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CHAPTER 1
The Land of Israel and Its Place in Jewish Tradition
The relationship of the Jews with the land of Israel may at first appear paradoxical. Although it occupies a privileged place in Jewish identity, never in their pre-Zionist two-millennia-long history did the Jews attempt to settle there en masse. It should come as no surprise that the Judaic sources speak with anything but one voice when it comes to geographical boundaries. The divine promise given to Abraham in no way implies a claim to possession of the Promised Land, as clearly illustrated by Abraham's insistence on paying for the plot in which he would bury his wife Sarah (Genesis 23: 6-13). "Promised land" means, in fact, that it belongs not to the one to whom the promise was made, but to the one who made the promise.
According to Jehiel Jacob Weinberg (1884-1966), a rabbinical authority who developed a creative synthesis of Lithuanian Judaism and German Orthodoxy:
Jewish nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah. ... In this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.
The founding event of Jewish identity is the epiphany at Mount Sinai. It was the instant of the gift of the Torah, written or inspired by God, that tradition celebrates as the "birth of the people of Israel." The Judaic sources trace the origins of the Jews to their shared experience during the exodus from Egypt and the reception of the Torah on Mount Sinai. As a group, the Jews were distinguished by their commitment to the precepts of the Torah. Although it contains abundant episodes of transgression and forgetfulness on the part of the children of Israel, its defining, normative relationship with them continues to this day.
More than a geographic identity, it is this relationship and the obligation to follow the commandments of the Torah that have traditionally been the hallmark of the Jews and that makes them a "chosen people" a concept that implies moral and ritual responsibilities rather than intrinsic superiority. Understandably, this concept can readily be deformed to justify attitudes of superiority, and even racism. As in every religion, the status of "chosen" whose meaning lies in the fulfillment of Judaic precepts, can give rise to a sense of ontological supremacy, particularly in our day, when the bonds between Jews and their spiritual tradition has been weakened.
In a broader sense, Jewish tradition administers a powerful antidote to racism by speaking of the origins of a personality as central as the Messiah. The sages concur that the Messiah will arise from the lineage of King David, which would appear to confer upon him a superior ascendancy. However, the same sages trace the Messiah's origin to three quite daring female initiatives, those of Ruth, Tamar, and Lot's daughters.
Ruth was a Moabite widow, the issue of a people whose origins, according to the biblical account, can be traced to Lot's daughters. For fear that the world was ending, they inebriated their father and became pregnant by him, and gave birth to Moav, the ancestor of Ruth (Genesis 19: 30-38). Ruth is she who takes her destiny into her own hands in approaching Boaz: "and she went over stealthily and uncovered his feet and lay down. In the middle of the night, the man gave a start and pulled back – there was a woman lying at his feet" (Ruth 3:7-8) The origins of Boaz, in turn, can be traced to the story of Tamar (Genesis 38: 1-30). Successively married to two of the three sons of Judah, son of Jacob, Tamar witnessed the death of her two husbands. The third brother, according to Levirate law, would then have been obliged to marry her, but Judah sent her back to her parents on the pretext that his son was a minor. Even when he reached the age of majority, Judah remained undecided for fear that his youngest son would die as his brothers had. Tamar could wait no longer, disguised herself as a prostitute, slept with Judah and gave birth to twins, one of whom became the ancestor of Boaz.
In each of the three cases the fatality of death is overcome by women affirming life through their own initiative to conceive and give birth. But above all Jewish tradition emphasizes the humble origins of the Messiah, the savior of the world meant to return the Jews to the Promised Land, which tempers any temptation to claim superiority for the Messiah's lineage.
The biblical texts put emphasis not only on the divine origin of the Torah, but also on the fact that it was granted outside the land of Israel. According to the Pentateuch, the Jews, or more precisely the children of Israel, did not originate in the land of Israel. As a group, they emerged in Egypt, having been consecrated as a distinct people near Mount Sinai only by their acceptance of the Torah. Spiritual purification, essential for entry into the Promised Land, took place — obviously — outside that land, during 40 years of wandering in the desert. As many commentators have underlined, the Holy Land cannot sanctify the Jews, but their transgressions can profane the land, which in turn will "spew" them out (Leviticus 18: 28).
Tradition defines the relation with the Holy Land in explicitly conditional terms:
Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord's anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is giving you.
