<em>Ne’emanut:</em> Placing Relationships at the Center
WHY ISRAEL NOW?Mijal Bitton
Mijal Bitton is Scholar in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and Rosh Kehilla of the Downtown Minyan in New York City.
When I sat down to watch my son and his friends at their kindergarten siddur party, I had no idea that their sweet celebration would help me better understand and articulate my own answer to the question “Why Israel?” The party took place in a Sephardic day school where, together with dozens of other parents, relatives, and school staff, I watched my son and his classmates sing, dance, and recite prayers in anticipation of receiving their first prayerbooks. At the end of their heartwarming performance, the Hebrew teacher looked at her group of kindergarteners and asked them in Hebrew, “Who prays using the siddur?” After the children offered some amusing answers, she gave them her own:
Abba [Father] prays from a siddur, Saba [Grandfather] prays from a siddur, Ima [Mother] prays from a siddur, Savta [Grandmother] prays from a siddur. And Saba’s Abba also prays from a siddur, and Abba’s Saba’s Abba’s Saba’s also prays from a siddur, and Saba’s Abba’s Saba’s Abba’s Saba’s Abba’s Saba also prays from a siddur. They all pray from a siddur.
As the teacher spoke, the children and the audience laughed at the way she played with her words to indicate that so many of the children’s ancestors prayed with a Jewish prayerbook. And then she asked, “And why do they pray with a siddur?” The question hung in the air while the audience waited, and the children traded answers with one another. She smiled and concluded by offering her own: “Because they want to be connected.”
Her words moved me profoundly. I stopped enjoying the celebration only as a proud mother and began to consider the pedagogical, moral, and even philosophical functions of her brief speech. This teacher was making a case for these children’s commitment to their siddurim by describing them within the context of family relationships. She did not appeal to intentionality, individual meaning, or theology. Valuing a siddur was presented as a taken-for-granted tradition that should matter to these students simply because it constitutes a world of meaning in the lives of the people they care for and who care for them. That using the siddur to pray was important to their parents and grandparents was enough of a reason for the children to make their own commitment to it.
The reason I was struck by these words wasn’t their historical veracity. I know with certainty that at least one of my son’s ancestors did not pray regularly with a siddur. The teacher’s words instead represented a moral paradigm—one that resists universal philosophical abstractions and sets relationships as a guiding principle for how we should act. In this paradigm, relationships are not instrumental means for independent higher goods, and they are not in service of any other outcome. They are moral ends in themselves.
The teacher’s message transported me to an experience I had had with a siddur six years earlier. My husband and I were visiting the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, and, as we are wont to do in our travels, one of our first stops was the local synagogue, which also happens to be the oldest Sephardic synagogue still in use today. Dating to the 14th century, the Dubrovnik synagogue building houses a beautiful presentation of the synagogue’s history, an exhibit that includes a letter describing a visit made by Doña Gracia Mendes in the 16th century.
Born into a Sephardic family in Portugal, Doña Gracia lived most of her life as a crypto-Jew, a secret Jew. Her life was threatened after she was widowed and inherited her husband’s banking empire. Countless rulers wanted her wealth, and they had a very powerful tool to use against her: the Inquisition. She spent her life evading it while helping other Jews around the world seeking refuge from persecution. Toward the latter part of her life, Doña Gracia was able to transfer her wealth out of Europe to the Ottoman Empire, where the Sultan promised her the right to live openly as a Jew. It was during her long journey to Constantinople that she stopped in Dubrovnik and prayed at the synagogue.
After reading about her visit, I went into the sanctuary and asked the man who seemed to be in charge for a siddur so that I, too, could pray in the place where Doña Gracia had offered her devotions centuries before. The man asked me a bit about myself and told me about his own life. He had lost most of his family during the Holocaust, killed by the Croatian Ustaše regime. Today, his circle of friends and family are not Jewish; he cannot read Hebrew or pray from the prayerbook he helped me find. Nevertheless, he comes to the synagogue every day to take care of it. I asked him why he was so dedicated to this place.
His simple response was profound: because the people he loved had done so, too.
