Some years ago when I was studying in Israel at a yeshivah, a fellow-student from the USA sadly and unexpectedly lost his father. It was November 1997 and the ground staff at Ben-Gurion Airport were on strike, meaning there were no international passenger flights leaving the country, which in turn meant it was impossible for my friend to make it back to the United States in time for his father’s funeral.
One of the rabbis in the yeshivah alerted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office to this desperate situation. The only plane that was able to leave the country was the Prime Minister’s and, on hearing about my friend’s circumstances, he welcomed him aboard his flight to Paris, allowing him to make an onward journey to New York and arrive in time for the funeral.
Whenever I tell this story, I still get goosebumps. There are thousands of stories which demonstrate the importance that Israel attaches to every Jew but this for me, no doubt due to my own personal connection to it, illustrates like no other the emboldened sense of peoplehood that the birth of modern Israel has enabled.
The early years of Zionism, with its interpretation of Judaism in nationalistic terms, drew much criticism from both Orthodox and Reform alike. For the latter, because the movement seemed incompatible with their idea of the people Israel’s mission to the nations; for the former, because it compromised the messianic hope, traditionally seen as a matter of direct divine intervention rather than human endeavour.
Such arguments are, of course, a far cry from today’s reality with Israel so prominent in the consciousness of virtually all spectrums across the Jewish world.
Israel has certainly enriched the Jewish experience and imbued a sense of confidence within so much of world Jewry. What, though, of Judaism in the land? Can Judaism thrive in the Jewish state?
The late Rabbi Louis Jacobs rarely wrote on the subject of Israel but in one important address to mark the centenary of Zionism, he warned of three necessary correctives to the prevailing tropes of religious Zionists that are perhaps more pertinent today than ever.
The first surrounds the conception of the Torah itself, regarded all too often as a static picture in which all the problems of land and statehood can find their direct solution in the pages of the Bible.
It is Jacobs’s approach to Torah, as divinely revealed through the historical experiences of our people, which enables us to confront questions of holiness and promise in relation to the land through association rather than by divine fiat. This understanding of Torah should facilitate a more dynamic halachic method than the attempts of Israel’s present rabbinic leadership to impose divine law.
The second area to which Rabbi Jacobs draws attention is the preference among religious Zionists for the more particularistic biblical texts over those of a more universalistic tone. Judaism has always thrived when it has held the particular and universal as a balancing dialectic together; so a focus on the particularistic carries with it the danger of an over-emphasis of God’s special concern for his people at the expense of an identification with the other.
The late Rabbi David Hartman, founder of Israel’s Shalom Hartman Institute, reminds us “we were born as a people within the desert in order to understand that the land must always be perceived as an instrumental and never as an absolute value’’.
The theologian David Novak, in his recent book Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory, draws from Jewish history a novel approach, arguing that faithful Zionists need not surrender the Israeli public sphere either to secularists or to “a dictatorship of rabbinical clerics”.
Rabbi Novak appeals to the tradition’s earlier rudimentary legislation in the Noahide laws and makes the compelling case that their public affirmation by a Jewish polity is the best foundation of a state that is both Jewish and democratic. The advantage of such a stance is it would ground the state in a broad universal ethic under divine sovereignty, without requiring the personal acceptance of revealed law as normative or that Jewish religious practices must be enforced in public.
The final element of Rabbi Jacobs’s address was his strong questioning of the introduction of messianism into the realities of present-day political life. This is a trend that has emerged particularly since the Six-Day War and helped to fuel the settler movement. It is dangerous because eschatology tends to justify actions and thoughts that would otherwise be unjustifiable.
Perhaps the most crucial corrective is the strong riposte Jacobs gives to the now familiar phrase so often trumpeted by religious Zionists, that the emergence of the state of Israel is “the beginning of redemption”. As he reminds us, such a concept is anathema to Judaism. “We are either redeemed or unredeemed”, as he says.
As Israel embarks on its next 70 years, a recognition of Torah’s revelation over time, the balancing of the particular and the universal and a halt to widespread messianic fervour are surely important ingredients for Judaism to truly thrive in the land.
Simon Eder is director of the Friends of Louis Jacobs
