Palestinian Rain | 215tural Zionism, against Herzl and Nordau (the leaders of political Zionism), and
while he passionately attempted to convince the World Zionist Organization to
invest in such projects as a Jewish publishing house, he differed significantly from
Ahad Ha’am on the matter of religion. As Martina Urban has written, “Whereas
Ahad Ha’am and his largely Russian Jewish associates advocated renewal as the
recasting of formal aspects of Jewish tradition—its literature, customs, language
as well as select values into secular modalities—Buber understood Jewry’s cul-
tural heritage as a fount of abiding religious sensibilities... independent of the
objective expressions of culture.”^8 Furthermore, in his defense of Ahad Ha’am in
D ie Welt, Buber praised him as the man who helped create “spiritual” Zionism.^9
Spiritual Zionism, then, might seem like a more appropriate designation
than “religious” Zionism, given the non-Orthodox, non-halakhic nature of Bu-
ber’s Judaism, despite the fact that he and Judah Magnes are grouped together
with Rabbi Samuel Mohilever and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in Arthur Hertz-
berg’s The Zionist Idea, the standard textbook on the subject.^10 Moreover, there is
a yawning gap between the dati le’umi (national religious), to whom the label “re-
ligious Zionism” is usually applied, and the “professors of Mount Scopus,” among
whom Buber is usually numbered.^11 This gap dates back to the period between
the two world wars, when “Religious-Zionism... tended to adopt a distinctive
‘right-wing’ orientation.”^12
These divisions emerged in stages. Ernst Simon, who moved to Palestine in
1928, was one of the first board members of the Bnei Akiva (Children of Akiva)
youth movement founded a year later in Jerusalem, which took as its motto “Pu-
rify your life through work and sanctify it through Torah.”^13 Bnei Akiva, an off-
shoot of Ha-Po’el ha-Mizrahi (Mizrahi Worker), the labor wing of the religious-
Zionist political party Mizrahi, promoted kibbutzim that combined religion and
socialism through the idea of Torah va-Avodah (Torah and labor).^14 This effort
was opposed by the Zionist executive, which favored secular settlements; it was
not until the chomah u-migdal (tower and stockade) strategy of settling in clus-
ters, in response to the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, that permission was granted to
establish the first religious kibbutzim, thus shaping their militaristic cast.^15 Bnei
Akiva was the same organization that would one day graduate the members of
the Gahelet (Embers) group from its yeshiva at Kfar Ha’roeh—men who would
go on to form the core of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settler move-
ment after they took R. Zvi Yehuda Kook as their teacher.^16 From Ernst Simon to
Zvi Yehuda Kook is a long way ideologically, but it was traversed in only a few
decades.
This historical connection between one of Buber’s most outstanding disci-
ples and religious Zionism may seem tenuous, and happenstance should not ob-
scure the fact that Buber stood on the opposite end of the political and religious
spectrum. And yet Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, the head of Yeshivat Har Etzion
in Alon Shvut (a settlement in the Gush Etzion bloc near Jerusalem), recently