“Thus said the L-rd Hashem: Behold, I am taking the Children of Israel from among the nations where they have gone; I will gather them from all around and I will bring them to their soil; I will make them into one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be a king for them all; they will no longer be two nations, and they will no longer be divided into two kingdoms ever again… I will purify them; they will be a nation to Me, and I will be a G-d to them… They will follow My ordinances and keep My decrees and fulfill them. I will seal a covenant of peace with them; it will be an eternal covenant with them…Then the nations will know that I am Hashem Who sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary will be among them forever.”
(Ezekiel 37:21-28)
To begin, we need to understand how the outrage of October 7 is correlated with the decline of civilizations. As Charlie Kirk has observed, the U.S. and Israel are the only nations on Earth that were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, so it’s no wonder that we are the primary targets of the anti-civilization forces. The threats come in two varieties – physical and spiritual. For America, the threat is primarily spiritual; for Israel it is both, though right now the physical predominates.
Commentators have already noted that Hamas would have hesitated to undertake such a massive invasion were it not for the extreme divisions in Israeli society. When the critics of judicial reform began to employ civil disobedience to the level of demonstrations that threatened actual physical harm to Cabinet members and officials of center-right NGOs in addition to disrupting the nation’s economy, that gave Hamas an opening.
Similarly, the perception of weakness on the part of the American government – as exemplified by the transfer of billions of dollars of frozen assets to Iran, waiving sanctions, and supplying hundreds of millions of dollars in fungible aid to the PA which finances “pay-for-slay” in direct violation of the Taylor Force Act – has emboldened the new axis of Russia, China, and Iran to escalate terrorism.
No one can deny that the tragic, brutal, genocidal massacre of innocent Jews on Shabbat Simchat Torah brought about at least a temporary ceasefire in the multi-level conflict in Israel – left vs. right, secular vs. religious, Ashkenazim vs. Sephardim. We can regard it as a form of shock therapy. The shock of thousands of Hamas terrorists penetrating the Gaza border wall and murdering, raping, and torturing thousands of Israelis brought the country together. For example, there were reports of long lines of people waiting to donate blood, and heroism on all sides, such as the woman who used her personal car for three trips to ferry the wounded to the hospital when ambulances were unavailable to respond. The sense of solidarity has been accentuated by the world’s usual response: tears (real or crocodile) over the death of Jews, followed by a repetition of all the old blood libels, fomented largely by mass media, to prove we had it coming to us, and calls for Israel to limit its counterattack to avoid excessive casualties to the Gazans who resoundingly elected Hamas to rule them in the first place, so as to preserve the delusion of the two-state solution.
How can we negotiate with an enemy that wants us dead, as Dennis Prager has observed? We have also had to face the reality of growing support for the destruction of Israel, chas v’shalom, in America and in the West, particularly on our college campuses, and especially the elite institutions such as the Ivy League that (mis-)educate our future leaders. It is truly sobering to see more than thirty student organizations at Harvard blame Israel entirely for the carnage inflicted on its own citizens.
For now we have a truce between Israel’s warring factions, but it may be short-lived, as Caroline Glick reports in her In Focus podcast of December 13 that Ehud Barak is plotting to resume his campaign to overturn the Netanyahu government in the middle of a war while hiding behind the hostages’ families, and President Biden is reiterating his call for Netanyahu to expel the Religious Zionist parties from his coalition and to endorse the moribund two-state solution that would create a terrorist Fatah state on both sides of Israel, in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. How can we extend our unity long-term?
More is involved in Israel’s internal conflict than judicial reform, which is merely the spark that ignited the active phase of the rebellion, just as, for example, the Confederates’ firing on Fort Sumter triggered the war that was already brewing, and similarly for Poland’s refusal to grant Nazi Germany an extraterritorial road across their country to the German enclave of East Prussia. Even the demographic conflict between secular Ashkenazi leftists on one hand vs. Sephardim, Religious Zionists, and chareidim on the other doesn’t tell the full story.
Actually, the conflict is over competing visions of Israeli society. Should it be a true Jewish state, governed by halacha and culturally centered in Jerusalem, as Orthodox Jews want, or should it be a state of all its citizens with secular laws affording no special privileges to Judaism and culturally centered in Tel Aviv, the high-tech capital of the “startup nation,” as the secular Left wants?
