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PDF FormatThe intellectual failure of autochthonous Zionism has granted surprising legitimacy in Israeli society to theories expressing the most extreme exilic position—theories like those of Rosenzweig, which claim that the true Jewish ethos involves a detachment from concrete, earthly reality. Ironically, this position has come to the fore just as the Jewish presence in the land, politically and demographically, has reached its most significant level since biblical times.
Jewish thought, then, offers three basic positions regarding the national experience vis-à-vis the land of Israel: The biblical position, with theology and politics intertwined in one holistic worldview; the exilic position, engaging theology but not politics; and the Zionist position, which is political but usually not theological. These three approaches find their clearest voice in their response to autochthonous nationalism. The Bible rejects autochthony as irrelevant in view of the political presence of God, who allocates and revokes national rights in the framework of covenantal and contractual arrangements with his creatures. Exilic thought rejects autochthony as incorporating physicality and worldliness from which it is cut off, whether by compulsion (as in the case of the Rabbis) or by choice (as in the case of Rosenzweig and the post-Zionists). Finally, the central stream of Zionism, that of the Labor movement, adopted the autochthonous position, chiefly because it provided a mythic foundation for the revolution in consciousness which this stream sought to effect.
Yet the cultural project of Zionism did not achieve this revolution in consciousness. From the perspective of a hundred years of Zionism and fifty years of statehood, Israel is a resounding political, military and economic success. But has it realized the dream of Ben-Gurion and his peers to create a “new Jew” in the land of Israel, one connected by an organic, unbreakable link to his “motherland”? The answer to this is clearly negative. In contemporary Israel, the spirit of pioneering vitality and the vision which inspired the early Zionist settlement have dissipated almost entirely. Groups such as Gush Emunim and certain elements of the Kibbutz movement today are merely exceptions which prove the rule. Political alienation from a historical inheritance that has simply become “the territories,” and the increasing instrumentalist-commercial approach to the lands of Israel, are clear expressions of the citizens’ continued disjunction from the land. Thus it is not difficult to agree with the words of Eliezer Schweid, that “The ties to the motherland of the generation that was born in Israel, on the level of consciousness, are tenuous and easily undermined.”42
Does all this reflect a basic flaw in the Zionist effort to revolutionize the Jew’s relationship to his historic land, or does it have something to do with the universal plight of modern man, the distancing of man from nature in this era of technological culture? Evidently the answer is a combination of the two. Together with the autochthonous element borrowed from European nationalism, Zionism also adopted the West’s exploitative materialism. The wane of the artificial autochthonous myth was accompanied by the ascendance of the alienated technological approach, which denies the land all inherent value. Ironically, the sense of primordial belonging encouraged a sense of mastery over the soil, a feeling the Zionists took pains to cultivate. With the passage of time, however, motherland became real estate, and the Zionist enterprise found itself subverted. As a result, Israelis of the 1990s once again are experiencing, in many ways, the very alienation from reality that Zionism had sought to correct. This alienation appears not in the form of a people exiled to a foreign land, but as individuals living on their own land, in a modern society which treats the land as a resource tagged for crude industrial exploitation, or as a commodity which can be bartered for political gain.
The dead end to which Zionist autochthony has invariably led, on the one hand, and the Siberian chill of a technological internal exile, on the other, open the door for a meaningful alternative to both: The biblical approach. The Bible offers a unique concept of the relation between man, land and God, one which puts a check on man’s domination of the land, but without rendering him a slave of nature. According to this view, a people can never fully own the land upon which it dwells, for “the earth is the Eternal’s and all that it holds.” The crucial point here is that man’s dependency upon God dictates a relationship of responsibility on the part of the people of Israel towards the land which has been delivered into its hands, a responsibility which is primarily ethical, while implying an ecological dimension as well: “When you lay siege against a city for many days, to make war with it and capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the axe against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. For are trees of the field human beings, that you besiege them as well?”43 The very notion of the agricultural Sabbatical year, too, underscores this approach: “When you enter the land that I give you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Eternal.”44 The land, like all living things, is entitled to a sort of rest, dedicated to God: “But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath for the Eternal....”45 On this subject Martin Buber wrote:
In the Bible, the earth is responsible for the guilt of man, who stems from the earth and cleaves to it. The two are conjoined together, whether in joy or in tragedy, in such a manner, that man is the one who determines, through his actions or failure to act, the fate of the earth, which then becomes his fate.... Man is subjected to the yoke of the commandments of a God who reveals to him His will. Through the act of creation of this same God, he is so closely engaged with the earth, that the manner in which he relates to the Divine command either directly benefits or harms the earth.46
The biblical worldview, then, demands that man assume moral responsibility for his world. The Bible presents us with an alternative, both to the existential positions of the West—the rationalist-technological one and the mythic-autochthonous one—and to the exilic Jewish outlook, in which land is unimportant. The biblical alternative introduces an element of foreignness, of “otherness,” between man and the world. This otherness, which in the Western-Greek tradition is at times a cause for rejection, aggression or fear, and in the exilic-Jewish position is an expression of detachment and alienation, serves in the Bible as a basis for responsibility and commitment. “Cursed be the ground because of you,” says God to Adam; yet, simultaneously, “By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground—for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”47
The land, then, is permanently divided from man, ever the “other”; yet at the same time, it is forever close to him, signifying both his cradle and his grave. The poet Uri Zvi Greenberg gave voice to this in his “A Man’s Home”:
This traditional Jewish rejection of mythical autochthony finds its fullest expression in the Bible. Pro-exilic Judaism chose to interpret the rejection of autochthony as the negation of the territory in general, in favor of an ahistorical, rootless destiny. This interpretation is surely not consistent with the biblical perspective, which is existential (that is to say, ontological) and simultaneously political, in the sense that it strives to realize its moral ideals by establishing an actual “kingdom of priests and holy nation.”49 As a result, dwelling in the land of Israel is a necessary condition for realizing the historical mission of the Jewish people: Without the political, there can be no full expression of the ethical.Only he who returns to the village at evening truly goes home:
He rolls off his back the city of exile, resolves for himself the riddle of longing
And the sadness-worry on this account, which man carries inside
All the days he exists in this sophisticated world, which is late...
Homeland of Adam, from which he was uprooted, is the reason for the longing
And grief and rootlessness;
The secret of the cutting of the wings while they are still touching...
Is the secret of the nomad’s wrath.48
The Bible’s unique claim regarding the relationship between man and earth, and between the people and the land, is of paramount significance for the continuation of Zionism. Even if the modern Jew does not necessarily accept the whole religious structure of beliefs of the Bible, he should be open to the biblical commitment to existence, and its necessary implications for the political, social, technological and ecological spheres.50 The Bible teaches us that the path of the Jew in history is just such a path of responsibility, not only towards his peers, but towards the natural world in which he lives and from which he is nourished as well, for the two cannot be separated.
“Motherland” need not be an autochthonous myth or a sterile technical term; it can also be an ethical obligation. Israeli society, afflicted with flight from responsibility on the personal and public levels, needs to relearn the meaning of concern, of compassion, of true engagement in the world. Out of a sense of responsibility, Israel needs to return and take up again the spirit of actualization, of national self-realization. The return to being, to the living essence of the soil of the motherland, need not be religious or mythic. It can be, simply, a moral calling.
Assaf Sagiv is a Graduate Fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
Notes
1. Cf. Eli Bar Navi, “Myth and Historical Reality: The Case of the Salic Law,” Zmanim, Summer 1984, pp. 4-16. [Hebrew]
1. Cf. Eli Bar Navi, “Myth and Historical Reality: The Case of the Salic Law,” Zmanim, Summer 1984, pp. 4-16. [Hebrew]
2. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1944).
3. Moshe Greenberg, On the Bible and Judaism: A Collection of Articles, ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1986), p. 110. [Hebrew]
4. Genesis 10:5.
5. Genesis 12:1.
6. Deuteronomy 26:5.
7. Leviticus 25:23.
8. Deuteronomy 32:8-9.
9. Deuteronomy 2:9,19.
10. Deuteronomy 2:20-22.
11. Psalms 24:1.
12. Genesis 17:6-9.
13. Leviticus 18:25-28.
14. Jeremiah 2:7.
15. The earth in general, and the land of Israel in particular, is held to be the exclusive possession of God, and exile constitutes a punishment. Exile signifies the abrogation of the right to inherit the land, and the transferring of this right to the conqueror. “I made the land, man and the animals on the face of the earth through my great power and my outstretched arm, and I have given it to whomever I see fit. Now I have delivered all of these lands into the hands of my servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. I have also given him the beasts of the field to work the land.” Jeremiah 2:67.
