Luke Ford

Aviad Hollander’s chapter “Zionist-Messianic Halakha” reconstructs Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) as a theorist of sovereign Jewish existence. Hollander shows that Goren’s halakhic rulings emerge from a theology of history. The establishment of the State of Israel constitutes for Goren a redemptive rupture that alters the conditions under which halakha operates.
Hollander’s analysis pushes past the standard binaries that dominate scholarship on Religious Zionism. Discussions of modern halakha often oscillate between two explanatory models. The apologetic account holds that halakha possesses timeless flexibility capable of accommodating modernity without conceptual disruption. The reductionist sociological account treats rabbinic rulings as rationalizations of prior ideological commitments. Hollander’s portrait of Goren reveals a jurist whose theological vision reshapes his jurisprudential imagination. Goren believes Jewish history has entered a new covenantal phase. The restoration of sovereignty is not another circumstance to which halakha must react. It transforms the horizon where halakhic reasoning unfolds.
The conceptual center of the chapter is the idea that Goren develops a form of sovereign jurisprudence. The phrase captures the distinctive nature of his project more accurately than broader labels such as “Religious Zionist halakha” or “messianic nationalism.” Many Orthodox rabbis accept the state pragmatically while operating within an exilic legal consciousness. They view the state as instrumentally useful for protecting Jews, facilitating religious life, or preventing persecution. They do not regard sovereignty as a theological category capable of altering halakhic method. Goren does.
For Goren, the establishment of the state represents atchalta de’geulah, the beginning of redemption. The state is not yet redemption. It remains open to criticism. But it constitutes a stage within the messianic process. Goren does not collapse contemporary Israel into eschatological fulfillment. He views sovereignty as the engine through which redemption progressively unfolds in history. The state becomes a “State on the way to the Messiah,” a vessel carrying unrealized redemptive potential.
Hollander shows that this conviction operates as a jurisprudential principle. Goren acknowledges that legal rulings concerning state ceremonies, Independence Day, and national institutions depend on one’s “whole approach” to whether the state represents the beginning of redemption. The admission is striking. It makes visible a premise usually left implicit within legal reasoning. Goren recognizes that jurisprudence is inseparable from historical interpretation. A posek’s understanding of where the Jewish people stand within sacred history shapes the legal process.
The insight destabilizes the common assumption that halakhic adjudication functions through purely internal doctrinal channels detached from historical consciousness. Goren treats theology as an operational variable within jurisprudence. Whether the state possesses redemptive significance alters the legal meaning of sovereignty, military service, public ritual, and national legislation. Ideological consciousness becomes a legitimate component of judicial reasoning.
Hollander’s treatment of Goren’s biography reinforces the argument by situating his jurisprudence within the broader transformation from exile to sovereignty. Goren’s formative experiences extend well beyond the study hall. His military service before and after the establishment of the state proves decisive. As chief rabbi of the IDF, he confronts problems for which classical halakha possesses no stable institutional precedent. Diasporic Jewish law contains discussions of kingship, warfare, public authority, and collective obligation. These categories remained theoretical under centuries of statelessness. The creation of the Israeli state turns them into practical realities requiring operational jurisprudence.
The institutional novelty produces immense interpretive pressure. Military ethics, battlefield conduct, public mourning, chain of command, wartime ritual, and national legislation all demand legal articulation. Hollander emphasizes that Goren enters a legal terrain without settled precedents. Within this vacuum, his theology of redemption acquires jurisprudential force.
A central contribution of the chapter is its demonstration that Goren’s messianism shapes not only the content of his rulings but the selection of legal questions themselves. Jurisprudence does not merely answer preexisting questions. It also determines which questions appear historically urgent. Goren’s theology directs his attention toward sovereignty, military ethics, territorial control, public ritual, conversion policy, and the integration of secular Israelis into the halakhic framework. He believes the Jewish people have reentered political history as a collective sovereign actor.
Goren attempts to reconstruct halakha as the legal architecture of a sovereign civilization rather than the normative system of a dispersed minority community. Classical exile halakha evolves under conditions of vulnerability and dependence. It concentrates on ritual life, family law, communal organization, and personal observance. Goren seeks to reactivate dormant biblical and talmudic categories relating to statecraft, warfare, and collective destiny. His project is not conservative preservation. It is civilizational reconstruction.
The distinction between active and passive redemption deepens the analysis. Hollander highlights how Goren associates passivity with exile and activism with redemption. This is not political temperament. It is theological anthropology. Exile produces a defensive Jewish consciousness structured around endurance, caution, and withdrawal from history. Redemption demands agency. The redeemed Jew acts, builds, legislates, fights, heals, and governs.
