Bret Jewish Genius Stephens, The Kohelet Policy Center, the Neo-Con Israel Democracy Institute, and KING BIBI
David Shasha
Bret Jewish Genius Stephens, The Kohelet Policy Center, the Neo-Con Israel Democracy Institute, and KING BIBI
We just received word of a new SAPIR Journal program on the problem of KING BIBI’s illegal Judicial Reform in Israel:
https://maimonidesfund-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Qkz0BodNSWKTxmJ_v6tPRg#/registration
Here is the announcement:
Join us on Monday, June 12, 12:00pm ET, for a conversation with Professor Avi Bell and Israel Democracy Institute's Jesse Ferris, moderated by SAPIR editor-in-chief Bret Stephens, about the complexities of judicial reform in Israel. Register here.
Jesse Ferris is Vice President of Strategy at IDI, where
he oversees strategic planning, organizational development, and international
programs. His research interests include diplomatic and military history,
Middle Eastern politics, nuclear strategy and Israeli national security.
Professor Avi Bell is a member of the Faculty of Law at Bar Ilan University and
the University of San Diego School of Law, and he serves as a Senior Fellow at
the Kohelet Policy Forum. His fields of academic research include property
and intellectual property law, international law, land use law, the laws of
war, and the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
The “Left Wing” side is Stephens’ own Israel Democracy Institute.
This is what “Left Wing” looks like:
https://en.idi.org.il/about/internationalvisory-council/
Here are some of the prominent “Leftists”; a who’s who of the Jewish Neo-Con Chickenhawks, led by their Goy ally:
George Shultz
https://www.hoover.org/research/george-shultz-father-bush-doctrine
Martin Indyk
Bret Stephens
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aTALXUv5we9c8vzIejU8Xm32i5OnKky_jVwGMlMpdNg/edit
Anne Applebaum
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/14/neo-conservatism-the-seductive-lure-of-lying-about-history/
Elliott Abrams
https://mondediplo.com/2019/03/03venezuela-abrams
https://tikvahfund.org/about/board/
Irwin Cotler (JJAC)
https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/irwin-cotler(1785)/motions/6252599
http://www.justiceforjews.com/refu_6.html
I have already addressed the IDI’s interlocutor, The Fascist Kohelet Policy Forum, whose leader Moshe Koppel is on the board of The Tikvah Fund:
https://tikvahfund.org/about/board/
I have collected some important resources on Kohelet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1xQ4nxiHealUzOvhYTTSzz8VbaOYk1RnPcuV8lLCHo/edit
The collection appears following this note.
It is yet another fascinating example of the monolingual ideological bubble in the White Jewish Supremacy institutional world, where “debate” is a matter of the ideological radicals “talking” to one another as they stifle any voices who would differ with them.
David Shasha
Moshe Koppel and Zalman Bernstein: Tikvah Fund/Shalem College/Kohelet Policy Forum Fascist Jew Intersectionality
Given the many problems presented by Moshe Koppel and his Kohelet Policy Forum, I gathered many articles and resources to provide context on the Israeli KING BIBI Fascism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/dP0lF_Y13V8/m/JfvLCQ6XAgAJ
It was thus serendipitous to receive the following post from Shalem College, where this Israeli Fascism began:
https://shalem.ac.il/en/news/moshe-koppel-and-yedidia-stern-from-crisis-to-constitution/
The complete article follows this note.
Veteran SHU readers will hopefully remember Shalem from its founder Yoram Hazony:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoram_Hazony#Academic_and_journalism_career
Which led to Azure magazine:
And to Hazony’s landmark Zionism is Fascism book The Jewish State, which I discussed in my review essay “The Nightmare of Diaspora”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiSKgPuEarpnSqRaJs6JdBTDWpWVzJkCG1XCCj37KEE/edit
https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-State-Struggle-Israels-Soul/dp/0465029027
Since then, Hazony has gone full Trumpscum Jew, causing me to work overtime following his Orban Alt-Right movements:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIGjVlWpqgYgp24AabfaDqm-8jngdKbn7ZqN99Jpnpo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R-gc2MyjXbCYOB8HGjpUdQnFOunETAcmErWPHOSZ4y0/edit
His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism became a White House staple:
https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DxHkOp4KpryDXxhnRSzmWg3McaUV0CcsWPvAmV7uJpo/edit
https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony/dp/1541645375
The Tikvah Fund Shalem Intersectionality can also be seen in the work of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, a regular Azure contributor:
http://azure.org.il/authors.php?id=218
It was in Azure that Soloveichik gave us his devotional for Jewish Pagan Michael Wyschogrod:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
Here we see Daniel Gordis, current member of the Shalem College executive leadership, moderating a conversation between Koppel and token “Liberal” Yedidia Stern:
https://shalem.ac.il/en/executive-leadership/
It is a classic FOX-style “Fair and Balanced” presentation, which privileges the Koppel position by marking it as legitimate.
Note well the use of a question mark in the title of the post, as if it is an actual choice for Torah Jews.
So, rather than fighting the toxic spirit of the New Jewish Fascism, Shalem – in classic Zalman Bernstein tradition – is giving it primacy and treating Koppel as if he is a respectable figure.
Which many Israelis are not accepting:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-government-demonstrations-reform-adf151235257d42acaea4b79a2960af9
Even in New York:
And New Jersey:
But when it comes to The Tikvah Fund and Shalem College Jewish Fascism is a matter of debate.
Choose your side.
The Zionist Redemption is coming.
Moshe Koppel told me so!
David Shasha
Moshe Koppel and Yedidia Stern: From Crisis to Constitution?
https://shalem.ac.il/mailings/2023/e-news/04-03/?v=2
Zalman C. Bernstein, the pioneering businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, was most of all a believer in ideas. In particular, he believed that great ideas were the driving force behind history, and that the study of these ideas—not only through texts, but also by means of thoughtful conversation—was the key to shaping the future of his beloved Jewish state. It was this belief that led to Bernstein’s foundational support for the vision of Shalem College, and which, stated Koret Distinguished Fellow Dr. Daniel Gordis at the college in March, led college leadership to decide that this year, the memorial lecture that bears Bernstein’s name should be a serious and civil conversation about the most challenging issue facing Israel today: the proposed judicial reform and its ramifications.
Speaking to Shalem’s student body against the backdrop of more than two months of social unrest, Gordis began by explaining that while the context of the conversation was the current political moment, the speakers were chosen for their having been involved in drafting constitutions for Israel for nearly two decades.
Computer scientist and scholar of rabbinic literature Prof. Moshe Koppel, for example, is co-founder and chair of the Kohelet Forum, an Israeli think tank that works to advance Israel’s dual Jewish and democratic character, and which played an active role in advocating for the judicial reforms in the Knesset. He is also a longstanding advocate for a constitution for Israel: He has previously participated in meetings of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee and prepared the drafts for the committee’s work on religion and state.
Legal scholar Prof. Yedidia Stern, meanwhile, is the current president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and former dean of the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University. An expert on constitutional law, he was also chairman-elect of the Coalition Committee to Enact an Israeli Constitution—and former lecturer for Shalem’s specially designed course “Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State.”
