PHILOSOPHY OF THE TALMUD

Whereas I have paradoxically denied the philosophical quality to the Bible (see my earlier entry Philosophy Of The Bible, posted on this blog on May 23^rd, 2012), the same cannot be said of the Talmud, and anyone who has read portions of the Talmud, as I have (I cannot imagine anyone in the modern world, except for a handful of very Orthodox rabbis, who may have read the Talmud even once in toto), has to come out of this reading with the clear impression that this great collective work is all about philosophizing on a broad variety of subjects, from the Torah to the littlest practicalities of life.

Philosophizing is indeed the essence of the Talmud. Like the Kabbalists of the later era, who delved into the mysteries of God, the Talmudists delved into the mysteries of the Word of God, dissecting the Torah down to the letter, but, unlike some dry analytical scholar, infusing the genius of their wild imagination into their effort, and thus amply deserving the magnificent title of “philosophizer” to be bestowed upon them.

Their fantasy brings philosophy to the dawn of the ages. It is the art in which the consummately mysterious ‘Melchizedek king of Salem and the priest of the most high God’ (Gen. 14:18) purportedly instructs Abram. The Talmudists are also pointing out that the Book of Psalms contains invitations to “admire the wisdom of Hashem through his works” which is nothing short of an insistent invitation to the Talmud reader to engage in the practice of philosophizing, thus creating a highly commendable philosophical foundation to Judaism.

…I might only wish that our modern Gentile admirers of Israel in America had a similar admiration for the spirit of the Talmud, and had thought of adopting the philosophizing intellectual adventurism of the Yeshiva educational system in American schools, doing away with the most contemptible system of multiple choice, breeding slave mentality in its young student victims. (See my various entries on this subject, including the sarcastic Freedom Of…Multiple Choice, posted on January 16, 2011, as part of the eponymous mega-entry.)

WHO IS A JEW?

Who is a Jew? Conventional wisdom is straightforward about it: One’s Jewishness is determined by either of the two criteria: the ethnic criterion and/or the religious criterion. End of story.

Paradoxically our conventional wisdom is wrong. It takes too much for granted. A perfectly Jewish-looking individual with a perfectly Jewish name, like, say, Shmuel Ben-David, is not automatically eligible for such an identification. Technically speaking, if his maternal grandmother wasn’t Jewish, and unless some Jewish Orthodox rabbi had converted his mother (or him)  to Judaism, he may not be formally recognized as a Jew... unless he should appeal to common sense, regarding his ethnicity, and at the same time successfully conceal the awkward fact concerning his non-Jewish maternal grandmother, which makes him ineligible for Yiddishkeit.

In other words, legally speaking, the two formal criteria of Jewishness are matrilineal heredity, or properly established religious affiliation. Ethnicity, in this case, has very little to do with it. Moreover, a proper Jew's mother, who makes him an uncontestable Jew in the eyes of the Jewish Law, does not have to be ethnically Jewish herself!

This does not mean of course that our unfortunate Shmuel Ben-David will be treated unsympathetically by the traditional old-school Jews, whose very practical criterion of Jewishness is whether such a person could have been suspected as a Jew in Nazi Germany and sent to Auschwitz as a result. Yet formalities cannot be overlooked in some cases, and the ensuing paradox cannot always be swept under the rug. So let us return to the title question again, and perhaps again.

Halakhically, there are two and only two ways of how a person can be a Jew. One, the most natural one is to be the child of an undisputedly Jewish mother. The other one is through a religious conversion, which meets the rigid criteria of legitimacy imposed by the qualified religious authority, normally consisting of Orthodox rabbis, members of the religious court called the Beth Din.

This short set of two strict criteria sounds simple enough, but in reality the situation with the second one is a subject of major, still ongoing controversy. By now we know that certain self-proclaimed Jews are treated as impostors by the State of Israel, and also, that there are Beth Dins and “beth dins,” the latter, of the non-orthodox denominations not recognized as legitimate by the Orthodox rabbis especially in Israel where they hold great political power.

Now, the following excerpt from Wikipedia’s article Who is a Jew? is important as an additional reference item:

“Who is a Jew?” is a basic question about Jewish identity  and considerations of Jewish self-identification. The question has gained particular prominence in connection with several high-profile legal cases in Israel since 1962, and in 2009 there was a prominent and controversial court case (regarding admissions to Jewish Free Schools) in the United Kingdom, about this question.