The anthropological transformation helps explain the institutional activism of Goren’s career. He does not merely write responsa. He builds frameworks: the military rabbinate, national ceremonies, legal doctrines for sovereignty, wartime ethics, and medical jurisprudence. Activity becomes a redemptive category. Sovereignty demands halakhic kinetic energy.
The IDF occupies a central place within this worldview. Goren describes the Israeli army not as an ordinary military institution but as an instrument of sacred historical purpose. In a 1956 statement Hollander cites, Goren insists the IDF differs from the armies of the nations because its mission ties to the prophetic realization of redemption. The army therefore becomes military, national, and theological at once. War enters sacred history.
The fusion of military necessity and redemptive mission explains why Goren invests such effort in constructing a halakhic framework for sovereignty. Exile-era jurisprudence cannot simply be repeated unchanged under sovereign conditions. A people without political power and a people exercising power inhabit different moral and legal worlds.
The result is a dramatic expansion of halakhic ambition. Goren seeks not merely to preserve religious observance within the state but to transform the state into a redemptive instrument. Hollander notes Goren’s insistence that the laws of the state should eventually harmonize with Torah through public internalization rather than coercive imposition. Here one sees the synthesis at the heart of his thought. The state is neither secular-neutral nor immediately theocratic. It is transitional, a polity moving toward covenantal fulfillment.
The transitional conception generates tensions. Because redemption unfolds through historical institutions, political developments acquire theological significance. Military victories confirm redemptive momentum. National crises threaten theological coherence. Hollander’s discussion of the post-1973 period therefore carries particular weight.
The Yom Kippur War represents not merely a military shock but a spiritual rupture within Religious Zionism. Goren’s earlier confidence that the concrete state transparently embodies redemptive ascent becomes harder to sustain amid military failure, political fragmentation, and later territorial compromise. The Oslo process intensifies the crisis. Goren expresses alarm at state policy, particularly regarding territorial concessions.
The evolution exposes a structural vulnerability of messianic jurisprudence. Once political history is read as sacred history, political setbacks become theological crises. A jurisprudence grounded in sovereign redemption depends on maintaining confidence that history possesses discernible covenantal direction. The post-1973 disillusionment shows the fragility of attempts to identify the state too closely with redemption.
Hollander’s treatment of Goren’s medical rulings broadens the analysis. Most discussions of Goren focus on war, settlement, or national ritual. His positions on autopsies, organ transplantation, and medical education reveal the same underlying logic.
Here Goren’s concern is national self-reliance. He rejects the earlier proposal of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook (1865-1935) that Jewish medical schools use non-Jewish cadavers to preserve Jewish sanctity. Goren regards such dependence as incompatible with sovereign Jewish existence. A redeemed polity cannot construct its scientific infrastructure on permanent reliance on outsiders. Medical modernity must become internalized within Jewish sovereignty.
The position represents a major conceptual expansion of halakhic responsibility. Goren transforms v’chai ba’hem from a principle of individual survival into a civilizational mandate. Torah must sustain the viability of a modern technological society capable of defending and reproducing itself through its own institutions. Halakha becomes responsible not merely for ritual fidelity but for the operational functioning of sovereign civilization.
The move widens the scope of halakhic concern. Scientific infrastructure, military organization, public administration, and national integration all become halakhically relevant because sovereignty possesses theological meaning. Goren no longer simply preserves tradition within modernity. He attempts to generate the jurisprudence of a technologically advanced redeemed nation.
A fascinating dimension of the chapter is the paradoxical relationship between messianism and leniency in Goren’s legal method. Popular portrayals often assume that nationalist or messianic jurisprudence produces rigidity. Many of Goren’s controversial interventions are lenient. His rulings concerning mamzerut, annulment, conversion, and Ethiopian Jewry often stretch traditional boundaries toward inclusion.
The contradiction becomes intelligible once one understands Goren’s overriding concern with national cohesion. He views the state as a redemptive collective enterprise. Preserving the attachment of secular Jews to halakha therefore becomes a supreme value. He fears that excessive rigidity might produce a permanent rupture between the Jewish public and the Torah.
The “Brother and Sister” affair illustrates the point. Goren’s intervention is not humanitarian sentiment alone. It reflects a strategic and theological determination to keep halakha from appearing morally archaic or socially impossible. If the rabbinate cannot solve painful human problems, secular Israelis might increasingly seek to dismantle religious authority altogether.
