Judaism, the Jewish spirit. It has used even its Exile for spreading light and learning. Palestine can help this people to understand itself, to give an account of itself, to an intensification of its culture, a deepening of its philosophy, a renewal of its religion. Palestine can help this People perform its great ethical mission as a national-international entity.
But this eternal and far-flung People does not need a Jewish State for the purpose of maintaining its very existence. The Jewish community throughout the world is a wondrous and paradoxical organism. It participates in the life of many nations, yet in spite of numberless predictions in the past and the present, it is not absorbed by them. It is patriotic in every land, yet it is international, cosmopolitan. Palestine cannot “solve the Jewish problem” of the Jewish people.
Wherever there are Jews there is the Jewish problem. It is part of the Jewish destiny to face this problem and make it mean something of good for mankind. Nor are the Jews dying out despite their weaknesses, their mixed marriages, their ignorance of Judaism and the deterioration that has laid hold of many a limb. I see them in America growing healthier and stronger in numbers and intellectual power. Their hearts respond generously to every Jewish call. They are multiplying their communities, their synagogues, schools, societies, libraries, unions. They are acquiring economic independence, and their sons and daughters are getting what the universities and colleges can give them. They are ignorant of Judaism. But they are asking eagerly, mostly in vain, to know what Judaism is. Perhaps it is not the fault of the teachers that the answer takes so long in coming. Judaism is a complex phenomenon. It is and it is not religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, ceremonies, life. The answer as to what it is and may mean to a new generation cannot come over night.
DAY OF FERMENT WITHIN JUDAISM
This is a day of ferment throughout the world, also within Judaism. The materials are there and are in the hands of the Potter. Palestine can perhaps help fashion this more than any one factor. But it is the living Jewish People everywhere that Pales tine must serve. It is a People of useful citizens permeating the life of hundreds of communities, and yet giving evidence of the changelessness of that mystic phenomenon—their continued existence as a body set apart and separate. They are scattered, yet are one; they are unorganized, yet hold together through spiritual bonds more subtle than through organization. One sees this people in all the lands of its exile continuing to yield out of its body individuals of mind and spirit in the arts and sciences, and common soldiers in societies whose goal is the betterment of our human lot. The Dispersion of this People, the Diaspora, is a marvellous instrumentality for the fulfillment of its function as a teacher. The Dispersion is an irrevocable, historical fact, and Palestine can be a means of making this fact into an even greater blessing.
Unfortunately one hears most of that Zionism which is not born of a positive, hopeful relationship towards the tremendous, unique fact of the Diaspora but of despair. It is a Zionism that loathes the “Ghetto” (which it identifies with the Dispersion), and that is so in despair of the future of Diaspora Judaism and that in its own way loves Jews and Judaism so passionately. that the further existence of Jews and Judaism is thought impossible if the present day Palestine be not made ready to act as saviour.
DIASPORA AND PALESTINE FOR GROWTH OF JEWISH PEOPLE
Palestine is the center of this organism, but by no means all of it. The Dispersion and Palestine are both required for the fullest development of the Jewish People. This peculiar People could not be content with either alone. This sui generis organism which we call the Jewish People has need of these all-embracing, complicated forms—an intensive center and a great periphery. The complete salvation and working power of Judaism is dependent upon both together.
But if I have thus exalted the Diaspora what is Palestine to us? It is the Land of Israel, our Holy Land. It is holy for us in a practical and a mystic sense. Its holiness attracts our old and our young, the religious and the non-religious from far away places, and they want to work its soil, and build up an ethical community, and thereby make the land still more sacred. Its very landscape and color help every child and simple man among us to understand our classic literature and our history. It helps us as through no other means to bare our very soul, to get down deep into the sources of our being, as they are recorded for us and as we feel and apprehend them among these hills and valleys and deserts, and among these peoples, wild yet related.—The sources of our being, history? Does history really mean so much? The individual does without it, but the community is a Bedouin camp without it. If we want to live, the more intensive must be our apprehension of our history and literature. Palestine served Israel in exile for centuries in this regard even though it was but a far off ideal. Palestine as a reality is itself the very scroll on which our history is written and spread out for us.
PALESTINE HAS GIVEN ISRAEL 3 THINGS
Three great things this poor little land has already given Israel in two generations. Hebrew has become a living possession and has thus restored to us and our children the sources of our history and our mind, and has thus given us the medium again for classic, permanent Jewish expression. The second great thing is the return of Jews to the soil, not only for the sake of a living from the soil but also for the sake of their love of this particular soil and its indissoluble connection with the body of the Jewish People. Third, the brave attempt on the part of city-bred, school-bred young Jews—moderns of the modern—to work out in life, in the cities and on the land, a synthesis between the radicalism of their social outlook and their ancestral Judaism. It is problems of the same nature that a whole world in travail is laboring to solve; and among Jewry no more splendid attempt at a synthesis has been made than here, in every day life and not in theory alone.
The beginnings of all of this, and much more than the beginning were made under the Turks; and Palestine is of such moment to us that it is capable of giving us much even though our community here be poor and small. I have indicated above that I do not want it to be poor and small. But poor and small and faithful to Judaism, rather than large and powerful like all the nations.
It is in derogation of the actual importance of the living Jewish People and of Judaism to place them on one side of the scale and have it balanced by the relatively unimportant Arab community of Palestine. The true parallels and balancing forces are Jews and Judaism on the one side, and the Arab peoples and even all of Islam on the other. In this way you get a truer perspective of the whole and you increase the significance of Palestine as being that point where in this new day Judaism meets Islam again throughout all its confines, as once they met centuries back to the ultimate enrichment of human culture.
PALESTINE SERVING AS TESTING GROUND
Our theories may differ as to the purposes Palestine may or may not serve. But there is no question that it is now serving as a testing ground, a dangerous frontier land for the lovers of peace in Israel. Much of the theory of Zionism has been concerned with making the Jews into a “normal” nation in Palestine “like the Gentiles of the lands and the families of the earth.” The desire for power and conquest seems to be normal to many human beings and groups, and we being the ruled everywhere, must here rule; being in the minority everywhere, we must here be in the majority. There is the “Wille zur Macht,” the State, the army, the frontiers. We have been in Exile; now we are to be masters in our own Home. We are to have a Fatherland, and we are to encourage the feelings of pride, honor, glory that are part of the paraphernalia of the ordinary nationalistic patriotism. In the face of such danger one thinks of the dignity and the originality of that passage in the liturgy which praises the Lord of all things that “our portion is not like theirs and our lot not like all their multitude.”
The question is, can we establish our life here not upon the basis of force and power, but upon that of human solidarity and understanding?
We are told that when we become the majority, we shall then show how just and generous a people in power can be. That is like the man who says that he will do anything and everything to get rich, so that he may do
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
