Re: "The Jewish State, Religious Zionism, and the Limits of Dissent" by Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot

"The Jewish State, Religious Zionism, and the Limits of Dissent"
by Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot
16 December 2009
Jewish Press: here
International Rabbinical Fellowship (IRF) blog: here

I read this article about a month ago, but a friend has shared it on his Facebook page today. I see the moderator on the IRF edition still hasn't approved the comments I left there more than a month ago, so let me quote myself and reproduce my comments in full, then:

(My comments are in the form of running replies to specific remarks in that article, so the reader is advised to read that article first.)

> This thought comes to mind as one considers the troubling
> instances (so far, thankfully, few in number) of religious
> soldiers in the IDF who have expressed public political
> statements while in uniform indicating that they will refuse
> orders issued by their commanders and the government to
> evacuate any Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

So now we’re criticizing IDF soldiers who both (1) hold by a democratic political theory, and (2) keep ein shaliah b’davar `averah? They’re obeying both the Torah AND modern Western democracy, and this you bemoan?

As Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both said, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to G-d."

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’"

And here, of course, the Talmud – saying ein shaliah b’davar `averah – agrees with the democratic concept of the rule-of-law, the idea that the government is accountable to the same moral laws as its citizens are, and that the citizens may call the government to account.

But no, you would have Jewish soldiers disobey both Judaism and democracy together at once. For shame!

> These [viz. the State of Israel's and the IDF's standards
> for when orders are illegal and are to be disobeyed]
> refer to "blatantly illegal orders" such as a command
> to wantonly murder unarmed civilians. The situations that
> are being discussed in our context are clearly not such a
> case.

Speak for yourself. For yourself, expulsions from the West Bank are clearly not equivalent to murder, but for religious soldiers, this is not the case. For a religious soldier who believes in G-d, the same G-d who commanded not to murder an innocent Arab also commanded him not to steal land from a Jew. If you command the Jewish soldier to disobey G-d in one case, he will not understand why he cannot therefore disobey G-d in other cases as well. In Biblical times, the man who violated Shabbat – which testified to G-d’s having created the world – was liable to murder as well, for the same G-d who commanded Shabbat also commanded not to murder, and anyone who is liable to violate one is liable to violate the other (especially since Shabbat was a memorial to G-d Himself, and violation of Shabbat was itself nearly tantamount to committing idolatry, as Rabbis Immanuel Jakobovits and Shalom Carmy have noted). So too, the religious soldier who is told to disobey G-d today and evict Jews from their homes, will reason that similarly, he may disobey G-d tomorrow and murder innocent Arab civilians.

The Torah is one and indivisible. If you may obey the government and disobey G-d today, then why not tomorrow as well? As Rabbi S. R. Hirsch wryly notes, if you violate the fourth commandment (to keep Shabbat), then your son will violate the fifth (to honor his parents).

> [Rav Kook's opinion] ... that in the absence of a
> formal king, the power of kingship and sovereignty
> devolves back to the Jewish people as a whole.

So let us quote the Rambam, Hilkhot Melakhim 3:9: "...And it goes without saying that if the king decrees that a mitzvah should be violated, that his words should not be heeded."

> one would hope that rule of law would prevail.
> [Instead of soldiers taking it upon
> themselves to disobey orders.]

Actually, the rule-of-law means that the government is accountable to uphold the law. The rule-of-law is the concept that lex, rex, that the law is king, instead of rex, lex, that the king is law. The rule-of-law is what empowers citizens to call their government to account when it fails to uphold the law. The rule-of-law empowers citizens and hamstrings the government, not the other way around.

To quote Thomas Paine’s "Common Sense," one of the most influential political tracts in colonial America, expressing the best of federal and social-contract thinking:
"But where says some is the King of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is."

In other words, the rule-of-law limits the government and empowers the people, not vice versa. As Henry David Thoreau’s "Civil Disobedience" (which both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi alike paid great homage to), "Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure."

