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Zionist Dreams.
We have introduced the idea of mythical and real pictures of Israel
and Jerusalem in general terms. We have seen how people in each
generation have constructed their own images that often have little
- or nothing - to do with the concrete reality prevailing at that
particular time.
Before we proceed to the reality of contemporary Israel, we wish
to introduce a related and relevant subject: the idealized and
partly mythical view of the Land of Israel developed by classic
Zionism. The fact is that the early Zionist movement performed
its own process of mythologization, presenting the physical land
and its past in a way that suited the ideological messages that
the movement wished to develop. Moreover, different streams within
Zionism created their own idealized visions of what the new Jewish
society or state should be like in the future. In other words
the past, the present and the future were all seen in mythical
or idealized terms that distorted reality, and set up a series
of expectations about the future that were, perhaps, impossible
to realize.
Let us examine both of these subjects.
How did Zionism envisage the past of the land?
Zionism saw the land as a wilderness. Eretz Israel was seen as
a land that belonged to the Jews, which - through an accident
of history or through Divine decree (depending on the religious
orientation of the Zionist stream in question) - was emptied of
its Jewish population. At that point, according to many Zionist
thinkers, the land started to disintegrate and lose its fruitfulness,
turning into a virtual wilderness. The reason for this, according
to some of the main Zionist thinkers, was that there existed between
the Jewish people and the Land of Israel a relationship of love
that could never be equaled by any other people’s feeling
for the land. In the past, the Jewish people had showed their
special relationship with the land by investing enormous effort
and energy in it, creating something of a paradise of fruit and
crops. Since no other people could feel the same for the land,
the decline in the physical condition of the land began simultaneously
with the Jews’ departure. According to some, the land played
a part in the process. In an almost mystical manner, the land
languished for its beloved people: it did not respond to the touch
of other peoples but rather awaited for the return of its lover,
Israel.
The truth is that there were many historical errors in this view
of the country. The land was certainly in a bad physical state:
it was a poor and neglected outpost of a distant foreign empire
(the Ottoman Empire) based in Constantinople. Nevertheless it
experienced many fruitful periods after the departure of the majority
of the Jewish population in the early centuries of the Common
Era. However, in this instance the past was seen in ideological
terms and there was relatively little research - at that time
- into the real history of the land. In this way, the Zionist
view developed apace.
How did Zionism envisage the present of the land?
Most Zionists’ view of the land in its present state was
conditioned by the previously-mentioned view of the past. The
early Zionist movement tended to present the physical land as
one of historical ruins, waiting for the Jews to return and fill
it, making the wilderness fruitful once again, after thousands
of years of neglect. It was clear to them that the land was essentially
empty: it was full of sand dunes and swamps where the majority
of the people who were there, Arabs, were basically nomadic Bedouin
who had put down few roots and who, as a result, had little stake
in or concern for the land’s future.
The historical ruins that most of the Zionists saw were, of course,
Jewish ruins: the remains of old synagogues and Jewish tombs littered
the landscape. They saw it as a Jewish land, and sought to reconnect
to it by seeking out the old Biblical names, many of which were
disguised under the names that Arabs or other residents had given
the places over the centuries. What Zionism tended to ignore was
the reality of the large Arab population living in the towns and
villages, whose families had lived in the land for centuries.
They were by no means all Bedouin, transient nomads. There was
a whole history to the land - a non-Jewish history - that had
been created over thousands of years. It was not only a land of
destroyed ancient synagogues: it was also a land of living churches
and mosques.
How did Zionism envisage the future of the land?
All streams of the Zionist movement were united in the idea that
the future of the land would - and should - be Jewish. However,
the specific way in which the future was envisaged depended on
the ideological orientation of each particular stream. Let us
examine this through the eyes of three main streams of Zionism:
socialist or labor Zionism, cultural Zionism and religious Zionism.
There were other important schools of Zionism such as political
Zionism (Herzl) and revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky), but the
three streams of socialist (labor), cultural and religious Zionism
had perhaps the clearest and most distinct visions of the future
of the land. Let us now see who the groups were, and examine their
visions of the future of the Jewish people in its own land.
THE VISION OF LEFT-WING ZIONISM.
By World War I, socialist Zionists or labor Zionists
had become the leading activists in the Zionist world
and in Palestine. A host of settlements had been set
up on a communal basis, and thousands of workers were
beginning to work the land and to build up its infrastructure.
The significance of these workers - from the viewpoint
of our program - is that they consciously took upon
themselves the task of changing the reality of the
Jewish people. As far as this can be said of secularists,
it seems no exaggeration to state that these people
saw that their work as having almost cosmic implications.
