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God's choice of Israel - Its Repercussions on the History of the Twentieth Century
Marie-Nalle Baillehache
You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex. 19:6)
These words of the Bible concerning the covenant of Sinai are at the basis of the concept of the chosen people which has marked the existence of the Jewish people all through the ages. A recent article in the periodical Forum 1 showed the impact of this concept on the crucial events in the life of the Jews during the twentieth century: the Holocaust and the resurrection of the state of Israel.
It is perhaps useful to re-examine what makes the above mentioned events unique before presenting the conclusions reached by the authors of the article. I shall do so briefly, mainly by using articles borrowed from contemporary Jewish periodicals.
The Holocaust
The extermination of the Jews of Europe during the second world war — systematic, carefully programmed and punctiliously carried out using modern scientific techniques — has been recognized as having no precedent in the annals of persecution. According to Saul Friedlander, himself a survivor of the Holocaust:
"The thing which makes the fundamental difference between the activity of the Nazis against the Jews and that against any other group is their manifest desire to exterminate the Jews out of hatred and to completely disregard for whatever reason all accepted principles when dealing with Jews or Judaism or Jewish spirituality. The Jews thus became the ultimate evil.... For the Nazis the extermination of the Jews was a fundamental goal and a sacred mission. It was not a means to an end.” 2
The French philosopher, Vladimir Jankelevich, wrote of Auschwitz that it had become
"something terrifying for which a name cannot be found, something which the mind refuses to think of and no human word dares to describe . . . this unspeakable thing, whose name men are ashamed to name . . . the secret of modern man.." 3
The conscience of humanity found perhaps its most eloquent expression of condemnation when the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy Brandt, spontaneously knelt down before the monument to the martyrs of the Warsaw ghetto on his first visit to Poland.
The conscience of the masses was not awakened, however, until the American television serial "Holocaust" was shown. In Western Germany this program produced "such an unexpected shock that it is difficult to assess its dimensions" as a writer in the newspaper Devoir expressed it on February 12, 1978. Chancellor Schmidt stated that a moral debate involving the whole nation had arisen, which would have important political consequences now that the Bundestag was preparing to make a decision on the limitation of indictments for war crimes. During the discussions that followed each instalment of the serial, a historian admitted:
"We had only reached the heads of our readers. `Holocaust' has touched their hearts.' For the first time a vast proportion of the population — twenty million people watched 'Holocaust' —knew what was concealed behind the 'final solution of the Jewish question.' For the first time the resistance of many Germans to recognize their tragic past was broken down, leaving them to face something that many of them had expunged from their memories: what genocide means to the individual who experiences it. 'The inconceivable has become conceivable', wrote the Spiegel, 'the walls of silence have crumbled at last." 4
Israel
The talks at Camp David have been in world news ever since last summer. Few people have any idea, however, of the complexity of what is at stake in these discussions. To compare the negotiations between Egypt and Israel with those of nations who were once at war and now are reconciled — France and Germany for example — is incorrect. The two situations are fundamentally different.
The zionist movement for the return to the land of Israel originated with the intellectuals of socialist leanings who hoped to restore the dispersed and persecuted Jewish people to a normal life among the family of nations. They were inspired by the nationalistic movements of Europe in the nineteenth century, certainly, but their initiative also corresponded to the centuries-old hope of the diaspora, nourished on the Bible and rabbinical tradition.
Very early on the first pioneers were joined by religious Jews whose leader, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, saw the return to the ancestral country as having a "messianic" dimension, and, though as yet only a beginning, possessing undoubted significance.
"The biblical covenant would become a reality again in this holy land which had seen the shaping of a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The disciples and friends of Rav Kook drew from his teachings the messianic meaning of the Jewish state and understood their mission as being the furtherance of its formation." 5
The doings of Gush Emunim and its clashes with the government of Israel about the settlements in the territories of the West Bank illustrate this point. What concerns this article is that this group of extremists supports its claims and justifies its behavior by invoking the passages in Scripture relevant to the Promised Land.
"The centre of its ideology is the absolute right of the Jewish people to its land, and the resultant duty of every Jew to take possession again of every piece, however small, of this ancestral heritage... The promisses to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and to the Children of Israel are the justification of this claim . . . The Jewish people on the territory of its former kingdom, in this country where prophecy flourished and the Holy Temple was built . . . The link between people and land is `metahistorical' — it stems from God's choice of the Jews and his vision of their destiny in the Holy Land... There are also two medieval sources used to justify the colonization of the country and place it in a messianic context ... Ramban, considered as the father of the restoration of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, who taught that the resettlement of Eretz Israel is one of the 613 commandments of the Torah ... and Maimonides, for whom the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the country would be the beginning of the messianic age..."
Such claims are rejected, however, by the majority of Jews, not only in the diaspora but also in the state of Israel itself. On this subject a study by Professor Yehoshua Arieli of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem establishes a sharp distinction between the emotional and historical link which unites the Jewish people with the land of Israel and the historical rights which it has to the country. The undeniable emotional link does not in itself create a right in the legal sense of the term.
