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PDF FormatThe centrality of sovereignty to Judaism according to Berkovits can thus be explained in two ways. First, it is a necessary product of Judaism’s insistence on reorienting the length and breadth of human life towards a divine order. If an exilic Jewish community is without control over such far-reaching, genuinely existential concerns as defense and economics, it has assuredly been rendered flatter, less representative of the human condition, and therefore less capable of fulfilling the central aims of a holy nation. It is, literally, less holy.
Many Jews, of course, may see this as a good thing, arguing that it is precisely by delegating to others the “lower” aspects of public life, filled with power and violence, that Jews have been able to offer a superior kind of community. And yet the problem is revealed the moment one takes the argument further. One may choose to live in a monastery, in which wide areas of “profane” concern are removed from the monk’s immediate attention, and call this holiness. Yet by hiding wealth and war and procreation from the monk, one does not make them disappear. The viability of monastic life continues to depend on such questions as before—just that these areas are now left to others. Holiness is not achieved, in Berkovits’ view, by ignoring profanity and celebrating its absence, but by focusing all the areas of public and private life on that which is “right and good in the eyes of the Eternal.” And what holds for the monastery is no less true for exilic Judaism: It has not removed the need for righteousness in crucial areas such as security and economics; it has merely delegated them to others, and its own holiness is thereby made limited, even superficial.
Second, sovereignty is central to Judaism’s aspiration to create an exemplary community. For it seems clear that few nations will look to the Jews for moral wisdom so long as they are exempt from addressing the hardest questions that come with sovereignty—questions upon which all communal life ultimately depends. Sovereign peoples are certainly capable of learning a great deal from the successes and failures of other nations, for they often face similar challenges. But how is any nation, daily charged with the task of attending to its defense and prosperity, to learn about morality from a people in exile? Put another way, if moral dilemmas increase in proportion to the power wielded by the actor, why would the powerful ever have cause to learn from the powerless, who simply do not face the same kinds of questions? A weaker country will have little to teach stronger ones about how and when to use overwhelming force to achieve just ends, for example, for it has little comparable experience; how much more so for a people with no means of self-defense at all?
To understand just how unusual was Berkovits’ approach in modern Jewish thinking, it is instructive to contrast it with the ideas advanced by other major religious-Zionist thinkers. Among these, two themes are heard most frequently. On the one hand, redemptive determinists like Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, identified the rise of Zionism with the messianic era, brought about by divine command through the instrumentality of the Zionist movement. For these thinkers, the end of days was everywhere in evidence, and the only question was whether the Jewish people understood and acted on its implications. As the elder Kook wrote in 1920:
From the lowliest level we are recreated as in days past…. We are invited to a new world full of supernal splendor, to a new era that will surpass in strength all the great eras that preceded it. The entire people believes that there will be no more exile after the redemption that is presently commencing, and this profound belief is itself the secret of its existence, the mystery of God revealed in its historical saga, and the ancient tradition attests to the light of its soul that recognizes itself and the entire genealogy of events until the last generation, a generation longing for imminent salvation.25
Kook’s son, who became the preeminent leader of the religious-Zionist community in Israel in the period following the Six Day War, put it more directly. “How is it that some religious spokesmen even withheld their support for Zionism and the movement for redemption?” he asked. “They failed to recognize that it was not that we mortals were forcing the end, but rather that the Master of the House, the Lord of the Universe, was forcing our hand….”26
On the other hand, pragmatic nationalists like Isaac Jacob Reines, and the religious-Zionist Mizrahi movement he helped found in the early twentieth century, advocated statehood primarily as a remedy for the tragic conditions of exile. The greatest threats to the Jewish people, they argued, are assimilation and persecution, and only Jewish nationalism, and ultimately statehood, could save the Jews. According to this approach, redemption and the improvement of mankind were irrelevant to the Zionist enterprise, and any effort to connect it with eternal Jewish ideals, rather than simply the pragmatic improvement of the condition of the Jews, was in error. “Zionist ideology is devoid of any trace of the idea of redemption…,” he wrote approvingly in 1899. “In none of the Zionists’ acts or aspirations is there the slightest allusion to future redemption. Their sole intention is to improve Israel’s situation, to raise their stature and accustom them to a life of happiness…. How can one compare this idea with the idea of redemption?”27
Berkovits did not deny the philosophical legitimacy of these approaches.28 In the wake of the Holocaust and the Israeli victories in 1948 and 1967, he joined many Jews in interpreting these events as revealing some kind of “messianic moment, in which the unexpected fruits of human endeavor reveal themselves as the mysterious expression of a divine guidance which the heart always knew would come.”29 Nor could he gainsay the pragmatic value of the state in defending Jewish lives and stemming assimilation. At the same time, these approaches share the weakness of being constructed on what is effectively a historical contingency: Reluctant to take upon themselves the critique of centuries of traditional Judaism in exile which such a position implied, these thinkers depicted the need for sovereignty not as fundamental to the central aims of Judaism, but rather as reflecting a specific need in our time. Berkovits, by contrast, presents sovereignty as an inherent and unchanging need, a minimum condition for the fulfillment of Judaism itself.
Moreover, Berkovits’ aim in writing is different from that of other religious-Zionist thinkers. The latter were directing their discourse primarily to the Orthodox rabbinic leadership, steeped in the idiom and assumptions of Tora learning; their principal ideological opponent was the anti-Zionist rabbinic establishment. Their hopes lay not in convincing a secular Zionist establishment to recognize the religious value of the moment, but in convincing Orthodox Jews to recognize the religious merits in a pre-existing, but hitherto secular, Zionist enterprise. Berkovits, on the other hand, lay aside the rabbinic rhetorical training of his youth and crafted a philosophical argument for a nationally based Judaism derived from his understanding of the unique Jewish approach to morality, thereby creating a coherent system which could serve as an alternative to the central ideas of modern moral philosophy and of those philosophies of Judaism that drew upon European thought for their inspiration.
The importance of these differences becomes apparent when we consider the fact that the most powerful intellectual opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the first half of the twentieth century came from the world of philosophical argument, and in the name of eternal, not historically contingent, Jewish ideas. Thinkers like Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Buber insisted that the idea of sovereignty violated the true spirit of Judaism, which affirmed the powerlessness of exile. Cohen, for example, argued in 1916 that the exile of the Jews two thousand years ago was a major step forward in messianic history, enabling the Jews to represent an “entirely universal religion” among the nations:
We interpret our entire history as pointing to this messianic goal. Thus, we see the destruction of the Jewish state [i.e., of the ancient Jewish commonwealth] as an exemplification of the theodicy of history. The same Micah who said that God requires man to do justly also conceived of the providential metaphor: “And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples, as dew from the Lord.”30 We are proudly aware of the fact that we continue to live as divine dew among the nations; we wish to remain among them and be a creative force for them. All our prophets have us living among the nations, and all view “Israel’s remnant” from the perspective of its world mission.31
