Save Democracy From the Ultra-Orthodox Community

No democracy has been as relentlessly tested as the democratic state of Israel. Its three major waves of immigration--Holocaust survivors, Jews from Muslim countries and refugees from the former Soviet Union--created a population unfamiliar with democratic norms and traumatized by this century’s totalitarian excesses. In its 50 years, Israel has fought five major wars, interspersed with an ongoing war against terrorism. Since 1967, it has forcibly ruled another people, exposing its young soldiers to the corruptions of occupation.

Any one of those factors could have undone Israel’s fragile democracy, which has been further challenged in recent years by an erosion of confidence in the country’s major institutions. Parliament, with its blatant horse-trading and rude debates, is considered a national disgrace. Even the army, burdened by occupation, no longer evokes unequivocal pride. The one institution that most Israelis continue to trust is the legal system, which has ensured that everyone, including Palestinian terrorists, can receive a fair trial in the state of Israel.

Now Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, numbering perhaps 7% of the population, has declared war against the Supreme Court. A quarter of a million demonstrators gathered in Jerusalem recently to insist on the primacy of religious over democratic law. One leading rabbi even compared Chief Justice Aharon Barak to Haman, the ancient tormentor of the Jews. With their campaign against the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, the ultra-Orthodox have turned themselves into the country’s leading threat to democracy.

The fight is over the so-called religious status quo, which has granted Orthodoxy certain privileges like exclusive control over marriage, divorce and conversion to Judaism, as well as military exemption of seminary students--in effect, of every ultra-Orthodox young person. Barak has challenged those arrangements. In one sense the ultra-Orthodox are right: They aren’t fighting to expand their power but to protect it. Still, for a clear majority of Israelis, ultra-Orthodox privilege has become untenable.

The status quo, imposed at the founding of the state, was an attempt to mediate between opposite Jewish longings. The most ancient debate among Jews is whether we are meant to be a divinely chosen people, living a separatist religious life, or a normal people like all others, a nation among nations, as the Israelites insisted when they demanded to be governed by a king instead of a prophet. For the modern “normalizers,” Israel was intended as a state of the Jews, for the Orthodox, a Jewish state. The status quo tried to satisfy both groups, by creating a western democracy compromised by limited religious control.

Most Israelis are neither ultra-Orthodox in their contempt for democracy nor militantly secular in their contempt for tradition. We don’t want to be governed by the rabbis, but we also don’t want to repudiate the generations of Jews who lived by rabbinic law. Last year, for example, 70% of Israeli Jews fasted on Yom Kippur. We are a modern people at home among the nations, and an ancient people trying to maintain its culture. We inhabit the paradoxical geography of a secular state and a holy land.

The way to satisfy our opposing needs is by minimizing the formal controls of religion while encouraging Jewish values in education and culture. That is precisely the position advocated by a small but influential group of religious intellectuals, and it may soon be adopted by the Labor Party and the new Centrist Party.

The future of Israeli democracy could depend on the so-called “religious Zionists”--Orthodox Jews who, unlike the ultra-Orthodox, participate in modern society and who number perhaps 15% of the population. In recent years, the secular left has tried to ostracize the religious Zionists, who are the mainstay of the West Bank settlement movement. But in the crucial battle over democracy, religious Zionists could be the left’s most important allies. Religious Zionists are torn between their loyalty to Israel’s national institutions and to Torah law. While some helped organize this month’s ultra-Orthodox demonstration, others joined the secular counter-demonstration a few blocks away. Many religious Zionists, while uneasy with some of Barak’s decisions, are horrified at the ultra-Orthodox assault on the Supreme Court.

Israel’s secular defenders of democracy need to create a coalition with moderate religious Zionists that will confine the influence of the ultra-Orthodox to their self-imposed ghetto.