REMAKING ISRAELI JUDAISM To Dani, Olga, Eli and Ita and to Benji, Jessica and Raphi DAVID LEHMANN BATIA SIEBZEHNER Remaking Israeli Judaism The Challenge of Shas HURST COMPANY,LONDON First published in the United Kingdom by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 41 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PL © David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner, 2006 All rights reserved. Printed in India The right of David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner to be identified as the authors of this volume has been asserted by them in accordinance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A catalogue record for this volume is available from the British Library. ISBN 1–85065–8196 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea which eventually led to the writing of this book was born in 1998 in Rio de Janeiro from a suggestion by Bila Sorj. For that and for her help in the early days of the project we remain extremely grateful. During fieldwork and as we developed our ideas we accu- mulated an unusually large debt of gratitude to a lively and caring group of supporters in Israel,notably Nurit Stadler and Kobi Shahar, Mario and Laura Sznajder, Gadi Sznajder and Oren Golan, who have been like a family to us over a period of six years,as have Menachem and Tamar Friedman. Nurit and Mario have read extensive drafts and we are extremely appreciative of their advice in correcting factual errors and analytical misapprehensions, as we are to Shmuel Eisenstadt, whose comparative and theoretical frames of reference are an ever-present source of wisdom. We thank Menachem Fried- man for his inexhaustible fund of knowledge and stories. Zeev Emmerich and Gal Levy have been faithful friends to our project from a very early stage and have also commented on drafts.Guillermo O’Donnell and Gabriela Hippolito O’Donnell gave us the con- fidence that our work would also be of interest to people whose primary concern was neither Israel nor Judaism. Shlomo Fischer has generously made unpublished writings available and has commented on draft chapters, and Ari Engelberg provided excellent support and unusual commitment as a research assistant, while Einat Wilf made a crucial contribution to the coverage of our interview material. At a very early stage Tali Loewenthal gave invaluable help and a very friendly welcome in London, and in the latter stages Risa Domb gave generously of her time to avoid mistakes in the glossary. We are especially grateful to the Leverhulme Foundation for the award of a fellowship and to the Nuffield Foundation and Cam- bridge University for grants and travel expenses. We are also grateful for institutional support to Beit Berl College and to the Harry v vi Acknowledgements S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University. Although the convention is that informants remain anonymous, some of them made such important contributions that they deserve to be mentioned in person, and that is why,with his agreement, we wish to mention Rachamim Harbel, a man of enormous generosity of spirit, who helped us with no afterthought as to what we might write about him and his movement. We are also very grateful indeed to students at Beit Berl for their interest in our project and for providing us with contacts for interviews. Support for this venture from quite an early stage from our pub- lisher Michael Dwyer and from Maria Petalidou, has been a source of indispensable confidence to us as authors. Parts of Chapter 6 have appeared in Birgit Meyer (ed.), Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, Indiana University Press (2006). We thank Birgit for inviting us to present our work at the seminar in Amsterdam in 2001 where that book originated. We are extremely grateful to Alex Levac for his help in selecting photographs taken by him and to Rohen Keden for permission to use his photograph. None of those mentioned, of course, bears any responsibility for errors and omissions in the final outcome. The support—much more than purely administrative—of Clare Hariri and Julie Coimbra at the Centre for Latin American Studies; of Odette Rogers, Deborah Clark and Norma Wolfe at the Social and Political Sciences Faculty in Cambridge, England; and of Hagit Ronay-Tal at Beit Berl has facilitated our arrangements in innu- merable ways. We are very grateful for their professionalism and, personally,for their innumerable human qualities. Jerusalem D.L. May 2005 B.S. CONTENTS Acknowledgements v Glossary x 1. Introduction 1 Scope and purpose 1 Israel as a society of enclaves 4 —Legal expressions of the enclave system 8 —Education and enclaves 10 —The enclave pattern of construction and settlement 13 —Social enclaves 18 Religion as ethnicity 21 The growing prominence of conversion-based religion 24 —Changing what it means to be religious 24 —Conversion as life crisis 26 Social movements 29 —The epidemiological pattern of spread 29 —A project of cultural transformation 36 The research 39 2. T’shuva meets Ethnicity: the Shas Religious Project 42 Chabad and Shas: contrasts and similarities in t’shuva 43 What observance means and who codifies the rules 51 North Africa and Morocco: Jewish life before emigration 55 Shas and Sephardi traditions: popular religion at the service of religious institutionalisation 70 3. T’shuva as Political Mobilisation 74 Shas and the centralisation of religious authority: the role of the newly religious 74 The machinery of t’shuva 79 —Joining a new community 81 —Mechanisms for transmitting tradition 88 vii viii Contents Reclaiming a heritage 90 Ethnicity,hierarchy and marriage 97 Tensions between tradition and stringency in the pursuit of a unified Orthodoxy 102 The experience of t’shuva 106 —Renewal and renunciation 106 —The opposite of pleasure 114 Social capital? 