Dreaming of Zion

Sep 12

8 min read

Rosh Hashanah 5787

In 2003, I was in my first year of rabbinical school in Jerusalem. It was the middle of the Second Intifada, and it was terrifying. After several bus bombings in Jerusalem, including one around the corner from my apartment, the rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College – both the Americans there for our first year and the Israelis studying in HUC’s Israeli rabbinical program – gathered together to talk about hamatzav, the “situation,” which is how Israelis euphemistically referred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At some point, an American student asked the question that was on many of our minds: how bad does it have to get before we can just go home? In response, an Israeli student said that if we left, the Israeli students would feel abandoned and betrayed. He spoke very movingly about the commitment he and all of his fellow Israelis have to the State of Israel, how living there is hard, but it’s worth it, and how we American Jews needed to stay to show our solidarity with them. In the end, I was grateful that the administration didn’t give us the option of going home in the middle of the year because I don’t know what I would have chosen. I wasn’t sure that I was as committed to Israel as so many people wanted me to be.

Twenty years later, the challenge of how to love and support Israel as an American Jew has only gotten more complicated and more painful. “Are you a Zionist?” It is a loaded question, and a dangerous one. These days, the wrong answer can get you kicked out of school clubs, jobs, professional organizations, political movements, and social groups. Even being suspected of being a Zionist can get you assaulted or worse. And in the Jewish world, not being Zionist enough can mean ostracism too, of having to endure accusations of betraying our religion and our people. But for a question with such significant ramifications, it is also remarkably opaque. Are you a Zionist? Well, what do you mean by Zionist? In the proud tradition of “two Jews, three opinions,” there is no single answer.

Before we get to what Zionism is, we should talk about Zion. “Zion” is another name for Jerusalem, but is often used to refer to the whole Land of Israel. It’s first found in the poetic and prophetic books of the Bible, like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Psalms. Here are a few examples: “Ki mitziyon teitzei Torah – For from Zion, Torah will come, and the word of God from Jerusalem” declares Isaiah. Or Psalm 126: “A song of ascents. When GOD restores the fortunes of Zion—we see it as in a dream—.” Or Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion.” Just from these three examples, we get a sense of what Zion means. It’s more than a literal, physical place; Zion represents the memory of a glorious past and the hope for a better future. Centuries later, when most Jews were living in exile and the Sages wrote the liturgy of the siddur, “Zion” was the term they often used in prayers that ask God for redemption, represented by either God’s or the people’s return to the Land. So we read in the morning liturgy, “Shine a new light upon Zion, and may we all soon be privileged to [enjoy] its brightness,” and later, “May our eyes behold Your merciful return to Zion.” Over the centuries, Zion continued to be referred to in a similar vein. Here, for example, by the great 12th-century poet Yehudah haLevi:

“My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west—

How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me?

How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet

Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?”

Or Naftali Herz Imber’s poem, which would become the lyrics of Israel’s national anthem, written in 1877:

“As long as in the heart within,

The Jewish soul yearns,

And toward the eastern edges, onward,

An eye gazes toward Zion.”

Longing is built into the word “Zion.” It is the place Jews yearn for, the place where Jewish dreams were once fulfilled and, God willing, will be fulfilled again someday in the future.

In 1890, an Austrian publisher named Nathan Birnbaum coined the terms “Zionist” and “Zionism” to refer to the work of establishing a modern Jewish nation in our ancestral homeland. In many ways, the term was an appropriate choice. Zionism was a movement founded to redeem the Jewish People – this time from rampant antisemitism in Europe – through a return to our homeland, just as the prophets and Sages had prayed for. And Theodor Herzl, who made Zionism famous, was as idealistic and as zealous as the biblical prophets were about the return to Zion. In 1896, he declared, “The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.”^[1] In Herzl’s mind, the founding of a modern Jewish State would bring redemption not only to the Jewish People, but to the world. But it was only after the catastrophe of the Holocaust, when Jews needed saving more than ever, that David Ben-Gurion read a Declaration of Independence and the State of Israel was born.