They are also, as Stern pointed out in his opening remarks, close friends of many years—and this, despite their tendency to hold divergent views.
Gordis began by asking both speakers to describe their visions for Israel, and to explain how these visions have been affected by the current social crisis. Koppel answered that he wants Israel to be a free and flourishing democracy, which will allow the Jewish people to develop its culture in an organic, bottom-up way. He also wants Israel to be a “bayit” (home) for the Jewish people, in that it feels empowered to express its uniqueness without fear of reprisal or interference. For this to happen, he said, Israel needs a constitution that “defines the state’s Jewish character, the rights of all its citizens, and the arrangements according to which the government will operate.”
Explaining that the procedure by which we arrive at these arrangements is no less important than the need to arrive at them at all, Koppel warned that too often, we base our decisions on what we know, and fail to acknowledge what we don’t.
“When we decide on the process for electing judges, for instance, we can’t look at the justices who sit on the court today. Their politics and ideologies aren’t relevant, because we’re deciding on a process for electing justices that will be used in another ten, twenty, and a hundred years,” Koppel said, adding that he believes this approach to determining Israel’s balance of powers is at the root of much of the problems with the judicial-reform discourse. He concluded by explaining that he believes that justices’ views should reflect those of the public that chose them, and that “in a free and flourishing democracy, judges cannot be above the law. I want there to be a strong Supreme Court, and I think there should be barriers to legislation. But I don’t think that justices should have unchecked and unbalanced powers. I don’t think that they should be permitted to make decisions whose logic isn’t transparent, and that are not based in law.”
In his response, Stern stated that this own vision for Israel isn’t the important thing; rather, what matters is to “find a feasible vision that all of Israel’s citizens can get behind, which balances the need for a Jewish character for the state with the equally important values of democracy and equality.” Echoing Koppel, he added that he thinks the real question of the moment is not “how we as Jews handle controversy, but how we as a state address it. What are the mechanisms by which the state both avoids and deals with the kind of crisis we’re in now.”
Like Koppel, he believes that a constitution is the best way to answer these questions, although both speakers concede that such a goal feels a long way off.
Explaining where he and Koppel differ on the matter of the reform, Stern concluded by saying that while he agrees that the court’s justices should not be able to choose themselves, he opposes a situation in which they are beholden to political sides and interests. “My fear is that by putting the power of selection into the hands of our politicians,” he said, “the result will be the radicalization of the court, and its failure to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities.”
In his conclusion to the dialogue, and prior to students’ questions, Gordis pointed out that over the course of the last hour, “We’ve managed to have exactly the kind of conversation that Israeli society needs to have.” He finished by relating the classic story of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who tried to have himself smuggled out of Jerusalem during the Roman siege of 70 CE. When caught by the Roman Emperor, Gordis explained, ben Zakkai asked that in exchange for the loss of Jerusalem, he be granted an educational institution—“Yavneh”—where he could save the Jewish nation through study and teaching.
“If an educational institution was what Jews once asked for to compensate for the loss of their national sovereignty, today, it is this educational institution that can save Israel from destruction. The conversation we’ve had here this afternoon,” Gordis insisted, “proves exactly that.”
From Shalem College website, April 3, 2023
Who’s Behind the Judicial Overhaul Now Dividing Israel? Two Americans.
By: David Segal, Isabel Kershner
As part of a recent “national day of resistance,” a group of army reservists wearing masks converged at the Jerusalem office of a think tank and blocked its front door with sandbags and coils of barbed wire. Outside, protesters led a noisy rally on the street, waving dozens of placards and sharing a microphone for a series of furious speeches.
“The Kohelet Policy Forum has been hiding in the shadows,” shouted one speaker, standing atop a car. “But we are onto them and we will not let them win!”
For years, Kohelet quietly churned out position papers, trying to nudge government policy in a more libertarian direction. Then, starting in January, it became more widely known as one of the principal architects of the judicial overhaul proposal that has plunged Israel into a crisis over the future of its democracy.
If the plan succeeds, it would be a stunning victory not only for the think tank, but also for the people behind it: two guys from Queens.
The first is Moshe Koppel, a 66-year-old mathematics Ph.D. who grew up in New York City and moved to Israel in 1980. He founded Kohelet in 2012 and has been drafting laws and producing conservative and libertarian policy papers with a roster of full- and part-time scholars that now numbers 160.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” he told Ami, the Orthodox Jewish magazine, in 2019, “but in some sense we’re the brains of the Israeli right wing.”
Kohelet is not required to disclose the names of individual donors, and for years Mr. Koppel has artfully deflected questions about funding.
But one source of money is a second New Yorker: Arthur Dantchik, a 65-year-old multibillionaire who has donated millions to Kohelet, according to people familiar with his philanthropic giving. Mr. Dantchik did not return a call for comment.
American money and ideas, from the left and the right, have played a perennial role in Israeli politics. Today, American consultants are a regular feature of election campaigns, and the American-backed Israel Hayom, a free daily, is the country’s most widely read newspaper.
Until recently, though, few knew that the nation-rattling judicial proposals were largely an American production.
The plan, which has spurred hundreds of thousands of Israelis to weekly protests, would give the government far greater control over the selection of judges and would make it harder for the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed by legislators.
Negotiations — which included Kohelet — for a scaled-back version of the judicial overhaul that would satisfy a broader swath of the Israeli public appear to be on hold for now. The government is determined to push at least some of its proposals through Parliament by early April.
Opponents of the overhaul say the courts are all that prevent Israel from devolving into a country with no checks on government power and no protection for minorities. Mr. Koppel and his allies believe that the real threat to Israeli democracy is activist judges, who, he says, now operate virtually without constraint.
While prominent in Israel’s conservative political circles for years, Mr. Koppel has long worked to maintain the lowest possible profile.
“I discovered that you get an awful lot more done,” he said during a rare interview at Kohelet’s headquarters, “if you let others get the credit than if you insist on announcing your contribution.”
Mr. Dantchik has for decades remained about as invisible as a man with his fortune can be. (With an estimated net worth of $7.2 billion, he ranks higher on the Forbes 400 list than marquee tycoons like Mark Cuban and George Soros.) He is a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a privately held financial powerhouse based in a sprawling campus in a suburb of Philadelphia, with offices around the world. The company has never taken outside investors, limiting what it is required to publicly disclose about the markets in which it operates — options, equities, cryptocurrency and sports betting.
“They are as quiet as a church mouse,” said Paul Rowady of Alphacution, a research group that specializes in proprietary trading firms. “These guys don’t like to talk, and they don’t want anyone in their business.”
Mr. Dantchik’s connection to Kohelet was first published in an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, based on reporting by the Democratic Bloc, a nonprofit in Israel that largely monitors right-wing groups.
“We spent months searching for a clue that would lead us back to the origins of the money,” said Ran Cohen, the Democratic Bloc’s director. “It was a maze of nontransparent U.S. companies and charities.”
