Avi Finegold is co-host of the weekly Jewish culture wars podcast Bonjour Chai. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2024 edition of the quarterly magazine published by The Canadian Jewish News.
To listen to the author read this essay, click here or subscribe to Bonjour Chai wherever you get podcasts.
In the weeks and months since October 7, debates about Zionism and its role within Judaism have become both more prominent and more pointed. Religious Zionists are firmly convinced that God gave the Jewish people the Land of Israel and that to be a Zionist is the most Jewish thing possible. Secular Zionists (which, notably, describes the majority of the Jewish-Israeli population) believe just as vehemently in Jewish rights to the land, though they argue these exist for historical rather than theological reasons. These two groups are often at odds with each other—and both are at odds with anti-Zionists, who argue either that Judaism does not entail any particular relationship to a particular patch of land, or that other Jewish values (such as our relationships with and obligations to others, including Palestinians), are more important in determining our relationship to that land than any ancestral or religious claim.
This essay is an attempt to explore what Judaism actually has to say about Zion as a historic homeland and how contemporary Jews might relate to it. It is not an attempt to be prescriptive: there are multiple points of view within the Jewish community, many of which are deeply rooted in Jewish ideas. My hope is simply to lay out that full spectrum of ideas in a way that can help us all navigate these debates with some solid ground underfoot.
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Though it may sound strange to many secular and even believing non-Orthodox Jews, Zionism is inextricably entwined with the Jewish understanding of a redeemed era—and therefore also of messianism. The former can be seen as either a fulfilment or a repudiation of the latter but, in any case, it must be grappled with.
The prophets of the late-First Temple era foretold the exile and subsequent ingathering of the Jewish people back to Zion. Isaiah—the prophet of “beating swords into plowshares” and of nations laying down arms—proclaimed that when that time came, “Torah shall come forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” describing this as a time of universal recognition of God and universal peace. Other prophets, including Micah and Zechariah, echoed these ideas.
The concept of a messiah figure as the vehicle by which this redeemed era and return to Zion would be brought about came later, in the wake of the destruction of the temple and subsequent exile in 70 CE. For the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud, the redeemed era, in which Jews returned to the Zion from which they had been exiled, would be led by a heroic figure: an anointed descendant of the Davidic royal family.
Much Talmudic discussion and lore emerge from this idea. These are the rabbis who tell of meeting the Messiah sitting among the lepers at the gates of Rome, or the Messiah leading the people back to Zion on a white donkey. (They were also pragmatic, advising that if someone is told of the arrival of the Messiah while in the midst of planting a tree, they should first finish the planting and then go to greet the Messiah.) By the Middle Ages, it was widely believed that the Messiah would, when he arrived, redeem the Jewish people, restore their homeland in the Land of Israel, and unify humanity in an era of peace.
Messianism has often come under attack within Judaism: first because of various false messiahs through the ages, such as Shabbetai Tzvi in the 17th century and, more recently, with the devotion among large swaths of the Haredi movement, to the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. For many Jews, this veers too close to Christianity; even for those who stop short of that accusation, these demonstrations of fidelity to individual, human figures still serve as a warning about the dangers of messianic thinking. Yet for most of Jewish history, messianism has been an accepted part of Jewish belief.
Maimonides, who included belief in the Messiah as one of the core articles of Jewish faith, famously also held that the more significant aspect of the messianic era was neither the person who would bring it about nor a universal acceptance of their significance, but rather the return to Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Maimonides made a point of minimizing the apocalyptic upheavals that the prophets foretold, such as Isaiah’s proclamation that the wolf shall lie with the lamb, or that the messiah will resurrect the dead. These prophesies of global peace and eternal life for all Jews are not to be taken literally, according to him: they are just parables. The messianic era, he wrote, will retain a global natural political order.