"The emotional link which the people of Israel feel with the land of Israel is primarily a historical fact which is also spiritual. A special connection exists between the people of Israel, the land of Israel and the religion of Israel which is an integral, organic connection.... The country is not only the ancient homeland of the people and the geographical space where it knew independence and created its spiritual, cultural and religious heritage, but it is also the Promised Land whose history is sacred and which is itself sacred . . . In this context the past loses its historical dimension... There is no aspect of the Halakah, the Midrash, the liturgy or the feasts of the Jewish year which does not refer to the Land . . . This link plays a great part in explaining the survival of the people in its various places of exile... Thus this emotional link does not automatically cease to exist with the weakening of religious faith... Zionism is none other than the direct consequence and the expression in modern terms of Jewish tradition, but it transmutes the emotional link into a historical act, the fulfilment of something which had hitherto been only a hope: the fulfilment of the redemption of the Jewish people." 7
Further on Professor Arieli notes that this mentality regarding the country only exists in Jewish consciousness:
"But while the historical link is bound to the past and to the present, the historical right is bound to the present and takes the form of a public claim demanding that this right should be recognized... It is to the international community that the request for the historic right to Eretz Israel is addressed . . . But it is precisely the international nature of the proclamation of this right, based as it is on the principle of the rights to nationality and democracy, which must necessarily prevent it from materializing fully. A right is valid in so far as it is not opposed to other rights and in so far as it will not infringe upon the identical rights which are valid for others. It is a fact that the right to construct a national home in Eretz Israel conflicts with the claims advanced by a similar right — that of the Palestinian population." 8
This analysis pinpoints exactly the situation underlying the drama of present-day Israel and partially explains why this state is misunderstood and isolated. The intransigence of the Arabs in refusing to accept Israel and the violence of their ceaseless attacks upon it are other aspects of the question. Both these aspects hamper the Israeli delegation whose mission it is to negotiate peace preliminaries with Arab neighbors.
Even after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, the government of Israel sees grave limitations to its liberty of action imposed by the subsequent negotiations about the autonomy of the territories of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, It is caught between the refusal of the Palestinian population to co-operate and the threats of the PLO on the one hand, and on the other, the legitimate anxiety of the Israeli public and the claims advanced by its own right wing.
Variants of the Doctrine of the Chosen People
The problem caused for the Israeli government by the extremism of Gush Emunim and the reaction of the great majority of Jews against this fundamentalistic interpretation of Scripture is a good illustration of the forces at work in Judaism from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards for a re-interpretation of the doctrine of the chosen people as it had been understood during the centuries of ghetto life. Rabbi Gunther Plaut sketched this development most tellingly in a lecture given at a conference on Jewish-Christian Relations in Toronto recently?
However, as C. Klausner and J. Schultz remark in their article in Forum:
"Ironically. while the Jews were attempting to re-interpret the biblical doctrine, the modern nation-states were incorporating the ancient antagonism to it into new ideologies. Utilizing the polemics of antiquity and the Middle Ages, modern anti-semitism in Europe added the new ingredient of racism to the poisonous brew of anti-Jewish diatribes..."
Racist ideology (yolk) gave rise to totalitarian movements. Pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism tended to shift national frontiers and create a common denominator for ethnic groups. More than any other element, the idea of the chosen people helped to strengthen these generalized movements from which Jews were excluded a priori.
"Volk ideology with its underpinnings of racism and its overtones of chosenness became part and parcel of the National Socialist program. If any further evidence were needed of the centrality of this idea to the Final Solution, there is Hitler's famous remark in a conversation with Hermann Rauschning: 'There cannot be two chosen peoples
. two worlds stand facing one another! It is the man of God versus the man of Statan! The Jew is the counter-human, the anti-man (der Gegenmensch, der Anti-Mensch). He is the creation of another God. He must have grown of another root of the human race.""°
"Though differing over the acceptance of the idea of chosenness, both Jewish and Gentile theologians, grappling with the theological questions raised by the Holocaust, have recognized it as a central issue."
And strangely enough,
"while the Holocaust appears to be the ultimate rejection of Jewish chosenness, the state of Israel appears to be its ultimate affirmation. And yet, the state itself oscillates between the two poles of uniqueness and normality."
Conclusion
At a time when the opening of Islam and pan-Islamism is having such a profound influence on international affairs, I should like to borrow my conclusion from the article which I have quoted above:
"The persistence of the concept of election in an age so hostile to it is indicative of the pervasive influence of this idea not only in the history of Israel but in the saga of the nations as well. The far-reaching consequences of the basic theological doctrine even in the realm of international politics seems to bear out Max Weber's contention that, whether one recognizes them or not, religious conceptions are vital to an understanding of the manifold dimensions of the historical process." 11
1. Autumn 1, 1978: article by C.L. Klausner and J.P. Schultz.
2. Dispersion et Unite, no. 16, pp. 123f.
3. Ibid, no. 12, p. 187.
4. Article by Gilbert Grand.
5. Dispersion et Unite, no. 17, p. 96: article by Janet O'Dea.
6 Ibid, p. 97.
7. Ibid, no. 18, p. 12.
8. Ibid, p. 17.
9. Cf. Rabbi Plaut's article in this issue (Ed.).
10. Forum, nos. 32-33, p. 73.
11. Ibid, p. 77.