(Deuteronomy 11: 16-17)
This conditional possession is often compared with a married couple: their relationship lasts only as long as the two spouses obey certain rules and regulations. If not, divorce ensues. Significantly, when the granting of the Torah (Shavuot or Pentecost) is celebrated in some synagogues, the scroll of the ketubah (marriage contract) that seals the relationship between the Torah (the fiancée) and her chosen one (the people of Israel) is read, one of the leitmotifs of the ceremony being the consecration of the Jews' relationship with the land of Israel.
Tradition also underlines the grave danger of living in the Holy Land, by comparing the land of Israel to a royal palace in which any transgression immediately assumes enormous proportions. Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (1838-1933), better known as Hafetz Haim (the title of his book dealing with the laws against derogatory speech), points to the grave risk of living in the Holy Land while casting aside the Torah and its commandments. The very specific fear of transgressing the Torah in the Holy Land discouraged simple Jews, those believed most likely to sin, from seeking residence in Israel. The relationship between the Jew and the land of Israel is qualitatively different from that of a Frenchman with France, or a Russian with Russia.
Jewish tradition tends to attribute all calamities, and even the most minor of accidents, to moral failure. According to this tradition, the land of Israel could only be acquired through the universal impact of good deeds as part of a messianic project, unlike the two other acquisitions, that of Joshua, and that which followed the return from Babylon, both of which were brought about by earthly power. It would thus be permanent, brought about directly by God.
Furthermore, only a minority of Babylonian Jews returned to the land of Israel with Ezra and Nehemiah, who restored political autonomy following the destruction of the First Temple. That is why the destruction of the Second Temple, which took place several centuries later, reinforced the status of exiles accepted by the majority of the Jews rather than causing a thorough transformation of their identities. Thus the Jews experienced only a few instances of "political crystallization": the Hasmonean Dynasty, the Khazar Khanate, and the Jewish principalities established in Yemen and Morocco (founded to a great extent on conversion). Here again we observe the notable marginality of the Jews to world political history and their centrality to its religious development. In the Jewish tradition exile, whatever its historical circumstances, is above all a state of spiritual incompleteness, a loss of contact with divine presence, rather than expatriation from an actual physical location.
For many pious Jews the refusal to be associated with political power in the land of Israel thus constitutes an integral part of Judaism. Their attitude has little to do with a transcendental principle of passivity. It should instead be seen as an act of resistance, often difficult and courageous, against the sentiment of national solidarity, which some Jewish thinkers consider a particularly great temptation. Two attitudes, active each in its own way, are locked in confrontation. Those who adhere to Jewish tradition insist that:
We did not go into Galut because we did not possess a Hagganah [pre-1948 Zionist militia] and because we had no political leaders of the Herzl and Ben-Gurion type to guide us along the same path. But we are exiled because we did possess them and did follow their lead. And certainly Jewish salvation will not come through such agencies.
The miraculous nature of salvation is a classical concept of Judaism shared by both traditionalists and the followers of National Judaism, a movement that originated a century ago in the Russian Empire and took the name Mizrahi ("oriental," as well as an abbreviation for merkaz ruhani, "spiritual center"). Quite contrary to the warnings issued by Mizrahi's founders, the devotees of National Judaism today affirm that the Zionist enterprise is nothing less than the realization of divine will, "the finger of God" that was made manifest during the flight from Egypt. Both agree that total destruction will precede redemption but they disagree on what constitutes such destruction.
While the ideology of National Judaism maintains that the destruction came to an end in 1945 and that the massacres of the Jews by the Nazi regime provided a springboard to redemption, the theoreticians of rabbinical anti-Zionism affirm, on the contrary, that the tragedy in Europe was merely the beginning of a long process of destruction that the existence of the state of Israel continues to aggravate. In their view, all the achievements of the Zionist enterprise will be annihilated before the arrival of the Messiah, who would find the Holy Land in a state of total desolation. From this perspective, which categorically denies any form of Zionist messianism, the state of Israel appears as an obstacle on the path toward redemption. To concentrate millions of Jews in such a dangerous place, according to this way of thinking, borders on suicidal folly. The physical reconstruction of the Holy Land by the impious will also bring about spiritual destruction. The Zionist will then stand guilty of inflicting upon the people of Israel an exile even more appalling and cruel than the two preceding ones. This warning is frequently reiterated in rabbinical discourse.
While Jewish tradition postulates that salvation can only be the result of messianic action, it remains prudent and forbids "forcing the end": that is, accelerating the process of redemption. The sign for liberation can come from God alone, and only God can bring an end to exile.
