{"id":1390,"date":"2022-04-17T15:38:32","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T12:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1390"},"modified":"2022-04-17T15:40:15","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T12:40:15","slug":"israels-minister-of-the-hyphen-tablet-april-11-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2022\/04\/17\/israels-minister-of-the-hyphen-tablet-april-11-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel’s Minister of the Hyphen (Tablet Magazine, April 11, 2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Emmanuel<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Minister of Religious Services Matan Kahana arrives at the president\u2019s residence in Jerusalem on June 14, 2021EMMANUEL DUDANDE\/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matti Friedman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matan Kahana\u2019s lonely battle to build a religious-Zionist-labor-Orthodox-democratic Jewish state<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s impossible to understand Matan Kahana, the surprise star of the current Israeli government, or to grasp the spirit of the coalition that has governed here for the past year, without the idea of the hyphen. The hyphen lies at the heart of the worldview of Kahana, a blunt ex-military officer who has stirred up more controversy, and has been called more awful names, than any other figure in the embattled government where he serves in what is usually a political backwater, the Ministry of Religious Services. The hyphen is at the heart of the crisis currently threatening to splinter the government, and will play a role in whatever political constellation ends up taking shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Kahana, who is 49, was growing up in the 1980s, \u201cbe the hyphen\u201d was an educational message drilled into religious-Zionist kids. The hyphen referred to what connected terms like \u201creligious-Zionist,\u201d for example, or \u201cJewish-democratic,\u201d or \u201cIsraeli-Jewish,\u201d or the community\u2019s triangle of values: Torah of Israel-Land of Israel-People of Israel. These are all ideas with inherent tensions, sometimes just barely held together by bars of horizontal ink. Kahana\u2019s generation was going to embody the connection. They were going to excel at Talmud and<\/em> at physics. They were going to be outdoorsy, salt-of-the-earth Israelis like the atheist kibbutzniks, and<\/em> they were going to pray three times a day. They\u2019d be right wing in their outlook but would serve in the army with the most left-wing Israelis, dying with them and for them if necessary. They\u2019d take part in democratic politics, and they\u2019d build settlements in the Land of Israel, demography be damned. The country\u2019s contradictions would yield to their willpower and grit. That\u2019s what they meant by \u201cbeing the hyphen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Kahana, speaking of his generation, put it in a recent speech to an audience of religious Zionists, \u201cWe showed that it\u2019s possible to do two things at once\u2014to learn Torah and serve in the army. To excel and lead in the world of action, and to fear God. To disagree, but to fight to stay brothers.\u201d The speech was delivered with the characteristic force of someone used to leading soldiers, and with a sense that all of this is coming apart. \u201cOur rabbis, the great men of our generation,\u201d he said, addressing the rabbinic leadership present in the auditorium, \u201cyou told us that our job was to be the hyphen\u2014to connect the people of Israel to a life of Torah and labor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now that he and his friends had done just that, rising through the ranks of the army and the civil service and taking their place in the center of Israeli society, they were being vilified by some of the same rabbis and political leaders for forming a government with the Israeli center and left. \u201cThe extremism afflicting religious Zionism,\u201d he said, \u201cis splitting the Jewish people.\u201d Last week, pressure from the hard right succeeded in peeling off a member of his own party, Idit Silman, who shocked her colleagues by abandoning the unity coalition and defected to the rightist opposition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Another member had already jumped ship months before. Silman\u2019s move has left the Knesset deadlocked and the coalition with just 60 votes, not enough to pass legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s difficult to think of someone who embodies the hyphen more than Matan Kahana. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Read the rest here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minister of Religious Services Matan Kahana arrives at the president\u2019s residence in Jerusalem on June 14, 2021EMMANUEL DUDANDE\/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Matti Friedman Matan Kahana\u2019s lonely battle to build a religious-Zionist-labor-Orthodox-democratic Jewish state It\u2019s impossible to understand Matan Kahana, the surprise star of the current Israeli government, or to grasp the spirit of the coalition that has governed here for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1393,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions\/1393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}