The group’s research found that funds to Kohelet came through a 501(c)(3) called the American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum, which was originally based in Bala Cynwyd, the same suburb as Susquehanna. Two of the nonprofit’s directors are siblings of Mr. Koppel’s wife. The third, Amir Goldman, works at Susquehanna Growth Equity, a private equity arm of Susquehanna International.
After Haaretz published its feature in March 2021, the Democratic Bloc found that the primary conduit for funds to Kohelet changed.
A financial disclosure report filed in Israel by the think tank in April of that year showed that more than 90 percent of its $7.2 million in income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes in 2021, according to its website.
In previous reporting on Kohelet’s funding, Mr. Dantchik was cited as a key donor along with Jeff Yass. Mr. Yass is a fellow co-founder of Susquehanna and a prolific conservative political donor in the United States, whose net worth has been estimated by Forbes at $28.5 billion.
But people familiar with giving by both men say that Mr. Yass has never been a Kohelet donor. He declined to comment for this article.
Should some form of the Kohelet-backed overhaul go through, Mr. Koppel would become an improbable godfather of a refashioned Israeli judiciary.
He is not a jurist, nor did he attend law school. Before he turned to politics, his expertise was in machine learning. A lean man with a graying beard and the faint remnants of a New York City accent, Mr. Koppel lives in a relatively upscale settlement in the southern West Bank, one filled with plenty of transplanted Americans.
Even many of his detractors like him personally, and most open with this assessment: “He’s brilliant.” One of his gifts is describing policy positions and himself in ways that make both sound eminently reasonable.
“You see I’m wearing a kippah on my head, but I’m not in favor of religious coercion in any form whatsoever,” he said in a recent interview on the podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys.”
He would not say how he connected with Mr. Dantchik, who grew up in Queens and graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton with a degree in biology.
Mr. Dantchik’s roommate there was Mr. Yass, a friend from high school, and the men bonded over a shared love of poker. The two moved to Las Vegas after graduation to become professional players, with modest success. They later lugged briefcases filled with cash from a “consortium” of like-minded gamblers to make thousands of small bets on long-shot combinations at horse tracks. In 1985, at Sportsman’s Park in Cicero, Ill., they won $764,284, then one of the largest payouts in U.S. racing history.
The pair started Susquehanna in 1987 with a handful of friends. Poker, with its emphasis on probabilities and decision making under pressure, remains so central to Susquehanna’s culture that its monthslong training program includes weeks of Texas hold ’em.
Former Susquehanna employees say Mr. Dantchik is a much-admired character at the company — quiet, warm and exceptionally generous.
“He ran the training program when I started,” said Francis Wisniewski, who joined Susquehanna in 1993 and stayed for a decade. “My grandfather died during it, and he offered me his Audi so I could immediately drive four hours home. He said, ‘I’ll get a cab. You take my car.’ That’s just the way he was.”
If money talks, it is apparently the only way Mr. Dantchik does so in public. What is revealed through his public philanthropy is a man interested in supporting mostly moderate Republican politicians; he has given approximately $850,000 to political candidates and groups that disclose their donors, according to data provided by OpenSecrets.org.
Far more of his giving is channeled through the Claws Foundation, which is based in Reston, Va., and lists Mr. Dantchik and Mr. Yass as two of its directors. The latest Claws Foundation filing with the I.R.S., which appears on ProPublica’s site, reported that the organization gave $36 million to more than 30 recipients, including theaters, hospitals, synagogues, universities and libertarian think tanks, such as the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute.
On paper, Mr. Dantchik and Mr. Koppel have a lot in common, most notably a shared passion for Israel and libertarian ideas. Mr. Koppel became interested in politics 20 years ago, when he began attending hearings of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. In the interview, Mr. Koppel said he quickly learned that busy and short-staffed politicians are grateful to anyone willing to help draft legislation.
“That person has a lot of power, the person with the pen,” Mr. Koppel said.
After a couple of failed attempts to write a formal constitution for Israel, he formed Kohelet — the word is Hebrew for Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible — more than a decade ago.
From the start, Kohelet targeted the ideological pillars erected by Israel’s socialist founders. The group promotes the familiar libertarian menu of small government, free markets and privatized education. In recent decades, Israel has tiptoed away from regulation and emphasized its hospitality to entrepreneurs. But Kohelet’s libertarianism feels to many Israelis like a foreign intrusion.
Describing Kohelet’s policies as an American import, Gilad Kariv, a Labor Party lawmaker and former chairman of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, said, “They are not only getting their financial contribution from the United States, but they are bringing in an ultra-right-wing, neocon philosophy.”
One of Kohelet’s triumphs came in 2019, when the Trump administration announced that the United States did not consider Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank a violation of international law, reversing four decades of American policy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a video message at a Kohelet conference, thanking the group for supporting the new doctrine.
But the proposed judicial overhaul represents the height of Kohelet’s influence. When Yariv Levin, the minister of justice, unveiled the plan in January, he publicly thanked the director of Kohelet’s legal department for his assistance. Mr. Koppel would only say that Kohelet’s judicial proposals were “similar” to the government’s.
“We can’t tell them what to do, only give advice,” Mr. Koppel said. “They’ve taken some of the advice and rejected some of the advice.”
Soon after this interview, tensions in Israel went from a simmer to a boil, and the president recently warned of the real possibility of civil war.
A speaker at the protest outside Kohelet this month denounced rich Americans who export ideas to Israel “straight from the delusional fringes of the Republican Party.”
Onlookers tossed fake $100 bills in the air.
Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.
From The New York Times, March 20, 2023
New York protestors yell ‘shame’ at Israeli judicial reform architect Moshe Koppel
By: Jacob Henry
More than 200 American and Israeli Jews gathered on the Upper West Side on Wednesday to protest a private event featuring Moshe Koppel, the cofounder of the Kohelet Forum, the conservative think tank whose ideas undergird the judicial overhaul being advanced by Israel’s government.
As people walked into a building on 86th Street for an event hosted by Aish New York, an Orthodox outreach organization, protestors surrounded attendees and shouted “shame” in Hebrew. The event began late and the protest was audible inside.
The protest was the latest in a series organized by Israelis living in New York City who oppose the judicial overhaul legislation, which would sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its independence, and which has led to raucous and widespread street protests in Israel.
“Moshe Koppel is the person behind the judicial coup that’s going on in Israel these days,” said Shany Granot-Lubaton, a leader of the local protest movement. “They are trying to make Israel a dictatorship.”
Some of the protesters were dressed in red robes with their faces covered by white bonnets in the style of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a Margaret Atwood book and Hulu television series about a misogynist Christian dystopia. The costumes have become a popular mode of protest in Israel and have elicited comment from Atwood herself, who called one of the displays “astonishing.”
Granot-Lubaton, who also works at J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby, she believes Koppel entered the building through a side door to avoid the protesters. Koppel and Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg did not respond to a request for comment.
In a video posted by News Israel 13 journalist Neria Kraus, Koppel can be seen attempting to speak over the protesters, whose cries could be heard inside the walls of the building.
