We are accustomed to thinking of monotheism as an idea that rejects the worship of objects and deities, calling into being a singular, unified belief in a creator God. “Abraham the Hebrew,” according to the biblical narrative and its reception, ushered in the diverse theologies of monotheism at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But is there still a value to the monotheistic idea in a world that not only rejected multiple gods but is increasingly secular? Is monotheism still relevant when we are often forced to choose between accepting no God or an overly simplified vision of one God?
One answer to this question was developed by the medieval Kabbalists, who argued that the unity of God was not only a spiritual idea or belief but also an act. According to this theosophical method of Kabbalah, the deity consists of a dynamic system consisting of ten forces, called sephirot (cosmic spheres), which are sometimes in harmony and peace and sometimes in conflict with one another. The goal of the Kabbalist was to help the deity (which Kabbalists believe has a broken relationship with a world that exists in a fallen state) reach perfection and oneness through the performance of religious acts, or mitzvot. With the help of the mitzvot, Torah study, and prayer, the Kabbalists claim that one can unite the cacophonous divine cosmos into a harmonious unity resulting in the influx of divine light (shefa) in the world. Thus, monotheism became something beyond a doctrine; it became an activity. It was an action to unify God’s light in the world. Instead of being just a metaphysical belief in the oneness of God, monotheism became a program of spiritual enactments that could unify all the forces of divine life within the world, dramatizing human action with cosmic significance.
Below, I examine the notion of monotheism as a form of activism in the thought of Jewish mystic and activist Menachem Froman (1945-2013). Froman was the rabbi of the West Bank settlement known as Tekoa, and he embodied the contradictions of his generation of Religious Zionism. Just as he advocated for increased Jewish settlement in the West Bank, he saw himself as a staunch peace activist who worked closely with Palestinians, meeting with everyone from Yasser Arafat, to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987. Froman was untiring in his dedication to peace activism, and he believed that religion was the key to uniting the fractured relationship between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians.
Kabbalah constituted the foundation of Froman’s thinking, yet he took its framing one step further. Instead of trying to bring about unity in the heavenly realm, he tried to do this on the earthly plane through peace activism. It was an activism rooted in the metaphysics of tikkun, or repair—the rectification of what is broken, and what is in need of being made whole.
Menachem Froman was a figure of stark contrasts. As a child he received a secular Zionist and humanistic education at the Reali School in Haifa and was a member of the socialist HaNoar HaOved youth movement, which was associated with the labor movement. As a young man he decided to enter the religious world and studied at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav, Israel’s flagship Religious Zionist institution, under the tutelage of its leader, Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982). Committed to Kook’s religious-spiritual worldview, Froman joined Gush Emunim (The Bloc of the Faithful), which founded the settlement movement in the West Bank. However, Froman’s process of becoming religious and joining the ranks of the settlement movement was not one-dimensional, largely because he did not adopt all the classical right-wing Orthodox positions—for example, that the Land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people—but challenged them, seeking to synthesize these ideas with the socialist values of his upbringing. These were the two significant voices in his education as a young student.
Is there still a value to the monotheistic idea in a world that not only rejects multiple gods but is increasingly secular? Is monotheism still relevant when we are often forced to choose between accepting no God or an overly simplified vision of one God?
As a settler living in the Judean hilltops, Froman articulated an exceptional position: seeking peace with Palestinians alongside the historic Jewish return to the greater land of Israel. Making an admittedly idiosyncratic and provocative claim, Froman posited that the purpose of the settlements could be a hand reaching out to the Palestinians that could foster, and not impede, peace between them. At the same time as settling in various outposts throughout the West Bank, Froman attended peace rallies, advanced political solutions with Palestinian leadership, and even protested violence against Palestinian civilians. On various public platforms, Froman sought to unite opposing political movements and create bridges in the Israeli public: between the religious and the secular, between the left and right, between Palestinians and Jews.
Much of his legacy is as an activist, but few know of the complex way he reinterpreted Jewish ideas to justify his work. Below, I will lay out Froman’s theological thought, showing its deep influences in the doctrine of Kabbalah and Hasidism, and I will try to demonstrate how he applied these ideas in his politics and peace activism.
