Redemptive Fictions

Holiness, Heresy and the Ironies of Zionism

n the late 13th century, after fleeing from Spain to Palestine at age 73, the Igreat kabbalist and biblical commentator Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (known as Ramban) concluded a lengthy Rosh Hashanah sermon in the Crusader city of Acre by quoting the Sifre, an ancient halachic text: “Dwelling in the Land of is equal in importance to all the commandments of the .” According to Nahmanides, religious observance in exile is a dress rehearsal; only in the Holy Land does Jewish ritual achieve mystical power and cosmic significance.

{ By STUART SCHOFFMAN

68 | Fall 2008 Redemptive Fictions /// Stuart Schoffman

Holiness, Heresy and the Ironies of Zionism

HAVRUTA | 69 In the 21st century, secular Israeli cos- The intimidating image of a king’s palace mopolites who never heard of Ramban or the helps us fathom why ultra-Orthodox Jews Sifre take the idea of sacred geography as a throw rocks at cars on Shabbat and have zero free pass, utterly confident that living a He- tolerance for gay parades in . Its brew life in Tel Aviv while willfully oblivious broader implications may also be the reason Theodore Herzl to Jewish tradition makes them more fully – as such disparate Israeli intellectuals as A. /// Illustration by Jewish than overseas Jews, the denizens B. Yehoshua and Aviezer Ravitzky have sug- Moran Barak of galut (exile). Meanwhile, in Jerusalem or gested – why Diaspora Jews, for many cen- Bnei Brak, legions of ultra-Orthodox Jews turies, were afraid to make aliyah. All that continue to live in imaginary galut, denying holiness was way too dangerous. Moreover, the validity of the Zionist state. Hypersensi- as the acerbic Anglo-Jewish author Israel tive to infractions of Jewish law, they take Zangwill wrote in 1919, in the giddy after- very seriously what Nahmanides said in that math of the Balfour Declaration, overheated same Rosh Hashanah discourse about “those Zionists should keep in mind that the Holy who are privileged to dwell before the Holy Land is not holy to Jews alone: One, Blessed be He, in his Land, for they are as those who see the King’s face”: Zion is a bride who after her divorce from Israel has been twice married to Gen- tiles –once to a Christian and once to a “Hypertension” is a Mohammedan – and when Israel takes her back he will find his household en- fair metaphor for the cumbered with the litter of the two in- tervening ménages. Such considerations, vulnerable, nervous however, are still invisible to the stock Jewish condition, which Zionist on whose self-spun structures re- alities impinge in vain, and whose Zion is is hereditary, like high as much a city of dream as that builded on celestial foundations by the popular blood pressure or imagination yearning for the Messiah. diabetes, and treatable, Zionism, in other words, is a tricky busi- if not curable. ness, but the Jews had, and have, little choice. In 1882, in the wake of the pogroms that fol- lowed the assassination of Czar Alexander II, I f they are heedful of His honor, it is the Odessa physician Leo Pinsker delivered a beneficial to them and they are happy. trenchant diagnosis of the Jewish condition However, if they rebel against Him, woe in his tract Auto-Emancipation: to them more so than to all [other] peo-

ple, for they make war and provoke the With the loss of their country, the Jewish King in His [own] palace. . He [therefore] people lost their independence, and fell removes them from there, as Scripture into a decay which is not compatible with states, a people that provoke Me to My face existence as a whole vital organism. The continually (Isaiah. 65:3) Again it states, state was crushed before the eyes of the They shall not dwell in the Eternal’s land nations. But after the Jewish people had (Hosea. 9:3).*1 ceased to exist as an actual state, as a po- litical entity, they could nevertheless not 1 * Ramban, Writings and Discourses, translated by Rabbi Dr. submit to total annihilation – they lived Charles B. Chavel (1985).

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on spiritually as a nation. The world saw in tion) suspected Herzl of harboring messianic this people the uncanny form of one of the fantasies, and denounced the movement at dead walking among the living. . . A fear large as a violation of the religious dictum of the Jewish ghost has passed down the that only God, not man, could effect the in- generations and the centuries. gathering of the exiles and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Pinsker had a name for this fear. “Judeo- phobia is a psychic aberration,” he continued. “As a psychic aberration it is hereditary and Never have Jews as a disease transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable.” As a Jew in Jerusalem, benefited from the I regret to agree that this is still so. But as hospitality of America any serious patient can tell you, there’s a vi- tal difference between “curable” and “treat- as broadly and brazenly able.” “Hypertension” is a fair metaphor for the vulnerable, nervous Jewish condition, as they have in our day, which is hereditary, like high blood pressure or diabetes, and treatable, if not curable. as they stand at their The best treatment, as Pinsker prescribed, full height with a blue- is Zionism. It was precisely because the Jews, unlike other nations, lacked a country of and-white flag waving at their own, argued the good doctor, that they could never feel truly secure anywhere: their back.

