To Shas officials ‘Sephardi’ is the description and the content of the ‘New Jewish Israeli’ identity they are constructing. This identity is an alternative to the secular, Zionist and Western identity of Ben-Gurion’s ‘New Israeli’, part of his agenda to build the Israeli secular melting pot. According to Itzhik Sudri, the New Jewish Israeli identity of Shas is serving the culture, the tradition, the Halacha or in one word – Judaism. Their ‘New Jewish Israeli’ is a religious person with an identity built on Jewish tradition and culture.
In order to describe Sephardi values to me, Itzhik Sudri uses the, in his view, contrasting Ashkenazi capitalistic outlook, wherein the strongest succeeds and success is built on intelligence and money. In this system the strong grows stronger and the weak grows weaker, Itzhik Sudri explains, and illustrates the idea behind the Ashkenazi economical views with an metaphor: “It is like tying a man and throwing him into the water – if he can swim he survives, if he cannot swim he drowns. Shas on the other hand, teaches the man how to swim so that he may survive and succeed in life”.
A Good Jew
Shas uses its educational system and social and welfare organisations to shape the individual Sephardi Jew.67 Here I shall look into how exactly the Shas officials want a pupils to emerge from these schools – which values and perspectives should a person with a Sephardi identity hold, according to Shas? How is the way of life and what are the future prospects of Shas’ New Jewish Israeli? To my question Itzhik Sudri answered that they want everyone to be what they want to be – what they are able to be. He said that parents send their child to the Shas schools and they are happy about the way their child develops, which is a child who loves his parents and behaves nicely towards them – he becomes a good Jew. Furthermore, a pupil educated in Shas schools emerges a religious person; a
67 The educational system in Israel was established in 1953 with the State Education Law, which included
two state schools; one secular and one religious supervised by the National Religious Party (Peled and Shafir, 1996: 400). Additionally, the Haredi community was allowed to keep its own educational systems financed by the state, but governed by the Haredim. Shas’ schools are defined as Haredi schools, thereby allowing Shas to supervise them and to receive financing from the state.
person who knows where he is from, why he is Jewish, what it means to be Jewish and why he is in the land of Israel.68 The pupil knows all the Halacha and he fulfils the
mitzvoth (the commandments and precepts of the Torah). This corresponds to the definition
of a Jew by yeshiva student Akiva Aaronson (1997:17) who writes that in the Jewish tradition “[..] the first duty of a Jew is to know who he is; […] how special and dear he is to Hashem/God […], from whom he is descended; Avraham Aveinu/Abraham Our Father […], and what his purpose is in the world; to maintain the name of Hashem in the world until the time when all will recognise Him”. 69
Modern Identity
Itzhik Sudri states that this pupil is also a part of the modern world; he knows all the subjects he needs to know to pursue a degree at university if that is what he wants to do. He can also become a rabbi if this is what he desires. Itzhik Sudri describes “[…] a person who studies modernisation, someone who does not remain only with the Torah and the Halacha, rather a person who studies Torah and economics.”
Again Itzhik Sudri uses the Ashkenazi Haredi party Agudat Yisrael to illustrate the Sephardi identity of Shas; he says that in Agudat Yisrael nobody did the military service whereas16 out of the 7 Members of Knesset form Shas did their military service. To Itzhik Sudri this proves that it is possible to study religion and also become a man of a profession – to combine being Haredi and Sephardi. He says this is more or less the idea of the New Jewish Israeli: to do the military service and keep the religion.
In contrast, the Haredi society is past oriented and according to Sivan (1990) the basic Haredi goal is to re-establish the exilic Halacha governed autonomous community from Eastern Europe.
Against the New Israeli Identity
“Shas wants to shatter the work Ben Gurion started, because his path was a mistake, you cannot make a man into something different,” Itzhik Sudri says, referring to Ben Gurion’s ‘New Secular Israeli’ and the policies of ‘Absorption of Immigrants’ practiced in the 1950s and 1960s.70 The underlying ideals and values of these immigration policies
68 Itzhik Sudri speaks in masculine terms only. It is difficult to know whether this has significance or if it is
due to the Hebrew language in which unspecified singular is masculine. As discussed in chapter three, I do not indulge in discussions concerning the possible reasons for choice of words by my informants.
