In The End of the Jewish People?, a book which appeared in 1967 and which was overtaken by the Six-Day War almost as it came off the press, Georges Friedmann, the French sociologist, wrote:

There is no Jewish nation. There is an Israeli nation. The state that came into existence as a result of Herzl's prophecies is not a “Jewish State.” The Israeli state is creating an imperious national community that is conscious of itself, but does not include in that consciousness belonging to a Jewish people.

This statement was not true even when it was written. It overlooked the profoundly dialectical character of Israeli nationhood and the tensions that existed even then between the religious and the non-religious sectors of the population. For if religion is dead, you don't have to go out and fight it; if people are willing to place their bodies in front of the oncoming vehicles of Sabbath-breakers in the main streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it is because the Sabbath is a central national issue for desecrators and consecrators alike. In fact, next to the problem of survival itself, the question of whether Israel is to be a secular or a religious state is the central issue of all. Nor did the war of 1967 divert interest from this issue: On the contrary, it gave it a new and more urgent dimension.

It is necessary here to make an important distinction between Israel and the Diaspora. In the Western Diaspora the problem of emancipation (or apostasy, if you view it from the Orthodox angle) has taken the form of a crisis of observance. At its center has been the question of mitzvot. The apostate Jew who opted out of Judaism (his type is to be found in the majority of the characters in Israel Zangwill's novels) did not, strictly speaking, abandon the faith of his ancestors; what he abandoned was the intolerable burden of the commandents: the Sabbath, the embarrassments and barriers of the dietary code, the social limitations imposed by the ban on marriage outside the Jewish fold, etc. But the poignancy that invests both Zangwill and his fictional creations derives from the fact that the light of faith still burns, even for those who have cast off the commandments. For Disraeli, Esther Ansell, Daniel Hyams, and even Heinrich Heine and the rest of the emancipated children of the ghetto, the faith of the Jew is still intact.

The present crisis of Judaism in Israel, by contrast, is a crisis not of observance but of faith itself. In Israel it is almost more difficult to break the dietary code than to observe it. Those who want to eat bread on the Passover, or forbidden flesh the year ‘round, have to travel far to find it. Where there is no public transport on the Sabbath it is practically speaking easier to sit quietly at home and meditate: There is certainly no possibility of opening shop, none of the fearful temptations which assailed the first generation of Americans when they had to decide whether to make their first Sabbath trip on the subway or to enroll in the downtown college which would give them education and security at the cost of an infinite series of infringements of the commandments. As for mixed marriage, with all its associated syndromes of forbidden glamor and buried loyalty (as in Zangwill's moving Diary of a Meshumad), it is far away from the average Israeli's experience. Even for those Israelis who have never stepped inside a synagogue and never will, there are few Gentile choices, so that marriage outside Judaism is practically speaking no problem at all. When it does happen, the rabbinate is almost indecently swift to convert and thus legitimate the non-Jewish spouse. When Judge Haim Cohen of the Israel Supreme Court wanted to marry a divorced woman, in contravention of the law in Leviticus 21:6, he had to go off to New York to do it. The resulting public outcry was of the kind that might greet a member of the British royal family who had decided to marry in a registry office. It hardly sparked off a major controversy.

The fundamental issue was correctly highlighted in 1963 by a certain Ziva Gonen, member of a leftwing kibbutz, in a letter which she wrote to the Orthodox monthly Bet Yaakov, a letter very widely circulated and commented upon at the time. In it she appealed to the religious to show the non-religious how they might recover their lost faith. She was willing to accept the fact that the way of life of the religious had many advantages (among them the relatively low incidence of juvenile delinquency), but for her and her fellow members of the kibbutz to accept such a way of life involved overcoming the seemingly insuperable barrier of faithlessness. “How,” she asked, “do you propose that the faithless should begin to believe?” Here is a new poignancy unknown to the characters of Zangwill or Abraham Cahan. And the poignancy of the question is deepened by a certain hopelessness. The fact is that neither Bet Yaakov nor those whom it represents have any answer for Ziva Gonen. Had she asked for the services of a rabbi or for the installation of a ritual bath, scores of willing citizens would have come forward, checkbooks in hand. But she asked for something which is harder to come by, and even those who have it do not have it in negotiable form.

