Negative Space, Positive Possibilities

Thoughts on the Jewish religious significance of the State of Israel

The Temple in Jerusalem depicted as the Dome of the Rock on the printer’s mark of Marco Antonio Giustiniani, Venice mid-16th century.

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When I write about Israel/Palestine issues, I’m sometimes accused of not saying what, at bottom, I actually believe. I’ve said that I don’t call myself a Zionist mostly because I think the meaning of Zionism changed necessarily with the founding of the State of Israel and I’m not convinced I affirm what Zionism as an ideology means in the wake of that event. (Also I’m just generally averse to ascribing to ideologies.) I’ve also said that I think anti-Zionism is a nonsense ideology because it is organized around rejecting something that happened in the past rather than on building a concrete and defined future starting where we are. Both of those are negations, though, not affirmations; they describe what I don’t believe, not what I do. Similarly, I write a lot about what the Israeli government is doing wrong (too many instances to count, honestly; here’s one, from a month after the massacres of October 7th), but much less about what would be the right thing for it to do. And I’ve rarely written about the significance of any of this for me as a Jew in a religious sense (this is a rare instance).

To some extent, all of that reflects my personality and general orientation toward the world. I am much more comfortable articulating questions, pointing out tensions and complications, and exploring implications than I am in offering definitive answers. And to some extent it reflects genuine uncertainty on my part. But even someone who strives for philosophical minimalism and humility should be able to say something positive. For me, though, the positive is rooted, inevitably, in the negative, in the sense of the open space that remains between what I cannot believe. So I’m going to try to do that here: to articulate a positive vision that emerges from that open negative space. I’m going to start with the meaning of the State of Israel for me religiously.

For context: my observance, as I have noted many times, is something wildly inconsistent and fragmented. There was a period in my life where I didn’t observe kashrut at all, didn’t go to synagogue or observe the Sabbath, generally lived as an unobservant Jew. Then, after a period of steadily increasing observance, I came to a point where my wife and I had a kosher home and, while we ate in non-kosher establishments, we stuck to vegetarian food or the kinds of fish that are kosher (no shellfish); we lit Shabbat candles on time and strove (with some exceptions) to observe many if not all of the Sabbath prohibitions; and I became extremely active in our synagogue, going to services every Sabbath and holiday and often leading services and reading Torah. Then, for a variety of personal reasons, there was a falling off, and now I am a mishmash of inconsistencies. We keep a kosher home, but we eat whatever we want out. We try to light candles on time, go to synagogue most Saturday mornings and holidays, and I’m still very active leading services and reading Torah—but we don’t really observe the other Sabbath prohibitions. The simplest way to describe my meshugas is that I am still deeply embedded in Judaism as a collective endeavor while constantly breaking the rules as an individual.

So I wouldn’t take me as a guide to how to live a religiously serious life. Yet, as an individual, I still care a great deal about the decisions my community makes as a collective, a subject that, in my personal life, mostly rears its head when it comes to things like prayer. Prayer, as I understand it, isn’t purely individual; it binds me horizontally to my fellow congregants and vertically with the past and with the future. So I don’t think my prayers need to always reflect things I personally believe—but I would have a hard time saying a prayer that I affirmatively rejected. Usually, I don’t feel the need to reject. Our liturgy refers repeatedly to God as “King of the Universe” while Reconstructionists, wary of what “King” might imply, say “Spirit of the Universe” instead, but I have no problem with our (traditional) usage, with affirming God’s ultimate and universal sovereignty and not just His universal presence. We also refer to God as the one “who gives life to the dead,” while Reform Jews, wary of affirming a doctrine of physical resurrection, say “who gives life to everything” instead, but I don’t have a problem with the traditional formulation here either, even though, if you pressed me on whether I believed in a bodily resurrection, I would not affirmatively say that I do. I think there’s enough ambiguity about meaning that I do not have to affirmatively reject any of this—and therefore I can say it, and, in some sense, mean it, and remain attached to the collective effort at prayer.

We also say the Prayer for the State of Israel, which begins as follows: “Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first sprouting of our redemption.” The prayer then goes on to ask for a variety of blessings: for its defense, for peace, for wisdom in its leaders, etc. But that first sentence remains startling, and poses a real problem for me. The word I’m translating as “sprouting of” is tzmichat, from the word tzemach which as a noun can mean branch or shoot and in its verb form can mean sprout, grow or plant. The word is used in Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophetic books to refer to the return of the legitimate heir of the house of David to the throne of Israel—in other words, to the coming of the Messiah. In its original wording, then, the first line of the prayer asserts that the State of Israel is a sign of or the actual beginning of the coming of the Messiah. This is an innocuous formulation in the context of Religious Zionism as derived from the thinking of Rav Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, who saw secular Zionism as an unwitting agent of God’s plan to bring about the coming of the Messiah. But that context is not, to me, innocuous.

