Israel and the Diaspora
In May 1993 the new President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, made a speech which created a brief flurry of controversy. It was Jerusalem Day, and he was addressing leaders from Jewish communities throughout the world. They had come expecting a conventional address about the centrality of Jerusalem to Jews worldwide. Instead they were subjected to an assault against the very concept of the continued diaspora itself. He urged “The future of the Jews is in Israel,” and continued: “We know what mixed marriages can bring. From a demographic point of view, Israel is the only place. I urge you to make Israel your home.”
This is the second great challenge to my thesis, and on the face of it, it is as powerful as the segregationist argument. In the spirit of Ezer Weizman a critic might argue as follows:
I grant everything you say about the crisis facing the diaspora. Assimilation is rife. Mixed marriage is rising. The Jewish family is fragile. Jewish identity is becoming weaker and confused. The Jewish future is altogether in doubt. You have diagnosed the symptoms correctly. But the cure you have prescribed is wrong.
You have spoken about Jewish continuity in the diaspora and you are about to say how it is to be achieved. But whatever you say next will be mistaken because it proceeds from a mistaken premise. There can be no Jewish continuity in the diaspora. Wherever Jews are, outside Israel, they are a minority. Even in the United States, the world’s largest Jewish community, they form no more than two percent of the population. The invariable rule is that minorities disappear. Not immediately, but ultimately. That is true even of Jews, the world’s great survivors. The latest figures prove it. Wherever you turn – Britain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, the United States, South America – Jewish communities are on the wane. They are assimilating, declining and slowly disappearing. That is a process you cannot reverse.
Nor is it a process you should wish to reverse, because the State of Israel is more than a fact. It is a value. Israel is the one place where Jewish continuity can be achieved. No less importantly, it is also the one place where Jewish continuity should be achieved. Israel is our home, our birthplace and our identity. We lost it for nineteen hundred years. We have recovered it now. Our ancestors prayed for the chance to be “Next year in Jerusalem.” Today, we have the opportunity to be “This year in Jerusalem.” Whether we are religious or secular Jews, whether we are moved by Jewish faith or Jewish culture or Jewish history, Israel is the only place where we belong.
Your talk about Jewish continuity in the diaspora is thus at best an irrelevance, at worst a serious distraction from the task of our time, namely encouraging aliyah, the return of the Jews to Israel. Whatever you do, you will fail. The rate of attrition will continue to rise. Diaspora communities will continue to decline. You will do worse than fail. You will shift attention from Israel, which is where our future lies. You will endanger the land, the state and its people. You will deprive it of potential funds. You will rob it of olim, of the immigrants it needs. You will have encouraged Jews to stay in the diaspora in the illusion that there can be a future in the diaspora. President Weizman was right. The best thing Jews outside Israel can do, for themselves, for Israel and for the sake of the Jewish people, is to leave.
THE ISRAEL OF SURVIVAL
No argument more perfectly encapsulates my thesis than this. I have argued that we are entering a new era in modern Jewish history. A new era calls for a new way of thinking, a paradigm shift. Attitudes that were appropriate to one age may become inappropriate, dysfunctional, in the next. The world changes. Nothing is as it was. At some stage even those – especially those – whose values are eternal must pause to look at the compass and take new bearings. That is true now. And nowhere is it more true than in our thinking about Israel.
My hypothetical critic is locked into a particular era and its mindset, the era of survival. It began in the mid-nineteenth century with the first stirrings of what we now call Zionism. It reached a series of peaks as crisis after crisis struck the Jewish world: first the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, then the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s, then the First World War, then the earthquake of the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel. The tremors continued through Israel’s wars of 1967 and 1973, the rise of international anti-Zionism, and the dramatic migration of Jews from the Arab world, Eastern Europe and Ethiopia. During the whole of this period, the Jewish world was dominated by a single ultimate question: where can Jews live?
