What Shall I Do with This People?: Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism Hardcover 2 by Milton Viorst ;Free Press

From noted student of Mideast affairs and New Yorker correspondent Viorst (In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam, 1998, etc.), a charged warning that the greatest danger facing the state of Israel is the “causeless hatred” of internal disunity.

That disunity is by no means new, allows Viorst: his very title comes from Moses’ complaint to God in Sinai about his ungovernable charges, and Viorst repeats at several points the biblical denunciation of the “stiff-necked” quality that “seems to have remained a part of Jewish nature . . . [and] has perpetuated needless conflict among Jews, when a bit of flexibility would have had better results.” In his account, this inflexibility has colored discussions about the nature and workings of the Jewish state from even before the time of Herzl; it particularly marks the relation of the ultra-Orthodox faction within Israel with secular Jews who are more amenable to making “Halachic adjustments to the shifting demands of modernity” and even inclined to separate affairs of church and state. Sometimes lethal struggles between adaptationists and rejectionists, pragmatists and idealists, and hard-liners of every stripe have crippled the ability of the Israeli state to govern effectively, Viorst suggests. A particular difficulty, in his view, is the growing insistence of the ever more powerful Orthodox leadership that “the Jewish state, of which it deeply disapproves, serve as arbiter of disputes within Judaism,” making of a secular democracy a counterpart to the Vatican that would sit in judgment over matters such as the Jewishness of Conservative and Reform converts (who, some members of the Orthodox leadership hold, are by definition members of heretical sects) and the impiety of surrendering Jewish lands to Gentiles—as the Oslo Accords demand, and in punishment for which one of the ultra-Orthodox took it upon himself to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin.

These apocalyptic disputes, born of religious extremism, are “tearing apart our four-thousand-year-old civilization,” argues Viorst sadly, and most effectively.