Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
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Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
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Two years ago, I gave a talk in Philadelphia about everyone’s favorite word, Zionism.
It was a Jewish Federation-type crowd, full of smart, thoughtful people who care deeply about Israel… and, like the rest of us, live in a world where the word “Zionism” has become radioactive.
Now, I see the basic definition of a Zionist as someone who simply believes in the Jewish people’s right to govern themselves in their ancestral homeland. It says nothing about borders, or governments, or policies, or a relationship to the other people who live in the land. Those are open questions with infinitely adaptable answers.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, the word Zionism came to mean… everything. Settlements. Netanyahu. Jewish supremacy. White supremacy. Colonialism. Capitalism.
The word itself has become a Rorschach test, an infinitely malleable shorthand for every conceivable grievance.
Which is exactly why I went to give this talk in Philadelphia. It’s kind of my job to strip all that away. To remind people of the original “Zionism,” before it was co-opted and redefined for us by outsiders.
The talk was going pretty well. People were nodding and asking smart questions. The energy in the room was good. So of course, it was the perfect moment for a major curveball, followed by an existential crisis.
As the evening wound down, a man in the audience raised his hand to ask me a question I had somehow never been asked before. I’m gonna call him Bill. (He looked like a Bill to me, I don’t know.)
“Listen,” Bill started. “Everything you’re saying about Zionism makes sense. And I think that despite all the challenges, the Jewish people’s return to their homeland was a good thing. But… you, Noam, you haven’t acknowledged the dangers of nationalism. Especially when it’s mixed with religion.
“So can you talk more about Religious Zionism?” Bill asked. “Because people who say they hate Zionism, they’re not just responding to this idea that Jews should have self determination. Broadly speaking, that sounds fine. They’re responding to the whole religious element. The messianism. The controversial figures in the Israeli government, like Itamar Ben Gvir or Betzalel Smotrich.”
By this point, I was starting to sweat a little. But Bill was still going.
“The attacks on Palestinian villages. The potential annexation of the West Bank. The politicians who talk about banishing Palestinians from their homes. The people talking about re-settling Gaza. THAT’s the problem, Noam. Some Jews are doing terrible things in the name of Zionism, or, to be more accurate, religious Zionism. And you, Noam Liyor Weissman, have failed to address that at all.”
OK, Bill didn’t use my full name. But it felt like he did. And as the question hung in the air, waiting, I was wrestling with two competing thoughts.
My mind was shouting: okay, Bill, relax, you are totally exaggerating!
But my mind was also shouting, Bill, I get exactly why you think that.
Part of me wished that Bill had thrown me a softball, rather than a difficult question worth truly grappling with. But wasn’t that why I had schlepped to Philly in the first place? To seriously address complicated issues? Still, I didn’t expect this question to make me feel so… activated. Emotional. Because when I hear the words Religious Zionism, I personally don’t think about messianism, or Itamar Ben Gvir, or Betzalel Smotrich. I definitely don’t. And I definitely don’t think about driving Palestinians from their homes.
In fact, the words religious Zionism conjure the absolute OPPOSITE of all of that for me. Religious Zionism makes me think about my parents, Pam and Neil Weissman, the kindest, gentlest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever known. It makes me think of my grandparents, who were inspired by the euphoria of 1967 and the deep Jewish yearning to come back home. It makes me think of my teachers in yeshiva in Israel – deeply empathic people profoundly connected to the land. It makes me think of all of the proud Jews who believe deeply in studying Torah, serving their country, and taking responsibility for the Jewish people. That’s who I think of. People who work every day to create a society animated by and anchored in Jewish values.
And it makes me think of myself, too. Because as much as I want to resist a label, a breezy shorthand, I have to admit: this one more or less fits. I was raised in a religious Zionist home, and I’m raising my own children the same way. I was the principal of a religious Zionist high school. By all metrics, I’m a religious Zionist.
But that’s the problem with labels, isn’t it? Depending on your vantage point, the same words can conjure vastly different meanings. When an Israeli political party literally brands itself as quote “Religious Zionism,” – AKA HaTzionut HaDatit – well, that complicates things. Because without going into details, the head of that party, Bezalel Smotrich, has said and done a LOT of things that are simply not MY version of Religious Zionism. (But let’s be clear – it is other people’s version of Religious Zionism.)
So Bill was right to press me. He was right to want to understand the relationship between Zionism and religion. He was right to question whether religious Zionism is a different animal than just Zionism. To ask: what makes a person a religious Zionist, not just to a Zionist who identifies as religious?
And is this identity as dangerous as Bill claimed?
