Zionism and Power: The Challenge of Our Time
WHY ISRAEL NOW?Donniel Hartman
Donniel Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, author of Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself, and host of “For Heaven’s Sake,” one of the most popular Jewish podcasts in North America.
Zionism and Jewish statehood demand the embracing and valuing of power. Without power—soft power and its currency of persuasion and influence as well as hard power based on access to coercive military and economic measures—Israel would never have been established, and it would not have survived in the hostile Middle East. In its early years, Israel's power was tenuous, bordering on the aspirational. But in the aftermath of its victory in the 1967 war, Goliath-like power became integral to Israel’s reality. Furthermore, power came to define Israel's national identity. Israel's power was magnetic, drawing support for the country from around the world, and placing Israel at the center of Jewish consciousness. It catalyzed a newfound sense of Jewish pride and identity, and repositioned not just Israel, but the whole Jewish people as serious actors on the world stage.
But as Shakespeare has taught, one’s greatest strength can also beget one’s greatest weakness. For many of us, this power is losing some of its luster, becoming instead a source of discomfort, and, at times, alienation. As we progress further into the 21st century, Israel’s power, principally its hard power, is serving its legitimate security needs, but also enabling it to sustain the Occupation and the morally problematic status quo in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
Nothing represents the transformation in the role of power in Israel more than the recent elections in Israel, and the rise of the popular ultra-nationalist politician, Itamar Ben Gvir, and his party, Otzmah Yehudit, which literally means Jewish Power or Might. As the name of the party denotes, its members view power as an end, and they exalt its exercise. As Ben Gvir proudly declared on election night, his success would return the Jews to their rightful position as the “owners” of the country. In his followers' eyes, power over others—non-Israelis and non-Jewish Israelis—is a national and divinely ordained right.
As an Israeli, I appreciate the gifts that Israel’s power has afforded my people and me. As a Zionist, I value power and embrace it. I recognize that power is a means—a necessary one—but not an end in itself. It is also one of the central answers to the question of why Israel is important in my life, and what I believe it contributes to the Jewish people: by granting the Jewish people access to power, Israel has made it possible for us to shape our future. Israel has redeemed us from the indignity of powerlessness, of living off the grace, whim, and will of others. As an Israeli, I embrace the fact that I have a voice and the power to support that voice in shaping my life and determining my future.
However, though I embrace power as a gift, I have never glorified it. It is a gift, an essential tool, but at the same time, its potential for abuse and injustice haunts me. While Israel may be able to physically survive as an ultra-nationalist-leaning state, like those arising today throughout Europe and the world, as such, it will no longer be a manifestation of the Jewish and Zionist dream to represent the best of Judaism and the Jewish people. It will certainly no longer be able to answer the question: “Why Israel?” for liberal Jews in and outside of Israel. Liberal Jews, in particular, need an approach to power that is commensurate with our values—a narrative that recognizes the need for power as well as its dangers. The aim of this article is to articulate such an approach to Jewish power.
In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis Chapters 1 and 2 present two parallel and alternate stories of creation, of God, and of humanity and their relationship with power. In Genesis 1, Judaism’s attitude towards power begins with the first verse: “When God began to create heaven and earth” (Gen. 1:1). These words, the Bible’s first introduction of God, accentuate divine power. It is this power that enables God to create the world from nothing, to will things into being, to speak a command and for it to be immediately actualized. Throughout the first six days of the world’s creation, God is the master, with the freedom and power to shape everything in accordance with God’s will.