69 Hashem literally means “The Name” in Hebrew and is a Jewish term for God.
70 This was the name of the official policy best described with another name for the same process:
were rooted in European Zionism. The political establishment considered the immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries as ‘the other’ that had to be integrated and assimilated into the Ashkenazi Israeli culture (Silberstein, 1994:13). The new immigrants needed to adopt the values of the modern secular West, to become ‘new’ through a rebirth and a spiritual ascendance (Cohen, 1983:115).
Shas wants to reshape to the identity of the Sephardi Israelis on the basis of the Sephardi traditions and observance of the Halacha. According to Itzhik Sudri, Shas is replacing the identity forced upon them by the predominately Ashkenazi establishment. Shas is rejecting the identity of the ‘New Secular Israeli’ that does not have any roots in the Sephardi Jewish tradition or history, and creating an alternative identity. This alternative identity includes a return of the individual to an observant way of life and thereby rescuing him or her from the corrupt and alien identity of the secular Israeli.
Returnees to Observance
Itzhik Sudri continues to explain that Shas is assisting people who return to observance, or want to do so, through its institutions and organisations. The goal is to make the returnees more observant following the Sephardi edition of the Halacha. Itzhik Sudri emphasises that Shas is not in favour of forcing a level of observance or a life style on anyone. Moreover, according to Itzhik Sudri, in the institutions and organisations of Shas all Jews are considered as individuals doing something they believe in, everyone in his own way. To Itzhik Sudri, seeing a Jew eating pork hurts him, but he does not consider himself in a position to forbid anyone to eat pork. Each individual can do what he wants; he can drive to the beach on Shabbat and he can eat pork, but according to Itzhik Sudri it is much better if he goes to the synagogue on Shabbat and keeps kosher, i.e. eats according to the Jewish dietary laws. Through its institutions Shas want to help people to do just that. Itzhik Sudri describes these institutions and the people who work in them as “[…] workers to restore the tradition and culture” so that everyone will guard his tradition by studying modern subjects and being religious at the same time.
Itzhik Sudri insists that they accept people as they are, they want to change them, but if it is not possible to make a person religious, they are happy as long as they have brought him a little closer to religion. “We will not turn our backs on him if he is not religious enough”, Itzhik Sudri says, “we want him to be as religious as possible, but if he does not become religious it is not something terrible”. According to Carmela Naor, the manager of the Shas welfare organisation for women, a person will become more serious and demand
more of himself through Torah and the mitzvoth – the Torah teaches him that. She says, “to be religious, is to believe in one Source, in the Torah and in the mitzvoth. Everyone chooses his own way; one is stricter in charity, another is stricter in prayer, yet another is stricter in inner development, but the religion, the way, is the same”.
Every Jew has got a free will and must choose to live a life in accordance with the commandments and prohibitions from God. According to the tradition, Messiah will come if all Jews keep Shabbat once and this illustrates the emphasis on living a life according to the Halacha. The same importance of keeping the words of God is behind Shas Member of Knesset Shlomo Benizri’s claim that to study Halacha and pray is more efficient as a defence of Israel than the Israeli Defence Force.71 The Jews believe they are making order and repairing the world by their individual keeping of the mitzvoth and moral. In this sense the individual is of great importance for the Jewish community and also for everybody in the world. The moral and conscience by which Jews follow and interpret the Halacha, the basic principle that is the foundation for all Jewish ideological development and ethics, is the belief that God made a covenant with the Jewish people and thereby made their lives, lived in accordance with the Covenant, holy (Groth, 2000:26). The rabbinical interpretation of the Halacha is a search to understand and explain how to live according to God's will in the Covenant.