Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

Sefaria · Jewish Thought > Modern > Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks · 920 sections

PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.59
The effects have been evident in several directions. In American Reform Judaism there has been a gradual turn back toward traditional forms. Bar mitzvah ceremonies have reappeared in place of or in addition to “confirmation.” There has been renewed interest in halakhah. Hebrew plays a larger part in the liturgy. The Reform movement has begun creating its own day schools. Hitherto it had insisted that religion, not peoplehood, was the essence of Judaism. But in its latest major statement, the “Centenary Perspective” of 1976, it declared that “the survival of the Jewish people is of the highest priority.” In 1885 it had been frankly anti-Zionist. By 1976 it was asserting that “we consider the State of Israel vital to the welfare of Judaism everywhere.” Collectively, these represent a Copernican revolution when compared with the universalist and anti-ritual Pittsburgh Platform of 1885.
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In Israel too, as Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah have documented, the new “civil religion” has reversed many of the assumptions of the Zionist-socialist founders. Religious symbols and concepts are more widely used. There is a convergence of Israeli and Jewish identities. In part this had been due to the increasing demographic impact of the Oriental Jewish immigrants, more traditional than the East European secularists who constituted the majority of the pre-state yishuv. But the politics of the last twenty years have also been significant. Surrounded by enemies, in a world perceived to be hostile, Israelis have found traditional images of the tense relationship between Jacob and Esau more relevant than Zionist-socialist universalism.
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The destinies of Israel and the golah have become more closely interlinked. Far from negating the diaspora, Israel has provided it with a focus of identity. The either/or of the nineteenth century – either Judaism as a religion in the diaspora or as a nation in Eretz Yisrael – has been transcended. They have emerged not as two exclusive alternatives but instead as a complex symbiosis, each supporting the other in a variety of ways. Perhaps the single word that best describes the new Jewish focus is not religion or nationalism but peoplehood, understood as an identification with Jews throughout the world and their shared history, culture, and traditions. This is not necessarily expressed in terms of religious belief. Still less is it reflected in a widespread return to halakhic observance. But it marks the end of the chapter opened by emancipation, and the beginning of what one might call Jewish post-modernity.
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Prediction and Promise
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A new era in Jewish history, one that we have charted in the last three chapters, began with Voltaire’s prediction of the disappearance of the Jews. Emancipation posed a fateful choice for Jewish identity and initiated a series of redefinitions which deeply fragmented the Jewish people. It induced widespread doubts about the internal capacity of Jews to survive. There were external fears too. Racial antisemitism was rising throughout Europe. It exploded in the Russian pogroms of the 1880s. There were Jews who were aware that this was only the beginning. In Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882), one of the seminal documents of the nineteenth century, the shadow of death already hangs heavily over the Jewish people. Jews are “ghosts,” “no longer alive, and yet moving about among the living,” a chosen people only in the sense of the people chosen for universal hatred. “For the living, the Jew is a dead man.”
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Voltaire, a man of enlightenment, had believed that Jews would disappear of their own accord. “We ought not,” he said, “to burn them.” That was in 1756. By 1833, a German writer using the name Dominicus Haman Epiphanes was less patient. After contemplating several alternatives for making the world Judenrein, he concluded that “the total extermination of Jewry would be incomparably easier.” Jews, he wrote, could be turned into “tallow candles, iron medals, or pretty milk-white glass.” Next, “a competition in the field of economics would be announced, whose subject would be according to which principles the total massacre of Jewry could be used to improve the soil.” The unthinkable had been uttered. A century later it began to be planned. Enlightenment ended in Holocaust. Jewish children were burned to the music of string quartets.
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By its close, the Central and Eastern European Jewries, who had given the Jewish world its revolutionary new identities and its most spirited defenses of tradition, had been reduced to ashes. The Reform Temple in Hamburg, the Russian centers of the “Lovers of Zion,” Hirsch’s Frankfurt, the great yeshivot of Pressburg and Volozhyn were ruins populated by the ghosts of a murdered dream. The great experiment of European humanism, Jewish emancipation, died in the ovens of Auschwitz.
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The new Jewish affirmation – the determination after the Holocaust to survive, to defend, to face the world as Jews – is therefore a momentous response and one that must evoke religious wonder. Whether our vision is secular or religious, we stand in the presence of a miracle, human or Divine. It is difficult not to feel beneath the surface of contemporary Jewish peoplehood the touch of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence. And it is hard to avoid that sense of a prescripted destiny which lies at the heart of the Jewish idea of providence. For pre- and post-Holocaust Jewish existence has traced out the oldest and most haunting theme of the Bible: the improbability and yet the certainty of the survival of the covenantal people.
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The first Jew was almost the last. The first promise to Abram was, “I will make you into a great nation.” Immediately thereafter Abram experiences exile, a family quarrel, and a war, events that were to become continuing motifs of Jewish existence. There then follows the most poignant motif of all. Abram’s first recorded words to God are, “O Lord, God, what will You give me if I remain childless?”
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Judaism is the story of the covenantal family, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Torah begins with humanity as a whole, with man made in the image of God, and with Noah with whom God makes a covenant. From then on it narrows its attention to one family singled out to keep the way of God, doing charity and justice. In its history and inner life God makes His Presence known in a peculiarly manifest way.
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The survival of the Jewish people is therefore a continuing paradox. On the one hand, as bearers of the Divine Presence, the people of Israel is eternal as God Himself is eternal. As Jeremiah was to prophesy: “Thus said the Lord, who established the sun for light by day, the laws of the moon and stars for light by night.... If these laws should ever be annulled by Me – declares the Lord – only then would the offspring of Israel cease to be a nation before Me for all time.” Israel will last as long as the sun and the stars. But on the other hand, its survival from one generation to the next is never assured or natural. It exists in and by a faith in the supernatural. It suffers exiles and wanderings. As a nation in its land, it is always surrounded by larger and hostile empires. In dispersal it is a fragile minority, not knowing whether more to fear oppression or assimilation. Its continuity is never mere survival. It is a miracle, repeatedly taking both Jews and non-Jews by surprise.
