In Search of and in Need of <em>Knesset Yisrael</em>
Leon A. Morris
Leon A. Morris is President of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
What does it mean to be part of the Jewish collective? At this time—almost two years after October 7, and following the preemptive strike on Iran—we experience anew the inadequacy of the terms we tend to use most often in speaking about our connection to all other Jews. Amid a surge in the desire of increasing numbers of Jews to find communal expressions of shared identity and practice, we have not been able to successfully settle on a phrase that can unite religious or spiritual understandings of Jewish collectivity with more secular terms that draw upon our shared history, language, and land.
In his groundbreaking work, Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation, already a decade ago, Noam Pianko offers the neologism “Jewishhood” as “a reflection on the evolving story of what Jews do, rather than an affirmation that Jews exist as a distinct group.” Pianko’s deep analysis of the term “Jewish peoplehood” and its history attempts to articulate Jewish collectivity and solidarity in ways that decouple them from notions of Jewish nationalism, and to propose more diverse ways of conceiving of Jewish goals, practices, and politics than the term “peoplehood” allows.
I respect Pianko’s keen analysis of the term “Jewish peoplehood” and am grateful that his work invited a new conversation about understanding Jewish collectivity. While I am not troubled by his concerns related to ways in which Jewish peoplehood is tethered to nationalism—in fact, I see the State of Israel as the most important project of the Jewish collective in our time—I am troubled by how the idea of Jewish peoplehood might limit our understanding of the meaning of the Jewish collective. As Pianko shows, Jewish peoplehood emerged as a secular way of affirming Jewish solidarity and collectivity. It thus furthered an unnecessary and problematic dichotomy between two strands of Jewish identity—the secular nation and the religious faith. Indeed, Pianko himself asserts, “There is a practical need for an English-language concept and a vocabulary for Jewish identity and collectivity that overcomes the dichotomy of religious versus secular modes of identifying as Jewish and being part of the Jewish people.”
When “secular” Jews speak about the endurance of the Jewish people against all odds, or consider the seemingly miraculous notion of the Jewish people returning to its historic homeland after two millennia of exile, only a very rigid definition of “religious” would preclude such ideas from being implicated with religious sentiment, a sense of wonder, and a feeling of awe.
In a parallel vein, Klal Yisrael tends to be used among American Jews who identify strongly with a specific religious denomination as their primary means of Jewish identification. Whether used by an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist Jew, Klal Yisrael means overcoming the doctrinal differences and modes of religious observance that characterize the Jewish community in order to come together as one unified (religious) community.
Pianko argues that
Nationalism and liberal American religious denominationalism… work side by side, in two increasingly outdated and thus impaired modes for articulating Jewish identity, with an implicit shared agreement to avoid facing the competing nature of their claims and emphases. Jewish peoplehood and Jewish religion have developed as two parallel modes of Jewish identification that coexist, partner, and share participants, but are not integrated; they play together by splitting the deck.
Though Pianko does not consider it, there is a classical Hebrew term with the potential to transcend this dichotomy: Knesset Yisrael. I’m purposefully not going to define it right away, as this term is more than nomenclature—it is a fully developed concept from classic Jewish texts to explain Jewish collectivity. It straddles the realms of the religious and the national, homeland and diaspora, past and present.
In our time, Knesset Yisrael is also the name of Israel’s parliament, a choice made by the state’s founders as a deliberate and bold reappropriation of a traditional theological term from rabbinic times, reflecting the new modern Jewish reality. The full significance of the Israeli Parliament's name relies on an appreciation of the layers of meaning that it encompasses, even as its use in this way obscures some of those layers.
Knesset Yisrael appears throughout rabbinic literature. Centuries earlier, the Hebrew root kns (to gather or assemble) is used in the Hebrew Bible ten times. Perhaps the most famous example is when Esther states, “Go, assemble (kenos) all the Jews who live in Shushan, and fast on my behalf; do not eat or drink for three days, night or day” (Esther 4:16). Her use of the word kenos here conveys the idea of gathering all the Jews in the city to perform a ritual act of solidarity.
