Dear Neighbor,
So who are the Jews? A religion? A people? An ethnicity? A race?
That question impacts directly on our conflict. It goes to the heart of the Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
The Jews began as a family. Four thousand years ago, Abraham and Sarah founded a dynasty that became a people and a faith. But family—a basic sense of belonging to a community of fate, regardless of your religious or political beliefs—has remained at the core of Jewish identity ever since.
Family ties among Jews can be expressed in dramatic ways. My formative experience of belonging to a global Jewish family was the protest movement to save the Jews of the former Soviet Union. I joined that movement in the 1960s, as a boy in Brooklyn, protesting for Jews I never met living thousands of miles away. But family knows no borders: It was self-evident to me that if my brothers and sisters were in crisis, my responsibility was to help save them. By “saving” Soviet Jewry, we didn’t mean protecting them from physical danger, because they weren’t threatened with actual destruction. But their Jewish identity was under assault by a government policy that banned Jewish education and practice, that was attempting to erase them as Jews. And so we set out to prevent losing them as part of the family.
Jews around the world organized a sustained campaign of protests that lasted for twenty-five years and helped redefine Jewish identity and purpose. Thousands of Jews from around the Diaspora traveled to the Soviet Union, simply to meet with fellow Jews and encourage them to persist. The protest campaign spread around the world, until almost every Jewish community, no matter how small or remote, was drawn into the effort. Finally, the gates of the Soviet Union opened in the late 1980s and the lost Jews rejoined their people.
The Jewish family also manifests in more intimate ways. In my travels, I’ve experienced the blessings of belonging to an extended and generous family, expanding my sense of home. In Mumbai I was hosted by a childless Jewish couple and treated as a son, because in a sense I was. While spending a year in a village in southern France, I was astonished one day to receive boxes of fresh produce, a gift for the Jewish new year from someone I didn’t know: a farmer who’d heard that a fellow Jew was visiting from abroad. “Are you a Jew?” I’m sometimes asked in airports, and it’s not hard to tell whether the question is being asked with hostility or anticipation.
Adversity has diminished us but also made us stronger. One reason Jews care so passionately about each other is because of historical necessity. That sense of family has impacted our conflict, too, neighbor. Every attempt to destroy or undermine Israel over the years only strengthened the support for the Jewish state from Jews around the world.
But, paradoxically, this overwhelming sense of family can also undermine Jewish solidarity. As in any family, mutual expectations can lead to feelings of betrayal. When Jews determine that fellow family members have betrayed either the interests or the values of the community, they can turn against each other with a ferocious contempt. That is the dark side of Jewish family.
The form that Jewish family takes is peoplehood.
The centrality of peoplehood in Jewish identity helps explain the seeming anomaly of Jewish atheists. In Islam and Christianity, for example, adherents who stop believing in the basic tenets of the faith are no longer Muslims or Christians. But Jews without faith, who still remain faithful to their people—contributing to its well-being, raising their children as Jews—will be widely regarded by fellow Jews as within the fold.
Over the years I have repeatedly heard variations of the following from Palestinians, and from Muslims generally: We have no problem with the Jews as a religion. We treated you better than the Christians did. But we have no sympathy for your insistence that you are a people, with the right to national sovereignty, because we know you aren’t a people but a religion.
The denial of Jewish peoplehood is one of the key divides between us. Even Palestinian moderates I’ve known who want to end the bloodshed tend to deny that the Jews are an authentic nation. So long as Palestinian leaders insist on defining the Jews as a religion rather than allowing us to define ourselves as we have since ancient times—as a people with a particular faith—then Israel will continue to be seen as illegitimate, its existence an open question.
For Judaism, peoplehood has a crucial spiritual dimension. If the Jews were just a family whose concern was self-preservation—a family bound only by shared fate—then it’s doubtful we would have survived through thousands of years of wandering and adversity. The Jewish collective functions on two levels: as family and as faith. What strengthened the Jewish family was its sense of destiny—that the Jewish people has an urgent spiritual role to play in the evolution of humanity. Destiny gives meaning to fate.
Judaism is the love story between God and a people. That romance is often tumultuous. Sometimes, as the Bible records, God accuses the Jews of faithlessness, and sometimes Jews reciprocate and accuse God of abandoning the covenant with them, especially in times of acute persecution. But so long as the Jewish people exist, the love story persists.