Are people – both Jewish and otherwise – reacting to the excesses of people who claim to be religious Zionists? For that matter, have we established consensus on what religious Zionism actually IS? And what does the answer mean for Israeli citizens? Or for Jews in the Diaspora?
See what I mean? Total existential crisis. Thanks a lot, BILL.
So Bill, if you’re listening, consider this series on Religious Zionism my belated response to your phenomenal, thought-provoking question.
This week, we’ll delve into the history of religious Zionism. Where did it come from? What were its aims? How did it differ from plain old secular Zionism? Next week, we’ll get a little more contemporary. We’ll talk about the evolution of the movement from the 1970s through today. We’ll talk about settlements and messianism and land for peace. About peace activists and political agitators, each inspired by their own vision, and version, of religious Zionism. And we’ll unpack the most significant question of all: what visions of the future can Religious Zionism offer Israelis and Jews around the world? And in a bonus third episode, you’ll hear something incredibly special, a sitdown conversation with Professor Yehuda Mirsky, one of the foremost experts in the person many would call the father of Religious Zionism, even if he never called himself that.
It’s a big mandate for a short podcast series.
One honest caveat before we begin. This is a series about a hundred and fifty year movement with an enormous cast of characters, and as much as I tried, there is simply no way I can give everyone their due. For every rabbi or thinker I mention, there are a dozen more who shaped this story and didn’t make the cut, not because they don’t matter, but because I had to make brutal choices in this episode. Take Rabbi Shlomo Goren. He shows up later blowing the shofar at the Western Wall in 1967, and again for his writings on the Temple Mount, but he was also the IDF’s first Chief Rabbi and one of the great halakhic minds of the movement. He – and the rest of the people I’m about to name – deserve their own episodes, not a cameo. Like Rabbi Chaim Druckman, who built much of the Bnei Akiva and Mizrachi world that raised generations of religious Zionists, including me. Or Zevulun Hammer, or Nechama Leibowitz, or Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, or Rabbi Eliezer Melamed – these are all important figures in the history and present of religious Zionist thinking, and they sadly don’t get airtime here. So if someone you love isn’t in this series, or only gets thirty seconds when they deserve thirty minutes, it’s not a judgment call about their importance. It’s just math.
So with that, ready? Let’s freakin’ go.
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Chapter One: Lovesick for Jerusalem
I don’t generally think of rabbis as love poets. There’s not a ton of romance in parsing the finer points of Jewish law. But there’s a surprising amount of poetry in the Jewish tradition, from the deeply erotic Shir HaShirim, aka Song of Songs, to the passionate religious piyutim, or liturgical poems, of the medieval mystics.
Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi’s Libi B’Mizrach, or My Heart is in the East, falls somewhere on the tamer end of the spectrum. It’s a poem of passionate longing for Zion, composed in Muslim Spain sometime in the 12th century, during the 88-year-period of Crusader control over Jerusalem, when Jews were barred from the city.
The original is in Hebrew – yup, contrary to popular opinion, the language never “died,” but that’s a story for another time. Here’s the English translation.
My heart is in the east, and the rest of me at the edge of the west.
How can I taste the food I eat? How can it give me pleasure?
How can I keep my promise now, or fulfill the vows I’ve made while
Zion remains in the Cross’s reign, and I in Arab chains?
With pleasure I would leave behind all the good things of Spain,
If only I could gaze on the dust of our ruined Holy Place.
My Heart is in the East is probably the most famous expression of the Jewish people’s “love of Zion,” outside of the Hebrew Bible itself. So I promise: I’m not pooh-poohing or dismissing it when I say that the poem slots neatly into millennia of Jewish longing for the Promised Land.
It’s the heart-cry of a people who pray facing East, towards Jerusalem. It’s a longing embedded in the liturgy, in our calendar, in our weddings and our funerals: do not forget Jerusalem.
The longing goes deeper than prayer and poetry. Over the centuries, many Jews did return to Zion. Or tried to, anyway.
100 years after Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi wrote this poem, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, aka the Ramban, aka Nachmanides, arrived in Jerusalem. The Crusaders had been vanquished, but the holy city was in ruins. In a corner of the Old City, close to the Temple Mount, Nachmanides established a synagogue that stands to this day.
Later, after the expulsion of all Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, thousands of Sephardic Jews moved to the Ottoman-controlled Land of Israel, settling mostly in the holy, mystical city of Tzfat, Safed. Soon, this city was a global center for the study of Jewish law and Kabbalah.
There were more organized attempts too. In 1558, Don Joseph Nasi, a Portuguese-Jewish diplomat and advisor to the Ottoman Sultan, leased the ruined city of Tiberias and surrounding villages, hoping to build an autonomous, self-sustaining sanctuary for Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition.
