Only a Moderate Idolatry: A Hopeless and Hypocritical Vision of Judaism from Israel's "Center"
In Ha’aretz, Israel’s liberal newspaper, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid just penned an homage to Israeli Judaism. Though he purports to demonstrate Israeli Judaism’s hopefulness and morality, the vision he offers is premised on idolization of the state, nihilistic despair, and hypocritical moral self-satisfaction.
Lapid begins by noting the variety of Judaisms in Israel:
Our Judaism, [sic] is not uniform, but rather endowed with an endless variety of Jewish possibilities. Each home has its own traditions brought from different corners of the Jewish diaspora; each home has its unique manner of connecting between the grandfather who has long passed with the granddaughter yet to be born.
In this, Lapid is right — Israel includes a vast range of Jewish traditions and communities. Iraqi, Syrian, Kurdish, Egyptian, German, French, Ethiopian, Moroccan, American, Russia, Tunisian, Algerian… the list goes on. And, of course, it’s worth noting that many of those communities are comprised of Jews who fled catastrophe: for Ashkenazi Jews, the Holocaust; for Mizrahi Jews, the exclusionary policies of Arab nationalisms; for Russian Jews, Soviet antisemitism; for Ethiopian Jews, political violence in Ethiopia.
But after extolling Israel’s diversity, Lapid quickly moves on to valorizing the State of Israel as a foundational religious principle:
The mitzvot we Jewish-Israelis observe – such as the Passover Seder, the family gathering on Shabbat evenings, enlisting in the Israeli army and preserving our democracy – are not religious duties imposed on us, but choices we make out of a sense of belonging.
In our Judaism, it is impossible for an Israeli youth not to enlist in the people's army, because mutual responsibility is the very basis of our existence. In our Judaism, Israel's Declaration of Independence is the sixth scroll that should be honored alongside the Song of Songs, Lamentation, Ecclesiastes, the Book of Ruth and the Book of Esther.
Army service is a mitzvah, and the Declaration of Independence should be considered a sacred text. What more obvious sanctification of the state could there be?1 As the existentialist Christian philosopher Paul Tillich wrote of 20th-century nationalism, “[E]verything is centered in the only god, the nation — a god who certainly proves to be a demon.”2
But idolatry is only one of the disturbing elements of Lapid’s proposal. Despite his insistence that “Judaism is the way of hope,” the vision he presents is strangely hopeless: “It is impossible for an Israeli youth not to enlist in the people’s army.” What future is offered by an opposition that can imagine no horizon beyond permanent war and mass conscription? For Lapid, being part of the army has gone from a “necessary evil” (itself a debatable notion) to a religious obligation.
Lapid’s idolatry and lack of political imagination are so prominent that one almost misses the hypocrisy of his moral self-satisfiedness. Lapid celebrates the ethical standards of Judaism, declaring, “Our moral standards begin with Abraham, who bargained with God over the number of righteous men in Sodom.” Avraham argued that God should not destroy Sodom, even if the majority of the population was wicked, so long as there were ten righteous people. Lapid, by contrast, has vociferously supported a war waged against Hamas even though the vast majority of the casualties have been civilians. How much more distant from Abraham could one be?
Lapid goes on to assert:
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said that we don't vanquish evil with hate, we vanquish it with faith in life. This is why precisely after the Holocaust, Jews did the most Jewish act in the last thousand years – establishing the State of Israel.
Aside from the return to idolatry (is the establishment of the State of Israel more Jewish than the Rambam? The Zohar? The Arizal? Hasidut? The Mussar Movement?), what stands out is Lapid’s inability to engage in any critical assessment of Israel’s founding. It is true that establishing the State of Israel was an act of “faith in life” for many of those who took part in it, and that it offered refuge to those Jews above who were forced to leave their communities; and yet it also involved — necessarily — the destruction of Palestinian life in this land. Yet Lapid takes no note of the latter: Nazis are bad and (therefore) Israel is good.
The same hypocrisy is evident in Lapid’s description above of “preserving our democracy” as a religious obligation. Beyond the idolatry, it’s simply not honest. Though Lapid and the opposition were vehemently opposed to the government’s efforts to undercut the Israeli Supreme Court and Israel’s other remaining democratic checks, most of their efforts can hardly be described as “preserving democracy.” The vast majority of the protests took no interest in Israel’s undemocratic occupation of the West Bank and treated controlling millions of people by military fiat as totally irrelevant to the question of Israel’s “democracy.” And even within the Green Line, Lapid and his ilk fought not for liberal democracy but for Jewish democracy: a state in which demographic engineering must ensure a Jewish majority that “precedes the democratic process.,”3 only after which there can be certain democratic features.
Those holding out hope that Israel’s main opposition parties can offer a suitable alternative to the government’s extremism are out of luck. It is true that Lapid’s secular sanctification of the state is better than Smotrich’s fundamentalist one and that his claim to support liberal values, even if untrue, is better than Ben Gvir’s disdain for them. But ultimately, what Lapid and his fellows offer is still a Judaism that worships the nation-state (and the nation), naively proclaims its morality even while engaging in one of the most brutal campaigns of the 21st century, and which offers little in the way of a compelling vision for a future. In other words, more of the same.
Carl Schmitt, the infamous Nazi theorist, argued that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modem theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” In that case, perhaps Lapid is simply saying the quiet part out loud and in more vulgar form that liberalism does. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 36.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1958), p. 2.
Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 28