The Torch Lighting Ceremony, perhaps the most important civil ritual of the year, joined the long list of public ceremonies, including those commemorating fallen soldiers, which became sites of confrontation, heckling, and disturbance.
In our current historical moment, Israel certainly does not suffer from a shortage of dramatic events. One of these, which occurred in the tumult of last week, was a non-event, that is, an event that did not happen – the cancellation of this year’s Torch Lighting ceremony on Mt. Herzl. (Because of the cancellation the television networks broadcast the taped rehearsal of the event, but no one was fooled. Everyone knew the lighting had been cancelled.) The reason given for the cancellation was technical and practical – the forest fires that engulfed the Jerusalem corridor, which Minister Miri Regev (the government minister in charge of the ceremony) was afraid would reach Mt. Herzl and endanger participants. Nevertheless, one cannot escape the feeling that the forest fires were not the real reason for the cancellation but were, in fact, more of an excuse.
All too often in recent years, the identity of the Torch Lighters, traditionally a high honor, was the occasion of controversy. Apparently, conscious of the fact that the current government, with its high Haredi and Religious Zionist components, does not sufficiently represent the Israeli mainstream, Regev invited the transgender singer, Dana International and the Jewish-Arab singer, Nasrin Kadry, to light torches. Though this gesture of inclusiveness did not evoke opposition among the general public, it raised the ire of Regev’s coalition partners – the Religious Zionist rabbis who called for a boycott of the ceremony.
The Torch Lighting Ceremony, perhaps the most important civil ritual of the year, joined the long list of public ceremonies, including those commemorating fallen soldiers, which became sites of confrontation, heckling, and disturbance. One suspects Regev cancelled the ceremony with a certain sigh of relief.
From a sociological perspective, though, this cancellation is ominous. Classical sociological theory asks the question – What holds society together? Or more simply, What is society? How do individuals with different interests, needs, emotions, and identities coalesce into a collective whole? One central answer is that society is established and renewed through common values, norms, and expectations. Social action becomes coherent and forms a collective of some kind when people share norms and expectations and act accordingly.
According to one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), such values and norms are established and renewed through ritual, whether religious or civil. Rituals, with their stirring music, mass participation, heightened gestures, vivid costumes and colors, are the crucible in which social norms become “normative,” that is acquire moral force – become something that we ought to do.
Durkheim elaborated his theory by examining the rituals of Australian aborigines, but he also asserted that the same social and moral processes characterized the French Republic in which he lived. The military parade down the Champs-Élysées on Bastille Day fulfilled the same social functions as the religious and mythic rituals of the Australian tribes.
In a well-known article, Israeli social scientists Elihu Katz and Don Handleman made the same argument about the Torch Lighting Ceremony at the opening of Independence Day. They showed that it embodied and reinforced the shared civic values of patriotism, public service, civil initiative, and the like. Every year, it showed that while we Israelis may disagree about politics, religion, the Palestinians, we have enough shared values and norms to not only sustain our society but to make it flourish.
That is why the cancellation of the Torch Lighting ceremony should stir a certain unease, especially if done deliberately. If the ceremony that celebrates the most basic values of patriotism and solidarity can only degenerate into boycotts, confrontation, and bickering, perhaps the State of Israel is devolving into unviability.