On this subject, the Talmud reports three oaths sworn to God on the eve of the dispersal of the rest of the Jews to the four corners of the earth: the Jews vowed not to return en masse and by force to the land of Israel, and not to rebel against the nations, while "the nations" were sworn not to subjugate the Jews excessively. The three oaths stand at the center of discussions on the admissibility in Judaism of the use of force (an issue that this volume will explore). In the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, the argument that the three oaths are now invalid is often heard. The violation by the Nazis of the third oath, the argument runs, cancelled the first two. But an oath sworn to God is not the same as an agreement between two parties, the Jews and the non-Jews.
The classical commentator Moses Nahmanides (1194-1270) touched off a great furor among his colleagues in Catalonia, the Kabbalists of Girona, when he took up residence in the Holy Land a few years before his death. They protested, insisting on the full application of the Talmudic oaths, and raised other arguments, primarily of a mystical nature, the better to reinforce the prohibition against settling there. According to the Orthodox Jewish thinker and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), "Nahmanides is undoubtedly alone among the masters who lends practical significance to the commandment to settle in the Land of Israel and to conquer it in the current sense of the terms. But his opinion on this question was hardly echoed in rabbinical responsa" A recent edition of the Babylonian Talmud, examining the controversy that continues to swirl around this question, reports numerous sources that challenge the assertion that Jews are commanded to settle in the land of Israel.
Historians of Judaism agree that the fear of attempting to accelerate redemption cannot be considered an anti-Zionist innovation on the part of any particular school of thought. It is not something that has been called into service for the cause, but forms an integral part of Jewish continuity, with deep roots in classical Jewish literature. For generations, well before the emergence of Zionism, the Judaic authorities enjoined the Jews to accept the yoke of exile. Even if the oaths are invoked when emigration to and settlement in the land of Israel has become a viable social option, the strictly Jewish use of the three oaths precedes the emergence of political Zionism by many centuries and thus cannot be seen as an anti-Zionist innovation. The three oaths underlay the warnings issued in Spain during the 15th century in the context of Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the subsequent expulsion of the Spanish Jews. An extremely limited number of Spanish exiles took up residence in the land of Israel, even though it was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, which extended to them a generous welcome.
The German rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776), an authority whose impact has been felt in jurisprudence down to the present day, also refers to the three oaths in his critique of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi. The story of Zevi (1626-1676), the false messiah born in Izmir, who aroused entire Jewish communities with the prospect of immediate deliverance but ultimately converted to Islam, is often cited as a warning. This story, and its sequels in Europe and elsewhere, traumatized the Jewish world and sharpened its sense of prudence toward all manifestations of messianic expectation. In underlining the fact that those were propitious times for a redemption that seemed so imminent, Rabbi Emden accuses the false messiah of having attempted to hasten the process and thus of causing a great tragedy for the Jews. The oaths are also frequently invoked even in the writings of those whom the Zionists consider their own spiritual predecessors, such as Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalisher (1795 — 1874), and Yehuda Alkalai (1798-1878), who lent their support to the colonization of the Holy Land but discouraged all messianic activism.
Alkalai was only one of several Sephardic thinkers who sought to calm this kind of enthusiasm. Rabbi Yosef Haim of Baghdad, better known as Ben Ish Hai (1834-1909), an eminent authority in Judaic law, also cites the three oaths in a preemptive attempt to dampen any form of messianic activism. A broad consensus seems to exist that a return to the land of Israel by political means does not correspond with the idea of salvation in Jewish tradition.
From this perspective, which might appear absolutist, unrealistic, and even anti-existential, messianic aspiration must remain intact and free of all compromise, until the arrival of the Messiah, the redeemer of Israel. Exile would thus have a therapeutic, and even a cathartic function. A parable attributed to Rabbi Joseph Haim Sonnenfeld (1848-1932), one of the pillars of the community of pious Palestinian Jews, explains the logic underlying the longing for messianic salvation:
God has exiled us on account of our sins, and exile is as a hospital for the Jewish people. It is inconceivable that we take control of our land before we are completely cured. God keeps and protects us, and administers to us His "medicinal" trials in perfect measurement and dosage. We are certain that when we are completely healed of our sins, God will not hesitate for a moment, and will deliver us to Him. How could we be in such haste to leave hospital in the face of mortal danger? What we seek of deliverance is that our cure be complete; we seek not to return in ill health to the royal palace, God forefend.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What is Modern Israel?"
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Copyright © 2012 Les Éditions Écosociété.
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