They considered themselves revolutionaries: they had
not come here just to change the condition of the
land, but also to change themselves. In so doing,
they were aiming for a revolution in the character
of the entire Jewish people. 
(we have come to the land to build and to be built)
was one of their slogans. It is strong and meaningful:
we have come to this country to transform it, but
in so doing we will transform ourselves.
They had a vision of a new Jew, diametrically opposed
to the old ghetto Jew bowed down by millennia of living
in galut. This new Jew would be a type never before
seen in Jewish history: he/she would be strong rather
than weak; brave rather than cowardly; active rather
than passive; rooted in nature rather than alienated
from it. In addition to all of these things, the new
Jew would not be a slave of the Halacha, of the old
theological form of Judaism: the new Jew would be
free, relying only on his/her own abilities or strengths.
By their own strength and work they would bring their
own salvation. The concept is Utopian, but it is a
Utopia that would be created by the efforts of the
people themselves. They took the activist tradition
in messianic thought - the concept that believed that
Jewish actions themselves could hasten the coming
of the Messiah - and secularized it. They would be
responsible for bringing about a better world for
themselves, for the Jewish people and even perhaps
for the wider world. They would be their own Messiah.
Perhaps the greatest of all the labor or socialist
thinkers of the time was A.D. Gordon. He rejected
the label ‘socialist’ because it smacked
too much of the cold ‘scientific’ socialism
of Marx. Marx had believed that the world was moving
in the direction of socialism because of its own economic
tensions. Gordon rejected this, but his ideas put
him right at the center of the camp of the labor Zionists.
The new society, the new world, could only be built
up by the efforts of the people within it. He saw
the basis of the great society of the future in the
relationships and the way of life created by the workers.
In laboring to build up their society, they would
create the foundations of the new way of life. Gordon
was a moralist. He saw all people as being endowed
with potential for good. In the service of the nation,
in their work on the land, this potential would be
realized. The power of the land would work on the
soul of the individual Jew. A moral society would
come into being.
Many of the pioneers saw the settlements that they
created as the seeds from which would grow the better
future that they envisaged. The new society of equality
and morality would spread out from the settlements
and would ultimately encompass the whole of the country.
There were those who dreamed of turning the country
into one big communal enterprise, one whole kibbutz.
Indeed when it became clear to many in the late 1920s
that this would not happen, some socialist-Zionists
left the country and returned to Stalin’s Russia
believing that this would prove a more viable road
to Utopia. |
THE VISION OF CULTURAL ZIONISM.
The second group are the cultural-Zionists, traditionally
associated with their great intellectual leader, the
fascinating Ahad Ha’am. A deeply learned Jew
from a Hassidic family, he left the religious framework
and became completely secular. Of all the thinkers
of the Zionist movement, he perhaps represents the
best model of secularization of traditional Jewish
thought.
Ahad Ha’am used religious language and injected
it with secular content. He believed that there was
a unique Jewish concept of values that had developed
throughout Jewish history. For the religious these
values were, of course, transcendent: that is to say,
the source of the values was God. It was hard for
Ahad Ha’am, without a concept of an external
transcendental source of values (God), to explain
where these values had come from, how they had actually
arisen; but he was sure that they existed.
When thinking of the autonomous society that he hoped
would be established in Eretz Israel, he thought,
first and foremost, of a society based on these values.
The state as a political framework had no value for
him: a state was a neutral organism. If it had value,
it was in its ability to safeguard culture and the
way of life of a particular society. What was important
to him was the way of life lived within the framework
of the society or state. For him, there could be no
compromise here: if the new Jewish society in Eretz
Israel had any value, any raison d’être,
it could only come from the moral value of the life
that would be lived within that social framework.
It was from the Prophets, those moral geniuses with
their extraordinary sensitivity to the human condition,
that he derived his yardstick for the social value
of a society. His aim was no less than a perfect moral
society based on their moral values: the aim of Zionism
- the only conceivable aim of Zionism for him - was
the creation of a society of total righteousness.
Political power was not a value. He looked back to
the past, to the time that the Jews had political
power and he saw the corruption, the power politics,
that had consumed the nation like a disease. This
was not what the Jews needed.
Only a restoration of values at the heart of a reborn
culture could possibly deal with the contemporary
sickness of the Jewish people. He believed, moreover,
that any Herzlian hope of bringing the majority of
the world’s Jews to the new Jewish center was
foolish and unrealistic: the country would only attract
- could only attract - a minority of Jews. He called
instead for a small group of dedicated Jews to come
to the new society and to dedicate themselves towards
the most important task that they could possibly take
on. They should see it as their mission to build the
essence of the new Jewish culture based on the prophetic
ideas of righteousness. He believed that, having established
its base in its own soil, the new society could then
start to radiate out its effect on the Jewish communities
of the world. This he felt was realistic.
