Torah Zionism

 TORAH ZIONISM
Rabbi David L Kline

    In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly voted to determine that Zionism is a form of racism. The UN revoked the declaration in 1991. For years I wore a button that announced “I am a Zionist.” If an anti Israel vote were to be taken today it would doubtless pass with a far larger majority and be sponsored by more than the Arab League and the Muslim majority countries. And an “I am a Zionist” button would be provocative even in NYC. The State of Israel faces an existential crisis and difficult choices. The idea of Zionism has a history that is relevant to such a choice.
    I am a born and bred Zionist. My father, Rabbi Alexander S Kline, HUC 1933, was a Zionist when being so was a career liability. Journals and books labeled “Palestine “ were on tables and shelves as I grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We sang Hatikvah, in Ashkenazic pronunciation at Shabbat services. At age 16 I went to Camp Tel Yehudah, of  Young Judea. My college junior year was  at Hebrew University and a second year there in the midst of my HUC/JIR studies. I am at home in Jerusalem of the 1950s. Like my father, I am a diasporic Zionist, though on a visit to HaArets/The Land in 1967 following the 6 Days War, I heard of an opening for a rabbi in a progressive congregation in Jerusalem. Had I not just signed a contract with a congregation in Queens, I might have been an Israeli rabbi. My wife, Barbara, was willing. But we returned to the States and are content here. Part of me is planted in The Land, Voteless, I nevertheless bear responsibility for what goes on there, same as here.
    Torah Zionism is a recent discovery for me. Torah means sacred teaching, as distinct from the accustomed culture that I have inherited and experienced. Hebrew Bible/Tanach, since my first year in Jerusalem has been my primary academic pursuit. Amòs, Michah, Y’shayahu/Isaiah, and Yirm’yahu/Jeremiah were the sources for “prophetic Judaism,” as the thinkers of the Reform movement understood our religion. Decent behavior, justice and fairness, truthfulness and kindness was what God demanded, not cultic practices. HUC had no course on the book of Ezekiel when I was there in the 50s. A few years ago, in the course of a project on Tanach I took more than a cursory look at that text and that prophet/navi rose for me in significance as an original thinker and a torah source and specifically the originator of Zionism.
    Focus on a specific place for a certain people became torah, an integral teaching in Judaism during the Babylonian exile in the. 6th century BCE. Geographic nationalism, with religious content, was an answer to to alienation, the malady of exile.
    Since the 10th century BCE, one of he nations on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean worshipped YHVH/Yahh as their god, their defender and provider. One of their kings built a  grand temple to mark Yahh’s presence. There priests served Yahh with burnt offerings. Covenant/brit with a powerful god meant identity and security. But that status came to an end in 586BCE. In a catastrophic war their nation Judah, was defeated, their temple destroyed and they found themselves in a distant and strange land. Nebuchadnetsar of Babylon, intent on extending his empire to Egypt. had conquered lands of the Fertile Crescent. The Judeans, he exiled, en masse, to Babylonia. Documents, biblical or extra biblical, tell us little about their existence in exile but apparently the Jews were concentrated in some areas and the words of two prophets suggest an audience of disoriented, depressed, and disheartened, people, separated and alienated from its home and god. How could such a thing have happened? Yahh defeated? Are they to disappear as a people? Assimilate into Babylonian culture? Should they go on being Jews, and if so, how?
    The navi Y’chezkel was a kohen, a priest, among the elite exiled in an early stage, ten years earlier, 596 BCE. He sees a defeated people, homeless, unguided. He hears them saying that they are as good as dead. “Our bones have dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off.” He responds to them with a story: Heaps and heaps of human bones, sign of a vast slaughter, sun bleached, deteriorated beyond recognition let alone living. But then Yahh orders the navi to convey his word to the bones: “LIVE,” and they do. And Yahh continues: say that I shall resurrect my people from their graves and bring them up to EretsYisrael. Then they’ll know that I am Yahh and that my spirit is in them. (Ezekiel 37:1-14)
    Y’chezkel meant to heal his listeners by giving meaning to their terrible experience. N’vuchadnetsar had not defeated Yahh, On the contrary, Yahh had brought that emperor from afar to punish his people for a string of offenses:. bloodshed, disdain for parents, taking advantage of widows and orphans, dishonoring sanctuaries, desecrating Shabbat, slander, lewdness, incest, rape, adultery, bribery, loaning on  interest, oppression, forgetting God. (Ez 22:1-12). Already in the 8th century BCE, the n’vi’im Amòs, Y’shayahu/Isaiah, and Michah had warned people that God demanded righteousness, not worship, and that war would be their punishment if injustice continued. And now, said Y’chezkel, it has come to pass and he emphatically listed more offenses than all his predecessors. 
