Tradition and Traditionalism
Meir Buzaglo
Translated by Levi MorrowMeir Buzaglo is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a 2023 recipient of the President’s Medal. He was instrumental in the revival of the piyyut tradition and chairs Tikkun, an organization dedicated to developing and encouraging a Judaism attentive to challenges within Israeli society.
Levi Morrow is a teacher, writer, and translator living in Jerusalem, where he is a PhD candidate in the Jewish Philosophy Department at the Hebrew University. He is a research fellow at both the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
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Some years ago, I had an experience that captures the dynamics of masortiyut, traditionalism. I was doing reserve duty on an IDF base near Tiberias, and between my guard shifts, I would sit and read in the synagogue. During one such instance, I came across a prayer book that included lists of Jewish laws. One law in particular struck me: If you’re hosting a Jew and you know that they won’t say birkat hamazon, the blessing after eating, you are forbidden from serving them food even if they’re in need of it. As I read on, I could feel the Judaism of my childhood in Kiryat Yam (a suburb of Haifa) and of my work as a social activist—a Judaism of charitable activities—bubbling up within me in protest.
As I was sitting there, lost in thought, someone else came into the synagogue to pray. It was mid-afternoon, and he, a Sephardi Jew, started putting on tefillin, suggesting that he was not particularly strict about getting up to pray early in the morning, when tefillin is required. Given the degree of my Jewish consciousness at the time, I might have just tossed the text aside. Instead, I showed this Jew the shocking rule I had found. He looked at it and, without a moment’s hesitation, said, “Look, I don’t even do everything God tells me, am I supposed to care about what some rabbi said? Let him write whatever he wants. Who even cares?”
This response provides the key to understanding masortiyut. First, I should note that his words took me entirely by surprise. My academic education—my readings of Maimonides, of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and so forth—none of it prepared me for this sort of response. Second, this response assumed a basic, unspoken understanding of the status of the written word: rabbis can write whatever they think is right, and we can do whatever we think is right. Third, it was clear to me that, as a result of this, differences of opinion about Jewish law in no way necessitate setting up different rabbinic institutions. This very specific sort of attitude toward the written word and its rabbinic representatives is characteristic of mesorati, traditionalist, largely Sephardi Jews. In contrast, Ashkenazi Jews have split into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative streams based on the different choices they make about Jewish law, leading to the undermining of certain rabbinic institutions and the establishment of alternatives. Masortiyut, meanwhile, can contain such differences whenever they emerge, holding the different sides together without splitting into different groups.
Fourth, the man I spoke with was clear that he doesn’t see himself as representing the ideal. What God says, he doesn’t necessarily do. He might as well have said, “What are you even doing, bringing some book to criticize my behavior? We all gossip despite knowing that it’s forbidden. We disobey the law of Moses, so what should we care what some random rabbi writes? I have never claimed to actually live up to my values and ideals.”
I don’t know how the conversation I had with the praying man will sound to American ears. In Israel, it typically gets a warm reception, and many of those who call themselves “mesorati” (30 to 40 percent of Israeli Jews) really identify with the man in Tiberias. In Israel, Judaism is primarily and officially represented by Orthodox Jews who rely upon and even sanctify a distinction between the religious and the secular, making them pretty ambivalent about the mesorati approach to Jewish law. They see mesorati Jews as indecisive and lacking in character. From their perspective, the man in Tiberias, because he strives to live according to halakhah but also accepts that he does not entirely succeed, practices an unserious Judaism, while they are serious Jews because they strive to live in accordance with their values and to preserve their heritage in a strict sense. Conservative and Reform Jews in Israel might assume that because someone isn’t Orthodox, he must belong to one of their camps. Other people might add that this is what pre-modern Judaism looked like in Western Europe and in Muslim lands, where custom, rather than law, was determinative. But few understand that for a mesorati Jew, it is not ideal to see yourself as living the ideal Jewish life.
What makes masortiyut unique is its context. It emerged specifically within contemporary Israel, developing only after other more well-known identities. It emerged out of opposition to the “melting pot” ideology once dominant in Israel, which aimed to turn kids away from their parents’ way of life and turn them into sabras, native Israelis. In masortiyut, grandchildren return to their grandparents’ way of life as part of a reaction against the attempt to separate children from their parents’ traditions.