The phrase Knesset Yisrael appears in the Babylonian Talmud 23 times and in midrash more than 200 times. In rabbinic literature, the term typically refers to a dialogue between God and the Jewish people, imagined as a singular, unified, and indivisible entity. Rabbinic literature focuses on how Knesset Yisrael addresses God: amrah Knesset Yisrael, “Knesset Yisrael said,” or often, amra Knesset Yisrael lifnei hakadosh baruch hu, “Knesset Yisrael said before the Holy One, Blessed be He.”
This example from Bereishit Rabbah 11:8, a fifth-century midrash on Genesis, uses the term Knesset Yisrael as it imagines a marriage between the Jews and Shabbat:
Why did He bless it [Shabbat]? Rabbi Berekhya, Rabbi Dostai, and Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahman [were discussing this]. Rabbi Berekhya and Rabbi Dostai say: It is because it lacks a partner. Sunday has Monday [as its partner], Tuesday has Wednesday, Thursday has Friday. But Shabbat has no partner. . . . Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai taught: Shabbat said before the Holy One, blessed be He: “Master of the universe, all of them [the other days] have partners, but I do not have a partner.” The Holy One blessed be He said to it: “Knesset Yisrael is your partner.” When Israel stood before Mount Sinai, the Holy One blessed be He said to them: “Remember the matter that I said to Shabbat: Knesset Yisrael is your partner.” That is the meaning of the statement in the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Shabbat day to keep it holy (lekadsho)” (Exod. 20:8).
This midrash hinges on the connection between the word lekadsho (to keep it holy) and the noun kiddushin (marriage). It suggests that when the nation of Israel is commanded to “remember the Shabbat day,” the specific thing it is charged to remember is that Shabbat is married to Knesset Yisrael, a single being. (Knesset Yisrael is usually female in the biblical text, but here it is gendered male.)
In the metaphor of being married to Shabbat, Knesset Yisrael is represented as a unified, singular entity capable of entering into marriage or speaking in one voice. Because the notion of kiddushin (marriage) is not limited to the wedding ceremony but can also refer to the status of marriage over the course of the couple’s lifetime, the notion of Knesset Yisrael extends beyond Jews at a particular moment in history to all Jews over the course of time. The term Knesset Yisrael unifies disparate voices and perspectives at any one time and across time, taking the long historical view of a people.
One example of Knesset Yisrael as a representation of the Jewish people across time can be found in the Babylonian Talmud, where Rava interprets a verse from Song of Songs:
“New and old, which I have laid up for you, O my beloved,” (Song of Songs 7:14). Knesset Yisrael said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, I have decreed many decrees upon myself, more than what You decreed upon me, and I have fulfilled them. (bEruvin 21b)
This midrash understands the phrase “new and old” to refer to the Oral Torah and Written Torah, respectively. More specifically, Knesset Yisrael, representing the entire people speaking in one voice, describes the development of the Oral Torah, whose decrees extend beyond what the Written Torah requires as a sign of her love for God. The Jewish people’s love relationship with God transcends time and becomes interwoven in the development of Jewish practice itself, alongside its expansive, interpretive tradition.
Using the term Knesset Yisrael suggests that, despite all of the differences that exist among them, the Jewish people are, from God’s perspective, understood as a single and unified entity, one body. God’s relationship is with the entirety of the nation, not with individuals. God engages in dialogue with the collective, and not with individuals.
Because the nature of the discourse between God and Knesset Yisrael conflates notions of faithfulness and communal identity, the reclaiming of the notion of Knesset Yisrael can reintegrate faith and practice into the notion of the Jewish collective. Knesset Yisrael bridges Jewish collectivity with religious commitment, joining Jewish peoplehood to Jewish faithfulness. While Klal Yisrael is invoked to speak to the diversity of Jews from various religious denominations, and Jewish peoplehood speaks of a collective solidarity, it is Knesset Yisrael that gives us the perspective of being a single collective by means of our relationship with God.