Others vehemently disagreed with Maimonides’ naturalistic approach, understanding the Messiah to be a unique figure who would be universally recognized and lead the world to peace and an understanding of Jewish monotheism. A century after Maimonides, Nachmanides claimed that not only would the Messiah resurrect the dead but all of those who were resurrected would go on to live eternally in this world—which was now the world to come. This line of thinking persists in some segments of the Jewish community to this day: many Chabad sources, for example, recount the Talmudic teaching that when the Messiah arrives all synagogues and houses of study, past and present, will be uprooted and transplanted to Israel, and that resurrection will involve the dead rolling through the earth to the Land of Israel, where they will then be made alive again.
In the 19th century, Jewish thinking on these matters diversified. Following the emancipation of German Jewry, and in a newly intellectual age that emphasized humanity’s capacity to develop itself rather than relying on God, Reform Judaism held that messianism was an ancient myth for which there was no longer any use. Today, Reform and other newer denominations of Judaism can be broadly seen as believing in a redeemed era rather than in a redeemer.
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Related to the matter of messianism, though not exactly the same, is the question of how much agency or autonomy Judaism allows us to have in determining our own destiny. At the same time as some Jews were reevaluating their relationship to messianism and religiosity more broadly was waning among a significant number of Jews, nationalism was beginning to take hold as a political theory: this was the era of the French and American revolutions, Rousseau and Voltaire, and a modern reshaping of political philosophy. Jews were at the forefront of this thinking as well, debating whether a people could take charge of their relationship to other nations or they were entirely dependent on forces (whether historical or religious) that had rendered many groups of people powerless.
The early Zionists felt that national self-determination was the tool to put Jews on equal footing on the global stage. Others were not as sure. As we will see, many Orthodox Jews at the time rejected this. As Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Conservative rabbi, told me, “Nationalism is not an inherently Jewish idea. Nationalism is an idea that comes from a famous essay by Ernset Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ It’s kind of a Christian way of rethinking collective living outside of empire. And that’s fine. It’s not that Jews can’t then use it for their own benefit. But to then say, That’s Judaism—the Haredim at the time were saying, Where is that?”
And yet, self-determination as a positive value took hold and has been a powerful force ever since. The western European Jews who would go on to found classical Zionism were almost entirely secularized and correspondingly devoid of any messianic fervor. They were, however, big believers in the ideas of nationhood and nationalism that were coming into vogue at the time. This led them to the conclusion that, as Jews, they had the right and the responsibility to take matters into their own hands, advocating for and creating a homeland for the Jewish people. The Messiah wasn’t going to do it and it needed to be done.
In the earliest days of Zionism, the question of where to create this modern political Jewish nation-state wasn’t viewed as entirely settled: there was some support for creating a Jewish home wherever this could be established. In 1882, Zionist Leo Pinsker wrote: “The goal of our present endeavours must not be the ‘Holy Land’ but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property from which no foreign master can expel us.”
The alternative to Palestine that was being considered was part of what is today Kenya. (This effort often gets referred to the Uganda Scheme.) Some saw it as a stepping stone to Palestine, which was at the time difficult to secure from the Turks. Others saw it as an easier path to statehood. When the plan was ultimately rejected, some (including British author Israel Zangwill) began to look for other lands in which Jews could possibly settle. Places both historical (ancient Mesopotamia, parts of Egypt), and modern (Angola, Australia) were considered and ultimately rejected. The overwhelming sentiment was that the historical land of Israel was the only real option. Even to avowed secularists, the historical pull of the historical homeland of the Jews was too strong to ignore.
The most famous proponent of the view, not only that Jewish self-determination can and should take the form of creating a contemporary nation-state, but that it should do so in the Land of Israel, was of course Theodor Herzl. The Austro-Hungarian writer and activist, who founded what would go on to become the World Zionist Organization, convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The upshot was a commitment to establish a national home for Jews in their ancestral home.
The year before, in a pamphlet titled “Der Judenstaat,” Herzl laid out his line of thinking. “The idea I have developed in this pamphlet is an ancient one: It is the restoration of the Jewish State,” he wrote. “The decisive factor is our propelling force. And what is that force? The plight of the Jews.” Not a messiah, not a God-given right—simply historical circumstances.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, he made this explicit: “I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question,” he declared. “We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live… 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.”
