Zionism: What's left?

By Gil Troy

Moment, Apr. 1999, Vol. 24, Iss. 2, pg.62

Sending kids to Israel for free is a great idea, but it won't work until Zionism has answers to today's Jewish problems.

THE NEW, $300 MILLION "BIRTHRIGHT ISRAEL" PROGRAM OFFERING YOUNG Jews free ten-day trips to Israel symbolizes the belated recognition that Israel is not just a cosmic insurance policy against anti-Semitism or a charity case, but the emotional, spiritual, ideological, theological, and intellectual Mecca of world Jewry. Israel is, in a word, the keystone of modern Jewish identity. Still, sending Jewish kids to Israel is only half the battle. For philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, and the Israeli government, to get their money's worth from "Birthright Israel," Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora must develop a new understanding of Zionism and a more relevant vocabulary.

Unfortunately, contemporary Zionism, especially the mass-marketed Zionism of the Hebrew school and Israel tour, is inadequate. The Zionism too many young Jews will bring to Israel and will encounter there will not adequately address the realities of their lives-- in fact, most tired Zionist canards will often contradict reality in both countries. The "I-love-Israelism" taught in North America still emphasizes how much the poor, threatened Israelis need their wealthy and beneficent Diaspora cousins, while acknowledging that Israel remains the ultimate backup if "it" happens here (which, they hasten to add, it won't).

The Zionism preached on too many Israel tours offers a land of heroic chalutzim singing Hava Nagila and sprinkling blue-and-white flowers everywhere as a refuge for 98-pound weakling Diaspora Jews doubly oppressed by assimilation and anti-Semitism (even with their Calvin Kleins and Palm Pilots). Jewish educators in the Diaspora and Israeli tour guides seem to agree only on one thing: "they" need "us" more than "we" need "them."

Put simply, the Zionism of even sophisticated Diaspora Jews is a Zionism more suited to 1949 than 1999. The only Zionist thinkers American Jews can name-Theodor Herzl and, if they are really good, Ahad Ha'am, A-D. Gordon, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky-- all died years, even decades, before Israel was founded. And the Zionism these thinkers articulated addressed the noxious fumes of Europe's enduring anti-Semitism rather than the intoxicating perfume of American-style assimilation.

Anti-Semitism offers Zionism an easy target; assimilation is far more elusive. Anti-Semitism is bold and ugly; assimilation is subtle and alluring, AntiSemitism must be fought with powerful sticks; assimilation must be fought with seductive carrots. Anti-Semitism testifies to the Jewish failure to be truly at home in the galut (exile); assimilation testifies to Jewish success in all four corners of the world.

For Zionism to work, it must be a solution to some kind of Jewish problem. And it is. But rather than being the answer to Jewish misery in the galut, it has to respond to Jewish success. It must-and can-offer meaning in a world of great freedom, unending leisure, vast wealth, mind-numbing entertainment, and rampant alienation, anomie, and unhappiness. The North American teenager who has never experienced anti-Semitism, who has an alphabet soup of creature comforts-CDs, TVs, VCRs, and PCs-still feels deprived. The technological world offers a smorgasbord of individual delights, all of which dissolve the ties that traditionally have kept human beings together. Insulated from one another by our toys, we need a meaningful community.

Zionism offers Jews that community. Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, helps us understand our Judaism better and like it more. Zionism teaches that Judaism is not simply a faith, nor is it merely an ethnic affiliation. Zionism invigorates Jewish theology and Jews' vague sense of brotherhood. It gives us a land, a people, a history as essential structures and bonds. It gives us a sense of belonging.

As a movement of individual and national selfdetermination, Zionism is a call for Jewish dignity, cooperation, and self-sacrifice. Zionism pushes the individual beyond the self, thereby rejecting the prevailing ethos of the modern world. For Zionism to be truly an answer it must offer an alternative vision, or series of visions, that must be communal in some way.

