Here is Rabbi Y.Y. Jacobson quoting or expanding upon the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s anti-Zionist ideology (with my comments):
“nationalism divorced from spirituality and religion will not succeed…”
See Rabbi Yitzchak Brand’s counter over here!
Zionism was a movement created more than a century ago with the goal of creating a national homeland for the Jewish people. Its founders believed that if a Jewish state were created, there would finally be one place on earth where Jews could be safe. Here, it was said, Jews would be able to defend themselves. The early political Zionists also believed that having a country would normalize the condition of the Jew in the world. The Jews were singled out, they speculated, because there was something unnatural about a people not having a home. The French had France, the Italians had Italy. If the Jews had a country, the condition of the Jew would change. The world would cease its relentless attention on this tiny fraction of the world’s population.
No, but if we kept the Torah (and the Torah includes Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish land) antisemitism would indeed cease (not to say that would be Lishma).
116 years have passed since the first Zionist congress in Switzerland (in 1897), led by figures like Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Dr. Nathan Berenbaum (the latter coined the term Zionism). Israel today is a beautiful country that we love and cherish. Notwithstanding all of its challenges from within and without, it will soon boast the world’s largest Jewish population and one of the greatest armies in the world. Its cultural, academic, social and religious achievements are extraordinary. It has become a home for millions of Jews and for their creativity in many diverse fields. We must support Israel in every possible way.
Yet, the sad truth is that the two primary and noble goals of Zionism – to create a safe haven for Jews and normalize their condition – have, sadly, not materialized in the State of Israel.
Only in the Jewish state were Jews subjected to daily missile attacks – for over six years! — on their children. Only in the Jewish State did a million Jews cowered in bomb shelters to protect themselves from Hezbollah missiles (In the end, the only thing that stopped the shelling of Israel’s northern cities was the United Nations. We needed the gentiles again for our safety…)
Nor has Israel normalized the Jewish condition. Not only has it not assuaged the obsession with the Jewish people and extinguished the flames of anti-Semitism, on the contrary, the very existence of the State has become the target of enormous anti-Semitism the world over. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur – all conflicts that have taken countless more lives than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – receive nowhere near the amount of attention that Israel does.
Writing from a very different paradigm, Martin Buber (in an essay titled Zionism and the Other National Concepts) argued against the creation of a purely secular state of Israel
“The secularizing trend in Zionism was directed against the mystery of Zion too. A people like other peoples, a land like other lands, a national movement like other national movements — this was and still is reclaimed as the postulate of common sense against every kind of ‘mysticism.’ And from this standpoint, the age-long belief that the successful reunion of this people with this land is inseparably bound up with a command and a condition was attacked. No more is necessary — so the watchword runs — than that the Jewish people should be granted the free development of all its powers in its own country like any other people…
“The certainty of the generations of Israel testifies that this view is inadequate. The idea of Zion is rooted in deeper regions of the earth and rises into loftier regions of the air, and neither its deep roots nor its lofty heights, neither its memory of the past nor its ideal for the future, both of the selfsame texture, may be repudiated. If Israel renounces the mystery, it renounces the heart of reality itself. National forms without the eternal purpose from which they have arisen signify the end of Israel’s specific fruitfulness. The free development of the latent power of the nation without a supreme value to give it purpose and direction does not mean regeneration, but the mere sport of a common self-deception behind which spiritual death lurks in ambush. If Israel desires less than it is intended to fulfill, than it will even fail to achieve the lesser goal.”
Buber, himself quite distant from many aspects of Jewish faith and practice, talks of the “eternal purpose from which they have arisen.” These are, like Buber himself, beautiful but nebulous words; but they can be taken in many directions. In fact, some of Buber’s students at Hebrew University have become Post-Zionist thinkers calling for the abolishment of Israel as a “Jewish State.”
We need to abolish the State, period! And start by separating religion and state, for real.
P.S.,
Here, from an addition to a different version of the article:
“Religion is the major impediment confronting the Jewish nation on the road to culture, science and freedom.” These words were written by Nachman Syrkin, the preeminent theorist of Zionist socialism.
But this is absolutely true of the falsely-ancient anti-Zionist “religion“, a perversion of the original!