Two Religious Zionisms
- Shai Reef
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Introduction
Today’s political camps in Israel appear to be driven by a series of ironies. A loose coalition of parties who are ambivalent to the state’s existence sit in a coalition with the most nationalist parties. Their fiercest critiques, religious Zionists flank them from the right, and do so with religious fervor. This simmering tension has hardly come to the surface, but this coming election may bring these tensions to the surface, with the military draft coming to the forefront. What are the ideological legacies and tensions that brought us to this point? Are there two distinct forms of Religious Zionism? How do they inform us on the future of the State?
Historical Background: Religion and Nationalism
With the advent of nationalism in Europe, the dormant dreams of the Jewish people were awakened by political formulations of their usually hostile host societies. It wasn’t always smooth. Some Jews rejected this synthesis as a foreign one.
When Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, sought to host the first Zionist Congress in Germany, the Jewish community adamantly denounced Herzl and his movement as dangerous, forcing the pragmatist to host the congress in Basel, Switzerland.
The multifaceted rejection of Zionism was motivated by a plethora of reasons, including pragmatic ones. The claim that the Jews belonged elsewhere was one that Ashkenazic Jews in Europe had sought to reject for centuries.
Religious Rejections of Zionism
Religious Jews primarily resisted Zionism. In Germany, both Orthodox and Reform camps, asserting their place in European society, rejected it. The American Reform movement formalized this in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, declaring Jews a religious community, not a nation, rejecting a return to Palestine or a Jewish state.
Orthodoxy, though claiming authentic Jewish identity, itself redefined Judaism as a religion, allowing Jews to integrate into national identities (e.g., German, French Jew) with a private faith. This modernization, intensified since the 18th century, enabled Jewish belonging in Europe.
This "religionization" minimized Jewish nationalism. Historical struggles like the Maccabean revolt or the Zealots of Masada were downplayed or reframed. They argued the nation of Israel would only be restored supernaturally in a Messianic era, through prayer and Mitzvot, not political action - a view borrowed from Christian readings.
Zionism challenged this. Early Orthodoxy largely rejected it, viewing Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a secular, modern threat. Hungarian authorities like the Satmar Rav were strictly anti-Zionist, opposing secularism. Others, mainly in Lithuanian circles, were more ambivalent or ignored it, expecting it to fail.
Pragmatic Cooperation: Mizrahi and Rav Reines
The Mizrahi movement, led by the Lithuanian Rav Yitzchak Yaacov Reines (1839 - 1915), was a notable exception to the prevailing Zionist views. Reines supported Zionist goals but cautioned against confusing political sovereignty with the Messianic era. He believed a future Jewish state could be a Western democracy, respecting individual Jewish life and religion in the private sphere.
This camp, a mosaic of religious Jews, held dual European and Jewish identities, keeping their ideological tendencies (like Jabotinsky, Herzl, or Ben Gurion) secular and separate from Judaism, which, in turn, should not inform state practice. They often took dovish positions, even voting to return the Temple Mount to Jordan after the Six-Day War (1967), opposing the Labor Government. Historically, the party aligned with the Haredim more than the political right.
Before 1967, their chief issue was ensuring that the Israeli curriculum had rigorous Tanakh (Bible) standards.
Today, this camp is less politically centralized, with members assimilating into various parties across the Zionist spectrum.
This camp’s religiosity is compartmentalized for the most part and practiced in diverse ways. They serve in the army as a civic duty, with often shallow religious justifications. They have produced a great deal of philosophers about identity- and that theirs has struck the perfect balance. But the ides of Rav Reines himself would flow in a different direction after the 1967 war.
If this camp sought accommodation, the other one sought integration.
Messianic Integration: Rav Kook’s Camp
Its ideological roots are not from Europe but the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook. Rav Kook travelled in diverse ideological spaces. He maintained relationships with the new Zionist Yishuv, and that of the Old Haredi Yishuv. In straddling this line, Rav Kook developed a religious Zionism that is unlike the formulations of Rav Reines- and critically, not that Zionist.
Upon the passing of Theodor Herzl, Rav Kook, then Rabbi of Jaffa, eulogized him by delivering a lecture on the Messianic process. Suggesting that Herzl was a harbinger of Messianic times was significant to the secular Zionists who had only encountered hostility when facing the religious world.
At the same time, Rav Kook criticized Zionism in many of his writings. He felt that the movement was a shallow expression of Israel’s collective hopes and dreams. However, he saw the flawed pioneers as inadvertently advancing the Jewish mission. Rav Kook felt that national consciousness wasn't merely compatible, but elemental to Jewish being.
The watershed moment for this camp didn't come at the founding of the state, but in June 1967, with Israel tripling in size.
