What do Secular-believer Women in Israel Believe in?

Abstract

Secular-believers, who constitute about 25% of Israeli Jews, are self-identified secular people who believe in some kind of divinity. Based on in-depth interviews with secular-believer women, this study aims to reveal their theological assumptions and claims. It examines metaphors and images participants used to relate to the divine as well as the theological categories they emphasized. The study uncovers the pluralistic nature of secular-believers’ beliefs and the common tendency to address faith-related content in a positive light.

Keywords:

• Israel
• belief
• faith
• Judaism
• postsecularism
• secular-believer
• theology
• women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Use of the term ‘orthodox Judaism’ does not imply that this religious stream is homorganic. Indeed, there is a wide spectrum of Jewish orthodoxy, extending from different types of ultra-orthodoxy to a much more liberal modern orthodoxy.

2. Reference to both ‘higher’ (which may imply a transcendent understanding of ‘god’) and ‘deeper’ (which may imply immanence) is dually motivated: firstly, I did not want to impose a particular perspective on the interviewees. Secondly, in post-traditional Jewish theologies (and also in some feminist theologies), the transcendent and the immanent are not understood as mutually contradictory but as symbolizing an axis of meanings that can be combined in different ways (Lahav, “Postsecular” 206). This issue will be discussed below.

3. The interviews also included less theological questions about the women’s perceptions of Judaism, religion, secularism, and traditional practices and law. These questions are beyond the scope of this study and were discussed in detail elsewhere (Lahav, “Complicated”). They will be mentioned briefly in the findings section.

4. One may question the framing of this perception of the soul as ‘secular’, especially in the light of the (Christian) tendency of the secularization thesis to identify secularity with atheism. This understanding does not fit the Israeli religious-secular landscape, however, as noted above. Furthermore, as this landscape identifies ‘religion’ with ‘orthodox religion’, a similar understanding of the soul by theologians representing more liberal Jewish denominations (such as Reform and Conservative Judaism) does not render it ‘religious’ in Israeli terms.

5. Here, too, it is important to bear in mind the identification of ‘religion’ with ‘orthodoxy’ within the Jewish-Israeli discourse. This is not to say that free choice does not exist in Jewish traditional and modern religious philosophy. Within the Jewish-Israeli discourse, however, ‘religion’ is associated with nomism and secularism with antinomism.