Images of Jewish Spirituality

Abraham’s Children The Jewish people has had a history longer than most, and it encompasses an extraordinary number of wanderings and reversals. Yet to Jews, that history is experienced not so much as the story of things that happened in the past but as the shape of things that happen in the present. Key moments that may have taken place long ago seem to recur again and again. It is as if Jewish history were a set of variations on a theme, or as if some events had so implanted themselves in our mind that we carried them with us wherever we went.

Consider the words of God to Abraham that set Jewish history in motion:

Leave your country, your birthplace and your father’s house and go to the land which I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you and I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse; and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. (Genesis 12:1–3)

First, Abraham was told that he would have to break with the usual securities of life. A country, a birthplace, a father’s house, are what make us feel at home. They are where we belong. But Abraham, in the words which Set him on his way, was commanded to leave these assurances behind. He was to become an ivri, a Hebrew, meaning one who wanders from place to place, whose sole security is his faith. To be a Jew since Abraham has often meant just that, travelling geographically from country to country across a vast diaspora, and spiritually, from trial to trial: a history redeemed from tragedy by faith alone.

Secondly, there was that unnamed destination: “the land which I will show you.” Where was Abraham travelling? We discover soon enough that it was the land of Canaan, later to become the land of Israel. But no sooner does Abraham arrive than famine forces him to leave. Throughout the Bible the land of Israel is never a simple destination, a place at which you simply arrive. It is indeed a geographical location, a country on the map, but it is more than that. It is the place we travel towards, symbol of a not-yet-realised future. That future, mapped out in greater detail in the book of Deuteronomy and in the visionary images of the prophets, is the perfect society: what Judaism was to call the Messianic Age. There are religions whose golden age is in the past, a paradise lost. Judaism’s golden age is in the future, a paradise not yet reached.

Lastly there is that simple phrase, half promise, half command: “You shall be a blessing.” Abraham, unlike Adam and Noah, is not a symbol of humanity as a whole. He is an individual singled out for a particular destiny. His children, too, become a people singled out for a particular destiny. Why Abraham was chosen, we never discover. That is one of the great enigmas of the Bible. But to what end he was chosen, we discover at the very beginning: to be a blessing. Not to his family or to God alone, but to all the peoples on earth. Somehow he would enrich the lives of others, of cultures and faiths very different from his own. Some would bless him for this, others would curse him. That much was known in advance. But the lives of his descendants would be peculiarly interwoven with the history of many nations, and they would leave their mark, hopefully for blessing, on many cultures. That too has been a recurring theme of Jewish experience.

It is strange and not a little awe-inspiring to think how much of Jewish history – its exiles, its messianic hopes, its singular destiny – was foreshadowed in those few words. To be a Jew is to be one of Abraham’s children. His fate goes with us, and his challenge too.

Choosing Life The story of the binding of Isaac is surely the most powerful and most perplexing in the Bible. Abraham and Sarah had waited years for a child, so long, in fact, that when they were told by God they would have a son, they could hardly believe it. They laughed.

But Isaac was born, the child of their hope, the son of the promise. And then, incredibly, came the command to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac, and go to Moriah and offer him up as a sacrifice.” Early the next morning, Abraham rose and saddled his donkey, and he and Isaac set off on their journey. Three days later they arrived and walked to the fateful place. Abraham built an altar, and arranged the wood, and bound his son, and lifted his knife. Then we read these words:

The angel of God called to him from heaven and said: “Abraham, Abraham.” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” the angel said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from Me your son, your only son.” (Genesis 22:11–12)

So the trial ends, and we are left wondering why. Why was Abraham put through so cruel an ordeal? Why was Isaac made to suffer such a torment? Why make the life on which the future of the covenant rested, seem to hang in doubt? Why did God issue a command that He never meant Abraham to fulfil? Those questions have been with us almost from that day to this. But generations of Jews understood that the point of the story lay in its end – in the voice from heaven that stopped the trial and said: Choose life, not death.

Death has often held a religious fascination, whether in the form of sacrifice or martyrdom. Against this, the binding of Isaac stands as a definitive protest. Death is not sacred in Jewish law. Instead, it defiles. “Choose life,” said Moses, summarising his teachings. When Jews raise a glass of wine they still say lechaim: “To life.”

This idea was one of the turning points of Jewish history. In the first century of the Common Era, a group of Jews surrounded by the Roman army on the mountain fortress by the Dead Sea called Masada, chose to die at their own hands rather than be taken captive. They were courageous martyrs, but they did not enter Jewish memory as heroes. In the early second century, under Hadrian’s religious persecution, many rabbinical leaders chose to resist his decrees and be killed. They too, though they are remembered with reverence, did not become models whose example was to be followed. There are times when it needs as much courage to live as to die. At such times, Judaism teaches: Choose life.

One of the great mysteries of the Jewish people is its survival through tragedies that seemed to spell its end: the destruction of two temples, exiles, medieval massacres, the Spanish Inquisition, and most fearfully of all, the Holocaust. After each blow, the Jewish people has begun again, choosing life. Where did it come from – this tenacity, this determination to survive, that has puzzled so many historians? Surely from the binding of Isaac. For if Jews felt that they were living through a trial, they were equally certain it would stop before its end. The God of Abraham desired life, not death. Isaac would survive and have children. The covenant which had seemed to hang in doubt would continue.

So it has continued, from Isaac, the first Jewish child, to the children of the Holocaust survivors. Jewish existence is bounded by a covenant fraught with trials. But it is a covenant, despite everything, of life.

The Argument with Heaven The town of Sodom epitomises what the Hebrew Bible regards as evil. God confides in Abraham that He is about to destroy it. But Abraham does not accept the verdict and its rightness. Instead he begins one of the most remarkable conversations in the history of man’s relationship to God:

Abraham came forward and said: “Will You sweep away the innocent with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent people in the city? Will You then wipe it out and not forgive it for the sake of the fifty innocent people who are there? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to kill the innocent as well as the guilty, treating innocent and guilty alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:23–25)

God agrees that if there are fifty righteous people, He will spare the town. But Abraham, admitting that he has no right to speak, that he is but dust and ashes, continues to plead until it is agreed that the town will be saved even if there are only ten innocent people.

As it turns out, there are not, for we read next that the entire population of Sodom surrounds the house of Abraham’s nephew Lot and attempts to assault his two visitors. But a quite unprecedented tone of voice has entered the dialogue between earth and heaven, one that was to leave a permanent mark on Jewish spirituality. We hear it again when Moses says to God after the first failure of his mission to Pharaoh, “Why have You brought trouble to this people?” And again, when he pleads for the Israelites after they have made the Golden Calf. “Please forgive their sin, but if not, then blot me out of the book You have written.” It continues through the prophets and reaches a climax in the book of Job.

Judaism has been called a religion of holy argument. The rabbis spoke of “argument for the sake of heaven.” But in these passages there is argument with heaven itself. Nor was it confined to the prophets. The rabbinic literature took it further still, and it continued through the elegies of the Middle Ages and the prayers of the eighteenth-century mystics called the Hassidim. It exists today in Jewish writings about the Holocaust. It takes the form of the question “Why?” Why do the righteous suffer? Why does evil have power? Why, in this world in which God reigns, are there innocent victims? Jews have never stopped asking these questions, and in asking them they have not turned away from, but towards heaven, saying, with Job, “I desire to speak with the Almighty and to argue my case with God.”

What is it based upon, this daring conversation that began with Abraham? God, after all, is infinite and man a handful of dust. God redeems. Man cannot. How then can we ask questions of God? It originates, surely, in two central ideas of the covenant: that justice is not mystical but ethical, to be sought on earth, not only in heaven; and that God and humanity are partners in achieving it. Injustice cannot be accepted as an illusion. It is a reality that must be protested. And in turning to God, we find new resources within ourselves to change the world.

The argument with heaven does not end with easy answers from God. It ends with a challenge to humanity. It is a prelude to action, and to that passion for justice which is the driving force of the Bible’s message to humanity.

Jacob’s Struggle The biblical Jacob had dressed in Esau’s clothes. He had stood before his blind father Isaac and taken his brother’s blessing. The result was tragic for all three. Isaac suffered the pain of deceit. Esau felt cheated. Jacob had to run away from home in fear that Esau would kill him.

Twenty-two years passed until Jacob decided to return home, hoping perhaps that Esau’s anger was spent. As he approached, though, he discovered that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. Was this going to be a brutal confrontation? Jacob was “very afraid and distressed.” He divided his camp so that some at least would survive. He prayed to God for help. He sent messengers to Esau bearing gifts. Then, after all the precautions had been taken, we read:

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that it was strained as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go. It is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he replied. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” (Genesis 32:25–29)

Who was the stranger who wrestled with Jacob? Rabbinic tradition said that it was the guardian angel of Esau. It went on to identify Esau with Rome, the reigning non-Jewish power of the time. In so doing, it turned a biblical episode into a lasting image of the relationship between Jews and gentiles.

At one level, the rabbis were alluding to the uneven struggle between Jews and powerful empires that often threatened their religious freedom, sometimes even their continued existence. Jews would never live totally at peace with the world. Their very name, “the children of Israel,” suggested conflict and struggle. But the image of Jacob signalled that they would survive, even if, like Jacob, they would afterwards limp.

But at a deeper level, and reaching to the heart of the biblical story, they were hinting at the struggle that would have to take place within the people of Israel itself. Jews have often been fascinated by other cultures. The Bible is full of warnings against adopting the religions of neighbouring peoples. Israel was to be singular, different, a people that dwells alone. But it was not easy. Some two hundred years before the Christian era, there were Jews who became devoted to the culture of the Greeks. Centuries later there were others who opted for the sophistication of the Romans. In the modern age, there were many who felt that Judaism was as narrow as the ghetto walls, and who chose secularism instead.

Encounters like these have always led to a crisis in Jewish identity, as if Jacob was once again putting on the clothes of Esau. In each case there had to be a long night of struggle before Jacob could defeat the inner Esau and become himself again. But the biblical story held a promise. The next morning, after the struggle was over, the two brothers met. Jacob’s fears proved groundless. Esau ran to greet him. They embraced and wept. Each spoke of his contentment with what he had. No longer did they envy one another’s gifts.

