The only solution to the crisis would be a radical move, one that would reconnect Jews with the creative, sovereign spirit which had earlier defined their national experience. Preservation was no longer an option, since the methods of preserving no longer worked for the great majority of Jews. Instead, Judaism must forgo the exilic model, in which evolution and creativity are all but precluded, and reconstitute itself as a national state. “Any further development of Judaism is possible only by the creation, somewhere on this earth, of a complete Jewish environment, one wide enough to embrace the whole existence of a Jewish national entity,” Berkovits wrote half a decade before the advent of Israel. “Only by the creation of such a Jewish environment can we give back to Tora the great partnership of life which alone is capable of freeing Judaism from its present exilic rigidity, and create the circumstances in which evolution will again be possible.”⁴⁷ Thus the Jewish state, which played so central a role in Berkovits’ understanding of the ideal Jewish community, becomes the centerpiece of his approach to Jewish life in the modern era.

Berkovits, it should be stressed, was under no illusions about the realities of Jewish and Israeli history. He did not advocate “liquidating” the diaspora, and dedicated an entire chapter of Towards Historic Judaism to diaspora life and his prescription for its success. Nor did he believe that the State of Israel, as it developed over nearly half a century, had lived up to its potential as a source of creative Jewish thinking; indeed, his Crisis of Judaism in the Jewish State (1987), which was written following his immigration to Israel in 1975, catalogues the failure of his adoptive countrymen to recognize the potential inherent in a Jewish state, and offers a warning that without a more significant reconnection to the ancient Jewish ideal, Zionism itself may not survive.

Despite these criticisms, however, Eliezer Berkovits never abandoned his belief that in the absence of statehood, Judaism is doomed to search for ever-newer stratagems for survival, pushing the ancient dream ever further into the people’s collective memory. Only with a Jewish state might the breach between the divine teaching and human history again be healed, and might Judaism reclaim its role in history as a powerful, creative, and developing source of human wisdom, a living example of holiness in national existence.

 

 

Religious Zionism in the twentieth century offered the Jewish people two competing images of statehood, which gained a dedicated following among a small number of adherents, but did not succeed in capturing the imagination of Jews on a broad scale. On the one hand, followers of the Mizrahi movement advocated statehood for the Jews principally as a means of protecting Jewish lives and material interests. A traditionalist offshoot of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Organization, Mizrahi built institutions along the lines of the other Zionist movements, establishing youth groups, sports clubs, kibutzim, and a political party. Its aim was to translate modern Zionism into religious terms and to provide an environment in which Jews committed to a life according to halacha could take part in the Zionist enterprise. Although it certainly did not shun religious symbolism and terminology, the Mizrahi movement emphasized pragmatism over theology, and did not offer a coherent philosophy of Judaism in which sovereignty played the central role.⁴⁸

By mid-century a second movement had emerged as well, around the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook, and amplified by his son, Tzvi Yehuda Kook. This movement read the events of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a messianic lens. The success of Zionism and the emergence of the State of Israel (and, after 1967, the return of the Jews to the holy places of Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria) were interpreted as at’halta digeula, the beginning of the redemption, and Jews were enjoined to build and settle the land of Israel in order to hasten the messianic process. While this movement offered a more profound theoretical basis than did the Mizrahi, its overt messianism, eschatological vocabulary, and intensive settlement activism at a time when the majority of Jews and Israelis had already ceased to find in settlement a central source of Zionist fulfillment, all served to prevent it from reaching the great majority of Jews.

Eliezer Berkovits offered a very different vision, which grants Jewish nationhood and Jewish sovereignty a vital role in Judaism while avoiding the determinism and exaggerated expectations that come with messianism. According to his vision, Judaism offers an understanding of morality which takes cognizance of the importance of nations in determining man’s moral fate, and which insists on the necessity of a moral exemplar in the form of a living, sovereign nation. The Jewish people was created with the singular aim of serving this vision—to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This is the challenge put forth in the biblical writings, and its centrality to Judaism is in evidence throughout the length and breadth of traditional Jewish teaching, even after two thousand years of exile. In our own era, the promise of Zion, in Berkovits’ view, is the hope of rediscovering the Tora’s own creative essence after centuries of suspended animation—a hope which requires the security and continuous creative exploration which only sovereignty can offer.

