rejection 509
Karta has taken its anti- Zionism to the extent of sending a delegation to
the president of Iran to express support for his implacable opposition to
the State of Israel. Other haredim have adopted a lesser form of separ-
ation, such as the followers of Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld, who in 1873,
in his mid- twenties, settled in the Old City of Jerusalem and succeeded
in avoiding any stay of more than thirty days outside the walls of the
Old City until his death nearly sixty years later. A leader of the Hungar-
ian haredim in Jerusalem, Sonnenfeld fought fiercely against any
mingling of orthodox Jews with others, urging haredim to opt out of
participation in the institutions set up by secular Zionists and opposing
the institution in the 1920s of a chief rabbinate for the land of Israel
(even though he was himself close to Abraham Kook). In contrast to
Neturei Karta, however, he treated modern Hebrew as his main lan-
guage, and he was in favour of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel
and of efforts to establish good relations with the native Arab popula-
tion. Sonnenfeld seems to have shared with religious Zionists a belief
that the return of Jews to the land preceded the messianic age. The
prayer for the State of Israel sanctioned by the Israeli chief rabbinate
refers to the state as ‘the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption’,
an eschatological hope generally adopted also in modern orthodox
synagogal liturgy in the diaspora.^16
Such notions of gradual redemption coexist only with difficulty with
the messianic fervour around a specific rebbe which has on occasion
convulsed hasidic groups, often to the dismay of other haredim, includ-
ing other hasidim. Immediate eschatological expectations were not
intrinsic to hasidic thought, as we have seen, but the conception of the
tsaddik as spiritual superman, through whom divine grace flows and to
whom God has granted control of everything by his prayers, already
elevated hasidic rebbes far above the level of ordinary humans. The soul
of a tsaddik is so pure that his prayers can even nullify a divine decision
that life should come to an end. In every era, a special saint, the ‘right-
eous of the generation’, is born with the potential to become the Messiah
if conditions in the world prove right. For hasidic followers of a particu-
lar charismatic rebbe, the messianic age can thus seem tantalizingly close.
We have seen (in Chapter 15) that, two centuries after the death of
Nahman of Bratslav in 1810, the Bratslav hasidim, nowadays based in
Jerusalem, have revived the practice of mass pilgrimage on Rosh
haShanah to his grave in Uman, in the Ukraine, which had been almost
entirely suppressed by the authorities during the Communist era. It is
believed that shortly before his death he vowed before two witnesses