The same logic shapes his evolving approach to Beta Israel. Hollander notes Goren’s movement from initially requiring conversion to later waiving it under growing public and political pressure. The shift is not simple opportunism. Goren fears that stringent exclusion might strengthen secular demands for separating religion from the state. National integration becomes a halakhic imperative.
This aspect of Goren’s jurisprudence deserves emphasis. Collective unity shapes his legal imagination at a deep level. The preservation of Jewish solidarity within sovereignty often outweighs procedural rigidity. His leniencies are not signs of secularization. They are expressions of sovereign theology. Halakha must remain attached to the national collective if redemption is to continue unfolding through history.
Hollander’s discussion of ethics and “purity of arms” adds another layer. Goren’s messianism does not merely sacralize power. It generates a theory of moral superiority. Jewish sovereignty guided by halakha is supposed to produce a more humane civilization than secular nationalism alone.
The Beirut siege episode exemplifies the synthesis. Goren defends allowing an escape route for enemy fighters by invoking the halakhic principle requiring an “open side” during siege warfare. He frames the decision not as technical legal compliance but as evidence of the humanitarian superiority of Jewish law. The IDF embodies both national sovereignty and prophetic ethics.
The move carries enormous symbolic weight. Religious Zionism inherits a profound theological problem. Classical Jewish memory associates sovereignty with covenantal justice and prophetic morality, but modern nationalism emerges amid the catastrophes of twentieth-century warfare. Goren attempts to resolve the tension by arguing that halakha can generate an ethically elevated form of sovereign power.
His fascination with ancient military categories reflects this ambition. Goren repeatedly seeks to show that Jewish law already contains sophisticated humanitarian principles long before modern international law. He fuses the secular Zionist ethos of “purity of arms” with classical rabbinic jurisprudence. The Israeli soldier becomes linked at once to modern nationalism and biblical covenant.
The synthesis illuminates Goren’s larger historical project. He works to overcome the split between sacred and secular that characterizes modern Jewish existence. The state, army, medical system, and public institutions are not to remain secular domains merely tolerated by religion. They are to become sanctified instruments of redemption.
Hollander’s achievement is showing how systematic the vision is. Goren does not issue disconnected rulings responding ad hoc to contemporary events. He attempts to construct an integrated theology of redeemed sovereignty. Every domain of public life becomes potentially halakhic because every domain participates in the national return to history.
The chapter therefore contributes not only to Jewish studies but to the broader study of political theology. Goren’s jurisprudence shows how underlying metaphysical narratives about history, collective destiny, and sacred time shape legal systems. Modern liberal legalism often presents itself as procedurally neutral. All jurisprudence presupposes some conception of the human person, political order, and historical purpose. Goren has an analytical advantage. He articulates his assumptions openly.
Hollander neither romanticizes Goren as a prophetic genius nor dismisses him as an ideologue cloaking nationalism in theology. He reconstructs the internal coherence of the worldview while tracing its institutional and political consequences.
The balance is important because Goren’s legacy remains contested. His attempt to build a jurisprudence adequate to sovereignty produces immense institutional creativity. It also weakens certain traditional restraints. Once political developments become signs of redemption, opposition risks appearing not merely mistaken but spiritually obstructive. The same theological apparatus capable of energizing national renewal can intensify absolutism and political polarization.
Hollander suggests that one cannot understand contemporary Religious Zionism without understanding Goren’s transformation of halakha into sovereign jurisprudence. He represents an early major rabbinic figure to confront the implications of Jewish political restoration after centuries of exile. His project is civilizational. He seeks to reconstruct halakha as the operating system of a redeemed nation-state.
The enduring significance of “Zionist-Messianic Halakha” lies in its portrayal of Goren as a jurist standing at the threshold between two Jewish worlds. Behind him stands the diasporic civilization of exile, caution, and political weakness. Before him stands the uncertain experiment of sovereign Jewish modernity. Goren believes the transition demands not merely new rulings but a new jurisprudential imagination. The state is not another circumstance requiring accommodation. It is the arena through which redemption advances into history.
Hollander’s chapter shows that Goren’s halakhic project cannot be reduced to nationalism, activism, or messianic enthusiasm alone. It is an attempt to answer one of the larger questions in modern Jewish thought: what happens to Torah when the Jews return from history’s margins to history’s center?

Aviad Hollander’s essay about halakhic decision-making in the Religious Zionist world is also an inquiry into the constitutional and theological crises generated by modern Jewish sovereignty: can Halakha function as the governing moral and legal language of a modern democratic state without either losing its internal integrity or rendering itself socially unworkable? Hollander approaches this problem through the jurisprudence and public career of Rabbi Shlomo Goren, especially through the explosive “brother-and-sister” Langer mamzerut affair of 1972, yet the implications of his analysis extend far beyond any single ruling. What emerges is not merely the portrait of a controversial rabbi, but the anatomy of a broader struggle over sovereignty, legitimacy, and the transformation of rabbinic authority under conditions of Jewish statehood.
