Page 113 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

high and low culture is bound up with relations of power. In Israel, also, high
culture is not a matter of religion; rather, it is the culture of the secular elite,
English-speaking, sophisticated, cosmopolitan and enamored of the canon of
Western civilization, and many indications tell us that the t’shuva movement is a
cultural dissidence against that culture and its secularism. The rabbinic erudi-
tion of the haredi communities stands in sharp contrast to the secular erudition
of the university: where academics bring modern sciences such as archaeology
and linguistics to bear on canonic texts, and place them in a historical context,
while in the yeshivas the rabbis do not accept the treatment of those texts as
historical documents. Although they cultivate an extraordinary command of
the texts, as far as they are concerned, Rashi (1040–1105) in France, Maimonides
(1135–1204) in Cordoba and Cairo, and the authors and editors of the Talmud
(300 b.c.–a.d. 400) in Babylon and Jerusalem, might as well all have lived at the
same time in the same place.
The Ashkenazi rabbinical world has imparted to its Sephardi pupils its hos-
tility to the secular elite. The broader Sephardi population, for their part, are
themselves marked out from the secular elite by a range of linguistic, educa-
tional, and socioeconomic markers, and they repeatedly charge that elite with
making them feel inferior in culture and social status. So the t’shuva movement
has been able to mobilize popular culture and strict religion against the secular
elite and its cosmopolitan (European-Ashkenazi) practices, building on the af-
¤nity of the ethnic Sephardi theme with return to religion. The streetwise tinge
to the movement—evidenced in Ovadia Yosef’s asides, the chatty style of some
cassette tapes, the religious music on tape, and, as we shall see, the fabulous im-
agery (mixed with an abundance of wit) of the evangelist Amnon Yitzchak’s
apocalyptic discourses—is the vehicle for its openness to the broader society,
and demarcates t’shuva from the haredi obsession with practices denoting ta-
boo, pollution and thus closure, introspection, and exclusion. The circle of dis-
sidence is ¤nally closed by the identi¤cation in Israel of the popular sectors with
the Judeo-Arab heritage rather than with the Yiddish-speaking Eastern Euro-
pean culture, because the Sephardim are disadvantaged since theirs is the lan-
guage of the street, of the criminal underworld, and even because the pronun-
ciation of modern Hebrew itself derives from the Hebrew of the Northern and
Southern Mediterranean shores and of historic Palestine itself and not from
Russia, Poland, Lithuania, or Germany. Similarly Israeli popular music also de-
rives from the North African and Middle Eastern musical modes, not from those
of Eastern Europe.
Some might remind us that outside Israel other t’shuva movements also use
modern media and also conduct extensive t’shuva campaigns. This is true espe-
cially of Chabad, also known as the Lubavitch Chassidim, the one Ashkenazi
sect that regards t’shuva as its primary commitment, that uses cassettes, co-opts
popular music, and also brings New Age themes and motifs into its activities.
Chabad has outreach programs in the Jewish community, on many university
campuses especially in the United States, and is well known for its missionary
activities in peripheral Jewish communities, for example, in Madrid, Rio de Ja-

102 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner