IF NOT ZIONISM WHAT?
I’ve recently read two Anti-Zionist books by distinguished thinkers, Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After Gaza and Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile. I was left disappointed by both books, feeling like they had overpromised and underdelivered.
I think both books are motivated by the unhappy reality of the state of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in general and the Gaza war in particular. The treatment is problematic both morally and practically. Morally, because it is simply wrong to kill innocent civilians even if Hamas uses civilians as a shield. Morally because stealing Palestinian land on the West Bank is wrong, because shooting peaceful Palestinian protestors in Gaza as the IDF did during the protests in 2018. Morally wrong because statements like there are no innocents in Gaza denies the humanity of the other. Our tradition teaches us to treat the other well because “we were slaves in Egypt” Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their ilk have forgotten this piece of Torah.
Practically wrong because if we ever hope to live in peace with our neighbors, what we are doing is just creating more hatred. The Netanyahu government has been 100% resistant to talking about possible solutions so that the two peoples can live in peace. Why? Because a large portion of Netanyahu’s government believes that it is OK to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank so that Jews can rule the entire Biblical land of Israel. The members of the government who might think it is morally wrong to advocate for ethnic cleansing or who understand that publicly advocating it will turn Israel into a pariah state—they are silent because they need the support of the immoral minority in order to rule. It’s not just in the United States where politicians do the morally wrong thing in order to hold onto power.
However justified the criticisms of the state of Israel are, in my mind, neither Beinart nor Magid deliver the promises of the titles of their books. Beinart is right that American Judaism has identified Judaism and Israel since 1967 and that there is a long history where that wasn’t the case. He’s right in saying this tight identification is breaking down.
But if not Israel, then what? He just doesn’t answer this. If he wants to argue for Tikkun Olam, my response would be that one can be for social justice without being Jewish. I suspect that many Tikkun Olam oriented Jews aren’t motivated by Biblical prophets (the source of the Tikkun Olam in the Reform movement that I grew up in during the 60’s and 70’s) and even fewer are motivated by the project of repairing the Godhead, the mystical origin of the term. If he wants to argue for learning and observance, which fits with the fact that he himself is an Orthodox Jew, that’s great for those who want to embrace it, but that’s not most American Jews.
Magid also doesn’t present a compelling argument for the necessity of exile. On the one hand he offers us the anti Zionism of the Satmar Rebbe who thinks the time isn’t ripe for redemption and so we shouldn’t be pushing the river. To which I respond by quoting Hillel: If not now, when? Besides, I don’t know about you, but how many of us believe that there is some kind of being called God who is going to send some individual who is going to redeem the world? Or if you prefer the idea of a Messianic age, it is hard to look at the world today and think that we are anywhere close to this.
In fairness to Magid, he also offers us two different approaches where Zionism isn’t at the heart of Judaism, namely Chabad and Bashevis Singer’s embrace of Yiddish. Again, neither of those seem like they would be very compelling to many Jews. If you are a leader of the community as a whole, which I am certainly not, you have to be concerned about what is going to motivate a big chunk of the community. Yiddish ain’t it—we can’t even educate most of our children to have any fluency in Hebrew.
I believe that exile is a compelling metaphor for how life feels in the 21st Century. But that doesn’t mean it is a desirable state of affairs.
The traditional view of Exile is that we would be in exile until the Messiah came. Labor Zionism in the person of A.D. Gordon came along and said we aren’t going to wait, we’re going to end our physical exile and engage in practices to redeem our souls as well by working the soil of the holy land of Israel. It was a messianic movement that has long since ended with a whimper. Religious Zionism in the person of Rav Kook said that the secular settling of the land was the beginning of redemption and would bring about the Messianic age. Only his descendants have forgotten that the Messianic age is supposed to be the redemption of the whole world, and the whole world includes the Palestinians who live in Gaza, Israel proper and the West Bank. Oops.
None of these seem to me to be viable options for addressing the exile that is in our hearts and may well turn out to also be a physical exile if Israel becomes akin to Apartheid South Africa. Neither Beinart or Magid, in my view, successfully address what might be next.
Further, there’s a really telling point in Beinart’s introduction. Recalling the wonderful novel The Chosen by Chaim Potok, he recalls the scene where the younger Orthodox but not Hasidic Jew is complaining to his father about the fanaticism of his friend’s father, who is the Rebbe of a Hasidic sect. The older non Hasidic father, himself a man of great learning and a true scholar of the Talmud, says that the Rebbe’s fanaticism might be what has kept the Jewish people alive. Beinart concludes that he can imagine a scenario in which he needs physical refuge as a Jew, and the only Jews left to provide it will be the fanatics. It’s a future I can imagine as well.
Lest I be rightly accused of only being critical and not offering anything positive, let me make a few brief comments about exile and Judaism. Any redemption from exile, it seems to me, has to address four big and related tasks.
Our exile from the place in which we live
Our exile from who we are at the deepest level
Our exile from having beloved communities to whom we are committed
Our exile from the divine.
Whichever piece we are working on, it seems to me, we also need to have our eyes on the other parts as well. I believe with all my heart that it is hard if not impossible to work on any of these tasks without being grounded in some kind of tradition which is usually connected to some kind of tribe or clan relationships. I am grounded in being a Jew, so I work on all of these in the context of our ancestral history.
I work on exile from place by dwelling with A.D. Gordon’s core insight that we need to physically work the land, and by orienting my life around the Jewish calendar which is rooted in our ancestral connection to the land of Israel. I work on my exile from who I am by studying examples of Jews who both succeeded and did not succeed in becoming who they were meant to be at the deepest level. I work on my exile from beloved community by connecting with Jews and particularly with earth based Jews. I work on my exile from the divine by seeking to reclaim the Animism that is present in our tradition and harkening back to our ancient ancestors who worshipped not just YHVH, but the Goddess in her many forms as well.
I don’t know if redemption from exile is possible. What I do know from my own experience is that we can feel more connected. And that’s not nothing. I wish Beinart and Magid had given us more than criticism or solutions that aren’t going to do much for non Orthodox Jews.