While Herzl readily accepts the idea of a home in Israel that is rooted in ancient history, the messianic drive is completely absent from his thinking, replaced by a not-untrue feeling that the force that prevented Jews from returning to Israel wasn’t the delayed arrival of a saviour but a mundane, human powerlessness.
Shaul Magid put it to me this way: “For most pre-modern Jews, the Land of Israel and the messiah are fused… It’s secularism that disentangles dwelling in the land of Israel en masse and the Messiah.” He continues, “If you think about it from the perspective of tradition, that is a pretty radical move.”
In sum: the tensions between and shifting significance of these two animating ideas—messianism and self-determination, one as old as Judaism and the other as new as the idea of modernity itself—explain much of how Jews relate to Zionism and Israel. Where someone sits on these two axes does much to explain their approach to the idea of Zion, and to the nation-state of Israel.
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When Jews with a strong commitment to messianism—which is to say, religious Jews—were confronted with Herzl’s burgeoning Zionist movement, they had one of two choices: modify their approach to messianism to accommodate Zionism, or reject Zionism. The former approach, what we now refer to as Religious Zionism, combines a high degree of messianism with a high degree of self-determination. In this revision of traditional messianism, rather than Jewish sovereignty being the outcome of messiah’s arrival, it instead lays the groundwork for that arrival.
Rabbi Chaim Strauchler, an associate editor of the Orthodox journal Tradition, frames the religious attachment to a Jewish return to the Land of Israel as a hope that would not die. “There was never a period where the Jewish people somehow stopped being aware of Israel,” he told me recently, “which is why thousands of years later they could re-engage Jewish sovereignty and Jewish power, and the idea of Zionism could find fertile ground.”
Like the adherents of most ideologies, most Religious Zionists temper their beliefs based on prevailing realities: they want to live in the land, not wage a holy war. They follow in the footsteps of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Jews of the British Mandate, and his students. Kook died before the Holocaust and the founding of the state, but he left behind a legacy of idealism. He maintained that the lesson of exile was that power is a dangerous tool, and that if and when Jews succeeded in their national ambitions, they needed to be careful how they wielded it. Jewish politics could be different, Kook believed, and Jews did not need to exert power over others. He approved of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund but not the taking of land by force. This reflects the view of many Religious Zionists today. They send their children to hesder yeshivot—a system of religious institutions in which young adults study in yeshiva while pursuing a parallel track of army service—and genuinely want peace with the Palestinians.
As with most ideologies, there are extremists: adherents who are so fervent in their beliefs that they will wish for or cause harm to anyone—Jewish, Palestinian, or otherwise—who impedes their pursuit of Jewish sovereignty in the full terrain of what they consider the Land of Israel. These are the Religious Zionists we are accustomed to seeing on the news, who assert Jewish supremacy and, increasingly, wage violent attacks on their Palestinian neighbours.
In an article in The New York Times Magazine this spring, Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti profile the rise of the Hilltop Youth, whose commitment to Jewish sovereignty is so extreme that it does not actually countenance the nation-state that currently exists. “Their objective,” the authors write, “was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish ‘Jewish rule’: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.”
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At the other end of this axis are religious Jews who also have a strong belief in messianism but with a weak commitment to political self-determination. These are the originalists—the ones who refused to modulate their messianism in response to the Zionist aspirations for a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel, and who persist in that refusal, to varying degrees, even long after that nation-state was born. This is the view that defines much of Haredi and Chabad Judaism.
Unlike Religious Zionists, these movements understand Jewish tradition as precluding any possibility of the human pursuit of national self-determination. They reject the notion that Jews can bring about the messianic era themselves, by becoming a political power among the nations. Rather, the only available path is for Jews to study and follow the commandments to the best of their abilities, thereby spiritually redeeming the world.
