Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [83]
There are other matters on which we diaspora Jews differ essentially, and sometimes even in loud argument, with the official Israeli point of view. Zionism has long viewed the figure of the wandering Jew as a tragedy of history, one to be overcome by the return to our ancient homeland and by the forging of a “new Jew” who was to emerge from that transformative process. Diaspora Jews are depicted by Israelis as physically unable to defend ourselves, unduly mercantile (and therefore trying to buy freedom rather than earn it honorably), living too much in the mind and too little in body and soil. From our point of view, there is a good deal of internalized anti-Semitism in this stereotype. The experience of building a new Jewish society, including that of fighting to defend it, was supposed to redeem us from these anomalies and bring about a new health and “normality” in the Jewish people.
This is not the place to debate the relative successes and failures of Zionism in creating a new Jew. Israel is clearly no longer a society based on the agrarian idealism that saw the new Jew formed by working the land. While secular Israeli values were largely shaped by a break with religion that was sharper and more clearly defined than the break that took place among Jews who migrated westward, in recent years it has become increasingly clear to Israelis and diaspora Jews that we are indeed a single people, sharing both a cultural legacy and a future. There are issues that divide us, to be sure. Diaspora Jews’ tendency toward optimistic liberal universalism, so soon after the Holocaust, drives many Israelis crazy. They see our worldview as apologetic and naive, one that refuses to look at the precarious position of the Jew. Their blatantly higher regard for Jewish life and Jewish rights than for those of others, a kind of compensatory view seeking to make up for so many centuries of Jewish victimhood, often deeply offends what we diaspora liberals see as most sacred to our own Jewish values. This is especially true for us American Jews, who live in a society deeply scarred by the legacy of mistreating a minority. The analogy to America, however accurate or not, never leaves us, and we find ourselves quite horrified that Jews could create a society in which we are privileged over others.
A Diasporist Judaism
On one point the Zionist reading of contemporary Jewish history is surely right. With the state of Israel and a thriving Jewish society in its land, the involuntary exile of the Jews is at an end. Any one or community of us who chooses to do so may make the decision to live in Israel. Those of us—still a bit more than half of the Jewish people— who do not live there are voluntarily living as minorities abroad. We are tefutsot, “scattered” or diaspora Jews, but no longer golah, Jews in exile.45 Why have we made this choice? What value do we find in living outside the land where so much of the Jewish future is clearly being shaped?
To answer this question we need to go back to Torah, where most of the narrative takes place outside the land. After receiving the Word, we set out on the road that leads away from Sinai. The rest of the story finds us in the wilderness, journeying in circles, trying to decide exactly what it is we heard and what sort of claims it makes upon us. It is no accident that the Torah, and with it each sacred year-cycle, ends just before Israel crosses into the Promised Land.46 For us diaspora Jews, having lived this way for so many centuries, our wandering is not to be taken lightly. It is an essential part of the experience and legacy of Israel. While the oldest traditions (the rabbis following the prophets)