That sublime note of reconciliation perfectly describes the relationship between Jews and the non-Jewish world at its rare moments of blessedness, when Jews and Christians, or Jews and Muslims, accepted their differences and enriched one another’s lives. The story of Esau and Jacob begins in conflict and ends in peace. They start as rivals but end, simply, as brothers.

Exodus and Revolution Moses, an Israelite brought up among Egyptians, is in exile. He is tending his sheep when a vision appears to him from a bush that bursts into flame, and he hears these words:

I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…. I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Exodus 3:6–8)

Of all events that have shaped the Jewish mind, none has been more powerful than this, the beginning of the exodus from Egypt. God, heard by Moses in those words, revealed three characteristics that have moulded Jewish spirituality ever since.

First, He was a God of history, not the abstract God of philosophy, nor even the intimate God of personal salvation. He was concerned with the behaviour of mankind, with society, freedom and the politics of suffering. The consolation He offered lay in historical and political change: the exodus of a people and the building of a new social order.

Secondly, He was a God who cherished freedom. Often the Mosaic books return to the theme, and always with reference to the exodus. Free your slaves in the year of release. Do not let them work for you on the seventh day. Remember that you were once a slave in the land of Egypt. It is as if any loss of freedom is an assault on the image of God that is man.

Thirdly, He was a God who wanted His people never to forget the experience of being a minority without power. Do not oppress a stranger, commands the Bible, because you understand the heart of a stranger – you were once strangers yourselves. Plead the cause of the widow and the orphan, the underprivileged. Power corrupts, the Bible seems to argue, unless we carry in our memories the thought of what it is to be without power. Social justice is born not so much of political theory as it is of the sharp pain of injustice and the decision, having felt it, never to inflict it.

The exodus showed religion to be political and not on the side of the established power. Ever afterwards it has been a text to which prophets, reformers and revolutionaries have turned when they sensed that their task lay in defending the oppressed and righting social wrongs. It appeared in the pamphlets of the German Peasants’ Revolt. It was cited by John Calvin and John Knox in their political writings. It was a key text of the Puritan Revolution. It figured largely in the thought of the founders of American society, who saw themselves as a new Israel. It played a role in the early writings of Moses Hess, friend and colleague of Karl Marx. Moses’ words, “Let my people go,” were the inspiration of black activist movements in the United States and in South Africa. The exodus story lies behind the powerful movement of Latin American Christian thought known as Liberation Theology.

The story of the exodus has been one of the Bible’s most powerful influences on human civilisation. It gives those who reflect on it a focused moral energy. It forces us to realise that the task of religion is not to reconcile us to the world as it is, but to change the world into what it might and should be. That command is always with us, for neither freedom nor justice occur naturally. Nor do they last without prophets reminding us of their importance. Small wonder, then, that the Bible commands us to remember the exodus from Egypt in each generation, all the days of our lives.

Promised Land There is a strange and recurring feature about the story the Bible tells of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and then Moses. Almost from the beginning, Abraham is promised the land of Canaan, the land we know as Israel. So is Isaac, and so is Jacob. Yet when Sarah dies, Abraham still has no land of his own. He has to negotiate to buy a burial place. He calls himself an alien and a stranger. Isaac cannot dig a well without a quarrel with the local residents. Jacob has to leave the land more than once, and dies in exile. By the time we reach the end of the book of Genesis, the promise is still just a promise.

As we begin the book of Exodus, we seem to be approaching the fulfilment. Moses is told by God to lead the people out of Egypt and into their land. But again the moment is deferred. On the brink of entry, the people lose heart and are condemned to wander in the desert for forty years. Even as we reach the end of the Mosaic books, the moment has not yet come. Moses prays to be allowed to set foot in the land, but the request is refused. The last picture we have of his life sums up the entire biblical narrative thus far:

Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, opposite Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land…. And the Lord said to him: “This is the land I promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said: I will give it to your descendants. I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over into it.” (Deuteronomy 34:1–4)

And there Moses died.

There is something fateful about that image of Moses seeing the land from a distance, the land to which his whole life as leader had been a journey, one he was destined not to complete. Historians have noted the paradox of Jewish history. On the one hand, the land of Israel is central to the Jewish journey. It is where we began and where we were destined to return. It is the place where we are summoned to create the just society. On the other hand, most of Jewish history has been spent outside Israel. It was outside Israel that Abraham received his call, and outside Israel that the Torah was given at Sinai. It was in Babylon that the prophet Ezekiel had his visions. It was there too, a thousand years later, that the great monument of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, was compiled.

For some 1,800 years, between the fall of the second Temple and the late nineteenth century, Jews throughout the world were like Moses, seeing the land from a distance, but for the most part unable to enter. They felt the full pain of those early exiles who said: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.” They mentioned the land in all their prayers. Wherever they were, they built their synagogues to face Jerusalem. At the holiest moments of the Jewish year they said, “Next year in Jerusalem,” as if they, like Moses, were at its very borders.

It is sometimes difficult to explain what the last forty years have meant to Jewish life – the years in which Israel has become again a Jewish home. They have not been easy. They have been years of wars and strife between Israel and her neighbours. Israel has faced ethical dilemmas to which no solution has yet been found. But religiously, it is hard to overestimate their significance. The promise which neither Abraham nor Moses lived to see fulfilled has come true again. The longest journey ever travelled by a people has reached its destination. However deep the difficulties, a new era in Jewish history has begun.

