A Zionism for the Future
Chaim Seidler-Feller
Chaim Seidler-Feller is a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and an organizer for A Land for All and Smol Emuni in the United States. He served for 40 years as Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
Years ago, during a class that I was guest teaching at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, I was proudly expounding on the humane attitude toward the stranger exhibited in Judaic sources when the professor of the course, Mustafa Abu Sway, interrupted me with a potent query: “Are we really the stranger?” By “we,” he meant himself and other Palestinians. I heard his comment as a challenge: Can we Zionists transform our view of the Palestinians from strangers and outsiders into neighbors and fellow residents? In the late 1970s, Rabbi David Hartman asserted that “how to govern a minority” is “the most important religious question that we face.”
Years later, I am still asking: can there be a Jewish nationalism that is ethically principled, restrained, and inclusive? This question feels more pressing than ever after October 7 and the Gaza War, but it is not new. In a 1958 lecture, my teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, raised the issue with which liberal religious Zionists are still struggling today:
The Jew has experienced persecution and brutality. We never had a state, we never had political power. What if we had been a state in the Middle Ages? How would we have acted—just like the feudal lords, or would we have acted differently because of Jewish values? Who knows? Now with the State of Israel, the test has come, we are facing the test: Will we behave like any other state ethically? Will we restrain ourselves from engaging in certain injustices, practices which are in conflict with basic Judaic ethics, or will we yield to temptation?
Here [with Israel] we have an opportunity: The Jews are the rulers, they legislate the laws; they are, so to say, the masters. Will we act like masters, or will we understand that Judaism doesn't know the concept of master and slave, victor and vanquished, powerful and weak? This is my problem with regards to the State of Israel. The whole of Jewish history will be interpreted in terms of what the State of Israel will do in the next 50 years. If the State of Israel doesn't live up to Jewish ethics, people will reinterpret Jewish history in a whole different light. The question is not whether Israel will defeat the Arabs on the field of battle, but whether we'll defeat our evil within our own community and be victorious in this field? To me this is the most important problem.
This is quite the question. Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel’s admonition that nationalism is the idolatry of our time suggests a different way of articulating this challenge: Can Jewish nationalism be a different sort of nationalism?
Below, I seek to recover the basic teachings of founding religious Zionist thinkers, including Amiel, Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, Rabbi Avraham Yehuda Chein, and their heirs, including Rabbi Yehuda Amital. I also weave in the work of my own mentors and teachers: Soloveitchik, Hartman, and others. These rabbis consistently deployed religious teachings as a means of inhibiting calamitous nationalist fervor. I offer them today as the basis of a new Zionism based in Judaism and Jewish teachings but opposed to the current extremes of religious Zionism. I will argue that their teachings can provide the scaffolding for a program to (re)shape a coherent Zionist ideology for the future: one that is inclusive, moderate, and peace-seeking, that constructively addresses the myriad challenges posed by modernity, and one whose a priori religious principles act as a check on the seduction of power and the impulse to pursue conflict in search of total victory.
A Zionism of Values
Below, I present four of the key values that I think must be at the center of religious Zionism moving forward. A fuller list would also include understanding exile as a positive dimension of Jewish experience; recognizing that every human being is created in the image of God; aspiring to an inclusive national identity; and developing a consciousness of being humble strangers in the land in which we are also at home.
With each, I demonstrate how the value is expressed in the Jewish tradition with multiple classical and modern sources. I also include examples of the sort of religious Zionist teachings—largely developed and promulgated by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, and his students—that I am rejecting, so that the stakes of the debate are clear.
Human life is to be privileged over territory.
