(Brian Hendler)

(April 30) - The ways in which Independence Day has - or hasn't - been celebrated over the years by different parts of the population, speak volumes about the changing face of Israel.

Israel at 50 is still a country very much in the process of becoming, of defining itself, of searching for its "true voice."

Are we a Jewish nation, or a nation full of Jews? Should our borders stop at the Green Line, or proceed to the Jordan? What role should religion play in the public life of the state? Which body should have the upper hand, the Supreme Court, Knesset, or religious courts? How many Supreme Court justices should we have? Should the shekel be fixed or floating? Should we have a president? Should the prime minister be selected by direct elections? Should there be electoral reform? Should we have public television? How many hours a day should the kids go to school? Should yeshiva students do army service? Should we have daylight saving time?

Who is a Jew? Who is a rabbi? Who is a Zionist?

Basic, fundamental questions - questions that in the proverbial "Medina metukenet" ("a normal country") would have been threshed out long ago are still being wrestled with here, half a century later.

It is only fitting, therefore, that we consider this dilemma on Yom Ha'atzmaut.

What is this holiday - a religious or civil one? How should we celebrate? Should we pray or play, taste or tour, sing or singe the kabobs just slightly?

Are we supposed to pound plastic hammers on each other's heads and watch fireworks, or recite psalms and eat of the fruits of Eretz Yisrael?

Aaron Ahrend, 34, a lecturer in Bar-Ilan University's Talmud department, has provided an Independence Day Guide for the Perplexed for the country's 50th anniversary. In the book called Pirkei Mehkar L'yom Ha'atzmaut ("Israel's Independence Day - Research Studies") Ahrend looks at the various customs of this relatively new holiday, and how they developed.

(Ariel Jerozolimski)

"A lot of people sit around on Yom Ha'atzmaut, and wonder what to read," said Ahrend, 34, the father of triplets. "This book is an attempt to fill in the gap."

Over the centuries, numerous volumes have been devoted to the various Jewish holidays, explaining in intricate detail their significance, meaning and customs. Ahrend's book is an attempt to do the same for Yom Ha'atzmaut. Just as books on Hanukka address why the Hallel prayer is said during that week, so Ahrend deals with why some do, and some do not, recite this thanksgiving prayer on Yom Ha'atzmaut.

Just as a book on Rosh Hashana would be incomplete if it did not explain the significance of the foods eaten on those days, so, too, does Ahrend deal extensively with Yom Ha'atzmaut's traditional menu. And just as a volume on Purim should mention the grogger (noisemaker), Ahrend also deals briefly with the origin of those annoying plastic Yom Ha'atzmaut hammers.

"LOOK IN the jewish sources," writes Ahrend in a chapter entitled "Yom Ha'atzmaut foods," "and you will discover a great deal of treatment of the foods of the holidays."

Jewish holidays, to a large extent, revolve around the stomach, since Judaism teaches that one must serve God not only through the heart and mind, but also through the body.

Ahrend points out that all the Jewish holidays either have special foods, such as matza on Pessah, dairy dishes on Shavuot, or oily foods on Hanukka; or they have special customs, such as eating in booths on Succot; or they are marked by a complete abstention from food, as on Yom Kippur and Tisha Be'av.

"One of the stages in the accepting of a holiday as part of the holiday system is to attribute to it a particular food," Ahrend writes. As such, numerous suggestions have come and gone over the years regarding what national food should be eaten on Independence Day.

Some of the suggestions came from the state. In 1951, for instance, the Knesset's Yom Ha'atzmaut Committee turned to a nutritionist for suggestions on what people should eat on the fifth of Iyar (Yom Ha'atzmaut). The nutritionist suggested the following: an Independence Day cake, orange juice and milk, and blue and white suckers for the little ones.

