Page 119 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

formations in the popular-elite relationship. Pentecostals bene¤t from the con-
trast between the social distance separating highly trained Catholic priests, edu-
cated in seminaries and sometimes abroad, and the style of their own pastors
who are close to “the people,” speak a direct, jargon-free language, and confront
the day-to-day problems of their followers. But the pastors retain a distance,
although a different sort of distance: they do not adopt a humble persona of
“men of the people.” Instead, they present to their followers a role model of
prosperity and bourgeois respectability.
If in Israel we have observed the af¤nity of t’shuva with the renaissance of the
Sephardi ethnicity, in Latin America we ¤nd that Pentecostals are particularly
successful among indigenous people, and that in Brazil Pentecostals have appro-
priated and refashioned the symbolic apparatus associated with the African
heritage, even while claiming to discredit that heritage. The t’shuva movement’s
Sephardi leaders have inverted symbolic structures of exclusion and low status
by invoking them as emblems of a grand tradition which, they say, remained
unbroken while the Ashkenazi tradition was interrupted and weakened by the
Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Like the Pentecostals, they have also mounted
a two-pronged attack on the religious establishment of the Ashkenazi ultra-
Orthodox—whose parties Shas outnumbered by seventeen to ¤ve Knesset seats
in 2002—and on the secular elite. They have adapted the music of popular cul-
ture to their religious crusade by keeping the tunes but exchanging secular lyrics
for liturgical verses; their radio broadcasts are a permanent thorn in the side of
the regulators of broadcasting; they transform Talmudic debate by their use of
street language and their evocation of the stresses and strains of daily life—
sprinkled with abundant rabbinic allusions and stories.
T’shuva Israeli-style does not explicitly confront the religious establishment
in the same way as Pentecostals confront Catholic hegemony. But in these mat-
ters content counts less than form—and by form is meant the rearrangement
and appropriation of symbols and ethnic identi¤ers, and the concomitant re-
drawing of public spaces. In this chapter we have shown how, for all the use of
modern communications media, the time-honored formal accoutrements of
religion—ritual, taboo, the delineation of space, style, language, dress, and so
forth—are more than equal to the challenge of reclaiming public space from a
secular intelligentsia to whom these arms are quite foreign. The t’shuva move-
ment is hardly likely to reclaim the whole of public space, as no doubt it would
like, but it is certainly redrawing its boundaries.

Notes

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support received for this research from the
Leverhulme Foundation. We wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Ari Engel-
berg, whose expertise has helped us avoid many mistakes. Remaining errors are ours
alone. The essay does not take into account political developments after 2002.

108 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner