How Central Is Israel?

SHIMONI, CIDEON

How Central Is Israel? In 1991, we are all Zionists. But what does that mean? For 50 years before the establishment of the State of Israel, some Jews opposed a Jewish state believing that it would...

...The second school of thought ascribes not an inherent but a "circumstantial centrality" to Israel...
...the ingathering of the Jewish people in its historic homeland, Eretz Israel, through aUyah (immigration to Israel) from all countries...
...Both views have sought support from the social sciences and studies of Jews in the Diaspora...
...Whether to choose Diaspora Jewish life or Israeli Jewish life is a matter of personal preference between If Jewish life is equally valid outside of Israel and collective Jewish culture equally ensured there, why go through all the trouble...
...Assuming the indispensable role of Israel for klal yisrael, for all Jews everywhere, no Jew devoted to Jewish people-hood can evade the call to give his or her optimal service by joining the people of Israel...
...I do not know which is more central to my body—my heart, my liver, my kidneys or my nervous system...
...A paradigm that vividly essential capturest this viewpoint is a prism...
...True, the term centrality has become widely accepted as a fitting description of the role of Israel, the state, in klal yisrael, the Jewish peoplehood...
...By contrast, the proponents of Israel's inherent centrality hold that for Jewish identity to be truly authentic it must encompass all of life...
...These very different ideological positions are rooted in a deeper dispute involving irreducible value choices over what is and what isn't authentic Jewish identity...
...Certainly, remaining in the Diaspora and lamenting the misguided course of development in Israel is unconscionable...
...To Jews ascribing to the circumstantial centrality of Israel it is not imperative to live, in Israel...
...Diaspora Jewry is too subsumed by the majority culture to ensure by itself the collective future of the Jews as a people...
...Within this consensus, however, is an ideological dissonance concerning a key term: "the centrality of Israel in Jewish life...
...True, the culture emerging in Israel is strongly influenced by universal rays of culture emanating largely from North America, but these are refracted by the Jewish prism of Israel...
...Any criticism of what is actually happening in Israel cannot detract from this imperative...
...Hence, the survival and creativity of Israel must, in principle, be granted primacy in calling upon the resources of Jewish life...
...1 March 10, 1987...
...In the Diaspora, especially in the United States, a comparable, if less acute, existential need underpins the normative ideological position that I have called the circumstantial centrality of Israel...
...Projections of Diaspora population decline, through below replacement birth-rates and interfaith marriage as well as a drop in the level of Jewish affiliations, have long been used to undergird the view that the Diaspora is tenuous and only Israel can ensure the future of Jewish life...
...According to the inherent centrality viewpoint, the burgeoning society and culture of the Jews in Israel is the crucial determinant of the collective Jewish future—for better or for worse...
...A partial or dualistic identity, resulting from acculturation to any environment that is not Jewish, can never be equally authentic...
...1 A more widely shared statement by the same author is this: "The issue before us...is whether or not to affirm the golah [Diaspora] as an integral part of the Jewish world, as an equal partner with the State of Israel, in the Zionist enterprise...
...they entirely miss the point of inherent central-ity as an ideology for understanding the significance of Israel for klal yisrael Inherent centrality does not deny the possibility of meaningful modes of Jewish life in the Diaspora, but contends that Diaspora life at its best is only a Jewish cultural subordinate or coordinate to that of Israel...
...Both are regarded as equivalent in intrinsic Jewish value, although different in intensity and character...
...the protection of Jewish rights everywhere...
...Other Jews were indifferent Those who supported the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancient land of Israel were called, appropriately enough, Zionists...
...According to the in-herent centrality thesis, after the Diaspora's Jewish cultural autonomy was lost in the wake of civic emancipation, meaningful Jewish cultural distinctiveness and self-determination requires Jewish time and space, land and language—a Jewish prism...
...of Chicago, 1981), p. 138...
...The difference among Zionists tends to break down between Israeli Zionists with their commitment to the inherent centrality of Israel and Diaspora Zionists whose failure to make aliyah usually implies a commitment to no more than the circumstantial centrality of Israel...
...According to these social scientists, innovative ways of Jewish interaction that often result from common occupations, communication networks, shared social class interests and leisure activities lead to greater cohesion of the Jews as a distinctive ethnic and religious group in American society...
...After all, to accept the position of inherent centrality, which connotes that Diaspora manifestations of Jewishness are somehow inferior to the comprehensive Jewishness of Israel, undermines the optimistic faith needed to develop and lead institutions that ensure the long-term future of American Jewry...
...After all, if Jewish life is equally valid outside of Israel and a collective Jewish culture equally ensured there, why go through all the trouble...
...they can live only a partial Jewish life chipped out of non-Jewish time and space, land and language...
...2 Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home (Univ...
...the other, "circumstantial centrality...
...One I call "inherent centrality...
...spurious analogies with the fate of German Jewry...
...Indeed, since both positions are said to have advantages and disadvantages, some evince a personal preference for the dual mode, that is to say, for Jewishness in the Diaspora...