Then there were the scholars of the 18th century who encouraged their students to make the trek to the Holy Land, believing that redemption would arrive only when the Jews returned home. The Vilna Gaon, Elijah Kramer – Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman – never got there, but hundreds of his students did. From Ethiopia, the ascetic and scholar Abba Mahari led his community towards the Promised Land in 1862 – a failed journey that few survived.
I could go on, but you get the point: in Jewish practice, the Land of Israel is inextricable from Judaism itself. But it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that this ancient longing collided with modernity. With politics. With a movement.
700 years after Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi lamented his distance from the Holy Land, another rabbi named Yehuda – Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai – channeled his longing into action.
A young Rabbi Alkalai was leading the Sephardic Jewish congregation of Semlin, in what is today Serbia. He was inspired by the nationalism in the air. But it was the 1840 Damascus Affair that turned him into a full-blown political Zionist – though that term didn’t exist yet. The term Zionist didn’t exist.
In February of 1840, a Catholic friar named Father Thomas went missing in Damascus, along with his Muslim servant Ibrahim Amara. Now, Father Thomas was known to have been involved in some shady business dealings, and most historians assume that he and Amara were killed by business rivals or unhappy customers. We don’t know for sure because the bodies have never been found.
But Father Thomas’ order – the Capuchin Franciscans, I think that’s how you pronounce it – were not historians. They were 19th century Catholics, still 125 years away from the Vatican II declaration that formally absolved all Jews of their collective culpability for the death of Jesus. In other words, their religious tradition automatically painted all Jews as god-killers. From there, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to The Jews killed them to use their blood to make matza. And when bones were found in the sewers under the Jewish quarter, well, it was game over – even though experts couldn’t verify whether the bones were even human.
You can guess what happened next. Roundups, detentions, torture, forced confessions, the death by torture of Jewish community leaders. The kidnapping of 60 Jewish children by local authorities, in an effort to make their parents “confess.” But it was the willingness of the European press to repeat and even endorse the blood libel that shocked so many Jews.
There was, however, a glimmer of hope. And that was Jewish solidarity. European and American Jews lobbied local leaders hard to intervene, and the British Queen and the US Secretary of State spoke out against the arrests. But it was only after a delegation of prominent Jews lobbied the sultan in Constantinople that the remaining prisoners were released. (By the way, the charges were never officially dropped, and Father Thomas’ gravestone still says he was killed by Jews. Nice. Lovely.)
Back in Semlin, Rav Alkalai was struck by an all-too-familiar epiphany: Antisemitism is never going to end. Not in the Arab world. Not among Catholics. Not among the so-called enlightened Western Europeans. Which meant that the only answer to the so-called Jewish question was teshuvah.
Usually, we translate teshuvah as repentance. But the Hebrew root shuv literally means return. And this was exactly what Rav Alkalai proposed in his 1843 treatise Minchat Yehuda, dedicated to “our brothers, the children of Israel, who dwell in the city of Damascus.” The Jewish people’s physical return to a Jewish land, a Jewish language, and a shared national life – exactly as the ancient prophets had predicted.
Anyway, this mass return to the ancient Jewish land sounded like a pipe dream, but Alkalai had thought it through, inspired by an earlier thinker named Rabbi Bibas, as well as very concrete directions in the Hebrew Bible. (Look at Deuteronomy 30:1-3: once Jews physically arrive in the Land, God will follow.)
Rabbi Alkalai proposed building a Great Assembly of Jewish leaders, raising funds for buying land, and reviving Hebrew as a spoken language. Of course, all of this required money and influence, so the rabbi appealed to wealthy and powerful Jews for help. Prominent Jews had stepped in to save the surviving Jewish prisoners of Damascus. But what if they used their influence to ensure that vulnerable Jews would never need saving again?
Now, you might have noticed that I’ve been talking about 19th century Zionism for a while without even mentioning the father of the movement, Theodor Herzl. That’s because Herzl wasn’t even born yet. You know who was, though?
His grandpa, Simon Loeb Herzl, who just happened to be one of Rabbi Alkalai’s few disciples. Elie Mischel, editor of the Hamizrachi magazine, puts it plainly: “Scholars have traced the line from there: Bibas to Alkalai, Alkalai to the Herzl family and from that home to the man who convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897.” In other words, there was no political Zionism without religious Zionism. The entire movement was based on centuries of religious longing, expressed in the new language of nationalism. Herzl just stripped out the religious angle.
Rav Alkalai did eventually make it to the Land of Israel, but he didn’t live to see many of his ideas find widespread acceptance among the world’s Jews. Neither did his contemporary Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who was making a similar argument in Prussia.
But Rabbi Samuel Mohilever did.
