur. One of these is preparing the alloy. Two different metals are added and brought to a temperature high enough to transform them from solid to liquid. In their liquid state, the metals then reconnect in new intra-molecular forms. When the liquid metal cools, we get a novel alloy—a new metal with unique characteristics.
Fewer will recall that the primary function of the melting pot is not creating the alloy but rather producing metal from ore. Metals occur in their oxidized state in ores, which must be reduced to convert the metal to its elemental state. Iron is reduced by feeding the ore into a blast furnace—a “melting pot”—which reaches a temperature of over 1,000°C, causing a chemical reaction to form pure iron metal.
The “melting pot” metaphor has been etched into the Israeli consciousness in the first sense: creating a uniform, homogenous material from two different sources
This process of refinement is often noted in the Bible as a social metaphor: “I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities” (Yeshayahu 1:25); “See, I will refine and test them, for what else can I do because of the sin of my people?” (Yirmiyahu 9:6); “And He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver. Then they will present offerings to Hashem in righteousness” (Malachi 3:3). The iron cauldron likewise serves as a Torah metaphor for the Egyptian enslavement, as found both in Devarim (4:20) and in Yirmiyahu (11:14).
The “melting pot” metaphor has been etched into the Israeli consciousness in the first sense: creating a uniform, homogenous material from two different sources. Based on this interpretation, the “melting pot” is a social policy that takes a range of diverse groups and fuses them, erasing their unique traits and creating a novel, uniform social material with new characteristics. The Poles and Moroccans, Russians and Tunisians, Germans and Iraqis, and all the rest fuse into one new mold: the Israeli Sabra.
In this article, I wish to point out that the original meaning of the Israeli “melting pot” referred to the second sense of purification rather than the first. It is important to realize this and to appreciate the ramifications. Following this, I will argue that today, we are in urgent need of a new fusion process: a “nuclear” one.
The Ben Gurion Melting Pot: Refining “Human Dust”
The architect of Israel’s melting pot policy is, of course, Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. The logic underlying his policy and the vision guiding it were laid out explicitly in a famous speech he gave to the IDF’s high command in its first years. In his speech, Ben Gurion articulated the educational role of the IDF as a “spiritual absorption” of the immigration to Israel, “merging it and shaping it.”
Ben Burion’s “melting pot” was set to purify the “mixed multitude” and “human dust” that the Jewish exiles had become. They needed to be purged, purified, and forged in the melting pot of the State of Israel
Ben Gurion noted two educational tasks with which he charged the army: merging the exiles on the one hand and molding them on the other. In fact, he devotes much more space to the latter role:
Much of the Jewish diaspora in the lands of Eastern Europe and those of Islam is making Aliyah. […] Most of these Jews are penniless and they lack property and capital that was forcibly taken from them. They are also denied the education and culture denied them.” Later, he continued to note that “the exiles that are converging in Israel are not yet a nation. They are a mixed multitude and human dust, lacking language and education, lacking roots, and lacking the nourishment of our national tradition and vision.
Ben Burion’s “melting pot” was set to purify the “mixed multitude” and “human dust” (a term Ben Gurion repeated time and again in his speech) that the Jewish exiles had become. They needed to be purged, purified, and forged in the melting pot of the State of Israel. “The spiritual absorption of this Aliyah, its merging and molding, turning this human dust into a cultured, creative, independent nation bearing a vision, is not a small task. […] A great effort is needed, moral and educational, an effort accompanied by deep and pure love for unifying these lost souls.”
The State of Israel would turn human dust into human beings, just as a melting pot turns metal ore into metal. Ben Gurion assigned this great task to the army. Finally, Ben Gurion explicitly employed the term “melting pot,” noting that “the melting pot of Jewish fraternity and military discipline” will “purify, distill, and cleanse” the Jewish from all of “its foreign and harmful slag.”
Ben Gurion’s refining process paraphrases Malachi: “For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver” (Malachi 3:2-3). Like Malachi, Ben Gurion meant to renew the covenant that made Israel into a people. The purifier was David Ben Gurion, and the melting pot would be the army.
