BELIEVE WE WILL BE ABLE TO SUSTAIN JEWISH LIFE WITH THE FAILURE OF A JEWISH STATE

something to be deeply proud of. Modern Hebrew is a miracle—a language spoken by a people exiled and persecuted and expelled from every European country and many countries in the Middle East—who found the strength to rebuild. No matter how much flak you get in certain American intellectual spaces, Hebrew is the greatest gift that we have. It’s our connection to the past and it’s our bridge between the past and the present and the future. For Jews, Hebrew is our precious connection to each other, ancient and alive.

Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God, an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and The Forward’s language columnist.

JAMES S. SNYDER

Up until the time I began my tenure at the Israel Museum in 1996, my academic and intellectual focus had been literature and the visual arts from the middle of the 19th century to the present. Then I arrived at a place where you could experience a million and a half years of material cultural history that informed that entire timeline from prehistory to the present, and, for me, everything changed.

Thinking about modern Israel, you can contextualize the creation of the modern state in relation to this incredibly long narrative. And there is an especially meaningful flow of history for us across these last 2,000 years, which includes the unfolding of Christianity and Islam after Judaism and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation for what the land of Israel is all about.

The birth of the State of Israel 75 years ago created a modern democratic state in the Middle East. And the ongoing beauty and complexity of this picture can be seen in relation to the unfolding of all the other cultures that are also there. The richly textured diversity of the place also demonstrates an innate duality, on the one hand promoting an incredibly meaningful narrative of cross-connection among cultures, while at the same time underscoring the complexity of these cultures as they move in different directions, even though they share a common heritage.

During the Ottoman Empire, there were no countries in the Middle East. There was only the Ottoman Empire, and there were cities—Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut—and before World War I you could easily travel by train between all of these cities. And, although they are not so far from Jerusalem, today they seem very distant. This is not about divisiveness, but rather about national borders that have risen up between countries that did not then exist.

In terms of Judaism in a Jewish state, remember too that one of its foundational tenets is that it’s not about nationhood, but rather about peoplehood— about people with a shared identity who live all over the world and share an underlying value and belief system that connects them. The potential, and also the challenge, for the State of Israel is how to balance all of this.

As an American who was not deeply connected with the Middle East before moving there in the mid-1990s, I did not yet fully appreciate the mix of Eastern and Western Jewish cultures and the distinct pathways to the history of Ju- daism in the East and the West. Now, of course, I know well the importance of the foundational history of the Jewish people in the region from the time before the First Temple, to the First Temple, and then to the First Temple diaspora to the east, followed by the history of the Second Temple, leading to the diaspora to the west. We were a peoplehood dispersed in two directions who became acculturated separately. Part of the potential and complexity of the founding of the State of Israel was the act of reuniting and unifying us, and all of this was surely part of the excitement, as well as the challenge, of the founding of the state 75 years ago. From a Western perspective, creating Israel as a modern democratic state in the Middle East was also hugely meaningful, and this remains an essential part of the picture today.

At the moment, Israel is struggling with extreme differences in views about how to shape and interpret the state’s value system. At the same time, there is an amazing rising generation of young leaders of cultural and community-based nonprofit organizations who want to envision a vital future for the country and who are committed to looking past the political darkness of the moment and realizing the potential of what can be accomplished in the miracle that is the State of Israel at 75.

When I came to Israel and Jerusalem 30 years after the Six-Day War, I still felt the closeness of that history. Today is very different. Now Israel is a contemporary country, and Jerusalem is a contemporary city. From Jerusalem, on a clear day, you can still see the landscape cascading downward 6,000 feet to the Dead Sea, with the hills of Jordan beyond. You see the beauty of that juxtaposition, and you see the complexity. And you cannot forget the potential that can still be realized there.

James S. Snyder is the executive chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, Inc. He served as The Israel Museum’s Anne and Jerome Fisher Director from 1997 to 2016 and then as its international president through 2018.

Yehudah Mirsky

That this Jewish commonwealth exists in the historical land of Israel and just goes about its business on a daily basis, when you step back and think about it, is nothing less than astonishing. It’s not at all to be taken for granted. Jews were powerless just the blink of an eye ago— and yet so many people have trouble even imagining it. For others, including some Israelis, Jewish powerlessness is still such an overwhelming presence in their minds that it gets in the way of coherently assessing how much power Jews in Israel actually have—or the limits to that power.

Seventy-five years is and isn’t a substantial chunk of time. One relevant point of comparison might be the Hasmonean kingdom, which lasted 80 years. Those 80 years were significant, with outsized historical consequences, but they were limited. The Hasmonean kingdom began in glory and ended in obloquy. There’s a reason why the story of the Maccabees was sorely diminished in rabbinic memory, and why it then became so important to the Zionist rebellion against that tradition. In any society, 80 years is also the span of three generations or so. We know that living memory lasts about three generations: If you want to keep a culture alive, you need a generation of grandparents who can talk to grandchildren.