With reference to the Torah, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a devoted student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, holds that the value of God’s land (Israel) supersedes the value of human life. As he writes in the 1978 essay, “Messianic Realism”:
Just as the Divine commandment to conquer the Land overrules the principle of “that he may live by them,” so also does it transcend the human notions of national rights to the Land. This follows from the fundamental Jewish idea that human ethics and the universal sense of justice found in man, derive their reality solely from the word of God. Such is the message transmitted to the world in the account of the Binding of Isaac, wherein the categorical superiority of the Divine over human morality is dramatically exposed. Man is, no doubt, instructed to act justly and righteously. But this too has no other meaning but that grounded in the will of the Creator. This is not an autonomous scale of values, the product of human reason, but rather a heteronomous or, more correctly, “theonomous” scale rooted in the will of the Divine architect of the universe and its moral order.
It is impossible to deny the word of God repeatedly inscribed in the Torah… roaring at us: “For unto you have I given this land, in its entirety, that you should conquer it and settle therein!” No amount of sophistry will succeed in distorting this cardinal element in the Divine scheme. It is part of the ideal order of the universe, approved by God and in the best interests of humanity, regard for which is ingrained in the Jew. Indeed, the world is fortunate to have Israel in its midst, to witness the Jewish people's restoration to a healthy existence through the length and breadth of its homeland. Such is the judgement of Heaven, against which an inferior earthbound and rootless morality is threatening to strangle the spirit of the Messiah. (Emphasis added)
Sacrificing one’s life for the sake of holding onto a piece of “holy land” is, according to Aviner’s radical reasoning, a requirement equivalent to the three cardinal obligations for which God’s law takes precedence over human life: idolatry, murder, and adultery.
Aviner’s reasoning is bolstered by Divine Command Morality (DCM), a theory of morality positing that whatever God commands is moral by definition, because God commanded it. According to DCM, the divine demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, for example, was inherently moral. Moreover, because it emanates from God, this divine morality is intrinsically superior to human morality. Aviner, utilizing DCM, claims with absolute certainty that Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, is “part of the ideal order of the universe that is a blessing to the larger world.” Revealing his conviction that we live in messianic times, he then argues that resisting the unfolding divine scheme, including considering the land of Israel from the perspective of a universal, human morality, is tantamount to “threatening to strangle the spirit of the Messiah.” Yitzhak Rabin paid the ultimate price for this catastrophic transgression.
Aviner represents an example of exactly the sort of religious Zionism we must resist. Instead, I turn to a letter addressed from Rabbi Soloveitchik to Professor Ernst Akiva Simon in November 1967. Here, Soloveitchik wrote:
All decisions regarding the State's borders must come from the security experts based on political considerations, for everything is dependent on one factor: the welfare of the people dwelling in Zion and the protection of their lives… there is another overarching halakha, that preservation of a single life pushes aside the entire Torah and this is certainly true regarding the preservation of two and a half million Jews, may they multiply.…
It is prohibited for Rabbis or anyone else, to declare in the name of Torah, that it is forbidden to return any part of land, when stable peace can save the lives of thousands and tens of thousands of our brethren who dwell in Zion. After all, halakha states that one who is ill on Yom Kippur may eat on the instruction of the specialists (doctors) and the specialists with regard to defense are military personnel, not rabbis who sit in court.
This perspective led the Rav (as he was known to his students) to conclude—as did Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel—that if Israel’s military and the political leadership contended that land should be exchanged for peace, then that position should be upheld by the rabbis. In this form of Zionism, peace takes precedence. All of the other values I explore below follow from this principle.
Warfare must be an absolute last resort.
Some religious Zionists have a long tradition of defending, even promoting, warfare as a holy deed. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook—the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, a profoundly influential and innovative religious Zionist thinker, and the father of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook—imbibed the nationalist spirit of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, along with it, a conviction that world conflagration unleashes divine potency and produces a messianic dimension. In his provocative essay “Hamilhama (The War),” he describes the positive impact of cataclysmic wars on the world order: When two nations are at war, each side refines and asserts its national uniqueness in contrast to the identity of its enemy, thus achieving the full potential of its national essence. These wars become instruments for hastening national redemption; they are not mere historical events, but cosmic necessities.