Today, Rabbi Mohilever is credited with co-founding the Hovevei Zion movement. Literally: the lovers of Zion. Like Alkalai, he was galvanized by horror – in his case, the brutal pogroms of 1881. And like Rabbi Alkalai, he understood that the best way forward was to appeal to wealthy donors. So in 1882, he traveled to Paris to convince Baron Edmond de Rothschild to bankroll the small, struggling Jewish farming settlements in Palestine.
It worked, and the Baron soon earned the nickname HaNadiv HaYadua, the known philanthropist, and sometimes even “the father of the Yishuv” for financing the purchase and development of more than 125,000 acres of land across Ottoman Palestine.
Rabbi Mohilever and his ideological successors didn’t care that the Baron was not religiously observant. The rabbi’s theology held that simply buying the land was a religious act. So was planting a vineyard, draining a swamp, and establishing the first Jewish-owned factory in the area. As he put it in a letter read at the First Zionist Congress in 1897: “the resettlement of our country … is one of the fundamental commandments of our Torah.”
As Rabbi Mohilever and his predecessors saw it, God wasn’t going to hand over national redemption on a silver platter. God wanted human action, right here on earth. And it didn’t matter if the work was done by deeply traditional Jews who kept their heads covered and their sidelocks long, or by atheists who ate sandwiches and plowed fields on Yom Kippur. It was the work itself that would bring redemption, not merely the piety of the worker.
By the time the First Zionist Congress rolled around in 1897, this idea had caught on among some devout Jews.
Not all. Not by a long shot. Which brings us to our next chapter: the religious case against Zionism.
Chapter Two: The Three Oaths
The Babylonian Talmud is full of all sorts of unexpected stuff. What to do if your ox gores your neighbor. Whether you can send a proxy to get married in your stead. How to spot the demons lurking around us at all times. It’s a wild ride. So you’d expect its most controversial passage – at least, controversial among Jews – to be pretty, pretty, pretty spicy.
You’d be wrong.
Here it is. Tractate Ketubot, page 111a, outlines three oaths.
- The Jews must not return to Israel “as a wall” – i.e., in a mass, organized movement.
- The Jews must not rebel against the nations of the world.
- The nations of the world must not subjugate the Jews excessively.
Now, we can sit here and argue about exactly what all this means until the cows come home. The rabbis of the Talmud certainly did. So have Jewish scholars across the generations. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that the three oaths became a lightning rod.
For many devout Ashkenazi Jews, the Talmud was crystal-clear: the Jewish people would remain in exile until God chose to redeem them. Which meant that anyone who tried to end the exile prematurely was violating God’s will.
Again, most early Zionists didn’t particularly care about God’s will. Most of the movement’s early leaders were proudly secular. Many called for the creation of a “New Jew” who would work the land instead of studying Torah, who would profane Hebrew – the holy tongue! The language of the Torah! – with ordinary, secular conversation. Some early Zionist thinkers went even further, insisting on throwing aside Judaism for some new, nonreligious Hebrew identity, whatever THAT meant. So I don’t blame the devout Ashkenazi Jews of the period for VERY REASONABLY asking: yo, what are you even trying to redeem us from? Antisemitism? Or Judaism itself? Not to mention: Who are you to preempt God’s plans?
Honestly, the rabbis didn’t even need to point to the Three Oaths to ground their objections. All it took was a look at the movement trying to lure their children away from Torah to decide, nope, this Zionism stuff is not for me. All of which made Ashkenazi Religious Zionists – like Rabbis Kalischer and Mohilever – the minority among traditional Ashkenazi Jews, aka Jews who spent the long years of exile in Christian Europe.
But Sephardic Jews – like Rav Bibas and Rabbi Alkalai – took a completely different approach to modern Zionism, and, in fact, to Judaism itself. (For the record, when I talk about Sephardic Jews, I am referring both to Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Jews who settled in the Muslim world.)
These differences are super-complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain them as simply as I can.
In Europe, the Enlightenment and modernity produced a dramatic split. Some Jews – including many early Zionists! – rebelled completely against religious tradition. Others responded by becoming stricter, more conservative, more insular, and more exacting in their approach to observance. You were either religious or you were secular. No shades of gray. It was Ashkenazi Jews who adopted denominations – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform – each with their own set of rules and norms.
But among Sephardic Jews, such divisions were far less pronounced.
Of course many Sephardic Jews were, and are, strictly observant. But many saw themselves as traditional – neither entirely secular, nor entirely observant. In the Sephardic world, faith doesn’t necessarily translate to meticulous observance.