Th e foreigner has a claim to hospitality, But the idea caught on, albeit all too slowly, which he can repay in the same coin. The and it was Hitler who drove it home. The pro- Jew can make no such return; consequently found historical necessity of a renewed Jew- he can make no claim to hospitality. . . He ish state was finally comprehended by the is not a guest, much less a welcome guest. world and its remaining Jews only after mil- Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere lions were murdered by a Judeophobic mad- regarded as a native, he remains an alien man and his ostensibly rational apprentices. everywhere. That he himself and his ances- And with the restoration of Jewish sovereign tors as well are born in the country does not power came a sea change in the status and alter this fact in the least. self-image of American Jews. Back in 1936, Fortune magazine could declare, in a special Theodor Herzl, as it happened, hadn’t yet survey called “Jews in America”: read Auto-Emancipation when he drew the same conclusions and, in 1896, launched The Jew is everywhere, and everywhere the political movement that captured the the Jew is strange. Japanese are strangers imagination of many Jews – and ignited in California but not in Japan. Scotsmen the anxieties of far more. You want us to do are outlanders in Paris but not in Edin- what? exclaimed Western Jews who wor- burgh. The country of the Jews, as Scho- ried, understandably, that their hard-won penhauer puts it, is other Jews. rights as citizens might be jeopardized by a scheme to relocate from Europe to an Otto- In 2008, when the country of the Jews man backwater called Palestine. Heresy! cried is called the State of Israel, Pinsker trumps Orthodox rabbis, who (not without justifica- Schopenhauer. Never have Jews benefited

HAVRUTA | 71 from the hospitality of America as broadly plicating the problem. Staunch advocates of and brazenly as they have in our day, as they Israel are infuriated (and shaky Jewish lib- stand at their full height with a blue-and- erals are unnerved) by the postcolonial cant white flag waving at their back. Now, in Israel, emanating from respectable universities that we Jews are full-fledged hosts, world leaders lumps Zionism with the Crusades and defies in science and technology. Here, collectively, the legitimacy of the state. Haaretz newspaper delivery staff, ca. we are a Grand Hotel on the Mediterranean Many overseas Jews are unhappy with the 1930 shore, with a menorah in the lobby instead of Israeli press, which appears to hang dirty a tree. And oh yes, we have an army. laundry online for the instantaneous delec- Too often, however, it seems that the vaccine tation of our foes worldwide. In an ironic in- against Judeophobia has only revived it, in new version of Nahmanides, many Diaspora Jews and virulent forms. Anti-Zionism is sometimes observe a strict ritual wherein one is forbid- a mask for anti-Semitism, but often not, com- den to criticize Israel except in Israel itself,

