On Emigration to the Land of Israel

The question of aliyah is pressing today in a way that it never had been before in our country. I read in the newspaper a rabbi who says that it could be that the golden age of Judaism in the United States is coming to an end. He is a Conservative rabbi in Forest Hills. He mentioned, in passing, the influence on him of Arthur Hertzberg’s anthology The Zionist Idea, and having never been a Zionist myself, I resolved to read it. Just as we tend to think about synagogue attendance as we grow older, so too is it said that we warm to the Jewish State with age.

One theme which seems prominent is that it behooves us to work on behalf of our own people rather than in a foreign land. The most poignant statement I read of that case has nothing, if I may correct myself, to do with land, but rather concerns the participation of Jews in the armies of nation-states to which they belonged as Europeans of good standing, before the war. There is the old joke about the Jews in Eastern European armies who would discover each the other’s Judaism on the battlefield and put down their arms to kibbitz. Who needs to fight? But the author I read had no jokes in mind, and rather argued that it makes sense for us to fight all on the same side instead of being integrated into foreign armies.

Ben-Gurion famously said that once we have Jewish prostitutes and Jewish policemen, then we will be a nation like all the other nations. We have a high opinion of ourselves and think that we would redeem anyone among us forced to work on the streets, or we would study rather than walk the beat. But if there are Jewish murderers and Jewish thieves, then what difference does it make who steals from or kills us? It is naive to think that, out of brotherly love, working alongside our fellow Jews will protect us from the harm that befalls us from evil motives among our fellow human beings, who after all we are. In the land of Israel, there are Jewish bosses who will irk us, and Jewish wives who will be poor matches for us, just as there are in the Diaspora. Most of us shake our heads when we think of those religious Jews who piously believe that living in the land will bring about the end times, and view settlement beyond the Green Line as needless provocation of opinion. The grass is always greener on the other side, and running to the Land out of conviction that it will improve our lot is idle fancy.

We know that Zionism gained in strength from anti-Semitism in Europe, when bold minds thought that we could secure a safer existence for ourselves by building a nation which would be ours – which we could own. The issue of territoriality barely moved Herzl, who spared not a thought for the conflict with the Arabs which crossed more perspicacious minds. Hertzberg credits Herzl primarily with organizational prowess, noting that he brought into existence the organizations for the settlement of the land which at first he merely imagined, and that the organizations met with wild success in their intended outcome and remain with us even today. However, he is right who remarked that Zionism today finds itself in a defensive position, claiming to be singled out for opprobrium on account of the same anti-Semitic motives on the basis of which Dreyfus was persecuted, so that, rather than being a creative force, it is hunched into the same position as Jews in the Diaspora, its youthful enthusiasm grown into the realization that one’s fate cannot be escaped.

In “The Eyes of Language,” Jacques Derrida observes that the renascence of the Hebrew language is bound to strike a chord which touches on the depths of our history, resounding with the times of antiquity in which the language came to be. He speaks of as volcanic the kind of revelation that encounter with this language can bring, and just as Hephaestus, the god of volcanoes, is the household deity of the pagan blacksmith, so too is continuity with the past forged in fire. In our own tradition, we speak of each of the Avos as having dug his own wells, reaching down into the earth and connecting with water in the same way that one must reach down into the past and connect with the God of one’s fathers. (We look down on Aristotle for not having had the periodic table of the elements, but in thinking which is both ancient and uncannily current, the elemental is understood to be something more picturesque than the atomic.) Incidentally, one could say that we forge the signatures of our fathers on our own flesh, deceitfully creating a covenant which, by definition, has no objective existence. It is interesting that the word forge should have this double meaning of creation and deceit. Man creates, unaccountably, the doctrine of creation out of nothing.

I say this by way of introduction to what is arguably Hertzberg’s most pressing goal, which is to introduce to the reader what he calls cultural Zionism. Here is the vision of Ahad Ha’Am.

“The secret to our people’s persistence is – as I have tried to show elsewhere – that at a very early period the Prophets taught it to respect only the power of the spirit and not to worship material power. … As long as we remain faithful to this principle, our existence has a secure basis, and we shall not lose our self-respect, for we are not spiritually inferior to any nation. But a political ideal which is not grounded in our national culture is apt to seduce us from loyalty to our own inner spirit and to beget in us a tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion, thus breaking the thread that unites us with the past and undermining our historical foundation.”

The idea that flying to Zion will bring us physical safety is the more unlikely in view of the proximate threats to Jewish life in the land of Israel, with Hamas and Hezbollah looming on the other side of the border. Iran threatens to nuke not New York, but Tel-Aviv. Yet the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’Am, as Hertzberg calls it, is portable as the Torah, and if on Hanukkah, we read the Haftarah in which the prophet says, “‘Not by force, and not by might, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord of Hosts” – a Haftarah, we may reflect, self-consciously chosen by the rabbis on a day when we commemorate a victory brought about by arms – then we see that the temporal, while necessary for the spirit, is inessential, a mere afterthought in the mind of God. Ahad Ha’Am thought a colony in Israel a necessary precondition for the continued spiritual life of Israel, serving as a center of Jewry, but subservient to its end, rather than an end in itself. That end can be served anywhere on earth.