David Hazony is Senior Editor of Azure. He is the editor of the collected works of Eliezer Berkovits. The most recent volume is God, Man and History (Shalem Press, 2004).

 

1. A striking example of this appears in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, which delineated the core beliefs of the Reform movement at the time: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and, therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

2. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Fate and Destiny: From the Holocaust to the State of Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 2000).

3. Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), pp. 216, 290.

4. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant, p. 231.

5. Eliezer Berkovits, Essential Essays on Judaism, ed. David Hazony (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2002), p. 164.

6. David Hazony,“Eliezer Berkovits and the Revival of Jewish Moral Thought,” Azure 11 (Summer 2001), pp. 23-65.

7. Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man and History, ed. David Hazony (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2004), pp. 137-138.

8. Cf. Hazony,“Eliezer Berkovits,” pp. 45-52.

9. In a sermon he delivered in Leeds in September 1942, Berkovits put the point as follows: “A man may be a perfect tzadik with nothing but good deeds to his credit, yet he cannot but share in the fate of the nation to which he belongs. And if the nation as such lives foolishly and is unable to manage its affairs competently and well, all will suffer within the nation, even the innocent; as all will benefit—even those whom you may think that they do not deserve it—from a just and honorable administration of the group or the state.” Eliezer Berkovits, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (Oxford: East and West Library, 1945), p. 142.

10. Berkovits, God, Man and History, p. 137.

11. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 157.

12. Eliezer Berkovits, Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halacha (New York: Ktav, 1983), p. 16.

13. Eliezer Berkovits, Prayer (New York: Yeshiva University, 1962), p. 51.

14. Berkovits, Prayer, p. 59.

15. Berkovits, Prayer, pp. 53-54.

16. Berkovits, Prayer,p. 55.

17. Eliezer Berkovits, Unity in Judaism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1986), p. 2.

18. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), p. 179.

19. Cohen, Religion of Reason, pp. 259-260, emphasis in original.

20. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant, pp. 16-17.

21. Berkovits, God, Man and History, p. 142, emphasis added.

22. Exodus 19:6.

23. Berkovits, God, Man and History, pp. 140-141.

24. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973), p. 149, emphasis added.

25. Abraham I. Kook, Orot, trans. Bezalel Naor (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993), p. 185.

26. Quoted in Yosef Bramson, ed., The Public Campaign (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 24-25 [Hebrew]; cited in Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), p. 79.

27. Isaac Jacob Reines, Gates of Light and Happiness (Vilna, 1899), pp. 12-13 [Hebrew], emphasis added; cited in Ravitzky, Messianism, pp. 33-34. Ravitzky also cites a letter published in 1900 by a number of rabbis under Reines’ leadership, in support of the Zionist movement. They write:

Letter in Hamelitz 78 (1900); cited in Ravitzky, Messianism, p. 34.

28. It is important to note that the thinkers of religious Zionism tended to offer a range of justifications for their support of the movement, of which the above-mentioned themes are merely the central thrust of their arguments. For example, both Kook and the more pragmatic Rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn declared “nationalism” to be central to the Jewish idea, in which that term is meant to denote the centrality of political sovereignty to the Tora’s application. Cf. David Zohar, Jewish Commitment in a Modern World: R. Hayyim Hirschensohn and His Attitude Towards the Modern Era (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2003), p. 93.

29. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 188.

30. Micah 5:6.

31. Eva Jospe, ed. and trans., Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1971), p. 168.

32. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo(London: University of Notre Dame, 1985), pp. 331-332.

33. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, p. 332.

34. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 171.

35. Berkovits, God, Man and History, p. 141.

36. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 161-162.

37. For an important example of the influence of rabbinic thought on modern philosophical discourse, cf. Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” Azure 13 (Summer 2002), pp. 88-132.

38. Brachot 8a.

39. Eliezer Berkovits, Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin, 1976), pp. 142-143.

40. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 157-158.

41. Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, pp. 141-143.

42. This was felt acutely, for example, in the curriculum of study in the leading European yeshivot in the nineteenth century. Cf. Norman Lamm, Tora Lishmah: Tora for Tora’s Sake in the Works of Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1989), p. 240.

43. Cf. Arie Morgenstern, “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840,” Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 71-132.

44. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 158.

45. Jospe, Reason and Hope, p. 220.

46. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 168.

47. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 163.

48. See note 27 above.