For the disciples of Rav Kook, this was nothing less than vindication; the war was a Biblical-style miracle erupting in the 20th century. They sought to resist any efforts to return the conquered territories, even if such a move promised physical safety. For this camp, Israel was no longer a "bomb shelter" state designed to keep Jews safe, but a revolutionary and Messianic vessel. While Jewish safety was a welcome byproduct, it could no longer be the compass for national policy. The "private religion" of the Diaspora, Judaism, had been effectively replaced by the public restoration of the nation. This birthed the Gush Emunim movement, one that saw settlement of the land as a fulfilment of divine prophecy and a Biblical commandment, leading them to flood the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai with Jewish outposts, even in primitive conditions.
A Reshuffle of the Camps
Yet, history provided a final, paradoxical plot twist. To some extent, the religious Zionism of Rav Reines is now the dominant position within the Haredi world, though they wouldn’t identify with him or the movement. They don’t identify as Zionists but no longer couch their arguments in that framing.
To quote the leader of the (anti-Zionist) Agudath Israel leader, Rav Aharon Feldman
“Why fight a movement (Zionism) that doesn’t exist anymore?”
For Rav Feldman, and counterparts in Israel, the relationship with the State has evolved to a pragmatic one that mirrors Rav Reines. In their calculus, Zionism wasn't the charge to establish a state, but the claim that Jewish existence was a national one, not religious one. Not a vehicle of redemption, but a place where Jewish life could thrive. They don’t say hallel on Yom HaAtzmaut, just as they don’t on July 4th or the other Independence Days where this community finds themselves.
The schools of thought that trace their Torah legacies to the Yeshivot in Lithuania and Poland, are unknowingly operating in the tensions that Rav Reines did some hundred years ago. They are undoubtedly pro-Israel in its existential battles, support policies that fight anti-Zionism, and cringe at the “extremists” who burn the Israeli flag on Yom HaAtzmaut. Far from arguing that Zionism was a Messianic movement, they still await the arrival of the Third Temple by supernatural means, but they are willing to do so under the banner of utilitarian cooperation with the Zionist State.
This attitude can be summed up by former Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Maran Ovadia Yosef, who sought pragmatic solutions to restore the “crown of glory to Sephardic Jewry” othered in the dominant secular Ashkenazic state. He founded a political party, Shas, that advocated for the rights of Sephardic Jews in the Ashkenazic hegemony. It was built to ensure that Sephardi Haredim could go to the same schools as their Ashkenazic counterparts, and that those who were learning Torah would have access to public funds. Most interesting, however, was the position on giving up land for peace. He fundamentally rejected the premise, arguing that the solution would not bring peace, but disappointed the Rav Kook world, in arguing that if it would, it would be permissible to give away land. The State wasn’t Messianic but a pragmatic good.
The modern Orthodox camp (Dati-Leumi) , which usually does recite the Hallel on Yom HaAtzmaut waves the banner of Rav Reines’ Mizrahi movement, but under some influence of Rav Kook, often on a shallow level, applying his Torah to the individual, as opposed to the collective. As individuals with a Jewish religion and nation, they serve in the army and the country as their fullest selves. There has been some movement within that camp to embrace Jewish nationalism as an ideal, albeit, stunted as just another form of Western nationalism.
Finally, Rav Kook’s camp, a diverse one with wide nationalist ambitions, stretching across several institutions (Yeshivat B’nai David in Eli and Har HaMor and Merkaz HaRav- to name a few) with varying ideologies, has largely been unable to articulate the universalist character of Rav Kook, as Israel remains engaged in prolonged existential conflict. His camp extends from the fringes of the Mizrahi to the hearts of the Yishuvim in the West Bank and Hesder Yeshivot preaching an uncompromising national consciousness.
Conclusion
This complex interplay of ideology and reality reveals that the "Two Religious Zionisms" are not static doctrines, but living responses to the challenge of Jewish sovereignty.
Today, the map of Israeli identity is drawn in irony. The spiritual descendants of the Kookian revolution, once the radical fringe, now form the ideological bedrock of the nationalist right, specifically expressed in the Religious Zionist Party lead by Betzalel Smotritch, viewing the land as an inseparable part of a divine anatomy.
Meanwhile, the Haredi world, which once stood as the fiercest bulwark against the Zionist project, has effectively inherited the mantle of the early Mizrahi pragmatists. They navigate the state not as a messianic end, but as a functional necessity, a "Western shelter" that allows for the preservation of a sacred, private sphere.
In Israel, the once-radical idealists have become the establishment, and the Haredi anti-Zionists have become the State's most essential, if utilitarian, navigators and kingmakers. The dormant dreams of Europe have indeed awakened, but they have produced a reality far more vibrant, and far more complicated, than Basel ever could have imagined.
Article written by Shai Reef
Co-founder of OROT Israel and tour guide specializing in Israeli politics, ideology, and Jewish history.
Contributor to VISION Magazine
Lives in the West Bank
Comments