Yosef Salmon, Do Not Provoke Providence: Orthodoxy in The

Yosef Salmon, Do Not Provoke Providence: Orthodoxy in the Grip of Nationalism ( Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2006); ISBN: 965-493-269-5 (in Hebrew)*

The concept of “messianism” was long seen in a positive light even by Zionist thinkers, Yosef Salmon argues in his new book. In the early days of Jewish national revival, the term did not connote, as it now does, a marginal, fundamentalist vision. On the contrary, it suggested a positive, utopian vision of return to Zion and improve- ment of the world. It was not only Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who regarded the Zionist enterprise as a messianic development; that view was shared by David Ben-Gurion, Yitz˙ak Ben-Zvi, Zalman Shazar, Ben-Zion Dinur, and a host of other secular Zionist personalities (p. 295). The anti-messianist voice of Yosef Óayim Brenner was very much the exception in its time. Only in the 1950s, particularly under the influence of Natan Rotentstreich and Yeshayahu Leibovitz, did the term begin to acquire its current, negative meaning; and only since the Six-Day War in 1967 have the critics of messianism become a dominant force within the Israeli intelligentsia (pp. 296–298). The triumph of this latter tendency has been so overwhelming that even the settlers in Judea and Samaria now rarely invoke national redemption to explain the need to preserve the integrity of the entire Land of Israel; their arguments are based primarily on considera- tions of security. This is one of the final steps in the long process through which Zionist-Israeli thinking has shed its traditional, reli- gious baggage, but the decisive step in that process, Salmon main- tains, took place generations ago, at the time of the Óibbat ¸iyon (“Love of Zion”) movement that preceded Herzlian political Zionism. Moreover, this is but one example of a late development in the Jewish and Israeli world that can be understood only by uncover- ing its earlier roots, grounded in what was at first the common path of Zionism and Orthodoxy. Salmon’s new book is devoted to an examination of those roots. The book’s Hebrew title (Im ta‘iru ve-im te‘oreru) is drawn from a verse that appears three times in Song of Songs: “I adjure you O maidens of Jerusalem, by gazelles or by hinds of the field: Do not wake or rouse [im ta‘iru ve-im te‘oreru] love

* This review has been translated from the Hebrew by Joel Linsider. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 EJJS 2.1 book reviews 177 until it please” (Song 2,7; 3,5; slightly differently in 8,4).1 The verse provides the basis for the midrash of the “Three Oaths” (Ketubbot 110b), one of which barred Jews from prematurely attempting to restore Jewish dominion in the Land of Israel. The title thus seems to allude to the potential embodied within Zionism as seen by the various strains of Orthodoxy. From a religious-Zionist perspective, Zionism could be seen as “arousal from below,” that is, worldly actions meant to elicit a redemptive response from God. From an anti-Zionist perspective, meanwhile, Zionism could be regarded as an effort to arouse redemption before the time is ripe—that is, a forbidden effort to hasten the End through worldly actions. But beyond the question of redemption, the book shows how Zionism roused Orthodoxy, both conceptually and practically: it posed bewildering questions to which Orthodoxy had to respond and it compelled Orthodoxy to choose its way among divergent paths. Naturally enough, different figures within Orthodoxy responded to those questions in different ways and chose, at decisive crossroads, to go in one direction or another. Their choices led to disputes and schisms within Orthodoxy and Zionism alike. Yosef Salmon has devoted most of his scholarly work to the com- plex relationships between religion and Zionism, and he here offers his second compilation of studies dealing with these issues. It goes almost without saying that the book’s importance goes far beyond the essays’ historical analyses of personalities and events, for the author probes the most complex roots of contemporary Jewish and Israeli identity. The points I noted above simply illustrate the mat- ter. Salmon himself is very cautious in dealing with these issues, and the reader who attempts to identify Salmon’s own position on the ideological conflicts and dilemmas he discusses will labor in vain. Nevertheless, some of his subject choices make it quite evident that he means to restore to center-stage personalities who have been for- gotten or suppressed and to right that historical wrong. Some of these figures he no doubt sees as worthy of consideration only for what they contributed to the historical processes. In other instances, I believe, he sees his subjects as heralds of contemporary issues, whose ideas pose challenges even for today’s intellectual discourse.

1 Translation from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 21999).