The founders of Zionism and the revolution, even when rebelling against Jewish tradition, were in very deep dialogue with it. And increasingly the various inheritors of it don’t understand each other at all. It’s a measure of the success of Zionism that Israelis who leave the borders of the state sometimes have no idea what Judaism or Jewish identity is. Their sense of peoplehood becomes very attenuated—what do I possibly have in common with Jews outside Israel? That’s one reason the non-Orthodox denominations have failed in Israel. Partly it’s because of the official war against them, but it’s also partly because they’re not indigenous.

Has having sovereignty in Israel changed Jews? Of course; it’s utterly transformative—the empowering effect, the pride. You can’t be Jewish without dealing with it; even if you choose to ignore it, you’re choosing. It’s hard to think of people who are Jewishly identified for whom it doesn’t play some role.

A common denominator between the problems with the Palestinians and the problems of internal Israeli society is the need to look at and rediscover and rebuild political society and civil society. There were many reasons for the failure of the Oslo process, and one is that no attention was paid to building a viable Palestinian political culture. Israel played a role in that, by not caring about it. And in this most recent crisis we also see very fundamental questions as to what is and should be the political culture of Israel and its legal regimes, still to be determined.

Israel isn’t the only country in the world where liberal institutions are under siege, or where we see massive politics of resentment against global elites. And Israel is not the only place where we see a kind of hyper-capitalism ravaging social democracy, breeding social unrest and nationalism and so on. In Israel as elsewhere, you can’t underestimate the extent to which socioeconomic and class divisions really drive these things. Societies need solidarity, and class divisions make that difficult. We may think liberalism is the default setting for humanity, but it’s not. It’s a position and it needs to be defended. Should these things have been more settled by now? Who knows? They’re big questions, and always in motion. But always there’s this mysterious, compelling Jewish will to survive. Divine? Human? Both? That’s an eternal argument too.

Yehudah Mirsky, a former U.S. State Department official, is a professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and lives with his family in Jerusalem.

He is the author, most recently, of Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904.

Meir Buzaglo

When the State of Israel was created, one group was dominant—the Ashkenazim who made up the workers’ movements. They created the hegemony, the power structures, social inequality. We can be very critical of them today—and as a Jew from Morocco I am indeed critical—but it was this group that enabled us to build our state. Today, everything that was pushed aside or pushed away because of the need to create a state—all of this is surfacing now, and sometimes it seems that we will never be able to bridge the rifts between us.

We recognize the miracle that is the State of Israel at age 75—not so young, but certainly not so old—but we must also ask: Will we emerge from the current situation stronger or weaker? Will we progress to a better time—or will we regress to civil war? Can we recognize our differences, yet agree that we are part of a greater whole, the whole of the Jewish people? This is Israel’s question at the age of 75, but it is also the question for the entire Jewish people: Can we develop new forms of peoplehood and relationships and structures?

Here in the Middle East, we are Arabs and Jews—Jews from very different backgrounds and with very different ways of viewing the country. Players from outside of Israel—both conservatives and progressives—come to us and tell us how to handle the conflict with the Arabs and how to handle the conflict among ourselves. But these ideas are foreign to our own DNA, and they were created to solve problems for other people in other places, and that is why they are leading us either into violent, zealous racism or simplistic attempts to flatter the rest of the world at our own expense.

We must learn to provide our own

Jewish answers to the problems we face. I am a religious man, and I am troubled because I see that in Israel, and for much of the Jewish people, Jewish thought has taken on a narrow, even closed-off and xenophobic character. This is not the living, universal Jewish Torah.

It is true, historically, that most of Jewish creativity occurred either in the desert, in Babylon or in the context of the broader world. Some might say we were never meant to be a state, that Jewish creativity can flourish only when we live among other peoples. There are also those who would say that throughout history, Jewish sovereignty never lasted very long. Yes, our state has already existed for 75 years, but this 75-year-old state has failed to provide a true, relevant response to the challenges of modern thinking. The lack of initiative and philosophical-political entrepreneurship is our failure; and instead, we fall into the traps of zealotry, or simplistic progressivism, or crude co-optation of Jewish thinking into Western thought.

At age 75, Israel must develop its own thinking—we must come back to the humanities, which will lead us to broad, compassionate interpretations of the Torah today. And we must pay attention to the Sephardi dimensions of thought. The Sephardic world was always open to philosophy, science, language. Sephardi history and the lessons it could teach us have been completely neglected. In the Sephardic world, there never was a violent rupture between the secular and the sacred—there was never a secular revolt against the church, and the distinction between secular and sacred is not important. But we continue to replay, over and over, the Western response to the challenges of modernity and to make that distinction, which creates entire worlds of meaning and significance that have led to some of the difficulties Israel and the Jewish people face today. In the Sephardi world, concepts of unity and togetherness are paramount—not in the fascist sense, but in the sense of making space for the other, for all.

Meir Buzaglo is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Hebrew University and is the founder and leader of the Tikun Movement dedicated to the renewal of society and culture in Israel.