Passover is a good indication of the attention Judaism pays to detail. Allegiance to the national narrative is expressed through recitation of the Exodus story, but more importantly through the removal of every scrap of leavened bread from the household. At the Seder, commonplace food items—flatbread, parsley, horseradish, apples—are invested with ultimate meaning, becoming sensual representations of slavery and freedom.
It’s like this throughout the year, too. How and what you eat, what kind of clothes you wear, the way you grow your hair—all of these become densely compacted signifiers, revealing manifold commitments and tensions when they are unraveled.
It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the recent decision of a group of Israeli soldiers to grow beards without permits is fraught with contentious historical meaning. The IDF is generally clean-shaven, with beard permits issued only on religious or medical grounds. As reported last week in Ha’aretz, an Orthodox army rabbi refused to acknowledge that a group of Conservative (known as Masorti in Israel) soldiers were religious Jews.
Without his seal of approval, their hairy faces became a breach of army protocol. As we enter the period of the Jewish calendar known as the omer, the somber period stretching between Passover and Shavout during which observant Jewish men are expected to let their beards grow, the stakes rise even higher.
Facial hair often means more than just a lost razor. Here it points to the long and complicated relationship between the generally secular State of Israel and orthodox Jewry, and the political marriage of convenience that gave the orthodox rabbinate authority over a host of personal status issues, in exchange for their support of the State. This rabbinate has the power to determine whether or not a beard is religious. In Israel, where religious identity plays into so many issues of citizenship, a beard’s religiosity has secular implications, whether that means punitive kitchen duty, or denial of citizenship under the Law of Return based on an orthodox determination of invalid Jewishness.
The fact that beards, which are de rigueur among the orthodox, are only permitted in the army by special permit, also indicates how the army was historically a secular preserve. But the permit clause itself hints at the growing representation of orthodox soldiers in the ranks, largely a function of increasing religious nationalism.
Finally, the Conservative soldiers’ brave decision to give free rein to their follicles, despite both religious and secular pressures, is a good illustration of the embattled position of middleground Judaism in intensely polarized Israeli Jewish society. Orthodox disdain for secularism is matched by an equally virulent secular animosity toward orthodoxy, arising in part from early Zionism’s rejection of tradition, but sharply increasing in response to the kind of theocratic control the orthodox have come to exert.
This environment has strongly militated against the emergence of robust religious compromises between tradition and modernity, such as we see in America. In fact, liberal religious Judaism, like the Conservative movement, along with Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, and all of the other 31 flavors, are virtually incomprehensible to Israeli pietiests and secularists alike. Anyone asserting that his beard is neither secular nor orthodox finds himself in a tenuous position.
As the Seder draws to a close, we invoke a final symbol: the cup of Elijah, which, because of the prophet Elijah’s place in Jewish mythology as a harbinger of messianic times, expresses our desire that the redemptions of our past, in Egypt and elsewhere, be transformed into an ultimate deliverance. Ideally, this would be a deliverance from the need for soldiers altogether. In the meantime, we might hope that every step away from extremist coercion is a step in the right direction.
