This dissertation is a study of an Israeli Jewish national-religious “social settlement” project that has settled in Israel’s binational cities, the moral imagination at work in this project, and the potentially uncanny resemblances between that moral imagination and our own. This “social settlement” project, known as “Torah seed” groups (gar’inim toraniyim), bears genealogical relations to Israel’s post-’67 settlement projects and is a fruit of the entrance of national-religious society into the new middle class during this same period. These groups intervene in cities within the Green Line through founding and strengthening institutions of Jewish identity and practice, cultural programming, food distribution, infrastructural and educational investments, municipal appropriation, and more. Observers of national-religious society, Israeli settlements, and recent Israeli politics might be inclined to view Torah seed groups as a kind of national-religious triumphalism brimming with confidence in its ascendance. However, my ethnography demonstrates that “social settlement” arises rather from a deep sense of national-religious unsettlement. Moreover, Torah seed group members often insist that the essential dimension of their work is not political or religious but moral, and that its raison d’être begins and ends with hesed, a biblical term bringing together notions of charity, loving-kindness, self-sacrificing self-giving, and covenantal faithfulness.

This dissertation grants this asserted centrality of the moral to “social settlement,” but asks: what kind of moral imagination is it? Taking as a case study the Torah seed group of Lod, the dissertation explores the group’s interventions along three related dimensions: “strengthening Jewish identity,” national-religious embourgeoisement, and national-religious education amongst the seductions of our secular age. The first two dimensions disclose two profound moral anxieties at the heart of the Torah seed group project: that national-religious children are at risk of surrendering their national-religiosity, and that middle class concepts and sensibilities threaten to undermine religious Zionism’s self-perception as pioneering leaven to the overarching trajectory of Zionism. The third dimension, national-religious education, discloses the relation between the anxieties of the first two dimensions: the attempts to resolve one of them summon and intensify the other, and vice versa. This leads not only to a perpetual discomfiture, but perpetual collective expansions as anxieties over embourgeoisement and a milieu corrosive to national-religiosity again and again push national-religious out to new frontiers.

The moral imagination attending this dynamic has concrete and troubling consequences for Lod’s Palestinians and other Jews. However, the dissertation also takes note of two constitutive aspects of this imagination: it is organized by the aspiration for a final end to alienation in this life, and the threat of intractably persisting alienation is felt to be existential. It is here that the dissertation invites readers to encounter the moral imagination of the Torah seed group as uncanny. For while the political and religious dimensions of Torah seed groups may be peculiar to them, the anxiety for national-religiosity to indefinitely endure, whole and complete, is an anxiety that is more familiar concerning our own cherished and threatened forms of life, and is an anxiety that may elicit a world of moral-imaginative trouble.