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If the real split is then on the question of faith, we may reasonably ask (leaving aside tricky theological issues which have never bothered Judaism overmuch), what is so difficult about acquiring faith? True, in the East and West it is in short supply, but in Israel it is a more everyday commodity. The founders of Petah Tikveh ninety years ago were not alone in having the kind of faith that moves mountains (or malarial swamps, to be precise); every Israeli child brings with him into the world as self-evident truth the proposition that the Jewish people is going to make it—notwithstanding demography, the atom bomb, the Algerian hordes, and the universal indifference of the ice age. Miracles are the Israeli's daily bread; without them he is lost.

Here, then, if anywhere, is the rich soil of faith, and if one section of the community cannot succeed in reaching the other there must be some rather special reason for this breakdown of spiritual communication. That special reason, I believe, lies in the demonstrable fact that the bearers of the ancestral faith are seen by many Israelis to be imprisoned in the past. They are thought to represent, above all, tradition, history, the pre-State inheritance. The Orthodox Jew, however modern his dress, however obvious his involvement in all the enterprises of a modern state, including army, agriculture, and science, is seen through a glass darkly. The spiritual eye invests him in the dark kapota, the fur kaftan, or the bright robes of the mellah. This is a great obstacle in the path of mutual understanding.

It must be understood that the attitude of the secular Jew in Israel to the past is basically traumatic. On the one hand he is passionately interested in archaeology (kibbutzniks who belong to the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement rejoice if in plowing they turn up the mosaic pavement of an ancient synagogue); but on the other hand, anything that smacks to him of the burdens of the life of the ghetto is anathema. This was well expressed some years ago in a short story by Haim Hazaz entitled “The Sermon.” In it he portrays a character who is possessed of the near-hysterical repulsion felt by the Israel-born youngster toward the tale of trial and suffering which is Jewish history. Obviously there is something in Jewish history that the young Israeli is afraid of, some burden of heredity that he wants to cast off. And this traumatic fear and hatred gets directed against the religious Jew whose way of life comes to symbolize the intolerable burden of the past.

It is surely evident to the outside observer that to live at ease in Zion must mean to live with both the past and the future, and yet that is just what the Israeli has not been conditioned to do. The religious community is thought to have preempted the past, and the secular community, the future. The fact that this state of affairs is itself the product of an immense delusion does not diminish the agony of the situation, for the delusion holds both sides sufficiently in thrall to cause them to stand against one another in a posture of latent warfare.

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It is here that we should locate the special metaphysical significance of the Six-Day War. The war did more than call into question the armistice lines set up in 1949 between the divided halves of Palestine; it also called into question the divisions between the two sections of the Israeli people. For in the course of the war it became quite clear to all that the connection between past and future was far more dialectical, far more intimate than had been supposed. The soldiers who jumped off the weapon-carriers at Jerusalem's Lions’ Gate on June 7, 1967, were, of course, not in search of archaeology—it is doubtful whether anyone out of mere antiquarian interest could be persuaded to storm a walled city in a half-track—and yet when they reached the Western Wall what they found there and what they found in themselves was the Jewish past. Israelis who had never known they were Jews suddenly awoke to their inheritance.

The books do not tell us where we go from here, but on the other hand without the books there is no way of explaining how we got here in the first place. In a collection of taped conversations among soldiers from kibbutzim, which were recorded and printed shortly after the war, two things emerged: With an almost monotonous insistence, as though afraid of making too perilous a leap, the heroes of the secular tradition insisted that they were not religious, but they also insisted that they had suddenly realized that they were Jews:

No, I am not religious . . . but the Wall spoke to me. It is enough that I know it to be the “address” for us all . . . that when something hurts, when something presses down on one, then it symbolizes everything, the lot.

When I heard about the conquest of Jerusalem on the transistor there was no one in my unit who didn't shed tears. Me too. Then I felt for the first time not the Israeli side, but the Jewish side of the people.

There was nothing religious about it. That's how it seems to me. When I try to explain it I can't give you a clear answer. But it seems to me that the Old City was for us always a symbol of something unfinished. . . . I can't really tell you why, but I am quite clear in my mind that there was no religious significance in that moment.

(My emphasis throughout—H.F.)