Survival still dominates our thinking, and with it a particular view of the place of Israel in Jewish life. Israel means many different things to different Jews. For some, it is the place for Jews to be religious. For others, it is the place where they can be secular. For some, it is where they can be most intensely conscious of being Jewish. For others, it is the one place in the world where they can be Jewish without being self-conscious. Every ideology, theology or philosophy of Jewish life today has its own distinctive vision of the land and state of Israel, and no two perspectives are alike. Only one thing connects them all. Israel is the place of Jewish survival. This is the Israel which unites Jews throughout the world. It is the Israel to which we turn in dedication and pride. It is the Israel which has rescued the Jewish people – all Jews, everywhere – from homelessness and powerlessness in the century of antisemitism and the Final Solution. It is the Israel which has given Jews a vestige of security in a dangerously insecure world.
But the role of Israel in an era of continuity is not the same as in an era of survival. The land is the same. The people are the same. But the age and its challenges have changed. In the future, Israel will be no less central to our lives. But its relationship to the diaspora, and the diaspora’s relationship to it, must undergo a transformation. If not, we will be held captive by attitudes that were right then but wrong now. We will make bad decisions, decisions that will harm Israel, the diaspora and the relationship between them.
NEGATION OF THE DIASPORA
The sentiment to which President Weizman was giving expression has a name: shelilat ha-golah, “negation of the diaspora.” Far from being a new idea, it is the oldest of all Zionist ideologies. As a concept, it has its origins over a century ago.
Zionism – the Jewish national movement – was born in the nineteenth century. It grew out of a complex set of influences. There was the impact of European nationalism on thinkers such as Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. If the Italians, Poles and Hungarians could achieve independence, why not the Jews? There was the sense of messianic possibility, brought about by the modern era, which moved Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai. And underlying virtually every form of Zionism, religious or secular, was the biblical idea of exile and return, the ingathering of Jews to the promised land. Undoubtedly, however, the most potent factor in the development of modern political Zionism was a sense of the failure of integration, a growing intuition that emancipation was going badly wrong.
It began with the Damascus blood libel of 1840. The realisation that this medieval antisemitic myth was still potent in an age of supposed enlightenment shook both Alkalai and Moses Hess and launched them on an intellectual journey which ended in the conclusion that only in their own land, responsible for their own fate, could Jews be safe. The Russian pogroms of 1881 had a similar effect on Yehuda Leib Pinsker. The Dreyfus affair in France in 1894 reinforced the same conviction in Theodor Herzl. Western Jews had hoped that through Enlightenment and emancipation the doors of European society would be opened to them. Yet, at the same time anti-Jewish prejudice was stimulated to new and virulent forms. Throughout Europe Jews became “the Jewish problem.” To the more far-sighted, it became clear that in many countries integration would be worse than painful. It would be impossible.
Herzl put it bluntly in The Jewish State (1896):
We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade or commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country.
Whatever the positive aspirations of the early Zionists, and they were many, the underlying proposition which drove the movement was a negative one: shelilat ha-golah, the negation of the diaspora as an environment in which to create a Jewish future.
This negation took many forms. There were those like Hess, Pinsker, Herzl and Nordau, who saw it mainly in terms of antisemitism. Jews were an unassimilable minority who in European society would always be the first target of hatred. There were others, like Jacob Klatzkin, who on the contrary held that assimilation was all too possible. Religion had preserved Jewish identity in the past, but its hold was rapidly waning, and now only the secular bases of land and language were capable of preserving Jews as a nation. Others focused on the economic or cultural dimension. Only in their own land could Jews forge an autonomous society and thus put an end to their condition of marginality and alienation. Rabbi Avraham Kook saw the issue as a spiritual one. Exile had gone on too long. It had created an unnatural split between body and soul. After centuries in the ghetto, Jews had turned in upon themselves and lost the living connection between religion, land and language. “Jewish original creativity,” he wrote, “is impossible except in the land of Israel.”
The Zionist case was not readily accepted. We tend to forget how bitterly the battle was waged between Zionism and its Jewish opponents. When Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897, he originally intended to hold it in Munich. The German Orthodox and Reform rabbinate, otherwise deeply divided, came together in a unique joint declaration dissociating themselves from the project for a Jewish national home, and succeeded in having the Congress banned from Germany. It was held instead in Basle, Switzerland. Even in the 1930s and 1940s, many of the leading representatives of Anglo-Jewry remained anti-Zionist and made representations to this effect to the British government. It was not until 1939, with the election of Selig Brodetsky as President, and 1943 with the dissolution of the non-Zionist Joint Foreign Committee, that Zionism finally prevailed in the Board of Deputies.
