The Jews are an odd people. While such a statement amounts to a cliché both ubiquitous and superfluous, one of their chief oddities comes to the fore every year around this time, when the State of Israel celebrates its independence day.
In most countries, independence day represents a moment of untrammeled revelry, gluttony, and jingoism. Even as local curmudgeons harrumph from the sidelines, the vast majority of the native population erupts in a paroxysm of self-congratulatory festivity, unburdened by philosophical scruple or theological nuance. (Such celebrations are admittedly a tad peculiar to the Englishman’s sensibility, which considers the lack of an independence fay to be history’s highest honour.) Yet it would surely strike most observers as remarkable if an independence day were to herald, year after year, an occasion for strident theological division, both within the celebrating country and among its diaspora communities. This, however, is precisely what occurs every Yom Ha’atzmaut, the anniversary of the day on which the first independent Jewish commonwealth to grace the pages of history in nineteen centuries declared its sovereignty.
Every year, the global celebrations and concomitant howls of outrage that mark the onset of Israel’s Independence Day also spur an annual, worldwide Jewish debate concerning the most foundational of questions: the relationship between God, Israel, and history. Does God intervene in human affairs, directly or otherwise? Do the triumphs and travails of the Jewish people unfold under a higher aegis, conforming perhaps to some predetermined plan? Do individual and collective choices have the power to alter such a course? Or is the Jewish story merely the product of more pedestrian forces: economic fluctuations, military struggles, political intrigues, tribalist hostility, and the sheer caprice of human ambition?
Such questions have always occupied a place within the broad panoply of Jewish thought, yet they have a tendency to be sharpened, even rendered inescapable, by monumental events. The twentieth century supplied two such events, the physical and psychological repercussions of which outstripped all other occurrences since the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century of the common era. The European Holocaust saw the violent annihilation of some of the largest, oldest, and most vibrant Jewish communities on earth. The sheer scope, barbarity, and dispatch of the destruction remains, to use a word so rarely applied with precision, truly inconceivable. Yet an even more remarkable event was to take place barely three years later. The establishment of a Jewish nation-state, its improbable victory over numerous invading armies salivating at the prospect of its eradication, and its subsequent rise as the undisputed global centre of Jewish life, culture, and religious activity stands as a stunning counterpoint to Judaism’s great catastrophe. This history-defying event, anticipated by Jewish prophets and visionaries for at least twenty-six centuries, has perplexed and galvanised the Jewish world ever since.
What, then, is one to make of the uncanny juxtaposition of catastrophe and triumph? To invoke a rabbinic idiom, these events cry out to us, demanding interpretation. The Jewish people, disputatious as ever, have furnished a wide array of mutually exclusive answers. With the usual violence visited by hasty taxonomy, one can divide these responses into three fractious camps.
The first camp comprises those Jews who do not believe the events of history to be supernaturally guided. To their minds, God, should such a being exist, neither condemned a million children to the gas chambers nor delivered another million during Israel’s seminal wars. The rise of the Jewish state is attributable to a concatenation of entirely human factors: diplomatic finagling, military prowess, strategic innovation, personal brinkmanship, and sheer good fortune. Unparalleled, yes, but thoroughly explicable within the bounds of natural causation.
Within this secular camp, however, reactions to Israel diverge sharply. Some have seen fit to celebrate what might be called the secular miracle. Under this interpretation, the State of Israel exemplifies the awesome contingency and unpredictability of history, and provides stirring tribute to the tenacity of the world’s most persecuted people in the face of implacable odds. Others, including many who occupy positions of cultural and academic influence, rather lament the entire enterprise. For them, Israel’s story is one of revanchist fury, tribal nativism, and the forcible displacement of indigenous peoples.
