It was this that caused Ahad Ha’am, himself no friend of the ghetto, to regard with such horror the fate of Judaism in the free lands of the West. As he wrote:

It is only in the latest period, that of emancipation and assimilation, that Jewish culture has really become sterile and ceased to bear new fruit. This does not mean that our creative power has been suddenly destroyed, or that we are no longer capable of doing original work. It is the tendency to sink the national individuality, and merge it in that of other nations, that has produced [the] characteristic phenomena of this period: … The really original intellects desert their own poverty-stricken people and give their efforts to the enrichment of those who are already rich, while our literature remains a barren field for dullards and mediocrities to trample on…. Even what is good in our literature… is good only in that it resembles more or less the good products of other literatures.… We cannot feel that our national life is linked with a literature like this, which is in its essence nothing but a purveyor of foreign goods, presenting the ideas and feelings of foreign writers in a vastly inferior form.²³

Once these considerations are taken into account, the idea that freedom of expression will lead to truth must be significantly qualified. Statements of fact pertaining to subjects both easily understandable and readily verifiable may on occasion be quickly accepted as truth, even if they overturn prevailing views. But the great issues are never of this kind. Arguments over moral, political, or religious truth are typically fought and won only over the course of generations or even centuries. Even where the falsehood is blatant, as was the case, for example, with Marxist historical and economic theories, it may be a century or more before disputes over abstract ideas begin to gravitate towards real resolution. In such protracted conceptual struggles, the truth of an idea is little guarantee of its acceptance if its advocates do not have at their disposal instruments appropriate to articulating, preserving, and advancing it over the course of long generations, and in the face of the vindictiveness that is inevitably arrayed to protect an established contrary view.

When I speak here of instruments suitable for the development of ideas over generations, and especially in the face of overwhelming opposition, I have in mind social institutions substantial enough to create a community of the like-minded, whose members can find mutual encouragement, assistance, and respect among themselves to a degree that cannot exist when the individual stands alone before society as a whole. Such institutions include universities and monasteries—and, on a far larger scale, the national state. What these institutions have in common is the recognition that seclusion, no less than liberty, is a precondition for the development of ideas of consequence. This insight was expressed long ago by Humboldt, the founder of the modern university,²⁴ and it is perhaps most immediately understood with reference to that institution (and similar ones such as yeshivot). Conditions of liberty, as we know, create a public arena in which ideas are tested against their competitors. The metaphor of the arena is apt: It is here that ideas are pitted against one another, here that they garner the applause or scorn of the public. The purpose of argument becomes, above all else, to sway the crowd, and its qualities are in accordance with this need. Arguments are chosen not because they are best but because they sound best. The prestige of the forum in which an argument is made, or of the individuals who can be induced to lend their names to it, is found to be of greater effect than the substance of what has been said. Humiliation and anger reign, careers are made and broken, everything is exaggerated and all subtlety lost. Quiet is restored only when one side reaches exhaustion and retires to the sanctuary of his study.

This is the public arena, the inevitable and wholly desirable outcome of liberty. It is the best means we have of adjudicating intellectual disputes. But it is absurd to think that weighty intellectual innovations are born or brought to maturity under such conditions. Rather, it is in the secluded society, in which like-minded individuals can work together over long years without fear of humiliation born of malice, that novel ideas appear and mature. Think of the university: There one has the benefit of a select audience comprised of individuals of like concerns, whose attention span is therefore measured not in minutes, but in years. There one has the benefit of the private criticism of one’s associates, whose interest is not in swaying the crowd, but in improving the argument and bettering the common intellectual effort. There one may engage the attention of future generations of scholars and public figures who are immersed in the complexities and difficulties of the developing idea, and for this reason steeled against the shallow rhetoric of its detractors—as they must necessarily be if they are to take up the work of construction themselves. In short, it is here that one finds an environment conducive to the articulation of an independent idea, and to the upbuilding of an independent school of thought, even in the face of severe prejudice and hostility on the part of the world beyond. And this is possible only because the university consciously secludes itself—using a variety of barriers, physical, psychological, and social—from the clamor of the utterly open society beyond its gates.

Anyone familiar with the national state will recognize in this description a model and a metaphor for such a state. For with its territorial, linguistic, and political barriers and boundaries, the national state is itself the greatest natural shelter under which an alternative understanding of truth and right living can take root and flower. Of course, the national state is an institution on an altogether different scale. And if the university is understood as a sheltered social space conducive to the development of an innovative but on the whole unitary school of thought, then the national state—which can be home to a wide array of such institutions—is best understood as having the potential to be a school of such schools: A microcosm in which various schools of thought compete with one another in interpreting a people’s heritage, each seeking to influence the basis for the intellectual and moral contribution that the national state will make to mankind. In the Jewish historical context, one easily thinks of the competing schools of Hillel and Shamai, or of the later schools of R. Yishmael and R. Akiva, which wrestled with one another over the precise location of the unique Jewish vantage point and of what might be seen from there, but which were nonetheless united in advancing a common and unique Jewish perspective before the world. As our tradition understood it, “These as well as the others are the words of the living God.”²⁵

In our own day, a sovereign Jewish state holds out the only option for a society that is regulated in accordance with the principles of liberty, while at the same time affording the seclusion necessary for the development of a specific Jewish vantage point that will not be a mere imitation of the main intellectual currents circulating in the West.²⁶ Like other national states, Israel is well suited to provide just such seclusion, which is to an important extent an inevitable result of the territorial, linguistic, and political divisions created by virtue of its existence as an independent, Hebrew-speaking country: Differences in language in any case have the tendency to reflect (and encourage) divergences from other cultures regarding the proper understanding of reality; and the language itself, by erecting a natural barrier to communication of these ideas to the outside world, and by damping outside criticism, is in and of itself a powerful sheltering agent militating in the direction of a secure space in which such alternative understandings can take root.²⁷ The barriers created by geography have a similar effect, even with their attenuation by modern methods of transportation and communication. Nor is it possible to overlook the cultural differentiation that results from political division and from variations in political regime. For the heart of every civilization is its historical experience, and historical experience is principally the experience of the political. The trials, accomplishments, and catastrophes shared by a given political society form the backbone of that which the individual shares with his neighbor, and these experiences, the basis for traditions of thought and action extending far beyond the strictly political, divide men from their colleagues who are members of another polity, no matter how much they share with them a fundamental sympathy.²⁸

When these factors are considered together, we see that the national state is an immensely powerful seclusionary institution, well able, in principle, to establish a sheltered cultural space in which differentiated and original ideals may find their full development for the common benefit of mankind. It was just this possibility that led Ahad Ha’am to argue that the answer to the deterioration of Judaism in the West had to be the creation of a concentrated Jewish settlement in Palestine. “The spiritual trouble of which I have spoken is fraught with danger to our people’s future,” he wrote, “no less than the physical trouble. A ‘home of refuge’ for the national spirit is therefore not less essential than a home of refuge for our homeless wanderers…. It is impossible, in my opinion, to deny that the necessary scale would be very large indeed… [if we are] to create a fixed and independent center for our national culture­­—for science, art, and literature.”²⁹