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The first words of Abram to God thus announce a recurring theme. Abram has no children. He can see no future generation. The end of the covenantal people is in sight. The text continues: “God then took him outside and said: Look at the sky and count the stars. See if you can count them. He then said to him: Thus shall your descendants be.” Why “outside”? The rabbis interpreted the word to mean that God took Abram outside the laws of nature and historical process. The driving tension of the Jewish people would be the conflict between the prediction and the promise. On the basis of prediction, the family of Abram would come to an end. On the basis of promise it would revive and be as eternal as the stars. That, too, has been the story of Jews and Judaism in modern times.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 5; The State of Survival.1
The State of Survival
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The last chapter surveyed the good news about contemporary Jewish affirmations. But there is bad news too. The Jewish people, both in Israel and the diaspora, face a present and future crisis. Jewish continuity is far from assured. Jewish observance continues to decline. There is the possibility of demographic disintegration. Jewish identities are tracing out conflicting paths. The possibility of schism, deep and wounding, is real.
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It is important to confront these issues openly but without despair. Jews are used to crisis. As we have seen, the literature of the nineteenth century was dominated by it. Some of it was justified. On antisemitism, the fears early expressed by Moses Hess and Leon Pinsker were all too accurate. Had they been heeded, there might have been fewer Jews in Europe in 1940, and fewer lives lost in the Holocaust.
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Other fears proved unfounded, particularly those which related to the survival of Jewish identity. Even so, this does not imply that the sense of crisis was unjustified. It may simply be that exaggerated fears for the Jewish future are part of what it is to take Jewish survival seriously. The transition from one generation of Jews to the next can and may never be taken for granted. It needs a massive self-sacrificing effort of education and commitment – unprecedentedly so in the modern age – to ensure that the tradition is handed on.
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Kabbalah and mesirah, receiving from the past and transmitting to the future, are the essential covenantal acts. Judaism is less a set of truths to be discovered than it is a set of commands to be learned from parents and handed on to children. Judaism therefore has much to fear from any break in generational continuity. The language of crisis may be a symptom of how deeply modern Jews took their responsibilities toward an uncertain future. It may have energized them into creating a Jewish future against the probabilities. It may, in short, have been a “self-refuting prophecy.”
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Raising the alarm is part of the function of those who see beyond the present. As the sociologists Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner amusingly describe it:
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If we take our minds back many millennia, back into the dawn of history, we may imagine the appearance of the very first intellectual. After centuries during which people did nothing but rhythmically bang away with stone implements and keep the fires from going out, there was someone who interrupted these wholesome activities just long enough to have an idea, which he or she then proceeded to announce to the other members of the tribe. We can make a pretty good guess as to what the idea was: “The tribe is in a state of crisis.”
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But there is a Jewish approach to impending crisis, one that marks the difference between prediction and prophecy.
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In telling the story of the Jewish past – in relating the Haggadah on Pesach – the sages laid down the rule: Matchil bi-genut u-mesayyem be-shevach, “Begin with the bad news; end with the good.” In thinking about the Jewish future the opposite rule applies. We begin with the good news and only then contemplate the bad. The good news is that both Jewish survival and revival are certain. That is promised in the last chapters of the book of Deuteronomy. Faith in the messianic age is, Maimonides ruled, one of the essentials of Jewish belief. “The Torah has already promised,” Maimonides further explained, “that ultimately, at the end of their exile, the people of Israel will return to God and immediately they will be redeemed.” The sages interpreted the biblical phrase “the God of faith” to mean “the God who had faith in the world He was about to create.”
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Precisely because he shares this ultimate faith, the prophet is able to look on future crisis with open eyes and without despair. He knows it can be averted. He speaks in order that it be averted. A prediction is successful if it comes true. A prophecy is successful when it proves false, when it has alerted the community to avoid catastrophe. The task of prophecy is to be self-refuting.
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The point is important. An emphasis on prediction over prophecy can lead individuals and institutions to see trends as inevitable. The only available policy is then accommodation, adjustment to what is certain to happen anyway. That approach, which has in one way or another marked most Jewish responses to modernity, is unjustifiable by Jewish sources. Fate is a concept that figures in Greek, not biblical and rabbinic, thought. Providence, by contrast, rests on the interaction between Divine promise and human choice. Whatever the present trends in Jewish life, their future direction is chosen, not given. What, then, are those trends?
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Intermarriage
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Perhaps the most serious trend in the diaspora relates to intermarriage. Jewish history is the story of the covenantal family, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ramified and extended across time. Jewish continuity depends critically on the strength of the Jewish family. Intermarriage is therefore a direct threat to Jewish survival and was seen as such from earliest times. There are biblical prohibitions against marriages between Israelites and their idolatrous neighbors. Ezra and Nehemiah, on their return from Babylon, instituted drastic measures against those who had “been unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us.” The rabbis enacted protective decrees against behavior that might lead to too close a social interaction between Jews and Gentiles. Their explicit concern was to prevent intermarriage.
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It worked. Until the modern period there were internal and external forces keeping Jews and non-Jews socially apart. The laws of Shabbat and kashrut and the alien quality of other faiths preserved Jewish distinctiveness. So too did the confined space, territorial, political, and economic, allocated to Jews by Christian and Islamic states. Jews saw themselves as a chosen people. They were seen by others as a pariah people. Benign or malign, these factors created boundaries between Jews and their neighbors that were hard to cross or to want to cross.
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With modernity, much of this changed. Jews were now participating in all aspects of non-Jewish society. Traditional observance was being abandoned. So too was the traditional Jewish self-image. Jewishness, from being a source of pride, was becoming a sense of stigma. In the opposite direction, where there was Gentile tolerance, Jews were welcomed where once they had been shunned. The barriers were down.