In “For the Sake of Unification” (Leshem Yichud), a 2008 essay by Froman that was published in On Sustenance and the Economy (Al Hamichya V’al Hakalkala) by Aharon Lavie and Itamar Brennerm, Froman introduces the tension between ayin (nothingness) and yesh (existence)—between a religious tendency towards negation of the physical world and a divine impulse that permeates all of existence. Ayin denies the world and desires to cling to, or become one with, God; Yesh is an interest in repairing the world that may consequently deny the experience of cleaving to God.
Froman writes:
There is a certain tension between social renewal and spirituality. Between “fixing the world” and religious fervor (shiga’yon ha-dati). This tension is, as I see it, a true tension. If we want to say this more sharply, religious action or the religious perspective is not really interested in the world at all, only God … [And similarly] religiosity is [uninterested in matters of the] world. I am prepared to say this in an even more radical fashion: religion is not relevant to life, but only to death. On the other hand, there is a way in which it does care about the world in its desire to fix the world. It sees the human condition in both fixing and serving the world.
Froman seeks to find a solution in which “social activism”—working within the material world—not only does not contradict the life of religious observance but is actually its culmination. Froman raises two different options for resolving what we may call the conflict between spiritual activism and pietistic quietism.
Religion is not relevant to life, but only to death. On the other hand, there is a way in which it does care about the world in its desire to fix the world. It sees the human condition in both fixing and serving the world.
The first option is to try and experience the opposing reality of that which one naturally inhabits—that is, to stand firmly where one is, and yet also see opposing perspectives. As a way of visualizing what this may look like, we can envision two axes. Actions and commandments that take place in the material and social realm are placed on the horizontal axis. This is the axis of the yesh, the tangible reality of existence that stems from a conception of divinity as immanent in the world (which Kabbalists refer to as the shekhina).
On the vertical axis, there are the actions and commandments that draw from the transcendent divinity (what Kabbalists call Kudsha Brich Hu), based in the nothingness of ayin, which represents a drawing from the transcendent deity.
In this scheme, movement along the horizontal axis of action can bring about movement on the vertical axis of the divine. Put otherwise, just as the medieval Kabbalists suggested that good deeds (mitzvot) can have divine implications, or as Maimonides suggested that human behavior can evoke divine reciprocity, Froman argues that social action too can activate movement in the cosmic realm. As Froman puts it, the breaking forth from the finite (the world of action and of mitzvot) to the infinite (eyn sof) is the higher spiritual work. This can be accomplished both by mitzvot and social activist engagement toward tikkun, both of which enact movement on the vertical axis towards divine fulfillment. As Froman puts it in “For the Sake of Unification”:
If you are aware of the yesh and its limits, then the activity within the existent, in the building of the world, in the fixing of the world, can connect you to God and bring about unification. Through that consciousness about the shechina and social action, one can actually arrive at a peak attachment to the Eternal.
By choosing and working in one’s consciousness to experience the other axis, Froman believes that one can find a connection to a transcendent divinity from within moral acts of social justice. Put otherwise, Froman insists that we can access, within the yesh, the depth of ayin.
The second option that Froman suggests to resolve the conflict between yesh and ayin—between the physical world and the divine—is through a recognition that the supposed duality between them is unstable: each side contains small portions of its opposite. Froman posits that because God manifests in the social and in social action, social action can bring us closer to the divine. There’s a moment when the binaries between the social and the spiritual break down, and we realize that this basic dichotomy is unstable. As Froman writes in “For the Sake of Unification”:
We must entertain the possibility that social activity will be not only the building of the world, but also a destruction of the world, but destruction in its positive sense, in the sense of the nullification of the world. One can see the building of the world as a form of liberation from the world. “Aza kamavet ahava: Love is as strong as death”—that love is about death and not life.
Froman suggests that the vertical axis of ayin can be manifest in the axis of yesh—that social action can become a vehicle for attaining an experience of the transcendent notion of God that is ayin. Similar to Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), Froman is suggesting here that engaging in justice on the horizontal plane can elevate one along the plane of the vertical, and thus one’s relationship to the spirit.
Thus far I have presented Froman’s idea that each side of the binary contains aspects of its opposite. But Froman’s next proposal is different, engaging the central question of perspective: how does our position in the world determine how we see things?
