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An Everlasting Heritage
R. J. Zwi Werblowsky

The following extracts are taken from an article by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, written in July 1967 under the title: "Israel: The People and The Land". Because Prof. Werblowsky touches on many of the same themes as the preceding article, we only present excerpts that develop his particular view-point.

The relationship of the Jewish people to the tiny mediterranean coastal strip known as Palestine is something of a problem; the more theologically minded would even call it a mystery. It is a relationship that has at all times found expression in certain facts, and this relationship and these facts (including traditions, beliefs, attitudes and actions) begot claims which in their turn resulted in new historic facts. They are part of Jewish history, and their understanding is necessarily part of the understanding of Jewish history — whether it is the Jew's self-understanding of his historical existence or the gentile's understanding (neutral, sympathetic or hostile) of this awkward, somewhat irregular and hence also irritating phenomenon. Even the fact that for many Jews — including some of the founding fathers of modern Zionism — this relationship and the claims implicit in it were so much taken for granted that they seemed to require no further justification, is in itself part of the total phenomenon to be understood.

... The Jew's historic consciousness is rooted in his original experience of election, i.e., his awareness of the difference of his group viz. people from other peoples (the "gentiles"). Whatever thecorruptions which the doctrine of election is capable of (and some of them are as surely Jewish corruptions as others are the projection, on the Jew, of unconscious gentile corruptions) it is primarily in terms of difference rather than of superiority that election must be understood. In fact, it is the classical expression, in the language of biblical religion, of what social psychologists today would call a sense of identity.

This historical self-awareness always contained, as an essential element, a relationship to a particular land. There was, correlated to the chosen people, a chosen, i.e., promised land. If the Jews are not just a group of people sharing similar theological beliefs, but a people with a specific historic identity — and that is what they considered themselves to be — then the bond to the elect land was part and parcel of their consciousness and religio-national identity...

In the experience of the Jews their relation to the land actually preceded their existence as a people. This may sound poor logic, but the Lord had said unto Abraham "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee" (Genesis 12 : 1). This promise became an everlasting covenant, as permanent as the laws of nature (Jeremiah 31:34-35; 33:20-21, 25-26), and the Jews always knew, deep down in their hearts and in the midst of the most abject humiliation, persecution, and massacre, that God would not only remember His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but that He would also "remember the land" (Leviticus 26:42). The notion of a return thus became a basic element of Jewish self-understanding and of the interpretation of their existence in exile. Foolishness to Greeks and liberals, and a scandal to Christians, the obstinate Jews persisted in their determination to consider all countries except one tiny mediterranean coastal strip as the lands of their dispersion. And when — even greater foolishness and worse scandal — they established the State of Israel, this historical event was experienced by them as return. Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that this return was possible because in the historical consciousness of the Jews the bond with their land was consistently formulated in terms of the future. The Land of Israel is neither a fatherland nor a mother country; it is the land of which God had said that He would show it to Abraham and give it to his seed as an everlasting heritage. In less biblical language we might say that the myth binding people and land together is anchored in the future and not in the past. Perhaps this future-oriented quality of the myth goes a long way towards explaining why even the longest separations could not sever this bond. The crucial point here is not that the Israelite tribes, at some early period of their history, conceived the idea of a promised Land but that this bond, once it had been conceived, persisted even after close on two thousand years of exile with sufficient vitality to become a dynamic and constructive historical factor...

It is a curious fact that even in our modern, secular age Jewish thinkers and ideologists are resorting to a religious idiom when trying to explain, to themselves and to others, the meaningof the unique relationship between their people and its land. Some Jewish "Barthians" may repudiate this language as dishonest abuse of a religious vocabulary whose legitimacy requires a definite theological context; others may object to it in the name of a radical marxissu or rationalism. But by and large this religious idiom and pathos assert themselves whenever Jews try to render account unto themselves as to what their historical existence and the land of Israel mean to them.

... The hymn of the Zionist movement, which in 1948 became the national anthem of Israel, speaks of the "eye looking towards Zion" and of the millenial hope of a return to "the land of Zion and Jerusalem". The anthem, known as haTiqvah (Hope) is very poor poetry indeed, but in all its awkwardness and sentimentality it somehow catches the essential — or, if you prefer, the existential — awareness of the Jewish people that at its centre there is an indissoluble bond with the land, and that at the centre of this centre is Zion, the City of David. Jerusalem and Zion are geographical terms beyond mere geography; they are "the local habitation and the name" for the meaning of Jewish existence and of its continuity from the days when God spoke of a certain place that He would chose to the days of the return which — however improbable it might seem — was never in doubt for the Jew.

Alas, to understand a problem is not to solve it. Understanding the nature of Jewish historical existence is, by itself, no answer to the difficulties and conflicts which it encounters and evokes. Legal and political claims can be opposed with legal and political arguments. Historical (or rather meta-historical) and existential claims can be countered by historical and existential arguments. It is an awkward situation when existential understanding and historic rights are invoked to override rights of a less exalted but all the more concrete order. Meanwhile the millenial Jewish hope and the unshakable Jewish belief in a return have ceased to be mere belief and hope, and have become concrete reality...