The big surprise is how Jewish these "nonreligious" Israelis actually are

By Gil Troy

Moment Magazine, October 2000

Five hundred and fifty wedding guests massed inside the ancient synagogue of Katzrin, on the Golan Heights. The light of the full moon danced off the dusty stones of the fifth-century ruin, once the heart of a talmudic era village. The rabbi delighted in consecrating the marriage amid such holy rubble, and praised the young settler couple’s shared bond with tradition.

Believe it or not, this was not a “religious” wedding. Most of the guests were aggressively secular Israelis, settlers in the collective farming communities that dot the Golan Heights. The groom, his father, and his new father-in-law had kippot perched awkwardly atop their heads—making the head coverings look more like beanies than symbols of piety. The tradition to which the rabbi referred was the pioneering heritage linking the moshavnik groom with his kibbutznik bride. And within two hours of this sacred ceremony, a wild party commenced. One of the venerable houses where talmudic scholars once parsed Torah phrases soon functioned—in my sister-in-law’s delicate phrasing—as a vomitorium. It had been that kind of day, a day of paradoxes, of ands-and-buts not either-ors.

Our hosts, my wife’s cousins, have lived on the Golan for decades. They cherish every inch of the land, but would abandon their homes for the sake of peace. They are passionately antireligious yet profoundly Jewish; their love for the Golan is compounded by their appreciation for the thousand-year-old Jewish settlements in their neighborhood. Even the family’s names reflect the symphony of influences that shape modern Israel. The name of the groom’s mother, “Miriam,” for Moses’ sister, is biblical; the name of the groom’s father, “Menachem” (the comforter), is traditional; the name of one sister and the groom himself, “Tal” (Dew) and “Guy” (Valley) are naturalistic, Canaanite, even pagan.

The morning of the wedding, 80 guests gathered for a quintessentially Israeli ritual, a tiyul. A tiyul is not just any kind of hike, it is a ramble through nature, a trek through history, a bonding experience with one’s companions and with the land. Our hosts distributed a 22-page booklet detailing the Golan’s geology and history. They quoted the late Israeli politician Yigal Allon: “If a nation doesn’t know its past, its future is impoverished and shrouded in fog.” The booklet explained the Golan’s role as Israel’s water source, mapped out the two dozen local synagogues from the talmudic period, listed nearly 20 archaeological sites, some dating from as far back as 4,000 B.C.E. and showed how Prime Minister Ehud Barak got a higher vote percentage from Golan voters than from Israelis at large—despite Barak’s openness to returning the Golan.

The seven-hour pre-wedding itinerary began with a visit to an ancient volcano that was also once a military lookout. We then took an extended historical tour of the remains of the talmudic village where the wedding would be held, and ended with a multi-kilometer slosh through the knee-high waters of a Jordan River tributary. These sites combined the key elements shaping the non-Orthodox Israeli’s identity—a love for the beauty of the land, a feel for the sacrifices made to build the country, and an appreciation for the deep religious and national roots.

The wedding—like so much else in Israeli society—highlights how misleading it is to call nonreligious Israelis “secular.” With “secular” and “religious” influences commingling so frequently, it was not surprising to hear a young, wild-eyed kibbutznik of indeterminate gender (and two earrings in each ear) tell the bride on a video broadcast at the wedding: “Be’ezrat Hashem”—with God’s help—“I, too, will soon find such a partner!”

As the rift between religious and secular has grown, non-Orthodox Israelis themselves have ignored just how Jewish, just how religious, they are—on the streets and at home. The rhythms of their lives, the vocabulary of their land, the soul of their country remain intensely Jewish. Israeli history is Jewish history. And Jewish rituals are often Israeli rituals. A 1993 study by the Louis Guttman Israel Institute for Applied Social Research found that 98 percent of Israeli Jews affix mezuzot to their doors, 91 percent believe it is “very important” to conduct the Passover seder, nearly 90 percent keep a kosher home to some degree, and 71 percent fast on Yom Kippur. The typical Israeli attends Shabbat dinner Friday night and lights Hanukkah candles; most Jewish children masquerade on Purim. Given that they all speak Hebrew fluently and that few work on the Sabbath or the major Jewish festivals—many Americans Jews would probably deem them religious, even fanatic.

Even more important, Israelis occupy Jewish space and keep Jewish time. In the Diaspora, Jewish space is mostly confined to the synagogue and perhaps, for some, the home. In Israel, the land itself is Jewish—be it the Golan’s ancient cities or its new collectivist settlements. In North America, Jewish time is time set apart, apportioned out to some specific Jewish ritual. In Israel, the whole country follows a Jewish rhythm, from slowing down on Saturday to vacationing during Sukkot. But the irony is most Israelis don’t think of these as Jewish activities. One supposedly nonreligious friend told me recently that she was thrilled because she was able to buy a sandwich, with bread instead of matzah, on Jerusalem’s pedestrian mall last Pesach. But the fact is, simply by acknowledging Pesach she was keeping Jewish time: Some American Jews don’t realize that Passover continues for a week after the seder; they eat bread and sandwiches unknowingly. And whereas all but the most committed American Jews ignore Shavuot, the major festival celebrating God’s giving the Torah to Moses, few Israelis can avoid the holiday, if for no other reason than because cheesecake is everywhere—a reminder of the three days the Israelites eschewed meat to purify themselves.

The Jewish things Israelis choose to do, they do easily, unselfconsciously. So many Jewish activities, phrases, and concepts are woven into their lives, they think these actions are “normal,” as opposed to religious. In contrast to this coherence and harmony, most American Jews live fragmented lives. The more involved we are with our Judaism, the more we have to struggle to reconcile our Jewish lives with our normal lives. As a result, many American Jews are constantly shifting gears, loudly, abruptly, awkwardly. Israelis drive in automatic, seamlessly flowing from Jewish activities to secular ones. In our instinctively self-justifying way, we have sanctified our neuroses, treating the effort it takes to be Jewish here as somehow virtuous.

Many dismiss the Israeli’s smooth transitions back and forth as lacking meaning, as an unconscious Judaism. This ease, however, this normalcy, is precisely what the Zionist revolution sought to achieve. But secular Israelis need to wake up to the rich Jewish content of their lives. Unfortunately, the religious tensions in Israel have made such an appreciation, such Jewish consciousness, politically unpalatable for too many Israelis. Still the fact is that more and more secular Israelis are beginning to embrace the Jewish part of their Israeli identity. Many Israelis have begun studying Midrash, or at least listening to the popular radio talk show “Bet Midrash Leil”—the nightly study hall. And Israeli celebrities are starting to have long-delayed bar mitzvahs and other public returns to Judaism.

My friend who eats bread on Pesach agreed that it is misleading to call most Israelis secular or cheeloni. She tells me that during the most recent election campaign, when Ehud Barak first rose to power, some nonreligious Israelis embraced the label chofshi, “free.” This is a superb term. It has a libertarian connotation, rejecting the rabbinate’s coercive role. The term recognizes that non-Orthodox Israelis, like so many of us, are free to choose, to create some idiosyncratic balance between modernity and tradition. To be chofshi, is to be what so many Israeli Jews are—and what so many American Jews are not: relaxed, natural, and comfortable in both their “secular” and “religious” skins.