119 4. Shas as a Social Movement 120 The historical project as engagement with modernity and public debate 120 Ovadia Yosef: a defining figure 125 The modernising face of Shas 133 Shas as a political construct: the project of ethnic renewal 145 The historic actor 150 —Supporters’ conceptions of Shas 150 —Shas as bodily presence 152 —Shas in the eyes of others 155 —Ethnic disadvantage, mobilisation and voting 160 5. Shas’s Penetration of State and Civil Society 169 Mechanisms of reproduction 169 —Shas’s involvement in institutional structures 169 —The Shas education system (HaMa’ayan) 170 —The Shas school curriculum 176 —Yeshivas for returnees 178 —Élite Sephardi yeshivas 180 —Shas’s use of government funding 184 Ties that bind: the culture of Shas and the social networks of its leadership 187 Reaching out: occupying intermediate spaces 191 —Social entrepreneurship and voluntarism 195 —Political entrepreneurship 198 —Individual initiatives 200 6. Knitting the Strands of Popular Culture 203 Holy pirates 203 —Pirate radios in the broadcasting system 205 —Pirate radios and the t’shuva movement 212 Contents ix —The cassette tape industry and the t’shuva movement 215 T’shuva and the tension between high and low culture 217 —The mischievous millenarian: the use of parables and myths to subvert official discourse 221 —Autistic and Alzheimer sufferers as oracles 226 The recovery of fragments from tradition 228 —Popular religion in the t’shuva movement 234 —From giving to gossip 238 —The nature of religious norms 241 —Memorability: converts learn fast 243 —Cascading demarcations and the increasingly central role of the t’shuva movement in the haredi world 247 7. Conclusions 251 Fragmentation and coalescence: enclaves and their boundaries 251 Shas and politics: a troublesome guest 257 Globalisation 259 Socialisation and conversion 260 —Family 260 —Rationalisation and the miraculous 262 —The question of popular religion 263 Religion, family and social capital 270 Bibliography 279 Index 290 GLOSSARY Agudat Yisrael (Agudas Yisroel in its followers’ Yiddish pronunciation) Historically the polit- ical organ of European Orthodox Juda- ism founded in 1912; today an Israeli political party, but under other names since 1988. Ashkenazi(m) Jews of European descent and culture and,by extension,the music,rituals and culture of European Judaism. avrech/avrechim (pl.) Devout persons; full-time yeshiva stu- dents. ayin ha-ra The evil eye. ba’al t’shuva/ba’alei t’shuva A ‘returnee’, a secularised Jew who has (pl.) turned to religious observance. bachur ‘Young man’ Often used to refer to yeshiva students. chozer/chozrei bet’shuva (pl.) Same as ba’al t’shuva and hozer bet’shuva. Chassidim Ultra-Orthodox Jews who follow in the more mystical tradition of a movement whicharoseinEasternEuropeinthe late eighteenth century and whose reli- giosity lays more emphasis on bodily religious expressions than the ‘Lithua- nians’. Chassidim usually recognise the authority of a single, dynastic Rebbe, and Chassidic sects are in principle en- dogamous,though not dogmatically so. chug/chugim (pl.) Discussion group(s) (lit. circle). dati/dati’im (pl.) Religious, or devout person. Degel Hatorah Israeli political party representing the ultra-Orthodox community,which emer- x Glossary xi ged in 1988 from a split within Agudat Yisrael, with which it later came to work jointly. emouna Trust in God, or faith. gemach A charitable body, sometimes a purcha- sing co-operative, a rotating credit fund or simply a very low cost local, volun- tary supplier of goods and services. An acronym of the Hebrew Gemilut Hasa- dim (acts of kindness). Gemara see Mishnah. goy/goyim (pl.) Literally nation, by extension non-Jews or gentiles. Halakha The legal corpus of Rabbinic writings relating to daily life, viz. running of the home, marriage etc. haredi/haredim (pl.) Literally those who tremble (before God); generic term referring to ultra- Orthodox Jews, including Chassidim, ‘Lithuanians’ and others, to be distin- guished from Orthodox, or what are now called ‘modern Orthodox’. Haskalah The Jewish Enlightenment, an intel- lectual movement which propounded engagement with modernity and the Enlightenment of late eighteenth-cen- tury and nineteenth-century Europe, provoking much Rabbinic hostility but also giving rise to Reform Judaism, which is less stringent than the Orthodox ver- sion.