A source who was in the audience for Koppel’s speech, and asked to remain anonymous because the event was supposed to be private, said Koppel was late because of the protests and discussed the judicial reform only during the final third of the speech, which lasted more than 90 minutes. He said Koppel said, as he has for at least a month, that he opposes pieces of the package of legislation currently advancing in Israel. Koppel predicted that a measure allowing Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to override court decisions with a bare majority would not pass.
The audience member said Koppel spoke to a friendly audience and came off as “a very educated man who holds very strong views on this topic” but who was “very distracted” by the protests.
In a 2019 interview with Ami magazine, an Orthodox publication, Koppel described Kohelet as “the brains of the Israeli right wing,” and conservative politicians in Israel and the United States have thanked the think tank for its work. They include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who is one of the officials spearheading the overhaul.
But according to the audience member, Koppel acknowledged feeling conflicted about the legislation. At one point, when an audience member asked him about how he feels regarding the seismic changes happening in Israel, Koppel responded, “I don’t sleep at night.”
“Obviously he feels the weight on his shoulders,” the audience member said. “There’s a lot of pressure on him from many different angles.”
Outside the building, Granot-Lubaton said that she felt the protests “had an impact.”
“We showed him that Israelis and Jewish Americans who love Israel are not giving up that easily on democracy,” Granot-Lubaton said. “It was a very important event. We’re going to continue to chase these people who are trying to fund and take down our democracy.”
From The New York Jewish Week, March 23, 2023
Old-Time Jews – Was Their Judaism Superior To Ours? An Interview with Professor Moshe Koppel
By: Elliot Resnick
European-born Jews who came of age before the Holocaust often seem both more “frum” and less “frum” than we are. How does one explain this paradox? How does one understand people whose sense of Jewishness and closeness to Hashem were so much stronger than ours in many ways but who also seemed not to be so careful about keeping certain halachos?
In many regards, Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures, a new work by Moshe Koppel, is an implicit defense of this Judaism of yesteryear. Koppel – a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University – discusses this Judaism by focusing on the beliefs of Shimen, a Gerrer chassid he knew as a child whose family was killed during the Holocaust and who made his way to America after the war.
He contrasts these beliefs with those of Heidi – a modern Jewish woman, the daughter of Conservative Jews, with whom Koppel became acquainted decades ago at Princeton University – and argues that only the kinds of beliefs that Shimon harbored can sustain a society long term.
The Jewish Press: In Judaism Straight Up, you write about Shimen’s circle of friends – who represent old-time Jews for you: “[O]ne thing they had no patience for was high-minded pieties. They despised pomposity and self-righteousness.” Can you expand on that?
Koppel: These people were all Holocaust survivors. They were very comfortable in their own skins and didn’t feel the need to impress anybody. At the same time, though, they also had a lot of humility.
And Jews today aren’t like that in your estimation?
That generation was completely above all the divisions that we’re familiar with now. Today you ask, “Is he charedi or Modern Orthodox?” but that whole dichotomy was completely beyond them.
They were very old-fashioned and very unashamed about their Judaism. They weren’t apologetic. And they weren’t tormented by the kinds of questions that torment people today. For them, Yiddishkeit was just the way their parents did it.
You want to go to college? If you think it will help in life, go right ahead. This chumra, that chumra? Suit yourself.
Their Yiddishkeit was very natural for them. They didn’t have to put on airs. They didn’t have to try to impress you. They didn’t have to signal to each other that they were really in the game. They just were.
So they were not kana’im like some charedim are today, and they were not at all conflicted by modernity like some Modern Orthodox Jews are today. They were totally comfortable.
You write about Shimen – who, again, represents for you the classical Jew of yesteryear: “The fact is he hasn’t got the slightest interest in exploring evidence for the veracity of any of the historical claims on which his most basic commitments ostensibly rely.” Why is that?
For [Jews of that generation], belief in Yiddishkeit was extremely natural, and the narrative that goes along with Yiddishkeit is just the way they saw the world. They were heirs to a mesorah, a tradition, and they were committed to carrying it on, and they believed that tradition was the right way to live.
They weren’t tortured by questions about whether yetzias Mitzrayim happened or not. And it’s not because they thought about it very deeply and decided the archeological or historical evidence favored the Jewish narrative. It’s just because the Jewish narrative was the way they saw the world. It wasn’t something they thought necessary to prove to somebody.
It’s hard for some people to understand this attitude because, at the end of the day, Judaism is a very distinct way of life – and very distinct from how we would live if the Torah wasn’t divine. So how can a person not think at some point, “Why am I living this way? How do I justify it?”
I’ll tell you how. The reason it’s obvious to you that you should be questioning is because part of you is outside of Yiddishkeit looking in, asking, “Gee, that’s a slightly eccentric way to be living my life. I wonder what justifies it.” But if you’re completely inside, you don’t ask those questions and you don’t need to justify it.
Let me ask you: When you get up in the morning and put on your socks and shoes, do you ever stop and say, “How do I justify this”? No, because everybody you know and the only culture you know take it for granted [that everyone puts on socks and shoes], so there isn’t anything to ask that requires an answer. It’s completely natural.
Was Judaism so natural to these Jews of yesteryear because they grew up in shtetls?
It was a combination of the fact that they grew up completely immersed in it and the fact that they lived through the Shoah. If somebody said to one of them, “How can you be a Jew after the Shoah?” they would just look at you odd and say, “How could you be a goy after the Shoah?”
It made them that much more certain that this was the way to live. So they lived under very special circumstances – under shtetl life, terrible tragedy, and then a very open Western society. It made them interesting people, but it also made them people who didn’t need to impress. They were super authentic people.
You write that for them Judaism was a “first language,” not a “second language.” What do you mean by that and why is it important that Judaism should be a first language?
When you speak your mother tongue, you speak it perfectly grammatically, but you don’t stop to think about the rules. They’re kind of [unconsciously] in your head. That’s why you speak your mother tongue more fluently and, as a matter of fact, sometimes you even take more liberties in your mother tongue than you would in another language because you’re confident. You know exactly how far you can push the envelope, and you know when you can take liberties and when you can’t.
When you speak a second language, it’s kind of stilted and halting. You [ask yourself in your head] as you speak, “Is this grammatical, is this not grammatical?” You think about what the rule is, and it makes your speech much less fluent and much less natural.
My argument is that [these old-time Jews lived] Judaism like you speak your first language. And for that exact reason, they knew exactly when to take liberties and when not to take liberties, and they didn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating the rules. They just lived by them in a more natural way.
Your typical American yeshiva student today – whether Modern Orthodox or charedi – speaks Judaism like a second language and it just flows less well. It’s less authentic.
Isn’t living Judaism as if it were a second language advantageous in many ways, though? It’s like the way baalei teshuvah practice Judaism. Baalei teshuvah are super sincere, they always want to do the right thing…
I’m not saying everything about people who speak Judaism as a second language is bad. There are many good qualities to it. Obviously the fact that you contemplate the rules may give you certain insight that other people don’t have. There’s also, as you say, the advantage of sincerity and self-awareness. It’s wonderful.
But you don’t think it’s ideal.