The central achievement of Hollander’s essay lies in his refusal to reduce Goren either to heroic visionary or reckless ideologue. Instead, he reconstructs the internal logic of Goren’s worldview while also exposing its institutional dangers and jurisprudential tensions. Hollander’s key insight is that Goren did not experience loyalty to Halakha and loyalty to the State of Israel as competing allegiances requiring compromise between sacred law and secular necessity. Under the influence of Religious Zionist theology, especially the legacy of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Goren understood the Jewish state itself as part of the redemptive unfolding of Jewish history. The state was not external to sacred history. It was one of its instruments. Once this premise is accepted, rulings that appear to critics as “politicized” or “state-serving” become, from within Goren’s framework, entirely authentic expressions of Halakha operating under transformed historical conditions.
This point is decisive because it distinguishes Goren from both conventional pragmatists and secular nationalists. He believed sovereignty altered the conditions under which Torah must be interpreted. In exile, Halakha had functioned primarily as the legal and ethical system of dispersed minority communities living under foreign rule. Its institutional orientation was communal continuity, ritual discipline, and boundary preservation under conditions of political weakness. Goren believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty fundamentally changed the historical situation. A sovereign Jewish state required Halakha to govern not merely ritual life, but armies, borders, warfare, citizenship, public legitimacy, and collective destiny. The old diasporic posture of juridical caution and communal defensiveness could no longer suffice.
Hollander’s biographical material therefore carries enormous interpretive importance. Goren was not simply a yeshiva scholar commenting on sovereignty from afar. He was formed by the state physically and emotionally. Hollander traces his journey from Poland and Jerusalem through elite yeshivot, military service, and eventually the highest religious institutions of the Israeli state. Unlike many Haredi rabbinic authorities, Goren inhabited sovereignty existentially. He served alongside combat forces, participated in Israel’s wars, entered the Old City in 1967 carrying a Torah scroll and shofar, and interpreted military victory through openly messianic language. The state, for Goren, was not merely an administrative framework for Jewish survival. It was a sacred national project through which Jewish history itself was reawakening.
Hollander cites Goren’s repeated insistence that the defining challenge facing modern rabbinic authorities was proving the compatibility of Halakha with democratic Jewish sovereignty. Here Goren articulated one of the central assumptions of Religious Zionism: Torah must demonstrate that it can govern actual Jewish collective life under conditions of power. A Halakha incapable of sustaining sovereign national existence would become historically marginal and spiritually alienating.
For this reason, Hollander’s discussion of Goren’s concept of “the eternity of Halakha” becomes foundational to understanding his method. Goren argued that the permanence of Torah lies in its interpretive elasticity. He invoked the rabbinic tradition that Torah was intentionally not given “cut and dried,” but with multiple interpretive pathways because rigid legal immobility would render Jewish life impossible across changing historical conditions. The task of the posek was therefore not mechanical obedience to precedent, but discerning which possibilities latent within Torah corresponded to the needs of the historical moment.
Hollander provides a taxonomy of Goren’s jurisprudential method.
The first mechanism was expansion of source range. Goren did not openly reject the authority of the Babylonian Talmud or classical halakhic precedent. Instead, he widened the operative canon by incorporating sources often treated as secondary in mainstream decisional culture: the Jerusalem Talmud, aggadic literature, Tosefta, Geonic writings, and minority precedents. The significance of this move was subtle but profound. Goren would rarely rule directly against dominant precedent. Rather, he surrounded dominant precedent with a dense field of alternative ancient voices until a different pathway became visible within the tradition itself. In effect, he redistributed interpretive authority within the canon. The result was not abolition of precedent but pluralization of precedent.
The second mechanism was purposive interpretation. Goren repeatedly sought to uncover the underlying aims or moral telos of halakhic institutions and then interpreted sources in light of those larger purposes. This allowed him to argue that rulings which appeared formally innovative were in fact preserving the deeper objectives of Torah under transformed social conditions.