The Ever-Dying People One of the great themes of Jewish history is announced early in the pages of the Bible:

God’s word came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Fear not, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward will be very great.” But Abram said, “O Lord, God, what can You give me, since I remain without a child?” Abram continued: “You have given me no children. A servant in my household will be my heir.” Suddenly God’s word came to him. “That one will not be your heir. Instead a son born to you shall be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look at the sky and count the stars. See if you can count them.” He added, “So shall your descendants be.” (Genesis 15:1–5)

In retrospect we think of Abram as the first Jew. But he feared that he would be the last. Would there be another generation to carry on the covenant?

The theme stays with us in countless variations. Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel are unable to have children, other than by a miracle. At the beginning of the book of Exodus, the picture is reversed. Suddenly the Israelites are fertile and prolific. Their numbers increase. Then Pharaoh decrees: Let all the male children be drowned. Again the people of Israel seem to be reaching an end. Again it is averted only by a miracle.

A Jewish historian once called Israel the ever-dying people. “The world,” he said, “makes many images of Israel, but Israel makes only one image of itself – that of a being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.” It has often seemed as if the end was in sight. Before the Israelites had even entered the land, Moses had already prophesied catastrophe and exile. It came. After King Solomon, the people split in two. In the eighth century BCE, the northern kingdom was defeated by the Assyrians. Its people were deported and eventually assimilated – the so-called lost ten tribes.

Little more than a century later the southern kingdom too was overwhelmed, this time by the Babylonians. In a terrifying image, the prophet Ezekiel saw his people as a valley of dry bones. But as he foresaw, they came to life again. They returned, renewed the covenant and rebuilt the Temple. But by the second century of the Common Era, with the Temple once again in ruins and Israel under repressive Roman rule, the rabbis made a remarkable confession. “If we were rational,” they said, “we would decide not to marry and have children, and let the family of Abraham come to an end.”

Fortunately reason did not prevail. Instead, faith did. But throughout the religious persecutions of the Middle Ages, above all the Spanish expulsion, it seemed as if the Jewish drama was drawing to its close. In the nineteenth century, as Europe opened the doors of emancipation, the end was predicted for the opposite reason. Judaism would be killed by kindness. Jews would assimilate into oblivion. Almost all the thinkers of this period saw themselves as the last guardians of a dying tradition. In the twentieth century a different and unprecedentedly brutal ending was announced, Hitler’s Final Solution, in which a third of the Jewish people died. Even today, in a period of rebirth, we speak the language of crisis. Jewish conversations are about schisms and divisions, the decline in religious observance, and low birth rates. We are, as Abba Eban said, “the people that can’t take Yes for an answer.”

Anxiety, pessimism and fear about the future have been a constant theme of Jewish reflection since Abraham confessed his doubts as to whether there would be a next generation of the covenant. But there was always the answering promise, stated most memorably by the prophet Jeremiah: that the Jewish people would live as long as there was a sun by day and stars by night. The ever-dying people has proved to be the people of eternity.

Though He may Slay Me, Yet I will Trust in Him For Jews of the Middle Ages the Spanish expulsion was a tragedy that turned the world upside down. For centuries Spain had been the scene of Diaspora Jewry’s golden age. Jews flourished and became poets, philosophers, scientists and statesmen. Then from 1391 to 1492 came an escalating series of persecutions and massacres. Jews, terrified at what was happening, began to convert to Christianity, though in secret they remained Jews. Marranos, they were called. But this brought an even greater terror, the Inquisition. Finally in 1492 those that remained were expelled. It was the worst disaster in Jewish history since the second Temple had been destroyed.

Could fate have anything yet worse in store? It could. The historian Solomon ibn Verga, who lived through those events, tells of an incident that occurred to one of the ships carrying Jews away. An epidemic developed among the passengers and the captain refused to carry on the journey. He made for the nearest land and put them ashore. There, most of them died. The survivors began to search for the nearest town, among them a young Jew with a wife and two children. After a few days of wandering, the wife died. The man continued his journey, carrying his children, until he fainted from hunger. When he regained consciousness he found that they too had both died.

Ibn Verga continues:

In great grief, he rose to his feet and said: “O Lord of all the universe, You are doing a great deal that I might desert my faith. But I say to You that – even against the will of heaven – a Jew I am and a Jew I shall remain. And neither that which You have brought upon me, nor anything You may bring upon me in the future, will be of any avail.” He gathered some earth and grass and buried his sons, and went forth in search of a settlement.

That remarkable speech, which overwhelms us by the sheer power of its faith, is itself an echo of far more ancient words – words spoken by the biblical Job. Job too had lost everything, his property and then his sons. He too had reason to believe that heaven had turned against him. “God has wronged me and drawn His net around me,” he said, “but I know that my Redeemer lives.” He cursed the day he was born, but he said: “Though God may slay me, yet I will trust in Him.”

