30 Mark Washo[sky

ought to be the case. Were the great sages of our day to take on the duty of readying the halakhah for the immense challenges posed to it by statehood, his Rabbinical Council might assume the more humble task of studying and disseminating the writings of those scholars.

Unfortunately, the great sages have refused the challenge.

To our sorrow, things have worked out differently. Some of our greatest authorities regard the state as a plague visited upon us(gezerah min hashamayim), to which they respond in the spirit of the Talmudic dictum: a plague will end some day.** They wall themselves off in splendid isolation, declaring everything that happens outside their little world to be of no import. We will not debate with them, both out of our respect for their honor and out of the knowledge that nothing we say can change their opinion in the least. For our part, we regard it as a divine punishment(onesh min hashamayim) upon our generation that we have not merited to see our great teachers march before us to show us the way. It is a punishment just as surely as the failure of our rabbis to bring our people to the land of Israel (in advance of the Holocaust ) was a divine punishment.

The Insufficiency of Method

This emotional reference to the passivity of the gedolei hador, the great rabbinical sages of Europe , in the face of the impending Nazi destruction neatly expresses R. Shaul Yisraeli’s bitter disappointment in the gedolei hador of his own time. He speaks of another tragically missed opportunity, of a loss of rabbinical nerve at another moment that required bold rabbinical leadership. His tone of frustration suggests that he knew then what we know now: namely, that the Zionist halakhic project was doomed. By this, I do not mean that the Mizrachi rabbis had accomplished nothing of value. Far from it: they succeeded in producing an impressive cache of writings that can be said to enrich the halakhic discussion to this day.*’ Rather, the Zionist halakhic project was a failure in its most fundamentally practical aim: it did not persuade the bulk of the recognized poskim to join in or even to pay much attention to the work of deriving a halakhah of Jewish statehood. By 1962, its energy spent, the Rabbinical Council