Mikhael Manekin, End of Days: Ethics, Tradition, and Power in Israel (Boston, Academic Studies Press, 2023)
Review by Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson
In a recent interview in Haaretz, the rabbi and activist Avidan Friedman explored the tension that lies at the heart of the Religious-Zionist project in Israel. Rabbi Friedman lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, and runs an NGO called Yanshuf, dedicated to the sales of Israeli arms to human rights violations, including countries like South Sudan and Myanmar. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that Rabbi Friedman was also my teacher a number of years ago.) Through the interview, he shared his opposition to not only arms sales to “genocidal governments,” but also his staunch support for a hostage deal, American sanctions on violent settlers in the West Bank, insisting that “the secret of our [Jewish] existence… is morality.” Yet in the same conversation, Rabbi Friedman equates Jewish sovereignty in Tel Aviv with that of the settlement on which he lives, and professes a deep commitment to the Zionist project, noting that his children will likely serve in the IDF when they reach maturity.
While Rabbi Friedman’s public life and work seem dedicated to living in the unresolved paradox of his national and spiritual commitments, many have observed a widening split between the religious obligations outlined in contemporary religious Jewish practice, and the ultra-nationalist rhetoric and practices now adopted by many members of these same communities. Nowhere has this been more visible in recent weeks than in the public repudiation of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s repeated attempts to ascend and worship at the Temple Mount near Al Aqsa mosque. No fewer than five prominent Israeli rabbis – among them Sepharadi, chassidish, and misnagdish leaders – vocally condemned Ben Gvir’s new policy to allow Jewish worship at the holy site. With the Dome of the Rock visible in publicity shots released to the Israeli media, Ben Gvir brought a contingent of worshippers and staff to the Temple Mount this past August on Tisha B’Av, the very holiday marking the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.
Ascension of the Temple Mount has long been considered verboten in Jewish religious circles, and Netanyahu’s office has more than once issued public denials that Ben Gvir’s policy announcements reflect the actual security protocols of the Israelis government. Combined with voices leading broad segments of both the Haredi and Religious-Zionist community, a queasy back-and-forth has emerged between the stated values of both the state and the religious world. From amidst this dialectic, the Israeli ultra-nationalist community in Israel has emerged to assert its desire to incorporate both camps, espousing a new national theology which extends beyond the prescribed boundaries of either ideology.
This tension is at the heart of Mikhael Manekin’s brief but incisive work, Achalta, published in English late last year as “End of Days: Ethics, Tradition, and Power in Israel.” A longtime activist in Israel – he is the former director of both Breaking the Silence and the progressive Molad think tank – Manekin takes on the theological and historical developments within his own Israeli National-Religious Jewish community, weaving scholarly analysis amidst anecdotes of his own experiences in the Israeli Defense Forces, quotidian social interactions in his community, and family memoir, to explore the growing chasm between “Jewish values” and the Israeli national “civic values” that define public life.
Among a host of political developments and issues, from the status of the West Bank settlements to ethical combat in war, Manekin tracks the evolution of the aforementioned Temple Mount fight, among many others within religious Zionist discourse. Deftly, he guides readers through the evolution of the dati le’umi call to ascend the Mount over the last few decades, locating the increased nationalist activism at the site within a larger phenomenon of increased religious identification with secular Zionist activity; at the cost, Manekin asserts, of redefining “redemption” as the increased control of the Land through “brute force,” and replacing God with political activism to the point of a “negation of religion.”
Part historical analysis, part theological manifesto, “End of Days” traces the symbiotic evolution of Israeli military and political history and the religious Zionist theology that evolved to support them. Interspersed among his arguments, Manekin includes the letters and diary entries of his Yiddish-speaking maternal grandfather, who survived the Holocaust and made aliyah in the early days of the State.
Manekin divides his argument into six sections, each named for a middah, a character trait that he views as a contradiction. While traits like “Remembrance,” “Patience,” “Submission,” and “Devotion” are valued and celebrated as positive virtues in traditional Jewish life, they are considered negative practices, in his estimation, for “good Israelis.” Manekin, who last year helped to found the small-but-growing Smol Emuni (“Faithful Left”) movement in Israel, relates in the book’s introduction that he is frequently asked about a perceived “gap” between his religiosity and his anti-Occupation politics. But, he asserts, “Jewish ethics inform my politics. If anything, the gap lies elsewhere – between the Israeli understanding of legitimate force and my Jewish upbringing.”
What is perhaps most striking about “End of Days” is Manekin’s choice to wed his analysis to form. Rather than laying down a thunderous, sermonized, condemnation of the ideological frameworks that define religious Jewish nationalism, he editorializes deftly while presenting his readers with excerpts of theological works, analysis of the historical events that inform them, and voices that are not his own: most strikingly, the greatest explicit censure of the Dati Leumi community in the book comes not from Manekin’s writing, but through the voice of his Druze colleague and friend Samer Swaid in the final chapter. In a work of less than a hundred and fifty pages, genres and realms of experience – the personal and the familial, the national, and even the metaphysical – are woven together in conversation. Rather than pointing his audience down a single path forward, Manekin’s voice instead functions throughout the book as a kind of Talmudic redactor traversing between the lines of his gathered texts, encouraging his readers to hold these sources in tension without directly pointing them towards an alternative theological conclusion.
Still, Manekin’s message is clear. The overwhelming spiritual posture of the Jewish sources quoted demands an ethical opposition to the Occupation, and he offers a new and thoughtful synthesis of Jewish ethics and observance to demand a deeper reckoning with the reality of Jewish political and state power. Reading the book almost a year after the devastating attacks of October 7th, and the beginning of Israel’s still-ongoing military response, it’s painful to hear the author’s imperatives reaching out from a time only months before this cycle started. Since then, a reported two percent of Gaza’s total population has been killed; over a hundred Israeli hostages still desperately wait to be rescued; and the West Bank is embroiled in a crisis that escalates by the day.
Having analyzed the slow but purposeful marriage of Jewish theology to Israeli state power within the National-Religious community, one can only hope that Manekin’s work serves not as merely a reconsideration, but as the opening salvo of a new fight via redemptive ethical literature for the continuing Jewish soul of a Jewish and democratic state.
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Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson is the Executive Director of Partners for Progressive Israel.
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