Talmud Out, Tanakh In

The massacre at the cave of Makhpelah in Hevron led to a heated public debate. One of the stronger arguments made during the last year was that the slaughter was just the tip of the iceberg - that the national-religious community in Israel really is suffering from a serious affliction: the basic value-system of the religious world is mistaken, crooked and dangerous.

One could dismiss such an argument by asserting that that event was simply one fanatical incident that had no real ideological or sociological connection to the religious world. But to my mind one cannot ignore certain dangerous tendencies that have infiltrated the religious community in the last few years, tendencies that have been highlighted by the massacre in Hevron. The roots of these tendencies are deeply entrenched in the religious, Jewish educational system from which today's religious-Zionist youth have sprung.

There are a number of stages in the attitudes that secular Zionism took to Jewish traditions and classical sources. In the earliest stage, there was a rejection of religious belief and the observance of mitzvot, but there was a recognition of the oral Torah (Torah she-be'al peh) as the source of Jewish culture and ethics. That's what Ahad Ha'am thought. That's what Bialik thought. (Bialik even tried to construct a secular "halakhic" system, patterned on the Mishnah.) That's what A.D. Gordon, who emphasized the religious-Hasidic dimension, thought too.

The second stage was characterized by its rebellion against the first stage. For example, S. Yizhar's heroes are totally cut off from all "diaspora" traditions. They struggle, using Israeli methods, with the types of moral and ethical problems that are posed by Israeli Zionism. The author Moshe Shamir uses a similar approach in his Bible-based novels.

David Ben Gurion, who tried to create a new culture entirely divorced from the diaspora experience, was very involved with Tanakh. The studying of the "book of books" was a highly honored activity in his secular educational framework.

The third stage consisted of disconnecting from and indifference towards any and all Jewish cultural sources, including the Tanakh. In the fourth stage, the one that we are currently experiencing, one can detect some effort to study Jewish sources using secular methods, and not to abandon the study of Jewish texts to the hands of the religious.

What has been the parallel development in the religious world? In theory, the yeshivah high schools, the hesder yeshivot and the other post-high-school Zionist yeshivot were to have been patterned after the Lithuanian yeshivah world, where the study of Talmud and talmudic commentaries was the central educational pursuit.

And in fact, from a curricular perspective the study of Talmud is the central experience at these yeshivot; most of the hours of the day are dedicated to Talmud. However, studies of students and graduates of these yeshivot show that, despite all the efforts that were extended in this direction, Talmud does not strike a deep chord in the hearts of these students. The new phenomenon of the growth of religious military preparation schools (mekhinot tzevaiyot) demonstrates well this new direction. One of the great attractions of those schools - even if no one declares this to be a principle of these schools - is that they are "Torah" schools in which the study of Talmud is not central.

There are two major curricular areas in these schools, Jewish thought and Tanakh. The study of Jewish thought, which penetrated into the Zionist yeshivot primarily because of the writings of Rabbi Kook, is very popular with the students. However, the Torah schools of the religious Zionists have not really reached any significant achievements in this field. One would be hard pressed to identify any new discoveries in this area - neither the development of new ways of studying these texts in a manner that would be different from other frameworks (e.g. the academic framework), nor the creation of any valuable secondary literature on the subject.

The only curricular area where one finds a combination of high student motivation, new pedagogic directions pursued by educators, and an abundance of creative analytical work - oral and in writing - is in the field of Tanakh.

One of the innovations of the Zionist yeshivah educational system - an innovation that can be appreciated only by those who are part of that cultural setting - is the return to peshat, the "plain" meaning of the biblical text. In the long history of Jewish learning the study of the Tanakh was generally neglected. The attitude to such study was negative. When people did turn their attention to Tanakh, it was through the "mediation" of traditional commentaries, or else it was in order to use Tanakh as a springboard for midrashic, "Oral Torah" interpretations. The Zionist Torah institutions have developed a new model, where students sit in Tanakh classes and the textbook that they are using is the Tanakh, without commentaries. As the years have passed new ways of studying Tanakh have developed and there has been much creative output in journals and new books that are published with regularity. (Consider, for example, Mordechai Breuer's book "Pirqe Mo'adot." The introduction to that book is entitled, "The Peshat interpretations that arise anew every day." In that introduction he attempts to find a basis in traditional Judaism for this innovative style of Bible study.)

The return to the peshat of the Tanakh is not confined to educational institutions. The settlement movement in YESHA - the pinnacle of achievement of the religious-Zionists - is, according to the testimony of its founders and its participants, a return to the lands of the Tanakh, and even to the world of the Tanakh and to its values. The return to the Tanakh, which characterized the secular Zionism of the fifties and has since died out there, is now gaining momentum in the circles of religious Zionism.

