Page 116 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

may be “planted”—speak with ease and eloquence, and Yitzchak responds in a
down-to-earth sort of way. Those who have speci¤c needs are asked to hand in
a piece of paper and he blesses them all at the end of the meeting.
Antiestablishment rhetoric is fueled by wordplay and by judicious use of ac-
cent and turns of phrase. In one videocassette, ¤lmed live, he defends the privi-
leges, or exemptions, enjoyed by haredim in Israel, on the analogy of a water-
melon. This is a reference to a remark by Ezer Weizman, Israel’s recent head
of state and, for the preacher’s audience, an archetypal representative of the
European, educated, secular elite, who had picked out the development of the
seedless watermelon as a source of great national pride. For religious people,
to whom Israel is above all the Promised Land, the notion that the country
should take pride in such mundane achievements is itself laughable. But Yitz-
chak builds his retort around the metaphor of “black” as the color of strict re-
ligious observance. For him, Weizman, like all secular Israelis, wants an Israel
without the black seeds, without the haredim. For Yitzchak, in contrast, the
haredim are not only black seeds, they are also the seeds of continuity of Juda-
ism, while the red ®esh represents communism and dictatorship, that is, the
godless Zionist secular regime—and the green outer skin represents fertile pas-
ture, an image of a fertile Israel. The kibbutz, secular and emblematically Zion-
ist, took the juice of state subsidies ¤rst, and so the haredim then had to come
and extort their due: if the haredim had staked their claim ¤rst, they would not
have had to exercise so much pressure later on. He then attacks a towering icon
of Zionism, namely, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, he claims, had said that
Israel had to make the Jews into a “people with a culture”—thus ignoring ¤fty-
three hundred years of Jewish culture—and introduced a German culture—that
is, anti-Semitism. What, Yitzhak asks, of charity, of Sabbath observance, of re-
spect for the sages—are these not also representative of culture?
We had occasion to appreciate the effectiveness of Yitchak’s use of these de-
vices in his address, entitled “Before the End,” more or less the same, word for
word, as a cassette he issued the day after the September 11 attacks which of-
fered a golden opportunity to merchants of biblical millenarianism. He recalled
his prediction at the time of the 1993 Oslo agreements that “there is no peace
with terrorists” (Cassette no. 35, noted above). Two years earlier he had pre-
dicted that “the great America would shrink: no one would have predicted it,
not even in their worst nightmares . . . a million Interpol agents . . . millions of
recorded telephone conversations . . . all these ‘sources’ are of no use because
those without ‘spiritual sources’ are unprotected. Only those who had the Jewish
sources knew it would happen.”
The discourse then discusses the biblical origins of claims to the land of Is-
rael, and quotes the Zohar, a thirteenth-century Kabbalistic text (Jacobs 1995): 14
“There will come a time when their right to the Holy Land will expire. Then the
sons of Ishmael will wage war on the whole world—on sea, on land and near
Jerusalem, and other peoples will participate in the struggle, but there will be
no victor there will be three months of war in a far-off place and in the end
only Israel will remain and the whole world will recognize the one God and his

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