Throughout this period, one of the most fraught in Jewish history, the argument was conducted in either-or terms: Israel or the diaspora, integration or survival. In part the debate turned on the mixed signals Europe delivered to Jews. On the one hand, there was the message of emancipation: toleration, civil liberties and an open society. On the other, there was the message of antisemitism: intolerance, prejudice and persecution. Equally, however, the controversy turned on the question of Jewish identity. Was it essentially religious or national? If it was religious, Jews did not need a state. If it was national, Jews did not need a diaspora. The clash of ideologies was fierce. Each side tended to negate the other and to portray its adherents in terms of unflattering stereotypes.
The argument came to an end in 1967. The Holocaust revealed the terrible, ultimately unbearable, cost of Jewish homelessness. The State of Israel was the one guarantee of safety for Jews wherever they might live. A threat to it was a threat to every Jew. In one of the formative events of modern Jewish history, the Six-Day War placed Israel at the centre of Jewish consciousness, and it has remained there ever since. In an age dominated by the spectre of genocide, Israel was and is the guarantor of Jewish survival.
Not surprisingly, therefore, shelilat ha-golah has remained the dominant Israeli view of the diaspora, given expression by such varied thinkers as Gershom Scholem, Natan Rotenstreich, Eliezer Schweid and Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. It has been lent enormous weight by three factors: the Holocaust (which A.B. Yehoshua described as the “final decisive refutation” of diaspora existence), the rise of antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe, and the continued demographic erosion of the diaspora. Taken together, they seemed to confirm the classic thesis of Zionism: that the diaspora is threatened equally by cruelty and kindness, the former leading to annihilation, the latter to assimilation. In his survey, Galut (1986), Arnold Eisen could conclude that “Negation of the diaspora…stands at the very centre of contemporary Zionist reflection.”
It is my contention, however, that we are entering a new era in Jewish life, one that will pose quite different challenges than the age of survival. Negation of the diaspora made sense when what was at stake was pikuach nefesh, the saving of Jewish lives. When a house is on fire, what matters is bringing its inhabitants to safety, not a nuanced philosophy of Jewish life. Shelilat ha-golah, born over a century ago, had a vital part to play in alerting Jews to the dangers that lay in store for them in Europe. It mobilised the formidable energies necessary for the tasks of ingathering Jews, building the land and creating a state.
As an ideology it has persisted, virtually unchanged, until the present day. In the meantime, however, the whole of Jewish life has been transformed. The centre of the diaspora is no longer in Europe but America. The State of Israel is not a dream but a forty-five-year-old reality. A momentous phase in Jewish history, the most dramatic since the destruction of the second Temple, has been enacted. Yet we have not yet fully adjusted to the significance of the events that have taken place. To a remarkable degree, when we speak about Israel and the diaspora, whether we do so in Israel or the diaspora, we do so in terms drawn from the 1890s, not the 1990s. That is why we find it difficult to think lucidly about either. We are living in one time-zone while our minds are in another. We live in the era of continuity. But our thinking remains trapped in the era of survival.
THE EFFECT OF ISRAEL ON THE DIASPORA
A century after the idea of shelilat ha-golah was born, what has actually happened? Much of Zionist prediction has come true, but as much has not. The reason is not that the prediction itself was false. It is that the existence of the State of Israel has changed the equation. It was one thing to talk about the diaspora in the days when there was no Jewish state. It is quite another to talk about it when there is.
The most obviously unexpected phenomenon is that the diaspora still exists. Jews did not do what Arthur Koestler recommended in 1948 and what Herzl had predicted half a century before: either go to Israel and live as Jews or stay in the diaspora and assimilate. The vast majority of Jews stayed in the diaspora and continued to live as Jews. Paradoxically, this was due in no small measure to Israel itself. By making it safe to live in Israel, the state made it safe not to live in Israel. Israel became the home of every Jew, in the sense of the famous line of the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Israel, by being “the city of refuge,” made it safer to be a Jew anywhere in the world. Far from negating the diaspora, Israel made a post-Holocaust diaspora possible.