These visions must also have some conceptual heft and some analytical bite. The Zionist move-. ment, to an extent, has been victimized by its own success. The establishment of Israel made Zionism's seemingly impossible but defining dream come true. At the same time, the struggle to keep Israel alive narrowed the movement's vision, politicized it, and made it defensive. Like any other movement, Zionism can only achieve so much if it is so universalized, so deified, so defanged, that it means everything and nothing. Back in 1975, when Jews and non-Jews defiantly sported blue-and-- white "I am a Zionist" buttons to counter the notorious United Nations "Zionism is Racism" resolution, Zionism gained worldwide legitimacy but lost its edge. In becoming synonymous with pro-Israelism it became subordinated to the broader-and at the time more pressing-fight for Israel's survival. This transformation helped advance Israel's cause; it generated warm, glowing feelings throughout the Diaspora, but it made Zionism a less potent answer to questions of Jewish identity and the search for meaning in modern life.

Even if dated and somewhat irrelevant, the Zionist thinkers of yesteryear remind us that Zionism is not just a solution to the Jewish problem; it is a powerful and far-reaching response to modernity. There were so many forms of Zionism because most Zionist thinkers did not simply want a Jewish state to combat anti-Semitism-they wanted a Jewish state as a vehicle to create a new world. The 51 varieties of Zionism, with Religious Zionists quarreling with Socialist Zionists who allied with Labor Zionists who detested Revisionist Zionists who did not quite know what to make of Cultural Zionists, testified to Zionism's grandiose ambitions to address the human condition while also solving the Jewish problem. Early Zionism's quintessential institution, the kibbutz, illustrates the conceit that the Zionists could fix the problems of industrial capitalism while solving the problems of Jewish statelessness.

One hundred years later, with the Jewish state a dynamic if messy reality and the kibbutz a fading and increasingly marginal institution, Zionism is modified most frequently by only three adjectives: religious, secular, and post. The post-Zionists, of course, reject many of the tenets of Jewish nationalism and the characteristics that make Israel and Zionism so important to Jews. Yet these critics have an intellectual vitality and creativity that Zionists should envy-- and- emulate. Secular Zionists, unfortunately, have allowed themselves to be defined mostly by their opposition to religious coercion rather than their embrace of broader, deeper, and more meaningful ideals. It is ironic then, that even though a century ago they were ideological stepchildren of the overwhelmingly secular founding Zionists, religious Zionists today offer the most inspiring and effective model for Zionist revitalization.

Religious Zionism understands that there is more to Israel than mere survival. Religious Zionism responds to modernity, uses Zionism as a vehicle for social criticism, and seeks to create a new man for the modern world, not simply a new Jew. Religious Zionism seeks to return Judaism to its integrated and authentic pre-modern state, whereby the concepts of Jewish nationhood, Jewish ethical conduct, and Jewish faith and ritual were one, where "law" meant both obligations to the sovereign and obligations to God.

In short, the multidimensional character of Religious Zionism-the sweeping and comprehensive nature of its vision, its enduring and resonant roots in the Jewish experience and the Jewish homeland-- illuminates just what modern varieties of secular Zionism should be offering, and how flat Zionism seems today. Zionism needs to be subversive. It needs to be inspiring. It needs to trigger passionate, intense debates and powerful challenges to the world and to our lives as we currently live them.

The primary challenge then, for all non-religious Zionists, who presumably are "Birthright Israel's" essential American target group, is to find a Zionist vision-or series of visions-as compelling, profound, authentic, appealing, revolutionary, as the religious Zionist vision is for many observant Jews-and as the original Zionist visions once were. Unfortunately, our information-saturated, cynical world encourages specific postures, not sweeping visions. As a preliminary step, then, rather than trying to create such a comprehensive vision that might be too ambitious, nonreligious Zionists need to cultivate many Zionist approaches. We need to have many Zionisms, not one monolithic definition.