    But Yahh has not abandoned Yisrael, Y’chezkel taught. Even in their exile he maintains miqdash m’at, literally, “small sanctuary,” some sense of divine presence. The navi tells the people that Yahh, having scattered them among the nations, will yet gather them and give them new heart–of flesh, not stone,– and new spirit so that they will walk in God’s laws and keep his ordinances. “They shall become my people, and I shall become their god.” (Ez 11:16-20) Stating that Yahh is becoming Israel’s god, is a new teaching, introduced by Y’chezkel four times (14:11, 34:24, 37:23). He describes a whole hearted relationship, a more intense form of the simple brit of the monarchy period. Prior to the exile according to Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and others B’neiYisrael worshipped local deities in addition to Yahh. The new relationship is to be exclusive. In Jeremiah, 32:38, the same statement occurs in a passage also referring to the people returning to Y’rushalayim. Z’charyah/Zachariah, 8:8, having himself returned from exile, teaches the line. The idea of becoming related is clearly and emphatically stated in Deuteronomy, 26:17f, a two way performative utterance:
Yahh! You have today spoken [him]to become your god, to walk in his ways, to keep his laws and his commandments and his judgements and to listen to his voice. And Yahh has today spoken you to become his treasure people as he told you, and to keep all his commandments. 
Deuteronomy, compendium of prophetic teachings and along with  legislation and ritual practices, appears to have been composed to serve as Sefer Torah, written guide, for the community having returned from exile. Recent scholarship (e.g. Etched in Stone, Dr David Aaron) sees the writer as reflecting the need for redefinition felt by the community. The words are ascribed to Mosheh giving them weight and legitimacy. Here brit is emphatically transactional: promises of grand reward for obedience and threats of dire punishment for disobedience. All is to happen in the land that Yahh had promised to the patriarchs. Y’chezkel originated this torah.
    The second voice is DeuteroIsaiah an unnamed navi in Babylonia, whose words are found mostly in Isaiah 40-55. He addressed the exiles a generation or so after Y’chezkel, in the days when the Persians under Cyrus had conquered the empire and issued a policy encouraging exiles to return to their places of origin. DeuteroIsaiah opens: “Nachamu, nachamu ami/Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”. His audience was still in need of supportive reassurance. He agrees with Y’chezkel that destruction and exile was well deserved divine punishment and, with sympathy, he adds, the penalty was double what they had coming. Now God will gather the people and return them to their land, adding that the way back will be smoother than the road to exile. (Is 40:1-4)
    DeuteroIsaiah went on to introduce teachings that became fundamental torah. He taught monotheism: Yahh alone is god, creator and ruler of the world, first and last, beyond compare.(40:21-28) Earlier thinking had been that Yahh was the national god, the protector of Yisrael, as K’mosh was god of the Moabites, Dagon–of the Philistines, etc. Each deity related to one people who worshiped him but it was acceptable to acknowledge the power of another nation’s god. King Soloman is said to have built temples to such gods in Jerusalem.
    Monotheism posits a single power over all lands, over all peoples, without favorites How then can one nation be chosen to enjoy a brit with the one god? DeuteroIsaiah repurposes the ancient idea of exclusive protection. Now the relationship will be master and servant: Yisrael will be Yahh’s eved/servant, witness on behalf of Yahh to the world. The people are called in righteousness to return to The Land where they will be a light to the nations, open the blind eye, release the imprisoned.(42:5-8) Y’chezkel’s Zionism was to keep the faith and return to Zion. Deutero Isaiah advanced torah, adding value and purpose to Zionism. Yisrael in Zion was to serve God by teaching the world ways of peace.
    A grand idea, exhilarating but involving responsibility and burden. How many exiles Jews returned, we can not know. But Deuteronomy, perhaps a generation or so after DeuteroIsaiah, repeatedly presents practices to be observed in The Land. “These are the laws and ordinances you shall attentively do in The Land that Yahh, god of your ancestors, gave you as a possession, all the days you live on the earth.”(Dt 12:1) Obedience to Yahh assures Yisrael’s special status, qadosh/holy and s’gulah/treasure (7:6), and shows its wisdom and nearness to God (4:5f), and earns prosperity and eminence (28:1-14). If these sound like narrow national interests, Y’chezkel had offered a universalist spin: “Then the nations will know that I, Yahh, make Yisrael qodesh when my sanctuary is in their midst permanently.”(Ez 37:28). Nations worshipping Yahh becomes a theme taken up by another navi, in the last ten chapters of Isaiah, TritoIsaiah, who spoke in the days of the return: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.”(56:7b)
    Zionism of the prophets pervades the Pentateuch which seems to have been composed in post exilic Jerusalem. Beginning with the simple but powerful charge to Avram to go to a land that Yahh would indicate where Yahh would make him a great nation, bless him, make him famous, and he would  “be a blessing.”(Gen 12:1f) The aged Ya’aqov/Jacob, in Egypt, in a parallel to Y’chezkel, tells his son Yosef: “Yahh will be with you and return you to the land of your ancestors.”(Gen 48:21) Exodus gives us, in words that sound like Deuteronomy, “And now, if you, obediently obey my voice and keep my brit you shall be my s’gulah/treasure of all the peoples for mine is the whole earth. And you shall be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”(Lev 19:5f).Leviticus puts it:”For I am Yahh who brought you up from the land of Egypt to become your god.”(Lev 11:45) In Numbers, on the journey from Egypt to the land Yahh is giving to Yisrael, we have the story of the spies who gave a discouraging report on The Land and the people refused to march forward. The punishment, 40 years wandering in wilderness. The older generation will die before the people cross the Jordan into its destiny.(Num 13) A suggestive parallel to the Babylonian exile and return.