You say, "Ultimately, however it is the democratically elected Israeli government that is the legal sovereign with the authority to make these difficult and wrenching calls." Yes, the government is duly-elected, and yes, it was democratically-chosen by the people. But as Samuel Adams says in "The Rights of the Colonists," following John Locke, "All men have a right to remain in a state of nature [ = absence of government] as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society [ = government] they belong to, and enter into another. When men enter into society [ = government], it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form an equitable original compact [ = constitution, contract]. Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact [ = constitution, contract], necessarily ceded, remains.” In other words: men freely enter into a government, and they can stipulate the terms of that government’s rule. When the people are not satisfied with that government, they may leave it. The "Declaration of Independence" declares about as much, saying, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [the end being the securing of the right, this being the purpose for which the people instituted that government in the first place and gave it their consent and allegiance], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

(End Quote)

Modern Orthodox Judaism and Historical Contextualization

I have been arguing for some time now that Calvinism is one of the most important sources of modern democracy and liberty. However, I have a leftist Modern Orthodox friend who has been consistently arguing against me, based not on historical evidence per se, but rather, based on the fact that the Calvinists would massacre Catholics in Ireland, or punish witches for heresy in Salem, etc. To quote a recent example of his ongoing argument against me:

MA and CT were intolerant theocracies. NH wasn't much better. RI's prosperity was largely based on slave trading -- and only descendents of the original signers of the Charter had full citizenship rights. And all of them treated the Indians terribly. Not much of a model if you ask me.

My response to him cuts to the heart of what I believe it means to be a Modern Orthodox Jew:

[Name omitted], how can you possibly be a Modern Orthodox Jew? I mean, if you're unable to engage in historical contextualization, and judge those societies in the contexts of their own times and beliefs, how can you possibly be a Modern Orthodox Jew?

For me, when I see what the Calvinists did, I remember that in their time, proper religious belief was the only way to be a decent, moral member of society. They condemned heretics not because they were concerned with whether everyone went to heaven or not (especially because Calvinistic predestination meant this would have not only unjust, but quite simply impossible and irrational), but rather, because they wanted to ensure that everyone's outward behavior was decent and moral. A heretic was guilty of civil sedition.

I do not necessarily agree with the Calvinists, but then again, I live in a different era. It is easy for me to say that one can be an atheist or a non-Jew and yet be righteous and decent, but it was far more difficult for a Calvinist to do so. In fact, I might hold my belief and not theirs not because mine is more correct in absolute terms, but rather, only because mine is more correct for the contemporary era. Even the Meiri held that only Christians and Muslims were to be protected, and even he said that atheists were to be subject to all the racist and discriminatory laws of the Talmud. And it is possible that for his own time and place, the Meiri was correct. Who am I to say that the Meiri and the Calvinists were wrong? Perhaps in their times and places, heretics actually were immoral and indecent and criminal! I can believe differently only because I live in a different time and place.

But you, [name omitted], you reject this practice of historical contextualization. You believe that everyone must judge all texts by today's standards. I would expect that when you see polygamy in the Torah, you would either reject it and all of Judaism with it, or that you would accept it and be a Haredi. That is, you, [name omitted], are incapable (or simply choose to reject) historical contextualization, and so you should either reject the whole Torah or accept the whole Torah, without any discrimination or judgement. You should see polygamy and slavery in the Torah, and either reject polygamy and slavery and all of Judaism with them, or you should accept all of Judaism and polygamy and slavery with it. So how, pray tell, can you, [name omitted], possibly be Modern Orthodox? You are rejecting the single most important foundational aspect of Modern Orthodoxy!

Professor Douglas F. Kelly, discussing Calvinist punishment of heretics, incisively argues (The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th Through 18th Centuries, p. 35, n. 70),

Our twentieth-century perspective, it must be added, is generally more comfortable criticizing the sixteenth-century execution of some hundreds of heretics than dealing with our own society's abortion of millions of infants.

