Diaspora
Justus Baird
Justus Baird is Senior Vice President at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
We are now living more than 125 years after the first Zionist Congress and 75 years after the founding of the State of Israel. Still, the ways we think about the relationship between diaspora and homeland are all too often rooted in thought that was developed during two millennia without a Jewish state and in the anti-exilic visions of early Zionist thought. Over the last generation or two, we have reinterpreted life outside the State of Israel by thinking of it less as “exile” and more as “diaspora.” But I find that the way we think and talk about the relationship between diaspora and homeland suffers from outdated thinking. In our era, Jewish diaspora and Jewish homeland are interrelated, even interdependent, not in opposition. Especially during last year’s judicial reform efforts and now during the current Israel-Hamas war, American Jews have been asking: what is our role and responsibility when it comes to Israel? And as forces of antisemitism strengthen in America and elsewhere, Israeli Jews are asking about their role and responsibility to diaspora Jewry as well.
The Diaspora-Homeland Metaphors We Inherited
Let’s start by defining homeland and diaspora. I use “homeland” to refer to life as a Jew in the Land of Israel (pick your borders) under Jewish sovereignty, and “diaspora” to refer to life as a Jew anywhere else in the world that is not under Jewish sovereignty.
The most prevalent and longest-standing metaphor for homeland and diaspora has deep theological roots in Jewish tradition: living in diaspora means exile and is the result of divine punishment, while living in the Land of Israel is a sign of divine favor. Jeremiah summarized this idea in two verses: “And you have acted worse than your fathers, every one of you following the willfulness of his evil heart and paying no heed to Me. Therefore I will hurl you out of this land to a land that neither you nor your fathers have known” (Jer. 16:12-13).
We reinforce this thinking on each festival, moments that have historically been centered around the temple. The Musaf liturgy on those days reads, “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land and banished from our soil.”
The interpretation of Jewish life outside the homeland as exile and divine punishment dominated Jewish thought for two millennia. There are just a few historical examples of Jews rejecting this idea. Jews living in Egypt between the third and first centuries BCE, and American Reform Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who proudly claimed that “America is our Zion,” come to mind as exceptions that prove the rule.
Early Zionist thinkers, however, broke this mold. Largely secular in orientation, they had no use for framing Jewish life outside the land of Israel as divine punishment. Instead, driven by the historical events they saw unfolding in Europe and elsewhere, they portrayed Jewish life in the diaspora as doomed because of the threats of extreme discrimination and persecution, or assimilation, or both. The Hebrew phrase that captured this view was shelilat hagolah, the “negation of the exile.” The idea was useful not only for early Zionist thinkers—it also had the rhetorical power necessary for promoting and sustaining aliyah. Shelilat hagolah was employed to help convince hundreds of thousands of Jews to immigrate to Palestine, and also to combat the longing that recent immigrants sometimes had for their lives back home: in her 2012 Israel: A History, historian Anita Shapira called it an “antidote to wanderlust.”
Here we should distinguish between two different meanings, or uses, of the word “exile” (galut). The first was developed by the prophets and early rabbis. They interpreted the forced relocation of communal life from the homeland to areas outside the land of Israel as a result of divine punishment for poor behavior by Jews while they were living in the homeland. This meaning stands or falls based on what happens in the land of Israel. The second use was by early Zionist thinkers, who framed exile as Jewish life outside the homeland that was existentially bad or necessarily doomed. This meaning stands or falls based on what is happening outside the land of Israel. These two uses take different routes to the same destination: Jewish life outside the land is bad, either because of God or because of the goyim.
But amongst the early Zionist thinkers, there was an exception that deserves special mention. Ahad Haam, in his writing about Jewish renewal, proposed a new metaphor for thinking about the relationship between diaspora and homeland. Partially rejecting the standard Zionist view that diaspora equals exile, he proposed that the Land of Israel would become a “spiritual center” surrounded by the diaspora. His choice of language confused many readers; the word “spiritual” was not intended to denote religious inspiration so much as a type of cultural influence, and “center” did not mean an institution. Instead, in his 1907 essay “A Spiritual Center,” he employed a metaphor of the Jewish nation as a human body with the homeland functioning as the heart:
When all the scattered limbs of the national body feel the beating of the national heart, restored to life in its native home, they too will once again draw near to one another and welcome the inrush of living blood that flows from the heart…. The influence of the center will strengthen Jewish national consciousness in the diaspora; it will restore our independence of mind and self-respect; it will give to our Judaism a national content which will be genuine and natural, unlike the substitutes with which we now try to fill the void.
