Avraham Oriah Kelman
Smol Emuni Conference
March 30, 2025
The Jewish nation is ancient, as ancient as the Torah. But while nations can be ancient, the idea that the entire world should be governed by “nation-states” is rather a new one. There was much that was possible and even self-evident before the rise of modern nationalism that now may seem impossible. We have, for example, plenty of historical records written in Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew, that demonstrate that Jews and Muslims, alongside practitioners of other traditions, made pilgrimage to the same sacred sites in the Middle East. One such place was Aaron’s tomb in Petra. A fourteenth century Jew who pilgrimaged to this ancient tomb wrote about it that “many people come to prostrate here, and the non-Jews preserve this place in great purity for the honor of the prophet, may he rest in peace. And they honor the Jews as well and allow them to enter and prostrate, and they themselves pray there.” He concluded this description with a prayer: “May it be that God will hear their prayers and our prayers!”
The modern nation-state, however, brings with it a fundamentally different paradigm: the impossible aspiration of having one nation in its one motherland. In times of turmoil and conflict, this underlying belief and dream rises to the surface. It is almost automatically translated into practices of separation such as apartheid and erasure. Lacking other cultural resources for meaning-making and coping with crises, what we see unfolding in Israel/Palestine right now was foreseeable.
The nation-state seems to have an almost hypnotic power over us. It promises us security and freedom, and presents itself as the ultimate carrier of our culture, tradition, and religion. I believe that our inability to distinguish ourselves from the state, in this case Israel, and its modes of thinking accounts for much of the horrors we are seeing right now.
I am not trying to say that there were no human-inflicted horrors before modern nationalism. Yet in our time we are all pushed to be complicit with these politics and violence, we are pushed to incorporate our bodies, minds, and hearts, and to even feel in certain ways about what is happening. Our Jewishness is also absorbed into these projects. In religious Zionist circles, establishing settlements in the West Bank is now considered a mitzvah – a fulfillment of the heavily-debated commandment of mitzvat yishuv ha’aretz, the commandment to settle the land. And so is bombarding Gaza.
The late Rav Shach, one of the greatest leaders of the ultra-orthodox world in Israel, raised his voice against these tendencies. He identified the religious-Zionist argumentation around mitzvat yishuv ha’aretz as a pseudo-halakhic discourse, presenting itself as religious while adopting the secular-national ideology. He made the same point when he addressed the peace talks with Egypt: we should do whatever we can, and give up on whatever is needed, to get to peace, because halakhically, nothing stands in the way of sustaining life, of piquach nefesh. He dismissed the counter-arguments of the religious-Zionists rabbis as nothing but national ideology in disguise of halakhic discourse. Rav Shach’s opinion on military recruitment also manifests his ability to think outside the paradigms of the nation-state. Rav Shach insisted that the decision of going to war, of putting oneself in such a state of radical risk, and taking other people’s lives, could not be taken lightly. Unfortunately, we know that governments decide on going to wars, or fail to end these wars as quickly as possible, not only for security reasons, but for political and even personal reasons as well. Let me read to you from the words he said after the first Lebanon war, in 1982:
We see that even great Torah scholars, rabbis, and righteous people are treating what happened here as if it is a milhemet mitzvah, a "war of obligation." But is this truly a “war of obligation”?! The decision to go to war was made based on a vote in the Knesset, and that vote was based on intrigues and agreements between one man and another: you say thus, and I will support you if you do this and that, you take care of me, and I will take care of you (shemor li ve-eshmor lekha). They had this kind of negotiation until they reached these outcomes and made the decision to go to war. It seemed satisfactory to them, but if the intrigues had led them to the opposite results, then the voting would have been different and a different decision would have been reached. Can we rely on such decisions? Can such personal considerations guide the path of the people and determine the fate of people’s lives?
This is a powerful example of how Jewish tradition can offer an alternative vantage point from which we can examine our states critically. While the ethos of opposing army service famously persisted in the ultra-orthodox community in Israel, it is hard to find any echo today to these words one of its most important leaders, uttered just a few decades ago. Even the ultra-orthodox community has undergone a process of Israelization that dismantled much of its ability to raise ethical questions regarding Israel’s policies.
We need to stand firm for the ability of our tradition to be spoken and thought in ways that are not corrupted by our political institutions-- not because we do not want to see Judaism in the public sphere, but rather the opposite: we do want to see it there as a critical, demanding, and inspiring oppositional voice, one that is not enslaved and weaponized by the state. We must allow our tradition to become a spiritual and cultural resource for a much more expansive ethical and political imagination, and for alternative modes of engaging critically with our political reality.
