Submitted by Rabbanit Leah Shakdiel
On May 14, 1948, when the British mandate over Palestine was about to expire at midnight, the leaders of the Yishuv, the Zionist Settlement in Palestine, got together in Tel Aviv (Jerusalem was under siege and inaccessible, and was not included in the UN plan for a Jewish state), and declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights finally saw the light of day on December 10 of that year. Is the historical proximity of these two events a coincidence? I don’t think so. I want to start with a discussion of the historical context that gave rise to both events, and proceed to a call to take a stand on the lessons that should be taken from that conjunction, in order to secure a hopeful future for Israeli Jewishness as part of humankind.
The historical moment – the aftermath of World War 2 – was experienced by Jews in two different and even opposing ways. And I propose that we should admit that Jews, in Israel and abroad, have continued since then to perpetuate these two dramatically opposed narratives, to the present day. For the purpose of this discussion I call one perspective the Jewish ethnocentric politics, and the other one the Jewish universal politics.
Let me illustrate the problem by a close reading of several paragraphs from the Israeli Declaration of Independence, that deal with the historical context of post World War 2, and the establishment of the United Nations as a pivotal move of the victorious Allies (this official English translation is taken from the Israeli Parliament, Knesset, website):
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, defiant returnees, and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.
In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.
This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.
The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations.
Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.
[…]
On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
In the above quoted paragraphs from Israel’s Declaration of Independence we meet Jewish history in an ethnocentric nutshell: the Jewish people belongs in this land, it has always wanted to come back to it, the Zionist project is about making this happen, the British Empire accepted this rational and adopted this agenda, World War 2 was the arena of the plan to exterminate the entire Jewish people which proves that Jews deserve to have a safe home in their land, the United Nations accepted this logic and decided upon the establishment of a state for the Jews in this land, and therefore what we do today is in perfect resonance with all the above. The entire world, as represented by the United Nations, supports our right to a state of our own. This is the only thing we need the world for: to support our right to political sovereignty. Because the alternative role of the world in our drama is the role of those who exiled us from our land, those who persecuted us, those who tried to kill us all very recently.
History is the story of things past, but the story is an active political agent in the real lives of those who tell it and the future generations they educate in its light. This is what historians nowadays call “a narrative”, a story that constitutes identity. It is not neutral in its interpretation of past events, but it is also not innocent in its intention to shape the future. This is why I am interested in a totally different take on World War 2, the Jews, and the United Nations, in another paragraph of the same text:
In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.
The Jewish Zionist community in the land, called “the Hebrew Yishuv” in the original text, operates as a historical subject in an entirely different way than described in the paragraphs quoted above. It is not the victim of wicked non-Jews, and it does not plead with the non-Jewish world to accord it justice, to allow it to have a state of its own. Rather, the Hebrew Yishuv, a precursor of the imagined state of Israel, an embodiment of the political community established today, joins the good non-Jews, the freedom and peace loving nations, in their battle against evil. This evil is not described as targeting Jews specifically but as a danger to humankind at large.
This part of the Jewish people is described as one of the victorious Allies who founded the United Nations, which is, to say the least, inaccurate and overrated…. But the core of this paragraph is correct: with the outbreak of that war, the Zionist movement decided to “continue the struggle against the British White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, as if there is no war, and to fight with the British against the Nazis as if there is no White Paper”. This composite policy was designed to make sure that the Jewish people scores points with the Allies, so it can be rewarded accordingly when the war is over and a new world order is established by the victors. To drive this point home I would like to add in parenthesis that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement at the time, made the opposite choice and sided with the Nazis against the British. The first Jewish narrative delineated above would emphasize his Antisemitism; this second narrative however would emphasize the immorality of his choice, as well as its political shortsightedness, and the heavy price that the Palestinian liberation movement paid for this choice at the time.
What transpires from this second universalistic historical account is the commitment of the State of Israel to universal human rights and peace. The right of all Jews to immigrate to Israel is the first one on the list of universal human rights, because the right to citizenship in one’s own country is a universal one. But the list goes on:
The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
[…]
We appeal – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.
We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.
