A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Ben-Gvir's move was nonetheless condemned not only by foreign diplomats, who warned against attempts to change the "status quo," but also, and perhaps even more forcefully, by Israel's Orthodox authorities, who consider ascending the Temple Mount a violation of halacha (Jewish law). Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi, wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir stressing the "stringency of the ban" on ascending the Temple Mount and warning that doing so could "lead the many to sin." Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Moshe Amar, wrote that he was "astounded by how a Torah-keeping minister in Israel could violate the law of the Torah in public." An editorial published by the Ashkenazi Haredi newspaper Yated Ne'eman denounced Ben Gvir's act as a "serious halachic violation that contravened the rulings of generations of great Torah sages." (Almog Cohen, an MK from Ben-Gvir's party, responded with a pun on the newspaper's name, stating that it was not loyal--ne'eman--to the Jewish state.)

Ben-Gvir and the Jewish Power party he leads are, at least on paper, Orthodox religious nationalists, committed at once to the strictest adherence to religious law and to the idea that the founding of the secular state of Israel is part of the opening stages of the messianic age. Yet over the last several decades--beginning with the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s and culminating with Israel's 2005 unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip--Israeli religious Zionism has undergone a series of crises that have led to a break with the Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, especially on the issue of the Temple Mount. "[Religious Zionist] identity is now based more on mythic ethnocentrism than on Torah study," Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow Tomer Persico writes in his essay, "The End Point of Zionism." "Ethnocentric consciousness is replacing halachic sensibility." Indeed, there is perhaps no starker example than the Temple Mount to illustrate how the messianic ethnonationalism of Israel's right-wing religious Zionists has overwhelmed their putative commitment to Jewish law--a dynamic that could have disastrously violent consequences now that they are in power.

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