The definition of who is a Jew varies, according to whether it is being considered by Jews on the basis of normative religious statutes and self-identification, or by non-Jews for their own purposes. Because Jewish identity can include characteristics of an ethnicity, a religion, and citizenship, the definition of who is a Jew has varied depending on whether a religious, sociological, or ethnic aspect was being considered.
According to the Halakhah, the oldest normative definition used by Jews for self-identification, a person is matrilineally a Jew by birth, or he becomes one through conversion to Judaism. Adherence to this definition has been challenged since the emergence of the Karaite sect, emergence of modern groups in Judaism since the 19^th century, and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Issues that have been raised reflect:
---Child’s non-Jewish mother: i.e. whether a child born of a non-Jewish mother should be considered Jewish through the father’s Jewish identity.
---Conversion: i.e. what process of conversion, other than the normative orthodox procedure, is considered valid.
---Historical loss of Jewish identity: i.e. whether a person’s or a group’s actions (such as a conversion to a different religion) or circumstances in his/her or community's life (such as being unaware of Jewish parents) should affect his or her Jewish status.
---Diaspora identity: identity of Jews among themselves, and by non-Jews throughout the Jewish Diaspora.
---Claim to Israeli citizenship: the examination of the three previous issues in the context of the Basic Laws of Israel.

So, has the question of who is a Jew been answered to anybody’s satisfaction? I guess it will never be, like so many other questions rising around and within res Judaica.

(A discussion of other thorny issues continues in my entry Abraham Versus Moses, published on my blog on May 7^th, 2012.)

JEWISH DIASPORA’S TABLE OF RANK

In modern Israeli and Jewish-American parlance, there is often a distinction made between just two groups of Jews, identified by their geographical origin: the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. This is not an accurate distinction, of course, as there exists a more authoritative ranking system among not two, but three, official Jewish groupings, namely, the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, and the Mizrahim. Today, whenever these three are separately recognized, the Ashkenazi Jews are implicitly considered superior to the other two, while the Mizrahim are found inferior to the Sephardim. (Concerning the alleged superiority of the Ashkenazim over the others, it is worth mentioning that the great Shulkhan Arukh codification of the Jewish Law, to which all observant Jews, regardless of their origin, adhere, was authored by a Sephardic Jew Joseph Caro in the 16^th century.)

Ironically, it is the Mizrahi group that not only constitutes the largest of these groups in Israel, but proudly counts the original Palestinian Jews among its number, together with all other “Oriental” Jews, tracing their first post-Dispersion home to the Middle East, the currently Moslem countries of Asia, and also to certain African countries. But due to the colossal influx of Jews from the former USSR into Israel and the United States, starting in the 1970’s, it is the Ashkenazic, i.e. European, Jewry who claim intellectual supremacy, on account of their better education, higher host country culture in their places of origin, and a vibrant Jewish Rabbinical tradition in Europe during the last several hundred years, plus the moral victim supremacy, on account of the Holocaust. Besides, these Ashkenazi Jews claim, with sufficient substantiation, that the very concept of Yiddishkeit, so precious to modern Judenthum, has its roots in the Ashkenazic tradition, to the exclusion of the other two.

With regard to the Sephardim, their actual origin were Spain and Portugal, whence they were expelled after 1498. Remarkably, at the time of the Iberian Reconquista, these Sephardic, meaning Spanish, Jews were by far the most cultured, best educated and generally advanced in all Diaspora at the time, but having to flee to less profitable and fruitful places in North Africa and elsewhere, they rather quickly lost their edge over the rest of the Judenthum, and so, even the great Maimonides and Caro notwithstanding, as of today they do not seem to amount to much.

Was that simple enough? If yes, be warned that we have not really arrived at the hub of the complications. Is the division at the heart of this entry really geographic, or ethnic-genetic, or cultural, or mainly religious? There are schools that tie this division to different criteria. The crudest of them is of course the geographic origin. But this is also the least reliable of the criteria. Too many historical eras have passed since that first Dispersion of the Jews, to give geography that much credence… But there are distinctive cultural/religious patterns of observance that constitute more solid criteria, because they are non-historical, and not subject to diachronic analysis, where the lines of diverse geographical groups have crossed multiple times, and sometimes merged. On the other hand, religious service customs, identified as Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and such, have endured to the present day, and there are many Sephardim or Mizrahim today who are praying according to the Ashkenazic rite, while there are many Ashkenazim who are praying according to the Sephardic rite, and so on. There are also many cross-denominational marriages where the partitions have been further effaced… Go, figure!

