Today we learned about the National Religious Community in Israel, and I would like to say that I tried to go into this lecture with an open mind. Although, I already had set notions on this topic. I thought it was important that I gave Rabbi Michael Unterberg respect and that I listened. Also, I know that not everyone in a “tribe” believes in the same ideas. With that being said, he confirmed what I always thought.
Rabbi Michael Unterberg is liberal orthodox man from Cleveland. I know, really sounds like an oxymoron. To quote Amnon, “he is a minority in a minority”, which truly reflects a great population of Israelis that political views do not correlate with their religious views. He does not agree with some of the recent political decisions made by religious political groups in Israel. In his own words, one can sum up the recent national religious policies with “we told you so”. In order to understand, you have to learn their history.
At first, the National Religious Community was very leftist. They truly believe that God has set aside the perfect land for a socialist Jewish society. However, this still meant the Palestinian territories. So when in 1967 we conquered “all the cities in the Bible,” meaning ancient Judean cities outside the 1948 Israeli borders, religious conservatives felt legitimized to tell the rest of Israel, “we told you so”. Meaning that this ten percent of the Israel population thought that they were the leaders of Jewish society. This caused them to become extremely hawkish with Israeli foreign policy.
Unterberg suggested that their attitudes toward Palestinians are that for the most part, “we don’t care.” In 2005, when the intifada hit, a minority of the National Religious Zionists wanted to reform their policies, but the majority just felt more convinced about their beliefs. Unterberg said that his definition of the beliefs of National Religious Zionism is that “modern Israel is a Religious event, a historical change by God, that prophecies from bible predicted for life today”. This past election, he changed his kippa because can’t understand how people can call themselves properly religious when their political leanings conflict with the morals of Judaism. Overall, National Religious Zionist show the confusion and chaos of the tribes of Israel.