In classical Kabbalah, right and left refer to different dimensions of the Godhead. For Froman, right and left (be they political, religious, social) gain their position based on one’s perspective on the human condition, right referring to observing from within (interiority), and left referring to observing from outside (exteriority). In “For the Sake of Unification,” Froman puts it this way:
Here we come to the main point with which I have been saying for years: in my opinion, the right is the religious conception, in the sense of the relationship between man and God, and the left represents the intellectual world, which seeks to define things. That is, if while a person is praying, he also defines for himself “I am praying,” then it belongs to the left side because he comes out of the relationship between him and his God and looks at himself from the outside. You have a reference to God, but once you define it intellectually it belongs to the worldview of the left, to the horizontal line, to the world of the yesh—prayer becomes an entity. On the other hand, there is the occurrence of prayer, the movement of prayer. When it does not belong to the yesh world, but rather is the motion itself. The entities belong to the world of the left and the relation belongs to the world of the right. The right is the divine abundance, on the right one flows, but as soon as you say “I flow,” you have already descended into the world of the left.
We are faced here with a new distinction: Prayer and connection on the one hand, and the detached intellect, even reflecting on prayer, on the other. It is not the Kantian “thing itself” (Ding an sich) that matters, but rather how it is perceived. Here one can hear resonances of Buber’s I-Thou, I-It distinction. In other words, what affects a person’s action is their mindfulness born from where they stand.
The person who is fully present in an action is distinct from the person who is intellectualizing their own actions, even if they are performing the same deed. Froman’s view on interiority and exteriority suggests the paradoxical combination whereby one can be fully involved in the act and also be able to view it from the outside. The hazard of knowledge is the ability to see things only from the outside. We can fix the “sin” of seeing the world in a detached manner by connecting the intellect to one’s inner presence. For Froman, holding those two ostensibly opposing perspectives in tandem (right/left, interior/exterior, matter/spirit) is the true challenge of the human being. An example of how this can be done practically will be examined in the following section.
Froman’s essay, which is supposed to offer an intellectual solution to this tension of detachment and engagement, becomes a religious work of unification between contradictory tendencies—the detached intellect together with the immersive action. The desired unification is achieved not by unifying two opposing sides but by becoming conscious of one’s perspective and the ability to see things from contradictory sides without one side canceling out the other. The transition from an intellectual solution based on abstract principles to an experiential solution built from one’s perspective and point of view is also the transition from a philosophical or intellectual solution to an existential one. Froman does not necessarily place the existential solution above the philosophical one, but rather places it as an equally valid alternative.
In “For the Sake of Unification,” Froman transposes this expanded idea of the left and right to the political left and right in Israeli politics:
How superficial are the definitions of “leftist” and “rightist” running in our political discussion! From the depths of the great socialist ideas we have long forgotten. There remains only one criteria: the attitude towards the stones of “the Territories.” If you are for the Territories, you are called right, and if you are for peace, you are called left. And since living life demands definitions, I will also offer an experimental definition, or in fact a parable, as an opening of hope for a dialogue that will advance us beyond the contemporary definitions: the political argument in Israeli society is between the roots of the vine and its branches. The roots are all about movement towards the earth and the sources of water, while the branches are all about reaching out to the expanses of the sky.
The first stage here is the application of the theoretical axes discussed above in the political space. Thus, the controversy between the left and right in Israeli politics that Froman placed on the horizontal axis (the realm of the social and political) is transformed and becomes a controversy on the vertical axis—that is, between the human and the divine. This controversy is between what Froman calls the branches and the roots, where the right strives downwards to the roots and the earth (the land itself), while the left sends its branches upwards to the light and to freedom (ethics). When the right was placed on the vertical axis it sought the divine, the ayin, while now it suddenly aspires to the yesh, the land. Devotion shifts from the holiness of God (vertical) to the sanctity of the land (horizontal). And so too with the left: until now, the left was placed on the horizontal axis of social relations and therefore was within the world of the yesh. Suddenly in this new reading, it turns out that the left is actually striving for the ayin, where ethics becomes a devotional act and there’s less of an embodied approach towards the land.
