Introduction

The Levites had killed three thousand of the Israelites who had worshipped the Golden Calf while Moses was receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai; that was the reason that God had honored them above the other tribes, not because of their service in the Temple. Moses had been a great zealot who had fought other Jews all his life. Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, had risen up against Zimri, even though he was a prince of Israel, because he had committed fornication. Elijah had stood up to Ahab and slaughtered the 450 prophets of Baal. These zealots, whose passion for God was often expressed in uncontrollable rage, were the true Jews, the faithful remnant. Sometimes they had to fight gentiles, sometimes their fellow Jews, but the battle was always the same. Faithful Jews must cut themselves off, root and branch, from such Jews as the members of Agudat who had left God and gone over to the Evil One. By collaborating with the Zionists, Agudat had done Jews “more harm than all the wicked of the earth.” To consort with them was sinful and to make a pact with Satan.
Hence the duty of segregation. Just as the Torah separates sacred from profane, light from darkness, milk from meat, and Sabbath from the rest of the week, so the righteous must keep themselves apart. The renegades would never return to the fold; by living and praying separately from these wicked Jews, the true Haredim were simply expressing physically the ontological gulf that existed between them at a metaphysical level. But this fearful vision meant that, living as they were in the midst of satanic evil, every detail of the lives of the faithful had cosmic importance. Matters of dress, methods of study, even the cut of the beard, must be absolutely correct. Jewish life was gravely imperiled, and any innovation was utterly forbidden:
“Care should be taken that the right lapel overlaps the left, so that the right hand of the Most High, ‘the right hand of the Lord uplifted,” in its exalted Love (hesed\ predominates over the left side, which represents Power (din), the strength of the Evil Impulse.” Where Protestant fundamentalists had sought to fill the void by seeking absolute certainty in stringent doctrinal correctness, these anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox sought certainty in a minute observance of divine law and customary observance. It is a spirituality that reveals almost ungovernable fear which can only be assuaged by the meticulous preservation of old boundaries, the erection of new barriers, a rigid segregation, and a passionate adherence to the values of tradition.
This rejectionist vision is utterly incomprehensible to Jews who regard the Zionist achievement as wondrous and salvific. This is the dilemma that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all had to face in the twentieth century:
between the fundamentalists and those who adopt a more positive attitude to the modern secular world there is an impassable gulf. The different groups simply cannot see things from the same point of view.
Rational arguments are of no avail, because the divergence springs from a deeper and more instinctual level of the mind. When Shapira, Teitelbaum, and Margolis contemplated the purposeful, pragmatic, and rationally inspired activities of the secular Zionists, they could only see them as godless and, hence, as demonic.
When later they and their followers heard about the rationalized, practical, and ruthlessly directed activities of the Nazis in the death camps, they experienced them as similar to the Zionist enterprise. Both revealed the absence of God, and were, therefore, satanic and nihilistic, destructively trampling upon every sacred value that these Haredim held dear. To this day, the placards and graffiti on the walls of an anti-Zionist district in Jerusalem equate the political leaders of the State of Israel with Hitler. To an outsider, such an equation is shocking, false, and perverse, but it gives us some idea of the profound horror that secularism can inspire in the heart of a fundamentalist.
The very idea of Jewish apostates setting up a secular state in Eretz Israel violated a taboo. Over the centuries, the lost land had acquired a symbolic and mystical value that linked it with God and the Torah in a sort of holy trinity. To watch its profanation by men who made no secret of the fact that they had cast religion aside inspired the same kind of mingled fury and dread as the violation of a sacred shrine, which, especially in the Jewish world, has often been experienced as a rape. The closer the Zionists came to achieving their objective, the more desperate some of the more radical Haredim became, until in 1938, Amram Blau and Aharon Katzenellenbogen, who had both defected from Agudat because of its alleged “collaboration” with the Zionists, seceded from the Edah Haredis. The Jewish community had recently levied a special tax to cover the cost of an organized defense against Arab attacks, and these rejectionists refused to pay it. To justify their refusal, Blau and K-atzenellenbogen quoted a Talmudic story. In the third century, when armed guards were organizing the defense of one of the Jewish urban communities in Roman Palestine, two Jewish sages told them:
“You are not the city’s guardians but its destroyers. The scholars who study the Torah are the true guardians of the city.” The new group formed by Blau and Katzenellenbogen gave itself the Aramaic title Neturei Karta (“The Guardians of the City”): Jews would not be protected by the militant activities of the Zionists but by the devout and punctilious religious observance of the Orthodox. They challenged the perspective of the Zionists. In their view, when Jews had been given the Torah, they had entered a different realm from other nations.