How then are we to bring together these two accounts of who we are, of where we come from, of where we are going? Many historians claim that the tension between these two directions was at the very birth of the Zionist project at the turn of the 20th century, and therefore it is no wonder that this tension persisted throughout the building of the National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Some researchers even term this tension a dangerous schism that continually threatened to abort the Zionist Project, and may still bring about the downfall of the State of Israel. This view condemns Zionist and Israeli Jewish leaders to the continuous, never ending task of devising creative ad-hoc formula that would keep both “faith communities”, the ethnocentric and the universalist, as responsible citizens of the same “polis”. I want to present an educational plan that addresses that problem through securing a proud Jewish identity that goes hand in hand with a universal ethos.
I find a clue for this endeavor in the very first paragraph of the Israel’s Declaration of Independence:
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
First of all I want to correct a mistake in this official translation of the document, because in this case this mistake is indeed misleading: the founding fathers knew very well that the people of Israel was not “born” in the land of Israel, and therefore used the verb “kam”, arose, or stood up, not “born”. The entire paragraph fills in the content of this national “rise to stature”: the shaping of a distinct spiritual, religious and political identity. Political sovereignty then is not enough for the constitution of an independent people: it must have a distinct cultural identity as well. But amazingly, that distinct identity is not only of national value, it is also of universal value! And the paradigm of this national-cum-universal value is the Bible: it is ours and at the same time we also gave it to the whole world.
Here we are directed towards a beautiful vision of “a world made new”, as Eleanor Roosevelt saw it: a tapestry of peoples and cultures and religions and sovereign states, all distinct and wholesome in their own right, all generous with the distinct gifts they make to the rest of the world, and thereby all participate in the synergetic creation of the greater whole.
It is not by coincidence, then, that this document was issued only a few months apart from the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights. Both these events derive from the same insight, that international protection is needed for the preservation of not only individual human rights, but also of the rights of human collective societies. And this international protection of people – and peoples – can take place only within a universal Social Contract that weaves people – and peoples – together.
Consider the following articles from that UN Declaration:
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
There are indeed individual copyright issues that need protection of their owner’s “intellectual property”. However, the majority of human creation is the fruit of interpersonal relationships, of collectives organized within national ethnic or religious groups, of responses of those collectives to their historical, political, and physical circumstances.
The ensuing educational agenda then is based on the need to nurture a dynamic discourse among individuals and groups, concerning their rich and diverse cultural identities. No culture ever stands still. All cultures are dynamic and continue to grow and change right here and now. As a Jew I embrace the term Torah in this context: it refers not only to a particular book that is tangible, printable, own-able, shelf-able, it refers to the unending fountain of learning and teaching, and it is about individual and collective empowerment, by way of contact with diverse texts, Jewish and universal, and the creation of new texts that add up all the time. We are all authors of our world.
This is the process that the UN declaration aims at protecting. And this is our understanding of the spirit of our renewed sovereignty in our land.
I would now like to turn to a specific Jewish textual tradition, as an example of the choices we must make as educators in the research of our own national traditions, between the ethnocentric perspective and universal values.
Begin the textual journey with the Bible – the song that Moses and the Children of Israel sang on the shore of the Sea of Reeds as they came out safely on the other side, whereas the Egyptians who had chased them all drowned dead (Exodus, chapter 15):
| 1Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord, and they spoke, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for very exalted is He; a horse and its rider He cast into the sea. |
| 2The Eternal’s strength and His vengeance were my salvation; this is my God, and I will make Him a habitation, the God of my father, and I will ascribe to Him exaltation. |
| 3The Lord is a Master of war; the Lord is His Name. |
| 4Pharaoh’s chariots and his army He cast into the sea, and the elite of his officers sank in the Red Sea. |
| 5The depths covered them; they descended into the depths like a stone. |
| 6Your right hand, O Lord, is most powerful; Your right hand, O Lord, crushes the foe. |
| 7And with Your great pride You tear down those who rise up against You; You send forth Your burning wrath; it devours them like straw. |
| 8And with the breath of Your nostrils the waters were heaped up; the running water stood erect like a wall; the depths congealed in the heart of the sea. |
| 9[Because] the enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will share the booty; my desire will be filled from them; I will draw my sword, my hand will impoverish them. |
| 10You blew with Your wind, the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the powerful waters. |
| 11Who is like You among the powerful, O Lord? Who is like You, powerful in the holy place? Too awesome for praises, performing wonders! |
| 12You inclined Your right hand; the earth swallowed them up. |
| 13With Your loving kindness You led the people You redeemed; You led [them] with Your might to Your holy abode. |
