In my high school, many moons ago, a sleepover weekend introduced us to the joys of religious Judaism. Back at home, I asked my mom to hold off on serving the ice cream after meat, to which she replied that I was welcome not to partake, but I shouldn’t foist my newfound belief on the family.
Our Counterpoint guides suggested that one thing should mark Shabbat. My kashrut efforts quashed, I decided to stop writing instead – a genius, life-enhancing decision.
Tradition and religion come with plentitudes of joy besides a day of well-deserved rest. The well-being that springs from belonging to a friendly group with shared norms and lifestyles, the comfort of knowing that God has the plot, keeping age-old rituals, faith in a higher power, davening in a minyan of like-minded brethren – it’s all understandably chicken soup for the soul.
But in Israel, according to lawyer Yair Nehorai, religion too often morphs into cult, and extremism is quickly becoming more mainstream.
He believes that Messianic Judaism is on the ascendancy and is spurring the judicial reform, is responsible for what he views as the assault on Israel’s liberal democratic bastions like the High Court and press freedom, and is in danger of taking over our police, army, and fragile democracy itself.
Is Israel's democracy under threat from extremists?
Nehorai’s claims are backed up by years of research. His book The Third Revolution (2022) predicted the chaos raging here today and revealed how messianic rabbis recruit students. His father, Holocaust survivor Michael Nehorai, was a professor of Jewish philosophy and student of Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook’s son, Rav Tzvi Yehuda, until they split over a disagreement about the original Rav Kook’s interpretation of Israel’s salvation.
Nehorai maintains that the messianic worldview envisages various stages of salvation. The first, that of Messiah Ben Yosef, occurred when the secular founders of Israel built the infrastructure of the land. The second, the stage of Messiah Ben David, will transform the profane into the sacred, aiming for a fully conquered land governed by Torah laws.
Nehorai suggests that this belief sees us currently in a transitional stage between the two. The whole purpose of this government is to pave the way for Messiah Ben David by adhering to Torah laws. Nothing must detract from that.
Nehorai believes this aim underpins every aspect of Israel’s present government. Our finance minister once declared that our economy should be guided by Halacha. Our national security minister has made his terrifying views all too clear, and our prime minister cannot cross these men on a messianic mission if he wants his coalition to survive. Our country, warns Nehorai, is lurching into the void.
And some religious leaders are upping the ante. Nehorai has scores of videos of venerable rabbis with impressively full beards declaiming on related issues.
RABBI ELI SADAN preaches on camera that Torah law must be the basis of our legal system, and he quotes Rav Kook to prove the judicial reform controversy is religious as the “source of the disease is in the mind.” In other words, the secular are sick in the head. Elsewhere, he describes them as “a knife in the nation’s back.”
Under this messianic ideology, Nehorai emphasizes, anything liberal is dangerously threatening.
Nehorai shows a clip of Rav Assaf Naumberg smilingly explaining how young children should be taught to hate the secular and their worldview. Only after their bar or bat mitzvah can kids grasp the difference between the secular (who shouldn’t be hated) and their evil actions (which should).
Naumberg boasts how he taught his own young son to despise all things secular, how he categorized David Ben-Gurion as “an evil man who did terrible things,” and how he derided Ashkenazi pioneers, who built the Land of Israel (and who loved Beethoven), for viewing anyone with different cultural values as barbarians.
Then, when his son turned 14, he slowly introduced the concept of not hating the people, only their actions; he balks at actual violence against the non-observant.
Footage shows Rabbi Yigal Levinstein excoriating secular liberals for stopping the judicial reform and for being the same dangerous population that brought about October 7. Why are the people of Nir Oz and Tel Aviv responsible for the massacre? Because the secular population has separated religion and state, thus harming Israel’s security.
Rav Baruch Slai explains that because misguided Jews gave back Gaza to the Gazans, the land, bereft, cried out to God, who needed to create a disaster of epic proportions to facilitate a return. The land is not ours to betray is the thesis; it belongs to God. If we desert Gaza a second time, Slai warns, God will punish us terribly all over again.
These ideas, claims Nehorai, are disseminated in varying degrees in pre-army religious academies to impressionable young men. The agenda is specific and spans the whole gamut of society.
Women, for example, are an enormous threat. Even the most committed youngster can’t resist the charms of sexy female commanders. Female soldiers become, derides Rabbi Yosef Kelner, comparable to whores.
“Feminism castrates women and removes their ability to shine light at home,” claims Sadan, hurting the woman, her husband, and the kids.
NEHORAI’S VIDEO footage seems lifted straight from Eretz Nehederet: “Homosexuals, you are mentally sick… you disgust me,” splutters Kelner, adding that granting them rights will destroy Israel.
Rav Eliezer Kashtiel thunders, “We are racist,” and suggests that Israelis are doing West Bank Arabs a favor by conquering them, as they are a lesser race. He calls on Arabs to “come and be our slaves; you’ll be much better off.” Unfortunately, says Nehorai, these leaders are not making bad jokes; they’re deadly serious.
Eighteen-year-olds, he claims, learn from rabbis like Shmuel Eliyahu that soldiers who die or fight bravely in battle bring Israel closer to salvation; war becomes a holy imperative. Rabbi Elyakim Levanon teaches that war serves God’s purpose by unifying us: pilots who refused to fight because of the judicial reform ultimately all turned up.
Nehorai concludes that the secular cannot coexist alongside such a belief system. He advocates for separate secular towns, schools, and army units. He declares that even the “nice guy” religious are just hiding their agenda, citing Naftali Bennett, who supported the Nation-State Law and awarded Sadan the Israel Prize. The same Sadan, says Nehorai, who blamed the secular for causing the righteous to die in the Holocaust.
This is obviously explosive, contested stuff. Graduates of the pre-army religious mechinot that I spoke to, a rabbi in the program, and parents of children educated there all countered that it is Nehorai who is dividing the nation by publicizing only a small percentage of what is preached.
They claim that the quotes are out of context and out of proportion and that Nehorai doesn’t mention how these rabbis also teach a great love for the people and the Land of Israel. They cite the many graduates who donate kidneys without knowing anything about the recipients’ religious beliefs, proving that Nehorai is provocative and wrong.
“Messiah” and “salvation” are loaded words with a spectrum of meaning, they maintain, and “democracy” means that a government chosen by the majority shouldn’t take orders from a radical liberal minority who lost the elections.
The overwhelming majority of these rabbis’ students, I was assured, categorically do not hate their fellow Jews; the opposite is true. Nehorai was castigated for either deliberately distorting facts or being unaware of his divisive effect. It is Nehorai who is causing hatred of the other, they say, not the other way around.
So, who are we to believe? Can Nehorai be blood-chillingly correct? Or is he needlessly spreading fear and division?
Visit www.facebook.com/yairnehorai1 and judge for yourself.
The writer lectures at the Reichman University. Peledpam@gmail.com