The idealized conception of a society based on justice
and righteousness recalls a secularized version of
the Prophets themselves. Heaven on earth - without
the theological framework of traditional messianic
thought - was the aim here. This is clearly a secularization
of the traditional messianic idea in its prophetic
incarnation. Once again, as in the case of the socialist-Zionists,
the work of creating the messianic society would be
taken on by the Jews themselves, or to be more precise,
by a small elite within the Jewish people. Again,
the Jews would be their own Messiah. |
THE VISION OF RELIGIOUS ZIONISM.
The third group is the religious-Zionists, and we will
represent them here through their greatest thinker,
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook. Rav Kook is unquestionably
one of the most challenging and deep of all Zionist
thinkers. Indeed to call him a Zionist thinker is
to do him a certain injustice for, in truth, he was
far more than that. Nevertheless, for our purposes
here, we will regard him as such. From one point of
view, he needs to be put on the opposite side of the
spectrum from Ahad Ha’am or the labor-Zionists.
He was, of course, a religious thinker whose understanding
of the world was deeply religious. Nevertheless, certain
of his ideas echo aspects of the thinking of the deeper
Zionist thinkers such as Ahad Ha’am and A.D.
Gordon.
Rav Kook was a messianist and had a very conscious
idea of the redemption of the Jewish People in the
Land of Israel. To him, such a redemption was part
of the divine plan - not just for the Jews but for
the whole world. Indeed, he saw that, ultimately,
there could be no redemption for the Jewish people
without redemption for the entire world. The converse
was also true. World redemption depended on the redemption
of the Jews.
It was clear to Rav Kook that such redemption could
only be carried out within the framework of a Jewish
state. The Jewish people needed a state of their own,
for only there could they return to the divine and
national way of life that God had willed to them.
The true glory of God’s name could not be expressed
when it was confined to the study houses and synagogues
of the Diaspora and limited to the world of the spirit:
it needed to expand to the full dimensions of national
life.
Moreover, Judaism itself needed to reflect every corner
of that national life. Rav Kook’s Judaism was
not one that was limited to prayer and study: it was
a fully three-dimensional way of life that would penetrate
to every corner of national existence, the physical
and the spiritual together, as one. He emphasized
the need for religious youth to develop their bodies
physically. It was a perversion of Judaism to limit
Judaism to the world of study. Judaism should be unlimited
in the world of life: this, he believe, could only
happen in a Jewish state.
However, there are dangers inherent in a Jewish state:
political life leads easily to all the abuses that
come from using power. The Jewish people are not immune
from this descent into the world of political dirt
and corruption. The two previous attempts by the Jews
to live a fully political life within their own state
had ended in failure. In both instances, various abuses
had crept into the lives of the people, causing a
perversion of the healthy national life that the Torah
demands. The second Jewish state had fallen because
the Jews had not learnt how to use power responsibly
without its corrupting the fabric of relationships
within the country. According to Rav Kook, this was
why the exile had lasted so long: the Jews had to
be purified from the influence of the abuses of power
and cured of their lust for power. Only when they
had become an ethical people once again, had the national
impulse arisen in the people. For Rav Kook, this was
tantamount to a sign from God.
The need for the exile had finished: the time for the
beginning of redemption was at hand. Now was the time
for Jews to leave the lands of exile as quickly as
possible, lands which were by their very nature ‘unclean’,
unholy. It was time for Jews to take themselves to
the only land that was intrinsically holy, the land
in which they could build their holy national life
once again. Here they would be free of the limitations
and of the ‘uncleanness’ of life in exile.
Here, too, they would be free of the need for power
for power’s sake which had characterized them
in their previous state in Eretz Israel.
What was the pure, holy national life that they were
called on to lead in their own state? We have already
stressed that it must be a fully three-dimensional
life, one in which all aspects of Torah in the widest
sense would be expressed. Now we must emphasize the
implications of this idea.
Just as Ahad Ha’am had believed, Rav Kook believed
that the Jews’ life in the Jewish state must
be one of the highest standards of morality. The same
obligations that bound the Jewish individual in his/her
relations with the world around - both people and
things - also obligated the Jewish national state.
Other nations and states were not obligated in the
same way, however, and this was a source of great
concern to Rav Kook. He knew well that it would be
impossible, in reality, for a Jewish state to behave
in a substantially different manner from other states.
He thus linked the fate of the Jewish state to that
of other countries.