To further explore how relationships can shape the contours of our moral paradigm, I want to introduce the concept of ne’emanut. This word derives from the Hebrew term emunah, a word that fundamentally resists translation: it implies elements of truth, strength, steadfastness, fealty, belief, loyalty, faithfulness, commitment, and acceptance (and this lengthy list is not exhaustive). The concept can be expressed as a noun, a verb, or an adjective. I began to consider ne’emanut—orienting oneself through emunah to a particular other—after reading a work by the philosopher Meir Buzaglo. Buzaglo has been a leader in the revival of Jewish Mizrahi culture in Israel, and in his work, he insists that the Israeli public square must make space for different conceptions of Judaism, including those developed by Jews from the Middle East and Northern Africa. His main argument has been on behalf of masortiyut, a term that can be loosely translated as “traditionalism,” and which is popularly used in Israeli discourse to identify those Mizrahi Jews whose practice of Judaism blurs and even resists the boundary between religious and secular.
In writing about masortiyut, which he believes is deeply interwoven with ne’emanut, Buzaglo explores different Jewish orientations towards truth, knowledge, and belief. What does it mean, for instance, for masoratim (traditionalists) to be ne’emanim, i.e., to orient themselves through emunah, to the theophany our ancestors experienced at Sinai? Buzaglo considers different epistemological orientations towards this event—true, false, and unknowable—before presenting what he takes to be the stance of ne’emanim: valuing a tradition, idea, or belief not because of the validity of its truth claims but out of respect and commitment to the earlier generations who transmitted the account and the claims it makes. In other words, whether we have proof of the events at Sinai is irrelevant, when we have ne’emanut for those who report they have witnessed God’s revelation.
Buzaglo describes the transmission of Jewish tradition between parents and children as a key example of ne’emanut:
Receiving the moreshet (Jewish heritage) from our parents is not emun like the belief we have for someone who tells us stories about what they saw in a faraway land. We are ne’emanim to [our parents]: We listen to them in a singular way. We distinguish between our connection to them and our connection to other reporters. Parents also do not tell their story to the whole world. Their intended audience is limited from the start.[i]
Ne’emanut for Buzaglo indicates trust rooted in your connection to the speaker(s)—a unique and distinct voice among many, that you hear differently from all others because it is speaking specifically to you, in the context of your relationship with them. To be ne’eman is to listen carefully, lovingly, and with steadfastness, so as to receive something unique from the other party. The relational act of transmission is what carries moral weight. When one is ne’eman, one sees oneself as a link in a chain and takes on the role of continuing the chain into the future.
Inspired by Buzaglo, I’d like to define ne’emanut as a moral orientation in which certain relationships become ethical commitments in and of themselves. Ne’emanut implies steadfastness in one’s commitment towards another—beyond proclivity, preference, or just enjoying someone’s company. It locates in these relationships the power to help shape what is morally significant. A person can have ne’emanut with a range of entities beyond their family of origin: their spouse, God, or even their fellow citizens.
This notion of putting relationships with others at the core of our moral discourse is not unique to Buzaglo, to the concept of ne’emanut, or even to Jewish tradition. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argues for a system of ethics founded in our obligations to the Other. Feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Annette Baier advocate for an ethics of care and trust in place of systems of moral thinking based on concepts like justice. Broadly speaking, these thinkers and others challenge moral paradigms based on abstract and universal concepts, and argue instead for contextual, concrete, and embodied systems of morality that have relationships at their center.
In his work on virtue ethics, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre illustrates what a moral view of the self and the world looks like when we accept that our relationships are morally fundamental:
I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity…the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships.[ii]
MacIntyre describes the self in light of the “givens” of one’s life. His description of the embedded self and its resulting moral matrix of ethical demands aligns with the core notions underpinning ne’emanut.
For Jews, ne’emanut relates to the more particularistic aspects of Jewish tradition. It is tied to the notion of covenant—the belief that the Jewish people are bound to each other and to God in a unique way. We can also observe it at work in Jewish history. Whether by the vagaries of destiny or by divine providence, Jews have most often been a visible and distinct minority in their host societies, and I would argue that this historical reality strengthened the commitment among Jews: in the face of untold persecution and demands that they give up their particularistic attachments, Jews held onto their traditions and supported each other from a sense of deep commitment to their fellow Jews across time and space. My admiration of Doña Gracia Mendes is many-faceted, but one reason I hold her up as a moral exemplar is because of her ne’emanut to the Jewish people.
The particularity embedded in the framework of ne’emanut pushes back against limiting our moral discourse to a universal ethical system, such as that typified by Kant’s categorical imperative, which demands that we act on the basis of universal moral principles that apply to all human beings, regardless of context or situation. Ne’emanut introduces a moral language that broadens our ethical commitments beyond universal moral abstractions: our ethical positionality includes commitments that, in part, are local and unique to the network of relationships we find ourselves in.