Zionists need to return to an ideological universe that is Protestant, not Catholic, with many denominations united under a broad rubric. A Liberal Zionism could strive to reconcile American-style individual liberties with the collective ethos so central to Jewish thought and the Israeli experience. An Ethical Zionism could deploy prophetic Judaism as a compass in navigating dilemmas the nation and individuals face. A Green Zionism could build on the historic love of the land and the turn-of-the-century infatuation with socialism as a way of coping with the wealth and materialism so many of us enjoy and crave. A Spiritual Zionism could seek to find transcendence through more secular Israeli and Jewish symbols, while a Traditional Zionism could seek to find a balance between modern life and our ancient lifestyle.

Such a Zionist denominationalism should address deep yearnings and serious problems in both the United States and Israel. The various ideological impulses would be anchored in the touchstones that unite us as Jews and could confront the puzzles that vex so many of us as secular human beings. All of these approaches recognize Jewish nationalism as an essential component of Jewish identity, and locate Israel at the center of the Jewish universe.

Underlying these approaches is the persistent tension between Jewish exceptionalism and normalcy. For 2,000 years the Jewish experience has been overwhelmingly neurotic-either because we were living in hostile neighborhoods in Europe and the Middle East or because our neighbors only welcomed us if we sacrificed our most essential and distinguishing characteristics. Even today, many of us who do not embrace our heritage fully still feel uncomfortable, not completely at home in our Jewish skins or in our secular ones. The Zionist quest for normalcy is a quest for the opposite, for an approach to our birthright that fits so comfortably in our lives that we shed centuries of neurosis and achieve a national and individual equilibrium Jews have lacked for so long: that settled, even occasionally complacent, state that President Warren G. Harding called "normalcy."

Only with these reinvigorated, updated, and redefined Zionist visions can we then approach the second central challenge-reconciling these ideals with the real world, in both Israel and the Diaspora. Too many Diaspora Jews are in love with an Israel that no longer exists-or that never existed. Such puppy love inevitably leads to disappointment. Diaspora Jews need to have a more mature and thus more enduring love for this frustrating, inspiring, ancient, cutting-edge, old-fashioned, wide-open, bustling, hustling, spiritual, material, religious, secular mishmash of a place that has dominated the Jewish imagination for the last half-century-and the last four millennia. Israel's five million Jews live in an odd mix of Athens and Sparta, a democratic oasis and a powerful fortress. This regional superpower is the Middle East's only democracy. It leads the world in per capita consumption of newspapers, books, and concert tickets, while also being one of the world's leading weapons producers.

The contradictions well up in the symphony of sounds that define the country-the ubiquitous ring-- ring--ring of cellular phones, the staccato rat-tat-tat speech patterns on the street, the hypnotic whoosh ... whoosh of the Mediterranean's waves, the warbly awaa-awaa-awaa calls of the muezzin to prayer, the throbbing ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom of Tel Aviv's discos, the heart-stopping pop-pop-pop sonic boom of maneuvering fighter jets, the furious kama? kama? kama? clamor of the pungent open-air markets, the shrill blah-blah-blah shouting in the Knesset, the paralyzing beep-beep-beep at the top of every hour heralding the latest radio news, and the ethereal hush that rolls over religious and secular homes every Friday night as the Sabbath descends.

Inevitably these new visions, this new and more realistic understanding, will change the concepts and the vocabulary we use when educating about Zionism, when talking about Israel. A trip to Israel has to be more than a trek along the Jews' own Via Dolorosa, our own way stations of sorrow. The big three monuments to Jewish pain, the three "must sees" on every Israel itinerary-the Kotel, Masada, and Yad Vashem-only tell part of our story. Israel must be more than old rocks, dead Jews, and shokeling rabbis.