Among the more theoretically inclined of this faction, hostility to Israel is based not on what the Jewish state has purportedly done, but on what it is. Jews, in their eyes, must remain in their diasporic condition: the sufferer rather than the sovereign, the moral conscience rather than the morally compromised, the voice of the powerless in a power-intoxicated world. Such a posture, they contend, preserves the moral purity and excellence of the Jewish people, and has been unforgivably desecrated by the exchange of teaching and texts for ministers and missiles. There are those who have argued this case with great eloquence, above all the late literary critic George Steiner. Yet even Steiner had the decency to concede, in a rare concession to reality, that the Holocaust had “made a mockery of my persuasions.” Self-perceived moral superiority stands, in the final analysis, as a rather poor trade-off for a smoking ash-heap of Jewish corpses.
The second camp consists of those Jews who see history as pulsating with divine significance, progressing unerringly towards its sublime telos. No event, least of all those of such earth-shaking magnitude as the destruction of Jewish Europe or the reclamation of the Holy Land, could possibly occur without divine intervention or, at the very least, significant providential oversight. Yet accepting this foundational assumption heralds no unity of conclusion; indeed, it produces two diametrically opposed theologies.
For one faction, the rise of the State of Israel is a world-historical event of unparalleled significance, a simulacrum of the messianic eschaton itself. Under this conception, Zionism is nothing less than the human counterpart to the biblical prophecies that foresee the epochal return of the Jews to their homeland and the instauration of their communities therein. Tragically, not all Jews chose to participate in this miracle and were thus condemned to suffer the natural depredations of a divinely ordained exile that could only culminate in assimilation or annihilation. At its theological edge, God either decreed or tacitly sanctioned the destruction of European Jewry as a terrible propaedeutic for their rightful re-entry into the Holy Land. For this group, Israel’s Independence Day ranks among the most significant occasions of the year, marking God’s decisive and unmistakable reversal of the agonies of Jewish history.
This view sharply contrasts with that of another faction within this providentialist camp, principally of the Ultra-Orthodox variety, which views Zionism as the single greatest modern rebellion against Judaism itself. With its general (although not uniform) secularism, Zionism stands charged with dethroning God and erecting the nation in his place as the highest ideal. Such an egregious rejection of the biblical covenant naturally evoked all the frightful curses recorded in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, instantiated in their modern form as firing squads and gas chambers. The Holocaust, in their eyes, raises little theological curiosity. Rather, it is the improbable success of modern Jewry’s ultimate heresy, the nation-state, that constitutes the genuine mysterium tremendum. Some shrug their shoulders in frustration; others chalk Israel’s victories down to divine tests, or perhaps even the intervention of Satan himself. Without denying its grain of logic, one cannot but pause to note the sheer deformity of a religious outlook that views the annihilation of the Jews as an act of God and their salvation as the act of the devil.
The third camp includes those who, like your charming interlocutor, remain essentially agnostic on the question. Without denying the possibility of supernatural involvement, we simply do not claim to possess sufficient information regarding when, how, or to what purposes God might choose to intervene in the human story. Especially regarding events as consequential and bewildering as these, the data resists neat domestication. If the very same decade can contain both Birkenau and Zion, both industrial slaughter and phoenix-like rebirth, then intellectual caution may be not only prudent but pious. When reality defies description, perhaps our descriptions ought to be reined in accordingly. God’s ways transcend even the most elaborate of human conceptions, and certainly defy the cack-handed and fatuous theologising that characterises certain quarters of the Jewish map.
Theological caution, however, must not be confused with dispassion or indifference. With or without God, the modern State of Israel remains perhaps the most successful national project of the past century, a testament to the resolve, ingenuity, and faith of its citizens and their allies. It remains an indispensable endeavour to the furtherance of human civilisation that would, in a sane world, receive encouragement from every quarter. The proposition that Jewish bodies, Jewish minds, Jewish initiative, Jewish strength, Jewish culture, and Jewish learning deserve their own homeland, and that this homeland be the tiny sliver of earth over which they have prayed, wept, and bled for nigh on three millennia, is a truth as self-evident as man’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whether one wishes to call such a wonder providential or merely historical, the response ought to be uniform: nothing less than awe-struck gratitude.
— J.J. Kimche