Marking a New Holy Community: God's Neighbors and the Ascendancy of a New Religious Hegemony in Israel

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Menny Ya'ish's recent film God's Neighbors (2012, ...) opens on a peaceful Friday eve with Avi (Ro'ee Asaf ), a rough-looking but attractive young man, who performs the ritual of Kiddush, or sanctification of the wine, that ushers in the Jewish Sabbath. When he is done eating alone with his father, Avi retires to his room to study scripture, basking in the sweetness of the Torah and relishing the peace and quiet of the holy day after a long week of hard work. But his blessed reverie is soon interrupted by loud music that comes from the street below. Looking down, he sees a group of young Russians drinking and loudly making merry in the yard to the sound of booming music. Faint cries by neighbors in surrounding flats to keep the music down in honor of the Sabbath are rebuffed vulgarly and dismissively by the carousing Russians. This incenses God's first neighbor, Avi, who calls on God's two other neighbors, his friends Koby (Gal Friedman) and Yaniv (Itzik Golan), to help him drive the Russians out. What follows is probably one of the most articulated action scenes in Israeli cinema to date-a rapid action sequence, in the course of which the Russians are violently beaten and forced to leave, bleeding and humiliated, to the sound of cheering neighbors.Piety and violence distinguish God's three neighbors-Avi, Koby, and Yaniv-who, since their return to the faith, have become religious vigilantes in their working-class urban neighborhood of Bat Yam. Avi is the leader of the gang. During the day he helps his father in their produce store. In his free time, he makes religious trance music. Having recently joined the Breslev Hasidic sect, the three friends practice their newfound faith in some of their former gang ways, imposing God's laws on their neighbors by force: they beat up drunks, impose the Sabbath on local businesses, force neighborhood women to dress more modestly, and fight a rival Arab gang. Their lives are a strange mixture of a lackadaisical drug culture, religious faith, and tough street action.1 But Avi's life changes when a pretty young woman, Miri (Rotem Zisman Cohen), moves into the neighborhood. At first Avi tries to impose a stricter dress code on her, but eventually he falls in love with her and is transformed by his love into a kinder and less vengeful religious person.I want to propose that God's Neighbors marks a significant cultural moment in the legitimation of Jewish religiosity in Israel and records an important milestone in the country's metamorphosis in recent years from a secular, liberal society to a more fundamentalist religious one. The film demonstrates this change in three interrelated ways. First, by combining Jewish religiosity with a powerful and aggressive Israeli Mizrahi2 masculine identity, the film relegitimizes Jewish religiosity, presents it as attractive and sexy, and declares it as the new Israeli hegemony. Second, by not killing off the members of a rival Arab gang , the film symbolically minimizes the conflict between Jews and Arabs, and advances the importance of mythical Jewish time over Zionist historical time. Finally, by ending happily with a union between Avi and his girl, Miri, the film provides a neat closure that offers an alluringly simple, Hasidic-like tale of Jewish life in Israel today, promising rewards to the righteous who believe in Hashem, the Lord.3The secular nature of early Zionism is fairly well known by now and needs little elaboration.4 Zionist culture, which was greatly influenced by the civic religion of European bourgeois nationalism, also developed as a reaction against Jewish traditional life and religious practices in Eastern Europe.5 But Zionism not only preserved the secular liberalism of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlighten- ment. It was also inspired by the great social reform movements of the time, such as socialism and communism, which were decidedly antireligious. When Zionism was later transferred to Palestine and developed there, it continued to be animated by the antireligious sentiments of its early thinkers, a sentiment that eventually grew to the outright animosity of what came to be known as the Zionist or Israeli negation of exile. …