Miracle Campaign

By Matt Rees

Gathered around the floodlit enclosure at midnight, they sing that he will make peace: ya'ase shalom. The words refer to God, but as 300 worshippers thump tambourines and clap their hands in the warm night, they have someone else in mind. It is the rabbi. He shuffles through the crowd, small and bowed. They touch him for his blessing. He is a tzaddik, a holy man, a saint. "I will clean the people," he mutters. His arm winging like a metronome, Rabbi Yaakov Ifargan slings candles into a brazier until the flame rises 20 ft. and wax sizzles onto the dusty ground. At 3 a.m., almost four hours into this ceremony, he turns to a row of cripples, sweating near the fire in their wheelchairs. "Are you a believer?" Ifargan asks Gabriel Rafael, 22, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. The crowd raises Rafael by his arms. The young man struggles to scuff his feet through the dirt. The crowd wills a miracle, until the exhausted invalid collapses into his wheelchair. "I do feel stronger," he says.

In the face of such powerful belief, you have to be pretty cynical not at least to wish for a miracle. But in Israel today it's a question of the kind of miracle you're looking for. The most controversial point in Israeli domestic politics is the way the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party uses mystical faith to cast an aura of purity around its machine. Rabbi Ifargan, 34, is the most prominent new leader in a wave of cabalistic mysticism sweeping Israel, particularly among the 60% of the population known as Mizrahis, who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East. Though Ifargan has no official link to the Shas, the party has capitalized on that mystical faith to build the kind of political support that has brought Prime Minister Ehud Barak's government to the brink.

Shas' every move is calculated to play on Mizrahis' most basic beliefs: their faith in the power of the tzaddiks, their resentment of being discriminated against by European Jews and a knee that jerks to the right when it comes to the peace process. Shas quit the Cabinet in July because Barak wouldn't advise the party leadership of his plans for the Camp David summit with President Bill Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak's response was to call for a "secular revolution" that would end the Orthodox rabbis' lock on institutions like marriage and allow civil weddings. And though most observers believe Barak was just looking for political leverage, it's clear that the balance of God and power in Israel--always a subtext in political exchanges--is teetering again.

What Barak really wants is to tie up a peace deal by the end of the month. He meets this week with Clinton and perhaps with Arafat too, in New York City. They will debate the results of the 20 lower-level negotiating sessions held since Camp David fell apart. Sources tell TIME that Barak has a new solution for the problematic question of control over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that is almost cabalistically ethereal. He wants Arafat to agree that sovereignty over the mount, holy to Jews and Muslims, belongs only to God (though Israel will keep control over security at the entrances to the Mount and the Palestinians will continue to administer the mosques there). That would allow both sides to maintain they did not concede the site. If he can get Arafat to agree, Barak may be able to take a peace deal to the electorate. If not, he'll be back to cobbling together a coalition--and to worrying about Shas.

Shas is having its problems. The party's former leader, Aryeh Deri--a golden boy of Israeli politics--is due to begin a three-year jail term for fraud this week. But when it comes to willing miracles from holy men, Deri's supporters take the cake. The man they most want to speak out on Deri's behalf is 96-year-old Rabbi Yitzhak Kaddouri, the country's senior cabalist. His endorsement of the Mizrahi candidate for President swung that election against Nobel laureate Shimon Peres in July. In the simple room where he receives visitors, Baghdad-born Kaddouri sits amid a jumble of papers. The walls are peeling and stained with the smoke from the 20 cigarettes Kaddouri inhales each day. Kaddouri's grandson leans next to the least deaf of the rabbi's ears and yells, "Do you think there will be a miracle, and Deri will not have to go to jail?" Kaddouri only wheezes a dismissive chuckle, adjusts his fez and shakily lights up another smoke. His grandson finally despairs and rolls in a wheelchair-bound boy who wants Kaddouri to help him walk. That's a miracle the rabbi is ready to believe in.

--With reporting by Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

With reporting by Aharon Klein/Jerusalem