Israel and peoplehood

Jeremy

We've been rather busy recently. But we've finally managed to be in the same place at the same time for long enough (without our Talmuds on our tables) to talk about the College Winter Learning Seminar that happened at the beginning of this semester.

Miri

It was really great to be back and learning in depth on a really contentious topic: Israel. We had around 20 college students join us for 2 weeks. They were here for davening, for learning and for chilling out. And there was quite a lot of diversity of opinion about the topic at hand. The goal was not to have political conversations but to put together a shared canon of sources around which the conversation could be framed, from Tanakh to Talmud to modern religious Zionists.

Jeremy

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to muster any strong feelings about Israel during the 2 weeks that we were discussing it. I have many political opinions about Israel, I have almost no religious opinions about Israel. I just don't see why I should be so invested in a country that I neither live in nor vote in. Sure there are lots of Jews there. There are also lots of Jews in the US, France, Argentina, and I don't necessarily feel more social responsibility for those countries than any other! Of course I believe in the right of Israel to exist, as I believe in the right for all self-defined ethnic/cultural groups to rule themselves. But I feel no more claim to Israel specifically than, for example, medieval Spain.

Miri

I see what you're saying, and think that's a totally valid perspective on Israel. Emotionally, I definitely shared that perspective for most of the time we were studying these sources. But I don't think that was the thrust of what the sources we studied were saying. Though they featured the claim that Israel is a distinct ontological and metaphysical entity, the more important aspect seemed to be about the relationship that Jews collectively have to space and time. Israel on this reading is the vehicle for understanding how the Jewish people should see themselves operating in the world more generally. 

Jeremy

Last weekend, I attended Limmud New York—my first non-UK Limmud experience, which I might talk about in another blog post. There I heard some J-DOV talks (TED-like talks for the Jewish talk of your life, run by our sponsors JHub), including one from Daniel Gordis which will probably be online in the next few weeks. In this talk, he argued that the Bible is fundamentally about Jewish peoplehood and Jewish nationhood, as well as concerned with peoples having their own lands in general as well as the Jewish people specifically. This seemed to me distinctly not what the Bible is about—if anything like this argument stands, it must surely be about Israelite nationhood, which is distinctly not Jewish peoplehood. Both Jews and Christians are, in my view, inheritors of an Israelite tradition, and both radically reinvented what it meant to be part of the "children of Israel". To try to use texts about Israelite nationhood to understand modern Jewish nationhood appears to me to be problematic. Further, any statement "The Bible is about X...", as Rav Shai at our yeshiva has said, must be categorically wrong—there are countless different views on almost every topic in the Bible. To lump them altogether as a unified political philosophy seems to be wrong.

Miri

But a claim that "the Bible is categorically not about X" is okay?! Can't the Bible also speak to Jewish peoplehood? Even though the meanings of terms that feature in Tanakh are undoubtedly subject to change over time and through their re/interpretation by chazal (our sages), this doesn't mean that there is no space to learn about Jewish peoplehood. Might there not be space in the Bible to learn about all aspects of collective Jewish life?

Jeremy

I take that point and obviously I don't think the original understood intention particularly matters to us interpreters of our texts, I still think it is a weak claim to make that this is the originally intended meaning of the text.

Miri

Pshita! (Gemara language for: self-evidently, see Frank's Talmud dictionary, p.226). But still how does what Israel means in these sources influence the way we view the world? Grappling with this question was the point of the seminar. As a necessary corollary your feelings about Israel are not really relevant. Chazal challenge us to think about how what Israel means to them affects the rest of their theology, philosophy, view of history, etc.

Jeremy

You're certainly right about my feelings being irrelevant for their theologies, but my feelings about Israel would certainly affect my own theology.

Miri

Ok. Well I still think that maybe part of the reason you didn't get so much out of the seminar on this topic is because you weren't open to the different ways Chazal could influence our worldview. Either way, it was certainly great to have all these new voices. Having the students around the Beit Midrash was a lot of fun. It was also great to hear some diverse and complicated stories about people's experiences of Israel scattered throughout the two weeks of the seminar.

Jeremy

I think the best part of the whole experience was certainly having an actual conversation about Israel, which is rare, in an open and inquisitive environment. And it was a far-cry from the usual shouting matches that count as 'dialogue' so often on this issue.