In this story, the association of power with God and the positing of it as the catalyst of creation makes power a virtue, a quality befitting God, and a tool for producing good in the world: “And God saw all that God had made and found it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Initially, God is the sole agent of power. But this changes on the sixth day, when God chooses to create human beings in the image of God, so that they will “rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth” (Gen. 1:26). Unlike all of prior creation, only humankind is created with a designated purpose, and that purpose is to rule over the rest of creation. In essence, God, the master of power, bestows power on human beings, so that they can fulfill their mission of sharing with God the responsibility of being the masters of the world. The text says that God creates humankind in God’s image, with the divine image referring to the capacity to marshal power to achieve one’s desired end. To be human, fully human, is to be a being of power. This story teaches one to value and embrace human power as a gift. It promulgates the belief that the exercise of power is a means to manifest human destiny, essential to the meaning of human life.
The second creation story, presented in Genesis 2, offers an alternate narrative of power. Here, too, the story begins with God characterized as the sole master of great power. However, in this creation story, God never transfers or gives any power to humankind; human beings never become mini-Gods tasked with ruling the world and mastering it. As a result, human beings are not described as beings created in the image of God. They are placed in a garden created for them by God and given a mission of living in the garden “to till it and tend it” (Gen. 2:15).
While bereft of their own power, the human beings of the second creation story nevertheless have access to the fruits of God’s power through fidelity to the will of God. God creates the Garden and offers humanity the possibility to live there and benefit from its gifts, but only if they obey God’s commands.
And the Lord commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die” (Gen. 2:16-17).
In short, in the second creation story, power is exclusively God’s, and instead of sharing this power, God shares its dividends with those who follow God’s will. This stands in contrast to the first creation story, where humans share power with God and are not dependent on God’s beneficence to access it.
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Looking back at the 20th century, we can see these two narratives of power expressed in the Jewish people’s differing relationships with the Zionist project. The principal opposition to Zionism came from within the ultra-Orthodox community, which remained faithful to the model of power expressed in the second creation story. For them, power was to be held exclusively by God, with the people Israel only able to access it through faith and fidelity to the laws of Torah. Reestablishing Jewish sovereignty was perceived as a divine endeavor, not a human one. In this framework, human efforts to marshal power on their own were not merely destined to fail, but were understood as rebellion against God. This was particularly the case due to the fact that the lead agents of Zionism and Zionism's objective—the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people—were both predominantly secular in nature. For the ultra-Orthodox, God would ingather the exiles of the Jewish people and reestablish the kingdom of David, to be governed by Torah law, only when God so willed it. In the meantime, the responsibility of a Genesis 2 Jew was to pray, study, live a life in accordance with Torah, and most significantly, faithfully wait for God to use the power that God alone possessed to change the course of Jewish history.
Zionism’s proponents, on the other hand, were a version of Genesis 1 Jews—even if, due to their ambivalence toward the Jewish tradition, they did not know it. Zionism was founded on the belief that human beings are not only empowered but obligated to shape their own destiny. Zionists aspired to create a new Jew who was free from the shackles of the Genesis 2 ideology and the passivity it engenders—for them, the archetype for the diaspora Jew. Zionists tasked themselves with creating a Jew of muscle and power, one who embraces and masters nature, the land, and most significantly, his or her individual and national destiny—the person described in Genesis 1. The charge of Zionism to the Jewish people was not to wait, but to act.
When I first experienced the Zionist embrace of Genesis 1 power for myself, it changed my life. It was in the fall of 1976 in the Sinai desert. As a soldier newly conscripted into the tank corps, my first designated position was that of loader. (There are four positions: commander, gunner, driver, and loader.) The loader is a critical job, for no matter how advanced the tank, or how skilled the commander and gunner, if the shells are not loaded into the tank’s cannon properly, quickly, and when needed, everyone will die. At the time, I weighed under 105 pounds and lacked the physical strength to lift 50-65-pound shells, let alone load them continuously and quickly, as I would be required to do in battle.