The purpose of Judaism is to sanctify one people with the goal of sanctifying all peoples. According to this belief, God set aside a random group of human beings—emphatically not a nation of saints—and exposed them to mass revelation at Mount Sinai, where God appeared not only to Moses, a single great soul, but to all of Israel. The very ordinariness of the people of Israel—a nation of freed slaves—was in some sense the point of their chosenness. The Jews were chosen, in other words, not because they were innately special but because they weren’t: the national equivalent of “everyman”—every people, any people. They were to be a test case for what happens when a cross-section of humanity is subjected to an unmediated encounter with the Divine. Sinai was a rehearsal for the revelation that humanity will experience at the culmination of history.
For all the beliefs and values Jews share with Muslims and Christians as fellow monotheists, there is a crucial distinction. Islam and Christianity are universal faiths, intended in principle for every human being. Each of these faiths envisions a future world that will be remade in its image; each believes that, at the end of history, humanity will embrace its way.
Judaism, by contrast, is a faith intended for a specific people.
Judaism shares with Islam and Christianity a universal vision: that the reality of God will one day be as self-evident as material reality is today. All three faiths aim at preparing humanity for the revelation of God’s presence. In the Jewish dream of the future, all of humanity will recognize the unity of existence and ascend on pilgrimage to the “house of God” in Jerusalem.
But Judaism has no expectation that humanity will become Jewish. Instead, the role of the Jews is to be a spiritual avant-garde, attesting to God’s presence—not least through their improbable survival—and helping prepare humanity for its breakthrough to transcendence: a particularist strategy for a universal goal.
The structure of the Hebrew Bible reveals the purpose of the Jews. It begins as a universal story: the creation of the first humans; their mysterious fall into this physical world from the “Garden of Eden,” a higher state of being; the beginning of fratricide; the inability of humanity to transcend the level of animal existence—culminating in an apocalyptic destruction the Bible calls “the flood.”
The failure of humanity to fulfill God’s plan required a new Divine strategy. And so God appointed Abraham to found a people, through whom, as the Bible puts it, “all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” The Bible then narrowed its focus and became the story of a people, struggling to rise above human nature and become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” God’s redemptive plan for humanity required a people to carry that vision through history. For Judaism, then, peoplehood and faith are inseparable. There is no Judaism without a Jewish people.
The Hebrew Bible culminates with a universal vision—a time when the presence of God will be, in Isaiah’s words, “as visible as the waters of the sea” and humanity will embrace its oneness. The biblical narrative returns to its universal roots and humanity returns to the Garden, but at a higher evolutionary state, having matured through its experiences in history.
Each religious strategy—the universal approach of Islam and Christianity, and the peoplehood approach of Judaism—has a spiritual advantage and disadvantage. The advantage of a universal faith is that it sees all of humanity as its immediate responsibility. I am deeply moved by the scenes of millions of pilgrims gathering in Mecca, representing a multiplicity of nations. Yet all-embracing universal faiths must struggle against the temptation to define their path as the only legitimate way to God.
Because Judaism is intended for a specific people, it can accommodate the validity of other faiths. As a Jew, I have no expectations of remaking humanity in my religious image, and so I feel grateful to other faiths for offering varied paths to God. Islam and Christianity have brought vast numbers of souls into a relationship with God—and, as it happens, with the sacred stories of my people. Now Judaism is encountering Hinduism and Buddhism, and rabbis and scholars are beginning to grapple with a Jewish understanding of those essential faiths.
The danger of a peoplehood-based faith is self-obsession. There is a tendency, especially among the most fervently traditional Jews, to ignore the rest of humanity and its problems. Partly that’s a consequence of thousands of years of persecution, which have driven many Jews into a kind of protective insularity. Still, the temptation facing Judaism is to forget its universal goal and imagine that God’s overriding concern isn’t humanity but a single people.
The Jews are not a hermetically closed people, let alone an ethnicity or a race—as any street scene in Israel, with its radical human diversity, will reveal. Judaism is open to converts. Orthodox Judaism makes the conversion process arduous (other Jewish denominations less so). But once completed, a convert is regarded as any other Jew. Fellow Jews are forbidden to remind converts of their origins, to avoid conveying, even subtly, the message of exclusion from the community of Israel.
One of the most beloved Jewish figures is Ruth the Moabite, who converted to Judaism and is the great-grandmother of King David, founder of the messianic line. The tradition linking a convert to the messiah is a reminder to Jews: We are a particular people with a universal goal.
