Israel: Between Exile and Redemption

The Holocaust raised in its most acute form the question of the interpretation of suffering. But the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 raised the no less intractable question of the interpretation of redemption. Biblical Judaism is a religion of history, for the covenant expresses itself in the path traced out by the children of Israel as they respond to the divine command, and by the answering response of God. History is the arena in which the fidelity or faithlessness of the covenantal people is rewarded or punished by national security on the one hand, defeat and dispersion on the other.

Ever since the first century CE the contours of that history had been clear. The Jewish people was, as the liturgy declared, in exile because of its sins. It would one day repent and be forgiven and would return to its land. This vision was already present in the concluding chapters of the book of Deuteronomy. Disobedience to the terms of the covenant would bring about catastrophe. The people would lose their national sovereignty. They would go into captivity, and there suffer indescribable horrors. Eventually they would reflect on their situation and conclude, “Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?”¹ They would return to God and God would return to them. “Then the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.”²

footnotes: ¹ Deuteronomy 31:17. ² Deuteronomy 30:3–4.

In the context of these expectations, the return of Jews to the land of Israel over the past century and the restoration of sovereignty in the form of the State of Israel called out for theological interpretation. Here surely was the empirical realisation of the biblical promise, cherished for some 1,800 years. The close succession of the Holocaust and the birth of the state seemed to recapitulate the classic terms of covenantal history: threatened extinction and national rebirth, the dark night of exile followed by the dawn of redemption. It was a theme deeply embedded in Jewish consciousness, familiar to Jews from the book of Exodus and the biblical prophecies of exile and return. It was the narrative annually recited on the festival of Passover.

The mass immigrations of Jews seemed to carry self-evident biblical echoes. A boat carrying survivors from the concentration camps to the new land was named the Exodus. When in 1949 the Jews of the Yemen were airlifted to Israel they saw their rescue as the biblical promise that they would be borne back “on eagles’ wings.” The successive waves of arrivals, from Iraq, Ethiopia and the Soviet Union, held an epic, scriptural, providential quality that impressed itself on religious and secular minds alike. This was no ordinary immigration. It was the “ingathering of exiles” for which Jews had prayed daily. It was, or seemed, a sudden return to the language of biblical history. After the Holocaust and the “hiding of the face of God,” it was as if providence had disclosed itself with the force of revelation. It was a religious event in a secular age.

But it is here that the problem lies. In what sense does a historical process constitute a realisation of a religious text? It depends on how we interpret the reality, the text, and the concept of “realisation.” Even prior to these hermeneutic questions, we can frame some of the dimensions of the problem. Firstly, not all Jews have returned to Israel. A majority continues to live in the diaspora, and there are more Jews in the United States than in Israel itself.

Secondly, many of the expectations recorded in the biblical and rabbinic literature have not been fulfilled. The State of Israel has not been accompanied by an era of universal peace and justice. Nor has it heralded the return of Jews to their religious vocation. To the contrary, Israel’s external history has been punctuated by wars, Arab enmity and international condemnation, and since 1967 the escalating military, moral and political problem of the Palestinians. Internally there have been fierce antagonisms between religious and secular Jews, which show no signs of abating. This is not how redemption was envisaged to unfold.

Thirdly, Israel raises in an acute and inescapable form one of the classic theological dilemmas of Judaism – the question of the relationship between divine providence and human history. The state was brought into being politically and defended militarily. Can the acts of man be seen as the acts of God? The problem is made all the more acute by the fact that for many secular Zionists and Israelis the state represents a conscious revolution against religious passivity, standing still and waiting for the salvation of the Lord. Can a rebellion against providence itself be an expression of providence? If not, how can the hand of God be glimpsed in the genesis of the state?

These problems coalesce in a fourth. Classically Judaism understood its history in terms of a polar opposition between exile and redemption. Exile meant geographical dispersion and spiritual alienation. Redemption meant ingathering and the return of Israel to its spiritual vocation as a people devoted to the worship of God: in short, the messianic age. Where, on this map, does Israel stand? Is it exile or redemption? Israel represents the return of Jews to the land in the context of a secular state. Seen from one perspective it is the beginning of redemption; from another, a new form of exile without dispersion. Could it therefore be an intermediate stage? But on just this crucial question Jewish theology was unclear. Is the transition from exile to redemption to take place suddenly or through a succession of stages? Naturally or supernaturally? Through human initiative or at divine behest? Intimations in both directions could be found in Judaism’s texts. Moreover there were several strands in secular Zionism that saw the creation of Israel precisely as a rejection of those texts and their authority over Jewish history.

Thus the State of Israel raises deep questions about Jewish destiny and the covenantal interpretation of history, questions that are unavoidable, for they touch on secular and religious Jews alike, those in Israel and those in the diaspora. Israel stands at the heart of contemporary Jewish self-definition. Yet what Israel is remains a deeply debated question. To understand it, we must take a slightly wider perspective in this chapter than in others to include some of the reflections that preceded the creation of the state. For it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the classic terms of the debate were set forth. So central are these issues that the whole course of modern Jewish thought can be understood as an extended midrash – a series of interpretive explorations – on the keywords of covenantal history: exile, redemption and the messianic age.

Defining “home” Ironically, the first impact of modernity on the messianic idea was a move away from the traditional concept of a national return to the promised land. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the early Reform congregations in Berlin and Hamburg created new liturgies in which the return to Zion was neutralised and reinterpreted.³ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43–61. The thinking behind these new prayer books was clear. Emancipation heralded a new era in Jewish history. But it was to take place in Europe, not Palestine.

footnotes: ³ See, for example, Michael M. Meyer, Response to Modernity: History of the Reform Movement in Judaism

The idea of a return to Zion was proving an embarrassment. It laid Jews open to the charge that they could not be fully loyal citizens of their host countries, for they expected ultimately to leave.⁴ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 80–103. The first Reform thinkers were anxious to insist that Jewish messianic hope had now changed. The prayer for the ingathering of exiles was deleted. The messiah was not a person but an age, and the age itself no longer signified Jewish national restoration but, as a later pronouncement put it, “the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.”⁵

footnotes: ⁴ See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto ⁵ The passage is taken from the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885.

