With the Jewish people scattered in the Diaspora throughout thousands of years of exile, they were denied the cultural completeness that defines a nation. Halachah (Jewish law) in and of itself did not supply the entire needs of an active inter-community Jewish identity. The more Judaism took on a uniform appearance, especially when it came to Halachah, the more it featured more variance in thinking, legend and the study of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), and the more it developed in light of the challenges of the period.
The changes that Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai spearheaded after the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jewish people were sent into exile still serves as a model of leadership handling historic circumstances which demand that everyone investigate new ways of doing things. Similarly, with the return to Zion over the past 100 years or so, the development of a majority of the Jewish people living life in an independent state in their ancestral land demands new breakthroughs in Judaism.
The question of Israel's Jewish identity, if it has any, is turning out to be a major challenge for the Jews of Israel and the Diaspora.
Take, for example, the words of a letter that David Ben-Gurion sent the poet Roni Somek when the latter was 16: "Even after 20 years of statehood, the Jewish state I hoped would rise here still does not exist, and who knows when it will be established," Ben-Gurion wrote.
It is important to note that Ben-Gurion talks about "the Jewish state" and not "a state for the Jews." The liberal approach holds that a state is nothing more than an organizational-institutional system of management for its citizens, and as such cannot be considered Jewish in and of itself. A state can be a state of Jews provided that a majority of its citizens identify as such.
The Jewish state Ben-Gurion longed for needed to include Jewish characteristics and identity, and this is where the real trouble starts. Because immediately – and unjustifiably – discourse about a "Jewish state" became linked with the threatening concept of "a state of Jewish law." It's very clear that this is not what Ben-Gurion meant. A state encompasses so many things above and beyond what can be considered legal matters. Similarly, it embraces Jewish areas far beyond the world of strict Jewish law. What is "Jewish" has never been restricted to the letter of Halachah. It included philosophy and myth, morality, culture and community life, and above all, an eternal dream of returning to Zion.
The pivotal return to Zion
Recently, a secular minority has been bemoaning the "end of Israeliness," as if it had ever been possible for Israeliness to exist totally outside a Jewish context. In one of his books, Dr. Arye Carmon, founding president of the Israel Democracy Institute, lays out a secular Israeli manifesto that seeks a way to build a consensus foundation for an Israeli (rather than Jewish) society. On one hand, he admits that by canceling the Diaspora, the forefathers of the Zionist revolution created a problem: They "threw the baby out with the bathwater and cut their children off from the sources of their heritage and culture."
But Carmon criticizes the tendency of Israeli society to adhere to traditional "Jewishness" as "an attempt to force sanctity into the public sphere. An attempt to bring God back into the public sphere. In a developed democracy, God has been removed from these spheres," he writes.
This is precisely the fundamental difference between a state in which there are Jews, who live their personal lives as Jews, and a state that is itself Jewish and seeks to express that Jewishness in the public realm. The question of the State of Israel's public identity lies at the core of the dispute, and is also where we tend to reduce the question of Jewishness to technical matters of Halachah, like Shabbat, kashrut and marriage registry. But there are other aspects of Jewish identity that are just as important, which by nature play out in the public sphere, such as a commitment to the idea of Shabbat as a form of social justice and the holiness of Jerusalem as embodied in the ancient oath: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill" (Psalm 137:5). These obligations are most important when it comes to how they are expressed publicly.
It is true that by the standards of the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, Ben-Gurion was a secular Jew. But when one probes his writings, another possibility emerges: The Zionist revolution, more than it expresses a shift from a religious to a secular way of reasoning, expresses a change in the very core of the perception of what it means to be a Jew, both in religious and national terms. The vision of Jewish redemption inspire national action, among other things, in Ben-Gurion's commitment to the aliyah enterprise.
Speaking of his devotion to the vision of an "ingathering of the exiles," Israel's first prime minister distilled the mission of aliyah into the longing generations expressed in the prayer: "Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise the banner to gather our exiles and gather us together from the four corners of the earth." This is the basis of the turning point of the Zionist movement's activities to redeem the Jewish people and their land. Whereas traditions such as laying tefillin in a minyan [prayer quorum] could have continued to take place without any official effort toward an organized state.
The same cannot be said for the efforts to return to Zion and re-establish Jewish sovereignty there. True, many of the first arrivals threw off the burden of the Torah and the commandments, but their devotion to the revival of the Jewish people was more than a secular revolution, it was an attempt to bring new life into vital aspects of Jewish existence that had been neglected in the years of exile.
Confronting the opposition of haredi Judaism to taking any part in the redemption of the people, Ben-Gurion ruled unequivocally that "this theological view is not a religious view, and it has nothing to do with the Judaism of Rabbi Akiva, the Maccabees, [the prophets] Ezra and Nechamia, Yehoshua Ben-Nun [or] Moses," as he told the Labor party council in March 1941.
Some will say that the ingathering of the exiles is a national event, rather than a religious one. But Judaism does not allow for a separation between the religious and the national. Aware of that, Ben-Gurion saw himself as a successor of Rabbi Akiva and Yehoshua Ben-Nun.
The leadership challenge
Neither extreme of Israeli Jewish society – the secular or the ultra-Orthodox – have much to say to the Jewish majority who wants to identify as Jewish. On one end of the spectrum, a small but vocal secular minority has cut itself off from Jewish heritage and belief. On the other, haredi communities are unconnected to the beating heart of Jewish and national life in the Land of Israel. The majority of the Jewish people are somewhere along the continuum and want a way of life that includes tradition and faith. The more strongly Israel bases its physical existence, the more important the questions of for what it exists and how it exists become.
Right now, it's not a return to Judaism that presents a threat to "Israeli-ness" and is creating schisms in Israeli society – it's the lack of a common, relevant base of Jewishness. The discussion of this question extends far beyond the dispute over the nation-state law. Anyone who wants to lead the Jewish people, whether from the Right or the Left, will have to choose a path when it comes to the very heart of the question, and make it known.
