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Israel, the Land and the Sacred

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Israel, the Land and the Sacred I. PUBLIC LECTURES JEAN-CHRISTOPHE ATTIAS–ESTHER BENBASSA ISRAEL, THE LAND AND THE SACRED Through so many centuries of exile, what has the land of Israel represent- ed to the Jewish imagination?1 The memory of ancient glory. The horizon of an expectation. The improbable site on to which is projected a hope for better days. Somewhere between heaven and earth, and more often nearer heaven than earth, Zion beckons and gives meaning. There, one day, the restoration of this fractured world will be complete; there, one day, the Jews will see the end of their tribulations. One day there in Zion or maybe here, perhaps today. While waiting for the dream to be realised, it is always possible to imagine that the place where one lives is already like a Jerusalem in exile, and like the provisional extension of a land of Israel that is inaccessible. Amsterdam is the Jerusalem of the North, Sarajevo is the Jerusalem of the Orient, Tlemcen is the Jerusalem of North Africa, Vilna is the Jerusalem of the East… One person’s Jerusalem is not another’s. Each Jewish group has its own, which it places above all others. Of course, such a land does not replace the real and distant one, but merely allows the group to be patient, to bear exile, internalised but never totally accepted. Not far from Istanbul, two Jewish villages face each other, one on the European shore of the Bosphorus and the other on the Asian shore. Each still has its own cemetery. The most pious and devout folk of the European village would prefer to be buried with their neighbours on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Their bodies would thus cross the narrow strait to rest over there, opposite, in almost holy soil, just a little nearer Jerusalem. Did they thus imagine themselves, on the day of resurrection, arriving more quickly and surely in the land of Israel? Was this a shortcut? At least this is how legend would have it… Israel, Promised Land, Holy Land, the consolation of exile. How can we describe it? How can we touch the dream without distorting it, decode it without being submerged by the emotion that evoking it unfailingly arous- es, and try to understand that emotion itself? The task seems arduous. And still more so these days than formerly, now that the dream is incarnated and has become reality. Moreover, this reality has by no means killed the dream. Different from what it was, imperturbable, throughout the ages, the dream does not cease to haunt the minds of Jews of the Diaspora as well as of Israelis. A few words about its medieval roots will make it easier to understand some of its contemporary metamorphoses. 1 This lecture briefly evokes some of the issues extensively dealt with in our book Israel, the Impossible Land, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Complete bibliographical data can be found there (pp. 270–86). 7 JEAN-CHRISTOPHE ATTIAS-ESTHER BENBASSA Doomed to have no political power, both in exile and dispersed, the Medieval Jew stands on the periphery of the world he lives in. Long ago the land of Israel ceased to be a place where a reunited people could exist. And nearly as long ago, it ceased to be the centre of a Diaspora perceived like a boundary. The Medieval Jew has no means at all to assert his rights to a land which through the epic of the Crusades, is the heart of spiritual aspirations and imperialistic ambitions of the two great religions, daughters of Israel, stressing at the same time the decline of its former owners. This alienation of the land, now under one rule, now under another, even though none seemed destined to settle for long or beget a real rebirth, naturally evokes the alienation of the people expelled from it, it, too, humiliated and depending on the goodwill of various and inconstant masters. The situa- tion of Israel and its land, bearing the marks of exile and expropriation, also seems to constitute a historical sanction of the theological pretensions of Christianity and Islam. So, how can we dare to claim, in spite of all appear- ances, that the mission of Israel and its exclusive link to its land are still con- tinuing? To organise an efficient spiritual resistance to the hard facts of history is a very arduous task in the cultural world born from the meeting of Islam and the philosophical and scientific heritage of Ancient Greece. From now on, Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers focus their attention on abstract and totally timeless themes, God, his essence and his existence, the Creation, prophecy, good and evil, reward and punishment, etc. Moreover, the con- ception, currently admitted by philosophers, of the Divinity and its relation to the world (an impersonal relation, governed by a system of universal and immutable laws) makes the Jewish theme of God’s choice of one people and one land, quite problematical. Thus the struggle is being organised on several fronts. The loss of the physical contact with the land is compensat- ed with its idealisation. Far from being satisfied with the accumulated treas- ures of Jewish traditional culture, and even though they keep on studying them in depth, some great masters of Jewish thought, philosophers or kab- balists, will endeavour to build up a theology of the land, likely to repel, suc- cessfully, the attacks of their Christian and Muslim counterparts, even by trying to make use of the scientific, climatological and astrological knowl- edge or beliefs then shared commonly by the medieval world. A real territorial exception, the land of Israel is far more than a territory. It is the image and the sign of the Jewish exception. Its intimate link to God sends back to God’s intimate link to Israel. Any change of the relations between Israel and its land is nothing but the clear sign of a change of its relations with God. However, no alteration of this kind is irrevocable and definitive. And none is as deep as appearances seem to tell. The land is a person endowed with will, which may be negative or favourable, now accepting now rejecting its inhabitants. Those who live on it, breathe a pure air and its dust for those buried in it has an expiatory power, compa- rable to that of the altar of sacrifices. Its successive conquerors did not man- age to put down roots, which reveals its positive resistance to any illegal 8 ISRAEL, THE LAND AND THE SACRED takeover. The land of Israel is hit by nothing but what it accepts to be hit by. Essentially pure, nothing could possibly stain it. The destruction and the oppression of a foreign ruler only has a limited impact on it: perhaps the divine impulse from above is no more as intense as it used to be, but evil has no grip on it, and it has itself the power to reject impurity. To consider that the effects of impious acts committed in the Holy Land through centuries are non-existent or fundamentally inessential is a way of implying that the relation of history to it, is like water off a duck’s back. The land of Israel is no more in history, but out of it. The rags of spoliation and destruction mask an essential, divine and unchanging land whose present troubles by no means affect it and which, some day, once again, is to reveal itself in all its untarnished glory. Indefinitely idealised, the land medieval Jews are dreaming of is this land toward which they turn to pray thrice a day. But it is also far more than that, and really something else. The more it is perceived as holy, the more it is lived as different – and as terrible. The modern Jewish Zionist-inspired ideology, of course, tended to claim that after destruction and dispersion nothing in fact had jeopardised the Jews’ relationship toward the Holy Land and that this land had never even been weakened by some symbolisation of the sacred space or by the trans- fer of this sacrality to whatever space or institution. However, the simple reading of texts inevitably makes such a simplistic axiom questionable. The longing for the lost place, as nostalgia, as the awareness of a lack, could not feed on itself alone. This desire, in fact, was never completely unappeased. The powers of dream, the artifices of allegory made Zion present at every time and everywhere. And there lay the paradox: the more one thought about the land, the more one forgot it. Even more: having it continually on mind, keeping on naming it was perhaps the best way to forget it… By associating it with such a superterrestrial reality, intellect agent or sefi- ra, philosophers and kabbalists work towards what can be called a ‘surreali- sation’ of the land of Israel, and at the same time, contribute to its ‘dereali- sation’. The moment it becomes a divine entity, the upper Holy Land is nec- essarily much more ‘real’ than the inferior material world where we live. On the other hand, because its essence comes from the celestial, with which it is in a privileged touch, the lower Holy Land may lose in the same propor- tion, every ‘reality’, this time in the terrestrial sense of the word. Then it is a short way from idealisation to allegorisation, from the temptation of meta- physics to the seductions of metaphor. An easy way to go, which makes the land less and less itself to be more and more something different from itself.
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