Whither Masorti?

ana anaḥnu olim?

—Deuteronomy 1:28

At the Beginning of the Seventh Decade

As it enters its seventh decade, the State of Israel is in dire need of a vision that negates the Jew as victim, affirms the Jew as hero, and reads Jewish religion as an instrument to facilitate both of those ends while maintaining a sense of deep and abiding fidelity to the twin conceptions that constitute the beating heart of authentic Judaism: that God so profoundly believed in the potential worth of human destiny that all humanity was created in the image of God, and that it is the mission of Israel to make manifest the reasonableness and correctness of God's faith in humanity.

What were the philosophical goals of Zionism? The driving idea behind all early Zionist thought was the need for a revolution in all areas of Jewish life and culture, including in the economic and political spheres. Some even thought in terms of revolution in Jewish identity and put forth the goal of creating a "new Jew" through the process of Zionism, one whose identity and sense of worth would be generated primarily from relationships within Jewish history, traditions, and values, rather than primarily from relationships with the history, traditions, and values of the non-Jewish societies where Jews happened to live.

There was one glaring exception to this revolutionary mindset in the area of Jewish religion. What were the goals of the earliest Zionists vis-à-vis religion? It's interesting how difficult it is to answer that question wholly cogently. For one thing, only a few dared to think of a revolution in Judaism. Foremost among those who did were Ḥayim Hirshenson, Rav Kook (at least to some extent), and Mordecai Kaplan. But even among those who waded into those waters, there was no real parallel of a "new Judaism" to match the idea of a "new Jew." Indeed, some—or rather, most—could only conceive of transplanting to the new state the very same religious lifestyle and outlook, not to mention dress codes, which had flourished in the Diaspora.

Non-religious Zionist leaders from Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion accepted this anomaly. The only real thought they appear to have had about religious authority was the fear that, given too wide a berth, religious leaders lacking any real commitment to the State itself might someday nevertheless attempt to exert control over the its secular institutions. Unique among this group were Aḥad Ha-am and particularly Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, both of whom wrote openly about ways to infuse the culture of the nascent State with values from Jewish tradition and, particularly, from Jewish texts. Still, even they did not write openly about altering Judaism as it had developed in Europe, but merely about utilizing the sources of Judaism for creating a "Hebrew" culture that would be essentially secular.

An essential part of Zionism—its religious component—was thus missing from its ideology in its earliest stages. While I agree with the need for revolutionary thinking in all of the areas noted above, I personally believe that, above all, such thinking was and is necessary vis-à-vis Judaism itself, and specifically its religious aspect. No return of the Jewish people to its homeland and to its sovereign self would be complete or meaningful without an accompanying vision of renewed religious creativity. After all, each time there was a renewed covenant between the land and the nation of Israel, a covenant expressed by a national return to the land and the creation there of a Jewish society, a great religious revolution was the eventual outcome.

The first time resulted in Genesis. The second time, after the Exodus, the result was the rest of the Bible. The third time resulted in the Mishnah, in the great works of halakhah and aggadah, and in the Talmudim themselves. So we are justified, therefore, in formulating my question in a slightly different, somewhat more provocative way, by asking what the fourth aliyah, the great return of the Jews to their land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will produce?

One Zionist challenge to...