Zionism Broadly Redefined

Transcription

1 Zionism Broadly Redefined A R e l i g i o u s P e r s p e c t i v e Elliot B. Gertel The Zionist movement has been described as an effort to make the Jews happy by Professor Stanley Mellon. After the Holocaust, some Jewish thinkers taught that it is mandate enough even a religious mandate that the Jewish people simply survive. Whether we believe that Jews should simply survive or that we must now be happy as well (the two need not be mutually exclusive), we all have to contend with the ancient mandate of the biblical Covenant: that we know we are capable of holiness because the Covenant is down to earth, built upon a People and a Land, and upon the promise of a People realizing its full potential in that Land. When I read the major voices of Zionism, especially those anthologized by Arthur Hertzberg in The Zionist Idea; when I, as a Conservative rabbi, read the major Zionist statements of Solomon Schechter and Solomon Goldman and Simon Greenberg and of other great pulpit Zionist advocates and activists including the great Reform Zionists, like Abba Hillel Silver I find tremendous spiritual resources of vision and identity as a Jew. Since the very beginnings of our people, the Land of Israel has done that to us. The feelings and ties and commitments are as old as the Covenant itself. God tells Abraham: I will establish My Covenant between Me and you, and your seed after you throughout their generations for an everlasting Covenant, to be a God to you and to your seed after you. And I will give to you, and to your seed after you, the land of your sojourning, the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession (Genesis 17:7-8). It is no exaggeration to say that the very thought of the Land of Israel should stir every aspect of Jewish being spiritual, ethical and cultural in matters of both identity and religious commitment. As Herzl wrote, Conservative Judaism, Vol. 46 No. 3 Copyright 1994 by the Rabbinical Assembly 55

2 56 CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM I do not bring you a new idea but an immemorial one. Yes, it is a universal idea and therein lies its strength old as our people which never even in the days of its bitterest need ceased to nourish it. This idea is that of the foundation of the Jewish State. As the halutzim sang: Now it is clear to me. I was here yesterday and a thousand years ago. I still recognize my footprints in the sand, and the wind following the moon. On visiting Israel, you don t have to be religious to be moved to exclaim with the poet: I will pour out my soul where the spirit of God was once poured forth on the elect. Zion should do that to us. It should make us feel that way. Yet many observers, especially after the most recent Zionist Congress, note that Zionism seems to have lost its spirit, its vision, its soul. Do we need Zionist ideology now that we have the State? Or do we need many ideologies, depending upon our religious oudook or lack of it, on our praise of American Zionism or contempt of it? I would suggest that the major problem we now face is the fact that we have not redefined Zionism in the light of precisely these challenges and many more. We have been stymied from even talking about Zionism from a broad enough perspective. Let me offer three reasons we have allowed ourselves to become derailed from even discussing the term, Zionism meaningfully. Three Wastes of Energy First, we have been arguing about who is not a Zionist. We recall Ben Gurion s famous broadside that only those who came to Israel can be called the actual builders and founders of the State. The immigrant Jews, he said, are the builders of Zion, whether or not they called themselves Zionists. The ordinary Jew, without a Zionist background, who came here has done more to build the State than an individual who calls himself a Zionist but who has not come. Ben Gurion insisted that American Jews who don t emigrate to Israel should be placed on the same level as all other Jews who support Israel and seek its welfare, but cannot be called Zionists. You may remember the controversy that Ben Gurion created in the fifties during speeches to American Jewish groups when he quoted the Talmudic statement that He who lives outside the Land of Israel is as one who has no God. He questioned not only the Zionism of American Jews; he questioned their religious identity. That provoked many sermons in the fifties and sixties, including a famous sermon by Rabbi Israel Levinthal, who responded with another Talmudic statement: But he who lives in Babylonia is like one who lives in Israel. That is the way energy was used for so-called dialogue on Zionism during; the early decades of the State. Things have changed. Twenty years ago