No, not in terms of sustaining a society. What sustains a society is a mass of people who live the culture in a very natural and organic way rather than in a self-conscious way.
We seem to be doing fine, though. Aren’t we?
It depends from what angle you look at it. If you mean to say many people are doing what they’re supposed to do most of the time, I guess in that respect we’re doing fine.
But in the sense of setting a foundation for a healthy natural organic kind of Yiddishkeit that’s sustainable in the long term, I think there are many problems. I think the fact that many people speak Yiddishkeit as a second language is not a healthy thing in the long run.
Why?
Because Yiddishkeit evolves very, very slowly, and the way it evolves is [as follows]: On the one hand, we maintain it very zealously. We keep all our minhagim, and we do everything exactly the way we’re supposed to. But at the same time, we need to adapt because circumstances change and you need to adapt gradually in an intuitive way that makes sense.
And the way to adapt in a very natural, organic, intuitive way that doesn’t break the system involves people having very healthy intuitions about what’s right and what’s wrong. When you speak Judaism as a second language, your healthy intuitions are not quite as robust as when you speak it as a first language.
To be clear, when you talk of Judaism evolving, you don’t mean what Reform and Conservative Jews did to Judaism. You mean something like Jews deciding to drop Yiddish in favor of English or Hebrew in the modern era.
Right, I’m talking about within the world of people who are shomer Torah u’mitzvos. I’m not talking about people who are attempting to change Yiddishkeit in order to align it with cultures on the outside. I’m talking about keeping Yiddishkeit true to itself under changing circumstances.
You spend much time in your book examining the worldview of Shimen – your classic old-time Jew – but you do so in part to argue that his kind of worldview and beliefs sustain societies long-term while the absence of them leads to all sorts of problems. For example, you argue interestingly in the book that the rejection of traditional religious worldviews has led to the cancel culture we see today. How so?
In the book, I compare two characters, one of whom is Shimen. The other one is Heidi, who’s cosmopolitan and liberal and doesn’t like the idea of Jews maintaining their own separate identity and ways. And one of the points I make is that Heidi [gives birth] to “Amber” [who symbolizes today’s “woke” generation].
Amber – unlike Heidi – comes to the world without any real culture, and what she does in the absence of any kind of tradition is invent her own, which is based on an ideology that all groups and genders are the same and everybody can choose their identity. And she ends up creating something that’s even more rigid than a religion.
You’re not allowed to distinguish between men and women, it’s your duty to perform a same-sex wedding if you’re a rabbi, you have a duty to address transgenders by their own chosen pronoun, etc. And [unlike Shimen,] Amber is very humorless about it.
Opponents of religion believe traditional religion is pernicious and all will be wonderful once we get rid of it. You seem to be arguing, though, that the story doesn’t end with the death of traditional religion. Something else will replace it. Is that correct?
Yes. You don’t get universal brotherly love if you abandon the restrictions on man’s base instincts that religion provides and if you abandon the notion of tribal loyalty that religion asks from us.
You just end up inventing all kinds of other bizarre religions that are more rigid and less open and less cooperative [than traditional religions]. It doesn’t lead where these people think it’s going to lead.
From The Jewish Press, December 30, 2020
In Defense of Religion
By: Moshe Koppel
It was in the kosher dining hall at Princeton where, in the 1980s, I lost my innocence. It was my first foray into life outside the strictly Orthodox Jewish confines of a yeshiva. Heidi was a graduate student in the humanities who had taken it upon herself to educate me about the special duties of the Jewish people to humanity. “How can you justify your narrow tribal loyalty and commitments? Isn’t the lesson of the Holocaust that we Jews must never put our parochial concerns ahead of those of others?” That was the moment I realized that I had never encountered true Orthodoxy before.
My own thoughts about Jewish obligation were somewhat less righteous than those of my interlocutor. My first lessons in the matter had been learned in the small shtiebel (prayer hall) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where my grandfather prayed along with his fellow Gerer Hasidim.
The regulars at this particular shtiebel were among the few survivors of their families and communities. They retained their loyalty to the ways in which they had lived before The War, but without beards or the fur hats (known as shtreimlekh, or in the case of the taller version worn by Gerers, spodeks) typically worn by Hasidim on Shabbat and holidays. They were God-fearing Jews, but they felt sufficiently at home with God to take liberties as necessary. They were worldly, cynical, and fiercely independent, but had chosen to remain loyal to the ways of their fathers. Although some were fully committed, others and maybe most might better be thought of as semi-lapsed Gerer Hasidim who nevertheless wouldn’t think of jumping ship after what had happened to their families.
My grandfather and Shimen, his best friend in the community, were of the latter variety. Shimen told many stories, all about the same topic. Here’s an example: a Nazi officer in the Lodz ghetto demanded that he hand over either his son or his daughter within 48 hours. One of Shimen’s profoundest sorrows, and he had many, was that his daughter sensed he had fleetingly thought to choose to keep his son. Up to the time both she and her brother were murdered, she never spoke to him again. After the war, Shimen got his hands on a pistol and went from house to house on a mission to extract Jewish children from the Polish families with whom they had been left when their parents were deported to the camps.
Elie Wiesel, who often prayed in that Gerer shtiebel, relates a story about Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in Auschwitz. One of his fellow inmates announced to the rest of the assembled in the barracks that though they had no wine, “we’ll take our tin cups and fill them with tears. And that is how we’ll make our kiddush (a holiday blessing made over wine) heard before God.” That inmate was Shimen. Of course, Shimen had no patience for drama, and whenever the story was told he would scrunch up his eyes behind his thick black-framed glasses and say, dismissively, “Nu, Wiesel. He makes a living telling maiselakh (tales) about me.”
The Gerer shtiebel gang were intense, they were angry, they could be funny in a biting sort of way, they were devoted. But one thing they had no patience for was high-minded pieties. They despised pomposity and self-righteousness. Their devotion to Yiddishkeit, old-fashioned Judaism, as a way of life, and to the Jews as a people, were as natural and instinctive as drawing breath.
The very cosmopolitan Heidi of Princeton patronized old Shimens as addlebrained relics out of touch with contemporary doctrines. First, Shimen’s old-fashioned views evince what Heidi regards as an immoral preference for the welfare of Jews over that of others. Second, Shimen is committed to social norms that are mediated by rabbis and thus, in Heidi’s view, insufficiently respectful of the autonomy of individuals. Third, Shimen’s understanding of the world is rooted in a set of beliefs that are, to Heidi’s understanding, ahistorical and unscientific.
Making the case for Shimen’s view of the world will require addressing in detail all three of Heidi’s claims—and I’ve written a book to do it. I’ll focus here, however, only on the third claim, the problem of belief. I should say up front that this focus is merely a matter of convenience and is not motivated by any conviction that the disagreements between Shimen and Heidi about how to live are second-order differences that follow inevitably from their irreconcilable beliefs about nature, history, and theology. On the contrary, my main point will be that the direction of the causality is exactly the opposite: virtues and traditions are primary and beliefs are derivative.
To begin, let’s get on the same page that Shimen was on as a boy in ĥeder (religious elementary school) in Poland long before the war.
