Religion in the State of Israel

Ever since the Roman period, the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Erets Israel (see Israel, Land of) and the Ingathering of the Exiles have formed part of the messianic vision of Judaism and found expression in the daily liturgy dating from the first to second centuries. This teaching was formulated by Maimonides in his Code (Melakhim 11-12) and Mishnah commentary (Sanh. 10): "The days of the Messiah will be the period when sovereignty is restored to Israel and the Jewish people return to Erets Israel." The actual realization of this dream in the emergence of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 qualified it in the eyes of the Israel Chief Rabbinate at the time to be described as "the beginning of the flowering of our redemption" (reshit tsemiḥat ge'ulatenu) in the Prayer for the Government, which was formulated to be recited in the synagogue on Sabbaths, festivals, and ceremonial occasions. The actual phrase Medinat Yisra'el (State of Israel) occurs in the writings of R. Abraham Isaac Kook, referring to the ideal Jewish state dedicated to spiritual perfection which he envisaged as the goal of the Zionist enterprise, 30 years before the phrase came into daily use.

The attitudes of interpreters of Judaism to a state-in-fact after 2,000 years of homelessness have ranged from disavowment of its significance as a redemptive phenomenon to varying degrees of acceptance, all finding appropriate supporting texts in the corpus of Jewish tradition. A number of factors underlay the reservations with which non-Zionist rabbis regarded the state: (1) their belief that the messianic redemption would be an entirely miraculous occurrence and could not take place under human auspices; (2) the talmudic tradition that God had extracted a solemn promise from Israel that they would not rebel, i.e., not regain the Holy Land by force of arms (Ket. 11a); and (3) the fact that the state was a secular one led by nonobservant and even anti-religious Jews. The most extreme exponent of this view was the Satmar rabbi, Yoel Mosheh Teitelbaum, leader of the Neturé Karta, for whom the "heretical" state was the work of the devil and a trial for the faithful. A more pragmatic attitude prevailed among the vast majority of the ultra-Orthodox world, represented by the Agudat Israel organization (later, party), whose delegate, R. Yitsḥak Meir Levin, affixed his signature to Israel's Declaration of Independence. In deference to Jewish tradition, the declaration ended---not without murmurs of dissent from secular Zionist leaders---with the epilogue beginning: "With trust in the Rock of Israel" (in the official English version: "Almighty God"). Among non-Orthodox Jews, the Conservative movement, which had always had a Zionist orientation, welcomed the new state unreservedly. So did the Reform movement, which diavowed its earlier anti-Zionism and (with the exception of a small minority, concentrated in the American Council for Judaism) enthusiastically backed the state and, like the Conservatives, joined the Zionist movement and became active in Israel.

The first basic law of the State of Israel, the Law of Return, recognized all Jews as potential citizens of the state, acquiring automatic citizenship upon immigration---a measure reflecting an ancient Jewish tradition that "every Jew has a portion in Erets Israel" (Otsar ha-Ge'onim, Kid. 60-63). Once the Jewish state was established, identifiably religious Jews were, and have remained, a minority. This minority element, comprising at the time almost all Orthodox Jews, presented certain demands, many of which were accepted---partly for political reasons (the religious parties were needed to establish a ruling coalition government), partly out of the wish of the leader of the infant state, David Ben-Gurion, not to add a kulturkampf (a struggle between the secular and religious populations) to the many problems with which he was faced, and partly out of a desire to give the Jewish state a Jewish complexion. As a result, laws were enacted guaranteeing the observance in all areas of public life of the Dietary Laws, the Sabbath, and the Festivals. On the Sabbath and on festivals work can carried out only in factories, industries, and utilities connected with health and security, and then only with a special permit from a government committee on which the Rabbinate has a representative.