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More than this. The very conceptions of religious identity on the one hand, marriage on the other, were changing. In traditional society, Jewishness was what one was. In secular society, Jewishness might be a fact of birth, a set of memories, or a religious affiliation, but it is merely one aspect of a complex identity, not its totality. In traditional societies, too, marriage is firmly set in a wider social matrix. Its function is to transmit the shared values of the community to the next generation. The kind of person one may marry and the subsequent roles of husband and wife are highly circumscribed by law, custom, and social control. The scope of individuality is relatively small.
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Only in the early nineteenth century, after the American and French revolutions and the rise of Romanticism, did love and personal compatibility become the main grounds for marriage. The shift in consciousness is encapsulated in a famous scene in Fiddler on the Roof. One of Tevyeh’s daughters wants to marry for love. The idea astounds and then intrigues Tevyeh. He asks his wife, “Do you love me?” She replies, “For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, and milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”
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In 1908 Israel Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot. It was performed before large and appreciative audiences throughout America and in London. It captured the imagination of a generation. It was a latter-day version of Romeo and Juliet without the tragic ending. In it two Russian-born immigrants meet in New York and fall in love. The boy is Jewish, the girl Christian. They discover that the girl’s father, a colonel in the Tsarist army, had been responsible for the murder of the boy’s family in the Kishinev pogrom. But the bitterness and prejudice of Russia disintegrate in America’s freer air. Love and tolerance triumph over religion and hate. Marriage across the divide is here portrayed as an ethical achievement. The social consequences were to follow.
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Intermarriage came relatively late to America. The immigration from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 was sufficiently large to maintain its own subculture for two generations. For the first two decades of the twentieth century the rate was 2 percent. By the midcentury it was 6 percent. In the early sixties it rose to 17.4 percent. By the late sixties it stood at 31.7 percent. Since then it has stabilized somewhat. A precise figure is difficult to determine. The rates differ from town to town and vary according to educational levels and degree of Americanization. Most, though, would put it at between one in three and four in ten. By 1980 research yielded the proposition that some 350,000 Jews were or had been married to non-Jewish partners. If their children are taken into consideration, almost a million individuals have been directly involved in intermarriage.
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The current American situation merely recapitulates the experience of two earlier waves of Jewish immigration, Sephardic and German. European Jewry, too, had undergone the same process in the pre-Hitler years. By 1929 three Jews in ten were marrying out of the faith in Berlin and Bohemia. In 1927 the intermarriage rate in Trieste was 56.1 percent. “A generational clock has ticked over and over again in the open society,” Arthur Hertzberg has written. “Whether in New York and Philadelphia in 1840, in Paris and Bordeaux in the 1850s, in Budapest around the turn of the century, in Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s, and now in the United States in the 1970s, it tells the same frightening time. The third generation in the open society intermarries and erodes out of Jewry at a rate of one in three.”
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The Jewish Family: Size and Stability
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But intermarriage is not the only problem confronting Jewish survival. Low birth rates are another. The Jewish people has not repopulated itself after the Holocaust. Immediately prior to their encounter with emancipation, Jewish communities, especially those of Eastern Europe, generally had higher fertility rates than the surrounding non-Jewish population. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were periods of rapid Jewish demographic growth. Arthur Ruppin estimated that the world Jewish population grew from 1.5 million to 10.5 million in that period.
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Emancipation suddenly and sharply reversed this pattern. Jewish fertility declined to a level below the general rate. In France, for example, Jewish women aged 26–30 had an average of 2.88 children in 1808. By 1872 the figure for the same group had dropped to 1.78. Between 1926 and 1930, births per thousand in Poland were 32.3 among non-Jews, 19.6 among Jews. In her study of Jews in a German village community, Alice Goldstein has traced a similar trajectory, a sudden drop in Jewish reproduction rates around 1880 from above to below the general population.
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American-Jewish demography is typical in this respect. Since the 1880s the Jewish birth rate has been consistently below the national white non-Jewish average. Jews have the lowest birth rate of all the major religious and ethnic groups. Even from this low level there was a dramatic fall in the 1970s, to an average family size of 1.2 children, a figure that suggested a rapidly shrinking and aging Jewish community. The rate has since risen, but the fear remains. Acculturation even without intermarriage leads to a Jewish population in decline, in absolute and relative terms.
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Simple explanations fail. Jews are more highly educated than other groups in America, and education in general has a depressing effect on fertility. But research by Calvin Goldscheider on the Boston Jewish community shows that the better educated expect to have larger families. Samuel Heilman suggests that Jewish women became increasingly reluctant to bear the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker as households changed from extended to nuclear families. But though this may be true of contemporary America, it fails to account for similar falls in family size in rural European communities. Others have argued that low fertility is a measure of Jewish dislocation and insecurity. If so, it should have risen as Jews became more established. Instead it has fallen.
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Most analysts, though, are agreed that a fall in birth rate is a feature of all societies that pass from tradition to modernity. Jews have simply been like everyone else, only more so. Peter Berger has pointed to the fact that in modern societies, people tend to see their future in terms of a “life-plan” in which the “biography of the individual is apprehended by him as a designed project.” Jews have become master-practitioners of this art which involves a high capacity for “delayed gratification.” They go to college more widely and for longer periods than other groups. They enter careers that call for high levels of prior training. The small size of Jewish families is not a function of nonmarriage, nor is it the case that childless or one-child families are particularly common among Jews. It is, instead, that they marry later than non-Jews, and are less likely to have four children or more. It seems, then, that they are adept at planning as such, and this includes birth control and family planning.
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There is by now evidence of a direct correlation between Jewish religiosity and family size. Samuel Heilman and Steven Cohen discovered that as against an average family size of 2.0 among the non-Orthodox, the figure for the “nominally” Orthodox was 2.1, for “centrist” Orthodox it was 2.9, and for “traditional” Orthodox it was 4.2. Similar correlations have been observed by Calvin Goldscheider and Paul Ritterband. The same pattern, incidentally, obtains among Catholics. This suggests another factor. As we saw in the last chapter, Jews in America are more secularized than other groups. They are less likely to attend religious services or cite religion as an important factor in their lives. Low birth rates, then, may be another symptom of the rapid flight of Jews from Judaism.