To be clear, arguing that relationships are morally obligating does not entail a rejection or negation of other ethical categories (whether specifically Jewish or more general). In other words, I am not suggesting that ne’emanut be the only moral mandate in our lives, or even the value that should be prioritized in every situation. There are universal ethical principles such as fairness and freedom that we must also consider. But if we take ne’emanut seriously as a value, it means that our moral vocabulary and decision making must expand to also include moral positionalities shaped within specific relationships.
What makes ne’emanut different from other values is not only that it invites particularistic as opposed to universal application. I believe its qualitative uniqueness also is that it demands an ethical mandate in relationship with a dynamic subject and not an object within our imagination or discourse. Here the distinction between relating to an it versus relating to a thou is helpful for exploring more deeply what ne’emanut entails.[iii] Considering the it/thou binary allows us to establish the difference between a system of commitments centered on external objects (it) versus those commitments with subjects (thou). It’s the difference between faith in something versus commitment to someone.
One example of this is the difference between occupying oneself with a conversation about God versus relating to God directly as we do when we pray. Jewish liturgy directs our tongues to address God in the second person instead of philosophizing about the Divine: Barukh Atah Hashem, Blessed are you, God. And if we see each human in God’s image then we can describe those relationships in the same way, seeing them as a subject instead of an object.
Being committed to someone contrasts with having faith in something the same way that being friends with someone because you are committed to them as a person (a thou claiming your commitment) and being friends with someone because you share the same views (an it separate from the person that ties you to them). In the latter case, it is always possible that should the committed parties diverge on the it they have in common, the relationship will cease to have value; such alignment of views is not required for the ethical commitment to a thou at the heart of ne’emanut.
On the face of it, choice might seem the antithesis of ne’emanut. After all, the obligations we have to others that most clearly fit the paradigm of ne’emanut are the family relationships we are born into or have inherited. I have no choice about who my relatives are.
But there are some relationships involving ne’emanut where choice is crucially and clearly exercised. For example, Psalm 119 describes the related concept of emunah—ne’emanut toward God—as a path that can be chosen: “I have chosen the way of emunah; I have set Your rules before me” (Ps. 119:30).
This verse appears as the psalmist recounts his absolute devotion to God, repeatedly describing himself as God’s servant. He presents a portrait of n’eemanut to God which was once chosen freely, but later not experienced as a choice. It’s not unlike the way we understand conversion to Judaism: a convert chooses to join the covenant of the Jewish people, but once they have chosen, they are understood to have been the children of Abraham and Sarah from the very beginning. In other words, ne’emanut can entail choosing to be committed to another, and then living out that commitment as though this relationship was never a choice.
We can also see this attitude exemplified in the story of one of the most powerful examples of ne’emanut between two human beings in the Tanakh: the story of Ruth and Naomi. As Ruth tells her mother-in-law:
Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you” (Ruth 1:16-17).
At this moment, Ruth commits herself to Naomi with absolute steadfastness for her entire life, acting henceforth as if there is no choice. She commits herself not only to Naomi, but also to Naomi’s God and people as an extension of that commitment. Ruth does not say, “I bind myself to you because of our shared values” or “because I admire you as a person.” She simply says “I bind myself to you,” and, as a result, to all of Naomi’s encumbrances as well.
To be clear, in our discussion of relationships and steadfastness, we should recognize that there are moments when we should put an end to a relationship—whether chosen or by blood. I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting ne’emanut requires staying in an abusive relationship that causes deep harm. There are multiple commitments that guide our lives, and in cases of relationships that leave us bruised, it is imperative for us to walk away. Sometimes we will choose to elevate other values over ne’emanut, and at other times, our ne’emanut to two different subjects will conflict.
But such edge cases and moral dilemmas do not diminish my central point: ne’emanut entails an abiding commitment to the other. Nor does ne’emanut require the other party to reciprocate. Although there’s nothing to indicate that the biblical text proscribes or idealizes a one-sided covenant, it’s clear that Naomi doesn’t bind herself back to Ruth. Whatever the reasons for this, one thing is undeniably clear: the Bible presents this type of covenant—in which one person commits to another without expecting or receiving the same level of commitment in return—as an ethical good that a person might choose.
Part of the reason that I champion a life of ne’emanut is autobiographical. I am Sephardic, and I am a sociologist of Sephardic Jews. Both my family and the subjects of my research have a relationship with Jewish tradition distinct from the emphasis on ideology, belief, and religious practice that quite often characterizes traditional Ashkenazic communities. The Sephardic communities I know emphasize and idealize community and put relationships at the center of their Jewish practice.