Rabbi Moses Sofer, the leader of Hungarian Orthodoxy in the 17th century and one of the architects of Haredi theology, did not shy away from the consequences of such a position. “It is worthwhile for the people of Israel to suffer prolonged exile, in order to attain such redemption in the end,” he wrote in his commentary on the Torah. “The full messianic claim does not permit the Jew to follow such heart promptings [for a restoration of the ancient past] and accept such existential options… It cannot be satisfied with a part, but only with the whole, the appearance of the Redeemer of Israel in all his power.” While Sofer lived and wrote long before Zionism was even possible, his ideas were taken up centuries later by late-19th century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. He wrote: “We are obligated to follow the ‘well-trodden paths of our ancestors and early leaders,’ who never mentioned any obligation for us to encourage the redemption by developing Eretz Yisroel. They mention as the path toward the Redemption only that we become better Jews, repent, and look forward to the redemption.”
How, then, do Haredim navigate the reality on the ground, namely the fact that, though no messiah has arrived, a Jewish nation-state does exist in the Land of Israel? Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Haredi umbrella group Agudath Israel of America, describes a delicate balancing act. “Once the state became a fait accompli,” he summarized in an email, “most of the Haredi world…opted to embrace, if not the Zionist philosophy, at least the fact of Israel, including citizenship. Which is why there are Haredim in Israeli government service and Haredi parties in the Knesset.” He describes current Haredi thinking as, if not reconciled to the existence of Israel, something like agnostic, calling it a-Zionist.
This is not fully borne out. As recently as January, a study conducted by Nishma Research found that Haredim are still much less supportive of Zionism than other Orthodox and non-Orthodox populations: in their survey of approximately 1,300 respondents, 28 per cent of Haredim felt strongly pro-Zionist and another 23 per cent felt somewhat Zionist—a combined 51 per cent. By comparison, 94 per cent of modern Orthodox Jews identified as somewhat or strongly Zionist. Among the comments from Haredi survey respondents: “Zionism enrages the nations of the world” and “I see how people put the army, its power and weakness before G-d and believe in that first.”
If Haredim are officially a-Zionist and unofficially divided, Chabadniks are most consistently clear in their rejection of the current Jewish state.
In 1900, the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, wrote a widely circulated letter on the matter: “Even if the Zionists were G-d fearing Torah true Jews, and even if we had reason to believe that their goal is feasible, we are nevertheless not permitted to join them in bringing our redemption with our own strength. We are not even permitted to force a premature redemption by showering the Almighty with insistent entreaties.” Schneersohn went even further: for him, the issue was not that Zionism was incompatible with Jewish faith but that it stood in direct opposition to it: “The Zionists’ true desire is to sever the hearts of the Jewish people from the Torah and mitzvos… We will not accept their promises. Even if they have some good to offer, we must throw it back to their faces.”
More than a century later, despite Chabad having launched many campaigns that “shower the Almighty with insistent entreaties” in the form of myriad children singing “We Want Moshiach Now,” and despite Chabad accepting the concrete benefits they receive from Israeli state coffers, there has been no real theological change of heart. Some materials currently available on the movement’s website explain that, politically, Israel is a land of darkness; others describe the state as the result of a Jewish inferiority complex.
Most congregations around the world recite a prayer for the State of Israel. There is a line in the prayer that refers to Israel as reshit tzmichat geulatenu—the beginning of the flowering of our redemption. Some Religious Zionist congregations add shetehe—that it should be—at the beginning of the phrase, to temper the strength of that claim. Others omit the phrase entirely, choosing to divorce the idea of the redemption from the idea of Israel itself. Haredi and Chabad congregations refuse to say the prayer at all.
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As is hopefully apparent so far, classical Zionism—the one that led to the creation of the State of Israel in the land of Israel—is founded on ideas that were very high on the self-determination axis and fairly low on messianism. This is the tradition that shaped mainstream (which is to say, secular) Jewish-Israeli society, and over the decades came to characterize the attitudes of a majority of diaspora Jews, as well.
