A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERScourse with other religious Israelis and with the state, insofar as these uphold visions
of Judaism and of Israeliness that draw exclusionary and militant implications from a
combination of trauma and religious narratives with which RHR refuses to become com-
plicit. Apart from its involvement with other groups in the Israeli ‘‘peace left,’’ RHR thus
cannot be seen as representative of a large front in Israeli society, let alone of a majority
among religious Israelis.^43 On the contrary, the group is a self-consciously marginal but
vocal phenomenon, in line with the prophetic tradition they consider themselves to
inherit.
What, exactly, is at stake in this self-positioning in prophetic terms? First, evoking
the prophetic bestows a form of traditional legitimization on the group’s dissent vis-a-vis the religious majority and the state, at a time of great pressure to ‘‘close ranks’’ behind state policies due to insecurity, which trauma-influenced narratives present as capable of escalating into the ‘‘unspeakable,’’ which has come to mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state or as a safeguard for the Jewish people as a testimonial community. By con- trast, RHR calls Jews to find a sense of courage and integrity in the prophetic tradition, combined with a particular sensitivity to the ethical and political needs of today’s Jewish Israelis as the bearers of a complex legacy made of past quasi-annihilation, present insecu- rity, and sovereign power. In particular, Rabbi Ascherman suggests that the challenge for rabbis who seek to ‘‘restore morality to Israeli politics’’ is to acknowledge the traumatic entanglements that complicate the self-positioning of Jewish Israelis vis-a-vis their ethno-
national identity and the state, yet to try to resist the temptation to offer consolation to
their communities or an illusion of divine intelligibility beyond suffering caused by con-
flict. Recognition of past and present traumas makes it necessary for ‘‘prophetic rabbis’’ to
speak compassionately to their people, rather than in the stern style of ancient prophets. A
greater challenge, however, is for rabbis to find a way tolive(in an active sense, as opposed
to ‘‘surviving’’) as Jews and Israelis in a time of darkness, when it appears as if God has
ceased to speak, to take an interest in the history of His people, and to suggest how it
may be possible to reconcile Jewish survival and the Covenant.
What, then, is the relationship between RHR’s recourse to the prophetic and this
acknowledgment of the present ‘‘darkness,’’ in which Jews must operate as if the key to
changing their reality were in their hands, even though their only hope resides in God’s
being at work in this very obscurity? Is the biblical call to ‘‘justice, justice’’ not beyond
the capacities of normal human beings, who find themselves facing an environment that
generates anxieties echoing those fed by authoritative identity narratives? The answers to
these questions lie, perhaps, in the second level of significance in the reference to the
prophetic in the work of RHR. Beyond legitimizing dissent, this reference also hints at an
ideal of perfect justice that the Jewish polity is called upon to realize yet cannot until the
coming of the Messiah. In other words, prophetic calls are God’s way to pose to His
people, time and again, an impossible challenge of perfect justice combined with sover-
eign power, while reminding them (through repetition) that He is aware of their vulnera-
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