    Return to The Land must have been a hard sell for people who had accepted their lot as immigrants in Babylonia. Not only does DeuteroIsaiah tell of miraculous leveling of the road back home but he repeatedly describes new water sources and bounteous fertility in The Land.(eg Is 41:18f (In the 1950s this and other lines from DeuteroIsaiah were popular Israeli songs.) People may have suspected such a pitch. Nearly 50,000 made the return trip as accounted in Ezra 2:64f and Nehemiah 7:66f. Another aliyah, led by Ezra amounted to perhaps 1500.(Ezra 8:1-20) No record tells us how many remained in exile but the population sufficed to carry on as Jews in diaspora. They produced the rabbis of the Talmud.
    In the course of two millennia Zionism raised aspiration that some realized while others praised, prayed, and sang while remaining in galut/exile. Diasporic Zionism became an aspect of Judaism. Erets Yisrael and Babylonia each had their function and importance. The great medieval rabbinic commentators studied and taught in Europe. 
    Early rabbinic literature records bits of history relating to this dual sense of place. The characters in this midrash lived while the  second temple yet stood, before the 70CE destruction:
A story of Rabbi Elazar ben. Shamua and R. Yochanan Hasandler, who were traveling to Netzivim (in Bavel) to Rabbi Yehudah ben Beteira to learn Torah from him. Arriving at Tziddon (in Phoenicia), they remembered Eretz Yisrael, whereupon they raised their eyes and wept and rent their garments and recited this verse: "Take heed and hearken to all of these things ... take possesion of it and dwell in the land”(Deut 11:31f) — at which they said: Dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is as weighty as all of the mitzvot in the Torah.They returned and came to Eretz Yisrael.(Sifre 80:4)
Less hyperbollic but far-fetched would be the Mishnah Kelim (1:6):
There are ten grades of holiness and the land of Israel is holier than all other lands. And what is the nature of its holiness? That from it are brought the omer/sheaf, the first fruits and the two loaves,(Lev 23:17) which cannot be brought from any of the other lands. 
A two step endorsement of living in Erets Yisrael from the Babylonian Talmud strikes me as dreamy and sentimental but illustrates Zionism at a remove:
The Gemara asks: And what does Rabbi Abba bar Memel do with this verse “He gives breath to the people upon it”?(Is 42:5) The Gemara answers: He requires that verse for that which was taught by Rabbi Abbahu. As Rabbi Abbahu said: Even a Canaanite maidservant in Eretz Yisrael is assured a place in the World-to-Come. 
This is from Ketubot, (111a), a discussion in an academy in Babylonia. The entire page preserves an argument about remaining in Babylonia as opposed to making aliyah/going up to The Land.Rabbi Zeira, educated in Pumbedita, made the journey and joined his fourth century contemporaries, Abba bar Memel, Tiberias, and Abbahu, Caesaria. The Babylonian académies remained in Bavel and flourished.
    An earlier, Mishnah, ruling clearly valorizes aliyah and denigrates y’ridah/going down/Leaving The Land in family legislation:
All may force their family to ascend to Eretz Yisrael, i.e., one may compel his family and household to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael, but all may not remove others from Eretz Yisrael, as one may not coerce one’s family to leave.(Ketubot 13:11) 
    We find Zionist sentiment in late biblical literature.     In a line that seems to reference troubled times of the Second temple period (beginning in 5th century BCE), Psalms 147 opens with:  Halleluyah for he is good. . . builder of Y’rushalayim is Yahh, the scattered of Yisrael he will collect.
    Ben Sirah, writing in Hellenistic Jerusalem of the second century BCE adopted the form of Psalm a136, “Hodu lAdonai ki tov/ThankAdonai for he is good” for :”Hodu l’mqabets nidchey Yisrael, ki l’okam chasdo/Thank the gatherer of the scattered of Yisrael for his love is eternal.”