This perspective has two important implications we cannot ignore. First, our connection to the larger Jewish people is the vehicle through which our relationship with God is established. There can be no authentic Jewish religious expression that ignores the larger Jewish people, our commitments, our practice, and even our national aspirations. Second is the inverse: The basis of Jewish collectivity is tied to those aspects of national life which one might label as “religious.” Our texts, our evolving traditions, our moral and ethical principles are the basis for our collective identity. They are part and parcel of our national character.
The term Knesset Yisrael gives religious and spiritual significance to the existence and perpetuation of the Jewish people as a collective. It asserts that communal solidarity is at the root of our religious commitments and posits that the peak of Jewish spirituality is reached chiefly within the collective. Knesset Yisrael rejects both a “cultural Judaism” grounded in communal solidarity or support for the State of Israel alone as well as any definition of Judaism that isolates religious obligation and ritual performance from the context of a larger Jewish collective.
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As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote in his article “The Community” in 1978:
The community is not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality; I might say, a living whole. In particular, Judaism has stressed the wholeness and the unity of Knesset Israel, the Jewish community. The latter is not a conglomerate. It is an autonomous entity, endowed with a life of its own. We, for instance, lay claim to Eretz Israel. God granted the land to us as a gift. To whom did He pledge the land? Neither to an individual, nor to a partnership consisting of millions of people. He gave it to the Knesset Israel, to the community as an independent unity, as a distinct juridic metaphysical person. He did not promise the land to me, to you, to them; nor did He promise the land to all of us together. Abraham did not receive the land as an individual, but as the father of a future nation. The Owner of the Promised Land is the Knesset Israel, which is a community persona.
A half-century earlier, Henrietta Szold articulated an expression of Jewish collectivity that captured the emotional and visceral valences of Knesset Yisrael. In explaining and expanding upon Solomon Schechter's use of the term “Catholic Israel” (“catholic” meaning universal), which Schechter used in various speeches and writing to refer to the organic evolution of Jewish law and practice, Szold implicitly argued for the centrality of Knesset Yisrael among American Jews. In her speech “Catholic Israel,” she said:
The supremacy of Catholic Israel differs from, and is more than, the solidarity of Jews. Solidarity means that each Jew stands ready to suffer with every other Jew. . . . Allegiance to Catholic Israel requires such sacrifices, such lessons got by heart, such emotions translated into effective action—and it requires far more. . . . He is, not a patron, but a fellow aspirant. . . . His obligation grows out of whole-souled belief in a mission waiting to be performed by Israel—Israel scattered or Israel nationalized.
The Jew permeated with these views knows Catholic Israel without a definition. Himself a part of it, he in turn creates Catholic Israel. Solidarity is the bold, if need be, aggressive front that we turn to the enemy upon the warpath; Catholic Israel is our fireside, at which we sit discussing, arguing, taking counsel, confessing longings, nursing hopes and aspirations, and, in intimate moments, not shrinking from the betrayal of God-intoxicated feelings.
Szold captures so poignantly how solidarity alone does not enable us to confront our enemies. What is required from a collective that can define us, animate us, and inspire us is a sense of mission, of passion, of fervor, and of intimacy.
Knesset Yisrael offers an emotional and imaginative complement to a Judaism that is at risk of becoming overly cerebral. It is a romanticized and personalized way of making sense of the Jewish people across time and space. In a footnote in his work Legends of Rabbah Bar Bar Hannah, Bezalel Naor notes that “Rabbi Isaac Hutner recalled that when Rav Kook would pronounce the words Knesset Yisrael, he would become overcome with emotion, as if these words embodied the essence of his vitality and his soul’s striving.”