So when political Zionism began making waves, Sephardic Jews were all in. Even deeply observant Jews didn’t worry too much about the dangers of modernity or the threat of secular Zionism. And when Israel was established in 1948, and the Arab world violently disgorged nearly 1 million Jews, these new immigrants came to view the State of Israel as a lifeline. Nearly 80 years later, you’re far, far less likely to find a Sephardic anti-Zionist than an Ashkenazi one.
Again, these are generalizations. But the takeaway here is that Zionism, both religious AND secular, fit very comfortably into the Sephardic view of the world. For devout Ashkenazi Jews, particularly in the early years of the movement, it was a lot more complicated.
And that’s what makes the early Ashkenazi Religious Zionists so compelling. Today, they’re commonplace. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Religious Zionist rabbis of Europe were in the minority. The secularism of the overall movement didn’t scare them off. In fact, the philosopher Micah Goodman points out that it was exactly this secularism that allowed observant Jews to become political Zionists in the first place.
Sounds counter-intuitive at first, but think about it. Political Zionism had never claimed to be a religious movement. It wasn’t interested in “redeeming” Judaism or rewriting Jewish observance. If it had been, traditional rabbis would have resisted it as a rival theology. But Herzl’s Zionism didn’t make claims about Judaism per se, but about Jews. Specifically, about Jewish safety and survival. And when the Sixth Zionist Congress rolled around in 1903, safety and survival were the only items on the agenda. The world had changed. Would the movement change with it?
Chapter 3: Uganda
Today, Kishinev is the capital of Moldova, home to a few thousand Jews. But in 1903, it was 40% Jewish, a relatively prosperous corner of the Pale of Settlement.
At least, until the pogrom that changed everything.
We talked about Kishinev in an earlier episode, which is linked in the show notes, so I’m not going to rehash why THIS pogrom changed the course of Jewish history in a way that others didn’t. All you need to know was that the world was horrified by the carnage.
Meanwhile, Theodor Herzl was frantic. He’d been saying it for years, and now maybe SOMEONE powerful would listen: the Jews needed safety, and they needed it now.
Turns out, someone was listening. Someone with a lot of power and influence. Someone who controlled a ridiculous amount of the world’s territory and had the authority to just… hand it over. British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain needed someone to watch out for England’s interests in East Africa. The Jews needed a safe haven. It was win-win.
Or it would have been if the Jewish people had any historical or spiritual connection at all to East Africa, which they didn’t. And if the British settlers had actually wanted the Jews there, to say nothing of the native East Africans, who were, of course, not consulted.
But Kishinev had changed the calculus. Jews needed safety and they needed it fast. So Herzl brought the “Uganda Plan” to the Sixth Zionist Congress of 1903, making sure to emphasize that this would be temporary, just a stopover on the way to the Promised Land. Moses wandered forty years, he argued. We can take a detour.
When he finished his speech, the hall exploded. The socialists tore into him. The Russian delegation stormed out, wailing and rending their shirts as though they were mourners sitting shiva. Yes! The Russians! The very same people who were living through the pogroms screamed and accused Herzl of betrayal. Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Russian journalist, who was covering the Congress for an underground socialist newspaper, declared that the Zionist movement was finished. (Nerd corner alert: that journalist was Leon Trotsky. History is completely insane.)
But not everyone was rending their garments in anguish. Once the delegates collected themselves, the Congress proposed sending an investigative commission to Uganda – and the motion passed.
Among the delegates who voted YES was Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, student and disciple of Rabbi Samuel Mohilever. If Rabbi Mohilever had opened the door to a religious-secular partnership, Rabbi Reines walked right through it. He had founded the Mizrachi movement — the organized religious wing of political Zionism – in 1902, throwing his full support behind Herzl’s secular and political Zionism. And yet, here he was, voting in FAVOR of sending an exploratory expedition to East Africa, a region of the world with absolutely no historical or religious significance to the Jewish people.
Why? Why would a RELIGIOUS ZIONIST – a man who believed that settling the land of Israel was a divine imperative – suddenly support this crazy plan?
Today, when so many of us think of Religious Zionists, our minds go to the extremes. To the so-called hilltop youth setting up shop on every hill in Judea. To settlers. To people who swear that the West Bank is holy ground and refuse to cede an inch.
But as the story of Rav Reines demonstrates, that is not how the movement started. Back in 1903, the religious wing of the Zionist movement was ready to give up on any part of the Land of Israel – at least temporarily – in exchange for safety.
Why?
Two words: pikuach nefesh. In English, “saving a life.” This is the trump card that beats almost every other commandment. There is very, very little that is as important to Jews as staying alive, and you’re permitted to do almost anything to save a life – either your own or someone else’s. So if a detour in East Africa would save Jewish lives, Rabbi Reines was all in.