Haam understood, or perhaps we should say he predicted, that the creation of Jewish sovereignty in the land would transform the experience of Jewish life in diaspora from exile into something else. His specific metaphor never caught on (perhaps due in part to the popularity of the body metaphor in Christian thought, as taught by Paul in 1 Corinthians). But the root idea of this metaphor was prescient: Jewish life in the homeland and Jewish life in diaspora are inextricably interdependent. In Haam’s body metaphor, homeland and diaspora cannot live without each other; the Jewish people are a single organism that needs both to thrive.
Despite Haam’s efforts, the basic idea of negating the exile was still guiding the founders of the state when they drafted the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948:
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
The declaration of the State has nothing positive to say about Jewish life in the diaspora, even though Jews had lived in diaspora from before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and for 2000 years since. At least the document offered diaspora Jews a role in helping to create the state: “We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream—the redemption of Israel.”
Over the 75 years since the founding of the State, Israeli Jewish attitudes toward the diaspora and diaspora Jewish attitudes toward the State of Israel have both evolved substantially. The Israeli use of “negating the diaspora” has given way to a mix of embrace—witness the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv—and ambivalence—education about diaspora Jews in Israeli schools is still limited—though many Jewish Israelis still believe that diaspora Jewish life is essentially doomed. In the U.S., American Jews shifted from a post-1967 proud, if naïve, commitment to Israel as a Jewish state, to an increasingly clamorous and contentious relationship that Donniel Hartman charts on two axes: committed/uncommitted, and troubled/untroubled.[1] More importantly, Jewish life has arguably thrived (at least by Jewish historical standards) in both the State of Israel and in North America, with the two regions each becoming home to roughly half of the world’s Jews.
In a speech at the JFNA General Assembly in Los Angeles in 2017, then-Israeli President Reuven Rivlin used the language of “tribes,” which he had previously introduced to describe the diversity of Israeli society, to bind together those living in the State of Israel with Jews in diaspora. “We are one big family…living in five tribes”: Arabs, secular Jews, national religious Jews, haredim, and “Jewish communities all over the world.” Rivlin’s tribes metaphor defines diaspora Jews as part of the larger Jewish collective, but doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about how homeland and diaspora should relate to each other or what, if anything, we owe to each other.
The Interdependence of Homeland and Diaspora
I count myself among those who care passionately about the relationship between Jews living in the State of Israel and Jews living in diaspora. My own Jewish story would not exist without both, and I cannot conceive of future Jewish life without both. I would go so far as to say that I believe God wants Jews to live in both homeland and diaspora conditions, but that is a theological argument for a different essay.
The notion of interdependence that undergirded Haam’s “heart and limbs” metaphor has more resonance today than when he proposed it over a century ago, forty years before a Jewish state existed.
To see an example of that interdependence, of homeland and diaspora Jews working together as different parts of a single body, consider the case of Operation Solomon, the airlifting of Beta Israel from Ethiopia to Israel in 1990 and 1991. The operation was triggered by political events in Ethiopia. A dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, had ruled Ethiopia since 1977. Not long after he came to power, persecutions of Beta Israel increased, and aliyah became very difficult. In the mid-1980s, Operation Moses supported the transportation to Israel of 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had made their way to refugee camps in Sudan. Not long after, when Mengistu’s regime started to crumble, Jewish leaders saw a window of opportunity to rescue a large portion of the Beta Israel remaining in Ethiopia before an unknown new regime took power.
Told one way, Operation Solomon appears to be a story of the ingathering of the exiles made possible by the growing power of the Jewish state: the State of Israel, using 41 Israeli aircraft, brought more than 20,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa and the surrounding regions to Israel. Major parts of Israeli society were involved in the planning and execution: Israeli diplomats in Ethiopia; the Mossad; the IDF; and countless social workers and volunteers staffing absorption centers. The Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa became the staging ground for processing the Beta Israel and bringing them to the airport.