I vividly remember to this very day, how, during the three months of my training, I was never allowed to rest. Whenever the unit had time off —during the hot afternoon or late at night—my commander would call me: “Donniel, come! Time to practice.” Over and over and over again. I was exhausted, every muscle that I lacked ached, but failure was not an option. Our lives depended on it. Day after day, I improved. I was motivated by knowing that if I trained, if I pushed myself beyond my capacity, if I found new capabilities, my family and my country could survive. It was on my inadequate shoulders, in my hands, and in the hands of my fellow soldiers. In those months in the Sinai desert, I was transformed into a player in shaping the future of my people. I became a Genesis 1 Jew. Though the constant practice was torture, I also remember this as one of the proudest moments in my life. I love my country for giving me this gift.
When we turn back to the Bible, we see that Judaism’s two narratives of power are quickly subjected to an interesting twist, when human beings fail the power guidelines of both creation stories. The first act of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is to eat precisely from the only tree that is forbidden to them. Though, as Abraham Joshua Heschel posits, the God of Judaism may be in search of man, humanity seems to have an inherent difficulty submitting to the will of God. Adam and Eve’s fall and subsequent banishment from the Garden become a paradigm for the Jewish people’s life with God through the Bible, leading ultimately to their exile from the Promised Land, the possession of which is similarly conditioned on the Genesis 2 model of power:
Be sure to keep the commandments, decrees, and laws that the Lord your God has enjoined upon you. Do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you and that you may be able to possess the good land the Lord your God promised on oath to your fathers (Deut. 6:17-18).
The fall, however, is not limited to the second creation story alone. Genesis 4 depicts humanity’s failure to embrace their responsibilities as put forth in the first creation story, when Cain murders his brother. To understand the nature of this failure, let’s return for a moment to God’s charge to humankind in Genesis 1: God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it: and rule the fish of sea, the birds of the sky, and all the creeping things that creep on earth” (Gen. 1:28). As beings equipped with power and charged to master and rule the world, humanity’s mission is limited to the exercise of dominion over the animal world. Explicitly excluded from the purview of human dominion are other human beings, their fellow partners in this mission. But it is precisely this limitation that Cain breaches, as he uses his power to murder Abel. Beginning with Cain, the abuse of power, using it to steal and harm others, becomes endemic to the human enterprise. Soon,
The Lord saw how great was human’s wickedness on Earth, and how every plan devised by the human mind was evil all the time…The earth became corrupt before God and the earth was filled with lawlessness” (Gen. 6:5, 11).
This lawlessness leads God to attempt to reset the world by destroying the wicked with a terrible flood while preserving the righteous. But this divine “do-over” is also a failure. God comes to understand that despite being created in the divine image, humankind is inclined to abuse power, as “the devisings of humankind are evil from their youth” (Gen. 9:21).
The Bible addresses the human propensity to abuse power with an amendment, a “patch” in the form of a commandment: “Whoever sheds the blood of humans by other humans shall their blood be shed, for in God’s image did God make humankind” (Gen. 9:6). With this commandment, the Bible sets limits on how human beings may use the power God has given them. In addition to making humankind God’s partner in ruling the world, being created in the image of God endows each human being with infinite value. And it is precisely this value that prohibits the taking of other human life.
In many ways, Genesis 9 rejects the fatalistic conception of human nature that God exhibits in declaring that “the devisings of the human mind are evil from their youth.” To command is to have expectations and to believe that obedience is possible. Genesis 9 thus expands the first creation story’s narrative of power, to include the possibility of humanity being able to control their use of power. Today, humankind continues to have the power to choose how to use power. We have the power to choose the good.
It is interesting to notice that the Bible does not present the prohibition against taking a human life as a categorical imperative, binding in all instances. The same verse that prohibits the taking of another human life simultaneously commands taking the life of a murderer, distinguishing between just and unjust killings. Though Genesis 9 would seem to be a formal sanctioning of capital punishment, the rabbis debate its permissibility extensively, setting limitations upon it, and according to some rabbis, abolishing it (mMakkot 9:1). In contrast, Jewish tradition has long seen self-defense as not only legitimate and just, but as a moral obligation. Bamidbar Rabbah states, “If someone comes to kill you, precede them and kill them first” (21:4). Killing in self-defense does not entail the violation of the value of another’s life, but the embracing of the value of one’s own.