Creating the New Jew
Ben Gurion’s melting pot idea was far from unique. His desire to create a new type of Jew and his dismissive attitude toward the traditional Jews returning from their exile were not dissimilar from enlightenment projects across Europe seeking to develop a more liberal, rational, authentic, and socialist human type. Zionist pioneers, Bolshevik socialists, and western liberals all believed in creating a New Man from scratch. In all these visions, the glue of tradition was to be replaced with a new, civic-democratic adhesive. In this sense, the Ben Gurionite fusion differed little from other secular processes unraveling the Jewish People in the preceding century. Jews went from being Jews to be “citizens.”
Secularism per se has no connecting value. The only thing that continues to bind together members of the “secular public” in Israel is the connection they retain with Judaism—their connection to Jewish tradition. Israeli citizenship itself does not bind Tel Avivians with Jews in Sderot any more than it connects those from Baqa al-Gharbia with the residents of Bnei Brak. This observation was eloquently made by Yechezkel Kaufman in the context of the Jews in their exilic condition; though our situation is different, it remains eminently true today.
The usual factors connecting a people—language, territory, a shared history, and blood ties—were absent from the many exiles that Jews were dispersed to, yet the Jewish People survived as a distinct national entity for thousands of years. As Kaufman demonstrates in his “Exile and Estrangement,” the Jewish People managed to preserve ties to a territory (the Land of Israel), a language (Hebrew), history (the history of the Bible), and a sense of being one family. This was not due to the incredible power of endurance of the Hebrew ethnos, as Ben Gurion imagined. Instead, it was thanks to the resilience of the Covenant between Israel and God. Even now, it is the same Covenant, of which we are all a part, that keeps us together.
The melting pot created the illusion of unity, temporarily papering over the absence of a strong glue to hold the nation together. Beneath the surface, however, it separated the Jewish people into various sectors, leaving us the task of fusing them
Ben Gurion’s secular melting pot was effective in its role as a dismantler. In all its varieties, the enlightened melting pot served to exorcize life within the Covenant from the Jewish People, removing what had kept together the Jewish People over long centuries. By contrast, the melting pot dramatically failed to create the homogenous society it aimed to achieve. If anybody needs proof of this, we’re just about to embark on a fifth election season in which no stable coalition is in sight, indicating the severe solidarity problem in the State of Israel. Our State leaders openly speak of Israel’s different “tribes,” and many are convinced that we can achieve little more than partial cooperation over material needs. Such needs, while important, are surely incapable of binding us together; we did not return to our homeland just to put bread and milk on the kitchen table.
Our State leaders openly speak of Israel’s different “tribes,” and many are convinced that we can achieve little more than partial cooperation over material needs. Such needs, while important, are surely incapable of binding us together
As Asaf Inbari wrote in his essay, Ben Gurion’s melting pot never offered something that would unite the different elements of the nation. In his words, “Ben Gurion’s ‘Hebrew’ melting pot was not, in fact, a melting pot. It was a status quo. Instead of bridging secularists and religious Jews via a shared national identity platform, it offered an alienated coexistence in a state with cultural cantons.”
The melting pot created the illusion of unity, temporarily papering over the absence of a strong glue to hold the nation together. Beneath the surface, however, it separated the Jewish people into various sectors, leaving us the task of fusing them.
From Judaism to “Judaisms”
In the wake of emancipation, Judaism became privatized and sectoral. Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch’s communal separatism is one expression among many of this coming apart. Orthodox Judaism became one sector among many, and Orthodoxy itself split into multiple groups, each with its educational system, independent source of authority, and internal language.
Within Orthodoxy, this separation is especially prominent in the relationship between Charedim and religious Zionists; yet, beyond the schism between the two groups are numerous sub-groups, each of them its own world: Sephardic, Litvish, Chassidic of one type or another, Charedi-national, liberal-religious, traditional religious, and so on. Even the adherence to Torah and Mitzvos has become “sectorial,” each group with its customs, leadership, and ideology.
