Forwarded with permission
Sobering thoughts about the condition of the SPIRITUAL State of Israel Today.
Sobering thoughts about the condition of the SPIRITUAL State of Israel Today.
"The following is from Dr. Mendel Hirsch's commentary on the Haftoroth. Dr. Hirsch was the eldest son of RSRH. The selection below comes from his commentary of the Haftorah for Shabbos Chol Moed Pesach pages 592 - 593. ( Written in 1896 I.L.)
"So that even if to-day, through some miraculous chain of events, Palestine were to be placed at the unconditional disposal of the Jews, and they could return to the "Land of their Fathers" and found an independent state there: nothing, nothing at all, would be gained as long as the causes have not disappeared which once brought about the downfall of the state and the destruction of the Temple, yea which made that downfall unavoidably necessary for the preservation of Judaism and thereby Jewry.
A Jewish National body without Jewish spirit would be, and remain, dead; a Jewish State, that does not, in making the laws of the Torah a reality, present a picture of the realisation of the eternal laws of justice and love of one's neighbour based on the sound foundation of purity of morals, would be a still-born creation, and irretrievably doomed, to dissolution, even as it was thousands of years ago. But this is just by way of parenthesis!
Gutn Mo'ed
RRW
5 comments:
Yes, yes, yes, so Rav Hirsch, zt"l, was against it.
Oddly, Ravs Zvi Hirsch Kalisher, the Netziv and other great rabbonim in the Chovevei Tzion heartily disagreed and there were just as well away of the limitations that would face a reborn Jewish state.
Wow. Good words.
See what Rav Joseph Breuer similarly said, here: "The number of Torah-true people who follow the Torah im Derech Eretz approach on the holy soil is not large. In general, those who are Torah-true in the Holy Land are in the minority and they are forced to wage a hard fight to protect their life's sacred treasures. It was the will of God to let His people experience the great miracle of the Six Day War. If the many yeshivos of the country would have prepared young men gifted in leadership and with the will to lead in the spirit of Torah im Derech Eretz, and if, in that hour of victory, they would have brought the message of Torah im Derech Eretz to their brothers and sisters, perhaps they too would have been granted a victory to win over the masses to build teh Torah state. But, the great opportunity was lost."
Rav Breuer is quoted (ibid.) as elsewhere having said the following: "The creation of the Jewish state in Eretz Yisroel is a world historic event deeply affecting our people in all its parts as well as the nations of the world. What is the atttitude that we, as Torah-true Yehudim, are to take in relation to these event? We have expressed it repeatedly in all clarity and intensity: this State will have a future only if an as long as it is organized as a Jewish state; i.e., a State of God rising on sacred soil. It will be a State of God if it proclaims the Torah as the fundamental law of its constitution and propagates its practical realization in the life of our people."
Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg there is quoted as having said the following: "It is possible at this decisive hour to build a bridge to establish contact with the perplexed and confused of our people. Religious youth must stand in the breach and show the way, and my advice to them is to imbibe the teaching of a great master who faced a similar task and succeeded brilliantly. [Viz. Rabbi S. R. Hirsch] He rescued his own generation and his methods and ideas can serve as an anchor for our own and future generations."
to be cont.
cont. from above
Or, as Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits put it in his Crisis and Faith (both the book and the Tradition 14:4 essay): "The question, of course, is: what is our function, the function of the Jewish people, in such a [Messianic] scheme of history? It would seem to us that no matter what our reaction to the scheme may be, we shall remain the witnesses [of G-d to the world]. What God has started with us he will complete. Too much remains unfinished; too much awaits its justification; too much waits for its redemption. God will not die in his exile. As far as we are concerned the question is: shall we just endure our destiny or willingly embrace it? We shall not escape it. This is probably the most important conclusion that we ought to derive from the Jewish meaning of the Yom Kippur War. The State of Israel has been forced back into Jewish history.