God created the universe, including the laws of nature. These laws hold most of the time but can be broken when God sees fit to intercede in the course of events by performing miracles. God revealed Himself to the forefathers of the Jewish people, promising that their descendants would be plentiful, would face special challenges, and would reap special rewards.
Our ancestors, the chosen descendants of these forefathers, were enslaved in Egypt and redeemed by God’s hand amidst many miracles. The proto-nation redeemed from Egypt received the Torah in the desert at Sinai, through the agency of Moses, the greatest of all prophets. The received Torah consisted of the Written Torah, dictated by God to Moses in the precise words of the Five Books of Moses that we have today, along with an accompanying Oral Law that served as the basis of interpretation of the Torah. With God’s direct help, the nascent nation conquered the Land of Israel, as had been promised to its forefathers, established the Davidic line of kings, and built the Temple in Jerusalem. But then, in retribution for various sins, the First Temple, and eventually the Second Temple, were destroyed, and the Jews were banished to the four corners of the earth.
The subject matter of Jewish belief is Jewish practice.
The Written Torah and the Oral Law, as faithfully transmitted from Sinai and further interpreted by rabbis over all subsequent generations, are binding on all Jews. The law unfolds over generations through a guided process that accurately reveals its original intent: leading rabbis of each generation are divinely inspired, and the Jews as a nation possess the collective intuition of the “children of prophets,” though in diminishing degrees with the passage of time.
The Jews are rewarded and punished, collectively and individually, in accordance with their observance of God’s laws. Those who, for some reason, do not get their just deserts in this world are compensated or called to task in another world, obscure to us. One day, when they merit it, the Jews will be redeemed by God through the hand of the messiah and returned to the Land of Israel, where they will rebuild the Temple and live harmoniously according to God’s law. They will be ruled once again by kings from the line of David and by the renewed Sanhedrin, and will be free of the yoke of foreign nations. Ultimately, some of the dead will be resurrected and will share in this idyllic existence.
That, in a nutshell, is what Shimen—and every other ĥeder student in the past millennium—received as the basic truths of Judaism. Some of those ĥeder students went happily through life believing exactly that in a perfectly literal way. But others, including many who remained faithful to the tradition, found it more congenial, as their intellectual lives matured, to distinguish the essence of these beliefs from secondary elements or to interpret some aspects of this narrative in a more abstract form than the one they had received in ĥeder.
Heidi isn’t having any of it at any level of abstraction. Let’s see why.
Heidi is proud to be a rational person; she is committed to accepting only what follows from evidence and reason. In her view, this criterion is not met by any of the traditional Jewish beliefs I’ve just enumerated. She notes with no small amount of disdain that Shimen and those like him seem never to have critically contemplated any of their beliefs in the light of readily available scientific and historical facts.
Heidi strives to be objective, to believe only what an unbiased person would believe. In her view, such a person would not place Jews at the center of the cosmos. Many tribes imagine that the world revolves around their own petty comings and goings, and they are all obviously wrong. The Jews are just another such tribe. From an objective point of view, their myths about their own chosenness are delusional, if not dangerous.
If she bothers engaging with specific canonical Jewish beliefs at all, she doesn’t find much of value. It isn’t so much that these beliefs are demonstrably false as that they are far-fetched and there is no particular reason to believe them.
As far as Heidi can tell, modern cosmology, geology, and astronomy yield immeasurably more insight into the formation of heaven and earth than does the biblical narrative, and so does the theory of evolution concerning the origins of plant and animal life. She’s not quite sure what it means for God to have created these things—and she’s pretty sure Shimen doesn’t, either—but she’s reasonably confident that it doesn’t add much to the picture that scientists have painted.
The probability that Heidi intuitively assigns to any book having been written by God is vanishingly low, and there isn’t much in the Torah’s inconsistent patchwork of dubious legends and rituals that screams out to Heidi that she needs to revise her assessment with regard to this particular book.
Reports of miracles, in the Torah and elsewhere, are more plausibly explained as the products of imagination or deception than as actual breaches of the laws of nature. All modern tales of miracles with which Heidi is familiar are either the products of wishful thinking on the part of religious enthusiasts or misinterpretations of random events. Somebody has to win the lottery, but to the lucky winner it always looks like a miracle.
Heidi is also not persuaded by claims that rabbis, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired. Some of them are indeed unusually clever, but she finds it hard to fathom how men in direct contact with the Holy Spirit could be so wrong about so many things. The rabbis seem to live in a parallel universe in which insects are spontaneously generated from inorganic material, human and animal anatomy do not resemble any form recognizable to moderns, the earth is flat, the sun circles back behind an opaque sky at night, and provable theorems of geometry and trigonometry are false.
Nothing in Heidi’s experience suggests that the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished; as often as not, the opposite seems to be the case. The invention of an invisible world where things are evened out is an embarrassingly artificial rationalization that only highlights the salience of the problem.
The claim of chosenness and the belief that the entire course of human history is directed toward Jewish political redemption strike Heidi as nothing less than a form of national narcissism. As for resurrection, she has no clue what to make of it. If she were to be resurrected (in what form? at what age? with which memories and emotions preserved?), she could hardly imagine what connection her resurrected self would have with her present self and why she should care.
In short, for Heidi the whole package of canonical Jewish beliefs does not hold the slightest credibility or appeal. But does the package of ĥeder beliefs that Heidi rejects reflect the true substance and nature of the adult Shimen’s beliefs?
Consider first the substance of adult Shimen’s beliefs. Like any rational person, Shimen draws conclusions about the workings of nature, including human nature, from his own experience and from the reported experience of others. Nevertheless, Shimen differs from Heidi in that he does not presume to construct all his beliefs about the world on the basis of evidence alone. In particular, Shimen’s most fundamental religious beliefs can be defined only subsequent to and in light of his prior commitment to Judaism.
The canonical Jewish narrative we laid out above can be conveniently reformulated as elaborations of three principles: that the Torah was revealed to the Jewish people by God; that those who follow the Torah will be rewarded; and that Jewish history is directed toward messianic redemption. The rest of the narrative consists of amplifications and embellishments of these principles. Thus, the narrative of events leading to the Jews standing at Sinai gives context to the revelation of God’s will to a specific nation. Miracles performed at various historical junctures demonstrate God’s ability and determination to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. The rise and fall of the Davidic dynasty and of the First and Second Temples and the implied trajectory of subsequent Jewish history set the stage for future redemption.
Each of these three principles is an aspect of the single belief that Judaism is a directed process linking the Jewish past with the Jewish future. The aspects of this single claim are that (a) the process developed organically from some non-arbitrary point (“revelation”); (b) the process is headed toward some non-arbitrary point (“redemption”); and (c) participation (and non-participation) in the process is self-reinforcing (“reward and punishment”). The rest is commentary.
As an empirical matter, different people understand these principles at different levels of abstraction. That’s because there is a trade-off here between gripping the soul with the narrative power of concrete beliefs and gripping the intellect with the plausibility of abstract beliefs.