    “Gatherer of the scattered of Yisrael” was first spoken by TritoIsaiah (Is 56:8) and became part of a sidur prayer in 8th century France. By then, the Jewish population in The Land had declined while the diaspora numbers had multiplied. Diasporic Zionism was a matter of devotion. “Libi b’mizrach va’ani b’sof hama’arav/My heart is in the east while I am in the end of the west, ” wrote Y’hudah Halevi in 12th century Spain. He actually did go up.
    When we speak of torah we generally think of ancient teachings, wisdom, words introduced by n’vi’im, interpreted and extended over the generations by scholars. But revelation happens also in science, mathematics, philosophy, experience: through living in and observing the world. 
    In 19th century Europe, nationalism dominated geopolitics. Nationhood meant self determination, cultural identity, distinctive character, a state delineated by a specific people and language. A new Zionism came to be at a time when Jews were allowed to leave ghettos to enter this modern culture which was still full of antisemitism. Rabbi Tsvi Hirsh Kalischer, in 1862, wrote Drishat Tsiyon/Seeking Zion, about resettling the Jews of Eastern Europe in Palestine. In reaction to pogroms in Russia, in 1881; Chov’vey Tsiyon/Lovers of Zion organized to advocate and set up settlements in the Ottoman controlled territory; Auto-Emancipation, by Leo Pinsker in 1892 Russia suggests that Jews would never be the social equals of non-Jews until they had a state of their own. Der Judenstaat/The Jewish State, 1896 pamphlet by Theodore Herzl in states that Jews needed a homeland based on the French reaction to the Dreyfus trial that he had covered as a journalist.If liberal France could be swept by an ugly wave of antisemitism, it could happen anywhere and Jews were entitled to a safe space. The first Zionist Congress met in 1897. In the words of Asher Ginsburg, pen name Achad Ha’am:
About two hundred Jews, of all lands and of all parties, met at Basle, and for three days (29-31 August) from morning till evening they discussed publicly, in the sight of the whole world, the establishment of a secure home for the Jewish people in the land of its ancestors. Thus the national answer to the “Jewish problem” came out of its retirement into the light of day, and was proclaimed to the world in ringing tones, in clear language and in manly fashion—a thing the like of which had never happened since the Jews were exiled from their land. (Lo Zeh Haderech/“This is not the way,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67667/67667-h/67667-h.htm#f11)
    The Holocaust confirmed this new Zionism. Jews, have human rights that have been threatened. Jews as a people are entitled to self determination. The new Zionism sees M’dinat Yisrael/The State of Israel as one of the many nations in the world with sovereignty and boundaries and economy and army. To be sure, its 1948 proclamation of independence declares: “The state of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets;” The precepts are there but the practice is something else. The State of Israel follows the world wide system of security through force of arms, conquest, domination, repression, and denial. Hence continuing threat, tension, intermittent war. Hence October 7, 2023 and the bombing of Gaza that followed. The bombing of Iran. That Israel became the mightiest power in the region is an appalling success story. Nineteenth century Zionism has its antecedents in Tanach. Our ancestors, both fabled and historic were fierce fighters. They were mostly victors in the battle scenes described in Genesis, Numbers, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
    The Hebrew prophets who introduced Zionism meant for Israel to be qadosh/holy/special. To follow divine law and show other nations the purpose and advantage of torah. The godly world of peace has come to be considered utopian, unrealistic an impossible ideal. Military power is realistic, reliable, essential, and nowhere moreso than in the State of Israel. Israelis can claim success but must be wondering about the sustainability of such realism.Now may be the window of opportunity for thinking like our prophets. In 2001, a thoughtful poet, Adrienne Rich wrote: “War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.” Zionism of the past century would not be easy to abandon. A new Zionism must start with a new dream, a vibrant imagination. Fortunately, the hint is there in torah.
     Most of us have a hard time imagining peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Here is one serious effort: https://www.alandforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/booklet-english.pdf
Young professionals, Israeli and Palestinian professors, geographers, doctors, artists, and more have met, discussed and produced plan based on acknowledging that there is a homeland of two peoples. Peace requires not toleration and domination but partnership, mutual support, cooperation. Shared interests in security, health, education, economy means whole hearted sharing of land and resources. Their proposal is a confederation with two entities divided by the old Green Line, armistice of 1949, with open borders. There would be political and cultural division but overall unity. Their website details plausible remedies for the long list of harms that have accumulated over the past century. Clearly these steps won’t be taken by leadership bent on violent suppression or violent resistance. But we have experienced non violence and its effect on a nation. We have learned about stages of moral development. And some of us are imagining peace. 
    A bitter irony: Religious Zionism is what  Bezalel Smotrich calls his political party that  wants to annex the West Bank convince Arabs to leave and replace Jerusalem’s Al Aksa with Bet Hamikdash, the rebuilt Holy Temple.. Their notion of religion is chauvinistic, a militant response to Holocaust, locked into defensiveness. We have better than that in torah.