Desire and yearning are among the emotional valences of the term Knesset Yisrael. We desire a degree of internal unity and connection with one another that eludes us, and we yearn for an imagined restoration of our relationship with God.
There can be, of course, a dark side to any expression of intense group or national identity. In the previous century, we repeatedly experienced the effects of nationalism run amok, and how the notion of folk can result in demeaning those outside the particular national group, sometimes fueling acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Indeed, one might argue that the resurgence of Jewish supremacy expressed by coalition partners in the current Israeli government testifies to how dangerous any notion that celebrates Jewish collectivity can be. However, fully understood in all of its complexity, Knesset Yisrael prevents a suppression of dissent and individual expression, and affirms the infinite value of each individual. Knesset Yisrael involves the interplay between the collective and the individual, thus preventing a kind of national extremism. As Rabbi Yonason Sacks wrote in his 1990 article “Individualism and Collectivism: A Torah Perspective” in the Torah u-Madda Journal, “The Jew must recognize that having been created in God’s image, he is personally endowed with infinite worth and sanctity. At the same time, however, he must see himself as part of a covenantal community, the unique and indivisible collectivity of Knesset Yisra’el.”
Conversely, in the American non-Orthodox Diaspora, Knesset Yisrael can serve as a counterweight to the almost exclusive emphasis on the universal over the particular. One year after the attacks on October 7, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch expressed the desperate need for this rebalance in a Times of Israel piece addressed to young American Jews:
We did not intend to strip Jewish solidarity, empathy, responsibility and mutuality from your Jewish identity—not only towards Israeli civilians, but soldiers your age who exhibit astonishing courage and remarkable self-sacrifice. . . . We thought we were emphasizing the equal dignity of all human beings, each created be’tzelem Elohim—in the image of God. We did not expect the Jewish spirit to dribble away while we thought we were passing it on.
Perhaps the concept of Knesset Yisrael can revive the Jewish collective spirit while fostering the qualities of empathy, responsibility, and mutuality in the lives of American Jews. By cultivating Jews who value Knesset Yisrael we can ensure a structure that, by virtue of its ties to other Jews, ensures that the Jewish spirit does not dribble away.
One way in which we might cultivate Jews who value Knesset Yisrael is to embrace the collective aspects of Jewish practice. The concept of Knesset Yisrael becomes ritualized through the notion of a minyan, the quorum of 10 adult Jews needed for the recitation of the most important parts of the daily liturgy, Torah readings, weddings, and brit milah. The minyan’s requirement of 10 participants might be better understood as a microcosm for Knesset Yisrael. As Adin Steinsaltz explained, “It is not just that the main prayers are recited publicly, among the ‘community’ (edah) of at least ten, but rather that each community prays like one part of the larger unity of the people of Israel in its completeness.”
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Knesset Yisrael carries the long story of the Jewish people, one that spans the past, present, and future, so that the Jewish collective is not confined to those Jews who happen to be living at this moment. Commenting on Pirkei Avot, Soloveitchik wrote that “All the Torah is interested in are those events that form the juncture at which the individual meets the community and commits himself to its destiny and ultimate end. The lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses have historical relevance in the oneness with Knesset Yisrael.”
And in his book And From There You Shall Seek, he wrote:
The individual and the community must come together through an act of historical identification with the past and future, the fate and destiny, of the Jewish people. The vision of the beginning and the end is constantly being renewed and joins the individual and community from past generations of Keneset Yisrael with those to come.
The eternal temporal span inherent in Knesset Yisrael stands counter to our age of instant gratification and same-day delivery. Knesset Yisrael imagines a single incremental human story in which each Jew is a part of that narrative.
Here, then, is my invitation to use the single term Knesset Yisrael, which carries with it the indivisible nature of Jewish collectivity and spirituality, spanning the passage of time, and fostering a passionate and emotional relationship with fellow Jews. It lends religious significance to our collective identity and ties our religious commitments to the broader Jewish community.
