Torn between Earth and Sky: National Jewish Homeland

"Can a Holy Land also be a homeland?" So begins Aviezer Ravitzky's 2008 essay, "A Land Adored Yet Feared." In it he bemoans the contemporary absence of a striking feature of Jewish tradition regarding the historic Land of Israel- dread. Dread that Jewish presence in the land would not live up to its holiness, for which Jewish sages regard Jews as particularly accountable, and thus result in the catastrophic loss of which Jewish memory is so replete.1But this tradition of dread of the land is of a piece with what early Zionists found so burdensome, if not repulsive, about Rabbinic Judaism. Understandably weary of exilic conditions, along with the apparent rabbinic enabling of those conditions, they hungered for the security and promise of Jewish sovereignty in a national homeland. This is precisely what other, modern Euro-American peoples had been acquiring.2 Early Zionists could scarcely imagine what the Shoah would do to stoke this hunger among Jews in Europe and beyond, even as it confirmed the error of Zionism among so many ultra-orthodox and other Jews among them.3Galvanized by the security imperative issuing from the Shoah, Zionism has forced contemporary Judaism to face squarely the romance of modern state nationalism and to attempt to digest its own, peculiar iteration of it.4 And Israeli nationalism, vulnerable on so many fronts both domestically and internationally (although not as militarily vulnerable as Israeli administrations have characteristically claimed), has had little room for the dread of the land of Israel in Jewish tradi- tion. Such scruples have hardly seemed fitting, given the stakes. Only the luxury of a relatively stable exile could afford them. But are the acidic pressures of such perceived stakes themselves what that dread of the land is traditionally about, even if not for the more pious reasons given by (fewer and fewer) ultra orthodox Jews?I wish to consider not so much the challenge of a Jewish homeland, as that of a national Jewish homeland to contemporary Judaism, at least insofar as its life depends on its rabbinic and biblical inheritance. In line with Ravitzky's concern about the loss of Jewish dread of the land of Israel, I am convinced that much Zionism in Israel and North America, religious and otherwise, underestimates the structured ideological influence of modern nationalism. In its Zionist form, this nationalism is often too easily equated with the land commitments of pre-exilic "Judaism" and ancient Israel, or it is otherwise naturalized. A consequence of thus naturalizing or essentializing modern Jewish state nationalism is that its particular burdens are not subject to needed scrutiny, and therefore they go unaddressed. I am inviting scholars of Judaica to apply such scrutiny and address such burdens, and I do so as something of an implicated guest. While I have studied Zionism seriously, including several stints of study in Israel, and I have significant academic training in various strands of Judaism, ancient and modern, I am a non-Jew for whom these remain secondary fields. My primary area of research deals with the Christian religious moorings and liabilities of Western nationalism, which I have found illuminating in the study of the relation between Judaism and Zionism.Below I will use theorists of modern nationalism, Benedict Anderson and Etienne Balibar, to articulate in summary form its ideological burden for Zionism, and for the rest of contemporary Judaism insofar as it is shaped by the nationalizing effects of Zionism. I will then point to the weight of this burden on Jewish diversity and Jewish ethics, highlighting finally how it is felt as a consequence of a key ideological characteristic of modern nationalism, the sublimation of the human. My hope is that this line of criticism can promote healthy scrutiny of the relationship between Zionist nationalism and Judaism, and signal the relevance of the Jewish tradition of dread of the land of Israel. …