Now, being an Orthodox Jew rather than a Reformed Christian, my own perspective on abortion is very different than Professor Kelly's, and I will side with Rabbis Benzion Uziel and Ya'akov Emden in saying that generally-speaking, there is no prohibition whatsoever of abortion. Nevertheless, Professor Kelly's point is very well-taken. Before you condemn others, first look at yourself. Are you wholly innocent? Can you comfortably accuse them of crimes? Are you criticizing the past societies' failings based on true, eternally-valid principles that you yourself are keeping and that you can confidently assert that they ought to have, too? Or are you a prejudiced bystander, presuming to be able to judge others based on what you know only because you were born in more privileged circumstances? From their own perspective, the Calvinists could say that at least they executed only heretics who were guilty of sedition and immorality and indecency, whereas, they would say, you are murdering infants who are entirely guiltless of any semblance of crime. Can you really be so confident in criticizing them? Judge yourself before you presume to judge others.

My friend later said,

John Knox was a tremendous misogynist. Not a model for me!

I responded,

He lived in the late 16th-century! What do you expect?

But [name omitted], your other problem, i.e. besides your inability to engage in historical contextualization - is that you want to rewrite history to fit your own prejudices. Fine, so you personally dislike the Calvinists' killing the Irish, etc. So what? If Calvinism is nevertheless the primary source of American democracy, then I don't care how much you dislike that fact. Facts are facts. Even if the Calvinists are the most repugnant and evil humans on earth, of all human history, even if so, nevertheless, facts are facts. You not only cannot historically-contextualize, but you also want to rewrite history to conform to your own contemporary prejudices.

I suggest you read "Thoughts on "Confrontation" and Sundry Matters Part II' by Professor Marc Shapiro, specifically s.v.

It is with regard to the issue of the mamzer that one can see manifested a point I have often thought about. The great classical historian Moses Finley spoke of what he termed the 'teleological fallacy' in the interpretation of historical change. 'It consists in assuming the existence from the beginning of time, so to speak, of the writer's values . . . and in then examining all earlier thought and practice as if they were, or ought to have been, on the road to this realization, as if men in other periods were asking the same questions and facing the same problems as those of the historian and his world.' The fact is that earlier generations often thought very differently about things. For example, we are much more sensitive to matters such as human rights than they were. They took slavery for granted, while the very concept of owning another person is the most detestable thing imaginable to us. Followers of R. Kook will put all of this in a religious framework, and see it as humanity's development as it gets closer to the Messianic era.

In that essay, Professor Shapiro shows, for example, that the Maharatz Hayot and Hatam Sofer thought it a perfectly reasonable practice for a king to kill the innocent children of a rebel, and that Hovot ha-Levavot said that if one bears a mamzer child, that if one does teshuva, that one's heavenly reward will be the death of the mamzer. (I saw this myself in Orhot Tzadiqim.)

[Name omitted], would you say that Hovot ha-Levavot and Orhot Tzadiqim are not only not good books to read, but that furthermore, they could not possibly have wielded any influence on Jewish belief? According to you, your personal dislike of the Calvinists means they cannot possibly be the source of democracy. By the same logic, Hovot ha-Levavot and Orhot Tzadiqim cannot possibly be influential books, simply because you personally, as an individual, will dislike their ideas.

Of Kollel Avreikhim and Stipends: The Undemocratic Nature of Israeli Politics

If we need more proof that Israel is not a democracy, this following ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court will be suitable. Regardless of how much I personally agree with its ruling ideologically, it nevertheless makes a mockery of constitutional political theory.

In Supreme Court: No More Gov’t Stipends for Kollel Students (14 June 2010, Arutz Sheva / Israel National News, by Hillel Fendel), we learn that the Supreme Court of Israel overturned stipends to kollel (post-marriage yeshiva) students.

Now, I will note that personally, I agree with this wholeheartedly; I do believe that kollel students should not be receiving stipends. But as much as I personally agree with this ruling, I find it outrageous and criminal in the way in which it was performed and achieved. Let me explain.

According to the law as it then stood (before the court's decision), the unemployed received a minimum-income stipend of 40% the average national wage, kollel students received a minimum-income stipend of 20%, and university students received none at all. The court's logic was that if university students do not qualify for a stipend, then kollel students should not either, and only the genuinely unemployed should receive a stipend. As we read in the above article,

Beinisch wrote that the law specifically precludes minimum-income stipends to students in universities, colleges and yeshivot, and that therefore kollel students must also be included in this category. She wrote that support for public institutions of this nature must be done in a manner that would enable other similar institutions to receive equal stipends.

