NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!

(In Hebrew: L’Shanah HaBa’ah B’Yerushalayim, Next Year in Jerusalem, is the traditional phrase said at the end of the Pesach Seder, Yom Kippur services, and on numerous other occasions. This entry is about Jewish Zionism, but there are at least two distinctly different, even incompatible types of Zionism: religious and secular.)

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” (Psalm 137:5.)

“The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine, secured by public law, and, for the attainment of this end, it is necessary to promote the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers; organize Jews, through local and general associations; strengthen Jewish national sentiment and consciousness; and take preparatory steps toward obtaining the government consent needed to achieve the aim of Zionism.” (From the so-called Basel Program, adopted by the First Zionist Congress, Basel, August 29, 1897, written by Max Nordau, and amended by Theodor Herzl.)

The beauty (figuratively and aesthetically speaking) of Haskala, and, at the same time, its congenital flaw, was its pipedream of a Jewish assimilation into Western society and secular culture (not necessarily giving up the Jewish religion, although the latter had to be impossible, in view of the strict dissimilationism of the Jewish religious identity--that was how Reform Judaism, an extremely watered-down version of “Judaism,” was born out of a Haskala compromise). The totally discredited by malpractice Messianic Zionism of yore was nowhere to be found among the Jews anymore, but a very different type of Zionism flourished among the so-called Christian Zionists. (Priorly referred to as restorationists, dispensationalists, or millenarians, their crazy breed had originated in Europe and was, naturally, brought to America, formerly an exception, but now virtually the rule among the American Evangelicals, plus several other Christian denominations. The most conspicuous latest example is the current [2012] Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a Mormon Christian Zionist.)

The Haskala had been, of course, a West-European creation. The religious Jews of Eastern Europe had no desire to assimilate, but, in reaction to a wave of pogroms in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they developed a desire to move. Where else could they move, but to Palestine, and thus the organization called Lovers of Zion was born, which not only had nothing to do with Messianism, but, quite the contrary, was vehemently opposed to it, on religious grounds. Any new “Messiah” for them would have been an outright blasphemy, whereas a fulfillment of the Messianic dream without a Messiah would have been an insanity. They just wanted to move closer to the ultimate Jewish home, and there to be left alone.

Theirs was not the kind of move that could ever generate the Zionist movement, as history knows it today. The first spark had to be struck in the enlightened West, yet by someone who had to be well familiar with the experience of anti-Jewish prejudice. And so it was, courtesy of a Hungarian Jew in Paris at the time of L’Affaire Dreyfus.
Before we talk about the man, the Hungarian Jewish journalist and extraordinary political activist Theodor Herzl, a few words about the place, France.

France has played a very special role in Jewish history, and it occupies a special place in the Jewish psyche. I had the experience of attending Jewish ultra-Orthodox religious services, to discover that in every shul the singing of a Jewish prayer to the stirring tune of La Marseillaise is a mandatory part of the weekly ritual. It is an unusual tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, a hero to the Yiddishkeit.(One of the two most celebrated and world-renowned Righteous Gentiles: Napoleon, who gave the Jews their civil rights, and the other one was Stalin (sic!!!), who saved some two million Jews from Hitler’s Holocaust by having relocated them East in the wake of the temporary annexation of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union under the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.)

Napoleon was an idol in the Jewish eyes. Even his impractical idea, expressed back in 1799, of establishing a national Jewish state within the confines of their historical home of ancient Israel (impractical in 1799 but visionary, as it turned out!), has naturally been endearing to them as a sensitive and commendable effort on his part to return their home to the Jews. Yet, even France, the land of the Great Revolution, the birthplace of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would not hold her enlightened good will toward the Jews for very long. In fact, Napoleon himself as he was ending his turbulent life in the last exile to St. Helena, bitterly complained to his faithful servant Gaspard Gourgaud (who is already mentioned in several other sections as a multiple recipient of Napoleonic wisdom): “The Jews were a cowardly and cruel people!”
I wonder what the Jews could have done to him, to deserve such bitterness. Could it have had something to do with his ultimate defeat, being drawn into the Russian misadventure, and set up one against all?...

After Napoleon, France was sliding into an anti-Jewish bias anyway, whatever Napoleon’s bitter experience with the Jews had to do with it, culminating, of course, in the scandalous Dreyfus affair. There, in Paris, in the last years of the nineteenth century, was the rocket of modern-day Zionism launched through the nearly superhuman effort of one man, Theodor Herzl.

The incredible significance of Herzl, not only in Jewish history, but in the modern history of the world, has been definitely underappreciated, and I am strongly recommending to my reader to read more about him in the available sources of information. He died in 1904, of a heart failure, at the age of 44, but the spark that he had struck by the sheer force of his will and determination, grew into a conflagration, out of which arose the modern State of Israel. In the aftermath of that First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, Herzl wrote in his diary: “If I had to sum up the Basel Congress in one word, which I shall not do openly, it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly, in fifty, everyone will see it.”

This new Zionism was a grandiose achievement of the Jewish people, and certainly one of the greatest, by a single man. However, the rise of Zionism, being the rise of a new militant Jewish nationalism, was destined to defeat the whole purpose of Haskala, to polarize the world opinion on the Judenfrage, and to destroy the amazing symbiosis between the Jews and the Islamic world. What it can still portend, though, if one listens with some attention to the rhetoric of the Christian Zionists, the most dangerous “friends” of Israel,  is a far greater Jewish Holocaust than Hitler’s, in numerical figures, and than Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Holocaust, in percentages. In Christian parlance, this is called the Apocalypse, the necessary stepping stone to the second coming of Christ.

Judging from my conversations with a number of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, very few Haredim are happy with the phenomenon of Messiah-less Zionism. Many have grave forebodings of the unsettling things to come, and they blame the Zionists, who should have known better. I disagree. Whatever the costs, nothing can or could ever have been done about it. Like all hurricanes, earthquakes, and other “Acts of God,” Zionism was inevitable, and the modern Jewish State of Israel is an objective geopolitical reality, whether one likes it or not. There are many nations in the world today, besides the State of Israel, whose raison d’être has been far less legitimate, yet the world has to learn how to deal with its many problems. First and foremost, equitable solutions must be sought. Unlike some doom-and-gloomers, I believe that a practical solution is possible in Israel’s case too, without any infringement on Israel’s right to exist. But the otherwise doable task becomes impossible when the already fragile political balance in Israel is upset by her ideologically biased American sponsors, advisers, and arbiters.