I have never been able to make this affirmation, because I cannot affirm Rav Kook’s overall religious-philosophical confidence. I think Rav Kook’s doctrine had the potential from the very beginning to be extremely dangerous, and has proven to be so as it has actually played out in reality. I am not a prophet and I don’t think Rav Kook was a prophet, and as such I think neither he nor I should be in the business of declaring what events do or do not presage the coming of the Messiah—whatever “the coming of the Messiah” itself might mean, and I don’t presume to know that either, anymore than I presume to know what it means precisely to say that God gives life to the dead or is the King of the Universe. But whatever the coming of the Messiah might mean, I cannot affirm that the State of Israel is its first sprout. The most I could plausibly affirm is that it could be.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, an ultra-Orthodox friend of mine (a misnaged—”black hat” as they say, but not Hasidic) who considered himself a Zionist but not a Religious Zionist (most ultra-Orthodox Jews are not Zionist at all, for religious reasons—I’ll go into that subject in a bit) amended the prayer to add the word sheteheih—”that it (she) might be”—before the words “the first sprouting of our redemption.” The addition changes the meaning of the first sentence profoundly; rather than asking for blessings on a state that is the first sprouting of our redemption, it asks for a blessing that the state might be that first sprouting. It leaves the precise significance of the return of Jewish sovereignty—and its relationship (if any) to the coming of the Messiah—to God. I was delighted to learn about that way of amending the prayer, and adopted it—not knowing that, as it happens, the amendment didn’t originate with my friend or with his religious disposition, but rather from left-wing Jews who wanted to separate themselves from Religious Zionism primarily for political reasons.

I’ve continued to say the prayer that way ever since. More recently the rabbi at our synagogue has been pushing congregants to do the same, and getting some pushback from people who think she’s trying to put distance between us and the reality of Israel—to say, in so many words, that we can only see an idealized, perfected Israel as something of worthy of religious significance. I don’t think that’s correct, though, or at least it isn’t correct as an expression of what I mean when I say it. I mean it as an expression of hope, and I think hope is much more valuable—and much less dangerous—than surety.

I mentioned earlier that most ultra-Orthodox Jews are not Zionists. The reason they are not is that there are very strong traditional rabbinic prohibitions against collective Jewish action to take possession of the Land of Israel. If you want a quick primer on these, and how they have or haven’t been reconciled by different Orthodox authorities with the fact of political Zionism, check out this Wikipedia page about the “Three Oaths.” From an Orthodox perspective, the primary question is a halachic one, a question of religious law, and for the most part that question is moot. The question is no longer whether it is permitted or forbidden to found a Jewish State, because the state has been founded; the question for them now is what their relationship with the state may or may not be. But on a deeper level, the existence of the state still raises those messianic expectations, even for those who reject the certainty of the Religious Zionists and the religious anti-Zionists. The Third Jewish Commonwealth is supposed to be the last one, founded with the coming of the Messiah. If the Religious Zionist perspective—that Zionism is destined to bring the Messiah—is rejected, and the religious anti-Zionist perspective—that the founding of the State of Israel was a heretical act that must be reversed—is also rejected, what remains of that messianic promise?

The only way I can keep that promise alive without falling into either of the traps I see on either side is to open up the field of what I don’t know, to increase the negative space, and admit the possibility that history may be longer and more complicated than the traditional timeline admits—that, in other words, history is still proximately in our hands and ultimately in God’s hands. If the Third Jewish Commonwealth is neither assured to be the beginning of the triumphant end of history nor assured to be a sin and a catastrophe, then the religious significance of the founding of the State of Israel is that it opened up possibilities. From the perspective of powerful human beings acting as agents of their own history, these are possibilities to figure out what sovereign Jewish self-government looks like and means, very much including what it would mean for it to be legitimate and ethical in its operation. From the perspective of vulnerable human beings in the hands of an all-powerful God who redeems whom He chooses, it is the possibility that a more profound transformation could be at hand. And, of necessity, there is are also the possibilities of failure, destruction, and another turn of the cycle. It has happened twice before. There’s no reason why the third time must be the charm—and if God remains sovereign, then in fact we cannot be sure that it is.

If possibility is the essence of the situation, though, then we should be less rigid in our imagination of the range of possibility, even about very fundamental things, like the nature and extent of sovereignty. Is dividing the Land of Israel between Jews and Palestinian Arabs a betrayal of the messianic process, as Religious Zionists tend to see it? Not if the Third Jewish Commonwealth does not speak with the voice of God but only that of its citizenry, and if we have no idea by what twisty path that process will unfold; sometimes a separation is the necessary prelude to a reconciliation. The same goes for the possibility that that commonwealth should not be exclusively Jewish in character, as opposed to being explicitly bi-national or something more complex; who knows whether such a transformation is precisely how God intends to bring about the promise that all peoples will worship Him at His holy mountain? For the sake of completeness, throw in other visions that don’t appeal to a liberal imagination: of a restored Jewish monarchy, of a rabbinic theocracy, of a unified land for one people only, with others expelled or reduced to the status of supplicant non-citizens. All of these are possibilities, and none of them can depend on God’s blessing; they must make their case in human terms.

There are practical problems with a vision of two separate states and practical problems with a vision of a unified state that represents both peoples and practical problems with more novel arrangements like a confederation of two sovereign states with free movement between them—even imagining a positive future of any kind seems delusional two years after the October 7th massacres and the subsequent destruction of Gaza. Needless to say, there are also huge practical problems with those other illiberal visions. My point is a very small one: that the practical problems—including the problems of corruption and narrow-mindedness and anger and distrust, which are very much practical ones—are the only real problems. Believing that the founding of the State of Israel has religious significance—precisely because it opened up a whole vista of new possibility—does not require you to foreclose any of those possibilities, or to conclude that God is definitely on the side of one possibility in particular. The future remains open.

There are, obviously, a lot of limits on what I will affirmatively say I believe, even as I continue to join collective affirmations of belief that I can situate in the negative space between the unacceptable. But I do believe that.