And yet, the rescue operation would never have happened without critical interventions by both homeland and diaspora Jews (not always working in concert). The American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ), under the leadership of Susan Pollock, organized and carried out months of secretive work, locating and gathering Ethiopian Jews throughout the province of Gondar and transporting them safely to Addis Ababa. Reuven Merhav, director general of the Israeli foreign ministry and one of the primary actors throughout Operation Solomon, said that Pollock “created a fact on the ground. This white woman with an American accent did what no state could do. She did a great thing. I honestly think so. Israel couldn’t do it.”[2]
American Jewish leaders also rallied American officials to pressure, even force, Ethiopia to participate in the emigration. They persuaded the White House to appoint former Congressman Rudy Boschwitz as President George H. W. Bush’s “special emissary,” and Boschwitz’s visit to the region became a crucial turning point in the month before the operation. At Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s insistence, American Jews also made the $35 million negotiated payment to the government of Ethiopia. American Jewish relationships with American officials even shaped critical security aspects of the operation. As the Mengistu dictatorship crumbled and rebel forces staged artillery fire a few miles away from the airport where the airlift was about to commence, it was the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Addis Ababa, Robert Frasure, who—cashing in the reputational capital he had built with rebel leaders over years—prevented Ethiopian military action against the Israeli rescue planes.
In other words, it took Jews from both the State of Israel and the United States to create the aliyah of the Beta Israel. Operation Solomon depended on the herculean efforts of the American Association of Ethiopian Jews, the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, the Jewish Agency, and the JDC, working alongside the government of the State of Israel, the IDF, and the Mossad. Jews from the State of Israel and the diaspora, sometimes working together and sometimes fighting each other tooth and nail, must both be credited for the operation.
We could tell a similar story of interdependence regarding the movement to free Soviet Jewry, or we could discuss other critical areas of Jewish life sustained by the interdependence of homeland and diaspora Jews: cultural creativity, educational efforts and identity formation, and political lobbying and foreign aid, to name a few.
But even despite these many examples, the language we use to describe this interdependent relationship remains meager. We need a new metaphor that captures the lived and imagined connection between homeland and diaspora of this era in Jewish history, an era in which the Jewish people is uniquely sustained by Jewish life rooted in both contexts.
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The Power of Metaphors
In their field-shaping book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors form and structure our conceptual systems, and thus guide our thought and action.
Some metaphors are so pervasive and ingrained in our culture that we use them unconsciously. “Time is money” is one example of a metaphor we embrace every day: “I spent too much time on that project,” “she invested a lot of time in me,” “you need to budget your time better.” Other metaphors are newer and less ingrained, but if they are adopted, they can trigger culture-level change. If we start to comprehend our experience through the lens of a new metaphor, that metaphor will start to create a new reality. New metaphors that replace older ones will shape how we think, and thus how we act.
There is much in Jewish tradition that aligns with this thinking. The idea that speech is powerful enough to create reality appears in the first creation story in Genesis, in Psalms, and in the daily liturgy, as when we say barukh sheamar vehayah haolam, “blessed is the One who spoke and the world came to be.” But the Jewish embrace of metaphor is pervasive even beyond this specific idea, from the use of metaphor in the Bible to rabbinic mashal (parable) to kabbalistic imagery.
Because metaphorical speech is powerful beyond description, it makes sense for those concerned about the relationship between homeland and diaspora to develop an appropriate metaphor that both reflects and guides the connection between them.
The Palace Floating on Two Ships
The metaphor I propose comes from a lesser-known midrash commenting on the last words of Moses in the book of Deuteronomy.
Toward the end of the book, Moses has been told that he will die before entering the Promised Land and that Joshua has been appointed as the new leader of the people. At this fragile moment, fear of the dissolution of the people weighs heavily on Moses. Will the tribes stay together under Joshua’s leadership, or split apart?
Moses’s fear is grounded. Recall that as the Israelites were about to enter the land, the tribes of Reuben and Gad, as well as half of the tribe of Menasseh, requested to settle east of the Jordan, outside the Land, because the land there was favorable for raising their cattle (Num. 32). Not unlike Jewish life today, the Israelites were faced with the challenge of staying together as a people although they were choosing to live in different regions.
Moses’s dying wish is that the tribes will hold together as a nation after he’s gone. Before offering each tribe a blessing, he opens with three words that encapsulate the message to stick together, regardless of location: yachad shivtei yisrael, “together are the tribes of Israel” (Deuteronomy 33:5). This phrase inspires a rabbinic parable about a palace floating on two ships:
“Together are the tribes of Israel.” R. Shimon bar Yochai taught a parable: A certain man brought together two ships, tying them with anchors and iron bars. He built upon them a palace. As long as the ships were connected, the palace stood. But when the ships separated, the palace fell. So it is, he said, with Israel.