Here-as elsewhere in the Jewish world-we must beware of the "continuity trap." We cannot just obsess about surviving for the sake of survival. Modern secular Israelis wonder how much they must struggle to keep the country alive simply because their grandparents built it, just as modern secular Jews doubt they need to make Judaism central in their lives simply because their grandparents ate gefilte fish. "Identity" is a more vibrant and more inviting concept. Continuity is about your past and your future; identity is about your present. Continuity warns, Don't break the chain!"; Identity asks, How does this inheritance inform and enrich my present life?

To teach Zionism well, fascination and love have to replace guilt and fear. We need to minimize anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as motivators and justifiers, to accept a more complex historical view about the many factors that created Israel rather than the simplistic notion that from the ashes of the Holocaust that ended in 1945 arose a Jewish state in 1948. We have to start asking how to live meaningful Jewish lives-in Israel and the Diaspora-rather than whether we will survive-- here or there. We have to cultivate a tribalism that is transcendent, returning to universal concerns and ideals via our particularism, rather than retreating from universalism into chauvinism.

A more complex and realistic appreciation of Israel does not dull the sense of the miraculous so central to the Zionist sales pitch. In fact, it heightens it. A land where the malls have synagogues, where ancient golden walls are stained black from car exhaust, where a ragtag band of romantics and refugees created a military and high-tech David that outshines and even intimidates its neighboring Goliaths, cannot fail to fascinate. The true miracle of Israel is just how normal, how modern, how thoroughly prosaic life is in this recently renewed, oftthreatened, old-new land stuck in the harsh, hostile, provincial, and primitive Middle East.

Israel's odd combination of familiarity and foreignness helps frame powerful questions about the Jew's sense of belonging in the land of one's birth and in this ancestral homeland. The immediate sense of connection, even ownership, most first-time Jewish visitors feel illustrates the powerful, primal, and often ignored links that still unite Jews and root us all in our homeland. That sense of being at home also raises important and potentially unsettling questions about whether the modern Diaspora Jew-no matter how comfortable and prosperous he or she may be-is indeed still living in galut, in exile.

Effective Zionist education, then, will ask the following questions about any lesson, any tour, any curriculum, any ideology:

Is it relevant: Does it speak to the Jews of 1999 not pre-1949?

Is it realistic: Does it gibe with the way Jews live in Israel and the Diaspora?

Is it positive: Does it emphasize Jewish life, Jewish lifestyles rather than Jewish death, and oppression?

Is it critical: Does it provoke profound questions, or does it numb with cliches?

Is it subversive: Does it challenge our assumptions and the way we live?

Is it modern: Does it address some of the dilemmas facing us in today's world?

Is it Jewish: Does it use our heritage, our ties to our homeland, to inform its answer?

Is it inspiring: Does it seduce the soul and electrify the heart while stimulating the brain?

Is it progressive: Does it point the way to Jewish and Zionist success rather than simply retreating from Diaspora failures?

For more than a century, Zionism has been making a mensch out of the Jewish people. In the 1880s, Zionism transformed pale scholars into strapping chalutzim. In the 1940s, Zionism turned European victims into Middle Eastern soldiers. Today, Zionism needs to help disaffected and self-indulgent suburbanites throughout the world (including Israel) inject meaning in their lives and find community. More than 70 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis said it well: "Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed, assimilation cannot be averted, unless there be reestablished in the fatherland a center from which the Jewish spirit may radiate." Brandeis had it all-wealth, power, a fancy title, friendship with President Woodrow Wilson-- yet he understood that he and his fellow Jews needed to look to their ancient homeland for spiritual satisfaction, communal inspiration, and, in essence, the very justification for continuing to exist as Jews.

Messrs. Bronfman, Steinhardt, and company are offering young Jews the equivalent of free hardware; Jewish educators in Israel and the Diaspora must now develop the right software to make the Israel experience compatible with the realities of Jewish life, to allow Jews to process their Israel experience in a vital and meaningful way. The young Jews who participate in "Birthright Israel" must enter the country pre-programmed with a series of concepts that will help them see how an enduring tie to Israel can rejuvenate their Judaism and enrich their lives.