The third mechanism was selective decision-making. Hollander’s analysis here is particularly important because it moves beyond accusations of arbitrary leniency. Goren often faced situations in which multiple legitimate halakhic pathways existed simultaneously. The controversy was therefore not usually over whether a lenient opinion existed somewhere within the literature. The controversy was over which opinions deserved elevation to governing norm. Hollander emphasizes that when confronted with competing principles such as “the lenient has someone to rely upon” versus “the stringent shall be blessed,” Goren consistently selected the path most compatible with the needs of sovereign Jewish life. These were not accidental choices. They reflected a conscious jurisprudential orientation.
Yet Hollander also introduces a critical corrective often missed by admirers and critics alike. Goren’s creativity operated within invisible traditionalist restraints. Hollander notes the internal brake captured in the phrase “me-heyot tov al tehi ra,” roughly “better to be good than bad.” Goren did not believe he was revising Torah in response to modernity. He believed he was uncovering dormant capacities already embedded within Torah itself. This distinction matters enormously. Goren was not a proto-Reform rabbi or liberal religious modernizer disguising innovation as continuity. His self-understanding was restorative rather than revisionist. He believed diasporic conditions had artificially narrowed the operational range of Halakha, and that sovereignty permitted suppressed dimensions of the tradition to reemerge.
Goren’s solution to dual loyalty was not compromise between state and Halakha. It was denial that authentic contradiction truly existed. If Torah appeared incompatible with the needs of Jewish sovereignty, then the interpreter had failed to excavate Torah deeply enough. The problem lay not in Halakha but in excessively frozen interpretive habits. The “forty-nine faces” of Torah meant that the tradition already contained the resources necessary for sovereign national life.
The Langer affair became the great public test case for this worldview. Hollander reconstructs the episode in considerable detail. Brother and sister Hanoch and Miriam Langer had been declared mamzerim by rabbinic courts because their mother had allegedly remarried without receiving a valid divorce from her first husband. As mamzerim, they would be permanently barred from marrying most Jews under halakhic law. The case became a national scandal because the siblings were ordinary patriotic Israelis, including military personnel, whose exclusion appeared morally intolerable to much of the Israeli public.
For Goren, the issue was not merely compassion for two individuals. The deeper issue was whether Halakha could absorb the pressures generated by sovereignty without fracturing. A democratic nation-state cannot easily sustain hereditary categories of permanently excluded citizens who participate fully in national life yet remain barred from the communal marriage structure. Goren understood instinctively that unresolved cases like the Langers threatened the legitimacy of religious marriage law itself.
This explains why Goren repeatedly linked the case to the danger of civil marriage legislation and fragmentation of Jewish identity. Hollander quotes Goren’s explicit concern that rigid handling of such crises would strengthen anti-religious movements and create competing systems of marriage and Jewish status. In his mind, the stakes were civilizational. Excessive rigidity risked severing masses of Israeli Jews from Torah altogether.
Haredi leaders did not merely criticize Goren’s legal conclusions. They described his actions as “burning the Torah,” staged symbolic mourning ceremonies, and declared his rulings void. Such rhetoric reflected an awareness that something larger than mamzerut doctrine was at stake. The real issue was the nature of rabbinic authority under sovereignty.
Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge and institutional legitimacy helps illuminate this dimension of the controversy. Much of the outrage surrounding the Langer ruling stemmed not only from substantive disagreement but from procedural and cultural norm violations. Goren bypassed ordinary institutional pathways by assembling a special court whose composition initially remained undisclosed. To critics, this resembled an executive intervention or “commando raid” into the rabbinic legal system rather than the slow consensual process characteristic of diasporic rabbinic culture. Uri Avnery’s mocking description of the ruling as resembling an elite military operation unintentionally captured something real about Goren’s style. He approached jurisprudence with the decisiveness, urgency, and state-centered mentality of a sovereign actor rather than the incrementalism of traditional rabbinic procedure.
This procedural style reflected a deeper transformation in authority structures. Diasporic rabbinic legitimacy evolved under conditions of fragmentation and political weakness. It depended heavily on tacit norms of deference, gradual consensus formation, and decentralized scholarly authority. Goren implicitly advanced a different model: a sovereign Jewish polity requiring decisive national religious leadership capable of responding to political emergencies and collective needs. The Haredi world experienced this not merely as a bad ruling but as an alien model of authority invading the rabbinic sphere itself.
Hollander’s discussion of the Temple Mount reveals Goren operating with an implicit theory of emergency sovereignty. Goren’s positions regarding Jewish ascent to the Temple Mount shifted depending on historical conditions and perceived threats to sovereignty. During moments of existential conflict or territorial uncertainty, he emphasized the overriding importance of conquest, possession, and national control, even at the cost of relaxing traditional restrictions. In more stable periods, however, he adopted more cautious positions emphasizing ritual boundaries, precise measurements, and purity concerns.