Those words echoed again this century. A Jewish writer tried to describe the last hours in the life of a pious East European Jew, Yossel Rackover, who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He imagined him saying this anguished prayer: “And these are my last words to You, my wrathful God…. You have done everything to make me renounce You, to make me lose faith in You, but I die exactly as I have lived, a believer.”

Why do the innocent suffer? The question is asked many times in the Bible, and if Moses and Jeremiah and Job were not given the answer, neither are we. But in Job and the refugee from Spain and Yossel Rackover we hear a faith deeper than questions or answers. It is the knowledge that God is with us even in the valley of the shadow of death. He can be spoken to, even when the world is falling apart. In that knowledge is a terrible strength: the strength to live through tragedy with the human spirit unbroken.

The words I have quoted, spoken in some of the deepest darkness ever known to man, are to me the most awe-inspiring proof that faith is stronger than any doubt, and that God has lit a flame in the human soul that no force on earth can extinguish.

The Teacher as Hero In the fifth century before the Common Era an event occurred that was to have a decisive effect on the character of Jewish life. In the previous century the kingdom of Judah had suffered conquest and exile at the hands of the Babylonians. The Temple had been destroyed. The country was in ruins. But the Babylonians in turn were defeated by the Persians. Gradually the Judeans, or Jews as they came to be called, were allowed to return. They began rebuilding the country and the Temple. The greatest moment came when the people assembled in Jerusalem and rededicated themselves to the covenant. Ezra, a priest and scribe, stood in front of the people and read to them from the Torah scroll, the book of the teachings of Moses. This is how the Bible describes the event:

When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, all the people assembled as one man in the square before the water gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the book of the Teaching of Moses, which God had commanded for Israel. On the first day of the seventh month, Ezra the priest brought the Teaching before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. He read it aloud from daybreak until noon…. All the people listened attentively to the book of the Teaching…. As he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen, Amen.” Then they bowed down and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. (Nehemiah 8:1–6)

Ezra was assisted by a group of Levites who acted as interpreters and teachers, explaining the meaning of the Torah to the assembled people. Shortly afterwards the leaders formally pledged themselves to keep the covenant, and fixed their seals to the agreement.

Ezra was a distinctive kind of Jewish hero – not a king or a prophet, not a poet or a general; not even, though he was these things, a priest or a scribe. Ezra was a teacher. Moses too is known by Jews simply as Moshe Rabbenu, “Moses our teacher.” Even God Himself was seen by the rabbis as a sage, discussing Jewish law with the angels, and as the God who had appeared at Mount Sinai to instruct His children in the eternal teachings.

Some five hundred years after Ezra, the Jewish people faced a new loss of land, sovereignty and Temple, this time under the Romans. Eventually they were to trace their survival to the request made by a rabbi, Jochanan ben Zakkai. “Give me,” he is said to have asked the Romans, “Yavneh and its sages.” Yavneh housed an academy for the study of Torah. There, in that enclave of teachers and disciples, the civilisation of sacred study called rabbinic Judaism was kept alive.

It was one of the most fateful intellectual achievements of all time, because for the next eighteen centuries it united as a people Jews scattered across the face of the earth. They had nothing else in common – not land or language or culture – except this, that they were the “People of the Book,” the Book given by Moses, taught by Ezra, rescued by Jochanan ben Zakkai, and studied unbrokenly in every generation since.

Perhaps each culture has its ideal type of human being: a political leader or a military hero, a charismatic leader or a saint. Judaism’s ideal type is a teacher, an interpreter of tradition, surrounded by disciples asking difficult questions. Judaism renewed itself through study. Its teachers did something more lasting than winning wars or ruling states. They kept the teachings alive.

Family Quarrels There is a scene at the beginning of Moses’ career which foreshadows a lasting aspect of Jewish character. Moses had been hidden by his mother at birth, afraid that otherwise he would be killed. He had been found by a daughter of Pharaoh and raised as an Egyptian prince.

One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and he saw their hard labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. He looked around and saw no one else. Then he hit the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting, so he said to the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” The man replied, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?” (Exodus 2:11–14)

An unpromising beginning. But it signals two things that have been motifs of Jewish history.

The first is a kind of fierce individualism that threatens to make Jews ungovernable. We see two members of this enslaved people fighting one another rather than confronting the Egyptians. When Moses intervenes in the name of justice, they resent it, “Who are you to be our judge?” Even after Moses has led the people into freedom, they remain obstinate and rebellious, not easily led. Several times Moses yields to despair and has to be persuaded by God to carry on.

At other key moments in our history, Jewish unity has seemed both necessary and impossible. The Maccabean uprising in the second century BCE was as much a conflict between zealous and Hellenising Jews as it was between Jews and Greeks. When the Romans later attacked Jerusalem, the Jews within were bitterly divided, fighting among themselves. Despite the enemy at the gates, there was civil war. When the Romans eventually seized power, one contemporary, Rabbi Haninah, the deputy High Priest, was moved to say: “Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, we would swallow one another alive.” The same tensions mark Jewish society today, in Israel and elsewhere. Jews long for unity. Rarely do we find it. We are a people with a tradition of individual dignity and liberty. We are critical of leaders, and have little reverence for power.