Various prayer books used by the national religious community have directed that a festive meal be served on the holiday, although they don't go so far as to recommend a particular menu. "A festive meal is served," instructs a prayer book put out by the Religious Kibbutz Movement, "and it should be eaten with many people in attendance."

Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriya, who founded the first yeshiva high school in the country and was considered by many to be the "father of the knitted kippot community," wrote in his Yom Ha'atzmaut pamphlet that a festive meal should be eaten "amid song and praise."

Neriya also said there is a custom to leave three matzot from Pessah, and eat them on Yom Ha'atzmaut with bread, as was done with the thanksgiving offerings of yore.

Celebrated Zionist educator Yom Tov Levinsky suggested making a crown of bread, symbolizing the return of the "crown of statehood" to the Jewish people. And, in the same way that matza is eaten on Pessah as a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt, so there have been suggestions for people on Yom Ha'atzmaut to eat Halamit (mallow), a staple eaten by Jerusalemites during the 1948 siege.

"The common denominator between all the different attempts to establish a specific food for this holiday is that they all failed," Ahrend says.

Except for one type of food which, on the face of it, seems to have no historic or culinary connection with Israel or the Jewish people: the mangal (barbecue.) How, Ahrend asks, has the mangal, with its accompanying smoke and litter, become the food that characterizes Yom Ha'atzmaut?

"The Jewish state was proclaimed on Yom Ha'atzmaut," Ahrend says, "therefore it is natural that the nation's citizenry tour the country that day, and by this express their connection to the land and their sovereignty over it."

Indeed, Rabbi Neriya wrote in his pamphlet of prayers for Yom Ha'atzmaut: "There are those who make it a custom to walk four new amot (arm's length) in Eretz Yisrael and there are those who make it a custom to leave their place and see new neighborhoods."

The Kibbutz Hadati prayer book adds: "It is a mitzva to walk along the borders of our land. The tours should be directed to places of battle, where the great miracles should be recounted."

This siddur even suggests saying a blessing at these sites: "Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who performed a miracle for us at this place."

For years, Ahrend says, touring and hiking all over the land was the country's Yom Ha'atzmaut activity, and when people tour and hike, they want to eat. Since they knew they were going to eat, they figured they might as well eat well, so they began schlepping along the portable grills.

"Gradually," Ahrend writes, "the status of the tour and the observation of nature lessened in importance, and the attention was directed to the protracted preparation of the meal. As a result, what was left of the Yom Ha'atzmaut tour was concentration on eating outside the home or out in nature."

Ahrend, who lives in Jerusalem's Givat Mordechai neighborhood and is a graduate of the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva in Alon Shvuat, says that the culture of the tour (tiyul) has been lost; while people used to at least walk a little into nature to a picnic spot for the barbecue, now they just park in a parking lot and start slapping the shishlik on the grill right then and there.

"This is characteristic of the country's shopping mall culture that has taken over," he says. "People no longer even want to take the hike."

THAT THE mangal has turned into the Yom Ha'atzmaut centerpiece has, over the years, elicited much response. Ahrend writes that, generally speaking, there have been three approaches to this phenomenon.

"One approach looks at this phenomenon positively, as a festive day when everyone can sit 'by his mangal' in groups, and eat, drink and be merry." Others, however take the opposite approach, saying that turning the day of Israel's independence into a day of simple gorging oneself is not worthy of one of the Jewish people's festivals.

"Critics see in the mangal phenomenon a cult of gluttony and are bothered that this is the symbol that represents our feelings of independence," Ahrend writes.

These critics, he adds, compare how the day was once celebrated, to how it is celebrated now.

"In the beginning Israelis would climb the Gilboa, look out toward the hills of Moab and Edom, walk in the Carmel Forest, meditate on the antiquities at Caesarea and Beit She'an, or take a boat across the Kinneret.

"Lately people stand in their courtyard or at the foot of one of the wadis. What they see are the roads, the parking lots, and the noisy radios. They gather twigs, wrestle and struggle with the dust, get burned and smelly from the coals, and in the end, eat a little, and litter a lot of the Land of Israel."