I should note that the splintering of Jews into groups is nothing new. Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewry, Chassidim and Misnagdim, and many other groups adequately illustrate this. But notwithstanding splits and struggles, there was always one Torah at the center, though the various groups disputed its interpretation. Today, however, it seems that multiple Judaisms separate Jews rather than uniting them, and their struggle is over resources rather than the meaning of Judaism.
A secular Israeli taxi driver, suspecting a friend of mine of opening the conversation between them to bring him closer to tradition, told him that he should first settle on what Judaism is: “There are so many of you,” he added, “that it’s confusing.”
A secular Israeli taxi driver, suspecting a friend of mine of opening the conversation between them to bring him closer to tradition, told him that he should first settle on what Judaism is: “There are so many of you,” he added, “that it’s confusing.”
Though we pray for it daily, we cannot today even imagine the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem for the simple reason that we could never reach a consensus over who would run it. At the time of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, there was still a Temple, a center. This center was spiritually preserved even following the Destruction, with the Jewish People gathering around the Torah. Today, however, there is no longer one Temple but many small temples, one for each group, each with its source of authority and internal unity.
To be a religious Jew today is to be part of a sector rather than a nation. This is far from how things should be.
We Need Nuclear Fusion
To remedy the situation of today, simple fusion is not sufficient. We need nuclear fusion.
A nuclear fusion reactor is the utopian dream of physicists, a plant where two light nuclei can be fused into a single atom. The thing is that particles don’t like to be connected, and their positive electrical charges repel each other just as the positive poles of two magnets. The only method physicists found for fusing atoms is to make them clash at tremendous velocities that can overcome the repelling force. Yet, this creates a new problem: When bodies move at enormous speed, they also reach such high temperatures that make them impossible to control. Physicists have been searching for ways to contain them for decades, without much success.
Yet, we do know of a prevalent source of nuclear fusion. In fact, nuclear fusion is the primary energy source in our world, and all life depends on it. How can this be? How can nature succeed where physicists fail? The source of this ever-so-common nuclear fusion is, of course, the sun. The light and warmth of the sun are energy emitted from processes of atomic fusion across the distant star, flowing to us in the form of light and heat. The sun is a star possessing such great mass that its gravity alone brings about the needed nuclear fusion. And thus, via this fusion, the sun’s light brings life, warmth, and energy to the world.
It seems that we, the Jewish People, can use a symbolic sun. As noted, the Jewish People were dispersed and separated among the nations for many years. We lacked the uniting factor of a single territory, and we did not share the natural ties that bind nations together. What united us for all these generations was something akin to the sun’s enormous gravitational power; it was God Himself.
The Children of Israel left their isolating slavery and underwent “nuclear fusion” via the enormous gravitational force which took them out of Egypt. God, Himself, was the force that purified Israel and made it a nation
God took us out of the “iron cauldron” of Egypt, where the Children of Israel were broken down into their component parts and made into a nation. How? By means of the very connection to Him, forged via a mutual covenant. Thus did the individual atoms form into a single whole. The Children of Israel left their isolating slavery and underwent “nuclear fusion” via the enormous gravitational force which took them out of Egypt. God, Himself, was the force that purified Israel and made it a nation, as the Prophets say repeatedly. His great power is what did the unbelievable and took “a nation from out of a nation.” God extracted the isolated scattered atoms and fused them into one.
The fact that this miracle occurred gives us a reason for hope today. The Torah describes the process of teshuvah as a renewed awakening of the force keeping the Jewish People together:
Then Hashem, your God, will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there Hashem, your God, will gather you and bring you back. He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors (Devarim 30:3-5).
And this miracle, indeed, occurred again. The Jewish People had already split into smaller units over years of secular emancipation, yet God pulled them, almost against their will, to the land of their fathers. However, as the Torah continues, it is not enough. Even when God employs His gravitational force, shaking out the map of history like an electronic storm and attracting the dispersed of Israel from all the exiles as though with a magnet, we remain in need of a new center to serve as the basis for continued development. This is the second stage in the process:
Hashem, your God, will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. Hashem, your God, will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. You will again obey Hashem and follow all his commands I am giving you today. Then Hashem, your God, will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock, and the crops of your land. Hashem will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your ancestors, if you obey Hashem, your God, and keep His commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to Hashem, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul. (Devarim 30: 6-10)
We need to return, to hear the voice calling to us and begging us to return so He may rejoice in us as He rejoiced in our fathers.
