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Chapter Two: Cultural Duality
Jewish society in Israel is based mainly on two cultures: the Western-liberal and the Jewish-traditional. The two are clasped in a mutual embrace, and in many ways draw on each other and constitute an organic element of one another. Although presenting them as alternatives is to some extent artificial, I relate to them here as separate cultures for the purpose of the analysis. Public discourse tends to categorize Jewish society in Israel along a religious axis divided into four groups: secular, traditional, religious, and ultra-Orthodox.[4] A majority within each of these groups appears to identify, at various levels of internalization and awareness, with both cultures. They experience Western and Jewish cultures immanently, and both are components of their identity, shaping their lifestyles and behavior.[5] Thus, for instance, many within the secular and the traditional groups (grouped together for purposes of this discussion) use certain symbolic and material products of Jewish culture, and even of Jewish religion.[6] For their part, members of the religious group have adopted central values of Western-liberal culture, such as equality, self-realization, freedom, a positive attitude toward science and the rule-of-law. Even members of the ultra-Orthodox community, who declare their rejection of anything “new” and conduct their lives “within bastions of holiness,” internalize cultural duality at the personal level[7] (though not in their discourse with their community). The substantial majority of Jews living in Israel, then, fashion their lives out of the rich lodes of both cultures.
Theoretically, cultural duality (or multiplicity) involves a complex potential. On one hand, it enables a diversification of cultural sources. In a pluralistic society, open to the possibility of validating the truth of the “other,” duality can bring great blessing. Diversity allows every individual and every community to construct their identity from the dialogue between the two cultures. Diversity could also lead to growth and development within each culture, arising from the challenge posed by the other. On the other hand, duality could also be a catalyst for the growth of a lethal competition for budgetary primacy, ideological influence, and political power. Although this competition exists in pluralistic societies as well, its effects are particularly virulent in a monistic society, where it could focus on one purpose: silencing the other’s voice. Furthermore, if truth zealots are not satisfied with a hierarchy of truths (our truth above the other’s truth) but are also intolerant toward the other’s truth, competition could slide into confrontation.
Which of these possible consequences of duality - from rewarding diversity to stifling confrontation and all the options in between - is implemented in Israel’s Jewish society? If we accept the assumption that members of all its groups fashion their identity from the lodes of both cultures, we might expect that none of the segments of society - secular, religious, or ultra-Orthodox - would relate to either of these two cultures as an “other” to be gagged or restrained. In the absence of an “other,” conditions appear ripe for open discourse between the two cultures, marked by mutual respect. In practice, however, observers of current Israeli society do not sense the joy of diversity’s blessing, but only the sorrow of multiplicity’s curse. Agents of influence in both cultures tend to downplay the similarities and the interface between them, preferring to present them as mutually hostile alternatives deployed for an inevitable kulturkampf.[8] They market each culture as an exclusive socio-cultural product that “belongs” to one of the groups, concealing the inclusive dimension of cultural duality in the Israeli Jewish experience. They also shift the relationship between the two cultures from a course of process to one of decision. They prefer a simplistic to a complex perception of reality and choose to engage in the cultural dispute on a monistic rather than on a pluralistic basis.[9]
Why this schizophrenia? Why, although every group is both “Western” and “Jewish,” is Israel’s public space daubed with the war paint of a cultural conflict? This critical question will not be the focus of the present discussion, although the discussion does occasionally touch upon it. My main concerns are not the causes of this state of affairs, but the description and analysis of its implications for the place of law and Halakhah in Israeli society.
Notes
4. An up-to-date survey found that 6% of Israeli Jews define themselves as ultra-Orthodox; 9% as religious; 34% as traditional, and 51% as secular. See Uryiah Shavit, “Playing It Safe” [Hebrew], Haaretz, 6 October 2000, Weekend Supplement.
5. “Jewish Israel is characterized by two cultures or two frames of reference.… Among Israeli Jews, we find more than one ‘People’ concerning the decisive issue, the spiritual legacy. Rather than a social problem, this is one of tribes and spiritual constituencies. The two cultures are like two worlds, and each of these worlds holds up a mirror in which reality is reflected differently.… Each mirror, then, reflects part of the contents of the other: the new (Western) Zionist mirror reflects quite a bit of the Jewish legacy, and actually accepts that without something from what was preserved in the traditional world of the yeshivot, the ‘soul of the nation’ will not prevail … while the traditional mirror reflects that part, at least, of the new and the rational that is embodied in the very existence of the civic State of Israel, including its institutions and its bureaucracies.” See Avigdor Levontin, “A Riddle of Twin Worlds” [Hebrew], Bar-Ilan Law Studies 16 (2001): 7, 12, 13, 15.