But on what basis can the court make this decision? Apparently, three different laws existed (or at least, three different provisions were present in some other number of actual laws), one specifying the stipend for the unemployed (viz. 40% of the national average wage), one specifying the stipend for kollel students (viz. 20%), and one specifying the lack of any stipend for university students. How do these three laws or provisions of law contradict? As it stands, these laws (or provisions) are all perfectly compatible with each other. None of them contradicts any other law. So if the Supreme Court's job is to simply apply the law and issue rulings according to the law as written (this surely being precisely the scope of the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court), then there is no problem whatsoever, and the court should have abstained from issuing any ruling at all.

The other task of any court in a democracy, viz. judicial review, i.e. the striking-down of laws that contradict the constitution, is not an option in Israel, because Israel currently lacks any constitution. (Israel does in fact have its so-called "Basic Laws", but these are merely ordinary and unexceptional laws passed by the Knesset which the Supreme Court had the arrogance and audacity to declare permanent and "basic", meaning that the Knesset could never repeal them, nor pass any new laws contradicting these laws. In other words, the Supreme Court unilaterally declared these "Basic Laws" to be Israel's constitution, even though the Supreme Court had no such authority or jurisdiction, and despite the fact that no constitutional convention had been formed and neither the Knesset nor the electorate had approved of these laws being Israel's constitution. I would say that the Supreme Court's action in this regard was itself unconstitutional, and that therefore, any pronouncement it made to declare the "Basic Laws" to be Israel's constitution, was ipso facto null and void. Likewise, any laws which the court strikes down, due to their contradicting the "Basic Law", this striking-down is itself unconstitutional.)

So these laws regarding respective stipends for the unemployed, university students, and kollel students were neither mutually contradictory, nor did they violate any constitution. So on what basis did Israel's Supreme Court strike down the law regarding kollel students? The Supreme Court claimed it was because this law of kollel students was different than the law of university students, but of course, this is irrelevant, for there is no reason there cannot be such a difference between the two types of students. Instead, it is clear that the Israeli Supreme Court has unilaterally and brazenly arrogated to itself the power to strike down any laws it personally dislikes, just because it ideologically dislikes them. In fact, the Israeli Supreme Court has its own name for this ability, calling it the "reasonability" test, meaning the court can nullify any law it personally feels is unreasonable according to its own subjective ideological preferences. Cf. "Opinion: Road to Nowhere" by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner (Jerusalem Post, 4 January 2010). There, regarding the Israeli Supreme Court's recent order to open highway 443 to Arabs, after it had long been closed to Arabs due to terrorist threats posed by them), we read,

The court claims that these rulings are based on what is known as the "reasonability" test, in which the justices assert the right to overrule any government action they deems unreasonable. When the court started using this test in the 1990s, critics warned that it would inevitably lead to judges imposing their ideology on the country, and replacing their judgment for that of elected officials - a slap in the face to democratic rule, according to which it is the voters, not the unelected judges, who ultimately decide whether their leaders are doing a reasonable job. The 443 ruling proves, again, that the critics were right.

And cf. Judge Richard Posner's review of Judge Aharon Barak's The Judge in a Democracy, entitled Enlightened Despot (23 April 2007, The New Republic; I am indebted to Tamar har-Oz for referring me to this source). Judge Posner there shows at length that whereas in a constitutional democracy (such as the United States of America), where separation of powers implies checks and balances, and where each branch of the government has power over the other, like a game of rock, paper, scissors, and where each branch keeps the others in check; by contrast, in Israel, the judiciary has no one checking it; it can do as it pleases, with no limits. There is no constitution which the judge is expected to use to judge laws. Instead, the judge applies the "reasonability" test, which means the judge can strike down any law which he personally feels is unreasonable, according to his own personal feelings and ideology. Thus, in retorting to Barak's own title of his book, viz. The Judge in a Democracy, Judge Posner entitles his own review, "Enlightened Despot".