When Israel's power is confined to Jews taking ownership of their destiny and engaging in act of self-defense against those who want to destroy them, the moral foundations of Israel and its power are strong. The fundamental challenge, however, is to determine and control the parameters of self-defense. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the disagreement between the two sides of who started what part of the fight, and who offered what concession for peace, has generated a reality in which each side believes it acts from a position of self-defense, perceiving the other as the perennial aggressor. The very name of the Israel Defense Forces is a claim that it can do no wrong.
Since Israelis presume that Israel offered peace and the Palestinians said no, they accept that the use of their power is the only viable remedy to Israel’s dangers. The disproportionate power of the Israeli military accelerates acceptance of this perspective, and instead of exploring and implementing other political options, one's power becomes one's most trusted ally. From within the context of a self-defense mindset where one experiences constant aggression and danger, it is difficult to remember that power, while a value, is but a means to be used only if other options are exhausted.
Furthermore, within the context of an ongoing conflict against an enemy aggressor, the impetus to explore non-power or even soft power options is weak, hidden behind veils of self-indignation and righteousness, not to mention national pride. It is these sentiments that have generated the increased support Israel's ultra-nationalist parties brought to the recent election.
But we must remember, our greatest strength can also beget our greatest weakness. I celebrate Israel’s success in amassing disproportionate power over our enemies. I love our power and feel no need to apologize for the fact that Israel is now stronger than those who seek its destruction. I remember fighting on an M48—a cutting-edge tank in the time of the Korean War—and coming up against the Russian T72 tank when we had no shell that could penetrate its superior armor. I love the fact that Israel now has the most advanced tank in the world, the Merkava 4Bs, which can destroy any enemy tank in the Middle East. I love the fact that our children, my children, who have taken my place in the front line, can be safer than we were.
That said, we need to recognize that this sort of power is intoxicating and inherently corrupting. Our power enables us to control the Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. For some, it is a legitimate tool to lord over Israel's Palestinian minority. However, power will not afford us peace, either within Israel or with our neighbors. Peace in the sense of relative quiet, yes, but peaceful coexistence, and justice for Israel and Palestinian, no. Israel’s power is no longer merely a means of enabling its bright and great future. It is becoming a means of survival alone, undermining our need to explore new options for a better future. It is the bulwark protecting Israel as it is, instead of serving as the foundation for building Israel as it can and ought to be. Our narrative of power must embrace the moral right and obligation of self-defense, and at the same time transcend it.
The prohibition against the unjust taking of human life is not only threatened by an overly expansive attitude of self-defense. It can also be undermined by God’s use of power, or more accurately, by those who paradoxically embrace the Genesis 2 narrative of a more passive humanity and then use it to justify their abuse of power. Let me explain.
Ostensibly, only Genesis 1 power is corruptible. The fall in Genesis 2 does not result from human abuse of power, for humans only have power over their choices, not over others. Here, power over others belongs exclusively to God. The fall is the result of failing to follow God’s guidelines as to how to access God’s power and the gifts that accompany it. Nevertheless, the Genesis 2 model faces an even more insidious potential for abuse. When God is the exclusive master of power, it follows that all human exercises of power must be, by definition, extensions of God’s hand and might, and their success evidence of God’s involvement and blessing.
Any taking of life may be justified when human exercises of power are understood as belonging to God. A powerful and especially disturbing biblical example of this is found in the book of Deuteronomy, where Israel’s wars of aggression against all “towns that lie very far from you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout,” (Deut.20:15) are legitimized and even sanctified. As these towns inhabit a part of the world that lies “very far from you,” there can be no pretext of self-defense. Yet the Bible describes these wars in the following manner:
When you take the field against your enemies, and see horses and chariots—forces larger than yours—have no fear of them; for the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, is with you… And when the Lord your God delivers it [the town] into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword…and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the Lord your God gives you (Deut. 20:1; 20:13-14; emphasis mine).