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The Jewish family used to be a symbol of stability. But this too has changed. Rates of divorce have risen generally in Western societies, and as Jews have become more like their neighbors, they too have been affected. In 1971, for example, the National Jewish Population survey in America revealed that among the 25–29-year-olds, 15 percent of households were separated or divorced. In Anglo-Jewry, the divorce rate doubled between 1965 and 1980. One child in six can expect to experience family breakup by the age of 16. Here, even the Orthodox community is not immune.
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There are two special causes for concern, apart from the tragedy itself and its impact on the institution of the Jewish family. Firstly, Jewish divorces occur more frequently among the 35–44-year-olds, at a time when children are most likely to be affected. The effects of divorce on children are now known to be significant, negative, and lasting, often not revealing themselves until many years later. Secondly, the American Jewish community has been relatively slow in adjusting to the problem. It does not yet have a strong support network of parents-without-partners groups, single-parent organizations, and a marriage market for the divorced. There have been problems in rabbinic counseling skills, and in the provisions made by congregations. As a result, the divorced often feel alienated from the Jewish community and its representatives and tend to seek non-Jewish partners when remarrying.
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Israeli Dilemmas
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These patterns were, however, expected. They form the very heart of the secular Zionist case against the diaspora. Jewish life could not long survive an exposure to an open society in which it was an increasingly indistinct minority. In Israel, the Jewish future would develop naturally without fear of either cultural or social assimilation. Since 1948, or at least since 1967, this explicit argument has become tacitly accepted in the golah as well. “A young state,” as Hillel Halkin put it, “is taking over the burden of Jewish history from an old diaspora.” Israel would discharge the duty of Jewish survival, while the diaspora would perform a supportive and enabling role.
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This is, surely, as it should be. While some philosophies of the nineteenth century, secular, Reform, and modern Orthodox, idealized the diaspora and the Jewish mission within it, this was hardly the mainstream of Jewish thought since biblical times. Jewish life is lived towards Israel, at once a land, a society, and a destiny. The Hebrew term galut is far less neutral than the words diaspora or dispersion. It signifies exile, punishment, alienation, dislocation. Nachmanides even raised the question, as had the sages before him, of how the covenant could still be in place and the commandments binding outside the land. Israel was where Judaism became lucid, where Jews had a direct relationship to Providence. In the sixteenth century, the Maharal, R. Judah Loewe of Prague, saw exile as a precarious imbalance. The order of nature itself was disturbed and would remain so until Jews returned to their land. Until the nineteenth century no thinker saw the Jewish future as anything other than directed toward Israel. Secular Zionism and the negation of the diaspora therefore have deep roots in the Jewish tradition as well as their support from recent Jewish demography.
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Three features, though, remain disturbing from the perspective of Jewish survival. The first is that birth rates in Israel itself, though they remain well above replacement levels, have also declined. This is particularly noticeable in the Sephardic population, who had generally arrived in Israel without first going through the modernization process that had been experienced by the European and American settlers. Initially they had had large families, but by the second generation their fertility patterns had rapidly approximated those of other Israelis. Birth control was only part of the problem. The high rate of abortion was another. The issue is acute because of the sharp disparity between the birth rates of Jews and Israel’s Arab population. In the late 1970s, for example, the fertility rate for Jewish Israelis was 3.4, for Israeli Arabs, 7.7, and among Arabs in the territories, 8.0.
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The second is the continued failure of Jews outside Israel to undertake aliyah. Of the 1.4 million immigrants from the birth of the state to 1970, the overwhelming majority were in flight from persecution in Eastern Europe and Arab lands. Only one in nine came from Western Europe, the United States, South Africa, or Australia. The paradox of diaspora Zionism is seen most clearly in the case of American Jewry. There Israel is the most widespread focus of Jewish identity, to the extent that some have called Israel the religion of American Jews. At the same time, its aliyah rates are proportionately among the lowest in the world. The Lakeville study, conducted before the Six-Day War, showed that while 91 percent of the respondents approved of fundraising for Israel, only one percent would consider living in Israel or encouraging their children to do so.
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Aliyah from the United States reached a peak in 1971 and has been progressively declining since. Equally problematic has been the fate of South African Jewish émigrés. The South African community has been signally Israel-oriented in its communal attitudes and educational structure. Nonetheless, many Jews who left South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s settled in Australia and Canada rather than in Israel. The phenomenon that has most disturbed Israelis has been the choice of a large number of Soviet Jews to settle in America, not Israel. The revival of Jewish consciousness among the Jews of Russia had largely been inspired by the events of 1967, so that the preference for America seemed to indicate a significant reversal of attitudes. These are, hopefully, temporary trends, the result of a period of external and internal turmoil in Israeli life. But for the first time it has seemed not only as if Israel was failing to attract Jews from free societies but that it was also being displaced as the first point of refuge. There were safer and easier places to be a Jew.
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Undoubtedly the most psychologically traumatizing, though not numerically the most significant, has been the third phenomenon: yeridah. Israelis have chosen to leave Israel. The significance of yeridah is that it runs directly counter to the assumption that has dominated both Israel and the diaspora since the state’s foundation. Israel is a place one moves toward, not a place one leaves. So disturbing is yeridah that there has been a deep reluctance to recognize, quantify, and analyze it. Estimates of the number of Israelis living in the United States vary from a half to a quarter of a million, although Paul Ritterband has argued that the figures are an exaggeration. He suggests a figure of some 40,000 in New York, with perhaps another 20,000 elsewhere.