In 1904, the movement did send a delegation to East Africa. But they came back with a pretty dismal report, claiming that the land was uninhabitable. The Seventh Zionist Congress officially rejected the proposal in 1905, at which point the Brits rescinded the offer. Very “you can’t fire me, I quit” energy there, Britain.
The Uganda plan was dead in the water, but the Zionist movement was stronger than ever. And it was about to get an unexpected boost from an unlikely source: a mystic whose writings would echo well into the future, changing religious Zionism in unexpected ways.
Chapter 4: The Mystic
From the outside, the Volozhin Yeshiva didn’t look like much. (I’ve actually been there.)
But looks can be deceiving. From 1803 to 1939, this was THE school where the most brilliant Jewish boys went to argue and debate and soak up thousands of years of scholarship. It was a deeply traditional place, its Talmud classes packed full each day while the few state-mandated secular classes sat more or less empty.
Not exactly the kind of school that you’d expect to churn out diehard Zionists.
I’m going to tell you more about Volozhin in two weeks, in the conversation with Yehuda Mirsky. But for our purposes, I need to tell you about an incredible Volozhin alum. One who had brilliant and innovative ideas, but who sadly did not live to see his ideas take hold. That far-ranging influence would come many years after his death.
But the ideas of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook are the hinge upon which this entire story turns.
Rabbi Kook, or Rav Kook was a brilliant scholar, but he was also a mystic, certain that underneath the surface of ordinary life lay a complex and invisible spiritual machinery. And whether they knew it or not, all human beings – even die-hard atheists – helped keep this machinery going.
So when Rav Kook took a position as the Chief Rabbi of Jaffa in 1904, he was certain that this machinery was at work.
Just… not how anyone could have expected or predicted.
On the one hand, the Jews were returning to the Land of Israel, just as the prophets had prophesied. On the other, these early Zionists were not only secular, but often anti-religious, who viewed Judaism as old-fashioned religious superstition.
So how could he, a rabbi!, a man who loved God and observed Jewish law stringently, POSSIBLY view this return to the land, by THESE particular people, as not just a good thing but a slice of divine redemption?
After observing the secular pioneers work from sunup til sundown and then dance under the stars, he found his answer in Kabbalah.
Now, Rav Kook was a kabbalistic genius, and I am, well, not, so bear with me as I try to unpack exactly what that means.
The kabbalah states that the Jewish people have a collective soul, known as Knesset Yisrael. Yes, we all have our own individual souls – but we also have a stake in the collective spiritual essence of the Jewish people (if you’re Jewish, that is), which is bigger than any one person and greater than the sum of its parts. And no matter what’s happening with us on an individual level, the collective soul of the Jewish people is always yearning for God.
But how does it express that yearning? Through the individual. And each individual has their own way of drawing closer to God, whether they know it or not. Their own way of serving and nourishing the collective.
Which meant that these pioneers craved God, too. They just didn’t know it. They rebelled not because they hated God, but because they secretly longed for Him. And though they might not have thought of themselves as part of a spiritual collective, Rav Kook saw their work as an expression of the collective soul’s devotion to God. Even the most secular, anti-religious pioneer came to the Holy Land to build a Jewish home and ensure the safety of future generations of Jews. What was that devotion to other Jews, if not an expression of the collective soul?
This concept was REVOLUITIONARY. Where other rabbis of his background looked at the secular Zionists and saw an abomination, Rav Kook saw a divine spark, an indispensable ingredient for the coming of the Messiah. And in response, most secular Zionists treated this eccentric, mystical scholar with the same deep respect he showed them.
In 1913, Rav Kook, along with other rabbis, embarked on a month-long journey to visit the tiny new farming settlements along the Galilee. Rav Kook and his colleagues hoped to encourage these completely secular farmers to maintain Jewish traditions, particularly those related to agriculture. (Side note: The Torah is very particular about the agriculture of the Holy Land.) But he had no interest in coercion or guilt. Instead, as he told the farmers of Poriya, quote, “we have to bind together all Jews, from the oldest rabbi in Jerusalem to the youngest laborer in Poriya.”
And then, he showed them exactly what that looked like. Later that evening, he took off his own coat and offered it to a watchman on duty, who was wearing a Bedouin cloak. As the two swapped their outerwear, Rav Kook said: “I wore your clothes, and you wore mine. We’ve exchanged on the outside. Let us exchange on the inside too. Let us join together in our hearts.” And then he danced with the farmers of Poriya, deep into the night. The chief rabbi and the farmhands, linking hands under the stars.
Because ultimately, Rav Kook believed the Jewish return would renew the religion itself. That the old forms of Judaism, shaped by centuries of exile, would soon meet the energy of national revival.