Nineteenth-century Reform remained steadfast in its rejection of any form of Jewish nationalism. In 1885, the American Reform movement in its Pittsburgh Platform declared that “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine…nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” In 1897, Reform rabbis protested against the convening of the first Zionist Congress, insisting again that Jews were a religious not a national group, and that with the destruction of the second Temple history had passed its verdict against the idea of a Jewish national destiny.⁶ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 427–28.

footnotes: ⁶ See Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History

These sentiments provoked an immediate condemnation by the Orthodox rabbinate. In 1819, a group of distinguished rabbinical authorities, among them Rabbi Akiva Eger of Posen and Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg, published their responses to the Hamburg liturgical reforms. The denial of the ingathering of exiles and the return to the land was, they argued, tantamount to heresy.⁷ Nonetheless, Orthodox opposition did not express itself in terms of a positive commitment to what subsequently became known as Zionism. To the contrary: the Jewish return to Israel would be brought about by God, not man, and in the meanwhile Jews remained bound, in Jeremiah’s words, to “Seek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you.”⁸ Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great spokesman of Western European Orthodoxy, was forthright in denying messianic activism. We pray, he wrote, for the end of exile, “but actively to accelerate its coming is prohibited to us.” Besides which, “Independent national life in Israel was never the essence or purpose of our existence as a nation, but only a means of fulfilling our spiritual mission.”⁹, translated by Bernard Drachma (New York: Feldheim, 1960), 107–8.

footnotes: ⁷ Ibid., 150–55. ⁸ Jeremiah 29:7. ⁹ Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters on Judaism

But the first stirrings of a new approach were not long in coming. The nationalist fervour that swept Europe in the 1840s raised the question in some Jewish minds as to why emancipation should not proceed to self-emancipation, to the reconstitution of Jews as a nation in their own land. The first to articulate these thoughts were two Orthodox rabbis, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Yehudah Alkalai, effectively the precursors of Zionism.

Both wrote within the rabbinic tradition. But they gave it a distinctively naturalistic interpretation. The messianic age would not come suddenly through divine intervention. It would come gradually, through a process set in motion by human initiative. Kalischer was critical of those who removed the messianic hope from history into metahistory. God, he wrote, “will not send the Messiah from heaven in a twinkling of an eye, to sound the great trumpet for the scattered of Israel and gather them into Jerusalem.” Instead “the Redemption will begin by awakening support among the philanthropists and by gaining the consent of the nations to the gathering of some of the scattered of Israel into the Holy Land.”¹⁰New York: Atheneum, 1980), 111.

footnotes: ¹⁰ Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (

The originality of Alkalai and Kalischer lay in the fact that they translated the religious longing for the return to Zion into a practical programme for action. They proposed the creation of agricultural settlements in Palestine, schemes for the purchase of land from the Turks, the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, and the creation of a network of leadership drawn from distinguished figures in world Jewry who would give the project the necessary political and economic direction. But despite the fact that theirs was a proposal to realise a dream Jews had articulated for some 1,800 years, they found little support among their fellow traditionalists.

Activism and the secularisation of history It is important to ask why. For at the heart of Zionism, from its beginnings to the present day, lies a paradox that needs explanation. The Orthodox circles that had been most critical of the German reformers’ abandonment of hope for the return to the land, became over the course of next century the most determined opponents of the Zionist movement. In the opposite direction assimilated western Jewry, which had given rise to anti-Zionism in the first place, was later to provide Zionism with its most successful leaders. Why was it that a movement that had its origins in the Jewish religious tradition quickly became secular, while the great religious spokesmen of Jewry for the most part condemned it as a rebellion against Judaism?

The reasons are complex, but one above all deserves attention. Biblical Judaism was, as we noted, a religion of history. The Pentateuch and the historical and prophetic books of the Bible trace the relationship between God and humanity through the shifting circumstances of national fate. The great covenantal addresses of Moses, Joshua and Ezra are recitations of the history of Israel seen through the eyes of faith. Yet remarkably, after the close of the biblical canon, the Jewish interest in history ceased. Between the first and fifteenth centuries CE there was virtually no historical writing by Jews.¹¹ (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1982). The vast literature of the mishnaic and talmudic periods, from the second to the sixth centuries CE, contains little direct historical material. Indeed, early rabbinic thought is marked by an almost wilful rejection of the normal categories of time. Midrash, the rabbinic genre of biblical interpretation, is systematically anachronistic, reading the personalities of the Bible as contemporaries of the sages. Rabbinic Judaism is a turning-away from historical consciousness.

footnotes: ¹¹ See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory

The reason is not hard to seek. Jewish thought about the transition from past to future is dominated by the messianic idea, and messianism is an inherently revolutionary and explosive concept. Jewry had been shaken – had indeed brought disaster on itself – by the ill-conceived revolt against Rome in the first century CE and by the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE. By the end of that period of messianic and apocalyptic politics, the Temple lay in ruins and any hopes for Jewish sovereignty in Israel were at an end. Jerusalem was now a Roman city named Aelia Capitolina; it was ornamented by theatres and temples dedicated to pagan gods; and Jews were barred admission. It was the beginning of the longest exile in Jewish history, and a national disaster without precedent.

From then on the religious literature is marked by a growing tendency to political quietism and accommodation, and a move from historical to metahistorical thought. The marriage of religion, politics and military activism had proved catastrophic. Henceforth Judaism and history would be separate domains. Salvation would come from God, not man. The messianic age, and with it the recovery of Jewish national life, belonged to an indefinite future which would be brought about by repentance and prayer, not military action. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, who witnessed the destruction of the Temple, said: “If there is a plant in your hand when they say to you, ‘Behold the Messiah!’ carry on planting, and only then go out and greet him.”¹², version B, chapter 31. Waiting, not acting, became the normative political stance. Speculating on when the end of exile would come was discouraged. The string of false messiahs who punctuated the Jewish Middle Ages only served to reinforce the conviction that human interference with history was uniformly disastrous. Theologically it was a form of presumption known as “forcing the end.”

footnotes: ¹² Avot de-Rabbi Natan

Clearly this marked a transformation of Jewish consciousness, an internalisation of exile. Many of the biblical narratives operate simultaneously on a natural and supernatural plane. Their world is that of empirical events invested with religious meaning. Only occasionally are the laws of nature suspended. Josephus records a debate between three Jewish groups in the late second Temple period on the relationship between history and Divine Providence. The Sadducees, he writes, believe that events are brought about by man. The Essenes, a pietistic sect, believe that events are determined by God. The Pharisees however maintain that there is an interaction between the two. “It was God’s good pleasure that there should be a fusion and that the will of man with his virtue and vice should be admitted to the council chamber of fate.”¹³, 18,1,3. The Pharisaic view allowed for human initiative in the shaping of history without denying the presence of the Divine. But while Pharisaism became the normative voice of Judaism, its political and military activism – dramatised by the Jerusalem Talmud in the person of R. Akiva, supporter of the Bar Kochba rebellion¹⁴ 4:7. – came to be seen as ill-advised, self-destructive and ultimately impious.

