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Hamoro Shel Mashiah
(The Messiah’s Donkey)
By Seffi Rachlevsky
Reviewed by Micha Odenheimer
A Western diplomat once suggested that the passions aroused in Israeli society by the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—perpetrated by Yigal Amir, a religious, ultranationalist law student—would last only until “the next suicide bombing.” Subsequent events appeared to prove that statement prophetic, as a wave of suicide bombings claimed the lives of more than 60 Israelis and shifted public ire toward the Palestinians and the Labor government that had made them partners in the peace process. One year later, Benjamin Netanyahu rode this public sentiment to electoral success, with the backing of right-wing and religious parties. But in truth, the public outrage directed toward Rabin’s assassin—and the deepening suspicion of the Orthodox religious community that fostered him—never dissipated. All that was missing was a catalyzing event to bring that simmering anger to the surface.
That catalyzing event turned out to be last year’s publication of The Messiah’s Donkey. In this fierce attack on Israel’s Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox religious groups and their politics, Seffi Rachlevsky, the book’s young, self-taught author, upped the stakes and changed the rules in the cultural war between secular and religious Israelis. For the first time in the history of Israel’s popular culture, an internal, Jewish enemy—the Orthodox—was defined as the most dangerous foe of Israeli society. The Messiah’s Donkey crystallized secular Israel’s fear of ultra-Orthodox power, amplifying the already alarming concern felt by many over Netanyahu’s perceived instability and infirm commitment to democratic values. The book became a runaway bestseller in Israeli terms (selling about 10,000 copies during its first weekend of publication). Although the secular counterrevolution that brought Prime Minister Ehud Barak to power in May 1999 was the result of many factors, including the lingering trauma of Rabin’s assassination, the role of The Messiah’s Donkey should not be underestimated.
The book was praised by some Israeli luminaries, such as Yaron London, a host of popular TV documentaries on Israeli history, and Yoram Bronowski, a leading book critic. One reviewer called Rachlevsky’s work “the most important book to be published in Israel in recent years.” Other voices, often from the religious camp, condemned it as a work filled with the spirit of hatred, some comparing it with the 90-year-old, anti-Semitic forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Rachlevsky purports to unveil the true face of Orthodox Judaism in Israel today. The book’s central claim is that over the last quarter century, nearly all the major schools and communities of traditional Judaism have been overtaken and devoured by a belief system that combines kabalistic mysticism, Orthodox xenophobia, and right-wing politics into a single toxic blend. The author characterizes this new and politically potent form of Judaism as messianic, mostly because he sees the pursuit of absolute power as its shaping goal. The Judaism described in The Messiah’s Donkey envisions victory over Israel’s secular, democratic society as the inevitable, welcome end of the redemption process. This messianism is infused with hatred and disdain for “the other”: secular Jews, non-Jews, and women. The Rabin assassination, according to Rachlevsky, was the first outburst of the messianic violence that will continue to break forth from a religious community bent on destroying Israel’s democracy, rebuilding the Third Temple (which will herald the age of the Messiah), and perhaps, sparking worldwide apocalypse.
Rachlevsky promotes the idea that Judaism has been transformed into something new and grotesque in the last 25 years. Fortunately for Judaism, Rachlevsky’s thesis is shot through with distortions and falsehoods. Like a bad amateur archeologist, he mixes up the layers of Jewish history, attempting to find the most outrageous expressions of Jewish chauvinism, ignoring their specific contexts, and then using all of these statements as the interpretive background for understanding contemporary Orthodox reality.
At times, he is just plain wrong. He states, for example, that Maimonides, the towering twelfth-century Jewish sage, called Islam idol worship. In actuality, Maimonides stated explicitly that Islam was not to be considered idol worship and that Muslim understanding of the unity of God—the central tenet of Judaism—was “beyond reproach.” Rachlevsky also confuses written texts with the dynamic of reality within religious society. For instance, while he paints a portrait of Orthodox society as increasingly misogynist and intent on the disempowerment of women, the reality is that, even in most of the ultra-Orthodox community, a quiet feminist revolution has been taking place. Women’s educational levels and economic power have increased dramatically over the last quarter century. Thousands of women have begun learning Talmud, the main intellectual endeavor of Jewish men and a central sacred task—just 30 years ago, women were still banned from Talmudic learning.
The idea that Jewish messianism is at the heart of the marriage between the Israeli Right and the ultra-Orthodox population is also painfully simplistic. As Asa Kasher, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University, pointed out in a review of The Messiah’s Donkey in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the religious population began its turn to the Right during the 15 years of nearly uninterrupted reign of the secular-nationalist Likud Party—a shift that had more to do with political equations than mystical messianism. The Right courted the religious parties, needing them to form a ruling coalition. And the nationalist ideology of Likud, with its emphasis on the unique historical mission of the Jewish people, resonated with the religious population’s distrust of the developing global culture that the Left embraced.
Despite the gaps in its scholarship and the deep fault lines in its thesis, The Messiah’s Donkey has succeeded in awakening the Israeli secular Left from its political slumber. The influence of the book on the recent Israeli election is easy to see. Several months before the elections, a poll showed that Israelis rated the religious-secular conflict as the country’s most dangerous problem, above even security concerns such as war and terrorism. Thousands of men and women—secular Israelis or religious moderates—volunteered to help the Barak campaign, many inspired by the desire to defeat the fundamentalist Right. Yisrael b’Aliyah, the Russian immigrant party led by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, openly confronted the ultra-Orthodox Shas—which controlled the Ministry of Interior during Netanyahu’s term—over its discriminatory practices toward immigrants considered non-Jewish by Orthodox standards. And for the first time in Israel’s history, a political party—called Shinui (Change)—focused its campaign exclusively and explicitly on combating ultra-Orthodox power. On May 17 of this year, Shinui won a remarkable six parliamentary seats (out of 120), taking tens of thousands of votes from right-wing parties.
Recent events, however, have proved that while it might be politically expedient to attack the ultra-Orthodox, the task of governing makes it far more difficult to exclude them. In fact, Barak has put considerable effort into making religious Israelis feel that he will be the “Prime Minister of all Israelis.” After a long and trying postelection negotiations period, Barak chose to include the National Religious Party, Shas, and United Torah Judaism in his majority government (excluding Likud, which was eager to join). What remains to be seen in the near future is the extent to which the religious Right will go in opposing Barak’s expected peace moves. If extremists manage to galvanize a fierce or even violent opposition to territorial compromises, and to couch their opposition in religious terms, then The Messiah’s Donkey, despite its flaws, might prove to have an enduring resonance within Israeli society.