Religious Post-Zionism

One hundred years after the birth of Zionism, and fifty years after the creation of the Jewish State, it seems wholly appropriate that we reflect on and assess the present state of the Zionist dream.

Certainly, the very miracle of a renewed Jewish homeland, Israel’s amazing pace of modernization, the stunning accomplishments of its military and industrial prowess, and its arousal of Jewish identity, all attest to the fantastic success of Zionism.

In the arena of ideas, however, Zionism appears increasingly embattled and even moribund. In this country, evangelical Christians often demonstrate stauncher support for Israel than do their liberal American Jewish counterparts, for whom the spirit of ‘67 has long since worn off.

The Israeli academic and opinion elite seems characterized by a secularist, self-loathing post-Zionism which sanctifies Jewish disempowerment, equates Zionism with colonialist racism and IDF soldiers with "Judeo-Nazis," which debunks Zionist heroes, and regards religious Judaism as the corrupt enemy of Israeli democracy. Variations on these themes are perpetuated in much of Israel’s literature (e.g. sometimes evidenced in the fiction of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz), political writing (Shimon Peres’ The New Middle East, denounces "particularist nationalism"), and newspapers (Ma’ariv feels compelled to report that Herzl once had a Christmas tree and was wont to visit the brothels of Vienna). The idealism of the chalutzim fades further into the oblivion of a no longer inspirational history. We are witness to the collapse of the Jewish nationalism which built the state, and to the emergence of a new ideology which regards Zionism as at best passé (one academic blithely announces that Herzl "doesn’t speak to us anymore"), and at worst evil.

The Israeli secular right, such as it is, suffers meanwhile from a general intellectual anesthesia, and religious Zionism, "whose standard of achievement [is] an additional house built, an additional Jew moved out to the settlements," as Yoram Hazony puts it, does not fare much better in articulating a viable and relevant vision. Settlers are perceived in an editorial in Ha’aretz to "command no real presence in the cultural mainstream;" they seem both culturally and intellectually marginalized, and religious Zionism, when it is not pontificating on theological abstractions or engaged in synagogue speechmaking, busily proves its woeful impotence in affecting general public opinion.

We might well imagine Nietzsche’s madman running through the streets of Jerusalem yelling: "Where is Zionism? Where has it gone? We have killed it! Do you not smell its putrefying corpse? For even ideologies putrefy, you know! What are Israel’s cultural centers if not the tombs of Zionism?"

What accounts for such disintegration? I don’t know. Perhaps it is due to the brazen confidence of a Leon Wieseltier, for example, who on the pages of the New Republic declares Israel to be "fundamentally indestructible."

But whatever the cause, the effect is pernicious. A nation’s strength depends not so much on the size of its army as on its inner unity, on the vibrancy and virility of its national raison d’être, on the depth of its historical consciousness, and on the degree to which it preserves its heritage and texts. Ideological disintegration, an absence of positive ideals, threatens the Jewish State far more profoundly than material or military weakness.

The critical void, the ideological emptiness that appears so indigenous to today’s Israeli political and cultural geography calls for a new idea capable of replacing Israeli ennui with a fresh sense of meaningful purpose. This idea, what may be called religious post-Zionism, affirms the fundamental applicability and relevance of Torah to all issues of the modern state. Not content with an escape into eschatological speculation, nor satisfied to proclaim itself in prayers but not in actions, this Zionism of the future represents not a departure from tradition, but a return to the Halachic dynamism and ambition of the pre-exilic tradition.

Religious post-Zionism declares that Israel is holy and the beginning of redemption, because it demands our national initiative and responsibility, because it challenges us to concretely implement Halacha as a total way of life on every level, and hence allows us, in the words of R. Aharon Lichtenstein, to become "maximally Jewish." It is holy because it demands that Halacha not withdraw into a separate, autonomous "holy sphere," that it acquire a kind of this-worldly presentness. Israel is holy, in short, because it confronts us with a daunting challenge: To coax our biblical and talmudic texts to speak to and genuinely address the modern society of our own making.

As Emmanuel Levinas writes, "The thing that is special about the State of Israel is not that it fulfils an ancient promise, or heralds a new age of material security, but that it finally offers the opportunity to carry out the social law of Judaism." Through Israel, we may put an end to the uniquely horrible predicament of the galut; namely, that Jews were the only people to simultaneously define itself by a doctrine of social justice, and yet be totally incapable of applying it.

Religious post-Zionism announces that Israel should be not primarily the attainment of abstract independence, not an answer to the Holocaust, not a refuge from persecution, and not a guard against assimilation, but rather the fullest realization of Torah; an actualization which widens the range of Halacha, thus intensifying the ways in which God can be made present in daily communal and national life. The fullest realization of Torah is enabled not by freedom from the burdens of daily existence, but precisely by the shouldering of these very burdens of shared responsibility for the fate of the nation; by participating and engaging in the mundane functioning of our own society. This is how I understand the Talmudic lesson (Chagiga 5b) that "since Israel was exiled from its place – there is no greater negation of Torah than this."