Israel is being torn apart by ideological forces. Ultra-Orthodox zealots are determined to shove women to the back of our common civic bus, while Haredi army recruits defy not only the military code of conduct, but also the very vision of Israel’s founding fathers and mothers who dreamed of a humanistic and pluralistic country. It is also, as always, political horse-trading season, and the privileges of the Haredi sector seem to be forever safeguarded and preserved in the minutest detail. While it is hard to imagine now, Jewish public opinion once held very different convictions.
Throughout the 1930s and ’40s there was much discussion about the nature of the future Jewish state, including among the ultra-Orthodox. In Hanukkah of 1947, soon after the United Nations General Assembly voted for partition, the New York-based Research Institute for the Post-War Problems of Religious Jewry, founded by Agudath Israel, published a collection of articles by rabbinical luminaries, “Material of a Constitution for the Jewish State.” Though ultra-Orthodox in orientation, this collection offers a shockingly moderate worldview in relation to where we stand today.
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