...and the absurd claim that a meaningful Jewish life can never be lived in the Diaspora...
...The implication is that should the causes for this concern happily pass, the preferential attention paid to Israel by Diaspora Jews would also pass...
...A prism refracts rays of light...
...Since the Jewishness of Israel and the Diaspora bears advantages and disadvantages, the choice before Jews as to where to live is a personal, almost aesthetic, preference...
...According to this view, the Diaspora can never be a viable alternative to the autonomous Jewish society and culture of Israel...
...By contrast, in the Diaspora Jews are structurally embedded in the prism of another religious-cultural tradition...
...the preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the fostering of Jewish and Hebrew education and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values...
...In principle, the Jewish experience emerging in Israel is not accorded primacy over the Jewish experience in the Diaspora when determining the collective Jewish future...
...These make Israel central as a concern for world Jewry...
...Such misinformed assertions deserve short shrift...
...dogmatic predictions that Diaspora Jews are disappearing through interfaith marriage and assimilation...
...The centrality of Israel can be understood in two significanuy different ways...
...Researchers such as Calvin Goldscheider of Brown University and Steven Cohen of Queens College and, in their wake, the talented popularizer Charles Silberman in his book, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (Summit, 1985), argues thtkt, far from assimilating, American Jewry has undergone a transformation and is entering a flourishing and creative period of development...
...On the personal level, this viewpoint carries with it the unequivocal imperative of aliyah...
...Why do these two contrasting interpretations of Israel's centrality persist...
...But now all Jews—even those most critical of Israel—support the continued existence of the state...
...Suppose one regards the course of political developments in Israeli society as materially or morally harmful (because of the impediments to religious pluralism or the implications of ruling Judea and Samaria or for the converse reasons), then the very logic of the inherent centrality of Israel makes it more vital to join those forces in Israeli society that strive toward necessary change...
...In 1968, the World Zionist Organization adopted what has since become known as the Jerusalem Program, which enunciates the following aims of Zionism: • the unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life (my emphasis...
...What, then, is "post-state Zionism" or "neo-Zionism" or "pro-Israelism" or whatever name you want to call it...
...To insist on, or even to give lip service to, the centrality of the State of Israel in the life of the Jewish people is to me an absurd shibboleth in terms of the practical implications of such a principle.3 By its logic, this position does not conceive of the act of aliyah as a personal imperative, but rather as a pragmatic response to the needs of Israel or as an act of personal self-fulfillment...
...For 50 years before the establishment of the State of Israel, some Jews opposed a Jewish state believing that it would create more problems than it would solve or that the hope for it was quixotic...
...two equally viable and creditable options...
...The circumstances that make Israel central in this view are external threats to the state's existence and internal hazards to its welfare...
...Sometimes this position is accompanied by rhetorical excess, as when Jacob Neusner provocativly stated several years ago in -the Washington Post that "the United States is a better place to be a Jew than in Israel...
...the strengthening of the state of Israel based on the prophetic vision of justice and peace...
...2 Gerson Cohen, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, who died August 17,1991, frames the issue in an even more enticing way: Israel is a vital part of my Jewish body and mentality....On the other hand, I also find the alternative of exclusive or even predominant concern for any one of my vital parts an absurdity...
...However, at the core of the dissonance is the precise way in which centrality is understood...
...3 Moshe Davis, ed., WorldJewry and the State of Israel (Amo Press, 1977), p. 242...
...In Israel, the relatively difficult economic conditions, the career limitations of a small society and, even more so, the anguish and suffering from the ceaseless conflict with the Arabs, create the need for an ideological rationale for remaining in Israel—inherent centrality ideology...
...They arise out of real human interests and existential needs...
...Exigencies may compel me temporarily to devote the major part of my attention and energies to the repair and strengthening of one vital part, but not to the measuring of its relative importance or to the abdication of concern and responsibility for other parts...
...Notwithstanding these differences, the centrality of Israel, in all its ambiguity, still provides all Jews with a workable basis for shared endeavor...
...More recendy, a contrary view has contested these dire forecasts...
...In contrast to the Diaspora's attrition through assimilation and erosion of Jewish cultural distinctiveness, Israel, whose very raison d'etre is purposefully Jewish, enables wholeness in Jewish public life and Jewish cultural distinctiveness...
...Diaspora Jewish culture can never be a self-sufficient alternative to the primary Jewish culture of Israel...
...In the final analysis, proponents of the circumstantial centrality of Israel regard a dual cultural identity—what Mordecai Kaplan called "living in two civilizations"—as at least equal in authenticity to an integral cultural identity within a wholly Jewish ambience...
...In describing this position I have deliberately avoided giving any weight to the distortions still prevalent among Israelis, such as blithe denial that the Diaspora can ever manifest anything of enduringjewish value...
...America is not only good for the Jews but better for the Jews than Israel...

Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5


 
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