ABSTRACT
The social, cultural, and religious changes in the consciousness of religious-Zionists come forth in two key aspects: the re-entry of the repressed messianic dimension and its expression in a new view of the concrete physical body. Chapter 3 focuses on changed perceptions of the body and of sexuality that took shape following the war. Until the 1970s, the concrete body had not been at the focus of the religious-Zionist discourse, and relationships between the sexes had been determined autonomously in the course of day-to-day life, without attracting rabbinic attention. After the changes within religious-Zionism in the wake of the Six-Day War, including the takeover of rabbinic elites by Merkaz HaRav students, attention finally shifted to the body. The body assumed metaphysical dimensions as a concretization of the divinity, expanding an ascetic approach that bound it to rigorous behavioral rules. The messianic interpretation of current events as stages in a process was extended to the body that, like the land, becomes an object of redemption.