| 14Peoples heard, they trembled; a shudder seized the inhabitants of Philistia. |
| 15Then the chieftains of Edom were startled; [as for] the powerful men of Moab, trembling seized them; all the inhabitants of Canaan melted. |
| 16May dread and fright fall upon them; with the arm of Your greatness may they become as still as a stone, until Your people cross over, O Lord, until this nation that You have acquired crosses over. |
| 17You shall bring them and plant them on the mount of Your heritage, directed toward Your habitation, which You made, O Lord; the sanctuary, O Lord, [which] Your hands founded. |
| 18The Lord will reign to all eternity |
| 19When Pharaoh’s horses came with his chariots and his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought the waters of the sea back upon them, and the children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea, |
The literary genre of victory songs is well known in all ancient cultures. Life was harsh, a zero-sum game: survival depended upon the crashing down of your opponent. The joyful celebration of victory included the humiliation of the defeated partner. Our ancestors were no exception: when they were oppressed, they prayed for cruel vengeance, “an eye for an eye”, and when they emerged safe and sound from a war, they paraded the loot unscrupulously. So much for explanatory historical context; but do we have to take into consideration the change in the world since then? Not only do we Jews reread this chapter once a year as part of the cyclical reading of all five books of Moses in our synagogues, we also read it annually on the date of the event (the seventh and last day of the Passover holiday), and we also incorporate it into our daily morning prayer service. This is how important the memory of this miraculous exodus from Egypt is to us, for generations ever after. Do we have the right to leave it as is, even today?
Yes, there are those Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, who read this text and teach it as fundamentalism, in other words, as having the same literal message today as it did in antiquity. The Jews are the same Jews, but the Egyptians vary throughout our long history, all the way to contemporary enemies of the State of Israel. This position can be typified by an often quoted line from the Hagaddah, the text read around the table on the first night of Passover:
For not only one [enemy] arose upon us to exterminate us, rather, in every generation [they] arise upon us to exterminate us, and the Holy One Blessed Be He saves us from their hands.
Humanists and liberals repeatedly reject this mentality, not only as primitive and anachronistic, but also as morally revolting. What is usually offered instead is a negation of all national sentiment and identification with our historical past. I propose that if humanists and liberals want to be globally effective, nothing will be gained by throwing away particularistic narratives of human collectives worldwide, because most people are attached to these narratives and cherish them as part and parcel of their identities, of who they are as individuals, as family members, as citizens partaking of specific cultures.
Instead, let us look at how generations of Jewish interpreters read that ancient Biblical text, what were the lessons they took from those readings to their contemporaries. What evolved is a two-branched “tree” that is based on the moral necessity to limit the glee over the fall of human beings and their punishment through death by drowning. We are called upon to reshape our holiday celebration, to contemplate over the danger of unrestrained outbursting joy, to talk about the fate of the unfortunate ones drowning at sea while we come out safe from the experience, and remember, “there but for fortune go you and I”.
Let us climb the first of the two branches of this tree:
“And the children of Israel were walking on dry land inside the sea” (Exodus 14/22). And the serving angels were wondering: Idolatrous humans are walking on dry land inside the sea?! (Mekhilta (2nd c):
There is a tradition that the Israelites sank into idolatry in Egypt, assimilated into the surrounding culture, were no different from their neighbors. Ethnic origin is not important – human conduct is what mattered. As the Israelites are called upon to leave Egypt behind, as they flee towards freedom from slavery and are chased by Pharaoh and his army, God’s judgment still pends over them, it is not self evident that they are the ones to be saved, because they are as sinful as those who chase them. Rejoicing is premature, it is based on the false notion that God will prefer the Jews no matter what, a completely erroneous belief.
“And as God rejoiced on you to favor you and increase you, so He will rejoice on you to cause you to be lost and to exterminate you, and you shall be uprooted from the land which you enter now to inherit it” (Deuteronomy 28/63). Does God really rejoice at the fall of evil people? As Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahman said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: What is the meaning of “And one did not get near the other all night” (Exodus 14/20)? At that time the serving angels wanted to say their song before God, and God said to them: The deeds of my hands [=creatures] are drowning and you are saying song before me? (Babylonian Talmud (5th c), Megillah 10b)
The rabbis who interpreted our tradition for us offer here an important lesson, relevant today as it was in their times: when evil is performed, the perpetrators should be punished, regardless of their ethnic origin and group identity. Israelites and Egyptians are thus subjected to the same measuring rod, and if at one point in history it just so happens that the Jews are spared, this does not become a blanket protection from punishment forever. Moreover, victimhood at one point in history does not provide us with a blanket excuse for misconduct as we go along. Nothing in our biological nature immunes us from sins that can be committed by humans and are committed by humans. We are as good and as evil as we choose to be, just like everyone else.