footnotes: ¹³ Josephus, Antiquities ¹⁴ Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anit

Thus Orthodoxy by the nineteenth century had been heir to a deeply embedded tradition of passivism. Thinkers as different as Moses Mendelssohn and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook noted that the long exile had resulted in a spiritualisation of Jewry to the point where concerted action to change their fate seemed impossible. Memories of the trauma created by the pseudo-Messiah Shabbetai Zevi in the seventeenth century were still present, and these added to the fear of any development that hinted at messianic politics. Instead the doctrine that seemed most cogent was the one that cautioned faith and trust, piety and prayer, and a decision to see the course of history as one of the “mysteries of the Almighty.”

The terms of exile had been set out in a talmudic passage in the tractate of Ketubot,¹⁵ 111a. according to which God had imposed three oaths on Israel and the nations. The people of Israel had promised not to rebel against the nations to which they had been exiled, nor to go back to the land of Israel “by a wall” (collectively and by force). In return the nations promised not to oppress Israel “too much.” Exile was thus something which could and should be endured until Heaven itself intervened to bring it to an end. This source was later to become a key text in the Orthodox battle against Zionism.

footnotes: ¹⁵ Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot

Kalischer and Alkalai had no difficulty in bringing biblical citations to show that the return to Zion could begin naturally and gradually though human initiative. But they were arguing against a major thrust of rabbinic thought, honed during the centuries, against collective Jewish activism of any kind. Thus a certain measure of secularisation was necessary before their vision could inspire a viable movement. It came in due course from a series of highly assimilated Jewish intellectuals, most notably Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl.

The birth of secular Zionism The career of Hess, the first secular Zionist, was characteristic of the members of this group, and illustrates another irony of modern Jewish history. In the 1840s Hess had been a colleague of Karl Marx, a socialist who believed that nothing remained of the Jewish mission and that Jews should now assimilate. But in 1862 he published Rome and Jerusalem, one of the first and most powerful arguments for Jewish national revival.

In the intervening years he had become convinced that the assimilation of Jews into Europe was impossible. What stood in its way was antisemitism. Until then many Jews and Gentiles alike had argued that antagonism toward Jews was caused by their differentness. Once they were acculturated and had passed through what John Murray Cuddihy has called “the ordeal of civility,” hatred would evaporate. Hess was one of the first to realise that it was not so. By the 1860s significant numbers of Jews had undergone the courtship ritual with German culture, only to find their gestures unreciprocated. They had assimilated, converted or reformed their religion. But they were still regarded with distaste as Jews. Hess concluded that the class struggle was secondary: the race struggle was primary. His prescience here was extraordinary. Germany had already decided, he argued, that there could be no integration of Semitic and Aryan cultures. Individual emancipation of the Jews of Europe was therefore doomed to failure. The only solution was the collective emancipation of Jews in the land of Israel.

Ironically, then, it was the from the ranks of the most secularised Jews that the most effective call for Jewish nationalism came. It was they who felt most keenly the failure of conscious assimilation and they who were most radicalised by the encounter with racial (and hence inescapable) antisemitism. Leon Pinsker went through a similar conversion to Hess’s in the wake of the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, as did Theodor Herzl in the course of the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890s. To be sure, they realised that to have any hold on the masses of Jewry, Zionism would have to be rooted in Jewish tradition and gain the support of the still religious public of East European Jewry. But throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, the leadership of the movement was increasingly dominated by the secularists. And despite Herzl’s efforts to keep it strictly confined to the political arena, leaving religion untouched, the more radical strand of cultural Zionism eventually came to the fore.

The leader of this group, Ahad Ha-Am, argued that the revolution implicit in Zionism could only come about if it were accompanied by a complete re-education of Jewish sensibilities. The central problem to which Zionism must attend, he insisted, was not the condition of Jews but of Judaism itself. Judaism must be reformulated to provide a viable national culture in a post-religious age. Ahad Ha-Am was himself conservative, anxious to preserve as much as possible of Jewish tradition by transmuting it from religion into culture, with national spirit taking the place of the commanding voice of God. But he was succeeded by more revolutionary minds. Micha Berdichevski, for example, argued that what was needed was a total rebellion against rabbinic values. The culture of the sword must replace the culture of the book. Jacob Klatzkin maintained that the hold of religion was now over and no attempt to revitalise it would succeed. Zionism could not be a framework for the realisation of Jewish values. Instead it was a declaration that henceforth a free national life was the only value. More utopian thinkers such as Nahman Syrkin, Ber Borochov and A. D. Gordon saw Zionism in Marxist or socialist terms.

Religious responses Inexorably, then, the movement which had been prefigured by Alkalai and Kalischer’s deeply religious longings was taking a pronouncedly secular, even anti-religious turn. What then were the responses of the Orthodox rabbinate? Even in the early years, between the 1860s and 1880s, when most Zionists were Orthodox Jews, most Orthodox authorities were anti-Zionist. The movement seemed to them a presumptuous form of “forcing the end.” From the 1890s onwards two more urgent considerations came to the fore. Firstly, the movement was now predominantly led by non-religious Jews, and religious principle militated against co-operation with heretics. Secondly, as it shifted from narrow political to broader cultural aims, it threatened to undermine the whole traditional basis of Jewish identity. To be a Jew, in the past, meant to be bound by Jewish law. Now, secular Zionists were suggesting, it meant being a member of a nation. A political, geographical or ethnic definition of Jewishness was supplanting the religious foundation of the past. As a number of rabbis accurately foresaw, this was a more fundamental onslaught against tradition than the Reform movement in Germany. That had been reform; this was revolution.

But Orthodox opposition to Zionism could not be unanimous, for two equally pressing reasons, one practical, the other theological. Practically, the plight of Eastern European Jewry could not be ignored. Exposed to pogroms, they needed a refuge. And theologically, the Zionist dream remained at bottom a religious one. The great rabbinic leaders of the recent past, among them the Vilna Gaon, R. Moses Sofer and several Chassidic luminaries, had advocated settlement of the Holy Land. Should this be ignored because it was now being propounded by secularists? One could go further. The fact that even assimilated Jews had been drawn into Zionism might be taken as a sign that Heaven itself was announcing the return. The signals were deeply conflicting, and Orthodoxy was divided into four broad patterns of response.