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Moshe Shokeid has recently published a full-length study of yordim in New York, and it makes salutary reading. Israelis leave Israel to pursue higher education or professional advance, or to start small businesses. What is unique about them, in sharp distinction to earlier generations of Jewish immigrants, indeed to all other ethnic groups, is that they have established no voluntary organizations, no social meeting places, and no economic enclaves. For the most part, they avoid contact with American Jewish institutions and with official Israeli bodies. Their contact with one another is sporadic and ambivalent. They are perhaps the first Jews since the lost ten tribes to have no strategy for survival in the diaspora.
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The reason is that in terms of the secular Zionist orthodoxy which they have internalized, they do not exist. The term yeridah carries with it a profound stigma. Israeli public opinion has frequently denounced those who leave as traitors, deserters, and mercenaries. In 1976, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin described them as “the leftovers of weaklings.” The yordim themselves, if they are secularists, see Jewish identity in strictly geographical-national terms. To be a Jew is to live in Israel. Living outside Israel creates an identity crisis which cannot be solved. The American Jewish community is organized primarily along religious lines. But this, to yordim, is a mode of Jewishness they have rejected. As a result, they cling tenaciously to the idea that they are in America only temporarily – though often their economic and social situation suggests otherwise – and they make no provisions for establishing a group identity or for educating their children.
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In the meanwhile, in Israel itself there has been deep soul-searching among a small group of writers on the implications of the “wandering Israeli.” The sabra, the native-born Israeli, planted in his own soil, was to have ended a millennial history of the “wandering Jew.” The figures explored by novelists like Aharon Megged, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua are not the yordim of the public image, materialists in search of a more affluent society, but spiritually restless individuals driven to leave Israel through a sense of claustrophobia. They feel constricted by the pressures of apparently endless war and Arab-Jewish hostility and by the ideals of the early settlers which now seem impossible to fulfill. One of the characters in Amnon Jackont’s Borrowed Time says, “Anyone who stays here has to choose between a war that will eventually end up in disaster or a peace that will lead to assimilation and make all these wars that we’ve fought and will fight totally meaningless.” In these novels, leaving Israel does not solve the problem. The characters are as plagued by doubts abroad as they are at home.
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Renewing the Dialogue with Destiny
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Political and military considerations aside, therefore, new thought is needed about the character and destiny of Israeli society and of the relationships between Israel, the diaspora, and Jewish survival. The question that drove Jews in the wake of emancipation was: What place could be carved out for Jews and Judaism in a world order that seemed to welcome neither? That place now exists, both in Israel and the diaspora.
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A new question has become suddenly urgent. Given that place, what next? Why and how shall Jews survive? In modern times this has become the ultimately unanswerable question, yet the one most frequently asked. A consideration of the future of the Jewish people cannot avoid it.
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We do not live in the nineteenth century. Yet contemporary Jewish thought seems locked in nineteenth-century terms. Liberal and neo-Orthodox philosophies were concerned about the modes in which Jews might become integrated into open diaspora societies. Zionism, religious and secular, was preoccupied with the question of creating a Jewish state. Both have been achieved. The question “What next?” has become imperative. But it has thus far generated no new and larger visions.
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Jewish thought in the late twentieth century has been marked by its attention to the immediate. How to resolve the problem of the Palestinians? How to create a momentum for peace in the Middle East? How to encourage aliyah? How to reduce the rate of intermarriage and divorce? How to increase the size of Jewish families? These are undeniably pressing concerns.
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But Jewish thought was traditionally marked by its attention to the ultimate. Paradoxically its present was secured by a deep conviction about the future. If there is a crisis in the contemporary Jewish world, it lies at the level of thought no less than at the level of pragmatic strategy. Jewish survival has rarely been more prominent on the agenda of discussion. But Jewish survival has rarely before been so difficult to define or flesh out with substantive content. Its meaning and purpose seem to vanish as soon as attention is turned toward them.
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Paul Johnson ends his recent History of the Jews with the question a historian must ask in reflecting on Jewish survival across almost four thousand years. Does it reveal the guiding hand of Providence? A believer would say Yes. But the historian is bound by the terms of his craft to “beware of seeking providential patterns in events.” There are, then, two ways of interpreting the Jewish past.
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On the one hand there is the perspective of faith. “If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it…. That the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed.” On the other hand there is the perspective of history, which sees human events in terms of human acts and their human consequences. “The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves.”
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But this either/or is, from a traditional perspective, a false dichotomy. Providence cannot guarantee the Jewish future without the free, unconstrained, and unpredestined assent of Jews. Nor, surely, could Jews have willed their own survival without a deep, even obstinate, faith in Providence. The concept of covenant is mutual. God takes Israel as His people. Israel takes God as its destiny. Israel believes in the one God in heaven. God chooses goi echad ba-aretz, “one nation on earth.” Jewish history is their interactive relationship. Divine revelation commands human response. Human action creates a providential reply. Mutuality lies at the heart of the Jewish religious-historical drama.
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Josephus tells us that this idea became problematic in the last days of the Second Temple period. The Sadducees, he says, believe that there is no such thing as Providence. History is made by man. The Essenes believe that there is no such thing as free will. History is made by God. The Pharisees, however, maintain that there is an interaction between man and God, a complex dialectic of decision and destiny. “It was God’s good pleasure that there should be a fusion and that the will of man…should be admitted to the council-chamber of fate.” The Sadducees and Essenes disappeared. The Pharisees survived and shaped the Judaism that persisted to modern times.
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Johnson is surely correct in suggesting that it was Jews’ faith in their own destiny that led them to write their unique story, and merely wrong in assuming that this is a secular interpretation of events. That faith, lucid and enduring, was itself the clearest expression of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, that accompanied them in their exiles and returned with them to their land. A sense of their own identity – historical, personal, collective, above all covenantal – was crucial to Jews’ survival. They kept the Torah. The Torah kept them. That reciprocity of faith and endurance, Divine command and human commitment, is the very pulse of the body of Israel as a people.