Between these two extreme approaches to the mangal is a middle road, Ahrend writes. This approach maintains that "the mangal can be, and is even worthy of being, the symbolic food for Yom Ha'atzmaut, since eating from the grill outside is fitting for a day where the main thing is the tiyul. This is on condition that the food is a marginal activity that accompanies the tour, and not that it becomes the center of the day, with the main elements missing."

ONLY IN Israel, it seems, can there be so much concern that Independence Day not be a day of mere eating and drinking, but rather be accompanied by a fitting spiritual element. There are few in the US, for instance, who worry whether their enjoyment of hot dogs and beer on the Fourth of July should be coupled with an equal measure of spiritual introspection and thanksgiving.

Not so Israel, where much of the debate that has raged around the nature of the day has revolved around whether or not it has religious significance, and if so, how to express that significance.

"The question of the religious status of Yom Ha'atzmaut is one of the basic questions of the holiday, one over which the rabbis have disagreed," Ahrend maintains.

"There have been rabbis that saw in the rebirth of Israel and the declaration of its freedom a religious event. In their view, behind the declaration of statehood by man is Providence guiding history."

Moreover, he explains, these rabbis see the declaration of Jewish statehood as at'halta d'geula, the dawn of Redemption.

On other side of the spectrum, he writes, are those who are either fiercely negative toward the state, such as the extreme Natorei Karta sect, or mainstream haredim who are publicly ambivalent toward the day.

"Rabbis who saw the fifth of Iyar as a day with religious significance imbued it with a festive-religious content," Ahrend says. Nonetheless, he maintains, the holiday has had difficulty penetrating into the public's consciousness as a religious holiday.

"Hanukka and Purim, even though they were not mentioned in the Torah, entered the holiday cycle because the sages were unified in the opinion that those days should be celebrated as festivals," Ahrend writes. "But the physical redemption of Israel, when at the head of the camp stand Jews who are distant from religion, has served as a bone of contention between the sages for more then a hundred years."

Halachic questions about the day, he says, are extant in the national-religious camp. These questions generally deal with whether a blessing should be said before the Hallel prayer on the day, whether the prayer should be recited both at night and during the day, and whether it is permitted to shave on Yom Ha'atzmaut - which falls during the counting of the Omer, when shaving is traditionally prohibited. Although the customs vary a bit from community to community within the national religious camp, Ahrend says, the vast majority of those subscribing to this world view endow the day with some kind of religious import.

Although Ahrend does not let on in the 264 pages of his book whether he thinks the day is a religious holiday or not, in an interview he allows himself more leeway.

"The passage from the Holocaust to rebirth all at once is not a natural event," he says. "I think it has religious significance."

THE QUESTIONS of saying Hallel, or changing the order of the prayers for Yom Ha'atzmaut, do not arise in the haredi camp, Ahrend says.

In fact, he writes, "The negation of Yom Ha'atzmaut as a religious holiday in the haredi world has led to a situation where haredi literature on the holidays, printed in Israel, does not devote any attention to Yom Ha'atzmaut. In these books, ethical or halachic literature on the holidays, there is no negative attention paid to the holiday, but rather a complete disregard of its existence."

"Despite this," Ahrend says, "the special feeling of the day permeates the moderate stream in the haredi world, even though they do not change their prayers on the fifth of Iyar. Surely they do not fast or fly black flags of mourning."

Ahrend says that over the last 20 years, as the haredim have become increasingly involved with the institutions of the state, their relation to the holiday has undergone changes. And although they don't celebrate it as a festival, work places are closed by law, and as a result many haredim declare it a "day devoted to the study of Torah," thereby giving the day a special nature.