They were not supposed to get involved in politics or armed struggle, but to devote themselves to the affairs of the spirit. By summoning Jews back to the world of history, Zionists had in fact abandoned the Kingdom of God and entered a state which, for Jews, could make no existential sense. They had denied their very nature and set the Jewish people on a doomed course.
The more successful the Zionists became, the more the Neturei Karta were baffled. Why had the wicked prospered? When the State of Israel was established in 1948, so soon after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum and Blau could only conclude that Satan had intervened directly in history to lead Jews into a realm of meaningless evil and sacrilege. Most of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox were able to accommodate the new state.
They declared that it had no religious value and that Jews who lived in Israel were still in exile, just as they had been in the Diaspora.
Nothing had changed. Agudat Israel was prepared to engage in shtadlanut-dialogue and negotiations--with the Israeli government to safeguard the religious interests of Jews, just as they had with the gentile governments in Europe. But Neturei Karta would have none of this. Immediately after the proclamation of statehood on May 14, 1948, they imposed a ban on any participation in the elections, refused to accept government funding for their yeshivot, and vowed never to set foot in government institutions.

They also redoubled their attacks on Agudat, whose pragmatic acceptance of the state they regarded as the thin end of the wedge.

“If [we] let up even to the slightest degree, God forbid, from our hatred of evil, of seducers and corrupters,” Blau insisted, “[if we breach] the separateness to which our holy Torah obliges us ... then the way is open to every forbidden thing, for we will have left the straight and narrow path for a crooked one.” The Zionist venture, which had enticed almost the entire Jewish people away from God, was plunging into a nihilistic denial of all decent and sacred values.
The more rooted Zionism became in the Jewish world and the more successful the new state, the deeper and more principled was Neturei Karta’s repudiation of both. There could be no possibility of reconciliation, because the State of Israel was the creation of Satan.
As Teitelbaum explained, it was not possible for a Jew “to adhere to both faith in the state and faith in our holy Torah, for they are complete opposites.” Even if the politicians and cabinet ministers were Talmudic sages and devout observers of the commandments, the state would still be a demonic profanity because it had rebelled against God and tried to snatch salvation and to advance the End of Days. Neturei Karta had no time for Agudat’s efforts to get religious legislation passed in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It was not a pious act to try to limit public transport on the Sabbath by law or to ensure that yeshiva students were exempt from the draft. This was simply converting a divine law into human law; it amounted to an annulment of the Torah and to a desecration of the Halakhah. As Rabbi Shimon Israel Posen, a leading scholar of the community of Satmar Hasidim in New York, said of the Agudat members of the Knesset:
Woe unto them for the shame of it, that people who put on phylacteries every day sit in that assembly of the wicked called the “Knesset” and, signing their names to falsehoods, forge the signature of the Holy One, blessed be He, heaven forfend. For they think that they can decide by majority vote whether the Torah of truth will be trampled upon even further or whether God’s Torah will be granted authority.
Yet even the Neturei Karta felt the attraction of Zionism. Blau’s description of the Zionists as “seducers” is significant. A Jewish state in a Jewish land is a temptation that tugs hard at the Jewish soul. This is part of the fundamentalists’ dilemma. They often feel fascinated and drawn toward the very modern achievements from which they recoil in horror. The Protestant fundamentalists’ portrayal of Antichrist, the charming, plausible deceiver, shows something of the same conflict. There is a tension in the fundamentalist vision of modernity that can be explosive. As Blau indicated, the piety of the anti-Zionists is one of principled “hatred” and hatred often goes handin-hand with unacknowledged love. Haredim feel rage when they contemplate the State of Israel. They do not kill, but to this day they throw stones at cars in Israel whose drivers break the law by traveling on the Sabbath.
Sometimes they will attack the house of a fellow Haredi who has failed to live up to the expected standard by, say, owning a television set or permitting his wife to dress immodestly. Such acts of violence are seen as kiddush ha shem “sanctification of God’s Name,” and a blow against the forces of evil that surround the Haredim on all sides and threaten to devour them. But it is not impossible that these violent assaults are an attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts.
These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely with the state. Their determined withdrawal from the State of Israel reminds the less zealous Haredim, who often feel a lack of integrity and authenticity in their cooperation with the Jewish state, that no matter how powerful and successful Israel has become in worldly terms, Jews are still in a state of existential exile and can take no legitimate part in the political and cultural life of the modern world. This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters displaying scantily clad women advertising swim wear they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility. Fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths are in revolt against the pragmatic logos that dominates modern society to the exclusion of the spiritual, and which refuses the restraints imposed by the sacred. But because the secular establishment is so powerful, most have to confine their revolt to small symbolic acts.