Let me explain, in conclusion, what I mean by this.
Abolishing Sectionalism Is Not in Heaven
Immediately following the section discussing repentance, the Torah says: “For this Mitzvah which I command you is not beyond you, nor is it distant.” I have employed some lofty parables and distant-sounding metaphors, but I am referring to simple and down-to-earth matters. “It is in your mouth and heart to do it” (Devarim 30:14).
The religious community is broken today into multiple sectors. What divides them, and what could also bind them, is the magnetic energy of self-love. We coalesce around local nuclei, clinging to them desperately so as not to drown in the stormy sea surrounding us. But this sectorial embrace denies us the fundamental attraction that kept Israel together in every generation: a united fidelity to the Covenant. This fidelity and commitment include no justification for the sectorial breakdown.
We defend our sectionalism zealously, almost primally, without giving the matter much thought. In every encounter with members of another sector, we feel a sense of rejection and sometimes even contempt
We defend our sectionalism zealously, almost primally, without giving the matter much thought. In every encounter with members of another—sector, religious or secular, Litvish or Chassidic—we feel a sense of rejection and even contempt. These feelings are not about anything in particular but rather the very Otherness of the Other. He’s not one of us, nisht fun unzerer. The very positive charge of clinging to the core repels the Other, rather than any ideology or theology, which are excuses rather than reasons. It’s narcissism, self-love, which separates us, and the small differences are mere lip service to that. It prevents it from returning to God, for this return requires the negation of the sector. But return we can; teshuvah is right around the corner.
Sectionalism is needless, harmful, flawed, and illegitimate. For instance, why do we need four or five religious parties in the Knesset? It is absurd. Our differences are minuscule compared to the enormous force that connects us. After all, what unites us, if not the covenant with God, the ancient Covenant of Sinai? What binds us, if not the enormous attraction with which he pulls us from the four corners of the earth? In this sense, moreover, God has already circumcised our hearts; after all, we all hear His voice. Now, all we need is to take the step and concede the needlessness and the harm of our sectionalism. We need to break down the walls and recognize the Covenant anew, validating the connection between all those who heed God and His Torah. Thus, we become one people, with Hashem at our center.
“It is in your mouth and your heart to do it.”
Tel Avivians may indeed not have much in common with people in Sderot But they definitely have more in common than either one has with Beni Brak, as both live consciously and contributingly in the Jewish State of Israel, while Bnai Brak is a wilfully maintained golus community located within and feeding off a Zionist state it abhors.
If the goal is fusion, it is best not to try. We have never been fused; we have always had diversity. What we should strive for instead, is the simpler goal of mutual respect. As my rebbe RAL ztl said: do not confuse tolerance for a lack of principle. What we value and how we behave differs; it is not meant to be easily tampered with to create some universal commonality. Eilu ve’eilu is not a be’diavad but our normal state.
The lack of mutual respect needs to be addressed; it is a more realistic goal than fusion. As the rabbis taught: tofastah merubah, lo tofastah. Not just tolerance, but mutual respect. In our past history, despite divisions on seminal issues, the sense of divisiveness (much more so at the institutional versus personal level) was not as overriding as it often feels today.
Diversity is great, but we certainly need unity, and I agree that lack of mutual respect is a part of it. The way to achieve that is, absolutely, to highlight shared values. I think the author is right that this is sorely lacking.
JJ, instead of writing the same comment on every article, perhaps you want to give us some thoughts on the specific content of the piece? We realize that you have some negative sentiments about Haredim, and that’s okay, but I think readers (and I, for one) will appreciate some discussion of the content rather than the same old stuff.
The United States is probably the best example at the moment of what happens when we lose our shared covenant and core identity. Things just begin to fall apart. At founding the US was ninety-some percent Protestant. Things were good, and the US could house minorities, too. But when you lose the shared values and identity, you lose it all. I don’t think Israel is going that way, but agree with the author that talk about the different “tribes” is not productive, to say the least.