This Article (some 10,000 words in Hebrew) identifies a new religious category in Israel – Spiritual Secularity. It presents Jewish Israeli New Agers’ attitude to Jewish Law (Halakha) and custome, and deals with the tension between alternative spiritual values and Jewish traditional ones, and its various solutions – ranging from indifference to Halakha on the one end, and rejecting New Age on the other. Nevertheless, the more interesting attitudes have to do with the processing of Halakha in the spirit of New Age (New Ageization). See the axis of attitudesin the gallery below.
The article was published in Israeli Sociology, the most renowned journal of social sciences in Israel. An article on a similar subject was published in English, and the research was also presented in conferences (see links below).
Abstract
We claim a new religious identity group has formed in Israel – religious secularity. After characterizing the “package deal” of Israeli secular identity, examples from the Israeli New Age are utilized to highlight its recent transformations.
Attitudes of New Agers to religious Jewish law (halacha) are placed along an axis: from indifference or opposition, through hybrids between tradition and New Age, to preservation of Orthodox halacha. While the extreme attitudes reproduce the accepted Israeli division between secular and religious groups, the religious nature of all of the attitudes undermines this division. We demonstrate how creative adaptations, combining New Age and tradition solve contradictions in the identity of secular Israelis and further the development of a new religious identity group: religious secularity.
.
Authors
Adam Klin Oron
Marianna Ruah-Midbar
Links
To download the abstract both in English and Hebrew – click here.
Click to download the primary sources that are included in the article, both in English and Hebrew, or in Hebrew only.
For the English website of the journal Israeli Sociology – click here.
For the webpage of issue 12.1 (August 2010), in which the article was published, on the journal’s site – click here. Note that the current article features third on the list of the issue’s articles. While the abstract’s page is in English, the article itself is in Hebrew.
Date
August 2010
Language
Hebrew
Academic/Non-academic
Academic item
Publisher/Source
Israeli Sociology
Bibliographical citation
Oron Klin Adam, and Marianna Ruah-Midbar, “Secular by the Letter, Religious by the Spirit: The Attitudes of the Israeli New Age to Jewish Law”, in Israeli Sociology 12.1 (2010): 57-81. [Hebrew]
