People's Collectivity

There was, one supposes, a poetic justice in Shimon Peres' inauguration two days ago as Israel's ninth president. Mr. Peres, whose intelligence, political skills, and devotion to his country no one has ever questioned, has been notorious as the perennial loser of Israeli — one is tempted to say, world — politics. By my count, he was defeated in three national elections for prime minister (in 1977, 1988, and 1996) while drawing once (in 1984); in four campaigns for the leadership of the Labor Party (in 1992, 2000, 2003, and 2005); and in one previous try for the presidency, which he lost in 2000 to Moshe Katzav. It's about time he won something, even if it's only the presidency of Israel, a purely symbolic position that Mr. Katzav has badly tarnished.

Indeed, the presidency suits Shimon Peres well. It's a role in which he can represent the enlightened Israel that liberal opinion around the world considers him to be a beacon of and express his semi-utopian views on the future of the Middle East without doing harm such as that inflicted by him in 1993, when he helped as foreign minister to drag Israel to the disaster of Oslo. His inaugural speech, with its rosy predictions of the economic and technological wonders that are in store for us all once Jews and Arabs kiss and make up was vintage Peres. In the final analysis, it's only words.

But Mr. Peres' words that spoke most to me were other ones entirely. They were uttered when, reminiscing emotionally about his childhood, he talked about the Lithuanian town of Vilozhin, near which he was born, and of its yeshiva in which his grandfather had studied. The headmaster of this yeshiva, who oversaw it for four decades until it was shut down by the Czarist authorities in 1892 (he was dead by the time it reopened), was my great-grandfather, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin. That doesn't make Shimon Peres and me second cousins, but it does lead me to reflect on a lost world that both of us ultimately derive from.

Vilozhin was the Harvard of the European yeshiva world. It drew the best and brightest students from all over the Russian Empire, and it was known for its high standards and its liberal atmosphere that demanded much from those enrolled in it while at the same time giving them great freedom. Although, like any East-European yeshiva, it concentrated on the teaching of Talmud and the producing of rabbis with a thorough knowledge of Jewish ritual and religious law, it adopted, under my great-grandfather's guidance, an intellectual and historical approach to Talmudic studies that was unusual in its day. It was also unique in its attitude toward Zionism, my great-grandfather being one of the few leading Orthodox scholars and rabbis of the times who was pro-Zionist despite the predominant secularism of the Zionist movement.

Many of the Yeshiva of Vilozhin's students eventually left Orthodoxy entirely; some became well-known public figures and authors, like the great Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, or the Hebrew fiction writer and essayist Micah Yosef Berdichevsky. What characterized Jewish Eastern Europe in those days was not that the disputes in it between secularism and religion, Zionism and anti-Zionism, or political radicalism and political conservatism, were less bitter than they are today — if anything they were more so — but that the parties to them had more in the way of common background and consequently understood each other better. They all came, as it were, from the same shtetl and they all knew its mental geography, even if they disagreed violently.

In contemporary terminology, a rabbi like my great-grandfather would be considered "ultra-Orthodox:" He was black-hatted, black-coated, and white-bearded, and despite the freedom he granted his students, he was rigorous in his insistence on the fullest observance of Jewish law. And yet he was not at all ultra-Orthodox — indeed, he broke with the ultra-Orthodox establishment of his time — in his attitude toward the Jewish people, which explains his Zionism, too. Ultra-Orthodoxy is by definition a creed that holds that, since the secular Jewish world has abandoned religion, religious Jews may abandon it in turn and look out for their own interests without worrying about the interests of other Jews. This point of view was never accepted at Vilozhin. The Hebrew concept of k'lal yisra'el, the collectivity of the Jewish people, for which every Jew, secular or religious, is responsible, was always taught there.

I'm glad Shimon Peres mentioned Vilozhin, even if he himself may not know much about its history and if his audience in the Knesset knew even less. He was elected to the presidency of Israel as the candidate of the Left, against the choice of the Right, Likud ex-speaker of the Knesset Ruvi Rivlin, largely with the help of ultra-Orthodox votes, which in national elections almost always go to right-wing candidates. He actively courted these votes by stressing his attachment to Jewish religious tradition (something that had not been particularly noticeable in the course of his political career), to which his mention of Vilozhin was meant as a form of homage to it.

It is time for ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel to return the compliment. Although it has considerably moderated its fervent anti-Zionism of former years, the ultra-Orthodox still tends to regard the Jewish state as something belonging to "them" — that is, to secular Israelis — from which the "we" of ultra-Orthodoxy is entitled to derive all the benefit it can without taking into account the needs of other Israelis. This was not the spirit of Vilozhin, where "we" meant the entire Jewish people. The ultra-Orthodox world in both Israel and America badly needs another Tsvi Naftali Yehuda Berlin today.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.