Page 117 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

name is One. . . . No one believed these or other prophecies, yet ‘the sons of
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Ishmael’ have made us the sixth power in the world and the Americans look
like circus performers, like dwarfs: they took away the King’s crown and slapped
him in the face.” Yitzchak ridicules the Americans branded by implication as
the global champions of the consumer society—and, indeed, of the Israeli state
itself, which trusts too much in military prowess. He predicts that two-thirds
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of the world will perish in the war of Gog and Magog: “In 9 months of catas-
trophe, there will be epidemics, and limbs will be cut from bodies. Two thirds
of the world will die. It is all written down—there is nothing to be done. The
American attempt to impose globalization, democracy and liberalism, ignoring
all religions, has come to this.”
But there is a chance of salvation for Israel if the people make t’shuva and
return to God. The history of the Jewish people is an endless alternation be-
tween abandonment of God and t’shuva—but “maybe this is the last t’shuva,
maybe we can be saved as in the Exodus from Egypt. Maybe now we have ¤nally
understood and the Messiah will return in our times.” (The last phrase is a fre-
quent feature of the daily liturgy.)
Apart from the violence of the language and the message, it is worth remark-
ing on the constant inversion of language in the discourse, with the use of word-
play and caricature: the Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel, Bush juxtaposed
with the Hebrew word busha, “intelligence sources” juxtaposed with “spiritual
sources,” and the ridiculing of a great power humiliated, an image of the “world
upside down.”
Written black on white, the speech seems extremely threatening, but in the
auditorium, delivered in a low-key measured tone, mischievously peppered with
jokes and ridicule of the great and powerful, including all Israeli political factions—
save Shas—the audience did not respond with abnormal emotion or enthusi-
asm, as they might have done to ¤ery political rhetoric in a less genteel location.

The T’shuva Movement in a Comparative Perspective

As occasional remarks have indicated, there is much in the t’shuva move-
ment that we have already encountered in Latin American Pentecostalism, and,
although there are differences, of course, it is the similarities that deserve close
attention, simply because similarities across the boundaries established by re-
ligious tradition—and certainly by the interests of religious bureaucracies—are
more counterintuitive, as are differences within the boundaries.
Both Pentecostals and the t’shuva movement propagate a change of life, a
strengthening of the family by infusing their discourse on family relationships
with a halo of happiness and positive feelings, together with a strengthening of
parental control over children and of husbands’ authority over their wives.
There are variations within as much as between: some churches insist more than
others on the authority of husbands, as do some rabbis; some rabbis and preach-
ers direct a message toward women and focus on the misfortunes of family

106 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner