.

Not Normal

By Assaf Sagiv




This was the vision which also inspired Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In a lecture he delivered in 1950 to the high command of the IDF, under the title “Uniqueness and Destiny,” he argued that:
Our spiritual advantage has supported the Jewish people in every generation for four thousand years now, and only if the Israeli nation… continues to preserve our spiritual, moral, and intellectual advantage, which was the secret of our survival over thousands of years, we… will win from among the enlightened world friends and partners in the vision of the eternal redemption of humanity, a vision which beat in our hearts through all time, and which was revealed in the Book of Books that served as a light unto nations.
 
The years that have passed since the establishment of the State of Israel have not been kind to these hopes. The idealism once integral to mainstream Zionism has faded in the harsh light of Israel’s political, social, and strategic predicaments, and the dreams of a model Jewish civilization in the land of Israel have given way, in the eyes of many, to the more “realistic” goal of normalization. The deep rifts that have emerged in Israeli society have led many Israelis to doubt the idea of a unified “chosen people,” which has come to be seen as reflecting a kind of religious fundamentalism or nationalist chauvinism. An outstanding expression of this sentiment appears in an essay written by one of Israel’s premier literary figures, A.B. Yehoshua, entitled “In Defense of Normalcy”:
The Bible, the prayers, whole sections of our tradition and our culture are flooded with the premise of “chosenness.” No amount of humanist education can blur this premise, neither through treatises nor casuistry. We must begin to address this fundamental concept and, gradually, to uproot it. We are not the first people which has attempted to uproot its fundamental concepts.
In a similar spirit, the historian Yigal Eilam, whose recent book announces the End of Judaism, has assailed “the delusionary idea” of the chosen people, “the source of our tragedy,” which has “brought upon us all the holocausts that we have known throughout Jewish history.” (Yona Hadari, Doing Some Thinking, p. 420) Tel Aviv University historian Yehuda Elkana has written that the time has come for Israelis to “understand that our self-perception as the chosen people…, which allowed us to survive two thousand years of exile, now risks ruining our chances of establishing a normal society in a normal state.” (Ha’aretz, March 18, 1996)
These views are not limited to the cultural elite. A segment of the Israeli public has begun to express its weariness in the face of the responsibilities which the “old” Zionist sense of chosenness demanded. The belief that Zionism has fulfilled its historic role—the establishment of a Jewish state—has spread, bringing in its wake a yearning for normalcy that seems to many to be the next, natural step in the country’s “maturation.” The journalist Tom Segev, who has depicted this transformation in his recent book The New Zionists, describes the emergence of a belief, gaining in popularity, according to which “Zionism had fulfilled its role, in a clearly successful way, and Israel is now moving on to the next phase.” Uri Ram, a sociologist at Ben-Gurion University, writing in the special issue of the prestigious journal Theory and Criticism that marked Israel’s fiftieth Independence Day, describes this in terms of a new youth culture, centered in the cafes of Tel Aviv. “The Tel Aviv post-Zionists of the nineties no longer read the Passover Hagada,” he writes. “They engage in a willful act of forgetting, at their own initiative…. Not a prefabricated ‘Jewish bookshelf’ that is on sale now for all takers, nor a ‘rock of our existence’ strewn with battered bodies. They prefer plastic chairs and vodka with lemonade.”
Such sentiments are regrettable. The idea of becoming a “normal” nation, so appealing to those whose vision does not extend beyond seeing Israel transformed into an ordinary Western country, is not only alien to the diverse strands of Jewish tradition; it is antithetical to them. The sense of destiny, the belief that our people is slated for a particular calling, to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” has been the cornerstone of Jewish identity in all its forms, from the time of the Bible to the modern era. Through centuries of dispersion in all its lands, the Jewish people continued to regard themselves as a people with a special charge in the world—a calling that was spelled out by the prophet Isaiah:
I the Eternal, in my grace, have summoned you,
And I have grasped you by the hand.
I created you, and appointed you
A covenant-people, a light unto nations.
To open eyes deprived of light,
To rescue prisoners from confinement,
From the dungeon those who sit in darkness. (Isaiah 42:6-7)
To be sure, such a presumption often triggered resentment among other peoples and cultures. (“To this day,” proclaims the talmudic sage R. Avin in Exodus Raba, not without a measure of pride, “throughout the world Israel is called the ‘stiff-necked nation.’”) Yet it is difficult to imagine the Jews surviving pogroms and persecutions without the strength they are able to draw from belief in their unique mission. “Incommensurable as it is to human reason and imagining, unbearable as it must always be to recollection,” the philosopher George Steiner has written, “Auschwitz is ephemeral as compared with the Covenant, with God’s reinsurance of his hunted people. Hitler could no more prevail than could Nebuchadnezzar or the Inquisition. There were rabbis who exultantly proclaimed this axiom on the edge of the fire-pits.”
The belief in a distinctive Jewish mission in the world was no less central to modern understandings of Judaism. Some thinkers, such as Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes, understood that mission to be above all universal and moral in nature, something that in their minds did not fit well with the political aims of modern Jewish nationalism. Others, including the leading Zionist thinkers, understood sovereignty to be an essential means for the realization of the specific Jewish character, a greenhouse in which the Jewish people could develop their spiritual and moral qualities under conditions of freedom. For all the differences between these two approaches, they both based their grandest visions on a belief in Jewish chosenness, vigorously opposing its displacement by a goal of “normalization” for the Jews or Judaism.
Thus the idea of the Jews as a special, unique, “chosen” nation cannot be erased from Judaism. One cannot “uproot this fundamental concept,” as Yehoshua would have us do, without gutting Judaism of its essential contents. Nor can it be surgically removed from the Jewish historical experience without denying that experience the very source of its vitality.
From an external viewpoint as well, one that looks at nations generally, the desire for normalcy seems odd and even self-defeating. As demonstrated by Anthony Smith, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, in his 1991 study National Identity, the idea of national “chosenness” is not unique to the Jews. On the contrary: Without a collective sense of destiny that causes a people to feel elevated above its neighbors, one could not imagine the emergence of the British, French, German, Irish, Polish, Russian, or Greek national identities. (With appropriate adjustments, Smith’s list could easily include the United States as well, whose founders explicitly compared themselves to the chosen people of the Bible and whose policies in many areas are still animated by this sentiment.) While a belief in their distinctiveness helped these nations survive and develop, those peoples who lacked such a belief—Smith cites the Phoenicians and Philistines as examples—tended to be absorbed within other civilizations following the loss of their independence. Without a sense of uniqueness or mission, these nations had little way of withstanding the pressures of assimilation over time, and many of them exist today only as archeological remains.


O
ne may doubt whether the rejection of Jewish uniqueness has brought Israel any closer to “normalcy.” Stripped of its Jewish idealism, the country would still be a strategic, cultural, ethnic, and religious oddity—as the tragic events of the past year have made all too clear. But for anyone who holds the idea of a unique Jewish state dear, the present state of affairs is nothing short of alarming. What is needed is to re-educate the Jewish public about the critical role that a sense of national mission plays in the survival and prosperity of nations. It is unfortunate that many Jews today reflexively associate such ideas with messianism and racism, and bristle against any attempt to pass them on to the next generation. But this is no reason to abandon what has traditionally been a central pillar of both Jewish identity and Zionist ideology: The idea of the chosenness of Israel.
This is no credo of racial supremacy, nor does it deny the merits of other peoples or individuals. After all, the same Bible that introduced the idea of a chosen people also bequeathed to the world the belief that all human beings are created in the image of God. The Jewish people is above all a spiritual community, whose founding covenant may be joined by all the nations, if they so choose. This community has always accepted upon itself a sense of mission, demanding that its members rise above the mediocre and the “normal,” and instead strive constantly for intellectual and moral excellence. It seeks to overcome, at great cost, man’s lower inclinations, and to cultivate his loftiest, worthiest side.
Perhaps it is true that the Zionist dream of a sovereign Jewish people fulfilling its highest destiny in its own state is still a long way from realization. For all its successes (and there are many), the State of Israel is not yet a model country. In some areas, its performance falls below even that of “normal” countries. At the same time, however, there would be nothing worse for the Jewish state than to relinquish its ancient dream of spiritual and moral elevation, of the realization of its national destiny—or, to put it more modestly, of an ethos of excellence and a clear sense of moral purpose. These are dreams that must never be given up. They are the lifeblood of the Zionist enterprise, and of Judaism as a whole.
 
Assaf Sagiv, for the Editors
July 1, 2001
 
 


From the
ARCHIVES

Locusts, Giraffes, and the Meaning of KashrutThe most famous Jewish practice is really about love and national loyalty.
An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of AntisemitismA prominent Israeli author gets to the bottom of the world`s oldest hatred.
Faces of DeathSaw, a film by James Wan; and Saw II, a film by Darren Lynn Bousman
The Magician of LjubljanaThe totalitarian dreams of Slavoj Žižek.
The Political Legacy of Theodor HerzlBefore the melting pot, a different vision of the Jewish state.

All Rights Reserved (c) Shalem Press 2024