Our Eyes Shall Yet See It

It is an elusive, perhaps even unattainable, ideal. And, indeed, I do think that Zionism will always constitute a kind of permanent challenge and that this will be so after we establish our state in the Land of Israel. Zionism, as I understand it, is not solely about the desire to acquire a legally secure piece of real estate for our downtrodden people, after all, but also about the desire to grow towards moral and spiritual perfection.

—Theodore Herzl, "Our Hope"

An Ideal without End

Sixty years after the establishment of the State of Israel, it seems as if Zionism has run its course. In Israeli schools, hardly anybody still studies Zionist writers. The institutions of the Zionist movement are undergoing drastic reductions and limitations. Zionism itself is either damned as an obstacle to regional peace or, even more tragically, considered utterly irrelevant to the discussion. Following Rabbi Michael Graetz's article calling for the establishment of a Masorti party in Israel, I would like to open with a call for the renewal of Zionism in Israel because, in my opinion, Zionism has not accomplished its task; in fact, it has only begun to address the attainment of its ultimate goals. That idea may sound odd, I know, since the very existence of the State of Israel is generally taken to signify the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. But I do not believe that it has actually been fulfilled at all, although it is also surely the case that much has been accomplished.

The demands of the Zionist idea on the Jewish people could not ever have been satisfied by the mere creation of a state. Even reading the ideas of Herzl himself, the great visionary of the Jewish state, suggests that Zionism was never only about creating a political refuge; rather, it was about the effort to bring about an all-inclusive renewal of Jewish existence, a departure from the private national anomaly in order to establish a new-world nomaly.

And so, more than a century after the convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the Jewish people still faces the most basic of Zionist questions. What is the significance of Jewish sovereignty? Will it suffice to build the same sorts of political, economic, and social systems as in the West or do we need to work at creating systems that have within them b'sorah—good tidings—and innovation? Herzl's words, together with other voices yearning for Zion in every generation, declaim clearly that Zion is not to be merely a political reality, but rather a vast, indeed infinite, and barely expressible ideal.

Exile in the Heart of History

If the Zionist concept is to be seen not only as a means for acquiring a political charter but also as a highly valuable and significant historic tool, then we must first and foremost give thought to our religious relationship with history and attempt particularly to define the place of the Divine and the place of humanity within Jewish history.

But humanity in our day is busily desensitizing history as it drowns itself in the singular narrative of the individual. The rise of the personal story over the public, of spirituality over religiosity—and perhaps most of all, the rise of the characterization of God as more immanent than ever before and thus as concomitantly less transcendent—all these obscure, even to the point of undermining, our relationship with history, a relationship Jews have always seen as an arena rich for the potential unfolding of the human-divine relationship. It seems that we moderns have lost our grip on the concept of mission, both in its public and transcendent aspects, as well as on crucial aspects of our own history.

Out of this modern approach to history branches an Orthodox approach to Zionism both in Israel and in the Diaspora: an ahistorical worldview according to which Zionism and the State of Israel are understood as twin entities that may be modified only in the most pressing of circumstances. In turn, this approach has given rise to...