One of the people whose love I felt most in my life is my Abuela Nory, of blessed memory. She was a deeply pious Sephardic Haredi woman who had limited formal education and whose general worldview was based on a socially conservative understanding of gender and family roles. She believed that women should be modest and thus should restrict certain public activities—teaching Torah, for example—to women-only or domestic spaces.
As a scholar and a community leader, I have not chosen to live this way, and Abuela Nory knew I spent much of my life violating the values she held most sacred. But she never told me that she disagreed with my less traditional lifestyle, nor did she try to bring me closer to her worldview. She simply related to me within the framework of ne’emanut. She showered me with loving words, encouraged me to treat her home as my own, and always wanted to know about my life. Abuela Nory was committed to our relationship unconditionally, despite my life not aligning with her values.
Because I have been the recipient of the gift of ne’emanut from someone with views radically different from mine, I have chosen time and again to practice ne’emanut in relationships with other people whose views and values are diametrically opposed to mine. I am in deep relationships, for instance, with many American citizens who vote differently than I do. I do not feel pressure to agree with their views, and I try to avoid the impulse to focus our interactions on trying to change them. I am present in these relationships, and I feel a deep commitment to them for their own sake—nothing more and nothing less.
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My relationship with the Jewish people around the world is defined by ties of ne’emanut. I see the Jewish people as my extended family, and I am committed to a relationship with them as a moral good. Just as within my family there are relatives I have never met and might never meet, so, too, with the Jewish people. Just as I feel a commitment to the people that make up my family even when we all disagree profoundly, so, too, with the Jewish people. And just like a family, new people can join and I can expand who I extend ne’emanut to.
This ne’emanut to the Jewish people is one of the main reasons why I value the land of Israel. This land has been the site of biblical shepherds and Israelite monarchs, the same site towards which millions of Jews in their different diasporas have oriented their bodies in supplicatory prayers and yearning. I feel blessed to live in a time when this same land has become (again) the geographic home of the largest community of Jews in the world. Thus, my ne’emanut toward the people of Israel extends not only to the land but also to the state of Israel. I see the state of Israel as imbued with ethical significance, simply because it has proven to be the most historically transformational site for the thriving and safety of my people.
A relationship of ne’emanut with Israel—one that includes my extended Jewish family in Israel, the land they inhabit, and the state that sustains them—is not instrumental for some other, higher purpose.[iv] The relationship is not conditional on whether Israel is morally exceptional, a light among nations, or living up to its commitments to God. These are worthwhile aims, but separate from ne’emanut, which exists independently of any means to an end. This ne’emanut carries with it all the precious complexities of being in a relationship not with static objects, but with dynamically complex subjects.
This complexity is especially important for us to consider because, all too often, American Jewish discourse approaches Israel as an object of discussion rather than as a subject in a shared relationship. Consider all the many programs and institutions that use Israel as a site where American Jews might figure out what it means to be Jewish. Already in 1996, historian Jonathan Sarna described American Jewish myths of Zion as more reflective of American Jewish needs than anything else:
All these images [of Israel], whatever truth they may have contained, took on mythic proportions in America. They embodied American Jews’ yearnings and dreams, responded to their psychological, political, and emotional needs, and helped them to counter the malicious slurs of their enemies. The Zion of the American Jewish imagination, in short, became something of a fantasy land: a seductive heaven-on-earth, where enemies were vanquished, guilt assuaged, hopes realized, and deeply felt longings satisfied.[v]
Often without realizing it and with the best intentions, American Jews have used Israel instrumentally, as a thing to help them figure out who we are, instead of relating to it as a subject. Changing that approach and adopting ne’emanut towards Israel would allow American Jews to better navigate difficult discourse about Israel, while helping us avoid two key potential pitfalls in the way we relate to it.
First, ne’emanut to Israel helps us avoid the lure of feeling we have to be its constant defenders— hasbarah warriors who must find a way to justify each of the state’s actions. Being committed to a relationship does not necessitate or demand agreement or alignment in how we see the world. Being in ne’emanut with Israel is not unquestioning loyalty. In fact, commitment to Israel through the relational lens of ne’emanut means a steadfast investment in the relationship itself, even when we speak different languages and have different politics. We can be as critical as we want of the government of Israel—indeed, I believe at times, ne’emanut demands deep and loud protest. We need not debate the particulars of this or that policy to remain steadfast, to refuse to walk away. Itzhak Charequi, a French Sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem, argues that because the Jewish people is like an extended family, it is obvious that we will fight with one other; this is what families do![vi]
Second, ne’emanut allows us to avoid the seduction of conditioning our relationship with Israel on our ability to change or reform it. Too many American Zionists have a relationship with Israel that is conditional on its transformation. I don’t think this is good politics, and I don’t think it is a good recipe for relationships: no one wants to feel that their own change is the end goal of a relationship.
