Zionism

by Ehud Bandel - President, the Masorti Movement

Of all the political movements and ideologies produced by human civilization in the modern age, Zionism is the most successful. Not only has it succeeded in transforming itself from a handful of idealists into a mainstream movement, but it has also transformed its dream into a reality. The achievements of Zionism as a national renaissance movement reach far beyond the Land of Israel. The revival of spoken Hebrew and the cultural creativity of modern Hebrew literature are all part of the Zionist revolution.

The strength and vitality of Zionism are partly thanks to the fact that the Zionist idea was never one dimensional. Arthur Hertzberg – a Conservative rabbi, historian, and daring, independent thinker – wrote and compiled The Zionist Idea, A Historical Analysis and Reader (Doubleday & Company and Herzl Press, 1959), which is required reading and presents Zionism as a clash of ideologies. Aside from being the most comprehensive anthology of Zionist thought, it has an introduction analyzing Zionism as the “most radical attempt in Jewish History to break out of the parochial molds of Jewish life in order to become part of the general history of man in the modern world.”

Thirty-nine years after Hertzberg’s book was published, Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, published a book that can be considered the continuation and revision of the Zionist idea. Zionism, The Sequel, edited by Carol Diament, explores the piercing confrontation between the Zionist theory described by Hertzberg and the reality of the State of Israel, 50 years after its establishment. In a series of short articles, the whole political, religious, spiritual and social spectrum of the modern Israeli reality is presented on the one hand; and on the other, its effect on the lives of Jews in North America. The question of the “Jewishness” of the Jewish State arises both in the discussion on questions of religion and state and the relationship between the religious and secular in Israel, and in the handling of the unsolved dilemmas of Israel’s Arab citizens.

The spiritual perspective, the theological significance of the State of Israel to the person of faith, is presented to us by one of the greatest philosophers produced by Conservative Judaism, Abraham Joshua Heschel. In Israel: An Echo of Eternity (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), published soon after the Six Day War, Heschel peels away the shells of cynicism and skepticism and forces us to confront the real challenge of Zionism: “Israel is a personal challenge, a personal religious issue. It is a call to every one of us as an individual, a call which one cannot answer vicariously.”