Making Jews out of Zionists

For committed Jews, life outside the borders of the Jewish state can be full of human meaning; but it can never be full of Jewish meaning. By contrast, Israel, where “the most—the only—meaningful future for the Jewish people” will occur, is by definition “the most meaningful place for a Jewish life to be lived.”

This profound and provocative statement by Hillel Halkin deserves close attention; it contains within it a radical idea that I’d like both to explore and to take issue with.

As Halkin notes in Letters to an American Jewish Friend, Zionism granted three gifts to the Jews: a land, a language, and sovereign power. In Israel, the synthesis of all three has helped to create a vital secular Jewish culture. As I understand him, the synthesis works like this: with the assumption of Jewish sovereignty, there came a whole series of new and extremely urgent challenges of a kind unknown to Jews in the Diaspora. But the encounter with these challenges now takes place through the medium of the Jewish people’s ancient language and against the background and within the environment of its ancient homeland. That enormously fruitful encounter is what has given birth to the new Hebrew culture of Israel—and this culture, the product of Zionism’s three gifts, has enriched and enlarged the Jewish heritage.