The first was a sharp rejection of Zionism and all that it represented. In 1900 a collection of rabbinic reactions was published under the title Or la-Yesharim (“Light for the Upright”). It was an impressive marshalling of forces against the movement, bringing together as it did both sides of East European Orthodoxy, Mitnagdim and Chassidim alike. The most systematic denunciation was given by the then leader of the Lubavitch Chassidim, R. Shalom Baer Schneersohn. The Zionists were, he argued, more threatening than previous generations of rebels against tradition. They at least knew that they were sinning, so there was a hope that one day they might repent. But the Zionists, by making nationalism a substitute for Torah, were redefining the terms of Judaism. There was therefore no hope that they would repent. This redefinition – the substitution of “culture” for religion – was essential to Zionism, Herzl’s disclaimers notwithstanding. Religious belief allowed Jews to come to terms with exile. It was an atonement for sins, to be ended only at the will of God. But Zionism needed to create a determination among Jews to end their exile, so it was forced to subvert religious belief. Zionism could not be religiously neutral. Acutely, Rabbi Schneersohn laid bare the secularising implications of Jewish nationalism and political activity.¹⁶ (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 203–26.

footnotes: ¹⁶ See Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet

It was a view shared by almost all the major rabbinical figures of Eastern Europe. Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk called Zionism “a public sin,” and Rabbi Zadok ha-Cohen of Lublin termed it “the work of Satan.” Rabbi Meir Simcha ha-Cohen of Dvinsk declared that “the Zionist vision is driving Israel to destruction, Heaven forbid.” The saintly Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Cohen invoked the talmudic passage of the three oaths to remind his followers that the Jewish fate was to remain in exile until redeemed by God.¹⁷ (London: Hamadfis, 1958), 179–244.

footnotes: ¹⁷ For a collection of these and similar statements, see I. Domb, The Transformation

Not all those who saw the dangers of secular Zionism could be termed anti-Zionists. There were those who saw the importance of settlement in Palestine, both as a refuge from persecution and as a less assimilatory environment than Europe. They refused at all costs, however, to work alongside the secularists. And they rejected their interpretation of Jewish destiny and identity. Judaism was a religion, not a nationalism. Nor was there any religious significance to a Jewish state as such. It was the land, not the state, of Israel that was holy. Characteristic of this group, though of a later period, was Isaac Breuer (1883–1946), grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch.¹⁸, edited by Jacob Levinger (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1974). For a recent study of Breuer’s thought see Alan Mittelman, Between Kant and Kabbalah (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). Breuer contrasted Zionism with what he called “Torah nationalism.” The former asserted the sovereignty of the nation, the latter the sovereignty of God. This was the second response, perhaps best termed non-Zionism.

footnotes: ¹⁸ For an English anthology of Breuer’s writings, see Isaac Breuer, Concepts of Judaism

Despite these differences, non- and anti-Zionists made common cause, coming together in 1912 to form Agudat Yisrael, an organisation designed to counter the impact of the Zionist movement. It was a significant moment, for it brought together for the first time West and East European Orthodoxy, widely different in their religious and cultural stances. Agudat Yisrael powerfully symbolised the threat Orthodoxy perceived in the profound change Zionism was bringing about in the conception of Jewish identity.

In the meanwhile, those Orthodox Jews who supported the Zionist enterprise determined on a new approach. Chief among them in the crucial decade of the 1890s were R. Samuel Mohilewer and R. Isaac Reines. Theirs was a quite different kind of religious Zionism from that articulated a generation earlier by Alkalai and Kalischer. That had been messianic; theirs was to be pragmatic. A sharp distinction was to be made between Zionism, which required human action in the immediate present, and divine redemption, which required human trust and belonged to a supernatural future. Zionism was to be stripped of all messianic resonances. It was concerned instead with providing a solution to a pressing practical problem, antisemitism and the persecution of Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe. It was a fulfilment of the command to save life. It had religious, but not messianic significance.

Mohilewer, and especially Reines, thus hoped to sidestep both objections voiced by the traditionalist rabbis, that Zionism was a secularisation of the messianic idea, and that in any case it was forbidden to work with the non-religious. In answer to the first, Reines insisted that the traditional idea of redemption had no connection with the practical task of providing a refuge for endangered Jews. So far did he distinguish between the two that he supported Herzl’s proposal in 1903 to settle Jews in Uganda, a plan inconceivable to those who saw an essential connection between Zionism and the biblical promise of return. In answer to the second, both men argued that when it came to saving life, religious differences were of no account. As R. Mohilewer put it in his letter to the first Zionist Congress, “Our attitude toward those among us who do not observe the religious precepts must be, as it were, as if fire had taken hold of our homes, imperilling our persons and our property. Under such circumstances would we not receive anyone gladly and with love who, though irreligious in our eyes, came to rescue us?”¹⁹, 402.

footnotes: ¹⁹ Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea

To be sure, Reines and Mohilewer both believed that the physical return of Jews to their homeland would lead to a spiritual return to their religion. Judaism was in danger in the diaspora precisely because it was a minority faith in the midst of a secularising culture. Once Jews formed an autonomous society, it would be possible to restore religion to the centre of public life. In the meanwhile, despite its secularist tendency, it was necessary to act as part of the framework of organised Zionism, hoping to influence it from within. In 1902, Reines formed a movement, Mizrachi, whose aim was eventually summarised in the formula, “The land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.”

The third response, then, was a pragmatic and non-messianic religious Zionism. But the ingathering of exiles to the biblical land could hardly avoid a messianic interpretation, and it found its most powerful exponent in Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel.²⁰, translated by Ben Zion Bokser (London: SPCK, 1979). Rabbi Kook was a mystic, and was thus able to draw on the rich vocabulary of Jewish mysticism to explain the apparent paradox of a redemptive process brought about by non-religious Jews. Appearance and reality are, for the mystic, two quite different things.

footnotes: ²⁰ For a collection of R. Kook’s writings in English, see Abraham Isaac Kook

The disintegration of traditional Jewish life in Europe was, for R. Kook, a clear sign that exile was coming to an end. Exile means dislocation and detachment. All existence is infused with the presence of God, and His unity pulses through all creation. Secularism is possible only when we consider subjects and objects as things in themselves, unrelated to the totality of life. Exile as detachment is thus a cosmic phenomenon, as is its opposite, redemption. In concrete terms, exile had brought about a split between the spiritual and physical aspects of Jewish life. It had contracted Judaism into an excessively narrow spiritual domain and had robbed it of its natural connection with a land, a language and a culture. The secular Zionists, in revolt against religion, were in fact expressing an urge to recover the lost dimensions of Judaism. In a global perspective their rebellion was a necessary prelude to redemption. For once Jews returned to Israel, the synthesis between the physical and the spiritual would be reinstated, and the now secular forms of politics, art and science would be transmuted into dimensions of the sacred. Secular Zionism was thus a transient phenomenon. “Secular,” for Rabbi Kook, meant “not yet holy.”