"One of the fundamental mistakes of Zionism has been - and this was clear to some of us long before now - that it sets for its goal the normalization of the Jewish people. We shall return to our land; we shall have a state; our own government, judiciary, police, army. Jews will again be farmers, workers; they will be in all trades and professions. We shall speak Hebrew again and create a new Hebrew literature. In short, we shall be the same as all other nations. Zionism was trying to emancipate us from the Jewish destiny of the ages. It was attempting something new, to wean us of our involvement with a Divine plan with man and to seek salvation solely for our national exile. [As opposed for the universalistic exile of God in the history of mankind.] The State of Israel was attempting to break out of Jewish history and to start an Israeli history. The attempt to escape Jewish destiny by way of Zionism has undermined the moral security of the people that dwells in IsraeL. Wide sections of Israeli youth, alienated from the historic continuity of Jewish people, have become unsure of the moral validity of our claim to the land of our fathers. And indeed, there is no Israeli claim to the land; there can only be a Jewish claim. Where there is no continuity, there can be no return. Only in the uninterrupted chain of all Jewish generations is the certainty to be found that this has been our land all through our exile, and has been taken from us by force. Our faith in G'ula, in the coming Redemption, has been our eternal protest against anyone who held possession of the land of our fathers. But this faith is inseparable from the historic destiny of our Jewishness. The moment we reject identification with it, our claim to the land of Israel can only be based on the barbaric right of conquest. We either return to the Holy Land or there is no land for us to return to.
to be cont.
(continuing the quotation of Rabbi Berkovits's words)
"Even more serious than the moral uncertainty of the claim, if it is to be based on Israeli history, is the puzzlement and the loss of bearing that has overtaken Israeli society in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Much more serious than the political uncertainty regarding the future is the spiritual uncertainty concerning the historic destiny of this little nation in the arena of violence of "normal" nations. All this struggle, blood letting, sacrifice, endless hardships, what are they all for? Where is the end to it all? Is it worthwhile? The hidden cause of the traumatic shock of the war has been the sensing of the loss of historic purpose, the loss of a transcending national destiny. Zionism has attempted to replace Messianism. The vision of the future has been replaced by the desire for the immediacy of the present. A new national purpose was to be forged for this ancient people. What we got is manufactured national reality, trying desperately to cut its roots from the soil of past history. But no nation can live with a borrowed national destiny, nor can it survive by a plastic national identity. Zionism has its justification only as an instrument of Jewish Messianism. It did have this character in the early days of the Jewish resettlement in Eretz Yisrael. The idealism of the pioneers was a secularized manifestation of the Messianic hunger of the Jewish people of history. That is why it could withstand all the trials and tribulations and triumph. Now that it has spent its inherited resources, large segments of Israeli society are left with a rootless secularism, which, as it is without memories, so has it no expectations either. It is altogether of today and all its future can be nothing but an eternal repetition of today. What it holds for man, it must deliver now; its only rewards are the fruits of the passing hour. A nation cannot live by that. It drags a society down to the level of the crudest forms of a demoralizing materialism. Therein lie the causes of the most serious internal problems of Israeli society. If the tragedy of the Yom Kippur War wil bring home to us the futility of our desire to become a "normal people and will induce us to recover the ethos of the Jewish stance in history in the context of Galut and G'ulah, it may yet be turned into a triumph of our struggle for survival within the messianic wave of world history. Only in that context can it be said that the State of Israel has come to stay. Of course, it is going to stay. The attempt to break out of that context has failed. It is going to fail again and again. The God of history will not let us go. We are not being asked. There is no escape for Israel from the historic destiny of IsraeL. The question is: shall we only endure it or find the ultimate meaning of our human existence in it by embracing it with resolute determination and dedication."
to be cont.
cont. from above:
(Recall that Rabbi Berkovits was one of the foremost students of Rabbi Weinberg. What is most fascinating I think, however, is that unlike the rest of the rabbis quoted, Rabbi Berkovits did not believe that the galut was a punishment. In Crisis and Faith, he puts forth an explanation that Rome and Jerusalem cannot exist in one world at the same time (based on a Midrash that says that if someone tells you that both or neither Jerusalem and Caesaria are standing, don't believe him; whenever one is standing, the other is in ruins), and so the Jewish people had to choose either galut or to Romanize, and that we sacrificed our statehood for G-dliness. In Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, his pulpit sermons from the WWII period, we learn Rabbi Berkovits reason for this: he says that frankly, no one - his family, his relatives, his friends, his rabbis, his congregants - deserved to die in the Holocaust, and that by extension, no Jew in the galut period of 2000 years deserved the galut treatment. Rabbi Berkovits is forced to reinterpret the galut not as a punishment, but as a self-conscious choice by the Jewish people, to put God above statehood.)
See http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/08/hirschians-on-meaning-of-state-of.html
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