The Jewish state could only exist in the way that
God demanded if it was part of a world which God was
redeeming. Jewish redemption, which could only occur
in the framework of a Jewish state, was part of universal
redemption: the two could not be separated. They were
both part of God’s plan. God had given the Jews
the task of redeeming the world, of guiding the rest
of the world towards righteousness and the acceptance
of God: it was this that would lead to their redemption
by God.
Unlike the Reform movement, however, which also stressed
the mission of the Jews in the world, Rav Kook was
certain that the Jews needed to separate themselves
from the other nations in order to do so. They must
turn themselves and their state into a stage for God’s
glory and for God’s rule on earth. This was
the path that would ultimately lead to world redemption.
In this version of messianism, the Jews themselves
had a vital role: they must show the will, resolve
and ability to rebuild their national life. This was
part of God’s plan; this was what He was waiting
for. He would bring redemption but it was up to the
Jews to supply the pre-conditions. |
It is not for nothing that the secular streams of Zionism - ultimately
the dominant streams --were often called messianic. No less than
religious Zionism, although in a very different way, they created
ideas of the future that flew in the face of reality. All of these
Zionist streams had strong, distinct visions of what should happen
to the country and of the society that should be established there.
Perhaps strong Utopian visions were needed to galvanize the Jewish
masses, both religious and non-religious, into supporting the
Zionist movement and finding the determination to move to a new
country and trying to develop a new life in very difficult circumstances.
Perhaps without such glorious visions of the future, the whole
Zionist enterprise would have come to nothing and we would be
living today without a Jewish state. Nevertheless, we must ask
today if those visions were realistic and if we are not paying
a high price for holding on to them.
One contemporary Israeli thinker who thinks that the latter is
the case is novelist Amos Oz. In 1982, a time when Israeli society
was under severe stress partly because of the difficult Lebanon
war in which Israel was engaged, Oz traveled to different parts
of the country to talk to a variety of different Israelis; he
tried to put his finger on the pulse of what was happening in
Israeli society. He turned the results into a series of newspaper
articles that ultimately became a book,
- [in English, In the Land of Israel].
Perhaps predictably, he started off in Jerusalem, examining the
dynamics of Haredi society, which thrives in the area of Jerusalem
where Oz was born. In subsequent chapters he proceeded to examine
many other aspects of Israeli society, each from a different physical
place in Israel. When he reached the last chapter, he made what
seemed to be a very surprising and perhaps anti-climactic choice:
instead of coming back to Jerusalem in order to bring things full-circle,
he chose to finish in Ashdod, a small town on the coast. Having
described a number of scenes and conversations there, he showed
what that city represented for him, thus explaining his choice
of ending for the book.
Perhaps it was a lunatic promise: to turn, in the space
of two or three generations, masses of Jews, persecuted, frightened,
full of love-hate toward their countries of origin, into a
nation that would be an example for the Arab community, a
model of salvation for the entire world. Perhaps we bit off
too much. Perhaps there was, on all sides, a latent messianism.
A messiah complex. Perhaps we should have aimed for less.
Perhaps there was a wild pretension here, beyond our capabilities
- beyond human capabilities…
Are we gradually learning, or perhaps not? But we should
learn.
And what is, at best, is the city of Ashdod.
A pretty city and to my mind a good one, this Ashdod. And
she is all we have that is our own. Even in culture and in
literature: Ashdod. All those who secretly long for the charms
of Paris or Vienna, for the Jewish shtetl, or for heavenly
Jerusalem; do not cut loose from those longings - for what
are we without our longings? But let’s remember that
Ashdod is what there is. And she is not quite the grandiose
fulfillment of the vision of the Prophets and of the dream
of generations; not quite a world premiere, but simply a city
on a human scale. If only we try to look at her with a calm
eye, we will surely not be shamed or disappointed.
Ashdod is a city on a human scale on the Mediterranean cost.
And from her we shall see what will flower when peace and
a little repose finally come. Patience, I say. There is no
shortcut.
Amos Oz
For Oz, Ashdod - “a city on a human scale” - is what
is attainable. Israel and Zionism need to cut down the size of
the dream and learn to settle for a human-sized reality. Dreams
and utopias are good - “for what are we without our longings”
- but it is important to remember that they are not necessarily
the most practical program for building a society. This is a concept
that needs to be considered.
Let us now examine all of these ideas together with our students.
Activities
(Access to activities is possible only from inside the
related background section)
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| Activities |
Activity:
Utopias - The Different Visions Of Classic Zionism.
The aim of this activity is to examine
Zionist visions and their feasibility before we start
to examine the reality of Israel today.
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