What then has held Jews together? That, surely, is the second element of the scene of Moses’ youth. Moses had been brought up as an Egyptian in Pharaoh’s court. He had before him a life of comfort. Few people knew him to be a Hebrew, born to the people who were slaves. Nonetheless when for the first time in his life he sees the condition of his kinsmen, he knows he cannot deny his identity. He enters into the Israelites’ suffering. He is incensed at its injustice. He belongs to his afflicted people. His destiny lies with them.

That same sense led alienated Jews in the nineteenth century, most famously Theodor Herzl, back to their people. More recently it lay behind the rescue of the Jews of Ethiopia, the worldwide campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry, and the universal Jewish concern when Israel is in danger. We have an overwhelming sense of kinship when we see other Jews suffering.

How then are we to describe this mystery of Jewish peoplehood, with its inner conflicts on the one hand, and on the other its sense of a common bond, a shared fate? Surely the answer is this, that more than Jews are a nation or a faith, they are a family. The members of a family have quarrels. But they know their destiny is interlinked. Jews began life as a family, the children of Israel. A family, they remain.

Renegade Children It is not easy to be a heretic in Judaism. We have few principles of faith. Those there are, are open to several interpretations. Jewish faith is expressed more in law than doctrine, more in what we do than in what we believe.

But there was one famous heretic in the rabbinic tradition. His name was Elisha ben Abuyah and he lived in the second century of the Common Era. The rabbis called him Acher, “the other one,” the one who became an apostate. Some say he was attracted by Greek culture, others that he was overwhelmed by the injustice of a world in which the righteous died the death of martyrs.

The picture we have of him is fascinating. Before his heresy he was a great rabbi. Among his students was Rabbi Meir, who was to become one of the great Jewish sages. According to tradition, Rabbi Meir remained devoted to his teacher even after his apostasy:

Once Acher was riding on a horse on the Sabbath, and Rabbi Meir was walking alongside him to learn Torah from his mouth. Acher said to him: “Meir, turn back. I have measured by the paces of my horse that we have reached the Sabbath limit. Beyond here, you are forbidden to walk.” Rabbi Meir replied, “You too turn back.” But Acher answered, “I cannot turn back. For I heard a voice from behind the veil of heaven saying, ‘Turn back, O rebellious children – all except Acher.’”

It is a remarkable scene. Acher is desecrating the Sabbath by riding a horse. But the bond between teacher and disciple is too strong to be broken. The two of them travel together, arguing and debating. Eventually they reach the city limits, beyond which it is forbidden to walk on the Sabbath. Meir, the faithful Jew, has not noticed. Acher, the heretic, has. He tells his disciple to turn back.

Both of them realise that the point they have reached is not just the border of the city. It is the border of faith. Within lies Jewish tradition. Beyond is the unknown country of apostasy. Meir begs Acher too to turn back, to rejoin the faith. Acher says he cannot. He has already gone too far. It is as if heaven itself had ruled against his repentance. So they go their separate ways.

There is no easy ending. But in the modern age the story has come to represent the tense relationship between Judaism and Jewish intellectuals. Some of the most revolutionary architects of modern thought – Spinoza and Freud, Marx and Trotsky, Einstein and Wittgenstein, Proust and Kafka, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss – were Jews. Most were lapsed or alienated, some were only half-Jewish, others renounced their faith. Perhaps they should not be thought of as Jews at all. Nonetheless, many scholars have found in them something distinctively Jewish.

This may be because being a Jew is not just a matter of religion. It means belonging to a people, and Freud, Einstein and Kafka felt their Jewishness deeply. It may be an ancient tradition, going back to Abraham, Moses and the prophets, that sees Judaism as a protest against the idolatries of the age, as if there is something religious in creating a revolution of thought. It may be the passion for reason, freedom and justice – Jewish values, even when they are turned against Judaism itself. Or it may simply be the profoundly Jewish condition of exile taken one stage further. Many of these figures were exiles from everything, even their own past, and had the unusually clear vision of the outsider.

The alienated Jew is an intriguing phenomenon. He is Elisha ben Abuya talking to Rabbi Meir at the border between faith and heresy. Something deep unites them even as they know they must part company. It is the great paradox of Jewish life these past few centuries that Jews, even when they have rejected their heritage, have kept on carrying it with them.

The Day of Grief Jewish history sometimes seems to have been written in tears. More than most other nations, our collective story is told in terms of exiles and expulsions, persecutions and martyrdoms, inquisitions, pogroms and holocausts. Despite this, the tone of Judaism is not sad. There is more celebration than lament. Jewish teaching is expressed in stories with a happy ending. Often it is told in jokes. The Hebrew language has no real word for tragedy, and modern Hebrew had to borrow one. Judaism is a deeply optimistic faith, except on one day of the Jewish year.

On the Ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the two Temples, we fast and sit like mourners. It is the one day we give over to grief. We read that most powerful of elegies, the book of Lamentations:

How deserted lies the city, Once so full of people! How like a widow is she, Who was once great among the nations! She who was queen among the provinces Has now become a slave… This is why I weep And my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, No one to restore my spirit. (Lamentations 1:1, 16)

Those words were spoken over the first destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The sense of desolation at the second destruction, by the Romans, was no less intense. There were Jews who vowed never again to eat meat or drink wine so long as Jerusalem lay in ruins. A rabbi of the second century, Shimon bar Yohai, ruled that Jews were forbidden ever to laugh until the land was rebuilt. To this day we break a glass at every Jewish wedding to remember this grief in the midst of joy.