Rabbi Kook was the most profound advocate of messianic Zionism. But it is precisely here, in the religious interpretation of history, that ambiguities become most acute. One of the key terms in his analysis is ikveta de-meshicha, “the footsteps of the messiah.” The phrase refers to the period of turmoil prior to the end of days. Rabbi Kook used it to give a positive interpretation of the work of the secular nationalists. They were driven, he said, by a love of the Jewish people and were engaged in the holy task of settling the land. The very fact that atheists were unwittingly fulfilling the will of God was itself a sign of the divine presence beneath the surface of Zionism. But the same term ikveta de-meshicha was used by a number of anti-Zionists, most notably Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, to argue that Zionism was a force of evil. Prior to the end of days there would be a final confrontation between good and evil. Zionism would be shown to be an idolatrous falsehood. Redemption can only come from God, not man. The same concept applied to the same historical situation could yield diametrically opposed conclusions, depending on whether one gave an evolutionary or apocalyptic interpretation to pre-messianic time.

The contemporary debate The debate about the place of Israel – land, state and nation – was a seminal one, for it brought into sharp focus almost all the major themes in the Jewish encounter with modernity. Did Jews constitute a religious or a national group? Were the transformations of modernity yet another trial of exile or the beginning of the process of redemption? What exactly was the messianic age? Were emancipation and enlightenment a signal that Jews should stay in Europe or that they should leave? Was Zionism the work of God or Satan? Was secularisation a threat to Judaism or the recovery of a lost dimension of its collective life? Was history made by God or man or both? Were religious and non-religious Jews part of a shared enterprise, or opposed forces in a war of cultures? These questions went to the very heart of the Jewish destiny in the modern world, yet conflicting answers emerged, often from within the same textual tradition. The midrashic quest – the search for contemporary meaning in the canonical texts – which formed the intellectual dynamic of rabbinic Judaism, continued unabated into modernity. With this difference: that it now generated deep religious, political and cultural divisions as different groups enacted their variant readings in new forms of Jewish society.

The parameters of the debate were largely fixed by the early twentieth century, which is why we have focused thus far on controversies that preceded the state itself. The contemporary argument is no less fierce, and is made all the more acute in that it now takes place within the institutions and frameworks of an existing state. The lines of division are broadly speaking what they were a century ago, but the fissures have, if anything, deepened.

At one extreme, represented by Neturei Karta (“Guardians of the City”), is a small but intense group of anti-Zionists who continue the argument that secular nationalism is a form of idolatry, deeply corrupting of the Jewish vocation. The most articulate exponent of this view was Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1888–1981), leader of the Satmar Chassidim. As we saw in the last chapter, Rabbi Teitelbaum maintained that Zionism had been responsible for the Holocaust. Jews had broken their oath to wait patiently in exile, and as a result the nations had broken theirs, not to oppress Israel too much. The State of Israel was a demonic creation. Its government is secular and therefore has no religious significance. Religious Zionists compound the offence by seeing in Israel the beginning of redemption. This is a false messianism as dangerous as that of Shabbetai Zevi in the seventeenth century. Israel’s military and political activism constitute a flouting of the necessary religious posture of quietism and trust. Besides which, exile has a divine purpose which Zionism seeks prematurely to end. “By virtue of the exile of Israel among the nations, the glory of God will fill the earth.” The proof of these assertions is that the existence of the state has not, as Zionists predicted, ended hostility toward Jews. It has increased it. The wars Israel has had to fight are evidence of divine displeasure. “If the [Zionists] would only give up their state and government, they would undoubtedly remove thereby the wrath of God and all of these hardships would vanish.”²¹ 31:2 (Spring 1982), 135–52.

footnotes: ²¹ See Alan Nadler, “Piety and Politics: The Case of the Satmar Rebbe,” Judaism

Ironically, these Chassidic views find an echo in the writings of some Jewish secularists who take a diametrically opposed view of the relation between Jewish and religious identity. George Steiner, for example, has argued that the Jewish vocation is to remain in permanent exile until a metaphysical end of days. The Jewish homeland is the text, not a geographical territory. To be sure, the Bible speaks of a homecoming, but “not now, not necessarily in secular time.” Jews are destined to be “a pilgrim tribe housed not in place but in time, not rooted but millennially equipped with legs.” Israel, for Steiner, represents a betrayal of the classic values of Judaism: a distrust of nationalism and the value of the state, and a reflection of the military ethic of power.²² (Winter/Spring 1985), 4–25. Steiner’s views, despite their secularism, have a striking similarity to those of Rabbi Teitelbaum.

footnotes: ²² George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi

At the opposite extreme is the philosophy of Gush Emunim, a group inspired by Rabbi Abraham Kook and more particularly by his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. Kook’s view that Zionism was part of a messianic process was predicated on the assumption that there would be a gradual symbiosis of the religious and secular elements of its culture and population. That has not happened, but something else did. The 1967 Six-Day War brought back within Israel’s domain the territories of Judea and Samaria. Above all it brought about the reunification of Jerusalem. To those who had been educated in the vision of the two Kooks, father and son, these seemed to be confirmations of atchalta de-ge’ulah, the onset of the redemptive process. Accordingly, Gush Emunim focused on land, settlement and “the commandment of conquest” as more cogent axes of the biblical vision than peace and religious return. As agents of the divine purpose in history, the instrumentalities of the state are endowed with holiness. This is a religious nationalism inspired by messianic politics.