You can call this a kind of spiritual nationalism. But Rav Kook did not like that term. As Yehuda Mirsky writes, quote:
“Kook categorically denies that Jewish nationalism is akin to non-Jewish nationalism, because the former is guided not by passion but the mind, and thus knows that its true vocation is an ethical mission for the benefit of all humanity.”
But back to the story. Rav Kook believed that nationalism unmoored from Jewish moral tradition could easily become chauvinistic, xenophobic, and violent. If it didn’t further a larger religious and ethical mission, he wasn’t interested. As he saw it, the Jews’ return to the land of Israel should be a blessing to all of humanity.
Keep that in the back of your mind; we’ll return to it later.
As is so often the case with visionaries, Rav Kook’s ideas never quite took off in his lifetime. To the secularists, he was still a strictly observant rabbi with rigid religious demands. Some even found his theology insulting. Turns out some people didn’t appreciate being told that they don’t know their own minds.
Meanwhile, to many in the religious establishment, Rav Kook was rubber-stamping heresy. Turns out some deeply religious people didn’t appreciate lines like “the souls of this generation’s sinners come from a higher place than the souls of the pious.” (Yup, he said that.)
And both sides had good reason to ask, hey, Rabbi, who made YOU the interpreter of everyone’s soul?
But most ordinary people, who fell somewhere in between “fanatical atheist” and “religious fanatic,” loved Rav Kook, no matter their religious affiliation.
So when the rabbi passed away in 1935, more than 80,000 people lined the streets of Jerusalem for his funeral. Shops and cinemas closed. Everyone showed up to honor him: religious Jews, secular Zionists, political leaders, and ordinary folks. But they had turned out to honor the man, not necessarily his ideas. Because Rav Kook’s ideas were nowhere close to mainstream. The official religious Zionist movement – Mizrachi – shied away from his mysticism. Theirs was a practical Zionism: work with the secular Zionists, build institutions, participate in public life, and leave the messianic questions alone.
They could not have predicted the seismic change that would soon be upon them.
Chapter 5: Politeness
On May 14, 1948, a modern movement 50 years in the making finally achieved its aims. An ancient aspiration had been, miraculously, fulfilled. (And I know, in a history podcast, I shouldn’t say miraculous. But that’s how it felt.) And suddenly, the theoretical became real. The State of Israel was reborn, and after 1,900 years, Jews were a sovereign people once more.
Last time around, they had been ruled by a king. This time, they established a parliamentary republic, with various political parties fighting over the parliament’s 120 seats. They were a diverse and often fractious bunch. The first Knesset of 1949 boasted a Communist party, an Arab party, a party concerned almost entirely with the role of women… as well as the “United Religious Front,” a union of four religious parties: two Zionist, two not.
There are very few constants in Israel’s crowded political landscape. Parties shift and morph and cannibalize each other, or else they split into ever smaller and more specific entities. That’s exactly what happened with the National Religious Party, aka Miflaga Datit Leumit, aka Mafdal. By 1959, the smaller religious Zionist parties had merged, and they remained a coalition partner in almost every Knesset until 2003, working with both the Labor leftists and, later, the Likud firebrands.
For the first few decades of Israel’s existence, they were respectable, moderate, polite. They handled religious affairs and made sure the army provided kosher food and that buses didn’t run on Shabbat. As the historian Yair Ettinger put it, the Religious Zionists were basically the kashrut supervisors on the train of Zionism. If Labor was at the wheel, in charge of the route and the destination, Mafdal’s job was to walk through the cars making sure nothing treif happened on the way. Their ambitions were modest, their reach limited. They didn’t believe they were destined to take over the whole national project, and they certainly did not make grand messianic claims.
Until they did.
Chapter 6: The Shofar
Israel’s nineteenth Independence Day. May 1967. The war that would change everything was still three weeks away. No one could escape the tension in the air, the sense of impending doom, but for one day only, the students at Mercaz HaRav – Rav Kook’s yeshiva – set all that aside. This was a day for celebration.
But when their rabbi got up to speak, he veered wildly off-script.
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook – son of the OG Rav Kook – was now in his seventies, but his rhetorical prowess remained as sharp as ever. His speech began with the happiest moment in modern Jewish history, when almost 20 years earlier, David Ben Gurion had stood up and declared: Anu machrizim b’zot al hakama yehudit b’eretz Yisrael, hee medinat Yisrael.
But instead of rejoicing, he reminded his students that their country was not complete.
“Where is our Hebron,” he asked rhetorically. “Have we forgotten her? Where is our Shechem, our Jericho — where?… They divided the land of God! I could not go outside to dance and rejoice.”