According to the book of Ruth, the conversion process of King David’s great-grandmother consisted simply of a declaration. Ruth told her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi: “Your people will be my people, your God my God.”
The order of those two vows reveals something essential about how ancient Judaism viewed not only the process of becoming a Jew but the nature of Jewish identity. First Ruth declares her allegiance to the people of Israel. And then she affirms her faith in God. The foundation of Jewishness is peoplehood.
One argument I’ve heard from some Palestinians is that the state of Israel lacks historical legitimacy because Ashkenazim—Jews of European origin—aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all but from the medieval Khazars—a Turkic tribe whose king, along with many of his people, converted to Judaism in the eighth century CE. The notion that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars is dismissed by most historians. (And what of the Mizrahim—Jews of Middle Eastern origin?)
But even if all Jews alive today were descended from the Khazars, it wouldn’t affect their legitimacy as Jews. Converts and born Jews are interchangeable; once you commit to the Jewish people and its faith, you are retroactively linked to its very origins—to the first Jewish converts, Abraham and Sarah. There is even the mystical notion that the souls of converts stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah along with the rest of the Jewish people.
My wife, Sarah, who grew up Christian, experienced a conversion process similar to Ruth’s. First she fell in love with the Jewish people (like Ruth, through a particular Jew), and then she came to love the God of the Jewish people and take on its path. When she converted she chose the name Sarah because, like her biblical namesake, she, too, was founding a Jewish line.
Having been formed for a Divine purpose, the Jewish people itself became a religious category. Loyalty to the Jewish people is, for Judaism, a religious act. That’s why religious Zionists never hesitated to partner with secular Zionists, who love and protect their people. For religious Jews, strengthening the Jewish people contributes to its ability to function as a Divine messenger in the world.
The inherent relationship between peoplehood and religion hasn’t always been accepted by every Jewish group. In the nineteenth century, for example, Reform Judaism declared the Jews to be only a faith. That position has since evolved, and today Reform Judaism embraces a normative Jewish identity that includes peoplehood and attachment to Israel. On the opposite end of the religious spectrum are the ultra-Orthodox, who emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as an antimodernist ideology and whose relationship to peoplehood is ambivalent. While surely accepting peoplehood as part of their religious identity, the separatist ultra-Orthodox in effect place stringent religious practice ahead of basic Jewish unity, alienating much of the mainstream Jewish community.
The notion of a people chosen by God wasn’t intended to bestow privilege but responsibility. Jewish history attests that this role carries more burden than glory. The classical way Jews understood their own history was as the story of a people failing to live in the intensity of God’s presence. This is the story told by the Hebrew Bible—a national epic astonishing in its relentless criticism of the people it is supposedly intended to celebrate.
With the rise of Christianity and Islam, the Jewish self-critique of our spiritual failures became an external assault on our very legitimacy. Judaism was dismissed as obsolete, a failure. But Jews resisted that judgment. Living for centuries in often hostile lands, they still believed that God intended them to play a key spiritual role in history. And that role would be activated once they returned home, where they would function again as a sovereign collective.
There are Jews who distort chosenness, transforming it from a basis for serving humanity into an aggrieved separatism from the world. Chosenness can become a form of conceit, a self-glorifying theology. One can readily find examples of chauvinism, along with the opposite, in the vast corpus of Jewish religious literature. For some Jews, particularism becomes an end in itself, and the very universal purpose for which the people of Israel was appointed—to be a blessing for the nations—is displaced by an exaggerated sense of Jewish centrality.
But we also face the opposite problem.
Throughout our history there have been Jews who, longing for the universal endpoint, opted out of the Jewish people altogether. If the goal is human oneness, why continue clinging to an outmoded separatism? That, in effect, was the argument of Saul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. An impatience with “tribalism” led many Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to exchange Jewish identity for messianic Marxism, with disastrous consequences, not least for the Jews themselves.
Sustaining the tension between the particular and the universal is one of the great challenges facing the Jewish people today. One part has barricaded itself within the most constricted and triumphalist aspects of our tradition, while another part is so open to the rest of the world that it risks fading out of the Jewish story altogether.
For me, carrying a four-thousand-year tradition that has thrived despite sometimes overwhelming hostility is a privilege and a responsibility. Our story has been a vital part of the human story, and I believe that humanity still needs the voice of Jewish history. In my Jewish identity, the particular and the universal coexist. One commitment reinforces the other.