"With a SHOFAR and a CAPOTE he rushed off to the Dakota": Images of Shlomo Goren within the Israeli Discourse

• In Event: Images of Israeliness in Folk Culture (Hebrew)

Abstract

From his early military days and political activity, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who served as the Chief Rabbi of the I.D.F. and later as Israel’s Chief Rabbi, insisted upon operating within the general Israeli realm, among the secular hegemony of his day. The emergence of the model of the “Combat Rabbi” awakened a spectrum of responses ranging from admiration to contempt, to disregard and ridicule. The commonality amongst the majority of these responses is the disregard for the broader context in which Rabbi Goren acted, and from the theological and political goals which he set for himself. This paper seeks to examine the manner in which the Israeli society looked at him, beginning from 1948 and through the culmination of his role as Israel’s Chief Rabbi. I seek to demonstrate how, in the terms established by Audrey Lorde, Rav Goren employed the Master’s language in order to dismantle his house. That is to say, he activated cultural codes, linguistic and political, of the language of the masses, to establish the legitimacy of a new hegemony, that of the Religious Zionism, in possession of opposing national and political goals.

Author

• Haim Weiss, Ben Gurion University of the Negev