Loyalty to one’s parents’ generation and to one’s religious upbringing is an essential aspect of masortiyut. Its theology is complex: Masortiyut does not emphasize the historicity of the revelation at Sinai, nor does it simply consider it a founding myth of the Jewish people. Masortiyut holds that God is concerned with and rewards human actions. It feels deeply connected to both Torah and Torah scholars, but it is not at all bothered by biblical criticism or academic Jewish studies. The Holocaust has had no effect on its understanding of reality. Masortiyut is neither religious nor secular, and both these forms of Israeli identity devalue or dismiss it.
The mesorati Jew sees himself as a work in progress rather than perfect, dispensing with the defensiveness masked as self-assertion displayed by everyone around him. It is worth noting what this isn’t. The mesorati Jew does not consider himself a sinner in the Christian sense of the term. He understands that human life, by its very nature, includes development, compromise, and sometimes also steps backward. The mesorati Jew might very well consciously violate the laws governing Shabbat, kosher food, and interpersonal interactions. Notably, the law I discussed with the man in Tiberias wasn’t even about fighting bodily urges or the like; it was about serving food to a starving Jew. This law clashes with compassion, not craving. This isn’t to say that compassion cancels out the law, as the apostle Paul once suggested, but it does sometimes suspend it. The face of the person in front of me and the Torah I inherited go back and forth between the two—between law and compassion.
Initially interesting only to sociologists, the great change in Israeli consciousness around mesorati identity has become essential to the self-definition of many Israelis. On the level of theory, my book, A Language for the Faithful: Reflections on Tradition (Hebrew), together with the work of my good friend Yaacov Yadegar, paved the way for scholarly and narrative writing on this topic. In recent years, we have witnessed an unending stream of top Israeli authors writing in this area. Masortiyut seems to be the most interesting identity in Israel at the moment. When I wrote A Language for the Faithful, I never imagined that it would affect discussions of culture, education, religion and state, the public square, gender, conversion to Judaism, and the Arab sector. Many people see masortiyut as the key to unlocking some of the fundamental issues splitting Israeli society, including during the protests of 2023.
What began as a general ambivalence toward the world of halakhah among certain people has expanded to the point where broad swaths of the Israeli populace want to take part in this way of life. Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye the Milkman” painted a vivid picture of the crisis and last gasps of pre-modern masortiyut, and now, in the State of Israel, a new masortiyut is in full bloom.
After long years of studying mesorati identity, it became clear to me that masortiyut is not a matter of individuals. In contrast to self-definitions like “vegetarian,” this is a form of collective identity generated by communities. When modernity came to Morocco, the Jews there were required to work on Shabbat. Many of them accepted this new condition, while many others rejected it. Those Jews who worked on Shabbat decided that they were not going to miss the Shabbat prayers, so they began getting up early to pray at sunrise before going to work. The local rabbis, for their part, did not expel these Jews from their communities, nor did they declare the wine they produced unkosher. Instead, they went out of their way to pray with these Jews before they went to work. This sort of behavior—on the parts of both communities and rabbis—is unique in Jewish history, and it is an element within the Jewish people that needs defending: a deep sense of connection involving dignity, love, and commitment to the entire Jewish people. The rabbi in this model is not a revolutionary leader but the rearguard who makes sure that no one gets left behind. The strong can get along fine on their own, and so the rabbi helps those who cannot help themselves. Certainly, he never takes the side of the strong against the weak within Judaism. This is a truly unique form of rabbi-community relations.
Masortiyut also shapes the way important Sephardic rabbis think about halakhah, their meta-halakhic considerations. Rabbi Yosef Messas formulated three principles of Jewish legal decisions: the law, reason, and the historical moment. When answering someone’s question about Jewish law, the decisor must take into account the written law, common sense, the personality and condition of the person asking, and the moment in which they live. As my friend Dr. Yehuda Me’imran (founder of the Morashah network for mesorati students) has shown, when Messas would make decisions about Jewish law, he saw himself first as an educator. As such, Messas would attempt to guide you from the way you were currently living toward a higher way of life. He would not shame you for your current failures or try to change you with threats. He would rule, for reasons of darchei shalom (“paths of peace,” or to avoid contention), that you should break bread with a guest whom you know will not say birkat hamazon.
