The new disengagers

On the last day of Kfar Darom's existence, about two years ago, Yair Amitai, the teenage son of Miri Amitai, who was killed in the 2000 terror attack on the Kfar Darom school bus, also climbed onto the roof of the synagogue that had become the symbol of the struggle. He held out the country's flag to his friends who were barricading themselves there and asked them to wave it, but they turned him away, almost with scorn. Amitai, somewhat embarrassed, folded the flag, climbed down from the roof and brought the flag back to his house, which the State of Israel demolished a few hours later.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the one depicting Yair Amitai during those moments contains within it the story of the most vehement debate in the national-religious Torah world, the debate over what's known in Hebrew as mamlakhtiyut - in essence, whether the state and its institutions partake of the sanctity of the Land of Israel and should be treated accordingly, a debate that, two years after the disengagement, has been fiercely reignited. On one side is the mainstream of national-religious Zionism, which was greatly dismayed but not completely disheartened by the disengagement, and even took it as evidence of the need to tighten its connection with the general public and the state's institutions, in order to forestall a further disengagement and uprooting. As far as this stream is concerned, nothing has changed. The State of Israel is still "the dawn of our deliverance." Its army is holy, its institutions are holy. The only thing needed is to replace its flawed government.

On the other side were the few rabbis who fostered a dissenting ideology, to the point of disengaging from today's State of Israel. They believe that, in its current formation, the state is no longer the "foundation of God's seat in the world" and surely not the "beginning of our redemption." Their approach resembles the insular Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) attitude of keeping apart, the approach that has despaired of the state, its institutions and the public in general. The "disengaging" trend, in all its various forms, is developing a new way of looking at the state. The attitude is one of detachment from the familiar religious-Zionist stance and includes a distancing from the state's symbols and institutions, such as the flag or the army.

But there is also a third way, whose most prominent exponent in the past year was Rabbi Haim Navon, a member of the Tzohar forum of rabbis and an outstanding pupil of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. Navon became increasingly concerned about the way religious youth were being sucked into viewing everything in terms of a dichotomy, i.e., that what is not holy must be impure. What Navon and other educators, who unfortunately are being pushed to the sidelines, seek to stress is that the opposite of holy isn't necessarily impure. The opposite of "holy" is "non-holy." "The State of Israel may not be holy, but it isn't impure either," says Navon. "The state is non-holy. One shouldn't dedicate oneself to the state unquestioningly, nor should one fight against it. In today's State of Israel, good and bad are mixed. Anyone who observes it realistically will see that the good far exceeds the bad."

Navon speaks very sensibly. Whoever chips away at the state in the wake of the disengagement is spoiled and views the State of Israel as something self-evident - perhaps because they were born into it and never lived under foreign rule. A state cannot be holy, certainly it cannot always be holy. And those who believe that the State of Israel is a link in the chain of "all the generations of the Jewish People" also needn't continually reassess where it stands at any particular moment with respect to the ultimate redemption.

The right way in which to consider the state, even after a harsh trauma like the unforgiving and uncompromising uprooting of 10,000 people from their homes, is by means of "a sober and mature assessment that also acknowledges the shades of gray," as Navon puts it. Jewish rule is valuable, even when it is not purely holy. It may be wrong, but it is not impure, and the state of the Jews that arose after 2,000 years of exile surely does not deserve to be repudiated. There was value to a Jewish state before 1967, too, and it will not be canceled out if, heaven forfend, those among us who seek to uproot us from the particularly historic parts of the land, such as Hebron or Beit El, which existed long before Tel Aviv or Hadera, gain the upper hand. Painful, misguided and harmful as it was, the disengagement does not mean the end of the state. And the brave uprooted people of Gush Katif were the first to internalize this.