Page 112 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

to form networks of solidarity that feed into Israel’s enclave system. Politi-
cally the organizations that radio promotes rely directly or indirectly on govern-
ment funding, and thus, when the party is in power, Shas’s strongholds in the
apparatuses of the ministries of social affairs, labour, the interior, and reli-
gious affairs are strengthened. This ¤ts in with the pattern of Shas activism, and
indeed of nationalist and religious activism in Israel generally, which advances
by creating “facts on the ground,” enclaves that begin as territorial entities—
settlements, ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods—and then become institutional-
ized in political parties or factions, and may eventually gain control of minis-
tries or ministerial departments. 11

T’shuva and the Tension between
High and Low Culture

For those whose knowledge or experience of Judaism is limited to the
diaspora, it is hard to imagine the adoption of strict religious observance as a
dissidence directed against high culture, or that the propagation of an obser-
vant lifestyle might be wrapped in symbols and motifs drawn from the sphere
of popular culture. Ultra-Orthodoxy, after all, seems so austere, so bound up
with the written word and canonical texts, that it is hard to think of it as any-
thing but high culture. In Israel the ultra-Orthodox communities could long
be regarded as erudite, austere, and self-isolated, relating to the rest of society
only through their leaders’ indefatigable political pressure and occasional di-
rect action against violations of their bodily inhibitions and Sabbath obser-
vance. Drawing the line between high and popular culture turns out to be a
complex matter, requiring that account be taken of the diversity of the ultra-
Orthodox world itself and the dif¤culties of setting the secular-religious con-
trast against that between high culture and its popular counterpart. For the time
being, therefore, it is enough to say that the powerful Chassidic strand in ultra-
Orthodoxy, with its elements of mysticism and physical expressions of devotion
and identity (through chanting and dance), is clearly self-identi¤ed as popular
culture; that the text-centered character of the life of ultra-Orthodox men (in-
cluding the Chassidim, for they too study Torah) does not in itself detach them
from the popular; and, ¤nally, that even in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe,
ultra-Orthodox identity developed as a reaction against the sophistication of
secularized and modernized Jews who wanted to join an overwhelmingly non-
Jewish elite (Katz 1973), and was also powerfully enhanced by the struggles over
intellectualism within highly observant circles that witnessed ferocious denun-
ciations of the Chassidim by extremely learned rabbis for their corporal effu-
sion and messianism.
To understand the popular cultural dimension of today’s movement of re-
turn to religion, it must ¤rst be recalled how radically different circumstances
are in Israel from those in pre-Holocaust Europe or indeed in today’s diaspora,
if only because, as a state, Israel constitutes a space in which the interaction of

Holy Pirates 101