Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [105]
43. For this reason I have been utterly opposed to any irreversible settlement by Jews of the territories occupied in 1967 (the so-called “facts on the ground” approach). These lands should have been kept to create a Palestinian state when the Arab populace agreed to a full and lasting peace and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by its side. Settlement (alongside ongoing Palestinian intransigence and folly) has made the two-state solution much harder. The attitudes of parts of the settler population toward their Arab “neighbors” hardly need condemnation here; their actions speak for themselves. Any thought of a one-state solution evaporates when one looks at the history of nearby Lebanon. I fear that this is the tragedy which our messianists, their loud supporters, and our own timidity — with plenty of help from the other side — are bringing upon us.
44. Avram Burg's The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (London: St. Martin's Press, 2008), is an eye-opener in this regard.
45. I should make it clear that I agree that all Jews still live in galut, that is, in an unredeemed world, but this applies equally to Jews in the Holy Land and abroad. The distinction between golah (Jews in exile, outside the Land) and galut (the unredeemed state of existence, in a universal and almost metaphysical sense) is not a classical one, but the terms seem to have been used differently in recent times.
46. It was also no accident that Zionist educators, both in Israel and abroad, tried hard in the mid-twentieth century to move the textual emphasis from Torah narrative to that of the Early (historical) Prophets, Joshua, Judges, and Samuel. Those books tell of an Israel that crosses the Jordan, conquering and settling the land. But the shift, at least in diaspora Jewish education, was unsuccessful, unable to stand up to the weekly cycle of Torah readings in the synagogue and the long-standing centrality of the Torah text in the Jewish imagination.
47. Of course, as a religious nonimperialist, I do not believe that only Jews can “raise the sparks” that transform reality; all humans may engage in that work, however they describe it. But I believe that it is indeed important that some of us live outside a near-exclusivelyJewish society precisely so that we can interact, as both teachers and learners, givers and receivers, with similarly dedicated people who represent different histories and spiritual languages, who will teach us and learn from us how to redeem sparks that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
48. R. Dov Baer of Miedzyrzec, Maggid Devaraw le-Ya'aqov, ed. Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1976), #49, p. 70.
49. I am playing in the Midrashic tradition of exegeting Gen. 2:4 (“These are the generations of heaven and earth, when they were created”), where the consonants of Be-HiBaRe'aM (“when they were created”) are identical with those of be-AvRaHaM (“through Abraham”). Abraham, contrarian but “straight,” allowed for like “generations” to emerge.
50. T. B. Qiddushin 31a.
51. See my discussion in “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Re-casting Hasidism for Moderns” in Modern Judaism 29:1 (2009): 62-79.
52. As a traditionalist, of course, Heschel never denied the importance of ritual observance. His works were often used as a buttress to defend it. But if you look at the key thrust of his writings, it is clear that what God seeks of us in the first place are those mitzvot that demonstrate human decency, compassion for the oppressed and needy, and a response to the prophetic call for justice restored to God's world.
53. T. B. Menahot 43b.
54. Ekhah Rabbah 1:35; cf. R. Bahya to Deut. 33:26.
55. I am much attracted (in general) to the associative thinking of the Tiqquney Zohar, where it is clear that Shekhinah = Torah = Kabbalah = Halakhah, all of them differing aspects or iterations of the same single truth. See Ephraim Gottlieb's edition of the Hebrew Writings