One could argue that in 1948, the Zionist movement ended. After all, if the project was to create a Jewish state, well, mission accomplished. The word “Zionism” could have been retired at that point, or at least redefined. As journalist Nadine Epstein writes, “Prime Minister Ben-Gurion actually tried to discourage its use by Jews outside Israel. As he transformed Zionism from a movement for national liberation into a nation-building ideology for the new State of Israel, he asserted that American Jews could no longer call themselves Zionists unless they moved to Israel. ‘There seems to be a general agreement,’ he said in August 1957 at a Zionist conference in Jerusalem, ‘that a Jew can live in America, speak and read English and bring up his children in America and still call himself a Zionist. If that is Zionism I want no part of it.’”^[2] Needless to say, American Jews did not agree. Over the next decades, Zionist organizations around the world offered financial and political support to Israel and Israeli causes. And crucially, American Zionists offered emotional and moral support. After the Six-Day War in particular, many American Jews felt an intense connection to and pride in Israel. Loving and advocating for Israel became an essential – sometimes defining – component of Jewish identity, particularly for Jews who didn’t consider themselves religious. Even if most of us never planned on moving to Israel ourselves, we still fervently believed in its importance as a haven for Jews and as a spiritual and cultural center for Judaism. We believed that as Jews in the Diaspora, it was our job to do all we could to support the Jewish State, by lobbying Congress for aid to Israel, by raising money ourselves, and by visiting Israel as often as we could. We thought Israel’s existence ensured that Jews would always be protected. It had become, at least in theory, the redemptive Zion our ancestors had prayed for.

If only that were the whole story. Because the other side of the story is much less comfortable to tell. This other story is about the Palestinians who lived in the land of Israel when Jewish pioneers came to “make the desert bloom,” as the early Zionists put it. It’s a story about their experience of the events of 1948, which we call the War of Independence and the Founding of the State of Israel, but which Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed or driven from their homes. It’s the story of 60 years of occupation, dispossession, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Yes, it’s also the story of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, of decades of war and terror inflicted upon Israelis, and it’s the story of Hamas savagely attacking Israel on October 7. It’s the story of the ensuing destruction of Gaza and the current humanitarian crisis there. It’s the story of the current far-right wing Israeli government that allows Jewish settlers to attack Palestinians with impunity, whose ministers say things like “we want maximum territory and minimum Arab population”^[3] and calls for the targeted assassinations of 30 to 40 Palestinians in Gaza every night because “There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people.”^[4]

When the world hears this story, it is not so surprising that Zionists are cast as the villains, and when Jews hear this story, it is no wonder that some of us want to distance ourselves from Zionism, or at least from the term “Zionist.” As Dr. Joshua Levisohn writes, “The story that much of the Jewish world tells itself about Zionism continues to be infused with the early mythology even as the realities of Zionism have been well acknowledged. More and more, this is leading many Jews either to lean even further into the mythology and reject or ignore the complexities or to accept the complexities and reject the classical Zionist story, and sometimes Zionism itself. This false choice is damaging to the truth and to Zionism, creating a need for an alternative, more expansive Zionist story.”^[5]

Levisohn argues that incorporating the Palestinian experience into our Zionist narrative is something that American Jews in particular should take on. He continues, “...I believe that as Zionists, as Jews, as leaders, and as parents to the next generation, we have a responsibility to own up to the consequences of Zionism for Palestinians and to tell a Zionist narrative that is not only inspiring and relevant but also true in a more complete sense. I also believe that it is particularly incumbent upon us, as American Jews with a deep commitment to Israel, to undertake this project in a way that Israelis have been increasingly reluctant to do…. The narrative I am envisioning reckons with the past but remains focused on what Zionism means for the present and for the future.” By creating a more complete Zionist narrative, he argues, we can better see where the State of Israel has not yet lived up to the aspirations and ideals of its founders. Levisohn concludes, “Our Zionist future can only be strengthened by our continued imagination about the dreams of an ideal society as well as a recognition that the self-perception of Israel and Zionism as a light unto the nations may not always have been true and actualized, but that it can and must be the guiding vision into the future.” In other words, fulfilling the promise of Zionism someday in the future begins by telling the truth about its past.

Some people have argued that since “Zionism” has been turned into a dirty word, we should just stop using it.^[6] But we know that simply erasing a word will not erase the problems behind it. Ironically, in order for Zion redeem the Jewish people – for it to be the source of security and blessing for our people and the place our Jewish hearts long for – we first have to redeem Zionism. So let us redefine Zionism to mean something like this: a commitment to tell the truth about the state of Israel, both its virtues and its shortcomings, to hold its leaders accountable using whatever power we have as Jews in the Diaspora, and to do all we can to ensure that the State of Israel is a country we are proud to love, a country that is not just a safe haven for Jews, but a safe haven for Judaism – for the ideals of justice, truth, human dignity, and peace that Judaism holds dear. And may we see the day that the words of the prophet are fulfilled:

In the days to come,

The Mount of GOD’s House

Shall stand firm above the mountains

And tower above the hills;

And all the nations

Shall gaze on it with joy.

And the many peoples shall go and say:

“Come, Let us go up to the Mount of GOD,

To the House of the God of Jacob;

That we may be instructed in God’s ways,

And that we may walk in God’s paths.”

For Torah shall come forth from Zion,