The Torah was not given to the ministering angels but was meant to make people better. Observing Jewish law isn’t some technical performance aimed at checking off all the various rabbis’ boxes, no matter how strict. The Shulhan Arukh doesn’t establish the law in its most immediate, concrete sense—masortiyut has a loose relationship with the written word, as I discussed above.
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At this point, it is worth taking a moment to discuss a remark by my dear friend Rabbi Chaim Navon in his recently published book, Mitkarvim Ve’ravim, which has a glowing chapter on masortiyut. Despite how much he appreciates the concept, Navon isn’t prepared to call himself mesorati, because he chooses to dedicate his life to the service of God. He thinks about masortiyut as what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called the “Covenant of Fate,” the basis upon which the “Covenant of Destiny” is to be built. Without getting into how my friend defines himself, his comments highlight the need for two important clarifications.
Soloveitchik defines the “Covenant of Fate” in his important essay, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” from 1956:
Fate signifies in the life of the nation, as it does in the life of the individual, an existence of compulsion. A strange force merges all individuals into one unit. The individual is subject and subjugated against his will to the national fate/existence, and it is impossible for him to avoid it and be absorbed into a different reality. (trans. David Gordon, 2006, 52)
Soloveitchik’s “Covenant of Fate” sees collective life as a power unaffected by a single person’s decisions and desires rather than as a value. Masortiyut, in contrast, takes collective life to be an independent value, one which sometimes takes precedence over other values. A second distinction results from the first: Soloveitchik contrasts the “Covenant of Fate” with the “Covenant of Destiny” composed of individuals dedicated to expressing their values in their collective life. As an ideal, the mesorati collective contains within it Jews of various degrees of personal commitment and strictness. In this paradigm, a rabbi who has dedicated his life to the service of God wouldn’t exclude a mesorati Jew. Any given mesorati community will include people who are strict about Torah study, others who are committed to aiding the marginalized, others who are committed to prayer and kashrut, and still others whose Jewish practice possesses no particular identifying features. Only when individual development leaves room for the other, and sees them in all their complexity, is it possible to talk about belonging to the mesorati community. If serving God includes protecting the weak, promoting harmony among Israel’s different demographic communities, and opposing divisiveness, then that’s masortiyut—full stop.
A mesorati collective is not based on a shared ideology, but instead has its own principle and value. This sort of collective therefore makes space for a plurality of viewpoints and different kinds of people to come together around the table—or in the synagogue, as it were. Different groups in Israeli society express their group identities via the form of their head covering: Mesorati Jews don’t wear any particular kind of kippah, hat, or cap, and many wear no headcovering at all. The image young people most associate with mesorati identity is their grandmother. If discourses around pluralism and multi-culturalism typically emphasize difference, then masortiyut presents an interesting tension: it grants a place of privilege to the collective, while also making room for individual differences.
The importance of the collective constitutes the differences between mesorati Jews and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, on the one hand, and between mesorati Jews and most liberal Jews on the other. Ultra Orthodoxy’s intense strictures are capable of detracting from the collective, and pathbreaking, progressive understandings of Judaism also leave many people behind. Masorti collectivism rejects both stricture and fervent piety, and progressiveness and radical innovation.
For my friends on the left, valuing the collective may recall the organic metaphor used by the Fascists to emphasize the collective and to downplay—and even dismiss entirely—the value of the individual. However, there is a clear distinction: Mesorati identity is fully disconnected from any form of power or governing party. It has no ability to use the state to enforce unity and conformity in any way, shape, or form. It is important to keep this in mind when you hear people talking about masortiyut and the collective. The mesorati collective transcends geopolitical boundaries and discourses to include brothers and sisters well beyond Israel’s borders.
The person praying who would share his bread with a hungry secular Jew does so because of the collective unity of people who eat together. The rabbi who gets up early with his community does so to protect his congregation from divisiveness. Mesorati collectivism is a live option available to a plurality of Israelis, and it differs from the sort of pluralistic policies intentionally enacted by communities in their relationship with strangers and foreigners. As opposed to a collective that is hostile to individual differences, the mesorati collective is one made up of different kinds of people.
My turn to masortiyut came after leaving behind the discourse of the Left, and after I spent time as a Mizrahi democratic activist, a role that emphasized the Mizrahi critique of Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel. At a certain point, I realized that my most fundamental identity was my Jewishness, and that privileging Mizrahi-ness—or Ashkenazi-ness or Sephardi-ness, for that matter—would mean turning down the invitation to sit at a much larger, more interesting table—the Jewish table. This realization does not override or dispense with the justified Mizrahi critique of years of ever-present exclusion, but it does introduce a new, more complete view of the world.
