The relationship between the Jewish religion and modern nationalism was, since the 1880s, the subject of great interest and this shows no sign of abating. Central to this discussion are a number of questions: should Jewish nationalists conduct themselves according to the standards of religious values, as established in exile or according to new European ones? Do modern values contradict the religious ones, or is there a prospect for synthesis? What will be the relationship between the religious and the secular members of the Movement? Who will lead it and according to what cultural and religious criteria? Should the movement include in its agenda cultural and educational activity? If so, what sort of ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ Jewish activities should it promote? Ironically, such questions are no less relevant in present-day Israel than they were during the lifetime of the Hibbat Zion. The wide-ranging changes that have affected Jews - wholesale emigration from Eastern Europe and the establishment of a new and dominant diaspora community in the United States, rapid secularization and a far-reaching economic transition, even the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel - none of these have either answered these questions or served to blunt their importance.

The Hibbat Zion Movement and the subsequent Zionist Movement relied on a tenuous balance, largely East European, between maskilim and the religious, the haredim. Both realized the impossibility of forcing its value on the other and were thus resigned to working together.

However, every now and then the disagreements intensified and an immediate solution was imperative. How was agricultural settlement to proceed during the biblically ordained Shemita year (the seventh fallow year)? What values and teaching methods should be introduced into the school curriculum in Palestine? Should the institutions of the Zionist Organization operate on the Sabbath? Solutions to these and similar problems were urgently required from the movement's leadership but were not always forthcoming. On the contrary, inside as well as outside the movement, some leaders, public figures, writers and. rabbis tried to utilize these issues to challenge Zionism's position on religion. Some set about doing this by invoking monolithic theories to prove that a new sort of agreement and regulations be introduced based on new, less vague, less elastic assumptions.