With these verses, the war becomes God’s war—and with that idea, though it might be abusing the power humanity was given in Genesis 1, Israel’s actions can still fit within the narrative of power found in Genesis 2. Deuteronomy excuses all of Israel’s Genesis 1 abuses under the blanket of a Genesis 2 rationale. It is Israel that is supposedly going to war, but it is God who is fighting and who delivers the “enemy” of Israel into its hand. As a result, despite the prohibition against murder, all such wars are sanctioned.
One of the great flaws of monotheism is its potential to allow human beings to control and manipulate the idea of the God of power, and to present religious legislation to legitimize their own nefarious behavior. The Bible can attempt to guide human behavior, but human action disguised as God’s is immune from the effects of such guidance.
One of the great paradoxes of Zionism is that it did not merely create Genesis 1 Jews, individuals empowered to take their destiny into their own hands; individuals responsible for their lives, but at the same time, responsible for their moral choices. In establishing the state of Israel in the holy land of the Jewish people, a people that has believed in their Covenant with God and in the idea that they are God's chosen people, Zionism has guaranteed that no matter how secular the Jewish state might be, God will always be a part of the discourse. The state describes soldiers who fight and die for Israel as martyrs who died al kiddush hashem, to sanctify God's name. Today, the influential Religious Zionist camp, which has viewed Zionism from its inception as a joint human and divine messianic endeavor, magnifies this danger dramatically.
There are ever-growing numbers of Israelis who see state power as a gift of God, and our enemies as God’s enemies. It is not by accident that the Otzma Yehudit party joined forces with the National Religious Party, and ran under a joint list. This mindset creates an atmosphere in which the rights of “God’s enemies” are never paramount, and it legitimizes discrimination. When these sensibilities guide our narrative of power, Jewish nationalism morphs into ultra-nationalism.
Israel’s possession of hard power obligates it to develop a new reading of the Genesis 2 narrative, in order to disarm its potential abuses of that power. Here, too, our tradition offers guidance.
Can the God of Genesis 2 abuse divine power? Is God subject to the same limitations on power that God imposes on humanity? The Bible, through the figure of Abraham in the famous story of Sodom, argues in the affirmative to both. Abraham believes that God can both fail and act unjustly, and that consequently, God is subject to the same moral limitations on power as humans. After hearing of God’s plan to wipe out the population of Sodom, Abraham calls God to account for what he perceives to be a blatantly immoral use of power.
What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You wipe out the place and not forgive for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that the innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly? (Gen. 18:24-25).
God, like all of humankind, is prohibited from taking the life of the innocent. Not only must humankind act justly, but so too, the Judge of all the earth. Israel’s power, whether a manifestation of Genesis 1 or 2, is governed by the same standards of justice.
In Israel today, we are in the midst of a culture war over the future of Israel's identity and the Jewish values it will embody. There are new forces, quoting biblical chapter and verse, who are idealizing power in unprecedented ways. They view moral guidelines placed on the IDF as weakness and defeatism. They sanctify Israel’s power as a manifestation of God's will. They undermine Israel's legitimacy by claiming that everything that it does is by definition legitimate. Genesis 1 and 2, especially when read through the prisms of Genesis 9 and 18, offer us a different path. In the culture war being waged in Israel today, we need to ensure that this path prevails. As a people of power, we are not only invited to become the masters of our destiny, but the masters of our narrative of power. We have the power to choose how we use our power. Zionism is about the empowering of the Jewish people—our becoming morally responsible Genesis 1 and 2 Jews. The essence of a liberal Jewish narrative of power, and indeed of liberal Zionism itself, is the understanding that the next stage of Zionism and the state of Israel must be about taking responsibility not only for the defense of our people, but for our moral future.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2022.
