Difficult as it may be to admit, it was the Holocaust that extinguished the flame of intellectual independence within the Jewish people, destroying our confidence in our tradition and ourselves, and reducing our conceptual horizon to that of a small people, overwhelmed by the day-to-day cares of its struggle to survive. That is, it was the Holocaust that destroyed our belief in ourselves as a historic nation. And while the conviction and valor of Ben-Gurion and his generation may have obscured this from view, engaging all our attention in the quest to achieve and consolidate a Jewish sovereignty, the struggle for the establishment of Israel only deferred the reckoning, whose time has now come. The signs of this can be seen everywhere: The sense of exhaustion which haunts us, while our enemies seem forever young; the inner cry that we have paid enough and deserve finally to rest; the feeling that our hope, while not yet entirely extinguished, is without any fixed object. All these cavernous hollows that now open up around us are the deep aftereffects of a life deprived of the end that once animated it, of a people no longer convinced it bears an idea, or at least one worth bearing.

Of course, there are peoples that can continue for a long time without permitting themselves to ask why. But ours is not among them. A historic nation, its life unnaturally extended by virtue of its ideal, loses its taste for ignorance. I do not mean by this that it is impossible for us to return to the path of a minor people, obsessed with persistence alone, and therefore utterly mortal—another Albania or Bulgaria or Montenegro, as Franz Rosenzweig once said, on the shores of the Mediterranean. We can choose this road, but we cannot prevent the devastation this choice will visit upon the next generation of Jews, the best of whom now have the option to slip away from such a people without a trace of regret. Indeed, we are already seeing this choice being made every day, not only in the diaspora but in Israel as well.

I know our people fears this road—the road of a historic people, a people that seeks its calling before the nations and responds to it, and which, in its truer moments, breathes the air of eternity. To hear some Jews speak on the subject, one would think that to believe in any Jewish calling or purpose other than survival and benignity is of necessity to be a fanatic, a messianist, and a hater of other peoples. This is the root of the constant vituperation one hears against even the mildest efforts to understand why the Jewish people might in some sense be chosen, and of the insistence that the Israeli state must be a “neutral” state, which is to say one that is stripped clean of any overarching purpose. But the truth is that the Jews have given much to humanity and are, even today, potentially one of the great factors in civilization. And one does not have to see the hand of the divine in history to understand this. Mankind has in the last hundred years arrived at a crossroads such as it has not known since the time of Elizabeth, Shakespeare, and Bacon. The Jews are one of the few peoples with the capacity to offer significant and independent answers regarding what man has come to, and where he must now turn. In this we are not “like all the nations.” At most we are like a very few other nations. And our destiny, like that of those other nations, is therefore of no mean, parochial interest.

It is this realization that brings us to the second aspect of the Jewish state’s purpose as the guardian of the Jews. For the conditions of dispersion and exile that preceded the establishment of the state spelled not only physical insecurity but intellectual insecurity as well. Certainly, there were important windows of grace—not only the “golden” ages in exilic Babylonia and Spain, but other, lesser-known periods of ferment and transaction. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny that the normative state of Jewry was one of intellectual siege, in which neither the free, internal development of Jewish ideas nor a real public airing of them was even remotely possible. Rousseau described these conditions in Emile (1762):

Do you know many Christians who have taken the effort to examine with care what Judaism alleges against them? If some individuals have seen something of this, it is in the books of the Christians. A good way of informing oneself about their adversaries’ arguments! But what is there to do? If someone dared to publish among us books in which Judaism were openly favored, we would punish the author, the publisher, the bookseller…. There is a pleasure in refuting people who do not dare to speak.

Those who have access to conversation with Jews are not much farther advanced. These unfortunates feel themselves to be at our mercy…. What will they dare say without laying themselves open to our accusing them of blasphemy? … The most learned, the most enlightened among them are always the most circumspect….²⁰

It was these conditions that stood before the eyes of early Zionist writers in their hope that an independent Jewish state could provide a suitable soil for the proper elaboration of Jewish ideas. Perhaps surprisingly, Rousseau himself came to this same conclusion, arguing that only a Jewish state would bring about a truly free development of the Jewish perspective in intellectual matters. As he concluded in the passage quoted above: “I shall never believe I have heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we know what they have to say.”²¹

Now this claim is one that requires some consideration, since it is hardly the most obvious argument Rousseau might have made. One of the architects of the egalitarian state, he might easily have argued that the absence of a distinctive Jewish voice in European public discourse was the result of intolerance, and that reducing the latter would create the conditions for the free development of the ideas of the Jews. Certainly, this is what many of his admirers would say today. Rousseau, however, seems to have realized that there is a far deeper question here than can be addressed by a simple end to persecution. For the desire to which he gave voice—the desire to “know what the Jews have to say”—is a burden that the principles of equality and freedom of expression cannot possibly bear. To have a hope of achieving such a purpose one needs to seek out additional analytic principles suited to this end.

The recognition that the machinery of political equality does not necessarily lead to intellectual and cultural independence—not of the Jews, and not of anyone else—is an insight of great importance in an age in which the liberty to speak is consistently treated as though it were the sole and sufficient condition for the development of ideas worthy of being spoken. In keeping with Mill’s infectious enthusiasm on the subject, we all tend to believe that given the free competition of ideas, the truth concerning every subject of importance will eventually be discovered, expressed in a persuasive fashion, and, as a consequence, heeded. And yet experience teaches something different. In public affairs, as in the life of the individual, we find that the liberty to express an opinion often does little to assure its eventual acceptance in the face of an opposite, prevailing one. The prevailing idea is defended by a great many individuals, whose desire to avoid the unpleasantness of revising their way of thinking is generally far in excess of their desire to learn the truth; and even those whose desire to know the truth is beyond question are rarely capable of investing the intellectual and emotional energies required to uproot a long-established way of understanding things. Moreover, the resistance to change is generally intransigent, poorly reasoned, and virulent in direct proportion to the importance of the subject. In the general case, it is only the young who even approach being “open-minded.” The rest of humanity have their minds opened for them by a catastrophic turn of events that forces them to reconsider, or else they do not reconsider at all.

Given this reality, the price of nonconformity becomes, for most people, unbearably high. Without the shelter provided by a community of the like-minded, the dissenting individual finds himself exposed and set upon from all sides. And, unless he is made of truly extraordinary materials and has no need for encouragement or for the respect of others, capitulation and accommodation are not long in coming. In this way, disagreement is driven underground or becomes the province of eccentrics, and every original strand of thought that emerges is forced to conform to the standards generally prevailing long before it reaches its full development.²²