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where transgressors have the most to lose. So it’s all true, he thought: It’s true that Others, of course – including many lovers of there’s really a hell. . . Wherever you went, Zion – behave like Israelis and don’t observe sin followed after. If you didn’t say “amen” that ritual at all. the right way after a single prayer, your soul was already damned. If you forgot to The Beginnings of Wisdom wash your hands even once before pray- In grappling with the perplexities of modern ing or eating, it was condemned to live in a frog for seven whole years. – It’s so terrible, Jewish history, it is the writers of fiction who **2 can get away with almost anything. With God, it’s so hard to live in Your world. this in mind, I return to my days as a teenage Zionist, when I attended a modern-Ortho- dox high school that put a high premium on Today, in Israel, we the . Our literature teacher may salute the fictional assigned a novella called Le’an? (Whither?), completed in February 1899, by a precocious Nachman’s gift for writer named Mordechai Ze’ev Feierberg, who died shortly thereafter, at the age of 24, in his self-criticism and draw hometown of Novograd-Volinsk, . Feierberg was the son of a sternly religious strength and practical Lubavitcher Hasid, a shochet (ritual slaugh- wisdom from the rich terer) by trade. The intriguing story begins as Nachman, the brilliant but tormented twen- textual tradition he ty-year-old son of the sternly religious Rabbi Moshe, commits the unthinkably heretical found so bewildering act of blowing out a candle in the synagogue and frightening. on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, as everyone looks on aghast. The narrator flashes back to Nachman’s The boy is consumed with anxiety. “His childhood, unspooling the events that led to thoughts were confused and spasmodic. . . Thou- his apostasy. Nachman yearns to run around sands of angels and hidden powers lurked all with other boys, but Rabbi Moshe warns him about him.” Satan rules, the Land of Israel lies that having fun is submission to the yetzer in ruins, the Shechinah – the divine presence – hara, the Evil Urge: “Every moment of plea- is in exile, and so is the holy Torah. “The Mes- sure and enjoyment,” says the father, “is put siah must be brought. He must, no matter there by the devil to drag us down into the what!” concludes young Nachman, and vows vanities of the world so as to rob us of our to do just that, employing traditional meth- place in the next.” So while normal kids go ods of study and prayer. The Messiah doesn’t out and play, little Nachman fights off the come. Teenage Nachman seesaws feverishly devil in traditional fashion, by sitting in the between doubt and epiphany: synagogue and obsessively studying Torah: “He went to the bookcase and chose a volume Within his frail heart all that was holy and that was called The Beginnings of Wisdom.” At- precious was at war with all that was holy tractive title, but an unfortunate pick: Reishit and precious. He realized then that not Hochma, a 16th-century treatise of kabbalis- tic ethics by Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas of Safed, ** M.Z. Feierberg, Whither? and other Stories, translated by Hillel scares the child silly: Halkin (1973); republished in 2004 by Toby Press.

HAVRUTA | 73 only did Evil do battle with Good, but that by traditional , becomes a Zionist. Good itself had many different shades and He attends a Zionist youth rally and aston- parties which fought among themselves. ishes the assembled by requesting permis- Previously he had known that Maimonides, sion to speak. His strong, deeply spiritual Nachmanides, Abraham Ibn Ezra, , peroration is all the more poignant, flowing Rabbi Levi ben Gerson, David Kimchi, as it does from the pen of the hapless M. Z. Abrabanel, the Narboni, Shlomo ben Adret, Feierberg, the dying tubercular prodigy who Rabbi Samuel ben Meir, Abraham ben Da- would never set foot in the Land of Israel: vid, Yedaiah ha-Penini, Joseph Caro, and Rabbi Azariah of the Adumim were all holy “You, my brothers . . . are gathered here to- men whose commentaries were as tried and night to seek a cure for our people’s illness true as the Law itself. Yet now that he had and to help restore it to its ancient home- begun to delve into their works, he discov- land . . . Europe is ailing now – everyone ered that their views were as far apart as feels how our civilization is coming apart east was from west, and he was left to wan- and how its pillars of faith are already eaten der like a lost soul among them. through. Society is weary of it all and thirsts for a new word of God, for the prophet and Most fatally, Nachman is drawn to Levi the lawgiver . . . and meanwhile Humanity ben Gerson – also known as Ralbag or Ger- must wander in the dark until a new wind sonides – the 14th-century French rabbi, phi- blows from God and brings it the nourish- losopher and astronomer who argued (via ment on which to live for another thousand Aristotle and Maimonides) that prophecy years . . . And here I want to say to you, my is a function of “active intellect,” a notion brothers, that not only are we ourselves that undermines the lad’s understanding of eastward bound, but that the whole West divine revelation, of Torah from Sinai. And has been journeying in this direction for then self-knowledge dawns: “Yes, he was a some time . . . And if the Jewish people has heretic!” Whereupon he stops reciting the a destiny to fulfill, let it forge that destiny Shema Yisrael and Grace after Meals. He mar- and that truth for itself and take it with ries the daughter of a well-off businessman, them to the East. Not just to Palestine but to an observant Jewish rationalist unfazed by the entire East . . . To the East! To the East!” the Evil Urge, who provides the provincial Nachman with a tutor. He learns French and The young Zionists leave the village and Russian, reads Kant, Spinoza, Darwin. But Nachman remains. “Only the madman still he feels bereft and guilty, mourns “the death sat on as before in his dusky corner . . . One of the old.” He seeks solace in secular, icono- look at him was enough to know he was clastic Hebrew writing but finds it sterile. He mad. His speech at the meeting hall was leaves his wife. And then – gevalt! – Nachman the last outward spark he threw off,” ends snuffs out the candle on Yom Kippur and as- the novella. “From then on God’s candle sumes the role of village madman. burned gradually down within him, until “Month pursued month, year followed death had compassion and snuffed out his year, and crazy Nachman sat stock-still in tedious life.” As for so many other Eastern the synagogue, or in his room in his father’s European Jews, Zionism came too late for house, saying nothing.” Until finally – and Nachman. Today, in Israel, invigorated by this, presumably, is why our Israeli teacher new winds, we may salute his gift for self- in Brooklyn had us impressionable 16-year- criticism and draw strength and practical olds read this wild, destabilizing little book wisdom from the rich textual tradition he – crazy antinomian Nachman, confounded found so bewildering and frightening.

