Societal secularism - extreme orthodox split

The religious–secular divide in Israeli society is more than a disagreement over belief: in Chaim Lerner’s account, it is a struggle over who bears responsibility for the Holocaust, what Zionism means, and how Jews should understand power. Ultra-Orthodox and secular Zionist communities turn those questions against one another, making the divide a source of collective blame. Chaim tries to unsettle that pattern through a theology centered on the problem of evil and a God whose power is limited; the novel’s competing responses to his ideas show how readily theological disagreement becomes political conflict.

Mutual Blame and the Holocaust

Chaim explains the divide to Judah as an exchange of accusations within the Jewish community. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, he says, blame secular Zionists for returning from exile before the Messiah’s coming. In this interpretation, the Holocaust becomes divine punishment for defying God’s will, and the Germans are treated as instruments of that punishment. Chaim stresses the moral failure in this explanation: it cannot account for how a loving and just God could punish a people by killing innocent children.

Secular Zionists, in turn, blame the ultra-Orthodox. Chaim describes their anger at the black coats, beards, wigs, prayer garments, and large families associated with religious communities. They see anti-Zionist religious resistance as having delayed Jewish migration to Palestine and, in a counterfactual accusation, as having prevented a Jewish state from being established in the 1930s, when it might have saved children murdered in the Holocaust. Chaim notes the disturbing force of this charge by comparing secular disgust at religious Jews’ appearance to Hitler’s antisemitic revulsion in Vienna.

For Chaim, neither indictment withstands logical scrutiny. Each contains numerous weaknesses, and each blames fellow Jews rather than confronting the catastrophe on its own terms. Yet he argues that the accusations make emotional sense within the communities’ stories about themselves: blame becomes persuasive not as proof but as a way of organizing trauma and national memory. He calls this reciprocal accusation a crisis, warning Judah that the nation cannot flourish while Jews continue to blame one another for the worst catastrophe of all time.

Chaim’s Theology as a Proposed Bridge

Chaim’s response begins with the problem of evil. In his account of the three irreconcilable statements about God, God is omnipotent, God is benevolent, and evil exists. Because innocent suffering cannot simply be explained away, he rejects the consoling claim that every tragedy must serve a reason beyond human understanding. The Holocaust therefore poses a theological problem that cannot be solved by assigning collective guilt to either secular or religious Jews.

His religious language is not a return to conventional observance. Chaim is described as secular, yet he regards God as central to Jewish consciousness and sees theology as an urgent Jewish task. He interprets a passage in the Zohar through the Hebrew word for who: God’s name becomes a question, and spirituality becomes inquiry rather than a settled answer. This way of reading sacred text offers a method for engaging religious tradition without pretending that suffering has been made intelligible.

Chaim carries that approach into public teaching. At a Jerusalem gathering of Modern Orthodox rabbis from North America, many of them former students, he jokes with the audience, praises their work, and says he might himself have become Modern Orthodox and perhaps a rabbi under different historical circumstances. He then tells Holocaust stories, shifting between humor, sentiment, and brutality. The contrast between his secular identity and his authority among religious listeners makes the divide less like a fixed boundary than a contested space in which teaching, shared memory, and interpretation can cross communal lines.

Political Consequences and Competing Interpretations

The struggle over Chaim’s theology also concerns the meaning of Jewish power. Meir Alon condemns Chaim for arguing that Jews should relinquish power in places including Lebanon, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem rather than risk becoming like their former persecutors. Alon interprets this position as an insult to Israeli soldiers and as an extreme moral demand imposed on Jews so soon after the Holocaust. His response shows how a debate about responsibility can become a dispute over security, self-defense, and the legitimacy of national power.

Rabbi Kaplowitz offers a sharply different religious interpretation of Chaim’s death. He tells Judah that God took Chaim because Chaim had dared to call God less than all-powerful, treating the death as a display of divine power. That reading reverses Chaim’s theological challenge: where Chaim insists that evil cannot be denied or made reasonable, Kaplowitz absorbs the death into a story of divine action. Their disagreement illustrates how religious frameworks can either preserve the problem Chaim raises or close it with an explanation.

Zehava Lerner’s later political work further complicates any simple opposition between religious identity and compromise. She says that she loves the Land of Israel while also attending to security concerns and Palestinian human rights, and claims that she has persuaded leaders on her side to consider territorial compromise. Her position makes political negotiation another arena in which attachments to the land, security, and moral responsibility must be held together rather than reduced to opposing camps.

The Divide’s Continuing Reach

The novel presents the split as something that extends beyond Chaim’s arguments and into later generations. Hannah Loeb becomes interested in Jewish spirituality after reading books Rabbi Kaplowitz gave her, announces that she intends to become a rabbi, and later studies at Hebrew Union College. In her senior sermon, she urges listeners to consider Chaim’s theology of a God with infinite love but limited power. Her religious path thus joins a religious institution to an idea advanced by a secular theologian, carrying their unresolved debate into a new setting.

For Judah, the book Kaplowitz gives Hannah is initially an unexpected sign of her spiritual life; years later, she identifies it as her most important religious influence. That development contrasts with Chaim’s warning that internal division threatens national flourishing: the same tradition that supplies rival explanations of suffering can also transmit questions across communal and generational boundaries. The divide remains consequential, but the novel’s teachers, readers, and future rabbi show that it is not impermeable.