Miracle Campaign

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.