Admittedly, this understanding of ne’emanut and its accompanying affirmation of a particular people is directly at odds with a morality that puts the universal above the particular. In her writings against nationalism, philosopher Martha Nussbaum articulates what she takes to be wrong about such a worldview:
Once someone has said, I am an Indian first, a citizen of the world second, once he or she has made that morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrelevant characteristic, then what, indeed, will stop that person from saying[,] I am a Hindu first and an Indian second, or I am an upper-caste landlord first, and a Hindu second? Only the cosmopolitan [has] the promise of transcending these divisions, because only this stance asks us to give our first allegiance to what is morally good—and that which, being good, I can commend as such to all human beings (emphasis mine).[vii]
For Nussbaum, the primary morally relevant characteristics are allegiances that all human beings can share. Instead of deepening divisions by aligning with this or that nation, the morally correct thing to do is to try to widen our circle of obligation and attention to universal humanity. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that particularistic attachment such as ne’emanut towards Israel is at best morally irrelevant and should be transformed into a set of universal commitments.
But Nussbaum’s analysis lacks any sense of the particular obligations or debts we owe to those we are closest to. My ethical commitments also involve the local and unique network of relationships I find myself in, and those obligations and debts I have incurred as a result of the covenant I share with them. Her universalist ethics cannot make sense of ne’emanut towards Israel any more than it can make sense of ne’emanut towards my son and his siddur. A life determined by the upholding of universal philosophical abstractions cannot account for relationships.
Offering ne’emanut as an answer to the question, “Why Israel?” allows North American Jews to consider what it would mean to approach Israel as the subject of a relationship and not the object of our political and moral aspirations.
But this approach also comes with a whole host of questions: Is American Jewish ne’emanut towards Israel reciprocated by Israeli Jews—and if not, is it sustainable? What is a moral response towards a subject with whom we have a relationship if they are harming others? How do we navigate conflicts between ne’emanut to competing individuals or groups? Can Jews relate to one another with ne’emanut without treating non-Jews with indifference or intolerance? What moral orientation towards Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel should ne’emanut for Israeli Jews engender? These and other questions have only grown sharper in the wake of this recent Israeli election, in which a party led by the disciples of Meir Kahane (whose racist values are in total opposition with my understanding of the Jewish covenant and human morality) won enough votes to be the third largest party in the Knesset.
These are hard and complicated questions without easy answers. Those of us who are dedicated to Israel through the prism of ne’emanut must confront them. But exploring these questions does not preclude engaging with the concept of ne’emanut to help us imagine a better path forward for American Jewish-Israel relationships.
I count myself among the many liberal American Jews who continue to feel a sense of peoplehood and extended family for Jews around the world. While we reject unexamined loyalty towards Israel’s actions, we also don’t want a relationship with Israel based on alienation or defined entirely by critique. We must work to craft a confident and honest language of ne’emanut.
My aspirational Zionism contains multitudes. It includes what I would love to see in the land, state, and people of Israel. It is also about a relationship based on ne’emanut between American Jews and Israel. And most of all, my aspirational Zionism is for ne’emanut itself—to see the fierce dedication it inspires lodge and take root in the Jewish people across the world.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2022.
Notes
[i] Meir Buzaglo, Safa Lene’emanim: Machashavot Al Masoret (Keter Sfarim, 2008), 35. My translation.
[ii] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 220.
[iii] Martin Buber popularized the distinction between I-it and I-Thou relationships. Martin Buber, I and Thou (Simon and Schuster, 1970). I am using these terms a bit differently.
[iv] My use of “Israel” to include the interrelated people/state/land is similar to how many would colloquially use the term “America.”
[v] Jonathan D. Sarna, “A Projection of America As It Ought to Be: Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews,” Envisioning Israel (Wayne State University Press, 1996), 41.
[vi] Isaac Chouraqui, “Judaism as Family,” in Kol Hator: Tziyonut Masoratit-Sepharadit, ed. Ophir Tobul (Yediot Sefarim, 2021).
[vii] Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 5.