The radical exception, of course, is Natorei Karta, an extreme anti-Zionistic sect of a "few dozen families" centered in Jerusalem's Mea She'arim and Batei Ungarin neighborhoods, who have always fasted and flown black flags in protest on Yom Ha'atzmaut. Since Natorei Karta's whole identity stems from its radical rejection of the state, it is only natural that for them the day when the state was declared will be a day of mourning.

"Every year prior to Yom Ha'atzmaut," Ahrend writes, "newspapers affiliated with the movement devote much space to Yom Ha'atzmaut, since the basic ideology of the group is to negate the State of Israel."

Natorei Karta's radical opposition to the state, Ahrend says, is based on two arguments. The first, is that the state represents an attempt to force God's hand, and as such is prohibited, even if it were run strictly according to Torah law.

Secondly, the group objects to the state because it is not run according to Torah law.

Natorei Karta's fierce objection to Yom Ha'atzmaut - every year they hold a protest rally in Mea She'arim against the festival - stems both from a feeling that there is nothing to celebrate, as well as an objection to the very nature of the celebrations.

Natorei Karta, as well as other haredi communities, have traditionally objected to the public mixed dancing and singing that marks the day in city squares, as well as the military parades that took place in the early days of the state and which they view as haughty demonstrations of belief that human might and power - and not God's will - is what was responsible for the country's various military victories.

The place of the military parades in the Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrations was for years almost as big a source of disagreement between national religious and haredi rabbis, as was the question of whether Hallel should be recited on that day.

For national-religious rabbis, such as Mercaz Harav dean Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the military parades were central and positive.

"Our rabbi would go watch the IDF parade on Yom Ha'atzmaut with great joy," Ahrend quotes a disciple of Kook as saying. "He would say the tanks, the cannons, the planes, the IDF uniforms are the implements of mitzvot, in the service of the mitzva of settling the land."

On the other hand, there were haredi rabbis, such as Rabbi Yehezkel Levinstein, the spiritual supervisor at Bnei Brak's Ponevezh yeshiva, who in a 1979 speech to his charges said: "Today is Yom Ha'atzmaut, and what is Yom Ha'atzmaut if not idol worship?"

Levinstein's argument was that these parades glorify human might and strength, thereby pushing God's hand - in the mind of the observer - far into the background.

ALONG WITH the parade, a number of other traditions have developed on Yom Ha'atzmaut. For instance, fireworks displays.

Ahrend cites another academic, Maoz Azaryahu, who said that fireworks can be traced back to the 18th century, when rulers used such displays as a declaration of their ability to enlist the heavens in glorifying their rule.

Ahrend traces the custom in Israel back to a 1950 decision by the Yom Ha'atzmaut Committee to have a fireworks display to "create a suitable festive opening to Independence Day by warming up the crowd and increasing joy by combining fireworks with entertainment programs." That tradition has lasted until today.

Another Yom Ha'atzmaut custom now several decades old is the Bible quiz. The first International Bible Quiz for Jewish Youth was held in 1958, Ahrend says. Its goal was to "pour a Jewish-spiritual content into the holiday, alongside the military, physical parade. There was nothing more suitable for that than the Bible."

An indication of the importance attached to the quizzes can be seen from an exchange in the Knesset in 1965. The winner of the quiz that year was from Australia, and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was asked how it was that no one from the Prime Minister's Office had escorted the champion to the airport when he left the country. Eshkol actually issued an apology.

To explain the most enigmatic of the Independence Day traditions, the plastic hammers, Ahrend cites an explanation given by philosopher Eliezer Schweid.

"This stems from the individual's disappointment that the institutions responsible for providing joy on Yom Ha'atzmaut are not doing their job. The individual goes to the street and looks for joy. He hears music, sees dancing and fireworks. His identity is blurred by the anonymous crowd surrounding him, and his heart is empty of joy.

"He then understands the benefit of anonymity, and he is liberated from himself. Banging the hammer says 'freedom,' in an unbridled way. 'I can do anything I want to.'"

In other words, independence - Sabra style.