Zvi Yehuda Kook develops his father’s ideas further in his Netivot Yisrael, where he teaches that:
In its fundamental sense, the concept of a Torah-commanded war is bound up with entering the Land, as explained by the Ramban [Nahmanides, 1194-1270] that this Land must be in our hands, under our active sovereignty and government, and not under the rule of any other nation. The Torah commands us to conquer Eretz Yisrael and to establish our sovereignty here.
A throughline can be drawn from Zvi Yehuda’s militant messianism to the recent writing of Rabbi Yigal Levenstein, co-founder of the B’nai David pre-military academy in Eli, who insists in He Leaps Like A Lion (2023) that
the war [in Gaza] is not a marginal thing and we should not view it as a ‘mistake’ or ‘mishap’ which we would have preferred to avoid. The war is a great thing and, at the end of the day, brings a great message to humanity on its wings.… These days [of warfare] constitute an additional stage in the renewal of Israel and a component of the process of the realization of the destiny of the people Israel. (Emphasis added)
Levenstein is one of many contemporary religious Zionist rabbis who have argued that Palestinians constitute an embodiment of Amalek and that, therefore, the war in Gaza provided an opportunity to fulfill the biblical commandment to wipe out Amalek (Deut. 25:19).
He echoes Rabbi Yisrael Hess, former Campus Rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, who in 1980 perversely pronounced that “The day will soon come when we will be called to fulfill the mitzvah of this jihad to annihilate Amalek, that is, the mitzvah of genocide.”
Against this, I offer Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv from 1935-1945, who understood Amalek in metaphorical terms: “Truly, the Holy One never likes wars. On the contrary, SHALOM is God’s name. Indeed, God proclaimed only one war to be obligatory, a milhemet mitzvah.… and that is the war against the warring of Amalek, it is the war against all wars, in general.” As Amiel understands it, the commandment in which Jews are obligated is to uproot Amalekite militarism and remove it from the world stage. The ideal of militarism must be suppressed and eliminated. Amiel continues:
When Judaism declared war on militarism, it was not through militarism, rather “The Eternal said to Moses, ‘Write this as a memorial in the book.’” This means that the war against the sword is fought by the book.… The book of paper and parchment will endure longer than all the swords made from many kinds of metal; it will defeat all the swords and cannon tools in the world, all will be beaten and scattered to the wind, and the book shall reign alone. (“The Book and the Sword,” 1929)
As Amiel explains, we must fight against militarism by championing the Torah’s eternal principles of love and compassion for the Other against the murderous violence of the sword, and by educating our fellow humans to defeat the impulse to do battle and kill, all in the name of Torah and God.
Amiel asserts a subtle point of political wisdom: Power is ephemeral and passing, and the instruments of power degenerate over time. In fact, every empire in history, when its power waned, suffered ignominious defeat at the hands of its adversary. Only the lessons of the book are timeless and transcendent. The goal to which we are to aspire is to transform our weapons of destruction into tools of education: let’s make books, not war. One need only note King David’s lament when he is precluded from building God’s Temple: “But God said to me, ‘You will not build a house for my name, for you are a man of war, and you have shed blood’” (1 Chron. 28:3), to comprehend the depth of the Jewish abhorrence of bloodshed, most especially when it is related to a sacred pursuit such as the settlement of the Land.
I suggest we think of this as the humanistic spirit of religious Zionism. It is grounded in the Talmudic discussion of the sanctity of the Land, as elucidated by Rambam (Maimonides, 1138-1204). In the Mishneh Torah, he rules:
All of the lands that [the Jews] who ascended from Egypt took possession of (through conquest) were sanctified in the first consecration [of the land]. When they were exiled, that sanctity was nullified. (Laws of Heave Offerings 1:5)
And:
When Ezra returned [to Eretz Yisrael] and consecrated it, it was not sanctified by means of conquest, but rather through chazakah, peaceful possession. Therefore, every place which was repossessed by [the exiles returning from] Babylon and consecrated when Ezra consecrated [the land] the second time, is sacred today. (The Chosen House 6:16)
The implication is clear: Sanctification occasioned by conquest has only limited staying power and ends with a subsequent conquest by another people. On the other hand, sanctification engendered by a universally recognized peaceful occupancy lasts forever. Translated into contemporary religious Zionist doctrine, this view rejects the value of warfare in favor of a process of acquisition and gradual nonviolent settlement. Violence and the sacred are utterly incompatible!