An old rabbi, at a party, weeping about a map. I want you to picture the room. Because I guarantee you that some of the young men sitting there thought: we love him, and he is living in the past. The borders are the borders. We’re lucky to have a state at all.
Three weeks later, the tension that had simmered all summer finally broke. Israelis had spent weeks listening to threats from Radio Cairo and Radio Damascus, digging ten thousand graves and debating whether to send the children away so that someone would survive the coming slaughter.
Instead, a miracle. Within six days, the Israeli army captured the Sinai, Gaza, the Golan, and the entire West Bank. The cradle of ancient Jewish civilization. Hebron. Jericho. Shechem. The Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple Mount. Every single place their rebbe had named, their rabbi spoke about, his lachrymose Independence Day speech now rebranded as prophecy.
And suddenly, the entire country found itself in need of a new vocabulary. Everyday political language simply couldn’t capture the wonder of this moment. Previously secular Israelis reached for biblical stories. The ancient Temple suddenly loomed large in the Israeli imagination, the quavering words of IDF Brigade Commander Motta Gur seared indelibly into every Jew’s mind: Har HaBayit B’Yadeinu. The Temple Mount is in our hands.
We’ve described this moment before, in our series on the Six Day War, but it bears repeating. Imagine a group of Israeli paratroopers bursting through the Lions’ Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. Fighting their way through the narrow alleys, asking directions from nervous passersby. Which way to the Western Wall?
And then, they arrived. For the first time since Jordan captured the city in 1948, Jews stood before their ancient holy site, filthy and bloodstained and exhausted. Some wounded. Some haunted by the faces of dead friends.
Many were secular. Some probably would have said they didn’t believe in God at all. And yet, with their hands pressed against the ancient stones, they wept. Hugged the wall close and kissed its face, as the army’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, blew the shofar – the ram’s horn, the instrument you hear on Rosh Hashanah that is said to open the gates of prayer. Its blast split the sky with the force of revelation. Of redemption.
Not a single Jewish person alive remained untouched by the miracle.
IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, who was about as secular as a person can be, was given the honor of choosing a name for the war. He picked Milchemet Sheshet HaYahim. The Six Day War. Just as God had made the world in six days, Israel had remade its own reality in the same timeframe. The victory was so unlikely it had to be divine.
After the Six Day War, it felt like redemption was on the horizon, just as Rav Kook had prophesied, just as the Hebrew Bible prophesied! People who had never heard of Rav Kook before were suddenly sifting through the rabbi’s famously cryptic and mystical body of work, finding lines that read like truth. Like prophecy.
But the glorious victory of the Six Day War also carried a nagging question that we still have not answered: what was Israel going to do about the one million people already living in the territories it now controlled? The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza had homes, communities, memories, fears, and national aspirations. The Biblical sites that stirred Jewish longing had been their home for generations.
Some Religious Zionists believed it was their duty to establish Jewish communities throughout these newly captured territories, even as Palestinians continued to live there. These were the spiritual forefathers of today’s “territorial maximalists” – the Religious Zionists who believe that if settling the West Bank is a divine imperative, withdrawing from this sacred ground is tantamount to sin.
But other religious thinkers urged caution.
Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik — one of the towering rabbinic leaders of the 20th century and the dominant intellectual figure of Modern Orthodoxy — believed passionately in Israel and Jewish sovereignty. But he never claimed that the state had ushered in a messianic timeline. Meanwhile, the scholar Yeshayahu Leibovitz — who was both meticulously Orthodox and his own brand of Zionist — warned that this military victory had no automatic religious meaning. He feared that ruling over another people would corrupt Israel, turning Judaism into a costume for nationalism.
At the end of the day, for many young Religious Zionists, the war had confirmed all of Rav Kook’s beliefs about Zionism as the precursor to redemption. But they did not yet believe they should lead the country. The old Labor Zionist heroes remained larger than life. Moshe Dayan. Golda Meir. Yitzhak Rabin. They had built the state. They had won the wars. They were still the adults in the room.
But on Yom Kippur of 1973, it became shatteringly, achingly clear that there were no adults in the room after all. Egypt and Syria had unleashed a devastating attack, catching the country’s leaders unprepared, with catastrophic results.
It took six days to build an aura of Israeli invincibility. It took one minute – and ten thousand Egyptian shells – to destroy it.
By the end of the war, more than 2,000 Israeli soldiers were dead. And so was Israel’s confidence in its leaders. A generation of Religious Zionists began to wonder if they had spent too long following instead of leading the country to where it needed to go.
But where exactly did the country need to go? What vision would the movement lead it towards?
That, my friends, is where we will pick up next week.
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Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Adi Elbaz, Jenny Falcon, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.