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Doubts, dissents, and indecisions about Jewish identity are therefore no mere intellectual quandary. They threaten Jewish continuity at its most fundamental level. To be sure, the Divine Presence will bring it about that there will always be a Jewish people. But only to the extent that the Jewish people always continue to believe in the Divine Presence. In Jewish history, identity and endurance are inextricably linked.
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The question posed by Judaism in the late twentieth century therefore is: Can there be Jewish survival without a clear sense of how and why Jews should survive? Strategy begs the question of meaning and purpose. What answer shall we give to the question: What is a Jew?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.1
What Is a Jew?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.2
In 1946, writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre surveyed the state of Jewish-Gentile relationships. His book was entitled Anti-Semite and Jew. It was an attack on antisemitism, and not surprisingly, given Sartre’s existentialist commitments, it was a powerful plea for “authenticity.” The antisemite is inauthentic in projecting his fears and discontents onto the Jew. Gentile authenticity would end anti-semitism. But what of Jewish authenticity? This is, says Sartre, for the Jew “to live to the full his condition as a Jew.” Inauthenticity is “to deny it or to attempt to escape from it.” The essay is, in short, an encouragement of Jewish self-affirmation. What then follows is perhaps the bleakest analysis of the Jewish situation since Spinoza.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.3
Jews, argues Sartre, “have neither community of interests nor community of beliefs. They do not have the same fatherland; they have no history.” What then do Jews have in common that constitutes their Jewishness and by which they are bound, in authenticity, to live? “The sole tie that binds them is the hostility and disdain of the societies that surround them. Thus the authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown toward him.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.4
To be Jewish, for Sartre, is to be the object of antisemitism and to face this fact unflinchingly. This analysis, provided by one of the great philosophers of the age, is remarkable. It is not merely barren; it contradicts itself on two counts. Firstly, to be authentic in Sartre’s terms is to “let existence precede essence.” It is to make oneself, to be one’s own “author.” Uniquely, though, Jews do not make themselves. They are made by others. They exist as such only because they are singled out for hatred. As one commentator concluded on Sartre’s analysis, “The Jew is the inauthentic being par excellence, essentially defined by the glance of the other.” Secondly, since Jews exist only by virtue of antisemitism and since antisemitism would not exist in a society of authentic individuals, the Jewish destiny is ideally self-liquidating.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.5
Sartre himself drew the second conclusion. “Thus the authentic Jew who thinks of himself as a Jew because the antisemite has put him in the situation of a Jew is not opposed to assimilation any more than the class-conscious worker is opposed to the liquidation of classes…. The authentic Jew simply renounces for himself an assimilation that is today impossible; he awaits the radical liquidation of antisemitism for his sons.” In an ideal world there will be no more Jews. It is difficult, at this distance, not to see the deep inner connection between Sartre’s philosemitism and the Nazi ideology it opposes.
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For this was an argument shared by friends and enemies alike since the eighteenth century. It had been Spinoza who first argued that antisemitism had been the most potent factor in securing Jewish survival. “As to their continuance so long after dispersion and the loss of empire,” he had written, “there is nothing marvelous in it, for they so separated themselves from every other nation as to draw down upon themselves universal hate…. That they have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred, experience demonstrates.” If only antisemitism keeps Jews Jewish, then an era of true tolerance would lead to total Jewish assimilation.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.7
Sartre was not an antisemite. His warmth toward Jews and Judaism grew over time, as interviews given shortly before his death make clear. He was simply, as Steven Schwarzschild and others have argued, describing a reality. The French Jews he knew at the time were assimilated to the point that exposure and resistance to antisemitism was the sole content of their identity. They knew that they were Jews because society so regarded them. But beyond this their Jewishness had no substance. It had neither historical consciousness nor religious faith. It was translated into neither a distinctive way of life nor a concrete vision of a Jewish future. They were Jews without knowing why or how.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.8
Something of that analysis remains true today. If Jewish survival is problematic it is because Jewish identity itself is problematic. Nineteenth-century Jewish thought was directed toward two specific goals: social integration in the diaspora and the creation of a Jewish home in Israel. Those goals have been realized. What remains as the motivating dynamic of Jewish survival in the late twentieth century? How do contemporary thinkers answer the question: What is it to be a Jew?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.9
Defying Hitler
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.10
Emil Fackenheim is one of the outstanding Jewish philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. His work is a continuing dialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and secular thought in the wake of the Holocaust. It is a deep and sophisticated attempt to explore the possibility of “mending the rupture” of a shattered world. But as we recall from an earlier chapter, he has offered a striking definition of Jewish existence after Auschwitz. He argues that the “authentic Jew who faces up to his singled-out Jewish condition” is now bound by a 614th command. He is “forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” Fackenheim continues:
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.11
If the 614th commandment is binding upon the authentic Jew then we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, second, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with Him or with belief in Him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler’s victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.12
Fackenheim’s thought as a totality is subtle and complex. But what is of interest is the fact that this particular formulation captured a widespread feeling. It articulated, as one reviewer wrote, “the sentiments…of Jewish shoe salesmen, accountants, policemen, cabdrivers, secretaries.” What, on this reading, becomes of Jewish identity?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.13
It is turned into a defiance of Hitler. This is only a hairbreadth away from Sartre’s definition of Jewish authenticity. Fackenheim has in one sense gone further, for even were there no antisemitism, it would be a Jewish duty to remember it. God Himself only lives in Jewish minds in order to frustrate the Nazi attempt to murder His people. In his more recent work, Fackenheim’s thought stays within these lines. In answer to the question “What is a Jew?” he answers that “we, the Jews of today, would either have been murdered or never born…. We are an accidental remnant.” But a Jew who is murdered simply because he is a Jew has, according to some authorities, fulfilled the command of kiddush ha-Shem, “sanctification of God’s name.” He has become, in his death, holy. Since any Jew might have been a victim of the Final Solution, every Jew is holy, and in this sense “our holiness is ineluctable and brooks no honest escape or refusal.” Here Jewish holiness has been equated with being singled out as a potential victim.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.14