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Wrecking and Building was others who wanted it and they forced us to accept it, against our will. The alleged opposition between Zionism and Judaism was articulated in a masterful An explosive image, which vividly con- short story called “The Sermon,” HaDrasha“ ” flates the classical Zionist notion of shelilat – from the same root as midrash – published hagalut – rejection, or “negation,” of the in 1943 by the Hebrew author Hayyim Ha- Diaspora – with a rejection of Judaism itself. zaz. Born near Kiev in 1898, Hazaz began Sabbath, the day of rest, the cornerstone of his career writing for HaShiloah and other religious tradition, the brilliant virtual edi- European Hebrew journals; spent the 1920s fice of transcendence – Heschel’s “palace in in Paris and Berlin; and arrived in Jerusalem time” – here symbolizes the contemptibly in 1932. His “Sermon” takes place in Pales- passive Jew. The Shabbes goy, the gentile who tine; its Russian-born protagonist is called enables him to circumvent halacha, who acts Yudka, which could translate as “little Jew.” in his stead, becomes the architect of Jew- This Yudka is a strong silent type, a hewer ish history. If Jews in their own land want of stones who fearlessly patrols the kibbutz to make authentic history, Yudka preaches, perimeter alone in the dark but never says they have to act like goyim. a word in the endless meetings where mem- bers bicker over Zionist ideology and social- Jewish history is so dull, uninteresting. ist housekeeping – except for the one time he It has no glory or action, no heroes and surprises his comrades by requesting a com- conquerors, no rulers and masters of their mittee meeting for the express purpose of- fate, just a collection of wounded, hunted, making a speech. “I want to state,” he begins, groaning and wailing wretches, always ***3 “that I am opposed to Jewish history.” begging for mercy . . . I would simply for- His fellow kibbutzniks have a good chuck- bid teaching our children Jewish history. le. The man running the meeting says, you Why the devil teach them about their an- want to talk about history, “go to Mount cestors’ shame? I would just say to them: Scopus.” (The hilltop location of the Hebrew “Boys, from the day we were driven out University affords a play on words: “Scopus,” from our land, we’ve been a people with- HaTzofim in Hebrew, alludes to an ivory tower out a history. Class dismissed. Go out and of “observers” who excel at critique but shun play football.” real work.) No, insists Yudka, I’m serious, I’ve been thinking a lot about this during those Jews, Yudka concedes, have bravely en- long nights on guard duty: dured centuries of oppression, but this is hardly heroic. “With no way out, anyone can We didn’t make our own history, the goy- be a hero,” he says. Such heroism “amounts to im made it for us. Just as they used to put great weakness . . . a kind of special talent for out our candles on Sabbath, milk our cows corruption and decay.” and light our stoves on Sabbath, so they made our history for us to suit themselves, This type of hero sooner or later begins and we just took it from them. But it’s not to pride himself on his “heroism” and ours, not at all! Because we didn’t make it, brags about it: “See what great torments because we would have done it differently, I withstand! . . . Who can compare with because we didn’t want it to be that way, it me? ” . . . We want to be tortured, we are eager, we yearn for it . . . Persecution pre- *** Haim Hazaz, “The Sermon,” in Israeli Stories (1962), Joel serves us, keeps us alive . . . A Jew without Blocker, ed. I have made several small alterations in Ben Halpern’s suffering is an abnormal creature, hardly translation.