Israel invigorated the western diaspora in other ways as well. Activism and fund-raising on its behalf created new forms of Jewish involvement. From the Soviet Union to America, Jews were touched by the drama of Israel’s wars and daring rescues. Israel awoke slumbering identities. It gave Jews throughout the world vicarious pride. The growth of Israeli yeshivot in the 1960s, often established by rabbis from the diaspora, gave momentum to a worldwide religious revival. The renaissance of Jewish scholarship in Israeli universities gave rise to similar movements in America and elsewhere. Hebrew began to replace Yiddish and Ladino as the international language of Jews. Israeli art and music gave new life to Jewish culture outside Israel. If Israel has brought a new confidence and vigour to Jewish life, it has done so not for itself alone but for Jews throughout the world. In a second paradoxical development, Israel made the golah seem less like galut, the “diaspora” less like “exile.”
There were other less positive phenomena which further confounded the black-and-white of ideology. Contrary to Herzl’s hopes, the existence of Israel did not end antisemitism. It created a new form, anti-Zionism, directed not only against Israel but against Jews in the diaspora, seen collectively as Israel’s allies. Nor has Jewish migration proved to be a one-way street. For some time now, as many Jews have left Israel through yeridah as have come to Israel through aliyah. Nor has Israel solved the problem of Jewish identity as religious, secular and cultural Zionists thought it would. The clash of tradition and modernity is as sharp in Israel as in the diaspora, indeed more so. The idea of an “autonomous” Jewish culture has, in any case, proved to be an illusion. Israel in its way is as influenced by western secularism as are the diaspora communities of the West. No open society has an autonomous culture in an age of international communications.
So Israel and the diaspora have interacted in unexpected and sometimes paradoxical ways. What we can say with some confidence is that an era is drawing to its close, an era marked by the Holocaust, the birth of the State, and the rescue of threatened diaspora communities. The Jewish map has been transformed. One Jewry after another has been transported to Israel: refugees from Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany, Bulgaria, Rumania, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. The diaspora communities that remain are, for the most part, free of immediate fear of unrest and persecution. Israel may face danger in the future. So may Jews in the diaspora. Yet the great drama of survival has, one hopes, passed its peak. Israel has turned to negotiations for peace with its Arab neighbours. The diaspora is turning to its domestic crisis of continuity. For the foreseeable future the dominant question is likely to be, not where can Jews live, but how shall Jews live.
TWO OPTIONS FOR THE FUTURE
In some form or another, then, the diaspora is likely to persist into the foreseeable future. It represents some nine million out of world Jewry’s total population of 13 million. It is centred in countries where, in the main, antisemitism is unlikely in the near future to provoke mass migration. What then is the most appropriate policy to be adopted towards this diaspora in terms of the future of the Jewish people?
Broadly speaking, there are three possible alternatives. First, there is the policy that has been in evidence in Anglo-Jewry until now. The majority of the community funds are sent to Israel. Curiously, this policy is indicative of shelilat ha-golah, negation of the diaspora, internalised by a diaspora community itself.
The logic of such a position may never be consciously articulated. Nevertheless we can imagine the line of thought that lies behind it: “The future of Anglo-Jewry is in doubt. I do not know whether my children will marry Jews or non-Jews. I do not know whether I will have Jewish grandchildren. In any case, nothing I can do will make any difference. Living as we do as a minority in an open society, we cannot survive in the long run as Jews. Only in Israel is the Jewish future safe. Therefore I must help to build Israel. If my family cannot survive personally here they will survive vicariously there. Israel is where Jews survive.”
The second option, and one which may become more common in the future, is to devote the whole of a community’s funds to its own interests. The logic here is the reverse of the first position: “Israel once needed the help of the diaspora, but no longer. It is forty-five years old, a mature country with an expanding economy. Its defence and infrastructure needs are best met by other governments, most notably by that of the United States, which will continue to support Israel not because of the ‘Jewish lobby’ but because it is in its own best interest to have a democratic pro-western ally in a Middle East increasingly dominated by Islamic fundamentalism. Israel will continue to enjoy the friendship, but no longer needs the financial support, of Jewries elsewhere.”