3 Elliot B. Gertel 57 when visiting Israel you expected to be asked, Why don t you settle here? When are you coming? Today we are not asked that. Many Israelis now look at American Jewish settlers as crazy. Their morale, too, is not what it was and their Zionism is not so passionate. Israelis have stopped asking, and we have stopped expecting to be put on the spot. I wish that more Israelis would put us on the spot. The second reason we could not get very far in defining Zionism for ourselves is the fact that the main agenda of American Jewish discussion of Israel has had to be the defense of the Jewish State. At first it was the sheer physical defense of the people by rallying for their security and capacity for military readiness in the face of so many hostile neighbors. And it included defense of The Zionist Idea, to use Arthur Hertzberg s phrase, as an ancient and basic impulse in Judaism and in Jews. Most recently a defense of the very name Zionist was mounted, against charges of racism. We have had to rally to Israel s side in fearsome wars and in a long war of attrition in which Arab nations used both terrorism and oil production as leverage to weaken Western support of Israel, in addition to their continued assault upon Israel. We also have had to counter the patent distortions of the press in its coverage of many events in Israel. Now our energies must also be harnessed to respond to revisionist histories by some Palestinian and other Arab thinkers that would make Israel the cause of every aggression and conflict in the Middle East, even among Arabs themselves. This revisionism is becoming a challenge on college campuses second in virulence only to those who deny the extent of evil against Jews during the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers cannot be labeled revisionists, because they wantonly perpetuate the evils of the Holocaust. Revisionists on the State of Israel, however, will have to be debated, because some such revisionists are Israelis who view the Jewish State s wars from a rather skewed perspective, and because the State which, thank God, is a reality, is subject to any kind of historical revisionism within and without, just as American historians, for example, have questioned Lincoln s or Theodore Roosevelt s motivations. Abba Eban s personal witness book and television program about the founding of the State and its first four decades is perhaps the crowning achievement of presenting events and personalities in a fair and even selfscrutinizing way. Eban shows that from the very beginning Israel has been forced into tragic sacrifices that no other nation has been forced to make. He notes, for example, that Israel was the only nation that had to plead for admission to the United Nations. These realities have placed defense of Israel, on many levels, at the top of the agenda of American Jews, whether affiliated as Zionists or not. Consequently, there seems to have been little time in which to explore the meaning of Zionism itself. The third reason we have not truly been able to explore the meaning of Zionism is that we American Jews have been too busy trying to decide who is a good Zionist and who is not, who is a great supporter of Israel and who is not. For about twenty-five years there has been a succession of American

4 58 CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM Jewish groups that many have loved to hate including Breira, an early peace group advocating negotiation with the PLO in the seventies and Peace Now. I remember when Breira was first organized. I was a college student. I didn t agree with them. But I also remember thinking that it was only natural and to be expected that there would be people on the extreme left of opinion within Jewish community responses to Israel. In fact, I remember thinking that you almost need such a spectrum of opinion to keep everyone s responses thoughtful, just as there has been a tremendous spectrum of opinion among Zionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For quite a while I agreed with Rabbi Harold Schulweis that American Jews do not have the right to speak out on Israel s policies because we do not live there. I am no longer so sure. Although I am convinced that we will never be in the Israelis shoes unless we live there, we must have a good understanding of Israel s policies before we speak. And we have to be very careful when we do decide to speak out, lest our comments be exploited by haters of Israel. But our concerns about who among us is helping or hurting Israel, who is doing too much or too little, have distracted us from talking about Zionism in any meaningful way. We must remember that Zionism is greater than any debate about who is loyal to Israel, greater even than the necessary defense of Israel and, I dare say, greater than any argument about whether you have to live in Israel to deserve to be called a Zionist. For many years, because of these distractions, the overriding significance of Zionism for each and every Jew at the end of the twentieth century has not been explored in a manner cognizant of the full range of spiritual and personal issues involved for all of us. As Horace Kallen observed decades ago: The problem of Judaism cannot be solved by itself. It requires to be treated as part of the solution of the Jewish People. As Ben Gurion put it, attempting to define the Jewish faith: The Jewish faith is not only monotheism. Intrinsic to it is the national and territorial motif, which led to the profound spiritual allegiance of the Jews to their ancient land even while they lived in exile. Intrinsic to it is the body of moral principles, proclaiming the supreme values of righteousness, mercy and love. And equally intrinsic to it is the idea of redemption, both of the Jewish people and of all the peoples of the world. The Spiritual Significance of Zionism The most profound effort in recent decades to explore the spiritual significance of Zionism was that of Abraham Joshua Heschel immediately after the Six Day War. I refer to his book, Israel: An Echo of Eternity. In that volume Heschel wanted to explain the classic Jewish response to Zion intellectual and emotional, textual and personal just as in other volumes he had explained the