Based on this reframing, it follows that both the right and left hold similar spiritual values: now however, the right pursues the yesh of the world while the left strives for the ayin of divine morality. Froman argues that what Israeli society needs today is to break free of these rigid definitions. For example, Froman suggests that a common mistake is to identify the Israeli left with the Palestinian position. In Froman’s political imagination, many Palestinian perspectives incorporate elements that are actually closer to the right-wing Settler worldview. As he writes in “For the Sake of Unification”:
A person who defines himself as fundamentally connected to the earth can be defined as “primitive.” It can also be argued that a person who is in such a ‘steadfast’ relationship to his land, is not a free person (just as a tree does not move easily from place to place). But if one wants to see how to make peace with such a person, one needs to recognize and respect his self-definition. Hence my conclusion that for the sake of peace, there is great importance amongst those Israelis who also live the connection between man and earth. And in more explicit words: precisely the Settlers can be a bridge of peace between the Israel people and the Palestinian people. Or in a more poetic formulation that I have repeated for years: the settlements could be the fingers of the Israeli hand outstretched for peace, with the word “fingers” having an association with touch and sensitivity.
By deconstructing this false binary, Froman suggests that it is possible to form a shared identity between Palestinians and settlers, because they often embody the same world of thought. Both are experientially rooted in the land and, in Froman’s reading, “primitive.” Both derive their power from the values placed on the vertical axis of normative religion that reaches from its upper end to God and its lower end to earth. This shared mixture of piety and landedness can form bonds and bridges across all positions.
The concept of the unity of opposites is a challenging one because it stands on very unstable ground, and yet it is an idea shared by mystics in a variety of traditions throughout Jewish history, from the foundations of Kabbalah that appear in the Zohar, through Kabbalists in Tzfat in the sixteenth century, Chabad Hasidism, and the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook. Looking at binaries as fragile and unstable, enabling opposites to flow within each other and also viewing each as limited by one’s perspective, does not easily lead to definitive decisions made about either side, nor clarification of fixed definitions. Rather, what we have is a kind of pause “between the sides.” Doubt in the stability of one’s position is an exercise in humility that creates an opening to see another perspective. The constructive possibility of the approach advocated by Froman can only transpire when the system that Froman develops begins to move in space and become transformed into its opposite. Only then will the axes deviate from their static positioning, and the potential for encounter and dialogue between the vertical and horizontal axes can begin. This mobility will hopefully produce a freedom that is the result of releasing the fixation of stasis, and from an awareness that each side without the other can be understood as being suspended in the air—and thus cannot be sustained. To achieve this dynamism, Froman writes in “For the Sake of Unification,” demands a humility whereby definitions and commitments become destabilized:
The most necessary spiritual step forward for the Jewish religion in my humble opinion, is a movement of humility. Humility is the foundation of religion, therefore if religious Jews make a move in the direction of recognizing the limitations and relativity of their beliefs and opinions, they will strengthen the religious foundation of Judaism. One of the means that may promote such a spiritual movement is a spiritual dialogue with another religion. When a human perspective finds itself faced with another human perspective, it automatically recognizes its own limitations and relativity in the face of the infinite.
The trait of humility also finds expression in relation to the land. Inheritance of the land cannot come from force or power but rather from a mutual dialogue with the neighboring Muslim people, who also rightfully call the land their own. The dialogue, as difficult as it is, teaches humility, and humility itself becomes a condition for the inheritance of the land. As he writes later in that same essay:
Placing the religion of Israel face to face with the religion of Islam creates the situation where humility can be revealed, which is ultimately the soul of the religion of Truth. When the two absolute positions are facing each otherthere is hope that the absoluteness of both will shatter. It turns out that the encounter with the religion of Islam may give the realistic ground, or if you want the “land,” the land of Israel–to fulfill the hope of the religion of Israel. If we want it, it is not a legend.
It can be said that the greatest danger that Froman felt in the face of the political situation in Israel was its rigidity. In his unique way, he proposed a resolution to the conflict by first dismantling the binary formations of yesh and ayin, right and left, and heaven and earth. He sought to dislodge the whole system, making it fluid and adaptable. It is this unmoored fluidity—one that refuses to adopt a logical solution—that may lead to greater spiritual and political renewal and movement in the contested land that both people rightfully call their own.
Just as the medieval Kabbalists tried to deconstruct the monotheistic idea by making it a performative act of rectifying the broken and fragmented cosmos, Froman tried to find a solution to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict by deconstructing the binaries of yesh and ayin, left and right, and Jew and Arab. By making monotheism an act and not a principle, by making Kabbalistic teaching relational and not a system of binaries, and by making the vertical a place of worldly action and the horizontal a place of divine-human relation, reconciliation becomes possible.
Translated by Shaul Judelman