To have the pleasure of knowing, and learning from, Peter Berkowitz, is to encounter a polymathic mind whose insightful intellect ranges across politics and the academy, law, philosophy, and history. My own experience working with Berkowitz as a member of the State Department’s Commission on Inalienable Human Rights was a true privilege for which I will be forever grateful. The range of Berkowitz’s knowledge can be found in a newly published collection of columns that are ostensibly all about one subject—the state of the State of Israel—but range across 10 years of that country’s controversies and crises, especially on the debate on the future of the Judiciary and the world after October 7.
Some of the reflections regarding the latter subject are especially invaluable. Thus there is Berkowitz’s succinct summary of all that is wrong with the odious International Court of Justice in The Hague. Drawing on his own experience in foreign policy, Berkowitz describes all the true injustices this purported court has ignored. Most noteworthy of all, perhaps, is the “internment of some 1 million Muslim Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party.”
And then there is a moving description of the author engaging in the unusual activity of teaching the writings of Burke, Mill, and Locke, to a group of adult members of the Israeli Haredi community (often inaccurately rendered “ultra-Orthodox”). I know of no one else who could have the right balance of gifts to lead this unique form of pedagogy. Berkowitz movingly describes the discussion between himself and his students, and reflects how freedom and religion are not “inevitable antagonists,” but rather “working partners and perhaps friends.”
How is this balance being struck in Israel, and how comparable is it to the cultural moment in America? Berkowitz compares the two countries at various points in the book, but I am unsure the comparison holds. Thus, praising a book by the Israeli intellectual Micah Goodman, Berkowitz describes how secularism can teach Jewish Orthodoxy that too often it fosters “a sense of guilt stemming from the experience of always falling short of God’s commandments.” Mutual understanding between the faithful and the secular, Berkowitz concludes, “may have the additional benefit—in the United States as in Israel—of tempering the increasingly entrenched enmity between right and left.”
This rabbinic reviewer, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not think this critique of Orthodoxy is accurate, but the more important point is that the cultural divide in America is utterly different than the divisions in Israel and cannot really be compared. Since October 7, one of the most popular songs in Israel as been a composition by the non-Orthodox singer Eyal Golan, which asserts that “the eternal people does not fear” and that “the Holy One blessed be protects us, who can therefore defeat us?” The prayers of the High Holy Days have been exultantly sung at concerts in seemingly secular Caesarea and Tel Aviv, reflecting, in the words of Israeli journalist Amit Segal, “what makes Israel unique: a place where tradition and modern life blend so seamlessly that even a centuries-old prayer can turn into a pop song.” Such cultural phenomena are unthinkable in American pop, reflecting how the cultural divisions in the United States are more profound.
This also means that for all the vituperative nature of its politics, we should be wary of comparing Israelis who oppose the current Israeli government to progressive Jews in America. In one piece about the judicial reform plans put forward by the Netanyahu government, Berkowitz disagrees with Elliott Abrams’s contention that, in his paraphrase, “as American Jews grow more secular and progressive, they become increasingly incapable of appreciating an Israel that has evolved into a conservative country that puts a premium on maintaining its Jewish character in a dangerous neighborhood.” Berkowitz comments:
Netanyahu’s bloc obtained a solid Knesset majority of 64 seats in the November 2022 election, the fifth in four years, but received only about 30,000 more votes than the anti-Netanyahu bloc. A slender conservative majority … backs the constitutional counterrevolution. Meanwhile, a large minority—much of it secular, progressive, and making vital contributions to Israel’s economy and defense—opposes it. To preserve political cohesiveness, substantial changes to the structure of the Israeli regime must earn support that extends beyond these partisan divisions.
Berkowitz is critical of the government’s policy on judicial matters, and my views are not the same as his; but we can all agree that in general, political prudence is a virtue. Yet in my view, Elliott Abrams is still correct to contrast Israeli Jewry with many in America. I would not describe the split as one similar to that in the United States, between right-wing and “progressive”—or even really “secular.”
As Dan Senor and Saul Singer have noted in their book The Genius of Israel (which I reviewed for this publication), the profound level of happiness and cohesion in Israeli society—in the face of all the controversies that consume its political culture—lies in the fact that tradition is still important to those not rigorously religiously observant. While many Israelis might not observe every rule and regulation of the Sabbath, millions mark the Sabbath nonetheless.
Religious observance cuts across the political divide. You will see Benny Gantz—a political opponent of the current coalition—attend Purim services in his local Orthodox synagogue; and the former opposition leader and now president, Isaac Herzog, has invoked with pride his grandfather, one of Israel’s first chief rabbis and a hero of Orthodox Jewish Zionism, and referenced his own religious heritage in his remarks. Meanwhile, politically, the opposition to Netanyahu includes the voters of Avigdor Lieberman, whose own reflections on how Israel should deal with its enemies would shock liberal members of American Jewry. Questions over faith and public policy, and the relationship between religion and democracy, unquestionably roils Israel’s politics in various. But when it comes to the vast majority of Israelis, one fact seems certain: doppelgängers of progressive American Jews they are not.
It is with this in mind that we may turn to the final essay in the book, “Athens, Sparta, and Israel,” a review of a book by the Israeli writer Avi Shavit. Describing Athens as an embodiment of liberty, and Sparta as an embodiment of military strength, Berkowitz concludes that “to remain free, democratic, Jewish, and secure in the post-October 7th world, Israel must surpass Athens and Sparta by blending the best in both.”
To be sure, Israel will have elements of Athens, such as art and innovation; but unlike much produced in Hollywood, many of its artistic creations touch on profoundly religious matters—such as the wildly popular show Shtisel, about a Haredi family. And while Israel has elements of Sparta, it bears mentioning that a strikingly large ratio of military casualties in post-October 7 Israel has been suffered by members of Israel’s religious Zionist community. Where once the elite units might be made up of members of secular, socialist kibbutzim, now they are filled by chovshei kippot, those who wear skullcaps. What motivates them is not only that they are defending their people (though of course they are), but also because they believe they are part of a miraculous story of destruction, exile, return, and restoration.
Other Israelis intuitively understand this as well. The most famous photograph in Israeli history remains an image of three simple soldiers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a reminder of the wonder of Jewish history. There is a reason, after all, why the Athenian agora lies in ruins, the Parthenon a tourist spot, and Sparta entirely obliterated on the ash heap of history. But ancient Jerusalem is teeming with Jews that reenact the same religious rituals, and sing the same psalms in the same language, that marked that site thousands of years ago. If Israel surpasses these ancient cities—as it already has—it will do so above all by embodying its sacred city, rather than these other locales that have impacted the West.
It is thanks to the innumerable gifts of Peter Berkowitz, as a writer and teacher, that I have come to understand the importance of Leo Strauss’s essay “Jerusalem and Athens.” Strauss’s point, as Berkowitz has written, is that both the focus on reason, and Jerusalem’s teachings about loving obedience to God, are critical to the “continued vitality of the West.” Jerusalem today remains Jerusalem, which is why it may well help save the future of civilization.
Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America
by Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Publishing, 248 pp., $28
Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva
University.
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