Bye-bye, religious parties (in Israel)

Dec. 13, 2004 1:21 | Updated Dec. 13, 2004 13:20
Bye-bye, religious parties
By ELLIOT JAGER

Michael Melchior and Moshe Feiglin make strange bedfellows. Yet in talking to both men last week, I was struck by how much they had in common.

They agreed that the era of religious political parties in Israel was coming to a close, that mixing politics and Judaism had been detrimental to civil society, and that an alternative way had to be found to instill Jewish cultural values into the body politic.

The Danish-born Melchior is a velvet-yarmulke-wearing Orthodox rabbi and Labor-Meimad Knesset member. But Meimad, which started out as a dovish alternative to the National Religious Party, is moribund. Melchior recently announced the formation of a new, non-sectarian, social-justice movement called Tnufa (Momentum).

The Israeli-born Feiglin, also an Orthodox rabbi, gained prominence as leader of Zo Artzeinu (This is our Land), the anti-Oslo activist movement of the mid-1990s. Today he leads the Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction within Likud.

Critics complain Feiglin has infiltrated the party to co-opt it as a vehicle for his ultra-right views. Feiglin says the Likud, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has strayed and needs to return to its ideological roots.

On the Arab-Israel conflict Melchior and Feiglin have nothing to say to each other; they are poles apart. Feiglin vehemently opposes handing over any sovereignty to the Arabs, while Melchior has long favored the creation of a Palestinian state.

What they do share is the belief that religious parties are pass . So why the headlines about Sharon's plans to bring Shas (Sephardi) and United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi) into a Likud-Labor governing coalition?

There's an argument to be made that neither Shas nor UTJ are "religious" parties, in the sense of trying to inculcate Torah values into the mainstream. Shas voters cast their ballots largely along ethnic lines; supporters of UTJ – comprising haredi-hassidic Agudat Yisrael and Litvak haredi Degel HaTorah – live in insular communities led by powerful chiefs and vote as tribal groupings.

The National Religious Party, by contrast, was founded in 1956 specifically to apply spiritual values to governing a modern nation-state. In its heyday, the NRP won 12 Knesset seats and looked to the Chief Rabbinate for religious guidance.

Ironically, the one religious party whose agenda had a society-wide reach then allowed a narrow issue – support for the settlement movement – to overshadow its spiritual goals.

Today it has six Knesset seats, and the rabbinate is in haredi hands. Bitterly fragmented over its agenda, the NRP now focuses mostly on funding its own national religious institutions.

Maybe it was too much to ask any party to be "religious" while simultaneously functioning in a profane environment. And corrupted religious parties are a lightening rod for secular rage.

Feiglin believes inserting religion into politics has undermined the country's Jewish identity. While Melchior is loath to agree with anything Feiglin has to say, he agrees that today it is counterproductive to turn the Torah into a party instrument.

So how do you instill spiritual values into a society in which nihilism and alienation seem so prevalent? For Melchior the answer is pursuing a domestic agenda through the prism of Jewish values while eschewing religious coercion.

Feiglin, too, opposes religious coercion. Personally, he'd like Jews to follow a strictly Orthodox life-style, but his main goal is to see cultural Judaism reinvigorated in society (think Ahad Ha'am).

A social-democrat, Melchior believes the state should play the primary role in solving societal problems. And it should do so by employing Jewish values – which he sees as synonymous with progressive politics.

Feiglin is a conservative. He wants the state to play a minimal role in our lives and empower local communities to make their own decisions. The challenge for him is to rebuild the community structure, worn down my decades of state hegemony.

Both Melchior and Feiglin agree that the state budget reflects perverted priorities. For instance, Melchior is angry that the Health Ministry refuses to cover the cost of a one-of-a-kind diabetes medication because it's too expensive. That kind of bureaucratic response, he says, is un-Jewish and – in the long term – inefficient.

I told Feiglin about Melchior's tangle with the Health Ministry. If you were in the Knesset, I asked, would you side with Melchior?

Feiglin said he'd rather the state got out of the healthcare business altogether; but until that happened, he agreed that Jewish values should dictate paying for the costly drug.

On conversion, surprisingly both men agreed that the rabbinate's unbending attitude toward immigrants who genuinely want to embrace Judaism did not serve the national interest. Halachic parameters could allow for a more broadminded approach.

The two men also shared an optimism about politics and people I found hard to fathom – maybe because they're not only religious politicians, but men of genuine faith.

Feiglin was adamant that democracy and Judaism are not at loggerheads; that if the true will of the people could find expression so too would their deeply-ingrained Jewish identity.

Melchior was convinced that radical change is possible; that Israeli society can operate on the basis of an ethical Judaism which applies Jewish values to economic and social policies.

Both these conviction politicians have opted to abandon the religious party framework to pursue their goals within the political mainstream.

Our politics would benefit if the constituencies which now find expression through Shas, NRP, and UTJ likewise abandoned religion as a vehicle for sectarian influence, and instead operated within the two main parties.

Here's a list of the many political parties in Israel. The above article appears to be someone's fantisy.

http://www.stateofisrael.com/parties/

Perhaps it's fantasy. Perhaps not. Likud, with 40 seats, has the largest number of mandates of any party in about 30 years. Relgious parties have been mainly outside the government, and until last week the secularist Shinui (Change) party, was in, for the first time under Prime Minister Sharon. If nothing else the influence of the religious parties, once kingmakers, has greatly diminished.

Certainly the two Rabbis are entitled to their opinion.

For the record, the composition of the current Knesset:

Likud (center/right) - 40 seats
Labour (center/left) - 21 seats
Shinui (centrist/secularist) - 15 seats
Shas (ultra-Orthodox) - 11 seats
National Union (right/nationalist) - 8 seats
National Religious Party - 6 seats
Yahad (far left/socialist) - 6 seats
United Torah Judaism (ulta-Orthodox) - 5 seats
various Arab parties - 8 seats

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