Shlomo Goren, who was the first chief rabbi of the IDF and later served as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, did much to shape the contemporary balance between religion and state in Israel; he also left an enduring mark on religious Zionism. Examining Goren’s legacy, Elli Fischer argues that his approach created many of the problems that haunt the Israeli rabbinate today:

In the unending tug-of-war between religion and state in Israel, [Goren] did the most to re-imagine Jewish law (halakhah) to be compatible with the governing of a modern democratic state, and to implement halakhah as state law. . . .

Goren’s vision was programmatic, consisting of distinct elements necessary to making it a reality. For one thing, religious Jews would have to see themselves not as a separate group but as an integral part of the whole Jewish people. . . . Next, halakhah would have to be substantially revised in order to integrate seamlessly with the governing of the Jewish state. To that end, Goren would offer unprecedented halakhic rulings, arguing that the Jewish state is a sui generis situation in which prior accepted rulings do not apply. . . .

Finally, in order to implement his vision, Rabbi Goren would need power—not merely the rabbinic authority accumulated by great rabbis in every generation, but the enforcing power of the state.

The problem, writes Fischer, is that Goren’s efforts discredited the chief rabbinate in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox while simultaneously investing it with an undue amount of power. The secular public, for its part, resents the rabbinate and its control over matters of marriage and divorce. Goren’s very idealism created a broken system that breeds only cynicism.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.