However, the least substantially significant of these distinctions is also the most important of them all, and that is the political distinction between the European Jews immigrating to Israel since the beginning of the twentieth century as well as in the wake of World War II, and the rest of them. It is the former contingent who has constituted the political elite of Medinat Yisroel ever since its formation in 1948, and it has remained the determining factor.

What will the future hold for this Jewish table of rank? It is hard to foresee a change in it under the status quo. For as long as the memory of the Holocaust is alive, the Ashkenazi Jews are bound to stay on top… Which means… forever?...

Unless a radical change takes place in the Middle East, in which case the Israelis will have to adapt to the changing circumstances by relinquishing the current uncompromising secular Zionist stand in favor of the more accommodating Messianic Zionism, which will definitely assure a lasting peace in the Middle East, but may also introduce a radical correction to the Jewish table of rank, placing the Mizrahim, ardently supported by the Haredim of the other two groups, at the top of the score sheet.

ALEINU UNCENSORED

The Biblical Prophet Joshua is traditionally recognized as the author of Aleinu, which means that the author is anonymous, as, otherwise, Joshua’s Prayer would have been included in the TaNaKh. However, I have no intention of arguing about this point, and for all intents and purposes, Joshua may just as well have been the author.

While, in so far as the music of religious services is concerned, Reform Judaism certainly has the upper hand over the other branches of Judaism, the situation is decisively reversed in all other matters of religious authenticity, intellectual and spiritual sincerity, and factual reliability, where it is ultra-conservative Orthodox Judaism which reigns supreme, as, undoubtedly, the sole credible authority on Judaism today, with the only exception of certain sections of Judaic libraries in some of the bigger synagogues, where certain unpresentable, moldy, out-of-print treasures bequeathed to these libraries by their ancient owners quietly dying of old age, books unwanted by their younger heirs,--- and now consistently ignored on their dusty shelves by the library patrons,--- are themselves living out their shelflives, until some youthful librarian might respectfully remove them from those shelves, and put them away somewhere, where their pitiful appearance would not trouble the aesthetic sensibilities of the new improved Judenthum.

It is to their authority only that I must now apply myself, for the complete text of one of the most important prayers in the life of an observant Jew, the Aleinu.

But first, here is the full text of the Aleinu in the English translation.---

First paragraph, Aleinu:

It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to ascribe greatness to the Molder of primeval creation, for He has not made us like the goyim of the world, nor emplaced us like other families of the earth, nor assigned our portion like theirs, nor our lot like all their multitudes.
(For, they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who helps not.) But we bend our knees, bow and acknowledge our thanks before the King Who reigns over kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He.
He stretches out heaven and establishes earth’s foundation, the seat of His homage is in the heavens above and His powerful Presence is in the loftiest heights.
He is our God and there is none other. True is our King, nothing beside Him. As it is written in His Torah, “You are to know this day and take to your heart that Hashem is the only God, in heaven above and on the earth below, there is none other.”

Second paragraph, Alkein:

Therefore we put our hope in You Hashem our God that we may soon see Your mighty splendor to remove detestable idolatry from the earth, and false gods will be utterly cut off, to repair the universe (the words in the Hebrew text are letakein olam (a form of tikkun olam), as no respectable Jewish source would ever fail to mention at the first opportunity in connection with the history of this term; it is quite obvious that Luria himself made such a huge deal out of verbal symbolism, that this connection is by no means an exercise in trivial pursuit) through the Almighty’s sovereignty.
Then all mankind will call upon Your Name, to turn all the earth’s wicked toward You. All inhabitants of the world will recognize You, and know that to You every knee should bend, every tongue should swear.
Before You, Hashem, our God, they will bend every knee, and cast themselves down, and to the glory of Your Name they will render homage, and they will all accept upon themselves the yoke of Your kingship, that You may reign over them soon and for all eternity (leolam vaed).
For the kingdom is Yours, and You will reign for all eternity in glory, as written in Your Torah: “Hashem shall reign for all eternity.” And it is said (Zechariah 14:9): “Hashem shall be King over all the world. On that day Hashem will be One, and His Name will be One.”

A short summary from reliable Jewish sources (derived from Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher’s monumental work Arba’ah Turim/Sect. Orach Chayim) of the history of this monumental prayer follows below, not for mere reference, but substantially connected to my eventual commentary on it.