Elliot Glassenberg, senior educator at the pluralistic Israeli non-profit BINA, says that most Israelis can’t even begin to identify much of what Zionism actually was or is anymore. Most are not religious and don’t have a sense of the historical or spiritual connections to the land. “The secular Israeli theology has been summarized as follows,” he told me: “There is no God and He gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.”
BINA which describes itself as a secular yeshiva, strives to be a place where Israelis and diaspora Jews can learn about Judaism and Israel in a space that is non-denominational by design, and offers classes on topics that are often off-limits to a wide swath of Jews otherwise. Glassenberg explains that “for young Jewish adults, whether they’re from Israel or from the diaspora, having these oversimplified and in many cases inaccurate understanding of what Zionism is, is incredibly limiting.” It makes for, as he puts it, “a very narrow conversation as well as a narrow choice of identity… If you ask a student Are you Zionist or are you not Zionist? I find this really unproductive. What does Zionism mean to you? or How do you see your relationship with Israel? are much more productive questions.”
Glassenberg advocates for reconnecting with the discussions that shaped Zionism from its outset: “I think it’s actually very empowering and enriching for students, to be exposed to Zionist perspectives that are over 100 years old, that in the time of Herzl and Ahad Ha’am were arguing about what the solution to Jewish challenges should be, and what a Jewish home in the Land of Israel should be or look like, and why we should or should not have a Jewish home in the Land of Israel.”
Though it may be counterintuitive, contemporary secular Zionism perhaps is least able to find a home in the schema I’ve been developing. More than any other quadrant, it has been reshaped in the wake of the Holocaust, which is generally understood by holders of this view to have fundamentally reconfigured Jewish nationalism, taking it out of the realm of theological or even broadly speaking political discourse and rendering it starkly existential. In the face of only partially avoided annihilation, the conceptual underpinnings of the Jewish relationship to Israel have taken a back seat to an imperative of survival.
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Finally, we get to what is undoubtedly, right now, the knottiest quadrant: Jews whose views about their relationship to the Land of Israel are not determined either by a strong belief in messianism or a strong belief in self-determination. This encompasses several different groups: diasporists, anti-Zionists, and many secular Jews who have little to no relationship to Israel. These are often the most misunderstood groups within the Jewish community, and the ones most likely to be—and feel—excluded from community’s conversations about Zionism.
A rise in Jews who are questioning their commitments to Israel in light of events of the past year notwithstanding, this overall stance dates back to the beginnings of early modern Judaism. In 1885, leaders of the then-emerging Reform movement convened to formulate their founding beliefs. The document, known as the Pittsburgh Platform, consists of eight concise points, one of which was a rejoinder to burgeoning Zionism: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
This was a controversial move, even for a liberal community, and over the following decades, with the prospect of Israel becoming more and more real, successive Reform platforms moderated those ideas. By 1937, the Reform movement’s Columbus Platform stated that, “in the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”
Around the same time as the Pittsburgh Platform was being written, but emerging from an opposing sentiment, was diasporism. If the early Reform movement emphasized the religion in Judaism, others were taken by the idea of Judaism as a culture and did not feel the need to move somewhere to fully flourish. This concept of Doykayt, or Hereness, was very much a part of the secular Yiddish world of Eastern Europe at the time. The idea emerged from the social-democratic Bundist ideology, which argued that Judaism didn’t need a separate place to exist. In order to develop a robust Jewish identity, Bundists argued that one needed to recognize that wherever Jews were was central to their identity. If there was a “Jewish Problem” it needed to be solved wherever it was being felt, not by fleeing to another land. (The Russian town of Birobidzhan, established in 1928, was originally planned as the centre of a Jewish autonomous region within that country, and a direct outgrowth of the idea that Jews could have their own land, wherever they were.)
