Beyond the Old Zionism

B"H

My wife and I recently returned to Vancouver from a series of visits to small-town synagogues. If Vancouver, as many locals say, is the Diaspora of the Diaspora, then these plucky Jewish communities must be the Diaspora of the Diaspora of the Diaspora! No day school or JCC in town, in one case not even a single rabbi, and every minyan is a close call. Yet we were called here by Jews intent on carrying their and our heritage into the remote cultural wilderness. What could possibly be more Jewish?

Of course it would be upon this backdrop, that I would find A.B. Yehoshua's May 10 commentary, on the Jerusalem Post web site, urging Israeli political debate "Beyond the New Jew"—beyond, that is, romantic idealization (by the secular) versus demonization (by the religious) of ever-more Modern liberties and attitudes. I could hardly agree more that "Modernity: Jewish or un-Jewish?" is a red herring. That is precisely why I found Yehoshua's conclusions to be so absurd. Worse, in a strictly kosher home where the meat must be purchased 200 miles away, they were an insult to my doggedly Jewish hosts.

"Beyond the New Jew" proposes that, rather than "new," the modern Israeli's Jewishness is "complete." Israeli Jews are surrounded daily by the business and perspectives of other Jews, therefore the Jewishness of their experience is pervasive and total, whereas Diaspora Jews bear Jewish experience "merely through rites" in synagogue. For this distinction to hold, Yehoshua must embrace the logic of secular Zionist manifest destiny: Israel is the "Jewish State," therefore whatever Israel contains must be "Jewish."

That headless syllogism is troublesome. Are we to believe that an Israeli producing Western-style pop records or running for office in a British-model parliament actually experiences richer Jewishness than his Diaspora ancestor who survived each pogrom to chant the Torah another day? The corollary argument, that the Jewish State is caused only by its strong Jewish majority (even if that necessitates shaming and insulting more Diaspora Jews into making aliyah) is often hard to square in reality. For example, an Israel supporter is regularly asked how it is anything but racist for a secular democracy to require one ethnic group's permanent dominance. If it was wrong for Nazis to propose an Aryan State, is it not equally wrong for Zionists to propose a Jewish State? The analogy is offensive and simplistic—for one thing, Israel lacks aspirations to genocide or fascist global empire—yet it stings for the stubborn grain of truth, that it really is racist for a secular democracy to require one ethnic group's permanent dominance. It is lamentable that discussion of Israel's place in our world regularly ends in such a philosophical cul-de-sac, but that is exactly where we'll end up if our very identity hinges on the Pac-Man shape of a pie graph.

So let's back up. Since when is Modern Nationalism the fulfillment of all Jewish narrative? To claim that Jewish identity achieves its completeness not in religion, not in scholarship, not in art, not in moral achievement, but in free-market democracy with a particular demographic profile, is to badly distort the soul of Jewish identity. It also distorts the inestimable value of both modern Israel and Diaspora as vital means to a common end.

Yehoshua argues correctly that newness per se is irrelevant to better Jewishness. "The French, Dutch, Thai or any other nationality" can be new. Change purely for change's sake will not distinguish us. Better than a New Jew, Zionism must aim to produce a "Complete Jew." If only he left it at that, A.B. Yehoshua could be credited for a perfect Zionist mission statement.

What he does, however, is go on to define Jewish "complete"-ness as life in a free-market democracy full of Jews, i.e. Israel. Only in Israel does a Jew live each day in a "Jewish framework that determines all aspects of his physical, economic and social existence" (whereas in Brooklyn I suppose Jews would be distracted from their pervasive Jewish framework by a lot of poor, brown non-Jews at the construction site, which perhaps Yehoshua wears magic spectacles to edit from his Israel). It's a circular argument: What is completely Jewish about an Israeli? His fellow citizens are Jews. But what is Jewish about those fellow citizens? They're Israeli, and Israel is a Jewish State.

Apparently, Israel doesn't deserve to be "Jewish" any more deeply than a Jews for Jesus church is "Jewish" for being maintained and populated by Jews.

Yehoshua, who must be unfamiliar with our Federations, feebly describes Israelis as the only Jews immersed in varied and challenging relationship with other Jews, even making a preposterous claim that Diaspora Jews are never required to work together across sectarian lines. Why must he do this? The superficial reason is his exaggerated view of statehood's importance in molding identity, over the importance of family and community. This is a common error, but as a Jew he ought to know better. Still, deeper is an apparent belief that Jewishness itself is context-dependent, yoked to an external "Jewish framework"—hence the more Jews around you, the more Jewish you are—when in truth Jewishness is carried within.

Handed from parent to child, and upheld by the global conspiracy of Jews and non-Jews who can both tell a Jew when they see one, Jewishness lives in that singular, unmistakable way a Jew wrestles with the world, wherever she came from or is going to. In Jerusalem, the Jew's experience is vivid for the challenge of his identity reverberating all around him. In Vancouver or beyond, it is vivid for the challenge of his being singularly, starkly different. Both experiences are essential to Jewish consciousness.

G!d, or circumstance, or our own disposition, has not yet allowed any Jewish community, in the Holy Land or elsewhere, to remain self-contained for very long. As though by script, each Jewish generation further embodies Abraham and Sarah, defying the previous generation's spiritual ruts to go out, into a greater possibility. In the course of this venture we each inevitably bring a bit of Zion into the Diaspora and a bit of the Diaspora into Zion.

Every Jew, then, is a New Jew. Every Jew stumbles on some new invention of history and is called to transform it from banality to the service of a higher, universal objective. Whether that means building the business, cultural, or political scenes of a modern Jewish democracy, or injecting Sunday school insights into small-town North America, the dedication of every Jew makes a more Complete Jewishness for our entire people to share. A.B. Yehoshua, or the Diaspora Jew ashamed that Yehoshua could be right, should visit my new friends on the far edge of Jerusalem's spiritual hinterland, to see just how vast is the Completeness of Jewish life in our time.