Torah Through a Zionist Vision (review)

Avraham H. Feder’s two-volume work, Torah Through a Zionist Vision, is a collection of essays in which the author applies a lifetime of Jewish and secular learning to probing each parashah, both for its own particular wisdom and also as a means of illuminating for the reader the larger narrative of the Torah. As a work of parshanut, this book is a fine collection of psychologically astute narrative analyses interwoven with philosophically and spiritually edifying reflections on relevant Jewish themes such as faith, chosenness, and anti-Semitism. As such, it is a book that will be rewarding both for the advanced Bible student seeking sophisticated new insights in the parashah, as well as for the novice reader who is looking to contemplate important Jewish subjects through the lens of Torah.

However, just as the Torah is more than a collection of parshiyyot, Rabbi Feder’s work aspires to transcend the unit of the parashah and seeks to bring into focus for the reader the way in which the details of each parashah conspire to communicate a larger narrative. Indeed, the author’s understanding of the Torah’s larger narrative, and his ability to demonstrate its presence in every parashah, is what makes this book especially valuable.

The story of the Torah, as Rabbi Feder explains it, is the story of God struggling to exist in covenant with humanity. After several failures to establish such a relationship with humanity as a whole, God chooses a single man, Abraham, with whom to establish a covenant. The goal of that covenant is the creation of a society that reflects God’s vision for humanity and that will serve as a model for the world so as to help humans realize their full potential as beings created in the image of God. This society is not to be established by returning to the timeless, utopian perfection of Eden, but rather by engaging in the difficult work of cultivating the wilderness that is the world outside Eden. To help facilitate this revolutionary enterprise, God has given the nascent Jewish people detailed rules for living— the Torah—and a specific land in which to live—Israel. The rest is up to us.

The fact that God’s dream for the Jewish people and for humanity remains unfulfilled in our own day is due in part to our failure to understand not only that the Jewish people exist in covenant with God, but also to understand why. Fortunately, the narrative of the Torah provides every generation with not only a record of the covenant, but also with the necessary context for understanding its purpose. The primary achievement of Rabbi Feder’s book is its ability to guide the reader through the narrative of the Torah toward an understanding of both the reality and the purpose of the covenant.

Rabbi Feder’s book is ultimately about God’s covenant with the Jewish people; however, the central role that the Land of Israel plays in that covenant also allows him the opportunity to reflect on the Jewish people’s relationship to the Land of Israel in light of our still-recent return to sovereignty in the Land after nearly 2000 years. Unfortunately, this opportunity is not maximized in the manner that one might have expected—based on the title of the book, the cover design (which bears an Israeli flag superimposed on a Torah scroll hovering in the foreground of a photograph of modern-day Jerusalem), the back cover approbations (one of which promises “essays with Israel at the core”), and the prelude (where the author writes that “for the Jew living in the Diaspora, listening to Torah must be hearing . . . a Zionist call”).

This is not to say that those readers looking for a “Zionist vision” will necessarily be disappointed; however, much of this “vision” is merely implied by the contemporary resonance of biblical issues related to conquering and settling the land. To be sure, Zionist themes are occasionally made explicit—for example, when the author...