Their sense of weakness and tacit acknowledgment of their dependence upon the state in times of war, for example, can only increase the fundamentalists’ rage. The vast majority of Haredim confine their protest to a determined retreat from the secular state and to the establishment of a counterculture which challenges its values at every turn.
The alternative society of the Haredim is motivated by a desire to fill the void created by the modern ethos. For Jews after the Holocaust this void is horribly graphic. Those who survived feel impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and Misnagdic yeshivot in Israel and the United States. It is an act of piety to the millions of Haredim who died in Hitler’s camps, and an act of rebellion against the forces of evil. They believe that by giving their Haredi institutions a new lease on life and making that dead world not only live again but become more powerful than ever, they are striking a blow for the sacred.m.
After the Second World War, new yeshivot were built in Israel and the United States. In 1943, Rabbi Aaron Kotler (1891-1962) founded the first Lithuanian yeshiva in America, when he established Bais Midrash Gedolah in New Jersey, modeled on the yeshivot of Volozhin, Mir, and Slobodka.
After 1948, Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv became a “city of Torah”; its newly established yeshivot drew students from all over Israel and the Diaspora.
Here the guiding spirit was Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (1878--1943), who was known as the Hazon Ish (the title of one of his books). These new institutions made the yeshiva more central to Haredi life than ever before. Torah study became a lifelong, full-time pursuit; men would continue their studies after they were married, and would be supported financially by their wives. In the dangerous new world of modernity, which had nearly obliterated the whole of European Jewry, a cadre of scholars who lived in the yeshiva had minimal contact with the outside world, and immersed themselves wholly in the study of sacred texts would become the new guardians of Judaism.
Kotler believed that his students kept the whole world in existence.
God had created the heavens and the earth simply in order that men could study the Torah. Only if the Jewish people studied the Holy Law day and night would it fulfill its vocation. If they stopped, “the universe would be immediately destroyed. “ It was a piety that sprang from too close a brush with total annihilation. Any secular study not only was a waste of time, but was tantamount to assimilation with the murderous gentile culture. Any form of Judaism which tried to absorb aspects of modern culture--religious Zionism, Reform, Conservative, or Neo-Orthodox--was illegitimate. In a world that had recently dedicated itself to the destruction of Judaism, there could be no such compromise. The true Jew must separate himself from this world and devote himself wholly to the texts. The new postwar yeshivot reflected the desperation of fundamentalist spirituality. The holy texts were all that remained from the Jews’ crushing confrontation with modernity during the twentieth century. Six million of the Jewish people had been killed; the yeshivot and Hasidic courts had all been destroyed, together with countless classics of Jewish learning; the lifestyle of the ghetto had gone forever, and with it an intimate knowledge of centuries of traditional observance;
the Holy Land was being polluted by the Zionists. All that a zealous Jew could do to fill the void was to cling to the texts which preserved his last link with the divine.
The destruction of the Holocaust had changed the nature of Torah study.
In the ghetto world, many of the traditional rites and practices had been accepted as a “given”; there had been no alternative way of living or observing the Torah. The first generation of refugees still had that knowledge of exactly how these rites should be performed in their bones, but their children and grandchildren, who were so anxious to re-create the lost world of their murdered ancestors, were no longer so instinctively aware of this custom al observance, which had never needed to be written down formally. The only way they could recover this vanishing Torah world was to comb the texts for scraps of information. From the 1950s, the yeshiva world was flooded by learned monographs describing in minute and complicated detail procedures which in pre-Holocaust Europe had seemed natural and a matter of course.
Each succeeding generation would depend on such scholarship more than its predecessors. As a result of the destruction, Jewish life was more text-bound and reliant on the written word than ever before.
There was a new stringency in fundamentalist Judaism. By the 1960s, Rabbi Simla Elberg, then visiting Bnei Brak, noted that an “extensive revolution in the entire alignment of the religious life” was taking place there.
The Jews in the “city of Torah” were observing the commandments far more rigorously than ever before. This effort to obey the law more fully than had been possible in previous ages was heroic: it was a way of incarnating the divine in a world that had been brutally emptied of God. The Haredim of Bnei Brak were finding new ways of being punctilious and exact about such questions as diet and purification, even if this made their lives more difficult.
The Hazon Ish had set the tone in the 1930S, when he first arrived in Palestine. A group of religious Zionists had approached him with a query.
They wanted to observe Jewish agricultural law in their settlement, and to farm the Holy Land according to the Torah. Did that mean that every seven years they should let their fields lie fallow, as the law enjoined? To observe this “sabbatical year” would obviously cause great hardship and was a practice utterly opposed to the techniques of modern agriculture, which were designed for maximum efficiency. Rabbi Kook had found a legal loophole for the settlers, but the Hazon Ish was adamantly opposed to such leniency (kula). The challenge, he said, lay precisely in the difficulty.