“It is time to recognise that Israel and the diaspora are two different answers to the question: what is it to be a Jew? Israel is the national answer: to be a Jew is to live in a Jewish state. The diaspora is the religious answer: to be a Jew is to live by the Jewish faith anywhere in the world. The diaspora has done its duty by Israel. It has supported it through its early struggles. The time has now come for us to go our separate ways. Israel does not answer the question of how to be a Jew in Britain any more than Britain answers the question of how to be a Jew in Israel. We must now return to our primary task, of being British by nationality and Jewish by religion. We have built Israel for long enough. We must now concentrate on building ourselves.”
By now we recognise these respective positions. They come from the mind-sets of survival on the one hand, and integration on the other. There is a clear conflict of interests between them. However, and less obviously, they are both recipes for disaster.
The first policy is bound to hasten the very collapse it predicts. If the diaspora refuses to take its own future seriously, it will have no future. It will have created a structure in which Jewish education, experience and life take place not here but there, not in London but in Jerusalem. Nor will its children necessarily live in Jerusalem. The ironic experience of the Jewish community in South Africa has been that, having created a powerful structure of Zionist day schools, the vast majority of its children have left the country not for Israel but for Australia, Canada and Britain. In short, a community which directs its energies to Israel at the cost of neglecting itself will find that it has sacrificed its children for the sake of Israel when such a sacrifice was neither necessary nor helpful to Israel.
The second policy is equally short-sighted. For centuries, the most powerful barrier Jews had against assimilation was the knowledge that, ultimately, home was elsewhere. On Pesach they re-enacted the exodus from Egypt. On Sukkot they recalled that outside Israel the most secure house was only a temporary dwelling. They never forgot that the Jewish people had a land and language of its own. Judaism was more than a faith. It was the code of a nation, and a nation has a home. Jews were exemplary citizens of the societies in which they lived. Yet, in a deep, metaphysical, even messianic sense, home was somewhere else. They were on a journey, as Jews since the time of Abraham have been on a journey. Therefore they could never say, even of Poland where they lived for eight hundred years, or Babylon‒Iraq where they lived for two thousand years, here my descendants will stay for ever.
Jewish life cannot be sustained without Israel at its core. That was true for the nineteen hundred years when there was no Jewish state. It is no less true now that the state exists. One of the most profound turning points in the history of a community is when it declares that it has no interest in the return to Zion. That occurred among Reform Jews in nineteenth-century Germany. Similarly, there are people today who claim that twentieth-century America is not galut. It has none of the characteristics of exile. Jews are equal, respected and secure. They identify with the American dream. Indeed Jews have been the authors of some of its most famous expressions. The inscription under the Statue of Liberty was written by Emma Lazarus. Irving Berlin wrote “God bless America.” As Israel is to Israeli Jews, so America is to American Jews: home.
Sooner or later, such a view spells the end of Jewish life. To be a Jew means to live between two worlds: the finite and the infinite, the particular and the universal, here and elsewhere. Once that tension is broken, the dissolution of Jewish identity follows as inevitably as night follows day. The process takes on average four generations. But it is inexorable. A diaspora that turns in upon itself and severs its connection with Israel is a community which, wittingly or otherwise, is breaking its links with Jewish tradition and the Jewish people and taking the first step on the path to complete assimilation.
FROM CONFLICT TO CONVERGENCE
There is a third option: the option of continuity. To understand it we must grasp what has changed in Jewish life. Israel and the diaspora once represented radically different versions of Jewish identity. One was national and collective. The other was religious and individual. For a century, as we have seen, this either-or was the subject of fierce ideological debate between the two camps. To be sure, there were exceptions on both sides. There were those, like Simon Dubnow, who believed that Jews could create a collective life outside Israel through self-rule in Eastern Europe. There were others, like Rabbi Isaac Reines, who preached religious Zionism. Such examples were nevertheless exceptions. For the majority of Jews there was a clear distinction: Zionism was one expression of Jewish life, the diaspora was another. There was no point of contact between the two.
