By Yossi Klein Halevi
Who are the Jews?
A religion? A people? The question has taken on a special urgency in our time.
At the heart of the anti-Zionist assault is the notion that the Jews aren't a
people but only a faith. That premise is normative throughout the Arab world,
and especially in the Palestinian statehood movement, all of whose factions
deny the existence of a distinct Jewish people with a right to national
sovereignty.
The Jewish calendar tells a different story. On Passover,
we celebrate the birth of the Jewish people through our escape from Egypt; it's
the beginning of a coherent historical narrative. On Shavuot, two months later,
we celebrate the giving of the Torah at Sinai, imprinting the Jewish people
with a distinct path to God. The Jews, then, are a people with a specific
faith. In that order.
The Passover Seder implicitly reinforces that hierarchy
of identities. The essential Seder ritual is the retelling of the exodus — “as
though you yourself left Egypt” — and the message is: There is no Judaism
without the Jewish people and its story.
My late
teacher, Rabbi David Hartman, noted that the definition of Jewish heresy
provided by the Haggadah, the text read at the Seder, simultaneously offers a
definition of Jewish identity. The “evil child” of the Haggadah refers to the
Jewish people as “you” rather than “us.” Unlike Christianity and Islam, where
heresy is the rejection of belief, for Judaism heresy is self-exclusion from
the community.
As a religious Jew, I believe that our relationship to
God is the purpose of Jewish existence. I believe that contemporary Jewish life
has been impoverished by the diminishment of the Divine, the abandonment of the
quest for the living God in our collective and personal lives.
Yet I also
believe that peoplehood is more crucial to Judaism than faith. How else can we
make sense of the Jewish atheist? Christians or Muslims who reject religious
doctrine are no longer a part of their faith community, while Jews who reject
Judaic beliefs but still identify with the Jewish people, its values and its
fate are universally regarded among Jews as one of us.
Peoplehood is given primacy over faith for the sake of
the faith itself: The Jewish people is the carrier of Judaism.
All three
monotheistic faiths share the same goal: the revelation of God's presence in
this world. But Judaism, once again, works a little differently. While one can
of course convert and become a Jew, Judaism was never intended to be a
universal faith, only the faith of a specific people — whose purpose is to be a
spiritual avant guard within humanity for its eventual redemption. Judaism is a
particularist strategy for a universalist goal.
In its early
stages in 19th century Germany, Reform Judaism tried to turn Jewish identity
into a faith without a people and a land, insisting that its Zion was Berlin,
not Jerusalem. Ultimately, though, the Reform movement returned to a more
classical understanding of Jewish identity. Even ultra-Orthodox Jews, who
routinely place the most strict interpretation of Jewish law over the well-being
of the Jewish people, accept peoplehood as a core religious principle.
The Seder
culminates with the affirmation, “Next year in Jerusalem,” a reminder that the
Jewish story that begins in Egypt ends in the land of Israel. We're a specific
people bound to a specific place.
Last week, as Jews around the world prepared for
Passover, the war against the Jewish people and its story — against the meaning
of Passover itself — took a particularly ugly turn. A UNESCO resolution,
sponsored by seven Arab countries, denounced Israel for supposed violations of
Muslim rights to prayer on the site that Muslims call the Haram el Sharif and
Jews call the Temple Mount. The resolution ignores the fact that the Israeli
government enforces a ban on Jewish prayer at the holy site, granting Muslims
exclusive right to pray there. Worse, the resolution implicitly denies the
Jewish connection to the area by never actually using the term Temple Mount
(only Haram el Sharif). It does refer to the Western Wall, but places that
label in quotation marks while leaving the Muslim equivalent, Al Buraq, intact,
as though that were the only authentic name.
Reading the resolution, one could conclude that there was
no ancient Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, that the Mount isn't the holiest site
in Judaism, that the Western Wall isn't the heart of Jewish prayer. One could
conclude, therefore, that the Jews living in Israel today have no historic
claim to the land, passed down through generations. Of all the attempts to
destroy us throughout our history, the campaign against history itself is the
most devious.
Passover
suggests this definition of the Jews: We are a story we tell ourselves about
who we think we are. The current assault on the Jewish story is so dangerous
precisely because it strikes at that core idea.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a
senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is author of
“Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem
and Divided a Nation.”