This distinction reveals a remarkably sophisticated jurisprudential instinct. Goren treated sovereignty as activating different halakhic priorities under different historical conditions. Emergency circumstances expanded the legitimacy of assertive national action. Routine conditions restored stronger restraints. In this respect, his thought resembles broader traditions of constitutional emergency theory in which exceptional historical moments temporarily reorder legal priorities.
Goren’s later Temple Mount writings functioned as a restraining mechanism against messianic extremism. By publishing a limited, scholarly treatment of the Mount in the early 1990s, Goren appears to have sought to provide a moderate halakhic framework capable of channeling nationalist-religious energies away from violent radicalism and underground activism. This complicates simplistic portrayals of him as merely a maximalist ideologue. Goren understood that uncontrolled messianic activism could alienate the broader Israeli public and delegitimize Religious Zionism itself.
The tragedy of Goren’s career is therefore inseparable from its ambition. He sought to prove that Halakha could sustain sovereign Jewish modernity without surrendering its integrity. Yet the very boldness required for that project destabilized inherited structures of rabbinic legitimacy. The Langer ruling solved the immediate political and human crisis, but at immense institutional cost. Trust between major sectors of Orthodoxy and the Chief Rabbinate deteriorated sharply. The institution Goren hoped to strengthen emerged weakened and contested.
Many of the dilemmas Goren identified remain unresolved precisely because his opponents never produced a compelling alternative capable of reconciling traditional Halakha with democratic sovereignty. Questions surrounding conversion, military service, marriage law, judicial authority, and the role of religion in Israeli public life continue to revolve around the same underlying issue: can Halakha govern a sovereign Jewish state without either becoming rigidly sectarian or dissolving into nationalism and political expediency?
Hollander’s essay demonstrates that Rabbi Shlomo Goren was not merely a controversial rabbi but one of the first major constitutional thinkers of Jewish sovereignty. His jurisprudence represented an attempt to answer a question scarcely confronted for nearly two thousand years: what becomes of Halakha when Jews cease being merely a dispersed religious community and once again become a nation exercising political power over territory, law, military force, and collective destiny?
Goren answered that sovereignty did not diminish Torah but demanded its fuller activation. His critics feared that this activation would transform sacred law into an instrument of political ideology. The enduring significance of Hollander’s essay lies in showing that both sides recognized real dangers and that the conflict between them was not merely political or legal, but civilizational. At stake was whether Judaism could survive sovereignty.

The intellectual significance of Rabbi Shlomo Goren lies not simply in his attempt to reconcile Halacha with modern international law, but in the much larger civilizational problem his work confronted: the reconstruction of a sovereign Jewish jurisprudence after nearly two millennia in which Judaism functioned as the legal and ethical system of a dispersed minority community rather than as the governing framework of a state. The 2014 article by Ilan Fuchs and Aviad Yehiel Hollander, “National Movements and International Law: Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Understanding of International Law,” is therefore best understood not merely as a study in religion and law, but as an examination of the deeper crisis generated when an exilic legal tradition suddenly reacquires political sovereignty and must once again address armies, borders, diplomacy, occupation, minority populations, and participation within a universal international order.
The central achievement of the article is its recognition that Goren neither rejected international law outright nor simply absorbed it into a liberal framework. Rather, he attempted to construct what the authors aptly describe as a “critical dialogue” between Halacha and international legal norms. Yet the full depth of Goren’s project emerges only when one recognizes that he was attempting to rebuild the sources and structure of halachic authority under conditions of renewed sovereignty. His jurisprudence therefore represents one of the earliest and most ambitious efforts to formulate a theory of Jewish statehood adequate to the realities of modern politics while preserving the covenantal and particularistic foundations of Jewish tradition.
The historical rupture confronting Goren was immense. Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple evolved overwhelmingly under conditions of political exile. Jewish law became extraordinarily sophisticated in the governance of ritual life, communal institutions, commerce, contracts, family relations, and minority survival within larger imperial systems. Yet the practical jurisprudence of sovereignty largely receded from lived experience. Questions concerning constitutional order, military ethics, territorial annexation, civilian immunity, treatment of prisoners, diplomacy, and relations with foreign powers remained largely theoretical after the collapse of Jewish political independence in antiquity. Consequently, when the State of Israel emerged in 1948, Religious Zionist thinkers faced not merely a political challenge but a jurisprudential vacuum. Classical halachic literature had never developed a fully modern public law tradition because the historical conditions necessary for such a development had not existed for centuries.
