It is sobering to recognize how limited is our capacity for education, if we still find these questions being asked—not only because the destruction of Europe’s Jews took place a mere fifty years ago, and because one would have to be foolish indeed to suppose that the fundamental dangers posed by man’s nature would be overturned in such a brief time; but principally because these same arguments concerning the imminent disappearance of hostility towards Jews and the imminent end of politics based on national interest were already being advanced with such great conviction, and with the most terrible consequences, a hundred years ago. Indeed, these arguments were so common in the decades before the Holocaust that Herzl felt he had to address them directly in The Jewish State:

It might… be said that we should not create new distinctions between people [by creating a Jewish state], that we ought not to raise fresh barriers, but make the old ones disappear instead. I say that those who think along these lines are loveable romantics. But the idea of the fatherland will go on flourishing long after the dust of their bones will have been blown away without a trace…. The Jews, like every other nation, will always have enough enemies.⁹

Today we know that Herzl was right, and his interlocutors unequivocally mistaken, regarding the feasibility of eliminating competition and enmity from the political life of nations. But the point that bears emphasizing is that the then-prevalent belief in such an imminent improvement of man’s condition was not without foundation. During the 1870s, for example, when citizenship and equal rights were being granted to the Jews throughout central Europe, a certain optimism may well have been in place. But it is hard to forgive the lavish interpretation that many German Jews gave to these events—a striking example of which can be found in Hermann Cohen’s 1915 essay “Germanism and Judaism,” which should perhaps stand as a warning to all of us concerning our proclivity for overly sanguine readings of political conditions. Written with the encouragement of leading members of established German Jewry, this discourse by the foremost Jewish thinker of his age announced that the German people had discovered and engraved upon its heart the truth of a pure universal brotherhood of man; and that, as this was none other than the eternal message of the Jews, the souls of these two peoples were in effect one, and Germany itself was the new homeland of the Jewish spirit. As he argued:

The inner commonality between Germans and Jewishness should now be evident to everyone. The concept of humanity has its origins in the messianism of the Israelite prophets…. Now, however, the Messiah is again to be found… within the framework of the German spirit…. The Jews in France, England, and Russia are also subject to the duty of loyalty to Germany, because Germany is the motherland of their souls…. Accordingly, irrespective of common prejudices, I venture to assert that the equality of the Jews in Germany is more deeply rooted than anywhere else.¹⁰

In short, Cohen, and through him many of the leading Jews of Germany, assured all who were willing to follow their advice that the long history of adversity they had experienced in Europe was virtually at an end. And yet when this essay was written and the era of good feeling was at its height, a mere eighteen years remained before the crisis that led to the murder, at the hands of the German state, of two-thirds of the Jews in Europe.

These facts must teach us something concerning the nature of the political realm, and especially concerning the feebleness of our capacity to predict political events. For if the Jews of Germany could have erred so terribly concerning the disappearance of the anti-Semitic hostility that was shortly to consume them, it is difficult to imagine what prudence there could be in building our own politics on the assumption that we can know, better than they, what the future holds for us fifty or a hundred years from now. This tendency to mistake limited fluctuations in political fortune for permanent changes in the fabric of political reality is, as it seems, endemic to human nature. We should know this well. It was just yesterday, after all, that some among us were speaking with such eloquence and conviction of the impending arrival of the “end of history,” and of a “new Middle East.”¹¹ Yet all that is gone now as if it had never been, lost in a world reeking of war.

It is perhaps a bitter fact, but nonetheless true, that for us, having been denied prophecy, the future is a closed book. Regarding its contents, we find time and again that we know next to nothing. And this is true even where events not many years hence are concerned, not to speak of events and conditions a generation or two in the future. Reasonable men should be able to understand this, and to accept it as a political premise that those who believe otherwise can contribute little to our efforts to guide the state.

A century ago, our people inclined its ear to false prophets who encouraged them to believe that the terror was gone from the world, or would shortly disappear; and we will never know how many lives might have been saved had they kept their peace, or had their predictions at least been greeted with suitable skepticism. Today new voices bear this same message, saying that the terror is gone from the world, or will shortly disappear. The lives of our children and grandchildren depend on our ability to dismiss all such vanity without hesitation and without afterthought. For we must always bear in mind: The future is for us a closed book, and regarding its contents we know next to nothing. We do not know with certainty that our world is no longer that of our fathers, in which men and governments found cause to practice terror and make war against our people. And even if we did know this, we would still not know that such a world will not return in the time of our children and of our children’s children. And since we cannot know these things, we also cannot know that the inheritance of a Jewish state, which our fathers bequeathed to us and which was won at such great cost, is a gift whose time has come and gone.

It is argued by some that Israel today seems hardly to possess the wherewithal to defend itself, much less the Jews of the world.¹² And indeed, amid the black winds that swirl around us now, the product of our own folly, we can see the Jewish state in all its human frailty. The existence of a state is no guarantee of wise rulers, and we certainly have it within our power, by our own errors, to transform Israel into a helpless nation. But one cannot judge an enterprise spanning centuries on the basis of the foolishness of this minister or that one. One must not forget that it was no more than a handful of years ago that Israeli security services devoted a decade of dangerous but successful work to the rescue of the Jews of Ethiopia, saving tens of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost. And one must not forget the triumph of the Six Day War, and of Entebbe, nor the work of Israeli officials on behalf of Jews in the lands of Islam, Russia, Argentina, and elsewhere. Nor even the trial of Eichmann, which established for the first time the principle of worldly punishment for those who commit crimes against the Jewish people.

The Jewish state is an extraordinary instrument in the hands of those who wield it well, and no moment of weakness is an argument against the principle of guardianship of the welfare of the Jews, any more than it would be an argument against American liberty if the nerve of America should fail under pressure of one test or another. For it is the nature of all political states that even at their finest, they grant to their heirs only a great potential—the potential to protect those who depend on them, and the potential to fulfill a higher purpose. Whether the Jews redeem this opportunity or not is left to each generation, whose great deeds are visited upon its children, and whose sins are as well.

III

If Israel could do no more than offer diplomatic and military assistance to Jews in need, this would be sufficient reason to maintain it as a Jewish state. Such a purpose is one of pikuah nefesh, the safeguarding of life, which in Jewish tradition is a purpose that has precedence over virtually every other concern.¹³ Given what we have learned in recent generations concerning life among the nations, no further motive should be necessary to persuade Jews that we must learn the arts of statecraft and war, teach them to our children, and maintain ourselves as a sovereign citizenry prepared to make use of them whenever the need should arise. Every effort in this direction is a matter of safeguarding lives, and must be understood as an imperative of the highest order.