Yet the sheer force of that anguish turned other tragedies into events Jews could live through. Many centuries ago a rabbi was asked why Jews no longer set aside new days as anniversaries of sorrow. He answered: Because there are not enough days in the year. So, gradually, all grief came to be concentrated on that one day, the Ninth of Av. It is then that we remember the medieval martyrs and the victims of the Crusades and the pogroms. It is then that we say the memorial prayer for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis.

The Jewish laws of mourning for a lost relative are strictly defined. There is a period of grief, but it has an end. It is followed, not by forgetting, but by consolation. As with an individual, so with a people. After the Ninth of Av come seven weeks of consolation in which we read from the closing chapters of Isaiah, the magnificent poetry of national hope.

The Jewish calendar is far more than a cycle of holy days. It is a way of structuring our emotions, leading us through different feelings at different times so that no one mood overwhelms us. Jewish life has its contradictions, but they are resolved not by ruling that one attitude is right, the other wrong, but by saying that each has its proper time. As Ecclesiastes says, there are times to work and times to rest, times to remember the past and times to hope for the future, times to grieve and times to be comforted.

The calendar of Judaism assigns moods to days so that the whole Jewish people moves through a collective rhythm of feeling. By concentrating our grief into the Ninth of Av, Judaism ensured that the tragic past would never be forgotten, but neither would it overshadow all else. For we can no more live today under the perpetual shadow of the Holocaust than the Jews of the first century could under the agony of the Temple’s ruin. Lamentations is our book of tears, and the Ninth of Av is its day. Then the book is closed until next year. We rise and return to the celebration of life.

Resistance One of the turning points in Jewish history came in the struggle against the Greeks that we celebrate in the festival of Hanukkah.

Israel had become a pawn in the struggle between the two great dynasties that followed Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. In 175 BCE Antiochus IV came to the throne in Syria, determined to turn Israel into part of his empire, not just militarily but culturally too. In the Temple, he set up a statue of Zeus. Impure animals were offered up as sacrifices. The practice of Judaism was banned. Jews called it “the abomination of desolation.” In Modi’in an old priest called Mattathias rose in revolt. His sons, most famously Judah the Maccabee, continued the struggle. Eventually they took Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple.

The revolution, though, might have died almost before it had begun. The book of Maccabees describes the moment when the rebels fled and hid in the desert. Antiochus’ army pursued them. The day they found them was a Shabbat. Mattathias’ supporters, all of them deeply pious Jews, refused to wage war on the day of rest. They were massacred. They died as religious heroes, but they died nonetheless.

Those who remained faced a fateful dilemma. Was it better to die or fight back?

When Mattityahu and his friends heard the news they mourned greatly. But they said to one another: “If we all do as our brothers did, and if we do not fight for our lives and teachings, we will be destroyed from the face of the earth.” That day they discussed and decided: “If someone makes war against us on the Sabbath day, we will fight back, and let us not all die as our brothers died in their hiding place.”

That decision to resist and fight back ended in victory. Without it Israel might have remained a Greek province, its religion extinguished. There would have been no Judaism, indeed no Christianity.

Almost the same sequence of events occurred more than two thousand years later. The year was 1943, and the place, the Warsaw ghetto. There Jews were herded by the Nazis, seven to a room. More than eighty thousand died of hunger and sickness. Hundreds of thousands were taken in trains to the concentration camps. Once again the fateful question was asked: to die or fight back?

For eighteen hundred years Jews had become used to martyrdom. They had died, as they did at Auschwitz, for kiddush ha-Shem, “sanctification of God’s name.” But in the Warsaw ghetto a religious leader, Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum, made a remarkable speech. “This is a time,” he said, “for the sanctification of life, not the sanctification of martyrdom. In the past, our enemies sought Jewish souls. So Jews sacrificed their bodies and refused to give their souls. But now the enemies demand the Jew’s body, so he must defend his body and preserve his life.”

It was a turning point as great as that of Mattathias. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose up to defend themselves. From 19 April to 16 May, weak, few in number, poorly armed and surrounded, they held off the German army. Eventually they were defeated, but they had won a great moral victory. Since then – most notably in the State of Israel – Jewish character has been transformed. After the Holocaust, the religion of martyrdom has acquired an ethic of defence.

Jews hate wars. Perhaps no other people prays so often and so passionately for peace. But sanctifying life may mean defending life. In an unredeemed world, one may sometimes have to take up arms to save life itself. It took two extraordinary crises to provoke the Jewish people into resistance, the one in Modi’in, the other in the Warsaw ghetto. For there is only one thing Judaism values above peace – and that is life itself.

From the Ends of the Heavens In almost his last words, Moses addressed the Israelites and drew a terrifying picture of the future. They had not yet crossed the Jordan or entered the land, but already he foresaw a time when the people would lose direction. They would desert the covenant. They would fight and lose wars and be scattered to the winds of dispersion. Then he looked beyond even this distant future to the far horizon of hope:

When all these blessings and curses I have set before you have come to pass, and you take them to heart in all the countries to which the Lord your God has banished you; and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul, according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity and bring you back in love. He will gather you from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the ends of the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. (Deuteronomy 30:1–4)

That vision brought together the two great contrasting Jewish themes: exile and exodus, dispersion and ingathering. It has been the key text of the State of Israel these past four decades.