16. Exodus 12:2.
17. Rashi on Genesis 1:1.
18. Nahmanides’ commentary on Genesis 1:1.
19. Mishna Avot 5:9. See also Shabat 33a.
20. This approach was foreign to Greek thought, with which Jewish thought clashed beginning in the Second Temple period. If the Hebrew possession of the land of Israel was regarded by the Bible and its commentators as a contractual right, in the eyes of Hellenic polemicists, the birth peoples—the Canaanites—were endowed with a more fundamental right, stemming from their autochthony. Greek political philosophy considered civil rights to be based primarily on birth (genos), a claim which can be translated into both the individual and the collective realms, as the Athenians did. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks (Oxford: Oxford, 1993). In disputing these opinions, the biblical story of the Hebrews’ conquest of the land evidently constituted a real political burden for Jewish apologetics. The extreme violence towards the autochthonous inhabitants of the land, as depicted in the book of Joshua, apparently served as a particularly effective weapon in the hands of those who challenged Israel’s right to the land: Here we have a political community (or communities) forcibly uprooted from the land in which it was born, and annihilated by foreigners, who even take pride in the deed. In these polemics the Jews sometimes resorted to legal tools, on which there was consensus with Gentile polemicists. The rabbinic tradition retreated to some degree from the uncompromising biblical line by sometimes grounding territorial claims in property rights: “There are three [places] on whose account the nations of the world cannot defraud Israel, by claiming that Israel stole them. These are: the cave of Machpelah, the grave of Joseph and the Temple.” The reasoning is, of course, that these three sites, in contrast with the rest of the land, were bought for full payment, rather than conquered by force. Cf. Yohanan Levy, “Disputes Regarding Land in Israel in Ancient Times,” in Olamot Nifgashim (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1969), pp. 60-78. [Hebrew]
21. Brachot 8a.
22. Prominent examples of this can be found in kabbalistic literature, among the Sabbateans and in the Hasidic movement.
23. Franz Rosenzweig, “Geist und Epochen der jüdischen Geschichte (Spirit and Times of Jewish History),” in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1937), p. 19.
24. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 299.
25. Rosenzweig, Star, p. 299.
26. Rosenzweig, Star, p. 300.
27. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978); Edmond Jabיs, “The One Who Says a Thing Doesn’t Strike Roots,” interview with Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, in Sarit Shapira, ed., Paths of Nomadism—Migration, Journeys and Passages in Current Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1991), pp. 9-16 [Hebrew]; George Steiner, “The Wandering Jew,” Ptachim 1, 1966, pp. 17-23. [Hebrew]
28. Dialogue on the State and the Culture, David Ben-Gurion with Haim Hazaz, October 1962 (pamphlet), p. 12. [Hebrew]
29. In the words of writer Amos Ayalon, “Many members of the second Aliya shut their eyes when it came to the Arabs. It is as if these pioneers deliberately ejected the Arabs from their consciousness.” Amos Ayalon, The Israelis (Jerusalem: Adam, 1981), p. 123. [Hebrew]
30. Signs of the polemic are recognizable to this day in the character of the claims regarding “historical right” voiced by the two sides. Take, for example, the Palestinian attempt to appropriate a Canaanite ethnic identity in order to prove ancient autochthony in the land of Israel.
31. Eliezer Schweid, Homeland and Designated Land (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1979), p. 218. [Hebrew]
32. Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, “From Two Pasts,” in The Writings of Micha Yosef Ben Garion (Berdichevsky): Essays (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960). [Hebrew]
33. Cf. Anita Shapira, New Jews, Old Jews (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), p. 166. [Hebrew]
34. Yitzhak Tabenkin, “The Ideational Sources of the Second Aliya,” in Dvarim (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1972), vol. 2, p. 25. [Hebrew]
35. Oz Almog, The Sabra: A Portrait (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), p. 81. [Hebrew]
36. Almog, The Sabra, p. 81.
37. As conjectured by Anita Shapira in Shapira, New Jews, Old Jews, p. 233.
38. David Ben-Gurion, Studies in the Bible (Tel Aviv: Am Oved and the Society for the Study of Bible in Israel, 1976), p. 61. [Hebrew]
39. Schweid, Homeland, p. 210.
40. A typical example is Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin’s article “Israel Has No Homeland: On the Place of the Jews,” Te’oria Uvikoret 5, Fall 1994, pp. 79-101.
41. W.D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California, 1974).
42. Schweid, Homeland, p. 224.
43. Deuteronomy 20:19.
44. Leviticus 25:2.
45. Leviticus 25:4. Clearly, this practice also reflects pragmatic agricultural logic, yet it should be noted that the land is treated as an entity with rights. This is not simply a literary metaphor, but a position of moral and ecological import. And as already mentioned, the biblical conception is emphasized in the statement in Mishna Avot 5:9, which associates the exile from the land with severe moral transgressions and a neglect of obligations toward the land.
46. Martin Buber, Between the People and Its Land (Jerusalem: Shocken, 1905), pp. 16, 18. [Hebrew]
47. Genesis 3:19.
48. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Complete Works (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1994), vol. 9, p. 11. [Hebrew]
49. Exodus 19:6.
50. It is worth emphasizing that biblical ontology is not anti-technology, along the lines of the “Deep Ecology” movements or the green parties. The Bible grants man the right—and even the obligation—to use nature for his needs, as taught in Genesis 1:28-29: “God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.’ God said, ‘See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.’” However, this use must be carried out with respect and commitment toward the biosphere in which we live. Man, in other words, is not the master of the world but its guardian, who was created “to till it and tend it.” Genesis 2:15.