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It should be noted that the very word for a religious person—dati—inevitably connotes in modern Hebrew a rootedness in the past, a refusal to address oneself to the future. That is why the secular youngsters who speak above are so afraid of the label. And yet their sense of newly felt wonder, of a newly acquired identity, threatens the careful semantic barriers which the secular have erected against the religion of their ancestors.

The dialogues were resumed a year after the war in a kibbutz of the Hashomer Hatzair; this time, the participants were even more outspoken, linking their newfound religious consciousness with the bankruptcy of their traditional Communist faith—a bankruptcy revealed to them fully by the 20th Party Congress:

The fact is that there is today a slow but uninterrupted return to tradition. . . .

You can call it reactionary, you can say it's no good, that it's medieval—but in my opinion it's a fact. . . .

We are now in a period of return to the tradition, toward the Jewish people and our connection with it. . . .

Another speaker was just as emphatic about the breakdown of her socialist faith but less optimistic about the possibility of a return to Judaism:

But we had one blow from the 20th Congress. It began then and now it's complete. That was really a powerful blow which left us without a faith. And I don't believe that we can get back to a religious faith. We had the sort of rationalist education which makes it impossible for us to go back.

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Avraham Shapira, the chief sponsor of these dialogues, is also the editor of a quarterly journal, Shedemot, issued by the Mapailinked federation of kibbutzim. In a recent issue of this magazine, which places great stress on religious and spiritual themes in general, a Miss Devora Diamant describes her own spiritual regeneration and how it has driven her to take seriously the positive commandments specified in the Jewish tradition. Her pilgrim's progress is made the more interesting by the fact that it is discussed in the context of a critical symposium on T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday. She shares with Eliot, she tells us, the experience of absolute despair from which her faith has sprung. But in her case, new-won faith has brought with it a sense of the positive values located within the world and in human society. Instead of desiring to lock herself in an isolated sainthood like Eliot, she feels called upon to exercise her powers in response to a God who calls her to intensified social activity and creativeness. There is a very basic Jewish discernment at work here.

Shapira himself is a follower of Martin Buber, not only in his emphasis on the social bond, but also in his belief that in dialogue true life contents are revealed. He quotes from Buber, “Dialogue opens up that which is not accessible by any other route.” In the conversations which Shapira and his co-editors have recorded there is much sentimentality, self-flagellation, and even a touch of smugness (the kibbutznik is seen to be above the weaknesses of the common man who, in the aftermath of war, might be tempted to loot or to trample on the nursery gardens of Arab villages). But there is no doubt as to the moral earnestness of these young men and women who are trying to sort out their identity by means of dialogue.

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Not the least interesting of the conversations recorded are those between religious and secular youths. These have taken place in the religious settlement of Tirat Zevi (in the Beth Shean Valley) and in the Yeshivat Merkaz Harav, a talmudical academy founded by the great Zionist rabbi, Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook. What the youngsters on both sides discovered was that they have in common both their youth and their Jewishness. This may seem very simple, but it is also very revolutionary. The mere fact of a group of unbelievers from a kibbutz entering a Yeshiva to discuss the problems of life represents a step forward. And the fact that such dialogue is initiated from below, by the youngsters themselves, is significant too. There is here a certain side-stepping of the establishment. The religious youth have done well—done well in the army and in the pioneering settlements. They have also pioneered the return to the village of Hebron. The settlers there—products of the Rabbi Kook Yeshiva—were at first frowned upon by all official bodies, but are now treated with respect.

The restlessness of the youth in the religious camp is also marked. True, the past has fulfilled itself, but what now? On this score the religious establishment has been remarkably unforthcoming: no message, no word, not even a new prayer to catch the imagination of the people. In these circumstances, young people have tended to take things into their own hands. Defying the rabbinical ban on worship on the Temple Mount, a group of young people, led by a student from the religious Bartlan University, has several times invaded the Temple precinct in an attempt to hold services in the open. The young people are seeking an order nisi from the Supreme Court which will call upon the Minister of Police to show cause why they may not worship in a Jewish holy place. Again, in June of last year, on the first anniversary of the conquest of Jerusalem, some fifty thousand religious youngsters defied the official leadership and stormed into the old and new cities to hold a mass thanksgiving. And in the recent internal elections of the National Religious party held in October 1968, the youth faction gained three times as many convention seats as in 1964. They can now rock the boat very appreciably.