Today, however, Israel and the diaspora have grown more, not less, alike. On the one hand, Israel by its very existence has given the diaspora a collective dimension. It has united Jews worldwide as never before, given them a joint focus, shared experiences, and even a new international language, Ivrit. If today we can talk of a single Jewish people, the reason is Israel.
At the same time, Israel itself has become less collectivist since the time when the kibbutz symbolised the Zionist dream. It has moved – as has Russia, from which many of its earliest thinkers were drawn – far beyond socialist utopias such as those envisaged by Nahman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, Aaron David Gordon and Berl Katznelson. Today, when young Israelis search for meaning, they are as likely as their diaspora counterparts to find it in a return to the yeshivah and to religious tradition. In the process, a profound re-evaluation has taken place in Israel regarding the diaspora and its values. Israelis are far less likely than they were to condemn the galut. A survey of Israeli attitudes taken in 1986 showed that most held positive views of diaspora Jewry, and regarded the Jewish people worldwide as their “extended family.”
What has happened in the move from integration and survival to continuity is that the sharp conflict between Israel and the diaspora has been replaced by at least the possibility of convergence. Both Jewries are beginning to see that how we live as Jews may be as important as where we live as Jews.
While the sudden rise in assimilation explains this new awareness in the diaspora, it is more difficult to pinpoint its causes in Israel. There are several possible reasons. The first is yeridah. An unknown but large number of Israelis now live in the diaspora, in the United States, Britain, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere. No group has disappeared faster from the Jewish map. As has been documented by Moshe Shokeid in his Children of Circumstances, secular expatriate Israelis fail to join synagogues or other Jewish organisations and create few if any communal structures of their own. They have no strategy for survival. Since being Jewish means for them living in a Jewish state, once they leave Israel, Jewishness becomes an insoluble dilemma. According to Shokeid, Israelis who have made their home elsewhere maintain a tenuous identity by keeping their names in the Israeli telephone directory and by claiming that their suitcases are packed and that they are merely temporarily detained abroad. Until Israeli-Jewish identity is a matter of how as well as where, yordim will continue to disappear.
The second explanation lies in the new forms which aliyah is taking. The early immigrants to Israel were either ideologically motivated or had nowhere else to go. Today, Israel is confronted with two different kinds of immigrant. On the one hand, there are those from Russia who have no knowledge of Judaism, and on the other there are those – most obviously the recent arrivals from Yemen – who are deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. The former have few ties linking them to Israel while the latter are scandalised by its secularity. For the first time, Israel has encountered new arrivals wishing to return, and the more widespread phenomenon of Jews fleeing persecution and making somewhere other than Israel their preferred destination. Hence the concept of kelitah ruchanit, “spiritual absorption,” has become part of government policy. Israelis are having to come to terms with the fact that Israel as a destination must have content as well as context.
The third reason, though, is the most central to our argument. Until now, Israel has represented itself to the diaspora as the guarantor of Jewish safety in a hostile world. That idea spoke powerfully to a generation traumatised by the Holocaust but it has diminishing relevance to the next generation who see themselves as safer in London and New York than in Jerusalem, let alone Judea.
It is in this area that recent research findings are very revealing. In 1986, Steven M. Cohen published a survey of American attitudes towards Israel and Israelis, Ties and Tensions. In it, he found a lower attachment to Israel among the young than among their parents. Support for Israel is not an inevitable feature of diaspora life. The foremost contemporary historian of Zionism, David Vital, in The Future of the Jews (1991), predicts “a nervous, ever more tenuous, ever less happy association between the Jews of Israel and Jews elsewhere.”
One of Cohen’s findings, however, is of the utmost importance. He discovered that the more Jewishly educated, committed and involved Jews are, the more likely they are to support, fund, visit, identify with and eventually live in Israel. This marks a development whose significance can hardly be over-emphasised. The either-or has become a both-and. The highly committed section of the Jewish community is more likely both to remain Jewish in the diaspora and to provide Israel with future support and aliyah. The less committed are more likely both to marry out in the diaspora and to disengage from Israel. Here then is the critical convergence of interests of Israel and the diaspora. Far from negating the diaspora, Israel now needs to strengthen it, even if – especially if – it sees itself as the potential home for all Jews.
