Basic military training is a familiar example of the methods where-by the most rudimentary form of character—the ability to maintain one’s course in the face of the pains and protestations of the body—is inculcated systematically and on a vast scale in response to the most evident need of the nation, that of self-defense. The raw recruits, even those who have prior athletic experience, are invariably afraid of the pain that their bodies are capable of inflicting upon them, and mistakenly believe that the spirit must sooner or later break in the face of such pain. Basic training goes about systematically eliminating this fear by taking the recruits through a protracted sequence of ever more grueling demonstrations of their own ability to perform in the face of pain. Certainly, their physical abilities are improved en route, so that that which was painful a month earlier is simply no longer painful. The essence of basic military training, however, is not the training of the body but the training of the spirit, which becomes ever stronger in the face of hardship, as it is demonstrated again and again that the onset of pain bears almost no relation to one’s ability to continue striving towards a given goal. In this way, the 2-kilometer forced march that gave one such a fright on the first day of training presently gives way to a 120-kilometer march, and the spirit is tempered so that it no longer quails before the prospect of physical ordeal.¹¹

This type of military training is an example of the way in which the needs of political independence are translated into a concrete educational effort—an effort whose ultimate purpose is to teach character. But physical endurance is not, in itself, character. The Hebrew slaves of Egypt were certainly capable of enduring physical hardship; what defeated them in the desert were the numberless fears that haunt a spirit that knows no form of self-possession other than physical endurance. Nor is the capacity to withstand the stresses of combat—which is, after all, a significant step beyond mere physical endurance—identical with character. From our own experience of public life, we know that the most battle-hardened military man, when dropped into the political arena and faced with a sandstorm of criticism at the hands of journalists or foreign officials, often finds himself once again experiencing the kinds of fears that gripped him in his first days in the army. One need only think of the prominent former general, who recently told the Israeli press that “I’m not going to get into a confrontation with the Americans. I’m not enough of a hero for that.”¹² Yet this example is hardly unusual. No small number of former officers, knowing little of character beyond the battlefield, simply adopt the fear of superior power as the guide and counsel of their political lives.

These considerations point to a significant misunderstanding on the part of many of the early Zionists, who believed that manual labor or military training would give rise to a strong character in a more or less automatic fashion. Military discipline can, to be sure, be an important step. But it cannot serve this purpose unless it takes place within the context of a broader philosophical framework—one that interprets the results of such training only as a metaphor, and as a template for use in transferring the lesson of self-possession to other areas of endeavor. Such a framework could be found for a time in the kibbutzim, which at their height were veritable assembly lines for the production of character, and whose educational efforts were probably the most systematic attempt by modern Jewry to develop a comprehensive system of education towards character. But whatever the specific nature of the approach, it is evident that it must be able to make sense of the onerous responsibilities involved in maintaining an independent state, and translate these into a course of education whose end-goal is not military discipline or bravery in combat, but a more resilient form of character capable of taking root well beyond the confines of military service, in the public life of the state generally.

Just as the demands of maintaining the state force a people to develop means of improving the physical endurance of its sons, so too do these demands press relentlessly in the direction of ever more ambitious traditions and institutions whose purpose is the inculcation of character and yet more character. Ten thousand men of character in each generation. This is the essential challenge posed by political independence. And in difficult times, when those entrusted with the state demonstrate their unsteadiness and even their worthlessness in the face of adversity, this challenge becomes a great din in the ears of men—a din that every free people, so long as it has not lost its last hope and acquiesced in its own bondage, gradually comes to recognize and take to heart.

 

 

Many of the early Zionists believed the conditions of uncertainty and fear under which the Jews had lived in the dispersion had not been without deleterious effects on their character, both as individuals and as a collective; and most saw the challenge posed by the establishment of a Jewish state as the surest way to remedy this condition. Give the Jews responsibility for maintaining a sovereign state, they argued, and we will soon see that the descendants of the Maccabees can handle themselves at least as well as any other people, and perhaps better.

Despite what has often been said, the critical assessment of the Jewish character implicit in this point of view was no invention of the anti-Semites and was not adopted from them. On the contrary, the suspicion that the exile had worked undesirable changes in the personality of the Jews is deeply entrenched within Jewish tradition, beginning with the merciless depiction of the behavior of the generation of the Hebrew slaves in the books of Moses. Traditional rabbinic interpretation expanded on this theme, painting shocking midrashic portraits of the generation that had grown up in the Egyptian exile. In Midrash Rabba, for example, the rabbis report that the elders who set out with Moses to confront Pharaoh were so overtaken by fear that each in turn took an opportunity to steal away, leaving him to face the Egyptian king alone.¹³ In later centuries, with the dispersion of the Jews in Christian Europe and the lands of Islam, the rabbinic tradition associated this new exile with a return to the bondage of Egypt—not least with regard to what it viewed as the reversion of the Jewish personality to slavishness. The great medieval commentator Abravanel, for example, writes of the Jews that:

Rabbi Ya’akov Hagiz, the famous anti-Sabbatean leader of Jerusalem, writes similarly that by comparing the military victories of the Jews described in the Bible to the Jewish condition in his own generation, one comes to recognize the depths of “our misfortune and humiliation and weakness, for the sound of a stirring leaf drives us to despair.”¹⁵ Hagiz, of course, paraphrases Scripture, which paints the most damning possible portrait of Jewish character in exile:

Most of the early Zionists considered this tradition all too accurate in its description of what had befallen the Jews after so many centuries of humiliation and persecution. Indeed, when one examines the writingsof Lilienblum and Pinsker, Herzl and Nordau, Brenner and A.D. Gordon, one quickly realizes that the issue of Jewish character haunted them perhaps above all others. Thus we find Max Nordau standing before the Zionist Congress and comparing the degraded character of the Jews in exile to that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt.¹⁷ Jabotinsky’s 1904 eulogy for Herzl likewise emphasizes the difference between Herzl’s character and that of the slaves, and his Samson is one long protest against the deterioration of Jewish character in the dispersion.¹⁸ In the works of such writers, we find proposals to build up the character of the Jews through the hardship of physical labor, through the responsibility of proprietorship, through physical training and military discipline, and through early marriage and parenthood. But ultimately, Jewish character was seen as being dependent on the establishment of a Jewish state, which was to serve a dual purpose in this regard: On the one hand, it would free Jews from the struggle for acceptance in the arena of European society, which was itself seen as a significant obstacle to the emergence of a strong Jewish character; on the other, the demands of statecraft would be a force for the development of a strong personality, in effect making the state into a vast school for nurturing Jewish character.