Goren occupied a uniquely consequential position within this transformation. As the first Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces and later Chief Rabbi of Israel, he was a halachic architect. The formation of the Israeli military, the integration of religious observance within a modern army, the treatment of enemy combatants, the handling of occupied territory, and the status of minorities within a Jewish state were no longer abstract theological questions. They had become immediate administrative and moral realities. Goren’s task was therefore unprecedented in post-biblical Jewish history: to formulate a halachic framework capable of governing sovereign Jewish power.
This required not merely new rulings but a transformation in legal methodology. One of the most important aspects of Goren’s jurisprudence, and one only partially developed in the Fuchs and Hollander article, is that he effectively expanded the halachic toolkit by partially bypassing the dominant interpretive structure of diaspora-era rabbinic legalism. In classical post-Talmudic jurisprudence, biblical texts are ordinarily mediated through centuries of rabbinic commentary, decisional precedent, and legal formalization. Goren, however, repeatedly returned directly to biblical narratives, ethical motifs, and pre-exilic political categories in order to reconstruct a sovereign Jewish legal consciousness.
This move was radical precisely because it implicitly acknowledged that the inherited halachic canon lacked sufficient sovereign content for the realities confronting a modern state. The kings of Israel, biblical warfare, covenantal territory, and narratives of national power became jurisprudential resources once again because sovereignty had returned as a lived condition. Goren therefore did not merely interpret texts under conditions of sovereignty. Sovereignty transformed the interpretive architecture of Halacha.
The significance of this methodological shift cannot be overstated. Diaspora Judaism developed through layers of rabbinic mediation precisely because Jews lacked direct political authority. Under conditions of exile, legal reasoning naturally gravitated toward communal administration, ritual discipline, and minority survival. Biblical political categories remained authoritative but largely dormant. Goren effectively reversed that historical process by retrieving the Bible as a living constitutional source for modern Jewish statehood. His repeated appeals to biblical kings, military narratives, and covenantal claims were not rhetorical flourishes but part of an attempt to reconstruct the jurisprudence of sovereign Jewish existence.
This reconstruction also explains the unusual interpretive flexibility visible throughout his work. Goren frequently elevated aggadic, narrative, and ethical materials into quasi-normative status because conventional halachic precedent alone could not fully address the moral dilemmas generated by sovereign power. The concept of lifnim mishurat hadin, conduct beyond strict legal obligation, became especially important in this regard. Through such concepts, Goren created a broader category of legal-moral reasoning that allowed humanitarian and universal ethical concerns to become internal religious obligations rather than external secular impositions.
This point becomes especially clear in his reconstruction of Jewish military ethics. One of the central challenges confronting Goren was the relationship between Halacha and modern humanitarian law. The conduct of warfare in the twentieth century had become increasingly governed by international conventions concerning civilians, prisoners of war, enemy dead, and proportionality. Yet Jewish law lacked a continuous sovereign military tradition comparable to the Christian just war tradition that had developed from Augustine of Hippo through Thomas Aquinas into modern international humanitarian law.
Goren’s solution was neither simple accommodation nor rejection. Instead, he sought to demonstrate that the ethical principles underlying modern humanitarian law were already latent within Jewish sources themselves. His interpretation of Ben Azzai’s reading of Genesis is especially revealing. By emphasizing the shared ancestry of all humanity through Adam, Goren constructed a theological basis for universal human dignity extending beyond ethnic or national boundaries. Enemy combatants retained dignity because all human beings participated in a common divine origin.
At the same time, Goren’s approach was not merely derivative of liberal humanitarianism. He insisted that the moral foundations of humane warfare arose internally from Torah rather than externally from international conventions. This was crucial to his broader intellectual project. Goren feared that if Halacha could not produce doctrines analogous to equality, minority protections, and humanitarian ethics, it would become irrelevant to the Zionist project and vulnerable to accusations of moral primitivism. The emerging postwar international order increasingly defined legitimacy through what nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jurists had termed the “standard of civilization.” States were expected to uphold norms of equality, minority protection, and civilized conduct if they wished to participate fully in international society.
Goren clearly understood that a Jewish state detached from such norms would face not only diplomatic isolation but civilizational delegitimation. Yet his response was not secularization. Rather, he attempted to invert the moral hierarchy implicit within the discourse of civilization. Because the Jewish people had endured centuries of minority vulnerability and exile, they were uniquely positioned, in his view, to model ethical sovereignty. The humanitarian achievements of modern civilization were therefore not foreign imports into Judaism but partial reflections of moral truths already embedded within Torah.
