We Stand Divided

The Rift Between American Jews and Israel

Daniel Gordis

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780062873705
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062873712
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From National Jewish Book Award Winner and author of Israel, a bold reevaluation of the tensions between American and Israeli Jews that reimagines the past, present, and future of Jewish life

Relations between the American Jewish community and Israel are at an all-time nadir. Since Israel’s founding seventy years ago, particularly as memory of the Holocaust and of Israel’s early vulnerability has receded, the divide has grown only wider. Most explanations pin the blame on Israel’s handling of its conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s attitude toward non-Orthodox Judaism, and Israel’s dismissive attitude toward American Jews in general. In short, the cause for the rupture is not what Israel is; it’s what Israel does.

These explanations tell only half the story. We Stand Divided examines the history of the troubled relationship, showing that from the outset, the founders of what are now the world’s two largest Jewish communities were responding to different threats and opportunities, and had very different ideas of how to guarantee a Jewish future.

With an even hand, Daniel Gordis takes us beyond the headlines and explains how Israel and America have fundamentally different ideas about issues ranging from democracy and history to religion and identity. He argues that as a first step to healing the breach, the two communities must acknowledge and discuss their profound differences and moral commitments. Only then can they forge a path forward, together.

We Stand Divided goes beyond the headlines to explore the core disagreements that define the past, present, and future of the Jewish people:

• Universalism vs. Particularism: An exploration of how America's universalist vision as a nation of immigrants and Zionism's particularist project as a national home for the Jewish people created two fundamentally different—and often conflicting—ideas of Jewish life.
• Returning to History: A look at why American Jews sought a refuge from the "nightmare of history," while Zionists were determined to re-enter it, embracing the messy, morally complex realities of sovereignty and power.
• Judaism as Nation vs. Religion: How the two communities developed opposing views, with American Jews defining Judaism as a faith community and Israelis defining it through peoplehood, language, and land.
• A Liberal vs. Ethnic Democracy: Why Israel was never meant to be a copy of America's "naked public square" and how its identity as an "ethnic democracy" clashes with American Jewish liberal values.
• A Path Forward: An argument that healing the breach requires both sides to move beyond blame, understand the deep-seated origins of their differences, and forge a new relationship based on mutual respect.

The Causes

3

A Particularist Project in a Universalist World

On July 8, 1776, four days after the Second Continental Congress voted in Philadelphia to approve the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphians were summoned to the yard of the Pennsylvania State House (today Independence Hall) by the public ringing of the city bells. There, at noon, Colonel John Nixon read the Declaration publicly for the first time.

“When in the course of human events,” he began, proclaiming Jefferson’s now immortal opening words. The phrase is so well known that we no longer pay much attention to how extraordinary it is. What is noteworthy about this phrase is not so much what it says as what it does not say. The Declaration did not open by saying, “When in the course of Christian events. . . .” Nor did it employ any other term that might have limited the applicability of its universal message. The point of the Declaration, like that of the American experiment itself, was that America’s founders believed that what they were creating was an ideal for all humanity.

America’s founders were Christians. Yet while they invoked the “Creator,” the “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence” in the Declaration, not once did they use the words “Jesus,” “Christian,” or “Christ.” The Declaration is infused with a theistic faith in a higher power, but there is nothing essentially Christian about it. It is, at its core, an invitation to human beings of all creeds and backgrounds. It is one of the earliest indications of the profound universalism that would characterize American life and culture.

One hundred and seventy-two years later, on a Friday afternoon in May 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in what was then the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (interestingly also now known as Independence Hall). “The land of Israel,” Ben-Gurion declared as he read the opening sentence of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” Much of the remainder of the Declaration is a recitation of the Jewish people’s history, intertwined with references to its eternal longing to return to the Land of Israel.

When Israel’s Declaration of Independence refers to God, in a conscious evocation of Jefferson’s phrase “faith in Divine Providence,” it uses the phrase “faith in the Rock of Israel,” as close an approximation as Hebrew allows to Divine Providence. It is worth noting, however, that while Jefferson’s “Divine Providence” is a thoroughly universal evocation of God’s name, “Rock of Israel” refers to the idioms ubiquitous in Jewish tradition that many Jews would have understood: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel, and even the God of Israel. Thus, even the name of God that the Declaration chose to employ reflects the Jewishness and deep commitment to the Jewish people above all other peoples. That commitment not only suffuses Israel’s Declaration of Independence but, more importantly, is the very purpose of the country. Israel would have citizens of many creeds and ethnicities, but there could be no doubt about its raison d’être. It was a state designed to foster the flourishing of the Jewish people.