A second branch of Jewish interpretation of the scene at the Sea of Reeds grows in a different direction:
On Passover you don’t find even once that joy is mentioned. And why? Because you find that on Passover the crops are judged, and man does not know if this year will bring crops or not, therefore no joy is mentioned. Another idea: Why is joy not mentioned? Because the Egyptians died at that time. Likewise you find that upon all seven days of Sukkot we read the full text of Hallel [=psalms of glory to God], whereas on Passover we do not read the full text except on the first night and day. Why? As Shmuel said, “When your enemy falls, do not rejoice” (Proverbs 24/17). (Midrash Psiktah deRav Kahana (5th c)
Here too we are called upon to develop a complex attitude to our history, away from the simplistic black-and-white dichotomy of “us versus them”: the other side may have lost the war, but we are not to forget its humanness, its resemblance to us as humans. We rejoice in our salvation, but that joy is curbed by the thought of the price the enemy paid in the process.
In this passage, the Egyptians are seen as “enemies”, not as intrinsically evil. They happen to be on the other side at a particular historical moment, and may become neighbors and friends in another circumstance. Their acts on behalf of their “side” in the conflict can be understood as patriotic, if we were on the other side we would have done the same. But consider this later text, that goes even further with the thought of mitigated joy:
When God wanted to drown the Egyptians in the sea, Uzza, the Angel of Egypt, rose and bowed before God and said to Him: Master of the universe! You created the world with compassion, why do You want to drown my children? Thereupon God convened the heavenly escort and said to them: Judge between me and Uzza, Angel of Egypt! The angels of the nations started the defense of Egypt. When the angel Michael saw this, he motioned to Gabriel, who flew to Egypt and picked one mud brick with a dead baby that the Egyptians had sunk in it during the construction. He came and stood before God and said: Master of the universe, this is how they enslaved your children! Thereupon God exercised judgment on the Egyptians and drowned them in the sea. At that time the serving angels wanted to say song before God. He said to them: The deeds of my hands are drowning in the sea and you say song before me?! (Midrash Avkir (11th c)
This text argues that severe punishment cannot be visited on human beings, who are all created in the image of the one God, without evidence of the sins perpetrated by those human beings. The perpetrators are not monsters, nor a degraded form of humanity, they are as human as we are. This brings to mind the Nurnberg Trials: if utter horrors are to be part of human history for generations to come, then we must weave them into a narrative that sustains universal justice, we must devise the legal terminology that makes room for them on the same continuum as our everyday lives (genocide, crimes against humanity, etc.). We do not “normalize” these crimes, quite the opposite, we teach that humans must rise to the task of putting other humans on trial, pronouncing a human judgment on their acts, and carrying out the justice resulting from that process.
Moreover, the text argues, even in the face of pure evil, the torture of babies, which justifies severe punishment, there is no room for joy when that punishment is inflicted justly on those sinners.
Many Jews are familiar with this view through the custom, during the Passover feast every year, to dip a finger into the full cup of wine and remove one drop from it for every one of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians, because our joy cannot be quite full when other humans die. This custom is first mentioned in a 16th century text, a commentary on the Passover Haggadah by Don Yitzhak Abravanel, a leader of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewry who suffered the horrors of expulsion with the rest of his community; nonetheless, he left us a rich legacy of a Renaissance man of letters, deeply stooped in the forging of a Jewish identity that embraces the best of human creation and is not stuck in post-trauma alone.
In this article I outlined two examples of Jewish text study – various paragraphs in the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, and an accumulated history of interpretation concerning the death of the Egyptians at the Sea of Reeds. These are two examples of the educational approach I propose to the dilemma of national vs. universal foci of identity, within the Jewish context, and in particular the Jewish Israeli context. I think that we have the duty to get educated in our respective traditions, find in them the narratives that have the potential of sustaining a humanistic national self, and promote those narratives to the forefront, alongside similar narratives in other cultures. By no means are we to erase from view the problematic ethnocentric narratives: we are to face them and spell out ways to live with them in our day and age, to convince our coreligionists and fellow citizens that we can take them in stride – and overcome them.
Voices for Prophetic Judaism 
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