Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. When the state of Israel was formed, its nascent structure tried to limit Jewish religiosity as part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Yaron Peleg's new book Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.
We asked author Yaron Peleg to discuss the religious undercurrents in today's Israeli media with fellow scholar Eran Kaplan. Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Lecturer in modern Hebrew studies at the University of Cambridge, where he teaches modern Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. He is the author of Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance and coeditor of Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Eran Kaplan is the Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and its Ideological Legacy, The Origins Of Israel: A Documentary History with Derek Penslar (both published by the University of Wisconsin Press), and Beyond Post Zionism from SUNY University Press.
In this discussion, these scholars tie Israel's shift to religiosity to a global pendulum shift away from separating religion and institutions of power and how popular entertainment and mainstream media both reflects and feeds these cultural shifts.
Eran Kaplan: Earlier this month, Israel’s Channel 2—the country’s most watched channel and newscast—featured a link to a video on its news home page of one of its most popular hosts, Sivan Rahav-Me’ir, giving a Torah lesson on the reasons why Jerusalem was destroyed nearly two millennia ago. Does this signify to you the type of social and cultural developments that you have identified in your new book?
Yaron Peleg: You are asking an interesting question, because while the personal story of journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir is not unusual—she grew up in a secular home and became religious later on in life, as an adult—the fact that she was given a mainstream national platform for "preaching" is very unusual. What we have here, I think, is an example of an increasing blurring of boundaries in Israel between the personal—religious belief—and the public—national TV. Sivan Rahav-Meir is not only a popular journalist but also a popular religious public figure. Until now, however, she separated these worlds, conducting her journalistic work while also being active in her religious community. Her Torah lesson on a popular TV channel, which has never before scheduled a religious show, is significantly different. Her televised lesson has no news value nor was she invited as a guest to speak about herself. In many ways it can be labeled "televangelism", which even in the U.S., where the genre was invented, is broadcast on dedicated television channels.
EK: Where else in Israeli culture do you see this blurring of the line between the public and private sphere?
YP: I would say that this blurring occurs most alarmingly in the military, the IDF. There is currently a culture war between the higher echelons of the IDF, who were educated during a time when the political influence of the national religious was less prominent in Israel, and the lower ranks, many of whom hail from the national religious sector in Israel. These lower ranks, especially the elite fighting units, were once populated by Labor-identified or more left oriented Israelis. These lowers ranks are where most of the higher command of the Israeli army is groomed, and eventually they will rise through the ranks to become the army's generals. When this happens, in a decade or so, the character of the Israeli army will likely change to reflect that. We saw this already in the last operation in Gaza in 2014, which was defined in religious terms by some commanders and soldiers who took part in it. A lot of media attention focused on this phenomenon during the 2014 operation.
Education is another area where this blurring occurs, especially under the influence of religious parties, which control the Ministry of Education and introduce various initiatives and textbooks that promote so-called Jewish values. I say “so-called” because many of the values that are promoted as “Jewish” in Israel today are separationist and jingoistic and seem increasingly beholden to the ancient Israelite aggression as recorded in the Hebrew Bible rather than to the more compromising Judaism of the rabbis. It is not difficult to imagine the long-term effects of these phenomena on Israeli society, whose children will be first drilled in schools and then in the army along more tribal sensibilities rather than more universal ones.
Joseph Skibell is renowned as a critically acclaimed and prize-winning novelist, the author of such genre-defying works as A Blessing on the Moon and A Curable Romantic. Critics have called him “a major talent” (Publishers Weekly) whose “gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times) has produced works that are “always a joy to read” (Jerusalem Report). His new book is nothing short, while also a bit of a departure. Entitled Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, it’s an elegantly written literary investigation into
the tales of the Talmud – the great repository of ancient wisdom that is the foundation text, along with the Bible, of Rabbinic Judaism. (The Talmud’s composition dates roughly from between 200 and 500 CE.) This new work is no less genre-defying. Part fiction, part exegesis, part speculative theology, the book is, above all, a love letter to art of storytelling. And in its pages, Skibell looks at these old stories from the vantage of a modern novelist in order to find their relevance for readers today.
A Childlike Love of Stories, the Essence of Human Life
The story behind Joseph Skibell’s Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud
Can you tell us a little about the history of this project?
Well, that’s a great question. As I explain in the book’s introduction, some years ago, I was taking a Talmud class at an Orthodox synagogue. I was raised in a Reform community, so the Talmud was like a vast, unmapped world for me. About 4/5th of the Talmud is dedicated to – let’s call them – the theo-legal discussions of the Sages. Rabbinic Judaism is a religion of laws – what’s permitted, what’s forbidden – and the Talmudic Sages devote a kind of scientific rigor to deciphering the will of the Creator as it has been revealed in the pages of the Torah.
The other fifth of the Talmud, though, is the legendary parts: the stories of the Sages’ lives, tall tales, myths, legends. As a fiction writer, I was drawn to these stories, of course, but my teachers tended to skip over them or hurry past them, and they were given none of the time and attention, the almost scientific dissection, the legal parts of the Talmud were given. And so I decided to study them on my own, in a kind of openhearted, open-minded way, taking them at face value and seeing what they were really all about.
And what did you discover?
Well, first of all, I discovered that there’s a genius afoot in the Talmud, a dramatist with a kind of Shakespearean scope. This, I should say, is just my way of talking about these things. Originally, the Talmud was an oral law, and one spanning many generations. So it’s the work of many tongues and many hands – you can’t literally speak of an author – but the little stories and tales in it are all, curiously enough, dramatic in form.
Meaning?
Meaning that, like scenes in a play, they all take place in “real time.” They’re made out of dialogue and action. With very few exceptions, there’s no interiority in these stories, so if people in these tales want to think, they have to speak aloud, just like characters in a play. The narrative descriptions are mostly simple, physical actions, not unlike a playwright’s stage direction. I started by gathering all the stories and story fragments that had to do with the same figures or constellations of figures, and what I found is that each piece sort of illuminated the other pieces, and if you brought them all together, they formed a larger narrative or a more complete drama. And then I realized that you could approach these “scenes” as an actor or a director or a writer might, asking questions like, “What’s this person’s motivation?” or “Why would he say this?” or “Why would he do this?” or “What is he thinking here?”
It’s a different way of thinking about sacred text, and in my experience, it was a very fruitful approach.