The specific fight over the role of the Supreme Court reflects its position as the “last line of defense” for secularists who governed Israel for its first three decades as a state, and which now arrogates power to itself to annul not only laws passed by the Knesset but even ministerial appointments and other state actions in order to thwart the emerging religious right majority. The result has been such disgraceful episodes as the Left disrupting Modern Orthodox outdoor Yom Kippur services in Tel Aviv over the issue of separate seating for men and women or liberal women chanting loudly on a bus en route to Bnei Brak to offend male chareidi passengers on one hand. And on the other hand, Etgar Lefkovits wrote in The Jewish Press, “There have also been incidents where secular women have been harassed on buses for how they dress and where they sit, with some chareidim illegally demanding gender separation on public transportation.”
In light of these developments, I respectfully call attention to a possible way out of the political impasse in the form of the largely ignored Gavison-Medan Covenant of 2004. Briefly, the late secularist and human rights activist Hebrew University law professor Ruth Gavison, a”h, and Orthodox Rabbi Yaakov Medan, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a leading Religious Zionist, each of whom was regarded by partisans as being too lenient toward the opposing side, met over a period of three years to develop a framework for bridging the gap between religious and secular Israelis. Remarkably, they reached agreement on every point but one, the registration of nationalities. As Gary Rosenblatt wrote in a Substack post entitled “Israel Already Has a Blueprint for a Constitution,” the Covenant aroused interest on the part of some scholars but never advanced as far as legislative passage in the Knesset, and has languished over the lack of anyone pushing it.” I wish I could take on that role, but not being a famous person or scholar, I would likely be spitting in the wind. Perhaps someone more distinguished will read this essay and run with it.
In any event, the following are the Covenant’s main provisions:
“Principle of Return: Every ‘member of the Jewish people’ will be eligible to immigrate to Israel, including the child of a Jewish father and a person who has converted through a recognized procedure. Even someone who converted in a manner that diverges from the tradition of the Shulhan Arukh will be entitled to register himself as a Jew in the population registry.
“Personal Status: The right to establish a family will be recognized. The law of the State will permit weddings conducted according to any ceremony the couple chooses, and the marriage will be recorded in the population registry. No individual in Israel will be allowed to marry who is not single both according to state law and according to a strict interpretation of the laws of his religion.
“The Sabbath: Saturday is the official day of rest in Israel. Persons will not be employed and will not be required to work in manufacturing, trade, or services on the Sabbath. Cultural events, entertainment, and a reduced schedule of public transportation will be permitted to meet demand.
“Principle of Non-Coercion: The elimination of any monopoly exercised by a particular group on overall arrangements; at the same time, the right of every group to preserve its own lifestyle according to its own conception and interpretation will be respected. The same will hold true in matters of burial, dietary laws, the Sabbath, religious services, and prayer arrangements at the Western Wall.
“Legal Implementation: The covenant will be anchored in law such that it will be difficult to introduce partial and unilateral changes into its mechanisms. It is in the spirit of the covenant as a whole to give preference to mechanisms for negotiation and compromise over legislative and judicial decision-making. The courts, therefore, will not be granted the authority to invalidate laws concerning the covenant. The interpretation of the covenant, insofar as there is no court case involved, will be entrusted to an accepted representative public body, in order to encourage consensual interpretation without the need for recourse through the courts.”
More recently, when Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked left the Jewish Home party to establish the New Right party, then-Justice Minister Shaked expressed interest in trying to update the Covenant, but nothing came of it. Then, as Rosenblatt continued in his post, “Last fall [2022], a two-day conference in Jerusalem focused primarily on whether the Gavison-Medan Covenant is relevant today, 20 years after it was published.
“Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz, a former IDF commander who co-founded and co-directed The Itim Center, which promotes Jewish pluralism and culture, played a key role in the conference, which included discussion of the covenant’s successes and failures. She noted that the document has become a kind of marker on how to approach the conflict and it succeeded in showing that a spirit of give-and-take, even on the most contentious of issues, can lead to compromise and consensus when there is trust between the discussants.
“The obvious failure was that the covenant did not result in any legislation,’ she told me this week. In addition, some say it was a mistake for Prof. Gavison and Rav Medan not to have widened their efforts to gain support by including other colleagues, politicians, and organizations sympathetic to their efforts.
“Ravitsky Tur-Paz believes that efforts by the current government to push through rigid religious laws on personal status issues only alienates traditional and secular Jews and drives them farther apart from Judaism. ‘Belief, and a bond to culture, tradition, and history cannot be achieved by compulsion, but only through love,’ she has written.”
In the words of a song by Sergio Mendes and Brazil 77, “Where is the love?”
