In recent years, Israeli society has been increasingly riven by tensions concerning religion and state, the sacred and the profane, rabbinical rulings and individual liberty, and parochialism and universalism. According to widely held public opinion, these tensions reflect an inevitable trend toward cultural fragmentation and erosion of the nation's collective identity. This trend, it is said, threatens to sunder the classic Zionist synthesis and the consequent Israeli ethos that sprang from it.This view has recently been expressed most eloquently in a number of publications, all of which speak of the post-modern (and post-Zionist) disintegration of the values and the underlying consensus that comprise the foundations of Israeli society.
In this position paper, I shall suggest a different way of looking at these very same developments and attempt to show that the current con-frontation between religious and secular Israelis does not necessarily repre-sent a process of alienation and disintegration. Rather, it can be seen as an expression of social maturation and cultural diversity.
Introduction
Contradictory Predictions
Flight From Tension
Normalization
The Status Quo
The Crucible
Conclusion