Diasporism evolved in the decades that followed, often but not always as an alternative to Zionism. Jews who embraced this model tended to focus on the incredible diversity of Jews around the world, and on the reality that, however painful the origins of Jewish exile are, much of contemporary Jewish culture and religion were informed by being a group of people who were dispersed around the world. Instead of seeing this only in terms of those painful origins—a state of affairs to be remedied—they framed it as an evolution that could be embraced.
While diasporism predates the Arab-Israeli conflict, that conflict is likely one of the reasons why it is having a bit of a resurgence today. This is evidenced in two books that came out (and this is worth noting) before October 7 and the subsequent upending of Jewish discourse around Zionism: Israeli-American historian Daniel Boyarin’s The No-State Solution, and Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile, both published in 2023. Both authors argue that living outside of Israel is not only acceptable but might even be the ideal state for Jews. Boyarin sees Zionism as a novel invention of recent Jewish history and argues that Zionism’s focus on land and sovereignty runs counter to what Judaism has believed for centuries. Magid, meanwhile, told me that while the realities of the Holocaust made Zionism a necessity for a time, that time has now passed. We are no longer facing extinction, and the exigencies that trump other considerations have faded. In arguing for a post-Zionism, he holds that the Jewish community could repair some of the issues plaguing the community in general as well as the rifts with Israel’s Palestinian neighbours. In recognizing our own existence in exile and as an other in the global society, Magid says, we should develop a more compassionate approach to the Palestinian people.
Then there is modern anti-Zionism, which comes in several forms and which was a lonely position for a Jew to hold until about 10 years ago. Cultural anti-Zionism is very similar to diasporism: it rejects a single place in which to center Jewish identity. Political anti-Zionism—the variety we tend to think about most often—itself comes in diverse forms, but most share the idea that a land established by displacing (an)other people, and continually causing harm to them both individually and as a group, is wrong. Whatever religious or historical connection Jews may have to the Land of Israel cannot supercede this wrongness, and as a result, Israel as a nation-state should be, according to this line of thinking, abolished or fundamentally reconfigured.
Anti-Zionist Jews have, by and large, felt alienated within and by the Jewish community: many describe being called, even by friends and family, self-hating Jews, and having their support for Palestinian rights vilified and trivialized. But their ranks have, slowly, been growing in recent years, in tandem with and largely fueled by Israeli expansionist tendencies in the West Bank and a pronounced rightward trend in government policy. More Jews than at any other time in Israel’s history reject the halutznik narrative of Jews as neutral immigrants to a barren land with foreign nations seeking to destroy the nascent Jewish state. Within larger segments of the Jewish community, there is a recognition that at the very least, the history is much more complicated and facts on the ground lend much credence to the Palestinian claims on the land. Israel’s pursuit of the war in Gaza in the wake of October 7 has visibly and significantly accelerated this growth. This is evident in the increasing numbers of Jewish participants in anti-war rallies and anti-war university encampments, in public statements by Jewish artists and academics, in polling of Jews since the war started, and in the growing presence of explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish groups. A survey of Canadian Jews conducted by University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym in February found a statistically significant drop in support for Israel compared to previous years, “particularly among younger Jewish Canadians.” The American Jewish Committee conducted a survey at about the same time; 19 per cent of respondents reported feeling somewhat or much less connected to Israel since October 7.
It is impossible to say how much the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism is growth, and how much is a change in how many Jews who have long harboured doubts about Israel feel comfortable expressing them. But it is clear that debates on the question are breaking out into the open in new ways. Nowhere was this more clearly evidenced than in the movement Reconstructing Judaism and its Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC). In the spring of 2024, two students left the school and published an op-ed in The Forward about their negative experience as Zionists on the RRC campus. “We came to find that RRC is, de facto, a training ground for anti-Zionist rabbis,” they wrote. It was a rare situation in which the Zionists, rather than the anti-Zionists, felt alienated by their Jewish community.