This concern with legitimacy explains Goren’s remarkable engagement with constitutional equality and minority rights during the formative years of the Israeli state. In his early constitutional writings, he explicitly insisted that the future Jewish state would not conflict with international law. He supported guarantees for minority populations and, in some contexts, abolition of the death penalty, not merely as pragmatic concessions but as evidence that Jewish sovereignty could embody a morally advanced civilization. The Jewish people, having suffered as minorities throughout history, possessed a special obligation to model just treatment of minorities within their own state.
Yet Goren’s universalism always remained bounded by covenantal sovereignty. This limitation appears most clearly in his treatment of Judea and Samaria following the Six-Day War. Although he acknowledged the practical force of international law and the de facto commitments incurred by Israeli participation within the international order, he nevertheless insisted that Jewish sovereignty over the biblical Land of Israel ultimately derived from divine covenant rather than from international recognition. International law could regulate administrative arrangements and practical governance, but it could not nullify the eternal relationship between the Jewish people and their ancestral land.
Here one sees most clearly the layered structure of Goren’s jurisprudence. International law possesses genuine authority, but only within boundaries established by Torah and covenant. The doctrine of Dina Demalchuta Dina, traditionally meaning “the law of the land is law,” became central to this framework. Goren extended the concept beyond domestic governance into the international sphere. Because the Knesset had accepted participation within the international legal order, international law acquired a degree of halachic validity. Yet this validity remained procedural and contingent rather than metaphysically ultimate. International law governed participation within the international system, but it could not override divine covenant or negate Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel.
This distinction clarifies the apparent inconsistency in Goren’s treatment of international law. At times he speaks in strikingly universalist terms, emphasizing civilian immunity, humanitarian obligations, and universal human dignity. At other moments he treats international law primarily as an instrument of geopolitical force. The contradiction is not accidental. Goren simultaneously occupied two different conceptual worlds.
In the first, international law represented genuine moral achievement and the ethical maturation of civilization. In the second, it functioned as an operational system of power regulating participation within global politics. This explains his remarkable argument that diplomatic pressure could be treated analogously to military pressure in halachic reasoning during the Sinai withdrawal. International law became not merely a moral language but a structure of coercive realities through which sovereign states were compelled to navigate.
In this respect, Goren’s jurisprudence displays a surprisingly modern realism. He implicitly recognized that legal systems derive authority not solely from abstract moral truth but from embedded structures of power and recognition. International law mattered because Israel existed within an international order capable of exerting practical consequences. Yet that order never acquired ultimate theological authority. Covenantal sovereignty remained prior.
The sociological implications of Goren’s work are profound. Viewed through the lens of Stephen P. Turner’s analysis of tacit knowledge and expertise, Goren appears as a jurist operating within a zone where inherited rules proved insufficient for unprecedented historical conditions. There existed no settled halachic framework governing aerial warfare, occupation, democratic constitutionalism, or international diplomacy. Consequently, Goren relied heavily upon institutional intuition, historical analogy, practical judgment, and interpretive improvisation, all while presenting his conclusions as continuous with tradition. His jurisprudence therefore illustrates the extent to which sovereignty transforms legal consciousness.
Indeed, one might say that Goren’s deepest contribution was his recognition that Jewish morality under sovereignty could not simply replicate Jewish morality under exile. Exilic Judaism conceptualized ethics largely from the standpoint of vulnerability and minority survival. Sovereign Judaism, by contrast, was forced to confront the moral responsibilities generated by coercive power. Questions that had remained theoretical for centuries became immediate and concrete: What constrains national violence? How should enemies be treated? What obligations exist toward civilians? How can a covenantal people wield military power without moral corruption?
Goren did not fully resolve these dilemmas because they are not fully resolvable. Rather, his importance lies in the seriousness with which he confronted them. He understood more clearly than many later religious-nationalist figures that a Jewish state could neither survive as a purely secular liberal entity detached from covenantal identity nor function as a purely theological polity indifferent to international legitimacy and universal norms. His life’s work therefore became an attempt to mediate between two legal civilizations whose foundational assumptions often remained fundamentally in tension: the universalist order of modern international law and the particularistic covenantal logic of Jewish sovereignty.
The enduring significance of Goren lies precisely in this unresolved mediation. He was among the first major rabbinic thinkers compelled to grapple with the full moral and jurisprudential consequences of Jewish power after exile. Sovereignty, he understood, changes not merely politics but law, ethics, interpretation, and theology. His work therefore remains one of the foundational attempts to articulate what a sovereign Halacha might look like in the modern world: neither wholly absorbed into liberal universalism nor sealed within uncompromising particularism, but existing uneasily and creatively between them.