Non-messianic religious Zionism Both extremes take the messianic perspective as determinative.²³ 6:2 (May 1986), 197–210; Chaim Waxman, “Messianism, Zionism and the State of Israel,” Modern Judaism 7:2 (May 1987), 175–92; Shubert Spero, “Does Traditional Jewish Messianism Imply Inevitability?,” Modern Judaism 8:3 (October 1988), 271–86. Their view is that the State of Israel represents a massive transformation in the terms of Jewish life, and no change so radical can resist categorisation within the either/or of exile and redemption. For the anti-Zionists a humanly-inspired, secular and partial return cannot be redemption. Therefore it must be a new and deeper dimension of exile. For the messianic Zionists, a return cannot be exile. Therefore it is redemption, and its imperfect character is more apparent and temporary than lasting and real. The difficulty of charting a position between these two extremes is the classic dilemma of moderate religious Zionism. It is a formidable difficulty, for it requires reintroducing a historical perspective within the metahistorical framework of rabbinic thought. Can a religious expression be found for the recovery of Jewish sovereignty, without denying its significance altogether, but without at the same time lifting it to the plane of “the end of days”?

footnotes: ²³ See Menachem Kellner, “Messianic Postures in Israel Today,” Modern Judaism

One attempt to do so was given by the influential Orthodox thinker, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in an essay entitled Kol Dodi Dofek (“The Sound of My Lover Knocking”).²⁴ (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1981), 9–56. The transition from Holocaust to national sovereignty was, for Rabbi Soloveitchik, a divine summons to respond to history. History is not the bearer of unambiguous messages. Instead, like the relationship between lover and beloved in the Song of Songs, it is a series of intimations that may or may not be recognised and reciprocated. God knocks on the door of human consciousness, and all depends on whether we rush to admit Him, or delay and find that the moment has passed.

footnotes: ²⁴ R. Joseph Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakhah

The Holocaust, followed by the creation of the state, was such a moment. It posed for Jews the question of whether they would see the sequence of events as incidents of external fate or as a divine call to inward renewal. Rabbi Soloveitchik implicitly suggested that the messianic character of modern Jewish history depended on how Jews responded to it. Covenantal history is not made by acts of God alone. It is made by the interaction of God and man. At present, Jews were linked in what he called a “covenant of fate.” They had not yet been reunited in a “covenant of destiny.” The State of Israel therefore still lacked religious significance until Jews had internalised its religious imperative, a call to renew the covenant of destiny. “As a secular-historical entity that is not animated by any covenantal goal, the State does not excite me.”²⁵ (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Orot, 1974), 430. In biblical language, it was Exodus without Sinai. It was an event in secular history that had not yet penetrated to religious consciousness, and would not do so until it became the context of religious revival.

footnotes: ²⁵ R. Joseph Soloveitchik, In Aloneness, In Togetherness

Two significant thinkers influenced by Rabbi Soloveitchik, his son-in-law Aharon Lichtenstein and the more radical David Hartman, have explored the religious possibilities of a non-messianic state. For Lichtenstein, the creation of a Jewish society as such has intrinsic significance. Judaism rejects the idea of religion as a purely private relationship between the individual and God, the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” A “spiritually oriented society” is “an indispensable condition for the fulfillment of the individual Jew.” Society is the vehicle of “personal and collective beatitude.” Israel therefore represents a necessary recovery of Judaism’s public domain.²⁶, edited by Arthur A. Cohen (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 421–50.

footnotes: ²⁶ Aharon Lichtenstein, “Religion and State: The Case for Interaction,” in Arguments and Doctrines

This too is the thrust of Hartman’s argument. Judaism, he argues, contains both a “covenant of intimacy” and a “covenant of social and political action.” It contains commands which link the individual to God, and others which bid him to build social, economic and political structures that bring the divine presence into the societal sphere. In the diaspora this second aspect is necessarily attenuated. To live outside Israel is to live in a predominantly non-Jewish society, one in which the public culture and its institutions are governed by other norms. Israel “expands the possible range of halakhic involvement in human affairs beyond the circumscribed borders of home and synagogue to the public domain.”²⁷ 7:3 (October 1987), 229–52; Conflicting Visions (New York: Schocken, 1990).

footnotes: ²⁷ David Hartman, “The Challenge of Modern Israel to Traditional Judaism,” Modern Judaism

These formulations, though, are difficult to translate into the reality of the contemporary state, which remains predominantly secular in orientation. When Judaism enters the public domain it is often in the form of sectarian politics or angry clashes with Israeli secularists. Evidence of Lichtenstein’s “collective beatitude” or Hartman’s expansion of halakhic involvement are hard to find. There is thus a certain logic to the controversial position maintained for close to half a century by the Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz.²⁸ (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1976); Faith, History and Values (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1982). Leibowitz denies any religious significance to the state. Israel constitutes a single negative proposition: that Jews have refused to carry on being ruled by Gentiles. Beyond that it signifies nothing. The state as such, like all states, is an intrinsically secular entity and of instrumental value only. Leibowitz has been an untiring advocate of the formal separation of religion and state and has argued that their association leads to a variety of offences. It corrupts the religious establishment; it encourages the development of pseudo-messianism; and it results in the religious worship of military force, the very opposite of traditional Jewish values.

footnotes: ²⁸ Leibowitz’s major essays are collected in Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel

Leibowitz’s position, though, illustrates one dilemma of the religious encounter with the state. For, as he was one of the first to argue, a state of Israel does make a crucial difference to Judaism: not from the perspective of divine involvement in history, but from that of human responsibility for shaping a society. Jewish law had developed under conditions of exile. Thus it never had to contend with problems of maintaining an economy, a political system and a defence force. It now had to do so, and this meant new halakhic legislation. The religious establishment, according to Leibowitz, could not be relied on to rise to the challenge. It was imprisoned in exilic modes of thought. Besides which, it was a captive of the state. Leibowitz believed such change would occur naturally and de facto. But this has not happened. To the religious, Leibowitz seemed to be advocating reform of exactly the kind that Orthodoxy rejected. To the secular, he seemed to be suggesting rule by religious law of exactly the kind that they had come to Israel to avoid.

The gradualist position, argued variously by Soloveitchik, Lichtenstein, Hartman and Leibowitz, depends on Israel becoming the context of some form of religious renaissance. In a sense it has, but mainly within the communities of the non- and anti-Zionists and the religious nationalists. Israel, in other words, has not resisted the sectarianising thrust of modernity, in which religion retains a powerful force over sub-communities but fails to provide an overarching framework of shared values. This has lent a certain power to non-Zionist Orthodoxy, represented by majority of the yeshiva community and by political parties such as Agudat Yisrael.²⁹ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 89–125.

footnotes: ²⁹ For the tensions and paradoxes this has created, see Aviezer Ravitzky, “Exile in the Holy Land: The Dilemma of Haredi Jewry,” in Peter Medding (ed.), Israel: State and Society, 1948–1988 [Studies in Contemporary Jewry, V]

These circles continue the line established by the Central and East European opponents of secular Zionism at the turn of the century. Only a messianic state could have religious significance. The present secular state clearly falls outside this definition. It follows that Israel is still “exile,” spiritually if not geographically or politically. Statehood has changed the context but not the substance of the religious struggle, namely preserving fidelity to Torah in an age of non-belief.