The state is only an apparatus, an instrument, and has no religious value.
Is the land of Israel holy? The Jewish tradition generally answers yes, but there’s an important debate about the nature of that holiness. On one side, Maimonides pointedly defines the value of Eretz Yisrael as its capacity to facilitate the observance of the commandments that are dependent on living in the land of Israel, such as tithes, the appointment of judges, and the sabbatical and jubilee. The sanctity of the Land is thus a function of human actions, the fulfillment of mitzvot; it is an instrumental, contingent sanctity and not inherent. The Land itself is not holy; it doesn’t sanctify the people who dwell there. It is, rather, the people, through their behavior, who effectuate holiness and generate sanctity.
On the other side, Ramban disagrees, holding that the Land is invested with innate holiness, writing in his Commentary to Leviticus, “But the land of Israel, which is in the middle of the inhabited earth, is the inheritance of the Eternal, designated to God’s name.” Because the Land literally belongs to God, God inheres in it, making it sacred. He then quotes a jarring homily as if it were a legal edict, declaring: “Whoever lives outside the Land, is as if they had no God.” This is tantamount to ruling that since God dwells in the land of Israel, life in the diaspora, outside the land, is inherently Godless.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Rambam and Ramban’s respective views of the sanctity of the land of Israel have been used as jumping-off points for thinking about whether or not the state itself is holy. The philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, very much a Maimonidean, was known for vehemently insisting that the state was not holy in and of itself. Hartman too followed Maimonides’ view of the land of Israel, writing:
Religious Zionism does not need to treat the rise of Israel as a divine ruse on the way toward realizing the messianic kingdom. There is an alternative perspective from which one can religiously embrace the secular Zionist invitation to return to the land, namely, the observation that Israel expands the possible range of halakhic involvement in human affairs beyond the circumscribed borders of home and synagogue to the public domain. Jews in Israel are given the opportunity to bring economic, social, and political issues into the center of their religious consciousness. The moral quality of the army, social and economic disparities and deprivations, the exercise of power moderated by moral sensitivities, attitudes toward minorities and the stranger, tolerance and freedom of conscience—all these are realms that may engage our sense of covenantal responsibility. The existence of the State of Israel, from this perspective, prevents Judaism from being defined exclusively as a culture of learning and prayer. We have left treating the realm of symbolic holy time as the exclusive defining framework of Jewish identity. In returning to the land, we have created the conditions through which everyday life can mediate the biblical foundations for our covenantal identity. (“The Challenge of Modern Israel to Traditional Judaism”)
Here, Hartman insists that the state in and of itself has no messianic or religious significance. But he specifies additionally that the establishment of the state created an opportunity for the extension of Jewish values and laws to the public domain from which they had been excluded for two thousand years. According to Hartman, the religious challenge of the State of Israel is: Will the teachers and citizens of Israel rise to the occasion and apply and adapt the just principles of Judaism to the full range of Israeli daily life, or will they simply retreat to their narrow and familiar comfort zones of parochial Jewish concerns?
Another way of thinking about this would be that Israel is a new framework for Jewish experience and thus provides a testing ground for Judaism: Does it really work? Or were all the moral pieties, humane laws, and inspiring lessons we developed in diaspora merely the product of a minority sensibility?
For Hartman and for his teacher Soloveitchik, for Leibowitz, and for Rambam before all of them, the religious significance of Israel derives from the gradually redemptive small steps of halakhah. Looking ahead, I think we need to join Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in asking: In its next phase, will Zionism progress from the creation of a state, the apparatus, to the creation of a moral society? A Zionism for the future must not be messianic. The volatile combination of politics and messianism is catastrophic, and the messianic achievement is an end goal, a state of perfection. Thus, the identification of Israel as a messianic state constitutes brazen idolatry.
