SLIDE 1 May 13, 2014 Saskatoon, SK, Canada Symposium: Doing Theology in Occupied Territory
A Blessing or a Curse: Judaism’s Zionist Dilemma By Stephen H. France
Hello, it is great to be here in Saskatoon and I am very honored to be asked to lead this session. I thank the organizers for inviting me and the United Church of Canada for sponsoring this important symposium. I’d like to offer two propositions: 1) The Zionism that produced the State of Israel is a terrible distortion of the Jewish Bible and tradition; but paradoxically, 2) The crisis that the so‐called Jewish State has caused by subjugating the Palestinians offers Jews – in fact requires them – to rediscover and put in practice the heart of God’s Biblical commands. Here’s how I came to believe these two things: I was sitting at a traffic light in 2005 when words
- f the Bible entered my mind: “Not like the nations. Not like the nations.” I looked for the
passage and found the prophet Ezekiel speaking in God’s name: “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve
- idols. But what you have in mind will never happen.”
Ezekiel and God were addressing the People of Israel, of course, but I had been thinking about the State of Israel and I heard Ezekiel saying, “Not Zionism.”
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Then, in July 2006, as Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon and Gaza, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote in a column, “Israel was a mistake,” a statement he soon regretted, of course, but in which I heard the echo of Ezekiel. I realized that forming a state like all the nations was not just a mistake, it was the mistake, the original sin that the Bible aims to expose to God’s truth and redemption. From the very first pages of the Bible, humanity is linked to land, but land is only a medium for the relationship between God and humanity. The original promised land, of course, was the Garden of Eden. In Gen 2–3, God creates the land before creating the Human Being, who is formed from the earth (“Adam” is from the Hebrew word for “earth,” adamah) to take care of the Garden of Eden for God and with God. The garden is made for Adam and Eve, and they are made for the garden. This arrangement expresses God’s loving nature. By living well in the garden, the humans are given a concrete way to love God back, just as God’s gift of the garden is a concrete expression of his love for them. The garden is what brings the Human Beings and God together; it is what they share. Adam and Eve’s most precious way of showing love for God is to respect God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—to accept and respect that God is God and they are God’s creatures. The original sin is Adam and Eve’s decision to treat the garden simply as the object of their desires, rather than as the medium of a relationship of trust and transparency with God. The medium of their friendship with God becomes the medium of their alienation from God, from whom, in a final insult, they attempt to hide. The first social sin, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, is framed by God as a sin against the land, and Cain’s punishment is mediated through the land. God says that Abel’s blood “cries out to
SLIDE 3 me from the ground,” that Cain is “under a curse and driven from the ground,” and that Cain’s punishment consists in his alienation from the ground, both in his perpetual itinerancy and in the hardship of tilling infertile soil. God’s promise to Abram of the Land of Canaan is the central dynamic of the Hebrew Bible, but it’s not so much about land as it is about a plan to reestablish the friendship lost in the garden and the peace broken by Cain. It involves “all peoples on earth” (Gen 12:3), who God says will be blessed through Abram. And, paradoxically, Abram’s original virtue is to give up his home and his nationality to live as a sojourner in a strange land. And God is in no hurry to make good
- n the promise Abram will become a great nation admired of all the peoples on earth.