Religious non-Zionists tend to take a less optimistic view of the thrust of modern Jewish history than do religious Zionists. While the latter focus on Israel’s role in enhancing a sense of peoplehood and return even among non-religious Jews, the former note its effect in secularising Jewish existence.³⁰, edited by Charles Liebman (Jerusalem: Keter, 1990), 21–44. Undeniably, both are valid perceptions. But as Israel’s internal conflicts have continued, it has been easier to see the interplay between religion and society in terms of confrontation rather than synthesis. This is the non-Zionist position, and it has emerged with considerable force – ideological, demographic and political – in recent years.

footnotes: ³⁰ See for example, Amnon Levi, “The Haredi Press and Secular Society,” in Religious and Secular: Conflict and Accommodation between Jews in Israel

Orthodox attitudes to Israel, then, have shown no tendency to converge over time. This applies not only to large philosophical questions but also to fundamental issues of Jewish law as they apply to the state. Four examples epitomise the problem. The first concerns religious expressions of the fact of statehood. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate formulated a prayer for the state which describes it as reshit tzemichat geulatenu, the “first flowering of our redemption,” an important theological claim which sets contemporary Israel at least at the beginning of a messianic process. It also recognises Yom ha-Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, as a religious festival marked by special prayers, thus seeing it as a phenomenon of the divine involvement in history. Neither of these institutions is recognised in non- and anti-Zionist religious circles.³¹Jerusalem: Torah Shelemah Institute, 1968); Bernard Kasper, “Reshit Zemichat Geulatenu,” in Jonathan Sacks (ed.), Tradition and Transition (London: Jews’ College Publications, 1986), 107–16.

footnotes: ³¹ See, for example, Menachem Kasher, Ha-Tekufah ha-Gedolah (

The second concerns the source of authority of secular legislation in the state. At least three views have been taken. The first sees laws passed by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as having the same status as those legislated by a non-Jewish government. They are to be obeyed under the rule of dina de-malkhuta dina, “the law of the land is law.” On this view, there is no difference between Israel and elsewhere or between a Jewish and a non-Jewish legislature. Since both are secular, neither has religious significance; their authority derives from other sources. The second sees the Knesset as a continuation of Jewish powers of self-government in exile. It has the status, in Jewish law, of bnei ha-ir, the “members of a town,” who have the power, based on mutual agreement, to create and impose local legislation (takkanot ha-kahal). On this view, Israel is a recovery of the limited powers of autonomy Jews held from the collapse of monarchy to the beginning of emancipation. The third sees Israel’s parliament as functionally equivalent to biblical malkhut, “monarchy,” which has authority in matters of national security and welfare. On this view, Israel is a more fundamental development in Jewish life, a return perhaps to the order established by the early Hasmonean kings.³² 9:3 (October 1989), 289–310; Gerald Blidstein, “The State of Israel in Halakhic Thought,” in Schubert Spero and Yitzchak Pessin (eds.), Religious Zionism After Forty Years of Statehood (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1989), 254–76.

footnotes: ³² See Mark Washofsky, “Halakhah and Political Theory: A Study in Jewish Legal Response to Modernity,” Modern Judaism

The third debate concerns the proper means of advancing the Judaic character of Israeli society. One school seeks to do so through legislation passed by the Knesset. Judaism is, after all, a religion of law, and laws are meant to be enforced. Another school of thought, however, argues against this. To be sure, Judaism is a religion of law and recognises the necessity of coercion. But this principle cannot be directly applied to the modern State of Israel. A secular legislature is an inappropriate vehicle for religious law. Moreover, the coercion of individuals presupposes consent on the part of the majority, and this is lacking in present-day Israel, composed as it is of a largely non-religious public. The enforcement of religion would not advance its standing among the general public but instead create a wave of anti-religious protest. In Jewish law, the rightness or wrongness of actions is not judged by their consequences; but the use of sanctions is. An attempt to enforce Jewish law by Knesset legislation which would create widespread resentment and bring religion into disrespect is therefore not to be undertaken. More fundamentally, freedom of the individual is itself a Judaic value to be set against the equal but conflicting value of enforced obedience. Advocates of this second approach argue for a disengagement of religious groups from the party political process and instead propose education rather than legislation as the route to a more religious society.³³, 277–308.

footnotes: ³³ See Nachum Rabinovitch, “The Torah Way,” in Spero and Pessin (eds.), Religious Zionism After Forty Years of Statehood

The fourth issue concerns the religious dimension of a possible political settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the question of “land for peace.” Here, one side sees Israel’s expanded borders, the result of the 1967 and 1973 wars, as a fulfilment of the biblical command to conquer and settle the land. The territories, as part of “biblical” Israel, are non-negotiable. Others, attaching no sanctity to land as such, see the pursuit of peace as taking priority over the retention of territory. Between these there is a variety of intermediary positions, some holding that the ceding of land is intrinsically harmful to security and thus forbidden; others, that Jewish law must in such a case be instructed by military and political assessments of particular proposals; some arguing that Israel’s present position vis-à-vis the Palestinians is morally and spiritually untenable; others, that Jewish law is built on the principle of reciprocity and that Israel may not make a unilateral gesture to those who deny its right to exist.³⁴ (London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1990).

footnotes: ³⁴ See, for example, Immanuel Jakobovits, Territory for Peace?

These unresolved arguments reveal the extent to which Israel has raised profound dilemmas for religious thought at all levels, from the most broadly metaphysical to the most concretely political.

Secularists in a quandary But the problem of reconciling reality and vision continues to perplex secular no less than religious Zionists. The utopian scenarios of Syrkin, Borochov and A. D. Gordon have not unfolded. Into its fifth decade of statehood, Israel has moved beyond the dreams of a Marxist or socialist experiment into the less ideological territory of technology and suburbanisation. Individual rather than collective beatitude marks this new phase, and secular Zionists have been disturbed on the one hand by the failure of Israel to reach a modus vivendi with its Arab neighbours, and on the other by the search of young Israelis for personal meaning in a return to religious roots. What then is left of secularism in an ideological vision rather than a sociological fact?