So to return to our present case of stipends for kollel students, the truth is according to Haredi MK Rabbi Meir Porush (United Torah Judaism), who said (according to Arutz Sheva),

The Supreme Court simply makes a mockery of the Knesset. We sit here and work hard to find compromises and pass laws, and the Supreme Court just comes and overturns everything. In this case, the Knesset Labor Committee stipulated, 28 years ago, that while the unemployed would receive 40 percent of the average national salary, a kollel student would receive only 20 percent, and even that only under certain conditions – no car, three children, wife doesn’t work, etc. Then the Court comes and decides that it doesn’t like that. I’m just waiting for the day when there will be a body that is above the Supreme Court.

It would have been nice if Porush had worded his critique in constitutional terms, in order to underscore the undemocratic nature of the Israeli government, but nevertheless, his basic point is completely correct.

So while I personally agree wholeheartedly with the court that kollel students should not receive stipends, and while my general ideology is the very opposite of Porush's (I would be a left-wing Modern Orthodox Jew, highly indebted to both the German Neo-Orthodox and the Judeo-Spanish Sephardim), in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court committed a mitzvah ha-ba'ah b`averah (a merit committed via a sin, which renders the merit valueless and null-and-void). So by this action, the Israeli Supreme Court has accrued not an additional merit, but rather, an additional stain to its name, another brazen and atrocious violation of the basic norms of democracy.

As an aside, I will briefly add a short remark on Israel's lack of a constitution, surely a crucial desideratum. The reason Israel lacks a constitution is essentially because no one in Israel can agree on just what that constitution ought to say. Based on my own personal studying of Calvinist political theory and liberal constitutionalism - this running the gamut from John Calvin in Geneva to John Milton and Locke in Britain to nearly the entire party of colonial American thinkers - I would like to suggest a libertarian constitution for Israel. I will admit, however, that I will perforce gloss over the very many differences between various thinkers in the Reformed Christian or Calvinist school of thought, and I will even more egregiously have to gloss over how this school of thought evolved into classical liberalism of the sort espoused by John Locke and the like. Unfortunately, space considerations demand this, but I will do my best to be basically accurate, if outrageously abbreviated. For our present purposes, the beauty of libertarianism is that it allows the government to do absolutely nothing at all in a myriad of different areas. If you cannot agree on the correct religion, then separate church and state! If you cannot agree on the best economic theory, then let the government do nothing, and leave everything to capitalistic market forces. In any area where there is not a solid and nearly unanimous consensus, simply let the government do nothing at all. In Calvinistic libertarian thought, the government was merely a constituent of society, not its constitutive element. (See "Covenant Origins of the American Polity" by Professor Steven Alan Samson, Contra Mundum 10 (1994): 26-38, here.) To quote Professor Samson (ibid.),

Furthermore, decentralized political institutions required the existence of healthy social institutions, which included voluntary associations. The mainstays of society in Plymouth Colony were, first, the family, then the church and the state in supporting roles. As John Demos points out, the family combined the attributes of a business, school,vocational institute, church, house of correction, and welfare institution. And so it wasto remain for some time after the War for Independence, sometimes supporting a larger charitable outreach.