HAVRUTA | 75 a Jew at all, half a goy . . . The world grows character in a Philip Roth novel – even when narrow, cramped, upside-down. A world of named, as in Operation Shylock, “Philip Roth” darkness, perversion and contradiction. - is actually Philip Roth. Yudka is a fictional Sorrow is priced higher than joy, pain eas- creation, an imaginary amateur dialectician ier to understand than happiness, wreck- who intuits the complex pitfalls of Zionist

Tel Aviv, Hanukkah, ing better than building, slavery preferred thinking. Listen to his bottom line: 2006 to redemption, dream before reality . . . It’s horrible! A different psychology is created, Zionism and Judaism are not at all the same, a kind of moonlight psychology . . . but two very different things . . . things that contradict one another! When a man can no This is unbearable stuff. Here we are in longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist . . . Zi- 1943, of all terrible years, and Hayyim Hazaz onism begins with the wreckage of Judaism. dares to write that Jews yearn for suffering? But of course this is not the author speak- Here the rough-hewn Yudka tips his cap ing, any more than a self-lacerating Jewish to the prolific Hebrew writer and scholar Mi-

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“We have come to a time of two worlds in conflict,” wrote Berdyczewski a century ago: “To be or not to be! To be the last Jews or the first Hebrews . . .”

But there’s a heavy price to this reversal of Jewish history, this rupture, as Yudka tells his fellow pioneers in Palestine:

This community is not continuing any- thing, it is different, something entirely specific, almost not Jewish, practically not Jewish at all . . . In the same way, we are ashamed to be called by the ordi- nary, customary Jewish names, but we are proud to name ourselves, say, Artzieli or Avnieli. Haimovitch, you will agree, that’s a Jewish name, entirely too Jewish, but Avnieli – that’s something else again, the devil knows what, but it has a strange sound, not Jewish at all, and so proud!

It’s natural, in other words, for Shlomo to become Seymour in the Diaspora, for Zim- cha Josef Berdyczewski, who was born to a merman to become Bob Dylan. But why, in Hasidic family in Ukraine and studied Ger- the Land of Israel, the ancestral homeland, man philosophy in Berlin. “The ‘long, dark should Jews trade in their ancestral sur- night’ is gone,” wrote Berdyczewski, forty names or prefer Nimrod to Nachman? Yudka years before Hazaz, “and new days, with new the quarryman excavates the final irony: circumstances, have replaced it.” Echoing Nietzsche, Berdyczewski called for “a trans- There we were living among strangers, valuation of the values which have been the people who were different and hostile, guidelines of our lives in the past.” His essay “Wrecking and Building” (the Hebrew title and we had to hide, to dissimulate, to be “S’tira U’vinyan” derives from the thirty-nine invisible, to appear different from what Mishnaic categories of labor forbidden on we really were. But here? Aren’t we among Shabbat) reaches the same problematic con- our own, all to ourselves, with no need for clusion as Yudka: “We have come to a time of shame? . . . A little detail, quite unimport- two worlds in conflict: To be or not to be! To ant, it didn’t deserve going into so much, be the last Jews or the first Hebrews. . .” but it is a symptom of far more.

HAVRUTA | 77 Why was the Second Temple destroyed? Uncertainty and Because of this hatred of one Jew for an- contradiction are built other. Why has the Messiah not come? Because of the angry hatred of one Jew into the system – so why for another. Angry disputes, verbal abuse, malicious backbiting, mocking gossip, scoff- not celebrate them as ing, faultfinding, complaining, condemn- the seedbed of Jewish ing, insulting – the blackest mark against our people is not the eating of pork, it is not national creativity? even marrying with the non-Jew: worse than both is the sin of Jewish speech. We Behold the paradox of Jewish independence. talk too much, we say too much, and we do Wallowing in a long night of Jewish sorrow is not know when to stop. Part of the Jew- no way to live. It’s “too Jewish,” not proudly Is- ish problem is that they never know what raeli. But the more you become like all the na- voice to speak in. Refined? Rabbinical? tions, unfettered to your own past, “normal” Hysterical? Ironical?. . . “For each and ev- and sovereign, you risk losing touch with your ery moment that a person remains silent, nefesh Yehudi, your Jewish soul. For ultra- he earns a reward too great to be conceived Orthodox opponents of Zionism, this means of by any created being.” This is the Vilna the desecration of Torah. For other Jews, Gaon quoting from the Midrash. secular and religious alike, Jewish statehood entails a supreme, ongoing challenge to the On goes Smilesburger for another half ethical imperatives of their ancient tradition. page, eventually invoking a simple prayer of the pious (Rabbi Yisrael Meir HaCohen, 1838–1933), famed for his The Impossible Task definitive writings on lashon hara or “evil speech”: “Grant me that I should say noth- So where does that leave us? As befuddled ing that is unnecessary.” as Feierberg’s Nachman? As committed as Nahmanides to the unique holiness of the I am a disciple of the Chofetz Chaim. No Land? The way I read the map, we might as Jew had more love for his fellow Jews than well make a virtue of the inescapable ironies the Chofetz Chaim. You don’t know the of Zionism. Uncertainty and contradiction teachings of the Chofetz Chaim? A great are built into the system – so why not man, a humble scholar, a revered rabbi celebrate them as the seedbed of Jewish from Radin, in Poland, he devoted his long national creativity? life trying to get Jews to shut up . . . In his Toward the end of Philip Roth’s endlessly old age, the Chofetz Chaim extolled his convoluted and irreverent Operation Shylock deafness because it prevented him from (1993), set in Israel in the midst of the first hearing loshon hora. . . The poor Chofetz intifada, the elderly, disabled Holocaust sur- Chaim was an Anti-Defamation League vivor Louis B. Smilesburger turns out to be unto himself – only to get Jews to stop de- (Warning: Plot Spoiler) a Mossad spymas- faming one another . . . He could not stand ter. (It’s that kind of book.) Readers whose their quarreling, and so he set himself perceptions of Roth are mainly framed by the impossible task of promoting Jewish Portnoy’s Complaint may be surprised to come harmony and Jewish unity instead of bit- upon Smilesburger’s learned discourse about ter Jewish divisiveness. Why couldn’t the the source of Jewish troubles: Jews be one people? Why must Jews be in