The prayer Aleinu, proclaiming God as King over a united humanity, has been recited as the closing prayer of the three daily services ever since the 13th century. According to tradition, Yehoshua composed it at the time he crossed the Yarden (Jordan) and entered the Land of Promise. It is generally held, however, that it was first introduced into the daily prayer service by Rav [Abba Arika (175-247) founder of the early third century Academy at Sura] as an introduction to Malchuyot, the section recited as part of the Musaf service for Rosh Hashanah. The Bach [Rabbi Joel Sirkes (1561-1640)] explains that Aleinu was added to the daily prayers to implant faith in the Oneness of God’s Kingship and the conviction that He will one day remove detestable idolatry from the earth… thus preventing Jews from being tempted to follow the beliefs and the lifestyles of the nations among whom they dwell.

As we can surmise from its authorship and its placement at the conclusion of every service, its significance is profound. Its first paragraph (Aleinu) proclaims the difference between Israel’s concept of God and that of the other nations. The second, Alkein, expresses our confidence that humanity will eventually recognize His sovereignty and declare its obedience to His commandments. It should be clear, however, that this does not imply a belief, or even a hope, that they will convert to Judaism, rather, they will accept Him as the only God and obey the universal Noachian laws (the Jews make a clear distinction between God’s laws applied to all mankind, they call them Noachian laws, and those specifically addressed to His chosen people Israel, called Mosaic laws) that are incumbent upon all nations.
In the Middle Ages the custom was formed of reciting the first paragraph every day at the end either of the morning service or of all the prayer services for the day. In the sixteenth century, Hayim Vital, a prominent Kabbalist, noting the opinions of Isaac Luria, ruled that both paragraphs should be included in all services and should end with the verse: On that day Hashem shall be one and His Name one. This was accepted in all communities, except for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who have retained the “short Aleinu.”

Considering the great importance of both paragraphs in Aleinu, the question arises whether the excision of the second paragraph was a matter of convenience, similarly to the use of an abbreviated Shema, or it was a matter of self-censorship, which has also affected the first paragraph of the prayer in the following way:

Since the 14th century, incessant attacks were concentrated upon Aleinu on account of the words For they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god, which helps not. (It is said that Christian authorities came to believe that this line referred to the Christians worshipping Jesus, and demanded that it be dropped.) So, this passage was finally deleted from the Ashkenazic Siddurim.

However, the accusation of a deliberate anti-Christian wording is clearly without merit, as the paragraph’s most offensive line is a direct quotation from Isaiah 45:20... I guess, quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi…

While most congregations have not returned this passage to the Aleinu prayer, some prominent authorities (characteristically, within the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities) insist that it ought to be recited in its original form. (This practice has never returned to non-Orthodox Jewish denominations.)

While the original reason for omission was a clear case of overreaction to a relatively innocent profession of faith in one God (quite harmless, compared to the explicit Christian contention, prevalent to this day in all Evangelical communities, that even the rare breed of the righteous shall burn in Hell, unless they hurry up to confess Jesus as their Lord and Savior, while even the greatest sinners of this world will be pardoned on the sheer strength of such a confession), the question remains as to why a great majority of Jewish congregations have failed to restore the original splendor of their cultural gem the Aleinu prayer to their religious services, while the curtailed version is sadly accepted as its substitute in daily worship, given the respect and honors due to the real thing, and not to an impostor? Perhaps, for the same reason that the so much beloved Torah in non-Orthodox synagogues is so profusely honored in scroll-bearing processions, yet so casually dismissed as a fossil from a long-gone past, when it comes to its actual content.

Ironically, even though the large symbolic value of the Torah is generally recognized, only a small minority of the Jews attributes a lasting religious significance to it. For these Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox believers, Torah Judaism is not a thing of the past, abolished two millennia ago with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, but a suspended religious document, awaiting for the Lord’s Anointed One to return the scattered sheep of Israel to the Promised Land, to restore the Temple, and by this to bring the Temple-centered Torah Judaism, and the Torah with it, back to life. It goes without saying that these Jewish believers do not recognize the modern Mashiach-free State of Israel as a legitimate Biblically-endorsed national entity. An important implication here is that the secular Zionist claim to the land of Greater Israel thus has no substantiation in Judaism.

 

DR. KENT AND THE TWO YETZERS

(This entry technically originates in the waters of my Judaica section, but in fact it ends up on the high seas of general human experience, particularly religious experience, where it truly belongs.)

There is an old Jewish allegory, so subtle that many modern-day Jews are eager and even proud to announce that they are taking it literally. It boils down to the permanent presence in the life of every practicing Jew of two supernatural advisers, Yetzer Hatov, the good angel, and Yetzer Hara, the bad angel, or demon, who sit, each on one of the man’s shoulders, and whisper, each in one of his ears, what course they might recommend for him to take, at each of the life’s crossroads. It’s fair to say that Yetzer Hatov is giving him a consistently good advice, while Yetzer Hara offers him the opposite course of action.