We must actively and incessantly pursue peace.
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed declares that “the illusion of peace which entails retreating from parts of our country is today’s sin of the Golden Calf.… The vision of peace is a lie.” This sentiment, in my view, is outrageous, convoluted, and dangerous, and I believe that we must instead see peace as the ultimate value.
Our tradition expresses a preference for peace at several key moments. In this striking midrash (Numbers Rabbah 19:33), Moses corrects God, and God acquiesces for the sake of peace:
The third [time Moses taught God something was] when the Holy One blessed be He said to him: “Wage war with Sihon even if he does not seek to wage with you; you provoke war with him,” as it is stated: “Rise, and travel, and cross the Arnon ravine; [see, I have placed Sihon king of Heshbon, the Emorite, and his land in your hand; begin taking possession, and provoke war with him]” (Deut. 2:24). But Moses did not do so; rather, it is written: “I sent messengers [to King Sion of Heshbon with an offer of peace]” (Deut. 2:26). The Holy One blessed be He said to him: As you live, I am nullifying My words and establishing your words, as it is stated: “When you approach a city to wage war against it, you shall call to it for peace” (Deut. 20:10).
This midrash draws on God commanding Moses to mount an attack on the Emorites in the book of Deuteronomy. Instead of complying, Moses dispatches a party to sue for peace. The midrash imagines God contemplating the matter, concluding that Moses was right and introducing a law later in Deuteronomy that requires the Israelites to call for peace before commencing any hostilities.
I would also point to Rambam’s outline of the laws of Chanukah, a holiday distinguished by its aggressive militarism and awesome victory, where he concludes with a lofty ode to peace: “Peace is great, for the entire Torah was given to bring about peace within the world.” In passing, he rules that Shabbat candles take precedence over lighting Chanukah candles; that is, if you only have one lamp on the Shabbat of Chanukah, you should light candles for Shabbat rather than for Chanukah. He explains that this is because of the principle of shalom bayit, peace in the home and domestic harmony. With this, he teaches us a fundamental lesson: The goal of warfare is not simply victory (Chanukah), but peace (Shabbat). By prioritizing Shabbat candles over Chanukah candles, we ensure peace in our households, core societal units that multiply peace so that it reverberates throughout society and is transformative.
Rambam supports his analysis of Chanukah by referring to the Talmudic discussion of the sotah, the wife suspected of adultery, where maintaining shalom bayit requires the erasure of the name of God (Num. 5:23). Here and in the midrash above, we cannot ignore God’s own willingness to allow God’s opinion and honor to be superseded for the sake of peace! Melamed and other messianic warriors who eschew peace pursue their goal in the name of God, but in these stories, our tradition’s peace seekers achieve their goal by overriding and erasing God’s name. I think that the lesson we must learn is that too much God is dangerous. What we desperately need is more humanity. We need a religious humanism that can serve as a control on too much God, messianic politics, and the excesses of nationalism.
Peace must be the ultimate religious value!
***
In a story generally attributed to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, there was a remote town that had all the necessary institutions but lacked a watchmaker. Over the years, the town’s clocks and watches became annoyingly inaccurate, leading all of the townspeople except for one stubborn individual to stop winding their clocks. When, one day years later, a watchmaker suddenly appeared in town, the only clock that he could repair was the one that had been consistently wound; the abandoned clocks had simply grown too rusty to be fixed. The moral is obvious: We must keep on talking about the possibility of peace. If we cease doing so, our discourse will become rusty—hopeless and even violent—leaving us unable to recognize a genuine offer of peace when it is proposed and allowing us to grow so skeptical that we may actually deny the desirability of peace. We must keep on winding the clocks; we must keep the dream of peace alive.
