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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This reality is already reflected in an ancient work such as the book of Esther. Although the book ends with the apparent victory of Mordechai, Hadassa and the Jews over their enemies, it is hard to avoid noticing a feeling of disappointment which steals into the reader’s heart, an inkling that this is a false dawn. Something fundamental is amiss, if the happy ending leaves the Jewess Hadassa married to a drunken, capricious gentile, if the greatness of Mordechai is dependent on the restraint and goodwill of a tyrannical king, and if the Jews remain sitting complacently in their houses in Shushan and the rest of the empire, waiting for the next wave of hate. The happiness of the book of Esther cannot therefore be complete, and the message of the story seems barren in the end. For the story of Esther takes place in the days of a king of Persia, and even if his precise chronological identification is uncertain, he clearly must have ruled during the time of the return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple, or thereafter. Not only does the book not contain any evidence that Mordechai the Benjaminite and the rest of the Jews had worked for this return to Zion, there is no expression whatsoever of longing for, nor even so much as a mention of, the land of Israel.

This is surely connected to the fact that Esther is the only book of the Bible in which the nation called “the Children of Israel” or “the People Israel”—that is, the Jewish nation—is not spoken of, and even the God of this people, the God of Israel, is not mentioned. Instead, we have only references to “the Jews.” This is already no longer a nation, not even a people, but rather a collection of communities, subjects, dependent on the mercy of others for their protection. There is no alternative but to recognize the connection between the severance from the land and this change in identity: Outside the land, the people of Israel become simply “Jews,” and instead of being called the book of Hadassa, it is known as the book of Esther—using the heroine’s Persian name. In stark contrast to all of this stand the books of Ezra and Nehemia, which tells of the return to Zion, more or less during the same time period in which the story of Esther takes place; and even though those who return are the exiles of Judea, and return to the territory of Judea, they are in these works described time after time as the Children of Israel, not as Jews.²⁴

Around 2,500 years after these events, Theodor Herzl witnessed how the Dreyfus Affair exposed the Jews of France to hatred and deliberate incitement which endangered their very existence. The denouement of this episode resembles the story told in Esther—Dreyfus was cleared of all wrongdoing and the incident contributed to an awakening of sympathy and strengthening of the rights of Jews. But the lesson Herzl learned from what he saw was the opposite of that described in the book of Esther.

Herzl reached the conclusion that any victory in the exile is only temporary, based on flimsy foundations, since the very presence of the Jews in the exile is the root of the danger to their existence. He realized that there was both a possibility of, and the need to work for, the return to Zion, and that if this effort were not successful—the fate of the Jews would be hard and bitter. But he was not the last, and certainly not the first, to reach the conclusion that the persistence of the Jews in the exile is spiritually and existentially dangerous to them. This is, indeed, the reason that Yehuda Halevi ends The Kuzari with the declaration by the Jewish sage of his intention to immigrate to the land of Israel (and it seems Yehuda Halevi himself actually immigrated in the end). This is also the reason for the traditions of the rabbis which say that after the events described in the book of Esther, Mordechai, too, immigrated to the land.²⁵

What was unique about Herzl’s activity was that instead of choosing personal immigration to Israel as a solution, he came to the conclusion that the “Jewish problem” must be solved in a political fashion. Herzl refused to accept the traditional dilemma which had persisted until then: On the one hand, the existence of the exile and its evils was an unalterable fact; but, on the other hand, a fundamental solution to the problems of the Jews would be found only at the end of days. He considered practical action for its own sake to be worthless, and spirituality for its own sake to be dangerous; instead, he preferred to blend action and intention, while strictly preserving the uneven balance of power between them—the greater emphasis was placed on Zionist action. Indeed, he deliberately postponed dealing with ideological and spiritual matters until the end of the road. Herzl chose to re-enter history, and offered a practical political, religious and military solution to the threats confronting his nation. In other words, what was special about Herzl’s outlook was that he finally returned the identity of “the Jews” back to “the Jewish people,” thereby renewing their identity as a nation.²⁶

The establishment of a national organization whose aim was to return the Jewish nation to its land was a result of Herzl’s understanding of the political and cultural conditions of the modern world, in which he believed there was no longer room for groups standing aloof from history under the protection of a ruler or historical custom. Modern culture and the contemporary state no longer allow true autonomy to minority groups and communities, and therefore the Jewish nation must either establish its own state or be annihilated.

It is important to emphasize that Herzl and the other leaders of mainstream Zionism did not hasten to formulate a new Jewish consciousness or identity. Rather, they saw their movement above all as a tool for the practical salvation of the nation, only after which spiritual correction could come. Many of these leaders wanted to consolidate an entirely new consciousness, but viewed the establishment of a state and the process of the return to Zion as being prerequisites for this.

In the exile before Herzl, Judaism walked a narrow bridge between the danger of messianism, and that of an introverted seclusion amid traditional learning, divorced from the world. Even the main streams in Judaism were accused, sometimes justly, of having slipped too far towards one of the extremes: Hasidism, founded by the Ba’al Shem Tov, which attempted to bring about a reawakening of faith, was (and is) frequently accused of dangerously approaching messianism. The countervailing movement of the mitnagdim in the Lithuanian yeshivas, founded by the Vilna Gaon, placed an emphasis on the learning of Jewish law, and was (and is) often accused of having concentrated in an exaggerated fashion upon dry and alienated scholasticism in which there is no room for faith or feeling.

The uniqueness of Zionism lay in its offering a way out of the pattern of the Jews’ extra-historical existence in the exile, and their return to the reality of the land of Israel, that is, their return to history as a nation. In the book of Esther—floating somewhere outside the bounds of history—”the Jews” make there first appearance, and already they are on their way out of history. Zionism is the attempt to re-enter history and to change the existence of the Jews back to the existence of the nation, Jewish and Israeli, in the land.

IX. Consciousness and Being

But the chances of success for this, the third return to Zion, were dubious from the beginning because of the heritage of the long exile: In the words of the famous Zionist adage, “It is easier to take the Jews out of the exile than to take the exile out of the Jews.”²⁷

In their talk of creating a “new Jew” who would cut himself off from the existential experience of the exile and would once again put down roots in his land, the leaders of the Zionist movement were in reality referring to the “old Jew” who had once dwelled in Zion—in other words, not a Jew, but an Israeli. The Jews who were born in the exile were supposed to return to their land, there to become Israelis, as one can see from the deliberate decisions taken by the renewed Jewish settlement in the land: The old-new Hebrew language was chosen as the spoken language in the old-new land, instead of other, more widespread Jewish languages (Yiddish) or non-Jewish ones (such as German or English); foreign and even Jewish names were abandoned by many in favor of Israeli names of judges, kings and Maccabees; and the name given to the state that was established was not Judea, but Israel.

But those who returned to Zion in our own time also knew from the start that it would be no easy task to transform the exilic Jewish consciousness into an Israeli one. They feared—with reason—that the exilic consciousness which the Jews would bring here with them would perhaps create, instead of a Jewish nation, just another community of Jews with an exilic consciousness, coincidentally living in the land of Zion, but in no sense feeling a part of it.

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