In my personal experience I have found that not only the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are expected to be more religious and more prone to literal interpretations than the rest, but, surprisingly, secular Reform Jews, have testified to the literal competing presence of an angel and a demon, promoting their opposite agendas every day of their life, particularly, when they are supposed to come up with some kind of decision. I have been inclined to attribute this literalness of the secular types to a desire to compensate for their lack of religiosity otherwise. But what if those Reform secularists, who had conveyed this conviction to me, were quite serious and meant what they told me literally?

Mind you, I am a strong believer in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, and I find the fundamentalists of all sorts unreasonable at best and mentally unbalanced at worst, when they insist on literal interpretations of the Scriptures. The story of the two Yetzers is obviously non-Scriptural and there is literally no justification, even for the religious zealots, to take it literally. I repeat that I am almost convinced that a large majority of those persons who have given a literal meaning to the story, may not have done it with a straight face, but I also suspect a certain part of them of actually believing what they said.

Without pronouncing an expert judgment on their disingenuousness, in case they were pulling everybody’s leg, or mental condition, in case they were telling the literal truth, I shall appeal to the illustrious authority of the American Dr. James Tyler Kent, MD, (1849-1916), one of the foremost homeopathic practitioners and theoreticians in the history of homeopathy, an amazingly interesting branch of medicine, created by Dr. Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Kent, like every outstanding homeopath, is a psychologist extraordinaire. In his discussions of various remedies he has prescribed to patients with different ailments, he develops psychological profiles of each patient type corresponding to the constitutional remedies prescribed. Here is what he says about the remedy Anacardium Orientale, and the psychological patient profile corresponding to it:

“This remedy is full of strange notions and ideas; the mind appears feeble, almost if not complete imbecility; seems as if in a dream; everything is strange; slow to comprehend; cursing; marked irritability, disturbed by everything. Weak memory. Forgetful of things in his mind but a moment ago. All his senses seem to vanish and he gropes around, as if in a dream. Change of states; after states. Dullness and sluggishness of the mind prevail. He is in a continuous controversy with himself. Irresolution marks his character. He cannot settle between doing this and that, he hesitates, and often does nothing. He cannot decide especially in an action of good or evil.

“He hears voices, commanding him to do this or that, and seems to be between a good and an evil will. He is persuaded by his evil will to do acts of violence and injustice, but is withheld and restrained by a good will. So, there is a controversy between two wills, between two impulses; when this is really analyzed by one who knows something of the nature of man, it will be seen that the man is disturbed in his external will, but the internal will cannot be affected by medicine. His external voluntary is excited by external influences, but his real will in which is his conscience, restrains that and keeps him from carrying the impulses into effect. This can only be observed when its action is on a really good man. He has a controversy when his external will is aroused, but in an evil man there is no restraint and be will not have this symptom.

“Hallucinations: a demon sits on one shoulder and an angel on the other. (Nota bene!!!)

He is disposed to malice and has an irresistible desire to curse and swear; laughs when he should be serious. So it is carried on until all things in the external will are inverted. Internal anxiety, i. e., the internal will is in a turmoil over this external disturbance.

“‘Contradiction between will and reason’ is an attempt to express what the individual knew nothing about.

“‘Feels as though he had two wills.’ That is better. It finally destroys or paralyzes the external will and when a man is naturally evil and is under the paralyzing influence of Anacardium, he will do acts of violence. A wicked man is restrained, not by his conscience, but by fear of the law. Anacardium paralyzes the external will arid places him in a position of imbecility, and he does acts of violence from his own natural perverted self It has so acted on a portion of the mind that it teaches a great deal.

"Ideas as if nothing were real, all seems to be a dream. Fixed ideas. He thinks he is double. This comes from a vague consciousness that there is a difference between the external and internal will, a consciousness that one will is the body and another is the mind.

"…Dwells on thoughts about salvation. That a stranger is by his side, is another recognition of the two wills. That strange forms accompany him, one to his right side and one to his left. This mental state drives him to madness.

"Alternation of his moods and understanding. One moment he sees a thing, and another moment he does not understand it. One moment she sees it is her child, and another that it is not. One moment it is a delusion, and next moment it is an illusion. One moment thinks it is so, and next moment has enough reason left that it is not so. Delusion is an advanced stage of illusion."