For some, it may be enough to believe that Judaism developed helter-skelter from some special origins in the murky past, but others might need the conviction that every detail of Judaism such as it is today can be traced directly to an original revelation in a specific place at a specific time.
For some, it may be enough that the process is limping forward in some vaguely understood positive direction, but others might need the ultimate destination of the process to be specified in terms of concrete political events and miraculous interventions, and for signs of the imminence and inevitability of such events to be already discernible.
For some, the satisfaction of leading a life bound to Torah is its own reward, but others might need to be assured that the righteous reap rewards and the wicked suffer punishments in the most prosaic of ways, preferably instantly and in plain sight.
Each person strikes the balance that works for him or her. In short, if we were to characterize actual Jewish belief such as it appears in the wild, we would find that different people codify it at different degrees of abstraction.
The key point for this stage of my argument is that the subject matter of Jewish belief is Jewish practice. The principles of Jewish belief, as we formulated them, are about the unfolding of Jewish tradition and the destiny of the people committed to that tradition, so that Jewish belief is empty without some prior definition of Jewish practice. This point becomes much sharper when we consider not the content of belief but the experience of belief, in particular for a Jew like Shimen.
So let’s take a deep breath and have an unflinching look at the true nature of Shimen’s belief.
Shimen’s two children, Leibele and Chaya Sara, were taken from his hands and murdered. He witnessed countless friends who died al kiddush Hashem (sanctifying God’s name) with the words of Shema or Ani Maamin, the most primal Jewish creeds,on their lips. He devotes his life to teaching young people about the suffering and the nobility of righteous Jews in the camps and ghettoes.
I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Shimen holds no naïve beliefs about God’s benevolence and the worldly rewards bestowed upon those who follow in His ways. What, then, does Shimen believe?
Shimen believes, as deeply and as viscerally as one can believe anything, that the Jewish way—Yiddishkeit—is the life force that animates the Jewish people. He believes that this Yiddishkeit is what sets apart the Jews, whom he watched die with nothing left but an inner dignity rooted in their devotion to each other and to their shared way of life. He believes in his gut that Yiddishkeit—not vague professions of high-minded virtue, but Yiddishkeit in all its detail—is so fundamentally right that it must be God’s will. He believes instinctively that devotion to the Jewish way is its own reward: he would not hesitate for a second to trade away the circumstances under which he lived, but he would not in a million years prefer to belong to any other people. And he believes that whatever is left of the Jews is sufficiently healthy at its core that it will regenerate and flourish.
Shimen’s approach to halakha is principally mimetic; he has internalized the ways of his parents and his community. The halakhic codes are just for fine-tuning. The same is true of his beliefs, which are thoroughly internalized. For Shimen, codified principles of Jewish belief are just ways of expressing that internalized belief; he doesn’t need them.
Still, if we were forced to codify Shimen’s internalized belief as a set of assertions, what might the code look like?
Shimen’s belief that the Jewish way expresses God’s will could, for example, be codified as the claim that God revealed the Torah at some specific time and place. Shimen’s belief that, whatever the circumstances, it is profoundly satisfying to be a God-fearing Jew might be codified as the claim that acting in accord with the Torah is rewarded and acting contrary to the Torah is punished. Shimen’s belief in the fundamental viability of the Jewish way of life could plausibly be codified as the claim that collective loyalty to this way of life will ultimately lead to its ascendancy.
In short, at least one codified version of Shimen’s ineffable beliefs would be more or less the set of claims that we’re calling Jewish belief.
But this codified version doesn’t capture what’s going on in Shimen’s mind; Shimen’s belief is emotional, not intellectual. If you insist that he expound on his belief, he’ll trot out the standard story, the one he learned in ĥeder. But the fact is that he hasn’t got the slightest interest in exploring evidence for the veracity of any of the historical claims on which his most basic commitments ostensibly rely.
To understand why this is so, we need to understand the relationship between his internalized belief and his assent to the claims surrounding it. Think of it this way. Shimen loves his children, Leibele and Chaya Sara. He remembers them as sweet and innocent and wise beyond their years, almost angelic. But were they actually as angelic as he chooses to remember them? Were they never cranky or ornery, foolish or immature? Should Shimen undertake archival research and interviews of surviving neighbors to replace his fond memories of Leibele and Chaya Sara with more accurate ones?
I hope you see how utterly idiotic this is. Shimen doesn’t love his children because they were angelic; he recalls them as angelic because he loves them. And recalling them this way only intensifies his love and his longing for them. Similarly, Jewish belief is only coherent and meaningful to those already committed to the Jewish way of life, who experience its vitality viscerally. For those who experience Jewish life as instinctively as Shimen, assent to codified Jewish belief might frame and intensify the experience, but is not the basis for that experience. And subjecting these claims to historical analysis makes as much sense to him as subjecting his memories of his children to historical analysis. Both his religious beliefs and his family memories are true for him not because of historical research but regardless of it.
Conversely, since these claims are merely outer expressions of inner experience, for those who don’t share some form of this experience, the claims are empty shells. Attempting to prove the truth of the canonical Jewish historical narrative from outside Jewish practice is nothing but a fool’s errand.
In Judaism, belief can only be the residue of practice.
From Tablet magazine, December 23, 2020
The Rise and Prospects of Israeli Conservatism
By: Moshe Koppel
For more than a half-century, public debate in Israel has been dominated by two large sets of issues: externally, how to work for peace while maintaining maximum security; domestically, how to navigate the relationship between religion and state. But when it came to social and economic policy, debate gave way to across-the-board consensus: for decades, it was taken largely for granted that welfare-state economics and heavy government regulation made up the sine qua non of the good society.
The past few years, however, have seen a subtle yet quite dramatic change. Several new issues have become prominent in public debate, and acutely so during the recent election campaigns. The deficiencies and limitations of the regulatory welfare state are now openly discussed. So is the question of how to define Israel as the Jewish nation-state, and how to do so in terms of its national character—a question distinct from the persistent debates about religion and state.
Such issues happen to be central to the concerns of conservatives and classical liberals—and, indeed, more and more openly conservative voices have been making their views known. Thus, for example, a host of young politicians have championed far-reaching free-market reforms. For another example, after years of debate and gestation the Knesset last year passed a law declaring and defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and listing a number of specific manifestations of that definition (among them its flag, anthem, calendar, language, connection to the Jewish Diaspora, and immigration and settlement policies). In May 2019. the first annual conference on the subject of conservatism in Israel, sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, was held in Jerusalem, attracting wide media attention and close to one-thousand energetic and mostly young participants.
Clearly, then, something is in the air. How has it happened, and where is it headed?
Let’s begin with a curious fact: while the Israeli government’s policies have, for the most part, been anything but conservative—socialist is a more accurate term—Israeli society itself is rather conservative. To understand this latter fact, consider the three key components of what George Will calls the “conservative sensibility”:
- Great respect for tradition and cautious skepticism of revolutionary change.
- Identification with and concern for family, community, and nation.
- Jealous defense of individual liberty and economic freedom, along with resistance to forced collectivism and social engineering.
How does Israel score by these markers?