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So much for political symptoms, of which there will be more to come before the next national election in October 1969. My present concern is with the deeper stirrings of the heart, and here one meets with such a personality as Colonel Mordecai Bar-On, now head of the Youth and Halutz Division of the Jewish Agency, but until very recently senior education officer for the Israel Defense Forces. Colonel Bar-On's religious awakening began twenty years ago, during the War of Liberation, when he found himself at the head of an infantry platoon in a hopeless position facing an Egyptian armored column. It was then, as he has narrated with an almost childlike candor in the quarterly journal Petahim, that he felt an irresistible desire to pray, but owing to a secular upbringing he simply did not know how. His search brought him through the Department of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University to the Western Wall in June 1967. And at that point he declared his entire conviction as to the religious momentousness of the event. He is now a committed Jew, though still with certain social embarrassments to contend with; the Army is not accustomed to religious colonels outside the chaplaincy, and it has even been whispered that this had something to do with his move to the Jewish Agency. But he will do a good job, for a man who can put his finger on the pulse of Jewish history at this hour may just catch the soul of the young.

The religious gropings I have been describing have not gone unnoticed by the cynics. Sylvia Keshet, a satirical columnist with a wicked pen, has remarked on the “flirtation with religion” which has now become fashionable. Where will it end, she wonders, when even a stout, solid colonel like Bar-On lets himself go in this unseemly way? It is altogether too trying when some of one's best friends begin to sneak off to the synagogue on holy days instead of going to the beach or listening to the radio like normal Israelis. More serious writers, like the veteran poet Natan Alterman, and the distinguished political journalist Eliezer Livneh (once a leading figure in the Mapai hierarchy) have spoken of the opportunities now available for a serious appraisal of Judaism as a living faith for the present generation. Livneh's own conversion was, as a matter of fact, well defined before 1967, but as with so many others his position has now become more emphatic. In the July 1967 issue of the literary journal Moznayim he published an article entitled, “The Hidden Face Breaks Forth.” The reference is to Ezekiel 39:29, and also to Buber's concept of the eclipse of God. That eclipse, according to Livneh, came to an end in the wonder of the miraculous deliverance of June 1967; he ends his article with a prayer in which he bids the faithful and the unbelievers alike to join together in a blessing to the God of Israel.

Livneh's convictions have found expression also in the framework of the Land of Israel Movement, of which he is a leading member. The movement is a fairly loose political association of men and women from all parties who are determined simply that Israel shall not cede the territories won in the 1967 war. And yet the movement is also pervaded by an overarching sense of historical challenge and responsibility which with hardly any exaggeration could be called religious. Its manifesto speaks of the opportunities for both material and spiritual fulfillment offered by the return to the historic boundaries of the Land of Israel. Furthermore, it denies the right of any government of Israel to sell or give up the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. Here, perhaps without knowing it, secularists and onetime socialists have seized upon the horns of the altar of what can only be called a biblical faith.

It is significant in this regard that the Land of Israel Movement also includes an appreciable number of religious personalities. They are in the minority, but their very presence is important and much valued by the secular majority. For this is possibly the first political movement in modern Jewish history in which differences between Right and Left, secular and religious, have faded away through the equalizing force of a newfound Jewish identity.

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There is no denying the theological dimension of the events which have electrified Israel in the past eighteen months. For simple people the reaction takes a simple form; for more sophisticated people like Livneh and Bar-On, it takes a more subtle, intellectual form. But for all, it takes the form of a new uncertainty about old boundaries and old distinctions. All are constrained by the past; all are hurled forward into the future. In the last analysis, it has come to appear, to be a Jew is not so much to believe in certain things, but to be in a certain existential situation: The Jew is that person who is caught in the grip of Jewish history, with its unique traumas, its dangers, and its glories. The religious Jew, in this perspective, is merely that Jew who acknowledges and accepts that situation as a charge.

Cynics will smile, and New Leftists will no doubt feel that such disclosures confirm their worst suspicions about the mood of Israel after the war. It all depends on whether one believes that the history of Israel is neutral history or the history of promise and fulfillment. If the latter view is taken, the growth of a new and hesitant religious consciousness among the people of Israel will seem what it has in fact been for many Israelis—a genuine experience of covenant.