Jewish identity cannot be built on such a foundation. Jews in the past did indeed preserve a memory of their sufferings at the hands of Pharaoh, Amalek, and Haman. They remembered, in kinot and selichot, the victims of the Crusades, massacres, inquisitions, and pogroms. They even, in one dazzling insight into rabbinic consciousness, saw suffering as part of the essence of Jewish peoplehood. A Gentile who comes to convert to Judaism is asked, according to the Talmud, “What reason do you have for wishing to convert? Do you not know that Israel at the present time is persecuted and oppressed, despised, harassed and overcome with afflictions?” The Talmud adds, “If he replies, ‘I know and yet am unworthy,’ he is accepted immediately.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.15
Despite this, no Jewish thinker prior to modernity saw suffering as a source of Jewish identity. Even Judah Halevi, who was able to rescue a vestige of pride from persecution, nonetheless saw suffering as a trial of faith, not as a substitute for it: Jews, he said, suffered more than others because they were more sensitive. “Israel among the nations is like the heart among the organs of the body.” Michael Wyschogrod, in a penetrating critique of Fackenheim’s work, has insisted that “there is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it.” Judaism survives despite Auschwitz, not because of it.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.16
The Holocaust and Jewish Identity
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.17
Fackenheim’s definition of Jewish purpose is more than mere theory. It articulates a major orientation of contemporary Jewish life. Consciousness of antisemitism, past, present, or anticipated, remains a dominant strand of present Jewish identities. Worse: while Jewry in the wake of emancipation tended to see hatred of the Jew as a temporary phenomenon, to be overcome by individual or collective “normalization,” post-Holocaust ideology sees it as an enduring feature of the Jewish condition. “Jews,” writes George Steiner, “are a people whom totalitarian barbarism must choose for its hatred.” To be a Jew is to place on one’s children “a burden of ancient loathing.” “That fear,” he adds, “lies near the heart of the way in which I think of myself as a Jew.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.18
John Murray Cuddihy has argued that this creates “a kind of Manichean view of the world in which a small, weak, good group (the Jews) is dispersed among a large, strong, bad group (the nations, the goyim). This small, good group is self-defined as a victim of the large, strong, bad Christian group that victimizes it.” A harsh analysis, but not an inaccurate one.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.19
In America the Holocaust has become a new and primary symbol of Jewishness, a source of survivalism and political and philanthropic endeavor. Holocaust memorial centers have proliferated. Holocaust programs dominate Jewish studies on campus. The Shoah has become one of the primary themes of Jewish literature – one writer recently estimated that one in four new books on a Jewish subject are about it. It is a key element in teenagers’ Jewish education. It is recalled in Yom ha-Shoah services. Its functional value is clear. It unites an otherwise denominationally divided community. It links American Jewry to Israel without negating the diaspora. It provides a logic for secular Jewish survival.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.20
But, as a number of commentators have recently pointed out, the Holocaust points everywhere and nowhere. It has been used by secular Zionists to “refute” the diaspora. It has been used by religious anti-Zionists to indict Zionism: the nations, they argue, would never have turned against Jews had Jews not sought prematurely to leave. It has been cited by Americans to justify democracy. It has been cited by Jewish activists, driven by the call of “Never again,” to denounce democracy. The Holocaust has been taken as proof of Jewish uniqueness. It has been taken, too, as proof that a sense of uniqueness, of the “chosen people,” is a vicious concept and leads in the end to the idea of the “master race.” As an instrument of Jewish survival its value is deeply ambiguous. One of the great scholars of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz, has spoken of her distress at the “almost obsessive, ceaseless attention” given to it by American Jews. “If we’re a people that gets murdered, the young will flee from us. We have something more than that.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.21
The Holocaust and Israel
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.22
The Shoah figures prominently too in Israel’s view of the diaspora. A.B. Yehoshua voiced a widespread sentiment when he wrote that “the Holocaust proved to us the danger of our abnormal existence among the nations. It is,” he writes, “the final, decisive proof of the failure of diaspora existence.” To one of the characters in Amos Oz’s In the Land of Israel, written in the aftermath of the Lebanon War, the hostility to Israel displayed by Western media was part of the “cunning of history.” It would increase antisemitism and thus force Western Jews finally to leave and make aliyah. This too is a significant shift in consciousness. Most of the early Zionists believed that the existence of Israel would end antisemitism. Instead it has transmuted it into anti-Zionism. But this, rather than being analyzed, tends to be seen in fated, apocalyptic terms. It is part of seifa de-galuta, the process of the end of exile. Israel fulfills a quasi-providential role when it increases the discomfort of Jews in and with the diaspora. It hastens the ingathering.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.23
Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah have charted the rise in Holocaust imagery in Israelis’ description of their own situation since 1967, and especially since 1973. Here again we face a revolution of thought. In the early years of the state, the Holocaust and Israel tended to figure as opposite archetypes. The Shoah symbolized diaspora suffering and passivity; Israel represented a new identity, powerful, proud, and assertive. But more recently the Holocaust has come to “reflect the eternal condition of the Jewish people – isolated and beleaguered.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.24
Liebman and Don-Yehiyah are disturbed by the possible consequences of this image. They warn that “Israel’s sense of isolation and distrust of its allies is profoundly influenced by the Holocaust symbol, resulting in behavior that could antagonize allies and become, in the end, a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That analysis has been echoed by the secularist Amnon Rubinstein.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.25
Since modern times, Jews have had a deeply ambivalent attitude toward antisemitism. On the one hand it is something to be detested, opposed, and fought. But on the other hand, though few have been as explicit in this respect as Sartre and Fackenheim, it provides substance for an otherwise perplexing identity. Leonard Fein has written that “deep down – and sometimes not so very deep – we still believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to keep us a people, that we have not the fiber to withstand the lures of a genuinely open society. It is seduction, not rape, that we fear the most.” It is as if, in resisting hostility, the Jew discovered himself.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.26