- Throughout the country a fair number of religious traditions are widely and seriously observed.
- Israeli families are on average both tight-knit and large. The average Israeli woman bears more than three children and, uniquely among OECD countries, even those women who identify as non-religious produce children at levels above replacement. In addition, when it comes to concern for the nation, most young Israelis serve in the military and many volunteer for extended duty.
- In the “Start-Up Nation,” the entrepreneurial spirit is very much in evidence.
Typically, the conservative sensibility is translated into policy preferences in standard ways. For one thing, to the extent that the state must involve itself in moral matters, it should do so in a way that respects traditional values (though on this point some libertarians might well question why the state must be involved in moral matters at all). For another thing, the state should let free markets function with only the minimum necessary interference. Finally, the state should robustly defend its borders, its citizens, and its foreign interests.
This is where the curious Israeli divergence between society and policy comes most visibly into play. On moral matters, Israel has, for instance, rather loose abortion policies; more surprisingly (to an American observer), these policies engender almost no public debate. As for the economy, apart from the successful high-tech sector it continues to be highly regulated, and both the country’s educational system and its broadcast communications remain extremely centralized. The one area in which Israel does pursue a standard conservative policy is in the defense of its borders and its citizens; but this is mostly because, if it didn’t do so, it would soon find itself without the need for any policies at all.
Why has a conservative society like Israel pursued such typically progressive policies on moral and economic matters? The answer is rooted in the very nature of the Zionist ideology upon which the state was founded.
Zionism began as a revolutionary movement. True, this fact alone would not have sufficed to divert Israel irrevocably from conservative values. After all, no less a conservative than Edmund Burke was a great supporter of the American Revolution (though not the French Revolution); sometimes, nothing short of a revolution can preserve tradition and ensure freedom. The more pertinent factor had to do with the problem that the Zionist revolution set about to cure. That problem was, in a phrase, the disease of exile: a disease incubated by centuries of Jewish life under Gentile oppression and discrimination.
To cure this disease, Zionists sought to replace what they regarded as weak and desiccated communities with a strong and vital state, to replace religion-induced passivity with secular self-determination, and to replace horse-trading and huckstering with a return to the land and a centralized economy dedicated to the collective welfare of the citizenry.
These underlying values of the Zionist revolution have persisted until today, and that persistence explains in turn why free markets, and even prosperity itself, are seen by many in Israel as selfish, materialistic, and “exilic”: throwbacks to the circumstances of the pre-state European Diaspora. Similarly, any state policy that shows deference to traditional Jewish values is widely regarded as a form of religious coercion—another reminder of the claustrophobic circumstances of a segregated existence in which local rabbis might often serve as enforcers of behavioral standards.
These superannuated biases are slowly being outgrown, but policies rooted in them remain in place. Therefore, conservatives who wish to change those policies need to adapt their approach to Israeli sensibilities, and to pick their battles wisely.
With this in mind, we can begin to outline the key points of an Israeli conservative agenda.
The lowest-hanging fruit involves the economy, which is in radical need of decentralization. As things stand now, there are dozens of state-mandated cartels and monopolies still in place, mostly concentrated in the agricultural and food sectors. Israeli conservatives must forthrightly advocate the termination of each and every one of them, as well as the removal of all unnecessary tariffs.
As, again, things stand now, 93 percent of the land in Israel is still either owned or administered by the state. The housing market must be made more competitive by privatizing state-owned land, by reducing and simplifying housing regulations, and by reforming the tax policies that provide an incentive for municipalities to prevent construction within their boundaries.
The economic list continues. As things stand now, one-third of a company’s work force can force unionization on the majority. Israel desperately needs right-to-work laws as well as a policy of binding arbitration in the case of vital services, so that striking workers can’t shut down the country at whim.
And, as things stand now, the Education Ministry determines almost the entire curriculum for almost all Israeli schools. This must be undone. Restrictions must also be eased on television and radio broadcasting—Israel does not have even one non-state-owned radio station that broadcasts nationally.
All of this, challenging enough in itself, does not exhaust the to-do’s. Two other main areas need to be addressed, each of which is likely to be less familiar to Americans.
I’ve already hinted at the first, which involves defining the parameters of a Jewish nation-state and defending its special character. Roughly speaking, Israel needs to distinguish itself as a Jewish state through its immigration policies, its calendar, its language, and its symbols—and to do so without religious coercion and without limiting the rights of non-Jews. This is not a simple matter. It is basically what last year’s passage of Israel’s nation-state law made feasible, but the hard work of policy-making remains to be done.
Along the same lines, Israel must become more welcoming to olim: Jews returning to the land of their forebears. Here, a top priority is eliminating artificial licensing barriers that have kept many new arrivals out of competitive professions.
At the same time, the state must discourage illegal immigration. Here, too, the Knesset has acted by passing several laws designed to disincentivize such action. But the courts have struck these down.
Which leads to the second matter of special and urgent concern to Israeli conservatives: namely, the need to curb Israel’s judicial bureaucracy.
It would be hard to overestimate the powers that this bureaucracy has assumed unto itself. All limitations have long since been eliminated on who can petition the court (standing) and what kinds of cases the court can hear (justiciability). The grounds for ruling a law or a government action unconstitutional—and bear in mind that Israel has no constitution—have been so unreasonably expanded as effectively to allow the Supreme Court to intervene whenever and on whatever grounds it happens to disagree with a given law or action.
Moreover, after unilaterally declaring Israel’s Basic Laws to possess constitutional status (and hence to form the grounds for striking down ordinary statutes), the Court now threatens to strike down last year’s nation-state law—which is itself a Basic Law. As if that weren’t enough, the justices of the Supreme Court have turned themselves into a review panel for government appointments of every kind, and, critically, hold veto power over all appointments to the Court itself.
As this unchecked judicial power has been used in the aggressive pursuit of a progressive agenda on every front, Israeli conservatives will accomplish very little until they find a way to restrain the Court as well as the entire judicial bureaucracy and especially the Court-empowered office of the Attorney General.
This, then, is the multifront battleground on which Israeli conservatives must fight.
Up until now—and despite dealing with, by Israeli standards, fairly sympathetic government coalitions—Israeli conservatives have won a few battles but lost many more. To return where I began, however, there is this encouraging note: in public discourse, and in the “war of ideas,” conservatives and classical liberals have been gaining ground in Israel for nearly a decade, and are beginning to affect significantly the tenor of public discussion. In the long run, the character of the Jewish state will be determined not by the Supreme Court but, as is proper in a democracy, by the court of public opinion and in the voting booth.
This essay has been adapted from a talk given on November 10 at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.
From Mosaic magazine, January 2, 2020
More on Moshe Koppel
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/moshe-koppel/
https://thelehrhaus.com/author/moshekoppel/
https://jewishaction.com/cover-story/artificial-intelligence-the-newest-revolution-in-torah-study/
https://traditiononline.org/book-review-moshe-koppel-judaism-straight-up-why-real-religion-endures/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcsFiGIeeEA
https://fathomjournal.org/book-review-judaism-straight-up-why-real-religion-endures/