Act and Comprehend

By Ofir Haivry

Both Judaism and Zionism were predicated on the idea that human fulfillment can only come of correct action. Today’s confusion is the result of the exaltation of principle over deed.

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The one truth, whether it is called right belief or pure wisdom, can be so dangerous because in its generality and absoluteness it cannot but subordinate and cancel all that surrounds it. This is the nature of an absolute principle. The clash between principle and reality is inevitable, because reality cannot ever contain the pure ideal.

When the cultures of the ancient world met with the principle of generalization, all of them—except one—collapsed, because the internal contradictions endemic to their eclecticism came to light in all their inconsistency the moment they were confronted with generalization, which is consistency itself. Not only Egypt and Babylon were incapable of coping with generalization. In both Greece and Rome, where the philosophical version of generalization developed, society and culture simply disintegrated as the customs and the gods on which they had been grounded were demonstrated, by means of the newly introduced method of philosophical generalization, to be worthless.

In other words, the tension between deed and principle was gradually revealed. It became clear that a culture or religion based on traditions and customs alone could not stand up to the test of principle. However, even when these societies attempted to base themselves on the rules of philosophical wisdom, they still could not overcome the constant undermining of every social framework or custom by abstract principles, and by the ruthlessness inherent in following one ideal through to the end.

For the last two thousand years, human culture has attempted to cope with this problem with a series of systems aimed at finding the correct balance between reality and principle. Beginning with Christianity and Islam, through rationalism and Marxism, there have been repeated attempts to find the way that will lead to the much-sought orchard.

The solution offered by Judaism is found in the emphasis on the moral importance of the path itself. That is, Judaism refuses to accept the confining of its essence to the realization of an abstract, metahistorical value in “the next world.” Rather, the Jewish faith ties that essence in a consistent fashion to “this world.” Thus in contrast to other worldviews in which this world is understood merely as a prelude to the main essence, or in which this world is all there is, the path in Judaism is not only a tool for arriving in the orchard, but a significant part of the orchard itself. In Judaism, the path—the means—has an inherent, irreplaceable value, which derives from the understanding that one can reach the orchard only within the framework of a life led in a very specific historical and geographical context: A way of life which is in itself supposed to embody the historical destiny of the Jewish people, and which transpires entirely in the land of Israel. The essential connection between the people and the land needs no documenting here, and is recognized even by those who could not be suspected of excessive sympathy for Judaism.¹²

V. Horev and Moria

From its first representations of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, beginning with the Tora’s description of Abraham’s arrival in the land and of his formal covenant with God,¹³ and indeed throughout its entire length, the Bible unambiguously insists that the connection to the land is ana priori condition for the fulfillment of the religious commandments. In addition to the significant fact of the chronological precedence of the patriarchs in the land to the giving of the Tora, all of Jewish religious ritual is intended for inhabitants of the land, and is possible only within its borders.

National existence, religious ritual and the land of Israel are inextricably intertwined in the Bible in the centrality of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the holidays connected to agriculture in the land, in the connection between religious and political reforms, and so forth. Perhaps the most outstandingly conspicuous sign of this is the fact that Horev, the site of the giving of the Tora, which might have been expected to become an important religious focus, has always remained remote and peripheral. Mount Moria, on the other hand, which is connected to the binding of Isaac and the promise of the land to the descendants of Abraham, is what actually became the center of worship and identification for the Israelites when the Temple was erected on it. But in the wake of the destruction of the First Temple at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., the relationship between the people and the land changed dramatically. Although the Second Temple was already standing less than seventy years after the destruction of the first, a significant gap had already begun to crystallize between the form of Jewish existence and the content this existence was supposed to clothe, a gap which still exists and continues to exert its influence down to our own day—namely, the dwelling of a large part of the Jewish people outside the land.

VI. Hillel and Shamai

One can observe the destructive consequences of this gap in the talmudic homily concerning a certain gentile who asked the two most prominent sages of Israel in their generation to teach him the entire Tora in the time one could remain standing “on one leg.” Shamai simply sent the presumptuous gentile away, while Hillel accepted the challenge and told him: “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor, and all the rest is merely interpretation.”¹⁴ This episode does much to substantiate the threat to Judaism when the connection of the people to the land is undermined. The demand of the stranger to learn the Tora “on one leg” expresses in a clear fashion the “Greek” search for the one abstract ideal which stands as the foundation of all things. The stranger expresses well the Hellenistic idea, which by this time held sway from India to the farthest West, that the most important thing is the one, concise and generalizing principle.

Among the Jewish people, too, there were those who were beguiled by this approach, especially those who lived outside of the land or who adopted a Hellenistic outlook. These began to downplay the importance of the fine points of ritual and the tie to the land, as opposed to the importance of the pure ideal—be it called “truth” or “peace” or “faith.” The struggle against this worldview was and is an enormous challenge for Judaism: The seekers after the ideal attempted to brush aside anything that was formal and ritual, and to arrive at the foundation, the faith. The sages of Israel for their part made every effort to fend off this trend, which they understood to have a tremendous capacity to destroy.

The reactions of Hillel and Shamai reveal two different attitudes as to how to deal with this struggle, attitudes that are fundamentally divergent both in terms of their philosophical points of departure and their tactics. For Hillel and Shamai were the representatives of two distinct approaches to the traditional Jewish law of their time. Shamai, born in the land of Israel and a product of its political-cultural tradition, articulates the early Jewish legal tradition whose source is the period of the First Temple, and which is completely immersed in life in the land of Israel, in Jewish nationalism and in the struggle for Jewish national independence. The first premise of Beit Shamai (the Academy of Shamai) is the strict preservation of the practical rules and laws of the Tora. In the legal tradition of Beit Shamai, a prohibition is a prohibition, permission is permission, and what counts is the deed and not the intention.¹⁵

Hillel, on the other hand, came to Israel from Babylonia and embodied the change that had taken place in Judaism with the establishment of the exile and reconciliation to it. Since in the exile many of the laws of the Tora are difficult or impossible to perform in a literal fashion, the Jewish law which was then developing in Babylonia tried to discover the intention behind the laws of the Tora so as to be able to derive a system of observance which could be performed outside the land. The advantage to this method lies in its flexibility. But in obtaining this flexibility, it runs the risk of diminishing the political-national dimension of the connection to the land, as well as of incurring other questionable consequences that such a weakening must necessarily entail.

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