(Taken from Dr. Kent’s Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica: Anacardium Orientale.)

…Well, I’ve long been on record with a conspicuously disrespectful treatment of a large number of fellow-Christians, particularly those whose practice of “healing the crippled,” or “speaking in tongues,” etc., which is a “normal” regular occurrence at the multi-million dollar mega-churches in America today, looks to me as blasphemous on the part of the preachers and the “sane” part of their flocks, while anybody who is really serious about this sham ought to be declared clinically insane and receive psychiatric treatment.

Having no intention of offending anyone’s, and particularly Jewish sensibilities, I have quoted Dr. Kent, in the earlier extended segment, only to make a larger point. I wonder if all esoteric exercises in the occult, the supernatural, the transcendent, and so on, produced in the course of intense religious experiences and associated with the literal interpretation of religious allegories, may have a devastatingly negative impact on the religious practitioner’s mental state, or whether the fact that these allegories have been taken literally may in itself be a telltale sign of a preexistent abnormality?

As the reader must realize, this question goes well beyond a specific religion: Christianity, Judaism, or any other, relating first and foremost to human psychology and states of an induced mass hypnosis. It is merely a coincidence and a pretext, that my subject matter here is rooted in a Judaic legend, for which I am certainly grateful to the fruitful source of this entry’s inspiration.

ZIONISM AND ITS SCHEMING HALF-BROTHER

(An ironic miniature.)

These days, “normal” Jewish Zionism has got itself a crazy scheming brother, or should I say a half-brother? I am referring of course to the so-called Christian Zionism, the two of them appearing walking side-by-side in a weird semblance of harmony, holding each other’s hand. I have no doubt that they relish the truth behind their relationship, and knowing that, in fact, they have nothing in common, all they want is to use each other with no love lost. This is a dangerous path, though. Two sworn enemies, pretending to be bosom friends and comrades-in-arms, constantly devising plans to outsmart each other… I don’t honestly know who is running Washington these days (although I do have my suspicions), but I would never trust either party to manage my foreign policy, or domestic affairs. Their priorities are too screwed up!

HATIKVA

Israel’s National Anthem Hatikva (Hope) has been mentioned before with regard to its music. This time we shall be talking about its lyrics. Rather ironically, some religious Jews have objected to their Anthem on the grounds of it being “too secular.” This is disingenuous, however, because it is impossible not to find even in the most secular piece of Judaica, a mother lode of religious references and symbolism. And Hatikva is no exception in this case. Let us start by quoting the song’s original lyrics, written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber. We shall limit ourselves to the first verse and the refrain, for they alone already tell the story:

“As long as in the heart A Jewish soul still yearns, And onward, to the East, An eye still gazes toward Zion, Our hope is not yet lost, The ancient hope, To return to the land of our fathers, The city where David was dwelling.”

The strong Biblical references and religious themes are unambiguous here. No wonder that when the song was turned into the national anthem (unofficially in 1948 and formally in 2004), certain changes to its lyrics were made, partly to reflect, of course, that the return had by then taken place. Here are those changes:

“As long as in the heart A Jewish soul still yearns, And onward, to the East, An eye still gazes toward Zion, Our hope is not yet lost, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free people in our land, The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The changes were thus made, but obviously, no matter how many key words one takes out of a song, there is no way that the religious spirit of Judaism could be taken out of Zionism. The name Zion itself is Biblical to the core, repeated 154 times in the TaNaKh. So is the word Jerusalem, charged to the point of saturation with a special religious meaning, as amply illustrated by these two verses of Psalm 147:

The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the outcast of Israel. (Ps. 147:2.) Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion. (Ps. 147:12.)

Thus, even the new “secularized” lyrics of Hatikva, just by mentioning Zion and Jerusalem together, trigger a wealth of purely religious associations which have become so ingrained in the texture of secular Zionism, as to become indistinguishable from it, to which Israel’s national anthem Hatikva bears such a powerful and unimpeachable witness.

The fact of the matter is that, in so far as the Jews are concerned, Jewish secular nationalism is inseparable from, and even virtually identical with, Jewish religious self-awareness, as religion is indeed the overwhelming source of that nationalism. The nationalist “hope of two thousand years” is no less than a dogmatic religious stand, as God Himself appears to underwrite the Zionist claim to the land of Greater Israel…

…Well, religion and politics is an explosive mix. Which makes the ongoing conflict in the Middle East not only terribly dangerous, but also hopelessly apocalyptic.