Answering today’s burning questions requires that this idea be turned into practical policy proposals. Before October 7, the most important questions facing masortiyut emerged from social issues. The State of Israel has massive inequalities between its citizens. Does masortiyut have anything to say about the topic? The Sephardic tradition offers new possibilities for a collective that grants space for individual differences. Such a collective would ensure that no child is left behind, and that no senior citizen is abandoned or excluded.
Masortiyut also has important consequences for gender equality. Many women are interested in masortiyut, and there is even a newer development we might call “Mesorati Feminism.” The Arevot (“Mutually Responsible”) movement has taken up the challenge of formulating a worldview continuous with both Mizrahi Feminism and Orthodox Feminism. This refreshing new phenomenon might lead to interesting collaborations and partnerships between all different forms of feminism including, in particular, helping people see their own blind spots, so that they can undermine unhelpful binaries instead of simply replicating them.
The Jewish collective fundamental to contemporary masortiyut is Jewish in a sense that encompasses Jewish identities and Jews who live beyond the borders of the State of Israel. Neither the Israeli community in America nor Sephardi Jews across the world fit easily into any existing categories of Jewish belonging. The Tikkun movement has recently created an initiative to formulate some preliminary tenets of this relationship, and it has been very well received among American Jews who are unaffiliated with mainstream movements (e.g., Conservative, Reform) and are now interested in masortiyut.
On October 6, the value of the collective was at the center of society-wide conflict and struggle in Israel. People were forced to choose sides, and those who refused to do so were seen as abdicating responsibility. In the Tikkun movement, we did not maintain a neutral posture, but we critiqued both sides for insufficiently valuing the collective and for insisting on a single position without leaving room for people to differ. The horrifying violence of October 7 and the ensuing war raised the value of the collective to heights unseen in Israel for decades. Every street corner now has a “Together, We Will Win” sign, and students in universities are called to “learn together.” The war immediately wiped out the movement to refuse to volunteer for military reserves, which had been growing over the past year, just as it removed the issue of judicial reform from the cultural and legislative slate. The astounding degree to which people from across Israeli society—left and right, religious and secular—showed up to volunteer for military service demonstrated for all that the collective is absolutely critical for our survival.
In the wake of October 7, we are encountering a unique historical phenomenon. The fight for Israel’s survival is more than just a military matter. In addition to the literal war, there is also a war being fought over how people think, both in Israel and beyond. Liberals, generally fighting just to keep afloat within Israel, have suddenly found themselves fighting the same old antisemitism, rearing its head while hiding behind free speech and decolonization. Free speech doesn’t include calls for genocide, and decolonization can’t justify abusing women.
Statements put out by people and institutions from within the religious world constitute an additional, though less emphasized, front of the war. Antisemitism can conceal itself behind religious language. Jews who observe halakhah are pointing out the danger of treating revenge as though it is in service of God. The two camps—the camp of faith and the camp of freedom and autonomy—that had been fighting each other on October 6 are now fighting together for the hearts and minds of people outside of Israel. The ideological intensity that once destroyed Israel’s collective became the most important resource in the fight for Israel’s right to exist, forcing us once again to confront the question of Jewish destiny.
The sheer number of mesorati Jews in Israel makes them determinative for the future of Israeli society. Time is on masortiyut’s side. It turns out that Israeli ideologies—both imported and homegrown—are irrelevant for huge swaths of society. We can see this in growing phenomena like people who identify as “loosely religious” (dati al haretsef, literally, “on the religious spectrum”). However, their lack of any political power makes mesorati Jews easy prey for existing parties. Without the infrastructure of a political party or integration into educational institutions, media channels, and so on, it is unlikely that mesorati Jews will manage to spread the idea of masortiyut throughout Israeli society. On the other hand, if they fight too hard for political and institutional power, they risk sacrificing the very values they are fighting for. Radical trends on both the Nationalist Right and the Canaanite-Progressive Left make it hard to maintain political neutrality and may eventually enable the destruction of the Israeli collective that masortiyut so values. They have therefore had none of the influence they should have; hopefully, clearly laying out this problem and its cost will constitute the beginning of a solution.