America’s universalism and Israel’s particularism are evident everywhere one looks. Consider national symbols. America’s symbol is the bald eagle, a creature of grace and strength not associated with any particular people; the symbol that Israel chose was the Menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that once stood in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. With minor changes, almost any nation could sing America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” What nation does not think of itself as “the land of the free and the home of the brave”? Yet Israel’s anthem, “Hatikvah,” is distinctly about the Jewish people and their return to their ancestral homeland. “As long as deep in the heart, the soul of a Jew yearns,” it begins, and then goes on to speak of two thousand years of Jewish yearning. Then there are the flags. America’s flag is made of stars and stripes, elements found on dozens of national flags; Israel’s, with a Jewish star flanked by two blue stripes, is specifically designed to be in conversation with the tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl.

Unlike America, Zionism has always been highly particularistic; Zionism, after all, was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Therefore, when we imagine that Israel ought to be a smaller, newer version of the United States situated in the Middle East—or more colloquially, as a Hebrew-speaking, falafel-eating version of America—we miss the point of both countries entirely.

THIS TENSION BETWEEN UNIVERSALISM and particularism is nothing new—it is as ancient as the Bible itself. It is a critical dimension of a long-standing difference between the ways that Judaism and other segments of Western civilization have seen the world. The Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible, as Jews refer to it) and the New Testament (or the Christian Bible, in Jewish nomenclature), as we will now see, have very different conceptions of how human beings ought to think about themselves and their lives—about what our world ought to look like. It may seem strange to discuss the Bible in a book on the rift between American Jews and Israel, but it is there that some of the underlying issues first took root. Unless we understand the fundamental difference in worldviews between Judaism and much of Western civilization, we cannot understand the conflict that has unfolded since.

Let’s start with the Hebrew Bible. The first chapters of Genesis all raise questions about the most critical questions that shape human life. The story of creation introduces the concepts of “man, heaven, and the created order.” The tale of the Garden of Eden explores questions of temptation, sin, responsibility, and sexuality, and the conflict between Cain and Abel grapples with hatred and murder. The flood deals with the inevitable imperfection of humankind.

Situated among these tales is the famous story of the Tower of Babel. What is the message of that chapter? The basic story is well known. Worried that they will be dispersed (“lest we be scattered all over the earth”), human beings decide to build a tower, with its top in the heavens, that will somehow bind them all together. Yet their project angers God. So God confounds their languages, making it impossible for them to communicate, thus bringing the tower’s construction to a premature end. Then God “scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

This seemingly strange story is actually our first introduction to the Bible’s politics. Interestingly, right before the Tower of Babel story, the story of Noah ends with the floodwaters subsiding and Noah’s three sons leaving the ark and spreading out. “From these the maritime nations branched out . . . by their lands, each with their language, their claims, and their nations.” Thus, after God unleashes the flood to destroy a sinful world, a new order emerges: nations spread out and live each in their own land, with their own language, their clan, and their way of life.

But as the Tower of Babel story opens, something has gone awry with that new world order. Suddenly, “everyone on earth had the same language.” The people do not wish to spread out. They seem to want to ignore, perhaps even erase, the differences between peoples and nations. So God has to upend their plan, and the Tower of Babel story ends with the world restored to what it had been prior—peoples are dispersed, living in their own lands, with languages and cultures distinctly their own.

Now the Bible can introduce Abram (later Abraham), who immediately comes onstage. It is as if the Bible were saying, “Now that we have illustrated the importance of distinct peoples to our worldview, we are ready to track the particular people who will be at the heart of the rest of this story—the Jewish people—and their love for their own land.”

The Jews never left the Land of Israel voluntarily, but they were exiled twice, first by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and then by the Romans. For centuries after the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE and exiled its Jewish population, Jews harbored a hope that one day they would be restored to their ancient ancestral land. There, they imagined, they would live among their own clan, conduct their lives with their own traditions, and speak their own language.* That hope, in a nutshell, was the essence of Zionism.

Why does it matter today what the Bible’s view of nationalism might have been? The answer is not theological, but cultural. Even deeply secular, often antireligious, early Zionists quoted the Hebrew Bible endlessly. To them, the Bible was essentially a diary of their people documenting their loves and losses, their dreams and dreads. It was a window into their people’s very soul. David Ben-Gurion kept a Bible on his desk, knew it inside out, and hosted a regular Bible study group, even when he was busy with matters of state. Classic secular Zionist poets like Shaul Tchernichovsky, Rachel the Poetess, Leah Goldberg, and many others wrote in dialogue with the Bible (as do even modern secular Israeli novelists like Amos Oz and David Grossman) because the “Book of Books” was the wellspring of the visions that animated their life’s work. To their minds, the Bible explained the revolution on which they were embarking.