It takes a miracle for Abram (now Abraham, the “father of many nations,” Gen 17:5) and Sarah even to have an heir. God grants them a son in their barren old age in reward for Abraham’s faithfulness (Gen 17:15). Then, to underscore the point that the object of the promise was not an end in itself, but an expression of the beginning of a new relationship of trust between God and humanity, God demands that Abraham offer up that son, Isaac, the father‐to‐be of Jacob/Israel, whom one must assume Abraham loves more than his own life. In the offering and near‐sacrifice of that heir, Isaac, Abraham proves his ultimate trust in God is greater than his desire for land and progeny. Again, God is really taking his time. The Hebrews begin to develop a sense of identity as a people while in bondage in Egypt, where they no longer are connected at all to the land. The point of the Exodus from Egypt is to exalt God over Pharaoh. He is the Anti‐Pharoah. (in Exod 14:17, God says, “I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his army”), who represents the
SLIDE 4 state—that is, the proud possession of land through might, wealth, and idolatry. When Pharaoh’s armies pursue the fleeing Hebrews, the people are not an army, nor do they win a military victory. Rather, God singlehandedly intervenes to wipe out the danger. God, not weapons or skill, protects and forms Israel. Moses as a man is pointedly described as not up to the task of leading his people, except as a follower of God’s commands. And God’s purpose is not simply to favor the Hebrews. Rather, He calls them back to the Promised Land to be “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). But not right away. First, they spend 40 years in the Wilderness, in complete, powerless, landless poverty they are formed by God’s precepts, providence, and their own many mistakes, so that when they come into the Land they will be free not just of Pharaoh but also of Pharaoh’s ways. Nor do they live off the land; this is not Wanuskewin. Instead, God feeds them and as Walter Brueggemann wrote, they see that “life‐giving resources do not come from land but from Yahweh.” The next key moment comes many generations after they have been struggling in the Land, which had been developed by others before they arrived. The people decide to establish a monarchy, disregarding God’s stark warning about how monarchs will create a state that will usurp the place of God and community. The prophet Samuel warns the people of the perils of statehood and all the evil that kings do to their people (1 Sam 8:11–17), but they insist, “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go
- ut before us and fight our battles.” God tells Samuel, “It is not you they have rejected, but
they have rejected me as their king” (1 Sam 8:7). Under David and Solomon a state among the states is established, with impressive early results,
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but the pursuit of national power has deadly side effects, blinding and deafening rulers and the elite to God’s will as they violate the covenant commitment to justice and mercy, as the great prophets chronicle and denounce. This brings on the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE), and then the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom of Judah (587–538 BCE). Ironically, the exile experience, with its longing for return and mediation on loss, generates tremendous spiritual creativity, including the Book of Genesis, and locks in many prophetic insights. The land of promise is alive in the minds of the wise men and women. Actually, from this point on, practically from the point that the Jewish people enter history, exile, including the sense of internal exile felt by Jews in the Second Temple period, becomes the norm of Jewish experience and the ground of their theological meditations. In fact, even during the kingdom period one can see a deep ambivalence in the attitude of the people of Israel toward the Land. Consider the fierce hostility to Canaanite and Philistine earth‐oriented fertility cults, which were linked to state power. Going back even further, in the Garden or with Abraham, the Land is a somewhat abstract reality, a symbol and token of relationship to God, whereas with other peoples (the nations) land was sufficient. These others, with their nature gods and Mother Earth myths, might almost be thought to have grown out of their land. In contrast, Abram is brought from outside into a land that others have loved and nurtured—a land he did not know or choose. For him, as for his descendants, it has no intrinsic value; God could reassign a different land. It’s about something more. But what? How did God intend to keep his promise? What were his people supposed to do? Those questions exploded in the ferment of the First Century, when the Romans tried to co‐opt the Jewish religion in their usual melting pot/mosaic Pax Romana way, while the vast Jewish
SLIDE 6 Diaspora of the Second Temple period continued to assimilate to foreign cultures. Two radical alternatives emerged: that of Jesus of Nazareth, who read the Bible one way, and that of the Zealots, who read it rather like the religious Zionists of our day. After the Zealots took on the Roman Empire and brought defeat and destruction on their people, more prudent rabbis made a new deal with Rome, preserving the Jewish people as minority groups throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East. As the centuries rolled on and Rome fell and other empires rose and fell, the rabbis kept to the same basic strategy of holding the people in tight control under their own religious laws, distinct from host cultures and maintaining as good relations as possible with host‐culture rulers. The rabbis’ approach took guts, smarts, resilience and unshakeable faith in God’s ultimate plan for the Jewish people. The land promise functioned as a marker of separation from any other land and its people, as a mark of separation, as well as messianic longing. “Next year in Jerusalem” was a bit of wry humor, since it was strictly forbidden to try to regain control of Jerusalem, but it also meant next year not in whatever other place a Jewish group might find themselves. “We may be here, but we aren’t from here; we’re God’s Chosen People in exile.” After centuries of marginalization and self‐marginalization and varying degrees of persecution and prosperity, the lid of Christian oppression lifted in Enlightenment‐era Europe and America. With the so‐called “Emancipation of the Jews,” they found themselves confronted anew with
- ptions they hadn’t faced since Roman times. But the emergence of the modern citizen‐state
was two‐edged. So, a famous declaration of the French Revolution stated: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation and granted everything as individuals.”