6. According to a survey by the Guttman Institute, about 80% of the Jewish population in Israel has some connection to Jewish religion and its commandments. See Shlomit Levy, Hanna Levinsohn and Elihu Katz, Beliefs, Observance, and Social Relationships among Israeli Jews [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Guttman Institute for Applied Social Research, 1993). For an interpretation of the findings of this report, see Charles S. Liebman and Elihu Katz, eds., The Jewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report (Albany: SUNY, 1997). Data published in the media shows that about 77% of all Israeli Jews believe in God, including more than half (53%) of the people who define themselves as secular. See Shavit, “Playing It Safe,” 24. Several religious practices are widely accepted, such as fasting on the Day of Atonement (73%), placing a mezuzah on the door (96%), and male circumcision (97%). For a report and analysis of these findings, see Tom Segev, “Who is Secular?” [Hebrew], Haaretz, 25 September 1996, B1. Note that observance by traditional and secular segments of the population, although partial and selective, is not haphazard, personal, or unsystematic. Observance is not an indication of intention (in the religious sense of the word) or of halakhic observance, but of awareness of the meaning of these acts from the perspective of Jewish survival. See Elihu Katz, “Behavioral and Phenomenological Jewishness,” in The Jewishness of Israelis, 71. According to Baruch Kimmerling, “Israel has secular individuals, secular groups, and even secular sub-cultures. Their day-to-day behavior and their self-identity are secular. Some are even involved in a cultural (or religious) war against the occasional use of the state to impose a particular religious practice, or even a halakhic rule, on the entire population or on part of it. Yet, when most of the Jewish population in Israel relates to its collective national identity, this identity is largely defined through terms, values, symbols, and a collective memory largely rooted in Jewish religion. In other words, there are secular Jews in Israel and in the world, but the existence of a secular Judaism is extremely dubious.” See Baruch Kimmerling, “Religion, Nationalism and Democracy in Israel” [Hebrew], Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly 13 (1994): 116, 129. On the percolating of beliefs, symbols, and behavior patterns originating in tradition down to the modern society and state, see Eliezer Don Yehiyah and Charles S. Liebman, “The Dilemma of Reconciling Traditional Culture and Political Needs: Civil Religion in Israel” [Hebrew], Megamot 28 (1984): 461.
7. Breakthroughs in “the bastions of holiness” can be identified in several areas, such as the political realm (with ultra-Orthodox elements assuming increasing responsibility at the national level) and the geographical realm (with ultra-Orthodox elements leaving their traditional dwelling areas and settling in mixed cities). As Yosef Shilhav shows, these processes change the attitude of ultra-Orthodox society, and particularly of its youngsters, to the outside world: “Haredi attempts to encourage different rejections of modernism, i.e., to adopt its instrumental components but reject its cultural ones, have been fruitless: modern cultural and social values are penetrating Haredi society.” See Yosef Shilhav, Ultra-Orthodoxy in Urban Governance in Israel (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 1998), 90.
8. Among the religious and the ultra-Orthodox, many tend to relate to theological dimensions in Jewish culture as a self-sustaining whole that fully explains reality. Hence, they sometimes perceive the very possibility of liberal-Western culture playing a significant role in the lives of Jews as a threat. By contrast, the secular public tends to relate to the two cultures as hierarchically ranked: Jewish culture, as embodied in Jewish tradition, is an earlier stage, meant to be superseded by liberal-Western culture. Due to the rebellion against tradition, this replacement is viewed as a necessary stage in an evolutionary process. In line with this analysis, the threat of a kulturkampf reflects the problem the religious public faces when required to give up the notion of wholeness, and the problem the secular public faces when required to give up the notion of rebelling against tradition.
9. Even in a pluralistic culture with an open marketplace of ideas, each culture could obviously consecrate a separate system of authority; champion unique values and priorities; uphold a separate ethos as well as different symbols and myths; and promote autonomous systems of meaning. Yet, it could do so in a non-imperialistic mode, assuming room for another “good” beside it.
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