Abstract
The religious-Zionist labor movement in Palestine, associated with the Hapo’el Hamizrahi party and labor union and the Torah Va’avodah Movement, was a highly influential current within The Jewish Orthodox community of Mandatory Palestine and represented most religious-Zionists
in the country on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. During the 1920s, 1930s, and
1940s, it mostly consisted of Jewish immigrants from Europe who created a fascinating
combination of fidelity to the tenets of Orthodox Judaism with a strong commitment to Zionist and
nationalist ideas and democratic socialists or social-democratic principles.
Reviewing the theological, ideological, and philosophical writings of most of the leading
thought-leaders of the movement against the backdrop of the rise of “the immanent frame,” as
defined, described, and analyzed by the contemporary Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor,
allows us to identify the core characteristic of much of their intellectual work as a passionate
rejection of the immanent frame aspect of modernity: a refusal to accept the premise that humans
operate in a world in which at least some areas of conduct and thought are being experienced and
engaged with as if God does not exist or as if His existence is irrelevant to them.
Most of the leading thinkers of the religious-Zionist labor movement in Palestine dedicated
much of their intellectual efforts to conceptually reconstitute vast areas of human activity and
involvement as immersed in religious meaning. They sought to portray history, politics, morality,
economics, law, the public sphere, the connection to nature, and societal arrangements in general,
as both an expression of divine ongoing involvement in this world and as God’s clarion call for
specific human actions.
However, a more complete and careful reading of the theological works written by thinkers
of the Hapo’el Hamizrai and the Torah Va’avodah Movement leads us to view it as a coalition
of two sub-currents: The first current, the much larger one, represented in this dissertation by
Shmuel Haim Landau, Rabbi Yeshayahu Shapira, Yeshayahu Bernstein, and Shlomo Zalman
Shragai, and associated with immigrants from Poland and Ukraine who were mostly raised in
Hasidic families, indeed unequivocally rejected the immanent frame. It viewed every aspect of
human life as having an inherent transcendent meaning that can and should be “deciphered” by
contemporary Jews, viewed morality as dependent upon revelation, and constructed a political
worldview that resulted from “the hearing of the calling voice of God” through events and
developments in the present and near past. The second current, much smaller in size, represented
in this dissertation by Moshe Unna, and associated with immigrants from Central and Western
Europe (mainly Germany), can be characterized as demonstrating a “partial acceptance” of the
immanent frame: viewing the religious meaning assigned to areas of human activity as being
non-inherent, dependent upon human consciousness and action, considering morality as
independent of revelation, and constituting a political worldview in which a much greater room
is granted to human agency in figuring out what is it that God demands.