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conflict with one another? Why must they Including, inevitably, the efflorescence of be in conflict with themselves? Because lashon hara, which has reached its zenith in the the divisiveness is not just between Jew Jewish State. As Smilesburger freely admits: and Jew – it is within the individual Jew. Is there a more manifold personality in all Well, I can testify to it – I am, unfortu- the world? I don’t say divided. Divided is nately, an example of it – the loshon hora nothing. Even the goyim are divided. But in Eretz Yisroel is a hundred times worse, inside every Jew is a mob of Jews. The good a thousand times worse, than it ever was Jew, the bad Jew. The new Jew, the old in Poland in the lifetime of the Chofetz Jew. The lover of Jews, the hater of Jews. Chaim. Here there is nothing we will not The friend of the goy, the enemy of the say . . . When it comes to defaming Jews, goy. The arrogant Jew, the wounded Jew. the Palestinians are pishkerehs next to The pious Jew, the rascal Jew. The coarse Ha’aretz. Even at that we are better than Stuart Schoffman, a Jew, the gentle Jew. The defiant Jew, they are! Now, once again it can be cyni- longtime columnist the appeasing Jew. The Jewish Jew, the cally argued that in this phenomenon lies for the Jerusalem de-Jewed Jew. Shall I go on? . . . Is it any the very triumph and glory of Zionism . . . Report, is a senior wonder that the Jew is always disputing? fellow at the Shalom He is a dispute, incarnate! Yes, indeed it can, and not at all cynically. Hartman Institute Fictionally spoken in Jerusalem, Roth’s and editor of Havruta. What Roth’s wily secret agent does not loquacious riff may be deplored, if one so His translations of mention is that the Chofetz Chaim, along chooses, as a provocation of the King in with other rabbinic luminaries, was a leader of His own palace. But isn’t it also, couched in include books by the anti-Zionist Agudath Yisroel movement, thick layers of redemptive irony, a splendid David Grossman and founded in Eastern Europe in 1912. In his evocation of modern Israel, and of the open, A.B. Yehoshua. commentary on the Torah portion Devarim energetic, unabashed Jewish mind that Israel (featured on a Web site called jewsagainstzi- empowers worldwide – in short, an inadvertent onism.com), the Chofetz Chaim cites a pow- (or perhaps deliberate) Zionist manifesto? erful statement by Nahmanides regarding the tense encounter between Jacob and Esau in Genesis 32. The character of Esau, of course, symbolizes in Jewish lore such future archen- emies of Israel as Amalek, pagan Rome, and the militant Church (which roped Ramban into the Barcelona Disputation of 1263 and ultimately drove him from Spain). The Torah teaches, wrote Ramban, that future genera- tions need to emulate the righteous Jacob and ward off dangerous gentiles with three meth- ods: Prayer, gifts (see Genesis 32:14–16 for all the ewes, bulls and camels Jacob gave Esau to quell his anger), and (as a last resort) flight. But now, laments the Chofetz Chaim, alluding to the Zionists, “new leaders have arisen who chose new modes of conduct, leaving behind our ancestors’ weapons and adopting the tac- tics of our enemies,” thereby sinking the Jews into greater travails.

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