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Israel
at a Point of No Return - In the Right Direction
by David P. Goldman
PJ Media
February 12, 2014
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I should like to advance a conjecture which I lack the qualifications
to adequately develop: The global Left, and the Israeli Left most of all,
perceives that the clock is running out, and has worked itself up into a
froth of hysteria against Israel. The world of John Lennon's "Imagine,"
where there are no countries and no religions, is about to dissipate like
last night's marijuana fumes. The demographic time bomb that worries the
Left is not the relative increase of Arab vs. Jewish populations between
the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, speciously cited by John Kerry
and a host of other errant utopians: it is the growth of the Jewish
population itself, and Israel's transformation into the world's most
religious country.
Israel now has a religious majority, as Times of Israel blogger Yoseif Bloch
observes:
"According
to our Central Bureau of Statistics, 43% of Israeli Jews are secular,
9% are haredi, and the remaining 48% are somewhere between masorti
(traditional) and dati (religious): 23% the former, 10% the latter, and
15% smack in the middle. These five groups do not parallel the five
groups identified by Pew, e.g. Orthodox is a denomination, while dati is
a declaration."
So 57% of Israelis practice a form of Judaism that for the most part
Americans would call "Orthodox," in that it recognizes
normative Judaism in the rabbinic tradition (the presence of the
"progressive" Reform and Conservative movements is almost
imperceptible and largely limited to transplanted Americans). Many
Israelis who are dati are far from completely observant, but there
is a great gulf fixed between a semi-observant Jew who knows what
observance is, and a "progressive" who asserts the right to
reinvent tradition according to personal taste.
This majority seems to be expanding fast. I spent the second half of
December in Jerusalem promoting the Hebrew translation of my book How
Civilizations Die and was struck by the increase in commitment to
religious observance, including among people who were steadfastly
secular. Almost half of Israel's army officers are "national
religious" and trained in pre-army academies that teach Judaism,
Jewish history, as well as physical training and military subjects. The
ultra-Orthodox are going to work rather than studying full time, little
by little, but the little adds up to a lot. Naftali Bennett's
national-religious party "Jewish Home" has created a new political
focus for the national-religious. Outreach organizations like Beit Hillel are bringing
once-secular Israelis back to observance. Beit Hillel's spiritual leader,
Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth, was in New York recently lecturing about Israel's
religious revival.
Anecdotally, I see this in my own small circle of Israeli
acquaintances. A musician friend told me that he attends a Talmud class
every Shabbat — he can't stand praying, but he is hungry for Torah. A
journalist friend dresses her young boys in the tallit katan, the fringed
undergarment of the very observant. It is becoming normal in Jerusalem
restaurants to wash hands before bread and to recite the Grace after
Meals.
This is a crucial, counterintuitive story: Israel is swimming against
the secular current, becoming more observant as the rest of the world
becomes more secular. Perhaps the explanation lies in the observation of
the Catholic sociologist Mary Eberstadt, who argued in a brilliant 2007
essay that it is our children who bring us to faith. Last year Mary
expanded the essay into a book
which I had the honor to discuss in Claremont Review of Books. It
is a commonplace of demographers' correlation that people of faith have
more children: Mary argues that the causality goes both ways, that having
children reinforces our faith. Israeli is a standpoint in the modern
world with a fertility rate of 3.0 children per woman (the closest second
is the U.S. with just 1.9). Excluding the ultra-Orthodox the number is
2.6 children per woman, still outside the range of the rest of the
industrial world. Secular Israelis are having three children. Not only
does that defuse the much-touted "demographic time bomb." It
ultimately changes the character of the country. It validates the
hundred-year-old argument of Rabbi Isaac Kook, one of the founders of
religious Zionism, that identification with the Jewish people eventually
will lead Jews back to Judaism.
This national religious revival is not occurring at the expense of
Israeli or West Bank Arabs. On the contrary, the Arab population between
the River and the Sea is flourishing as no modern Arab population ever
did. A fifth of Israel's medical students are Arab, as are a third of the
students at the University of Haifa. Ariel University across the
"Green Line" in Samaria, the "settler's university,"
is educating a whole generation of West Bank Arabs. The campus is full of
young Arab women in headscarves, and the local Jewish leadership reaches
out to Arab villages to recruit talented students. Israel's expanding
economy has a bottomless demand for young people of ability and ambition.
The Left calls Israel an "apartheid state" the way it used to
call America a "fascist state" back in the 1960s.
The Israeli Left, with its soggy vision of univeralist utopianism, may
be at a point of no return. It is becoming marginalized and irrelevant.
The Europeans, whose experience of nationalism has been uniformly
horrific, are equally aghast. Liberal
Christians who abhor the Election of Israel because they abhor
Christian orthodoxy cannot suppress their rage. And
"progressive" American Jews, who have been running away from
Judaism for the past three generations, are upset that Israel has
embraced the normative Judaism they worked so hard to suppress. American
"progressive" and unaffiliated Jews, one should remember, have
the lowest fertility rate of any identifiable minority in the United
States. Even if most of them did not intermarry (and the intermarriage
rate in the past ten years approaches 70% according to the October 2013
Pew study) their infertility would finish them off in a few generations.
Meanwhile 74%
of all Jewish children in the New York area live in Orthodox
families. The center of gravity of Judaism will shift decisively to
Israel in the next generation, and the segment of American Jewry that
most identifies with Israel–the Orthodox–will set the tone for American
Judaism and eventually become the majority in a much smaller American
Jewish population.
It is up to the Israelis, to be sure, to draw out the implications of
these trends. But I am encouraged by the perceptions of religious leaders
like Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth, who perceive this revival in their daily work.
This is good news for Christians as well as Jews. The secularization
thesis is refuted: a country with the world's greatest record of
high-tech innovation is also becoming the industrial world's most
religious country. It is devastating news for Lennonists as well as
Leninists. The "Imagine" world turns out to be imaginary.
Israel, as Franz Rosenzweig said of the Jewish people, is there to be
"the paragon and exemplar of a nation." For all its flaws, the
State of Israel stands as a beacon to people of faith around the world.
It is honored by its list of self-appointed enemies. Will Israel prevail
against the unholy coalition against it? As we say, b'ezrat Hashem.
David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Related
Topics: Demographics, Israel & Zionism
| David P. Goldman
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