This is a study in the transformative capacity of traditional Jewish religious culture. I shall examine the ability of the historic Jewish religion structured around halakhah – Torah law – to sustain a modernizing thrust and systematically to design rational life-patterns toward the achievement of religious goals; in other words, to undergo rationalization in regard to modernization. I intend to show that within the bounds of Orthodox Judaism, traditional Jewish religion can provide vigorous mechanisms for legitimate innovation in response to modernity, as well as limit change.

The study's historical point of departure is the traditional Jewish society that preceded Jewish Emancipation. Its social agents are the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orthodox modernizing movements. And its main focus is a fairly small subsection of the Jewish national community of Israel: the Religious Kibbutz Federation, or RKF. In 1990 the RKF comprised seventeen kibbutzim, about six percent of the total number of collective settlements in Israel, with a population of about 8,000 souls. Yet despite their small numbers, the members of the religious kibbutzim play a significant role in Israeli society: they have enacted, and continue to enact in their daily lives, the creative tension between twentieth-century ideologies and a time-honored religious culture.

The Religious Kibbutz Federation formally came into being in 1935. The founders of the RKF were Orthodox pioneering youth, mostly of German origin, who opted for the kibbutz form of settlement as the pre-eminent route to Zionist self-realization.