This "return" took on different characteristics in each of those two cultures, as a result of the differences between their cultural bases. While a secular Jew can declare that he has liberated himself from the interpretations of the "Oral Torah," and can put that declaration into practice, a religious Jew cannot allow himself to destroy the underpinnings of the tradition. But he can shift his emphasis.

So this process of return to the Tanakh that occurred in the secular community in the fifties is appearing today in the religious community. Similarly, a number of other phenomena that have roots in secular Zionism have appeared in the religious community in the last decades: an ideology-based society, placing group needs above individual needs, the value of settlement, the attitude to the state and to the land, and the attitude to the army. All of these values together can be seen as "negation of the diaspora." This approach not only negates continued Jewish living in the diaspora, but also and especially rejects those values that were developed during the years of the diaspora.

One of the more important characteristics of the great cultural developments of the diaspora was the "refinement" of the more rigid and cruel elements of the Tanakh. I refer not only to the halakhah's "softening" of some of the laws of the Torah (e.g. corporal or capital punishment, or the laws of "the rebellious son"), but especially to the process of refining the characters and the moral sensibilities of biblical heroes. Every bellicose biblical hero was "moved" by the Oral Torah into the bet-midrash [study hall]. Bloody wars were changed by exegesis into "the wars of Torah." Ways were found to whitewash sins that consisted of destructive, uncontrolled acts of passion.

In the last few generations this process of refinement reached an extreme in Jewish life and writing. Extreme concern about human life and total negation of the use of force and violence sometimes reached the level of caricature.

In his book, "Maasios fun toyzand ein nacht," Sholom Aleichem tells the story of Yechiel who was taken to the Russian army and a gun was put into his hand. His commander showed him the nearby hill where the (German) enemy soldiers were stationed and told him to shoot. All the soldiers started shooting in the proper direction, except for Yechiel who shot towards the sky. The commander hit Yechiel, cursed him, and yelled: "Over there! There's where you're supposed to shoot!" Yechiel looked at him with amazement, and said, "Ahin?! Dort zeinen doch menschen!..." (Over there?! There are people over there!)

European Jewish folklore is full of stories and jokes about the Jewish soldier "from Chelm." These stories are characteristic of the social-psychological reality of that society. Satirists used this theme to explain, among other things, how it came to pass that even in the difficult conditions of the ghettoes in the days of the holocaust there hardly ever were acts of murder or physical violence between those who were fighting over a crust of bread.

After the establishment of the State of Israel and the development of a Jewish army with Jewish fighters, it no longer was possible to identify with such characters as the diaspora Jewish "soldier." The leaders of the State fought against those images, and rightly so. (To be sure, they took pains to establish in the IDF moral norms of conduct regarding human lives that transcend anything found in any other army. This, to my mind, is a result of the diaspora heritage which they ostensibly were negating.)

The current return to the Tanakh of the new generation of religious Zionists, despite all its beauty and romantic allure, contains within it a danger of changing the image of the Jew, particularly the image of the believing Jew who observes the mitzvot. We already can see the development of "the new religious Jew," for whom the value of power is part of his character, and who does not react with revulsion to such concepts as "vengeance" or "expulsion" or even "destruction." One can find precedents for such characters and for such concepts in the Tanakh. But the great accomplishment of halakhah and of Jewish folk traditions over the years was the attempt to soften and to refine those elements.

The heads of the religious-Zionist educational system and its ideological leaders are faced with a crucial challenge: to stop the process of the return to the Tanakh - which is an imitation of the values of secular Zionism - and to start to reemphasize those basic traditional values that are being neglected. This must be done without toning down the criticism of "diasporism" with all of its complexes and without abandoning the new Israeli cultural values which are necessary for the continued existence of an independent, proud nation that does not require other people to defend it.

The return to a love of "oral Torah" is a difficult task; the appropriate ways of accomplishing it have not yet been found. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to begin by renewing the connection to the values that were developed in the diaspora, and to the moral role models that one can find in its rich literature.

At the same time, it is clearly incumbent on thinkers and educators to protest not only against acts of fanaticism, but against any attempt to establish a world of ethics and values that purports to be based on "Jewish sources" but, in actuality, is a dangerous perversion of Jewish ethics, ethics which traditionally knew how to live in peace with God and with His Torah - but also with human beings.

ed. note: The author teaches Tanach at the Himelfarb Religious High School, Jerusalem.

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