Some, like the writer A. B. Yehoshua, continue to stress the minimalist vision of Jacob Klatzkin. Israel represents no more than the negation of the diaspora. Life in exile, for Yehoshua, is an untenable option for two reasons. Firstly, it is unviable. The Holocaust proved that. It constitutes “the final decisive proof of the failure of diaspora existence.” Secondly, it is psychologically or spiritually self-deceptive. Jews cling to exile, he argues, out of a passion to be set apart, different, “chosen.” But this desire is pathological and can only be maintained by the “neurotic” solution of always living on the brink of danger. Jews are different, but so too are every other people. In principle, there is no such thing as a unique differentness. Israel allows Jews to live a normal existence without constant fear of benign or malign extinction, through assimilation or antisemitism.³⁵ (New York: Doubleday, 1981).

footnotes: ³⁵ A.B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right

A similar view is held by the novelist Amos Oz. Israel for him is the context of a new expression of Judaism as an open-ended civilisation evolving in ways that cannot be constrained in advance by Jewish law or any prescription of Jewish theology. “A living civilisation is a drama of struggle between interpretations, outside influences and emphases, an unrelenting struggle over what is the wheat and what is the chaff, rebellion for the sake of innovation, dismantling for the purpose of reassembling differently.”³⁶ (London: Fontana, 1983), 137. This is strongly reminiscent of Klatzkin’s insistence that “In longing for our land we do not desire to create there a base for the spiritual values of Judaism. To regain our land is for us an end in itself – the attaining of a free national life.”³⁷, 319.

footnotes: ³⁶ Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel ³⁷ Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea

But this fails to address one of the central questions posed by a pluralistic culture, namely, what holds such a culture together? Pluralism can thrive to the extent that there are core values held in common which mark out a shared conception of the public good. When there are no such values, pluralism tends to fragment society into a series of conflicting ghettos, each of which seeks to bring its vision to bear on others. The result is a cultural equivalent of Hobbes’s “state of nature,” a war of all against all. Such a realisation lay behind the agreement between Ben Gurion and the religious parties prior to Israel’s independence, that certain public aspects of the state would bear a religious character. The Jewish Sabbath would be the official day of rest. Public transport would not run on that day. Jewish dietary laws would be maintained in state institutions. The government would maintain a religious school system alongside the secular one, and matters of personal status would be determined by religious courts. This, the so-called “status quo,” has continued to govern Israel’s public life, giving it at least a minimal content to its character as a Jewish state.

Some secularists, most notably the philosopher Eliezer Schweid, have pursued the argument further along lines indicated by Ahad Ha-Am. For the “status quo” concerns only law, not the culture that underlies it. Israel, Schweid argues, can develop a national culture only by appropriating the values of Jewish tradition. Without a distinctive culture, Israel cannot inspire commitment among its population. It would then simply be one place among others where Jews might live. Secularism had failed in Israel because it had attempted the impossible, to create a form of Jewish identity with all religious forms edited out. A religious‒humanist synthesis must be developed in which the law of the land grew out of the classic rabbinic sources, and culture was nourished by a deep grounding in the religious texts. Schweid’s proposal is the point at which secularism comes closest to the kind of religious liberalism espoused by David Hartman.³⁸ (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1973); Judaism and the Solitary Jew (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975); Judaism and Secular Culture (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Hame’uchad, 1981); The Land of Israel: National Home or Land of Destiny (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985).

footnotes: ³⁸ See Eliezer Schweid, Israel at the Crossroads

An interpretive debate In a very real sense, then, Israel – state, land and society – embodies the contemporary argument about the nature of Jewish destiny in the modern world. This surfaces in all aspects of public life: the status of the Knesset, Israel’s legislative assembly; the conflict between religious legislation and individual liberty; the way in which Israelis perceive their personal identity and their place in Jewish history; and the values brought to bear on the peace process and the Palestinians. It produces strange alliances and unpredictable confrontations. There are those – radical secularists and religious extremists – who view the argument in sharply dualistic terms as a genuine war of cultures. There are others – secular traditionalists and religious moderates – who search for common ground and a new synthesis.

Traced to its fundamentals, the debate about Israel reveals the incendiary potential of the messianic idea in Judaism. Reinterpreted, it lay behind both the Reform rejection, and the secular embrace, of Jewish nationalism. In its traditional form it led some religious thinkers to see Zionism as the beginning of redemption and others as its most formidable obstacle. It could lead in the direction of passivity or intense political activity. With the return to Zion, arguments that had raged at the time of the second Temple and had been dormant for 2,000 years began again, almost as if without interruption. Was covenantal history made by man, by God or by both? Was the messianic age natural or supernatural? Would it emerge incrementally or suddenly, by human initiative or divine intervention?

As with the Holocaust, Israel encapsulates the central paradox of contemporary Jewish consciousness. On the one hand, it testifies to deep and intractable divisions in Jewish thought. Among religious Jews there are messianic Zionists and messianic anti-Zionists, pragmatic Zionists and pragmatic non-Zionists. Among secular Jews there are some who see Israel as a revolution in Jewish life, others as a restoration of biblical existence, some who see it as the normalisation of Jewry and others who hold out for it utopian expectations. Among both secular and religious, there are those who deny all value to Israel and those who deny all value to the diaspora. No variant is without its passionate protagonists.

On the other hand the existence of Israel has been the most powerful unifying agent in post-Holocaust Jewish life. Few Jews worldwide do not feel involved in its fate and responsible for its support. It has transformed the condition of Jewish existence. Hebrew has been reborn as a living language. The Jewish people has been reconstituted as a political nation. For the first time since the days of the Hasmonean kings there is Jewish sovereignty, a Jewish landscape, a Jewish home.

The explanation of this paradox is that the different views of Israel are not disparate and disconnected. Instead they are variations on a single set of themes: exile and redemption, the roles of God and man in history, and the relationship between the Jewish present and past. They are commentaries to a single set of texts: the biblical narrative of the Exodus and its prophetic and rabbinic projections on to a messianic future. They are, we have suggested, part of Jewry’s ongoing midrash on its destiny, its construction of a present through an interpretive dialectic with its past. The argument shows no signs of abating.

But on one point most Zionists agreed. The Jewish destiny lay in the land of Israel. The diaspora was nearing its end. An almost 2,000 year-long chapter in Jewish history was reaching closure. Has that prediction proved true?