An Israeli soldier hangs an Israeli flag on an armored personnel carrier near the border with the Gaza Strip, April 15, 2024. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images

Contributing Columnist Sruli Fruchter May 13, 2024

Yom Ha’atzmaut — Israeli Independence Day — was always among my favorite Jewish holidays. Belting the festive Hallel prayer, immersing in Hebrew texts, celebrating at Israeli-style BBQs — the day’s rapture gripped me. Every year reinducted me into the Religious Zionist fold, reaffirming my belief in this Messianic drama.

This year’s Yom Ha’atzmaut is different. Oct. 7 casts a dark shadow over celebration almost to the point of eclipse. Imagining a conflict-free Middle East, lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, or Israel becoming “a light unto the nations” — all integral to my religious beliefs and hopes — feels delusional.

Five years ago, I heard a shiur in my gap year yeshiva that paralleled prophetic and Talmudic teachings with the state of Israel’s emergence and development. It all suggested, if not proved, the rabbi said, that the foundation of the modern nation-state of Israel marked the beginning of Messianic times.

Unlike its secular counterpart, Religious Zionism considers the state of Israel’s sovereignty, cultivation and protection as innately religious endeavors. Its Messianic stream, which the 1967 War’s victory popularized, views today’s Jewish state as “the advent of the flowering of redemption” — a utopian era of universal peace, love and divinity. Jewish tradition’s admittedly limited knowledge of that period makes the prospect all the more exhilarating.

Right then I declared myself a Religious Zionist. I was captivated by its harmonious blend of divine purpose and physical promise, and I committed myself to aliyah that same day, finally moving here in August 2023.

But now celebrating Israel’s 76th birthday — my first as an oleh — I feel mired in despair. Everything about today’s disaster haunts me: over 100 hostages trapped in Gaza, Hamas and Hezbollah’s ongoing threat, Gaza’s future, Israel’s international isolation, its fractured U.S. relations. Absent a clear path forward, the Jewish state’s future looks dark, and I’m struggling to find the light.

The period of Israeli history most comparable to ours is the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which shattered Israel’s self-perception and bludgeoned its self-assurance concretized a few years prior in the 1967 War. It sent Israel onto a difficult path of reckoning: what went wrong, what it means and how to move forward.

Everyone was scarred by the near miss the Jewish state had undergone — even prominent American Orthodox rabbis. Rabbi Norman Lamm, three years before becoming Yeshiva University’s president, “confessed” his “sin of premature Messianism” and “a cockiness about Israel’s power.” He rejected the hubris that enabled such a blunder.

Many Religious Zionist voices, however, coped by still situating the war within God’s larger plan of redemption. Most notable was an essay penned shortly after the war by Rabbi Yehudah Amital — one of the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel.

Citing the war’s focus on Jewish sovereignty, involvement of “all nations,” and miraculous victory, Rabbi Amital insisted that “all these things belie the war’s local and temporal aspect and, instead, ascribe it to its Messianic element, its revolutionary historical perspective.”

That search for meaning characterized my favorite quality of Religious Zionism: watching and listening for God’s signals in our Messianic story.

Before Oct. 7, I had the luxury of relating to existential peril and national trauma solely on a theoretical level — I wasn’t alive during the Yom Kippur War and knew no such crises in my lifetime. But living through Oct. 7, I feel estranged from Religious Zionism’s perpetual certainty in our past and future history.

I question how we propped up Hamas all these years, how we left the Palestinian-Israeli conflict dormant, how we accepted Israel’s social strife, and how we failed to prevent Oct. 7. Most alarming is that I don’t think we are doing anything differently. Seven months since Oct. 7, we are hardly more safe than before, our hostages’ fate feels hopeless, and our future is muddled with danger. None of this reassures me.

My faith in God and Israel remains ironclad, but it is no longer blithely naive. “A redemption narrative can solve many problems,” Rabbi Zachary Truboff explained, “but only if one is willing to look away from trauma.”

I think about that a lot these days. Celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut is so difficult for me because buried in my heart is an unimaginable question: What if Israel ceases to exist? While that is unlikely today, Jewish history never conforms to pure expectation. I cannot extinguish my fears with a redemption narrative because Israel’s survival cannot be guaranteed. Oct. 7’s trauma is proof of that.

After the Yom Kippur War, Religious Zionist rabbis like Lamm urged humility: in ourselves, our narratives and our beliefs. They recognized that the times were too grave, the risks too severe, to hide beneath absolute confidence. Doubt is needed to avert fatal hubris; skepticism can save. It forces us to confront the reality before us and act accordingly, without reverting to wishful (and irresponsible) thinking.

Strangely, this framing is what consoles me as I prepare for the first Yom Ha’atzmaut after Oct. 7. I think that I still believe we are in the beginning of Messianic times. And that’s why I recognize our onus to navigate it properly. Commemorating the miracle of Israel’s birth reminds me that this redemption unfolds by our hands; God grants us agency to form Israel’s future.

My Religious Zionism is precisely what drives me to reorient my Yom Ha’atzmaut mindset and reshape my philosophy. If the state of Israel is truly to be the harbinger of Messianic times, then our religious imperative demands we act like it. That begins with the highest level of scrutiny, a radical and religious act of questioning.

We must fight not only for the country’s survival but also for its values, morals and ideals. That means asking difficult questions — questions I, like most, feel wholly unprepared to consider — about our past, our present and our future: our hostages, war, dangers, errors, leadership, aims.

What, in the future, do we want Israel to be? Only a humble faith in our discoveries can assure we protect Israel from its enemies, and perhaps even from itself.

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