The law demanded that the farmer sacrifice his prosperity for a higher good.
The sabbatical year was designed to celebrate the holiness of the Land, to make Jews aware of its inviolability and that, like all sacred objects, it was essentially separate from the needs and desires of individuals. The Land was not to be exploited by Jews for their own benefit, milked for increased productivity, or subjected to cost-effective projects. The truly religious farmer should challenge the rational materialism of the secular pioneers, which might be “Zionist” but was not at all “Jewish.”
At Bnei Brak, the Hazon Ish presided over what Rabbi Elburg called “the world of hum rot (‘stringencies’),” and taught his disciples to find the “most restrictive, stringent, and punctilious” way to observe the commandments, a discipline which would set them radically apart from the pragmatic ethos of modernity. This type of rigor had been frowned upon by the rabbinic establishment in the traditional Jewish communities in Europe. Rabbis had respected the scruples of people who were concerned about the finer points of the Law, but would not allow them to impose this stringency (humra) on the community as a whole, because it could become divisive. Jews who came from communities which had more rigorous standards about the slaughtering of animals would not be able to eat with a Jew who interpreted the rules more leniently. Too great a stringency could also be insulting to the great sages of the past, who had not been quite so punctilious in such matters.
Rabbis had tended toward leniency in their interpretation of the Torah:
a spiritual elite could not be allowed to make observance impossible for the more run-of-the-mill Jews.
The revolutionary stringency of Bnei Brak was part of a new counterculture that the Haredim were trying to create. It set a religious standard that was diametrically opposed to the rationalized spirit of modernity, which made efficiency and pragmatism the main criteria. At a time when Reform, Conservative, and Neo-Orthodox Jews were discarding parts of the law or trying to find a more relaxed and rational religious life, the more rigorous observance of the Haredim refused to compromise with the norms of mainstream society. On his visit to Bnei Brak, Rabbi Elburg noted that it had become “a world in itself “; Haredi Jews were not only withdrawing from modern society, but from other, less punctilious Jews. They needed different slaughterers, shops that were stricter about kosher food, and their own ritual baths. They were cultivating a distinct identity in opposition to the temper of the times.
Similarly, in the yeshivoc, Jews did not study, like students in secular colleges, to acquire information that could later be put to practical use. Many of the laws of the Torah, such as those concerned with the rituals of the Temple and animal sacrifice, could no longer be implemented; the laws of torts and damages could be restored only by the Messiah when he established the Kingdom. Yet students spent hours, days, and even years immersed in intense discussion of this apparently obsolete legislation with their teachers, because these were God’s laws. The repetition of the Hebrew words that God had--in some sense--spoken when he had given the law to Moses on Mount Sinai was a form of communion with the divine. Exploring every detail of the laws enabled a student to enter symbolically into the mind of God. In an age which had so horrifically cast the divine law aside, Jews would observe it more accurately than ever before. Familiarizing himself with the legal opinions of the great rabbis of the past was a way for the student to take the tradition into his own mind and heart, and commune with the sages. In the yeshivot, the methods of study were just as crucial as the material itself, and the object of yeshiva education was not greater facility in this world but a quest for the divine in a society which had tried to exclude God. Everything about the yeshiva world was different from the secularist world outside. In mainstream society, men (still considered the superior sex in the i9^os) went out to engage in business, while Yeomen stayed in the seclusion of the home. Among the Haredim, it was the inferior sex who went out into what the goyim considered the “real” world of affairs (tacitly proclaiming its secondary status), while the men led an enclosed, protected life with the true Reality in the yeshiva. In secular Israel, the army was becoming almost a sacred institution;
national service was obligatory for both sexes, and a man would remain in his army unit for reserve duty for the whole of his active life. A yeshiva student, however, was excused military service, turned his back on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), proclaimed that he was the true “guardian” of the Jewish people, and was on the front line of a holy war against the evil forces that pressed aggressively upon the yeshiva on all sides. For the Haredim, modernity--even in the State of Israel--was simply the latest manifestation of Galut, the state of exile, alienation, and distance from God. The Holocaust had revealed its essential malignity.
A Jew was not supposed to feel at home in such a world, even though, paradoxically, in both Israel and America, Torah education was generously funded and nourished as never before. Students were, however, taught to keep apart from the secular world. As a Haredi educationalist explained, the yeshiva not only taught a young man “total dedication to Torah,” but also how “to distance himself from the experiences of this world.” Theyeshiva walls were a constant reminder that the Torah can never be at home in the Galut.
The counterculture was designed to enhance the students’ separation from the mainstream. As Avraham Woolf observed in Education in the Face of the Generation (1954), the yeshiva Jew was dedicated to the task of reviving the world of his father and grandfather, despite the indifference of the secularists.