The Religious Zionists Can't Have it Both Ways
Jan 15
posted by Jewish Response Staff in
Current Events
| 0 Comments
The Religious Zionists, known as Mizrachi, can't have it both ways. They must either listen to the Song of Songs, or hear the singing of their partners in rebellion against G-d.
Recently, everyone is talking about the Israeli soldiers from the religious Zionist movement who walked out of an army event in order to avoid hearing female singers. (Jewish law prohibits a man from hearing the singing of any woman outside of his immediate family.)
It seems that the Israeli government fails to understand what a great service the religious Zionists provide them. The Israeli government badly needs Jewish identity, in order to claim based on the Bible that the Holy Land is theirs. They also need continuity – at a time when secular Israelis are increasing joining the peace movement or defecting from the country altogether. The religious Zionists – the Mizrachi movement – deserve the credit for building a bridge between the two irreconcilable opposites: Judaism and Zionism. They are increasingly making up the backbone of the IDF.
If the secular Israelis understood this better, they would do their best to accommodate the religious soldiers – instead of penalizing them for trying to observe what is left of their Judaism.
Alternatively, it could be that the secular government is playing a game with Mizrachi, arousing their zealous opposition to a woman singing so that they can appear more religious and give the army a more Jewish image.
For the Mizrachists, the bitter irony is that because they refuse to listen to the Oaths spoken by King Solomon in the Song of Songs, which forbid the Jewish people from ending exile early, they are now faced with another kind of song, the kind prohibited by Jewish law.
For us, the lesson here is that just as anti-Semitism has become more dangerous now that it is camouflaged as Zionism (since anti-Semitism and Zionism really have the same goal - to keep Jews from living peacefully together with non-Jews), Zionism has become more dangerous now that it is camouflaged as the Torah and religion.