THE ISRAEL OF CONTINUITY
There is one final step in the argument. Not only does Israel have an interest in Jewish continuity worldwide. It is potentially its most powerful resource. Once again, though, there must be a paradigm shift. The Israel of survival was Jewry’s “city of refuge,” what A.B. Yehoshua called the diaspora’s insurance policy. The Israel of continuity must become Jewry’s classroom, the diaspora’s ongoing seminar in Jewish identity. Once, Israel saved Jews. In the future, it will save Judaism.
For nineteen hundred years, the dream of Israel was sufficient to preserve Jewish identity. Today, we have the reality. If Jewish continuity is to be predicated on education, then Israel is Jewry’s supreme educational environment. Isaiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled in our time: “From Zion will go forth Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
Israel is now the only place in which a total Jewish experience is possible. It is the one country where Jews constitute a majority of the population. It is the only context in which they exercise political sovereignty. It is the sole place where Judaism belongs to the public domain, where Hebrew is the language of everyday life and where the Sabbath and the festivals form the rhythm of the calendar. It is the land of our origins, the terrain on which Joshua and David fought and Amos and Isaiah delivered their prophecies. It is the birthplace of Jewish memory and the home of Jewish destiny.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Israel on the formation of Jewish identity. Jewish existence, which in today’s diaspora may appear random, arbitrary and disconnected, in Israel takes on coherence. There the Bible comes alive against the backdrop of its own landscape and its own language, once again a living tongue. There, too, the concept of the Jewish people becomes vivid in the visible drama of a society gathered together – as Moses said it would be – “from the ends of the heavens.” Above all, it is in Jerusalem that the mystery of Israel becomes tangible. Here is the old-new heart of the old-new people, the place from which, said Maimonides, the Divine presence never moved.
Jews who spend time in Israel, whether they settle or not, are changed. David Harman, head of the Joint Authority for Jewish Zionist education, reports that among American graduates of Jewish day schools there is still a 23 percent intermarriage rate. Among those who have visited Israel the rate drops to 4 percent. The reason, perhaps, is this: Judaism was never the private faith of isolated individuals. Its entire pulse is collective, societal, communal. From the destruction of the second Temple until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews lived in self-governing communities. Exiled from their land they took a fragment of Israel with them. In each locality they had their own language, customs and culture; their collective life. In the modern diaspora, however, Judaism has been confined to the private domain of home, school and synagogue. Israel restores to Jewish life what it has lost elsewhere: a public dimension. Within its borders, Jewishness is out there in the street as well as in here, in the soul. That is why spending time in Israel is today essential to a full understanding of what it means to be a Jew anywhere in the world.
So we arrive finally at the third policy option for the Jewish future. The diaspora will no longer use its funds to support Israel. Nor will it use them to support itself alone. It will use them to resource Israel to strengthen the diaspora, since this is in their joint best interests. It will fund Israel experiences for young Jews. It will make it a goal that every Jewish teenager should spend time in Israel. The Israel-based year of study or service will become normative. The diaspora’s teachers will be part-trained in Israel. Its rabbis, youth leaders and outreach workers will study there. There will be more exchanges between Israeli and diaspora teachers and academics. The entire relationship between Israel and the diaspora will shift from dependence to reciprocity.
Future generations will look back in wonder at the strange ideological wars fought between Israel and the diaspora before they reached a symbiotic, mutually supportive relationship. They will be perplexed by Israel’s need to negate the diaspora. They will be yet more amazed at the diaspora’s tendency to negate itself by devoting its energies to Israel in a way that weakened rather than strengthened its own resources and thus ultimately endangered its long-term support for Israel. It is to be hoped that such self-destructive policies have come to an end. Israel, surely, is our ultimate destination. But the immediate question is less whether Jews are at home in London or Jerusalem than whether they are at home in their Jewishness. That is likely to become the leading concern in Israel and the diaspora alike as both turn their attention to continuity.