In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 11 Is There Religious Meaning to the Rebirth of the State of Israel after the Shoah? Shalom Ratzabi The question posed in the title of this paper involves too many issues to be dealt with in one paper. I will therefore confine my discussion in the present essay to national religious Zionist thought as it has been manifested during the last century. The theme of this discussion is that although the greatest stream in the Zionist camp bases its outlook on traditional religious Zionist thought, since the 1960s and particularly since 1967, some religious thinkers have started to develop new concepts to determine the connection between Israel and the Shoah. In my view, these religious thinkers believed that Zionist thought had failed to face the totality of the Jewish experience since the Holocaust. This failure was revealed in the fact that the older forms of Zionist thought could not satisfy the religious feelings of the generation whose most formative experience was the Holocaust and the emergence of Israel, and particularly the sequence of these events—that is to say, the realization of the greatest expectations of the Jewish people, such as the ingathering of the exiles and the foundation of the sovereign state of Israel, which actually means the abolition of the “kingdom of bondage,” and all of this in only three years after the most catastrophic event in the whole of Jewish history, the Shoah. As a consequence , in the first decade of the existence of the state of Israel, particularly during the phases of anxious expectation before the Six-Day War in 1967 and of the euphoria after Israel’s victory that took hold of the whole Jewish people, religious thinkers and theologians began searching for new concepts to explain their religious experience. Regarding the religious meaning of Israel, two main traditional approaches are prevalent in the religious Zionists’ camp. One approach 211 claims that the state of Israel is a human institution. That is, it is a state that has been established to solve existential, political, and other problems that threatened the Jewish people as a collective. Today we might infer that the fundamental premise of this stance is that it perceives in Israel an ordinary state. Consequently, we should treat Israel just as we treat any other modern state. Alternatively, there is the attitude of the major stream in the religious Zionist camp, which bases its Zionist worldview on Rabbi Kook’s mystical national doctrine. Assuming that the messianic era is the goal of Judaism, Rabbi Kook identified Zionism with the core of Judaism. The reason for this identification is obvious. If the messianic era is the concrete aim that has shaped Jewish life, it is evident that Zionism, whose aims are the ingathering of the people of Israel and the reestablishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land, is the modern embodiment of the messianic hope. This means that Zionism is not a secular ideology but the very heart of the Jewish religion. By adopting Rabbi Kook’s mystical Zionist doctrine, this camp perceives the state of Israel as a holy instrument that has an important role in the messianic process.1 According to both of these approaches, there is not a unique connection between the rebirth of Israel and the Holocaust. Thus, for example, the first approach views the state of Israel as a response to the Shoah just as it is a response to other existential woes that tormented the Jewish people in exile. One of the pioneers of this position was Rabbi Reines.2 Apologizing for cooperation with religious Jews (haredim) and nonreligious Jews (hiloniim), he argued that the Zionist movement comes to solve the Tzarat ha-yehudim (“the troubles of the Jews”) and not the Tzarath hayahdut (“the troubles of Judaism”). This means that there is no necessary connection between Zionism as a political phenomenon and the cultural or religious-spiritual issues confronting the Jewish people. It is obvious that by adopting such a view we are unable to attach any religious significance to the state of Israel. Rather, as the culmination of Zionist activity, the state of Israel is an instrument intended to improve the capacity of the Jewish people to survive in a nonredeemed world. But it has no special religious meaning. Alternately, according to the second attitude, which is based on Rabbi Kook’s mystical teaching, the reborn state of Israel is charged with religious significance. Indeed, from this mystical...

Share