Dissimilar as they may seem, these responses to gentile civilization result from the same cause: Weakness of character and its attendant fears. How else to explain a rabbi rising in the morning and donning the outfit of a Catholic priest, if not by a secret hope that shelter and safety will come from hiding one’s too-Jewish self from view? How else to explain a rabbi rising in the morning and resolving to prevent Jewish children from learning multiplication, if not by a secret hope that shelter and safety will come from hiding the gentile world from view? The former, like the chameleon, seeks safety by pretending he does not exist; the latter, like the ostrich, by pretending the gentiles do not exist. On a certain level, however, the two programs are one. For each seeks to put an end to the unbalanced relationship between the Jew and his far stronger Western environment by denying the significance of one of the two parties. Having thus disposed of whichever one he prefers by an act of mind, he feels free to go about his business as though all outstanding difficulties have been settled.

Now between these extremes there must exist adifferent path, which grows not out of weakness and fear, but out of strength. By this I do not mean anything resembling a compromise, whereby one’s cultural disposition is determined by casting an eye in the direction of each of the opposing extremes and determining what is right by seeking the geometric center between them; for there is nothing so indicative of weakness of character as the belief that the proper posture can be determined by such compromise, and that compromise, in and of itself, is therefore a formula for discovering truth. Rather, I have in mind something else entirely: An individual for whom Jewish ideas and customs are the natural currency of his thoughts, so that when he comes to examine the ideas of another people, or when his children do so, he feels not even the most passing need to cast down his eyes or the slightest tremor of fear, whether conscious or unconscious; and is therefore moved by reflex neither to reject what he sees nor to embrace it, but judges it as a man of substance and resilience. Having found such an equipoise rooted in a confidence in his own value and in that of the civilization out of which he has grown, such a Jew would be able to admire that which is worthy in other peoples, and still to return to his own people without having endangered his essential cultural disposition or loyalties. He would set his intellectual course in accordance with the need to give ever greater depth to his own Jewish perspective, now diving into the deep water of the ideas and traditions of our people, now venturing forth again into the wide gentile world, but always out of a belief that he acts as he does so as to attain the highest reaches. Such an individual will always have before his eyes that enrichment of his ideas that will bring the greatest benefit to his people and to himself, with the clear understanding that in matters of civilization, the betterment of one’s own invariably redounds to the betterment of all mankind.

There is every reason to believe that such an intellectual posture can be achieved, not only on the level of individuals but far more broadly. Indeed, it is only in this way that the oft-discussed revival of Jewish civilization can come about. Yet if one examines this ideal carefully, it becomes evident that it is, from first to last, dependent on character—and in particular on the ability of a strong character to permit us to clearly distinguish ourselves from the gentiles without fearing them. To stand upright in the face of the gale wind that is the civilization of the gentile West, to be able to look deep within it and engage directly the sources of its strength, and yet, in the face of such stress, to maintain a sharply distinguished and independent Jewish conception of the highest things—this requires the capacity to bring to bear a formidable counter-pressure whose source is, and can be, in nothing other than force of character.

The restoration of Jewish civilization, which was and is a central purpose of the Jewish state, is thus contingent on our ability to raise up men and women of character. And the same is no less true of Israel’s traditional purpose as guardian of the physical well-being of the Jews. This, too, is a responsibility that can be shouldered only by a state willing and able to exert itself in the most trying circumstances, wielding diplomatic, security, and economic tools alike to achieve its aims. Character, then, proves to be not only one of the purposes for which the Jewish state was established, but a prerequisite for attaining any of them.²⁶

 

Has the Jewish state brought with it the development of the Jewish character, as so many had hoped? I do not believe there can be a simple answer to this question—in part because the Jewish experience of sovereignty has been so brief, and success in such an endeavor is not something that one can reasonably expect to measure over a handful of years. Nonetheless, the significance of this question requires that an attempt be made to render at least a tentative answer. I will therefore touch on several factors that must be considered if we are to assess our progress in this matter.

As discussed above, the expectations of the early Zionists with regard to the state and character were twofold: First, the state was supposed to free Jews from the onerous burden of having to adapt themselves to gentile norms as the ticket of entry into society; second, the challenge of independence and self-government was to create a relentless demand for individuals of character who would be sufficient to the task of maintaining the state. In other words, the removal of the barriers to Jewish entry into society was a largely formal change in our environment, which would open the door for the next, substantive step: The establishment of traditions and institutions capable of inculcating character in successive generations of young Jews.

With regard to the first, formal condition, I think that the results have been unequivocal. Life in the Jewish state has in fact put an end to the fear of social sanction resulting from one’s being a Jew. This is not to say that an Israeli Jew seeking professional recognition or business contacts abroad does not occasionally come across some kind of hostility or unpleasantness related to his origins. But this is a marginal aspect of the life of Israeli Jews, who do not, after all, live overseas but in our own Jewish state and society. Here, the once pressing need to obscure one’s Jewishness in order to gain acceptance has disappeared without a trace. The restoration of the Jews’ “inner wholeness” of which Herzl spoke—that is, the dream of attaining a perfect unity between our ambitions as individuals, and our loyalty to our forefathers and to our people—has been achieved. And with this, a fundamental obstacle that had frustrated the development of Jewish character in the liberal societies of Western Europe really has been eliminated from our lives.

Regarding the second, substantive aim, the picture is more complex. As suggested earlier, the challenge of establishing Jewish independence did inspire the creation of certain frameworks focused on training for character, of which the kibbutzimwere the outstanding example. But the agricultural communism of the kibbutz was hardly an ideal of sufficient generality to be capable of propagating itself beyond the very particular set of conditions that brought it into being. These conditions disappeared shortly after the founding of the state, and with this the collective farms began their rapid decline as a significant educational force in Israel, taking with them the Labor Zionist youth movements and all the other satellite institutions that had sprung up around them. Though some of these institutions still exist in form, they ceased to fulfill their aristocratic function as models of character development long ago. The years have passed, and despite various promising developments, no obvious successor to the kibbutz has emerged. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Private schooling was never an idea with much traction in a country with a powerful public commitment to socialism; and Israel’s universities, all of them vast institutions dealing in mass education, are hardly equipped to cope with something so personalized and labor-intensive as the effort to improve the character of their students. Only in the small, elite units of the army, under cover of military secrecy, has Israeli society systematically sought to develop the kind of character necessary for shouldering the responsibilities of statehood. But for the reasons already mentioned, these units have seldom, or at least not for many years, graduated soldiers whose sturdiness in battle has been readily translatable into parallel qualities in other areas of public life—political, diplomatic, economic, or intellectual.²⁷

This almost exclusive reliance on the military to educate our young men and women in matters of character has had far-reaching consequences for the quality of Israel’s public life. On the one hand, the tradition of discipline in the army’s elite units, together with the general conscription and training of most of the Jewish population, has succeeded in making of the Jews a people capable of showing exceptional force of character in warfare. This has been no less evident over the past two years than in previous wars, and in some respects it may be said that the present test surpasses anything Israel’s public and its political leadership have faced since the War of Independence. Not for a generation has the Jewish state had to sustain a war whose duration was measured in years; not since independence has it had to contend with warfare directed against its civilian population, with war in the streets of its cities and capital. Nor is it possible to ignore the tide of anti-Semitism that has washed over Europe and other parts of the world as a result, throwing up hatreds against our state and our people that many had believed were long extinct. Yet despite all this, Israel has held its ground in a struggle our enemies were certain would break us.