This visually arresting metaphor—a palace floating atop two ships—appears in Sifre Devarim[3] and a handful of other places in rabbinic tradition. If the ships stay connected to each other, the palace is stable on its twin foundations. But if the ships divide and separate, the palace will tilt and fall, sinking into the ocean depths. In its original contexts, the metaphor is used to describe the bonds between the earthly and heavenly realms. But the metaphor can be repurposed as a way to think about the interdependence of homeland and diaspora.
Given that roughly half of the world’s Jews live under Jewish sovereignty that governs a large portion of the Land of Israel, and the other half lives in a diverse and reasonably stable set of diaspora communities, we can imagine both homeland and diaspora as ships carrying roughly half of the world’s Jews. Atop those two floating ships is the palace of the Jewish people. Without both homeland Jewry and diaspora Jewry undergirding the palace—if either falters, or if they float too far away from each other—the palace of the Jewish people will teeter and fall.
I interpret this metaphor further in the following way. The ships carry actual Jews: we spend most of our daily life on one ship (diaspora or homeland), though we can take a vessel to visit, or even move to, the other one. The palace on top of the ships, like our notion of the Jewish people, is a shared, imagined project. Jews will talk about the palace of the Jewish people in the language of history, culture, or Torah. Knowing that we are doing our part to uphold the palace gives our lives additional meaning and purpose.
To be useful, the metaphor must not only capture but also guide the relationship that we experience between homeland and diaspora. There are at least three ways in which the metaphor could guide the relationship into the future. The first is that it redirects our gaze. Instead of constantly peering only at our fellow sailors or at our compatriots on the other ship, the metaphor forces us to keep one eye on the ships and one eye on the palace above: the Jewish people, for which we are both responsible. It is a reminder that whatever ship we belong to, a larger project in which we also participate rests on our shoulders.
Second, the metaphor establishes the vital and essential role of each ship has in supporting the palace. In any given moment, situation, or era, the actions of one ship may seem to be much more consequential than the other. But over time, the role of Jews in both homeland and diaspora are critical in sustaining the Jewish people. There is safety and security in concentrated Jewish life under Jewish sovereignty, ensuring there is always a refuge. But there is also safety and security in dispersion, as Jacob intuited in that fateful moment when he was meeting his brother Esau after many years of separation: Jacob “divided the people with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two camps, thinking, ‘If Esau comes to the one camp and attacks it, the other camp may yet escape’” (Gen. 32:8-9). There is creative energy generated by concentrated Jewish life under Jewish sovereignty, as anyone who has spent time in the State of Israel knows. But there is also creative energy generated by dispersion, as Gerson Cohen pointed out in his 1966 talk, “The Blessings of Assimilation in Jewish History.” Exposure to other cultures has always been, he said, “a stimulus to original thinking and expression and, consequently, a source of renewed vitality.”
Even from the perspective of the religious mission of the people Israel, there is a role for both ships: there are mitzvot that can only be fulfilled in the land of Israel, and there are prophetic callings that can only be fulfilled through lived relationship with the peoples of the world. The homeland ship and the diaspora ship are both essential; the Jewish people will thrive only when both are fulfilling their unique roles.
And third, the metaphor demands a particular way of relating to each other. Just as antagonism between two literal ships balancing a literal palace would threaten the palace’s stability, so too neglect, insults (verbal cannonballs), or worse between homeland Jews and diaspora Jews are self-defeating, since the sinking of either ship means we all lose. Sailors on each ship have the benefit of a distant gaze and can see things that their peers on the other ship cannot, such as a hole in the hull, and they should speak up about those concerns. But rhetoric designed to convince sailors on the other ship that their vessel is not seaworthy, that it will eventually sink, is self-defeating. The metaphor challenges us to always be constructive and helpful to the other ship, lest the “anchors and iron bars” holding the ships together break, causing the palace to fall.
Lakoff and Johnson taught that “we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors.” As diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews continue to poll each other about our attitudes toward one another, as we continue to gather at conferences and write declarations reacting to the fragile state of affairs between diaspora and homeland, let us try on a new metaphor—the palace floating atop two ships—that brings to life the interdependence of homeland and diaspora Jews in sustaining the Jewish people and the Jewish project.