The Jews of Israel are one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse populations anywhere. In its small population of just over three million there are grandchildren of the East European pietists who came in the nineteenth century in search of the messianic age, and of the secular intellectuals who saw Israel as the rational solution to antisemitism. There are the children of Holocaust survivors, and there are the immigrants from Britain, South Africa, the United States and South America who have come in search of a place where Jewishness shapes the public domain, not just private life.

The story of the ingathering has had a series of dramatic moments. In 1949 almost all the fifty thousand Jews of Yemen, who had formed a community there since pre-Islamic times, was airlifted to Israel. These Jews, who had had little contact with the modern world, were not surprised when they saw the planes that were to carry them. Had the Bible not said that God carried the Israelites on eagle’s wings? Here were the eagle’s wings again, even if made and piloted by man.

In 1950 another ancient community, the 120,000 Jews of Iraq, was resettled in Israel in what was known, again with a biblical echo, as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. At the end of 1984 Operation Moses brought to Israel most of the 25,000 Jews of Ethiopia, people who had lost contact with mainstream Judaism since antiquity. And there is the continuing trickle of Jews from the Soviet Union and the hope that one day soon there will be more.

There are white Jews and black Jews, speaking more tongues than were heard at Babel. There are some whose culture is modern, others medieval, others ancient. Each carries a family history of persecutions and deliverances, traditions and cultural borrowings, from which one could almost piece together an encyclopaedia of human civilisation over the past two thousand years. It makes for a society that is as unpredictable as a storm and as multicoloured as a rainbow. Yet each is a child of Abraham, sharing the covenant, its history and hopes.

Israel is a secular state which is religious despite itself. Many of the Jewish leaders who dreamed of the return of Zion were consciously trying to change the course of Jewish history, from a story dominated by God into one written by human beings. But it keeps writing itself in biblical terms, nowhere more so than in the modern ingathering, a story unprecedented, yet foretold by Moses: the coming together of Jews from the furthest corners of the earth.

The People of the Book Throughout these portraits, I have been suggesting that certain biblical events and images recur repeatedly throughout Jewish history: the exiles and wanderings and national homecomings; scenes of catastrophe and rebirth; the conflicts between brothers and the reconciliations; the never-ending argument with God about the justice of history and society. It is not simply that Jews are the people of the Book. It is as if the Bible were the Book of the people, uncannily telling its story in advance.

It is well over two thousand years since the last sentences of the Hebrew Bible were written, but its themes have stayed with us, perhaps more so in the twentieth century than in any other. Search the contemporary literature, and you will find no more terrifying description of the Holocaust than Moses’ visions of future catastrophe, no more searching reflections on God after Auschwitz than the book of Job, no more precise metaphor of the revival of Jewish statehood forty years ago than Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones that came together and lived again. Biblical themes form the leitmotifs, of collective Jewish experience, seemingly without end.

Why? From the vantage-point of faith, we would call such a history providence, the working out of an ancient covenant between God and Abraham, reaffirmed at Mount Sinai with the Israelites, and renewed again by the returning exiles in the days of Ezra. Perhaps such a momentous claim needs less of a leap of faith than it seems. For a covenant is mutual. It needs the agreement of two partners. Not only did God commit Himself to the destiny of a particular people. The Jewish people in turn committed itself to God and His word. The story of Jewish survival testifies not only to the presence of God in history but also to the decisions of generation after generation of Jews to continue the covenant. The human aspect of Jewish history is no less awe-inspiring than the mysteries of providence.

For this is a people that decided to live by a Book. George Steiner once used the phrase, “Our homeland, the text.” By this he meant that for most of their history, Jews were dispersed through many lands, languages and cultures, united only by the past and future and way of life they found in the Bible’s pages. It was their home, and they kept returning to it. Their laws, literature and philosophy were cast in the form of biblical commentaries. How then could they avoid seeing what happened to them as another kind of commentary to the Bible? Their conflicts with surrounding cultures were Jacob wrestling with the angel. Their suffering was Isaac bound on the altar. Their exile was Egypt. Their hope was another exodus.

There is a special Jewish word for this kind of commentary – midrash. It was practised by the rabbis, and before them by the prophets. Literally it means “exposition” or “investigation” of the biblical text. But what it represents is the reading of the present into the past. When Jews no longer had miracles or prophets, they still held in their hands the text of the word of God. So they searched it for an explanation of their situation. Midrash, or commentary, took the place of prophecy. Jewish history itself became a series of commentaries to words already written.

Of course, the Jewish people did not survive intact. There were persecutions, conversions, defections and assimilations. Isaiah said that a remnant would return, and only a remnant did. But somehow that remnant was the one that held most tenaciously to the biblical vision, as if the words themselves had given it strength. That, perhaps, is as near as we will come to the mystery of Jewish survival. To paraphrase a famous saying: More than the Jewish people has preserved the Book, the Book has preserved the Jewish people.