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This new freedom triggered an identity crisis. People, both Jewish and non‐Jewish, spoke of the Jewish Question or Problem. Jewish intellectuals like Theodor Herzl wrestled with the problem. They seemed to have only four choices: 1) Traditionalism – authoritarian, anti‐modern ethnic isolation; 2) Assimilation, often including a conversion of convenience to Christianity; 3) Reform Judaism – which stressed ethics and spirituality and rejected messianic, chosen‐ people, promised‐land passions; and 4) Secular revolutionary creeds, mainly types of Socialism – a form of assimilation. Enter Zionism: a nationalist revolutionary option. On the surface it was “normalization,” just another settler colonial project. It was a way to be modern and to be fiercely Jewish. In a racist, imperialist world that was the way civilization was thought to progress. But Zionism also tapped into deep, unfulfilled passions ‐‐ messianic, chosen‐people, promised‐land passions. Listen to Ben Gurion: “Without a messianic, emotional, ideological impulse, without the vision of restoration and redemption, there is no earthly reason why even oppressed and underprivileged Jews… should wander off to Israel of all places.” In Zionism the community of people that had formed around the old faith was to be liberated from God and remade as its own ultimate good, demanding the devotion once given to God and God’s law. Zionism, in effect, declared that the Jewish people were “like the nations” and that their greatness was self‐made and they should go take back their homeland. They should become as Ben‐Gurion put it, “a self‐chosen people.” A romantic nationalist idea of the people
SLIDE 8 became the people’s idol. Implicit in this idea was rejection of diasporic Jewishness. Many Zionists expressed of shame intense feelings and repugnance regarding diasporic mores and
- attitudes. In their place was supposed to come the ideal of the muscular, pugnacious New Jew,
who seemed to bear considerable similarity to other New Man notions of the day in the Soviet Union or the fascist countries. To most Jews before the Holocaust, Zionism seemed either blasphemous or retrograde or unlikely to succeed. But there was a deep, noble longing in the heart of many Zionists, who included great souls such as Martin Buber, and for a time Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein. Buber was maybe the most interesting, with his deep love of “The Tradition,” his zeal to revitalize the faith and his fascination with return to the Land. But in a 1944 lecture in Jerusalem he discussed the verses where Ezekiel said Israel can never be like the nations. Buber said: “If Israel reduces Zion to ‘a Jewish community in Palestine,’ it will not get the community. If it only wants to have a land like other lands, then the land will sink down under its feet just as the nation will melt away if it only wants to be a nation like other nations.” Well, that is what is happening in Israel‐Palestine. The carriers of God’s promise are acting like the hard‐hearted Pharaoh, creating a wilderness of hatred that is poisoning the Middle East and also America and Canada. It’s like the ancient days of Israel and Judea, when, to quote Walter Brueggemann: “The very promised land that promised to create a space for human joy and freedom became the very source of dehumanizing exploitation and oppression. . . . Time after time, Israel saw the land of promise become the land of problem.”
SLIDE 9 So, Zionism was a huge mistake, as Richard Cohen wrote. But mistakes sometimes create
- pportunities; God brings good from evil. Here, the moral, spiritual catastrophe of Zionism that
has brought about the endless Palestinian Nakba, has also bestowed on the Jews not just the
- pportunity to be a light unto the nations, but the imperative. Thanks to Zionism, they have
power and agency and thanks to its manifest failure, they are forced to choose between a blessing or a curse – just like God set it out in the ancient days. Those who choose to stay on the Land will find no middle ground: They can have dehumanizing Holy War or transformative Holy Peace. Jewish tribalism and insularity, which in the absence of sovereign power could co‐ exist with amazing explorations and celebrations of the human heart and human community, now in Israel must be confronted and cast down. Or it will destroy the Jewish soul. As long as the Palestinians are denied their human rights, the Jews do not truly possess the Promised Land; they merely cling to a soul‐destroying idol. The Jews of Israel and the world need really to believe that they are chosen and really to believe that they are chosen to help God restore the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, “chosen to overcome chosen‐ness,” as Joel Kovel put it. The positive impact this would have is beyond measuring. God’s vision for Israel and for humanity would be made manifest, who said to Isaiah: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6) **For references, see footnotes and bibliography accompanying the author’s essay “Not Like the Nations” in Zionism Through Christian Lenses: Ecumenical Perspectives on the Promised Land, published in 2013 by Wipf and Stock, www.wipfandstock.com , edited by Carole Monica Burnett (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013). The book may be ordered at: www.wipfandstock.com and on Kindle.