In other words, the government was merely one party of many in society, and the government was not identical with society, as Thomas Paine reminds us in his opening to his Common Sense. Instead, the government had a sharply-defined and demarcated role in society, and anything outside that constitutionally-defined limit was simply untouchable by the government. Furthermore, since the very essence of the social-contract theory was that the government is the shaliah (proxy or agent) of the people (and the late Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Goren agreed here), therefore, the government can do nothing without unanimous consent of its citizens (see Samuel Adams's The Rights of the Colonists, written representing the general consensus of a Bostonian committee of correspondence), since the government is formed by the mutual consensus and compact of its citizens, taking them from the state-of-nature into a contractual assocation they call the government. (See again the opening to Paine's Common Sense.) Since the government is formed by the mutual and voluntary consent of all its citizens, the government cannot take any action where there is not a fundamental consensus of all its citizens. The only exception is that the government may take action on matters automatically permitted it by natural law, such as such as punishing murderers and thieves. The reason is that any lay citizen may himself protect himself and his neighbor from murderers and thieves and other threats, and so the government too may do the same, even without permission from its citizens. Similarly, any law condoning slavery would be automatically null-and-void, it being a violation of natural law for any man to own another man without his consent. (Cf. Paine's "African Slavery In America". In fact, Samuel Adams's aforementioned work seems to suggest that slavery is illegal even when the slave fully consents to his own servitude! Cf. the Rabbinic explanation of Exodus 21:5-6 and Deuteronomy 15:16-17, regarding the slave who refuses to go free.) But any positive shaping of society, i.e. social-engineering, can be undertaken only with unanimous consent of the citizens. Anything else would be done by private organizations. For example, Orthodox Jews can compact and contract among themselves to form synagogues and appoint rabbis and oversee kashrut. Those desiring to assist the poor can contract among themselves to send charitable donations. Anything the government does not do will be left to free enterprise. If the Haredim want certain handouts which other parties do not want to give, then all the coalition politics in the world will make such handouts impossible, for the government will simply lack the constitutional authority to make any such handouts to anyone, no matter how many vote for them. I ask earnestly and sincerely: who in Israel could possible disagree with this? For example, the seculars will be free from religion while the religious will have all their religious needs fully attended to! Who can disagree with the government, when the government does almost nothing? Furthermore, according to Yoram Hazony and Fania Oz-Salzberger and others, the roots of classical liberal thought are in fact in none other than the Tanakh. (See

• Yoram Hazony, "The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition", Azure No. 4 Summer 5758 / 1998, here
• Yoram Hazony, "Judaism and the Modern State", Azure Summer 5765 / 2005, here
• Yoram Hazony, "The Biblical Century", Jerusalem Letters, 10 May 2010, hhere
• Fania Oz-Salzberger, "The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom", Azure, Summer 5762 / 2002, here

I have already noted that Rabbi Shlomo Goren consented to the liberal notion that the government is merely the shaliah (proxy or agent) of the people. It would appear that a libertarian constitution would not only solve the infighting among different factions in the Jewish people in Israel, but such a constitution itself would be ipso facto profoundly Jewish in character, simply by virtue of its libertarian character.

Nancy Sinatra's Humpback

Many have been puzzled by the humpback exhibited by Nancy Sinatra in her 1967 performance of "Summer Wine" with Lee Hazlewood:


But I believe I have solved the mystery: Nancy Sinatra's humpback - it's her shoulder blades; it's her shoulder blades! I have wondered what on earth was causing her hump, and now I looked closely, and saw how the cloth was folded across her hump, and how the light hit it. It's her shoulder blades; it's her shoulder blades! She has double-jointed shoulder-blades!

See the following image (left-click it, or right-click and choose "Open in New Tab/Window" to see a full-size version):

Helen Thomas, Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and return to "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else".

Regarding Helen Thomas's idiocy regarding Israel:


I just sent the following letter to her (helent@hearstdc.com), to her boss (lbagley@hearst.com), and to her agent (ninespeakers@usa.net):

Dear Ms. Thomas, Ms. Bagley, and Ms. Nine,

This is regarding Ms. Thomas's remarks that Jews should go "back" to Germany and Poland:

First, Jews are not from Germany and Poland. Before Jews ever were in Germany and Poland, they were first in Franco-Germany, and only around the 14th-century did they begin to migrate to Eastern Europe. And that's only the Ashkenazi (European) half of the Jewish people. The other half, the Sephardim, began in Spain, and moved from there into either Western Europe (especially Italy, Holland, and Britain), or the Americas (following Columbus), or into the Ottoman empire (whether Turkey or the Balkans, i.e. Greece, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, etc.). And then there are the various other Jewish groups, such as the Iraqi Jews, the Persian Jews, the North African Jews, and the Yemenite Jews, all these being called "Mizrahim".