Rabbi Brant Rosen was the staff clergy at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois from 1998 until 2014, when he resigned over a deepening divide over his outspoken criticism of Israel’s policies and actions. Recently Rosen, now the rabbi of Tzedek Chicago, an anti-Zionist congregation, told me that “the politicization of the land and the goal of creating a Jewish sovereign presence in the land—to establish, or reestablish Jewish political control of that land—was always treated with deep ambivalence by Jewish tradition.”
For Rosen, Zionism is very far from a natural expression of Jewish tradition: “I would never make the argument that Zionism is alien to Judaism. But I would say that Zionism sought to overturn in many ways the very definition of Judaism and what it meant to be a Jew up until that point.”
It isn’t just that Zionism was a modern invention; Rosen is candid that he views it as “a destructive form of Judaism.”
What, then, does he think Judaism’s role should be with respect to the Land of Israel? He describes it as many anti-Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, do: a settler-colonial project. It’s language that many Jews find incendiary and abhorrent—but which is also, perhaps, deeply misunderstood. The claim is not that Jews have no ancestral or religious connection to the land—no legitimate attachment—but rather than the claim is not exclusive. “I think that Palestine, like other countries that had been under colonial domination, should have been decolonized and power reverted to the indigenous people who live there,” he says. And that includes Jews. Rosen argues that rights should have been extended “to all people who live there, whether they were, Jewish, Christian or Muslim.”
Zionists have and will continue to argue that there has been continuous Jewish presence in Zion since the time of the First Temple. Anti-Zionist Jews, even when they describe Israel as a settler-colonial state, don’t necessarily contradict that. But they do want to decouple the Jews that were indigenous to the land from the European Jews who began to settle the land, displacing others in the process.
“Biblical tradition records certain narratives about the Jewish people creating a sovereign state after the conquest and settlement of Canaan,” Rosen tells me. These are not historical documents; these are religious documents—and they’re profoundly ahistorical. What we do know from history is that the Jewish people as we know them came into being centuries later, and that Judaism as we understand it today by and large was a product of the day it came to full flourishing in the diaspora.”
Rosen recognizes the role the Holocaust had to play in shaping contemporary Zionism and believes the world should bear deep shame over its unwillingness to settle Jewish refugees before, during, and after the war. He understands that it is specifically that refusal to resettle Jewish refugees that led to Jews, refugee and otherwise, clinging to Israel as their homeland. But he believes that this should never have come at the expense of the Palestinian population that has deep history with the land as well. As many anti-Zionist Jews do, Rosen’s beliefs are rooted in his understanding of Judaism. In the seder supplement that he published for his congregation this year, he wrote: “If we fail to give the Palestinian people a voice at our table this evening, we will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover seder… If we celebrate this festival by hardening our hearts to the horrifying stories and images from Gaza that have been crying out to us for the past seven months, we will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover seder.”
Rosen is also careful to differentiate between a right to the land and rights on the land.
“The very notion of people having a right to the land flies in the face of the Torah itself… God has the right to the land, but allows people—and by the way allowed other nations before the Jewish people—to live on the land, with certain conditions of how you’re supposed to behave on the land. But the land [can] vomit you out if you’re not careful.”
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights is an extensive network of rabbis whose aim is “to lead Jewish communities in advancing democracy and human rights for all people in the United States, Canada, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.” In one piece on their website, Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton of Ottawa Reconstructionist congregation Or Haneshama connects the fact that the Torah records separate names for a given place—one by Jacob and one by Laban—to the various place names in Israel-Palestine today. If the Torah values both enough to remember them, she wrote, we should honour and value the multiplicities that exist today.
Whenever I see a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, I am struck by the blue thread that runs along its left side. Ostensibly, this thread was used to sew together the three pages of script, but I can’t help but draw a comparison to the blue thread of the tzitzit on the tallit.
The Bible tells us that the tzitzit act as a reminder of all the commandments whenever we see them. Thousands of years have passed and we have an ever-increasing multiplicity of views about Jewish thought and practice. None have a monopoly and—however you think of your Judaism—the tzitzit are a reminder of that thread that binds us together.