That is why no sooner does Israel’s Declaration of Independence open by saying that the Land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people, it then continues: “Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.” This new state, Ben-Gurion was essentially saying, was going to be a project in the image of the Hebrew Bible’s idea for humanity, and it would be, to paraphrase but misquote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “of the Jews, by the Jews, and for the Jews.”

IF ZIONISM’S DEEPLY ROOTED particularism emerged from the Hebrew Bible, American universalism reflected the worldview of the Christian Bible. The politics of the Christian Bible is radically different from that of the Hebrew Bible. In the Christian Bible, the differences between cultures and human beings that so often lie at the core of the nation-state (and of the conflicts in the Hebrew Bible) are explicitly dismissed, nowhere more clearly than in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” Paul says there, “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

To be sure, the Jewish tradition has a distinct universal streak as well, and the Catholic Church would often become very political and particularist in its own way; still, the fundamental Jewish tendency toward particularism is at odds with Christianity’s instinctive universalism.* Zionism—and then Israel once it was established—saw the Jewish people as the central purpose of the project. America, in contrast, is colored by Christian universalism, a sense that what the founders were building was not about Christians or any one people, but about the world at large.

No one people figured centrally in the story that the United States told about itself. Almost a century after America’s founding, as Abraham Lincoln headed to his inauguration and prepared to try to preserve the Union, he reminded his listeners of the universal reach of the American project. The Declaration of Independence, he said, “gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.” For the majesty of this vision, Lincoln expressly gave credit to Jefferson, the man “who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

America’s applicability to “all men at all times” and Israel’s commitment to the flourishing of the Jewish people are starkly opposite foundations for two different countries. That is why for many American Jews, to whom America’s universalism seems both natural and the indisputable ideal for the basis of a country, there is something deeply problematic and discomfiting about the very purpose of the State of Israel.

ZIONISM WAS A PARTICULARIST project from its very beginnings. In the nineteenth century, as those biblical seeds of a promised Jewish return to Zion began to sprout, Zionism’s great thinkers were never abashed about particularism. One of the first people to articulate Zionism’s vision was Moses Hess. Hess was a socialist with universalist tendencies, but toward the end of his life he sensed that European socialism would not liberate the Jew the way that many had hoped or expected. It was time, he thought, to give up the charade:

As long as the Jew denies his nationality, as long as he lacks the character to acknowledge that he belongs to that unfortunate, persecuted, and maligned people, his false position must become ever more intolerable. What purpose does this deception serve? The nations of Europe have always regarded the existence of the Jews in their midst as an anomaly. We shall always remain strangers among the nations.

The Jews deceive themselves, he said, if they imagine that Europe will welcome them into a large, universal human family. It was time for the Jews to unabashedly embrace their own particular story, their destiny—and their hope for a country.

Hess was a man before his time. When he penned those words in 1862, the Jewish world was not yet ready to hear him; for decades, his idea languished, largely ignored. Theodor Herzl, who later in his life admitted that he had essentially just given new life to an idea that had been proposed before him, had much better luck: his pamphlet The Jewish State took the Jewish world by storm when it was first published in February 1896. It was printed, translated, and read more quickly and more widely than any other Jewish work of the modern era. In 1896 alone, it was published in seven languages, beyond the German original: English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, and French.

Students, in particular, were enthused by his proposal; almost overnight, the appearance of The Jewish State transformed Herzl from a lone voice into the leader of an international movement. And key to that international movement, which would eventually create the State of Israel, was an explicit rejection of Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s universalism:

It might further be said that we ought not to create new distinctions between people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old disappear. But men who think this way are amiable visionaries; and the idea of a native land will still flourish when the dust of their bones will have vanished tracelessly in the winds. Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream.

Max Nordau, a leading European intellectual who ultimately became a leading Zionist thinker, also understood that Zionism was essentially about Jewish peoplehood. “Whoever . . . believes that the Jews are not a nation can indeed not be a Zionist,” he wrote, while “he who is convinced to the contrary that the Jews are a people must necessarily become a Zionist.” Nordau saw no intermediate possibilities. One was either in or out.

Zionism’s early ideologues mince...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• The Rift
• The Causes
• The Future
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Daniel Gordis
• Copyright
• About the Publisher