Rabbinical courts exercise exclusive jurisdiction in matters of the personal status of Jews---Marriage and Divorce being in accordance with Halakhah for the Jewish population, administered by Orthodox religious judges (dayyanim) presided over by the two (Sephardi and Ashkenazi) Chief Rabbis. The definition of a Jew for both civil and religious purposes and for the Law of Return is basically, though not unequivocally, halakhic---i.e., one born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism (see Jew, Who is A?). At the municipal level, religious councils cater to religious needs. Their services include the provision of ritual baths, burial facilities, registration of marriages, care of synagogues, and the promotion of religious study circles, all under the supervision and administration of the appropriate departments of the Ministry of Religion. A state religious school system run on Orthodox lines exists alongside the general state school system, the latter also providing hours of Bible and post-biblical Judaic studies. In recent years classes and even entire schools, known as Tali schools (from the Hebrew letters standing for "Increased Religious Education"), have developed as part of the state system. These schools provide a religious non-Orthodox education along historical or Conservative lines. Generous state aid is provided to private ultra-Orthodox schools, which opt for a more intensive and fundamentalist Torah syllabus and a minimum of general subjects. The traditional houses of rabbinical study, the yeshivot, flourish as never before in Jewish history, attracting tens of thousands of students from all over the world, and benefiting from state grants and deferment of compulsory military service for those continuing their studies there. Direct religious legislation includes the prohibition of pig-rearing and the sale of ḥamets (leaven) during Passover in Jewish areas. Much state legislation owes a great deal to halakhah in its spirit and wording---as, for example, those laws relating to the withholding of wages (after Lev. 19:13; Deut. 24:15) or to the responsibility of bailees (after BM 8).

In the first Knesset elections, a united religious bloc obtained 16 of the 120 Knesset seats. Since that time, through the early 1990s, religious parties representing both the religious Zionists and the non-Zionist Agudah camps have generally won from 15 to 18 seats (out of 120) in the Knesset. As neither the left nor the right bloc has ever won an absolute or viable majority, it has been necessary to form government coalitions in which religious parties have formed a constant element. Up to 1967, the dominant religious faction was the Zionist party (Mizrachi-Ha-Poel ha-Mizrachi, later the National Religious Party). Prior to 1967 it was generally content to vote with the ruling Labor party in questions such as foreign policy and defense, in return for concessions on the religious and educational fronts. After the Six-Day War, many religious Zionists decided that they wished to enter the political fray more actively. They played a leading part in the Greater Israel movement, founding settlements in the "administered areas" and opposing proposals to return territory to Arab control, on the grounds that Jews should never relinquish any part of the Holy Land Divinely promised to them. (This position was not accepted by some rabbinical authorities, who ruled that the "sacredness of human life," endangered by remaining in the territories, outweighed the sacredness of the Land itself). The 1980s saw a marked change in the internal composition of religious representation. The non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox religious groups received considerable encouragement from the Likud party, which had come to power for the first time in 1977, in return for their support of a Likud government. Whereas up to the 1980s the Zionist religious faction had generally secured two-thirds of the religious vote, in 1988 it received only five of the 18 seats obtained by all Orthodox parties. The other seats went to the ultra-Orthodox (ḥaredi) parties, whose influence had grown rapidly over the previous decade and who had obtained considerable financial support from the government for their institutions and educational system. Most prominent among them was the Shas party, founded in 1984 to represent the interests of North African and Oriental Jews and winning 17 seats in the 1999 Knesset elections to make it the country's third largest political party after Labor and the Likud (see Yosef, Ovadiah) The ultra-Orthodox parties were themselves fragmented because of internal rivalries between Ashkenazim and Sephardim and between the various schools that perpetuated East European disputes (between Mitnaggedim and ḤASIDIM and among various Ḥasidic groups). The religious establishment has remained in the hands of the Orthodox dating back to the arrangements made by the British during the period of the Mandate. This establishment has vehemently opposed the growth of non-Orthodox Judaism, which became notable in the early 1960s. Although hampered by this establishment, and its control of all procedures of domestic law (marriage, divorce, personal status), the non-Orthodox religious groups---Conservative and Reform--have sought to gain recognition for their rabbis and synagogues and introduce Jewish religious pluralism in the state. So far these efforts have failed to produce any significant changes in the system, despite the extension of the non-Orthodox religious programs to the fields of education, settlement, social action, etc.

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