And all these groups - Ashkenazim and Sephardim and Mizrahim - before they were in their various locations in Europe and Asia, they were all alike living in Israel, until the Babylonian and Roman Empires expelled them. But during all the thousands of years in which they were expelled, they never ceased to pray to return to Israel. Jewish liturgy emphasizes the return to Israel constantly throughout the daily prayers, each and every single day of the week. And Jews never ceased to attempt to resettle Israel throughout the centuries. Doña Nasia from Spain tried to resettle Teveria (Tiberias) in the 15th-to-16th-centuries, at the same time that Rabbi Yosef Karo in Tzefat (Safed) tried to reinstitute the ancient traditional rabbinical ordination which the Romans had severed, in order to help prepare the Jewish people for the coming of the Messiah in Israel. A few centuries later Rabbi Haim Benattar (the Ohr ha-Hayim) from Morocco tried to build a yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) in Jerusalem in the 18th-century, at the same time that Rabbi Haim Abulafia from Izmir, Turkey tried to resettle Teveria (Tiberias), after Doña Nasia's attempt had failed. Throughout all these centuries, the shadarim (an acronym for "sheluhim de-eretz yisrael", Jewish rabbinical ambassadors from Israel) would frequently travel from Israel to the rest of the Jewish world, and these ambassadors - who included such prominent rabbis as Rabbi Haim Yosef David Azulai, the Hida - were seen by the rest of the Jewish people as some of the most important Jews alive, keeping the Messianic dream alive by representing Israel. These ambassadors were among the greatest and most scholarly rabbis of their days, but it was their living in Israel which made them be considered truly great, and worthy of being ambassadors for the whole Jewish world. Rabbi Solomon Gaon, one of the former chief rabbis of the Sephardim in Britain, writes about his childhood in Sarajevo, Bosnia, saying (http://www.hagshama.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1683), "When I was a boy of about six my first Hebrew teacher, Rabbi David Gaon who was the spiritual leader of the little town in which I lived, left for Israel, at that time Palestine. I vividly remember him telling me, while giving me the lesson, in Hebrew and in Jewish history, that he would be going to Yerushalayim, that he would be taken there by his son who already lived there and that the greatest Mitzvah that a Jew could fulfill was to live in the Land that the Almighty had promised us and to pray for the time when the Messiah will come and redeem the Land and the people of Israel."

Second, it was not the Holocaust which gave rise to the modern State of Israel. First, the Sephardim and Mizrahim were largely spared from the Holocaust, but Sephardim and Mizrahim were prominent in the Zionist movement, including such rabbis as Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai of Zemun, Serbia were prominently represented in the Zionist movement. And Ashkenazim were prominent too, long before the Holocaust, such as Theodore Herzl of Vienna or Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer of Prussia. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 came long before the Holocaust, and the Irgun was bombing and shooting British soldiers (just as American colonists had done in the 18th-century) before the Holocaust as well. So the Holocaust has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The State of Israel exists because it is the Jewish homeland, and because Jews spilled their own blood in war to return to their homeland, and the Holocaust has nothing to do with it.

If the Holocaust were the reason for the existence of the State of Israel, then two facts would become apparent:
(1) Middle-Eastern Jews like the Sephardim and Mizrahim would have no place in Israel, because they were never in the Holocaust. But the fact is that HALF of the Jews in Israel are Sephardim and Mizrahim whose ancestors were never involved in the Holocaust.
(2) Jews would have no right to punish the Arabs in Israel for the sins of the Europeans. I.e., it would be wrong to force the Arabs to give up land just because the Europeans murdered. Instead, if the Holocaust were the cause of the State of Israel, then the Europeans, not the Arabs, would have to surrender land in payment. But the fact is that the Jewish hope to return to Israel has nothing to do with the Holocaust, and even if the Europeans had been the most lovely and philosemitic and hospitable people to the Jews, even so, the Jews would still have returned to Israel, their homeland. European antisemitism is irrelevant.

So Ms. Thomas's call for Jews to return to Poland and Germany displays an astounding and awe-inspiring degree of ignorance about Jewish history. I suggest that a higher degree of education be expected from her, on any matter on which she expresses an opinion. On any matter in which she is ignorant of basic objective history, I suggest she practice silence.

Thank you, and sincerely,
Michael Makovi

** Update: With h/t to my friend Tamar Har-Oz, Nine Speakers, Inc. will no longer represent Thomas: here.