He's one of ours

Right-wing rabbis have hastened to dissociate themselves from Yaakov (Jack) Teitel, the "Jewish terrorist." Instead, they are trying to place him in the same category as the perpetrators of other recent shocking murders. "Our link to Teitel is like that of secular people to Assaf Goldring," a leader of the national-ultra-Orthodox community told the Web site ynet, referring to a father who murdered his daughter. The rabbis said they had every reason to join the condemnation of the terror acts Teitel has reportedly confessed to.

Apparently, right-wing rabbis, and perhaps the Israeli public as a whole, have an interest in portraying Teitel as a mentally-ill weirdo who acted on his own without accomplices; someone about whom "it was impossible to tell" what he was up to. He was also a quiet man who was busy with computers, a family man and an exemplary one, of course, a kind of Jewish Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Maybe the reason for this is the difficulty in finding a place for Teitel in the Israeli social fabric. After all, what is he? Jewish American? Religious Zionist? Ultra-Orthodox? A settler? A homophobe? And what is the connection between all these categories?

Teitel is not the first Jewish terrorist, and apparently he isn't the last. Like all people - from terrorists to saints - he grew up in a complex social and philosophical environment. He must have heard and read things like, "It's our duty to combat the spiritual decadence that could provide the wellspring for a weakening of our grip on the Land. The Gay Pride Parade is the manifestation of an earthquake ... one cord is woven out of our duty to work on the development of the settlement project and our duty to protest powerfully against abomination." This appeared in the settler leaflet Yesha Shelanu exactly three years ago.

We are accustomed to ultra-Orthodox objections to gay pride parades, especially when they take place in Jerusalem. When did the national religious community join in the vilification? If in the past, religious Zionists have relied on the notion of the Promised Land and on the State of Israel as the "beginning of redemption," it seems that in recent years their confidence in the redemptive process has begun to give way.

The State of Israel is no longer perceived as part of things. At best, it's a secular country that has outlived its role and is no longer relevant to the messianic process. Certain elements in the religious Zionist camp, ranging from students of the moderate, postmodern rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (Shagar) to the radical rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg (the compiler of "Baruch Hagever," an anthology that honors the memory of another Jewish terrorist, Baruch Goldstein) have foreshadowed the next stage of Zionism: a struggle for a Jewish-religious regime in the Land of Israel.

Such a regime cannot come about, they believe, if the Jewish community is defiled by abominations. These can arise from the settlement of foreigners in the Land of Israel, especially if they own expanses of land - an idea that Ginsburg has expounded on at length - but also from impure conduct by Jews. With the people and land being increasingly defined as a mystical covenant, similar to marriage, homosexual relations become a real menace.

Gay Pride parades and declarations of alternative single-sex marriages play on this raw nerve of the religious Zionist public, which is becoming more and more mystical and radical. Religious Zionism is morphing into a fear of defilement and is increasingly turning "the others" into "the tainted." Teitel, like Goldstein and Yigal Amir before him, is merely the executor acting on behalf of a radical ideology that can also be expressed in delicate and moderate terms, so it is spreading fairly widely in the religious community. Teitel is not alone.

The writer is working on a master's thesis on radical religious Zionism and postmodern discourse at Tel Aviv University's Cohn Institute.