5 Elliot B. Gertel 59 Jewish experience of the Sabbath, of Torah and, above all, of the God who has shown us the way with all these observances, including love of Zion. Heschel wanted to explain to non-jews, to the many Christian groups who had seemed so aloof during Israel s greatest danger, why Jews had felt as though the last Bible in the world was about to be thrown into the fire. And he wanted Jews to come to terms with their feelings about Zion, however mixed, emotional, perplexing, or embarrassing. He wanted us to learn to talk about Israel by seeing the big picture, both historical and spiritual. Heschel saw Zionism as an imperative of the Bible, of the ancient Covenant, the only response to which is an oath of loyalty to Zion because God has promised that the People would return to their land. Zionism, he wrote, was born out of memory, out of ritual and prayer, out of faith in the promise, out of loyalty to the biblical command, never to relinquish hope for Zion and Jerusalem. Heschel guides us toward appreciating Zionism from the broadest possible perspective. One does not have to share his specific theological assumptions or to posit them as most meaningful to the search (though I do on both counts) in order to appreciate his frame of reference. Ahad Ha-am had insisted that our religion is a product of our national spirit. Heschel would respond that the national spirit, a vague term, grows out of the biblical Covenant and must be understood that way. The fact of the matter is, however, that the very discussion of terms like Covenant and national spirit shows how intertwined these concepts are. It is the challenge of the Land of Israel down through the ages, and of the State of Israel in our time may it endure and prosper! which keeps these words in our vocabulary. Israel keeps the discussion, even the debates, of historical and spiritual matters an urgent, immediate and basic enterprise. Zionism should tell us what that means to us and how we should respond. A Working Definition o f Zionism Let me offer my own working definition of Zionism. Zionism is Jewish commitment to respond to the mandate. Biblical and historical, religious and cultural, national and personal. To settle in the State of Israel and to contend with its claim to be the center of Jewish culture. Zionism is more than what American or other Jews do for Israel. It is what Israel does to us. Zionism is our Hineni ( Here I am! ) in any form, in many forms, to the call of the Land, to its claim upon us. We can be Zionists when we say that we prefer to live in America but will do everything possible to help Israel only to the extent that we are prepared to account for why we remain here in the light of the challenge to live there. Ben Gurion was not correct when he declared that the only real Zionists are living in Israel. But he was correct when he said that the State of Israel should challenge the way American Jews look at themselves. Maybe we will be judged by what we export to Israel. Maybe Conservative Jews, for exam-

6 60 CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM pie, will be judged to the extent that they can get the meaningful approach to Judaism and to Jewish scholarship that has been developed here to shape national and international Jewish perspectives in Zion and from Zion. We ought to realize that what we plant and establish in Zion now, what we export to Zion now, intellectually and spiritually speaking, will be the only way to truly establish, in any universal way among Jews, the enduring insights and perspectives of what we American Jews have built here. We ought to consider that the only way for us to be strengthened and confirmed is by remembering that Torah, and meaningful interpretations of Torah, must proceed out of Zion even if they come from somewhere else originally. Given this definition of Zionism as a commitment to respond to the demands of Zion upon us (and to give account for our response accordingly), we no longer have to get involved in the old debate over who is the real Zionist. We still will have to defend Israel against countless detractors, but it will be more meaningful when we discuss more creatively among ourselves the guiding ethical and spiritual principles of Zionism. As for the issue of criticizing Israel, the third matter that has distracted us from exploring the broader picture of Zionism, instead of escalating debates on who is and who is not a constructive critic of Israel or on whether we should criticize Israel at all, perhaps we should approach the argument from another angle, perhaps we should encourage the most radically different groups to join in drafting a common statement of the commitments that unite them. Professor Steven Spiegel, Professor of Political Science at U.C.L.A. and an advisor to the Clinton campaign, addressing the 1993 Rabbinical Assembly Convention in Los Angeles, ended his survey of the many changes in the world and in the Middle East by lamenting, Bill Clinton likes new ideas, but the People of the Book has lost the ability to deal with idea message. What s the message? Too often we retreat to slogans in favor of foreign aid and against arms sales to Arab states. As important as such activities are, Spiegel declared, we American Jews and Israeli Jews we Zionists need some fresh ideas to present. Professor Spiegel observed that Israelis are still passionate in their debates on the issues. They still debate late into the night over Peace Now proposals, Likud proposals and the like. He said that after visiting Israel he feels that what Israel needs most is a good night s sleep! There is so much debate there! American Jews, he concluded, need the passion to argue, to believe. We ve lost the ability to produce a message, I fear, and that is the great danger as we move through this decade. Bill Clinton is a very receptive ear, he s a loving ear, but he s looking for ideas. Can we provide them? I don t know. We need to dedicate ourselves to developing new Zionist ideas and proposals. And before we do that, we must define Zionism in the broadest possible terms, remembering that Zionism begins as a response to the Land and now to the State. Zionism is our statement of what makes us, as Jews, care so much about

7 Elliot B. Gertel 61 that Land and its citizens. It is no longer the building of a State, though it was and had to be. Now that the State is here, Zionism is our statement of why that reality demands something of us. It is our attempt to make sense of beliefs and Bible, of history and heritage. We need, more than ever, to be inspired to invest our Zionist activity with the passion of the Psalmist who speaks for our generation too: What we once heard we have now witnessed... in the City of our God.... Walk about Zion, encircle her.... Then tell her story to later generations; tell of our God who will guide us forever. Elliot B. Gertel, acontributing Editor of this journal, is Rabbi of CongregationRodfei Zedek in Chicago, Illinois.