Yet as the basis of an identity, it has fearful consequences. Internalized, it can become self-hatred. Externalized it can be used to justify stances of unwarranted suspicion and aggression. Though Jews in the Middle Ages explained their suffering in terms of an enduring tension between themselves and the world – in R. Shimon bar Yochai’s phrase, “Is it not well known that Esau hates Jacob?” – this was counterbalanced by the conviction that, in Malachi’s phrase, “Nonetheless, God loved Jacob.” Indeed, the very notion that the hostility of “the world” had its roots in the distant past helped to deprive non-Jewish perceptions of their sting, and make them marginal to the Jewish self-image.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.27
What is harmful about taking antisemitism as the basis of identity is that it is an imposed identity. It takes as definitive, not the Jew’s encounter with his historical past, his religious present, or his messianic future, nor even his chosen kinship with other Jews, but instead his encounter with non-Jewish society. As an identity it is, to use David Riesman’s terminology, neither tradition-directed nor inner-directed, but other-directed. It turns destiny into fate. It sees Jewishness as something thrust upon the Jew. It is the product of a complex and interlocking set of alienations, of the Jew from the traditional content of Jewishness on the one hand, and of Jews from social and political neutrality on the other.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.28
Having sought “normalization” either in the diaspora or Israel, Jews find themselves still and unpredictably bearing a high public profile. If Charles Liebman is right in seeing American Jews as “torn between two sets of values – those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival,” we need look no further in understanding the role of antisemitism in identity. For in fighting it, the Jew simultaneously asserts his right to acceptance in the wider society and establishes his differentness as the object of prejudice. The ambivalence is momentarily resolved. But at the cost of a love-hate relationship with both Jewishness and the non-Jewish reference group. A long history of ambivalence can be traced from Spinoza to Sartre and onward to Fackenheim. That surely is one price of the secularization of Jewish identity. The hatred of the world is no substitute for the love of God in explaining the Jewish “singled-out condition.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.29
Diaspora or Exile?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.30
If antisemitism is one component of contemporary Jewish identity, identification with Israel is another. Charles Liebman suggests that “concern for Israel, efforts in its behalf, and the symbols of Israel increasingly represent the content of American Judaism.” Leonard Fein concurs. Since the Six-Day War, he writes, “Zionism has been the collective religion of the Jews, and the needs of Israel rather than the demands of the halakhah have provided the norms for communal behavior.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.31
But here too lies a deep ambivalence. The consensus on the centrality of Israel is unaccompanied by either a sense that Jews ought to leave America in favor of aliyah, or by a perception of America as galut, exile. To the contrary. The category of “exile” seems radically inapplicable to the American situation. “American Jews,” writes Charles Silberman, “now live in a freer, more open society than that of any diaspora community in which Jews have ever lived before.” As Jacob Neusner puts it, “American Jews politically, socially, and economically stand within the corporate limits of society; they do not see themselves as temporary residents, people who really belong somewhere else. Their homeland is America; its turmoil is theirs; so too is its tragedy and triumph. To allege that in the eschaton they will be magically lifted up and transported on eagles’ wings to some other place is to present American Jews with a useless fantasy.” America is home.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.32
What are the consequences of a secularly Israel-oriented diaspora? The most serious is that it creates a form of vicarious identity. Authentic Jewish life takes place elsewhere. Charles Liebman has penetratingly defined the role of Israel for American Jews as the new heim, the substitute for the “old home” of Eastern Europe, now vanished in the Holocaust. The heim is a place one visits occasionally, feels nostalgia for, and about which one wants to feel that life goes on there as it always has. But the “characteristic of the heim…is that one doesn’t live there.” Jewish continuity is guaranteed by someone else, somewhere else. It is delegated away to a surviving elite. For the rest, to be Jewish is to enable other Jews to be Jews.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.33
The most critical voice within American Jewry of this vicarious identity has been Jacob Neusner. “The rebirth of the Jewish people takes place through the achievement of the Zionist movement, and that is true. But it is true for someone else. It is not true for ourselves. We are not there.” The categories through which diaspora Jewry explains itself to itself relate to events that take place elsewhere and to other Jews. “Ours is a mythic situation in which we talk about what other people go through, but then we find ourselves unable to explain the world in which we live, the things through which we pass, the life we choose for ourselves and our children. We are spectators at someone else’s drama.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.34
Beyond this, vicarious identity masks a deep disparity between the way American Jews see themselves and the way they are seen through Israeli eyes. For Americans, Israel is a source of diaspora renewal. It strengthens the sense of collective Jewish peoplehood. It provides a focus of identity and activity. For the majority of Israeli thinkers, however, this is dangerous self-delusion.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.35
Natan Rotenstreich, A.B. Yehoshua, and Eliezer Schweid among others have continued to argue the classic Zionist case that there can be no true Jewish creativity in the diaspora, nor ultimately can there be secure Jewish survival. Schweid argues against Achad ha-Am’s thesis – central to diaspora Zionism – that Israel represents “a spiritual center” for Jews throughout the world. This ignores, says Schweid, the way culture is transmitted. “Participation in a culture means direct involvement in the process of creativity.” Jews outside Israel cannot absorb its inner vitality at one remove. “The superficiality of Jewish culture among the vast majority of the Jews of Europe and America is irrefutable proof of the validity of this assertion.” Gershom Scholem applied to American Jewry the chasidic maxim that the greatest exile is not to know one is in exile. Arnold Eisen concludes, from his survey of recent thought of the themes of exile and homecoming, that “negation of the diaspora, including America, stands at the very center of contemporary Zionist reflection.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.36
Paradoxes of Interdependence

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023. Via Sefaria (sefaria.org), Sefaria-Export. Version source: https://korenpub.com/products/arguments-for-the-sake-of-heaven Licence: CC-BY-NC. Source.