Bartley Kulp makes a number of excellent points that are easy to agree with.
If there is a separation of "shul and State" in Israel, then how can we call Israel the "Jewish State?"
What would be any more Jewish about Israel than for example, Brooklyn or Queens? (The demographics would be about the same, Jews, Russians, Arabs, Chinese).
If Israel is not a "Jewish State", but a State where Jews live, then what would be the basis of a Jewish claim to govern ANY Middle Eastern land as Jews comprise less than 1% of the population?
The basis for Jews to govern a non Jewish state in the Middle East boils down to a UN referendum and surely not a Biblical prescription.
The UN referendum granted war reparations to the Jewish people from Germany.
In other words, Germany committed a horrific genocide against the Jewish people. The UN passed a referendum to repay the Jewish people in allowing the Zionists to drive nearly a million Arabs from their homes and confiscate their lands and cities.
Today we risk the life of every 18 year old Israeli Jew to protect that UN entity that could just as easily be dissolved by referendum as it was formed.
I think that Bartley Kulp presents an excellent argument in support of "Post Zionistic" ideology.
Bartley Kulp responded...
anonymous said...
"I think that Bartley Kulp presents an excellent argument in support of "Post Zionistic" ideology."
This does not a support for post zionist ideology per say. I will admit though that on the surface it would seem to support their agenda though. Enough of post Zionism for now. I will touch on your other points. I am also not advocating a complete divorce between church and state in the American sense of the word.
First of all you are asking an existential question that without the bible what is our our excuse for dispossessing the Palestinians and being a center trigger for so much conflict? The truth is that there is no justification for it. This is why Ben Gurion sent a message through Aba Ebben to the U.N. on the eve of the vote over partition, that the justification for our presence in the holy land is the bible. Keeping in mind that Ben Gurion was himself an athiest, he was not just trying spin on a potentialy religious audience. The matter was and still is very simple without bringing in divinity. Besides being a book of laws the bible represents the oldest deed of land ownership known to mankind.
Again this was Ben Gurion who brought up this point before the U.N. and not Chief Rabbi Herzog z'l. In fact all of these things that you are bringing up such as German war reparations, the fact that we could be dissolved by refurendum (although I am not so sure that that is so simplistic) are irregardless of the fact on whether or not our country is a theocracy of any kind. Certainly the U.N. delegates who voted on these issues did not have frum interpretation of halacha or the rabbinate in mind while voting.
Nor do I think that soldiers when they risk there lives on the battlefield do they declare "G-d save the chief rabbi of Israel."
The thing is that I think you are mixing up Torah and nationalism. The law of return is essentially a nationalistic law, not a torah one. It is not that much different to the laws that exist in such countries like Germany, Hungary and China. The rabbinate does not have much of a part in the enforcement or carrying out this law. The jewish Agency and the ministry of the interior do. In fact they do so in spite of the rabbinate. Under the law of return individuals of Jewish patrilineage decent and non Jewish spouses can become citizens here. Thus the seeds of todays problem that Rav Druckman was desperately trying to deal with. This is hardly a torah based law and it is unlikely that much will change without a rabbinate.
You are also forgetting that the most powerful body that can facilitate Jewish identity through education and religious ordinances is not the Rabbinate but the Knesset. In this building the religious parties have a lot of clout.
Even with all of this said, the heart of the matter is that the ends do not justify the means. It is degrading to the torah to have beiti dinim that are not autonymous and are subject to government pressure. This is in spite of the problems that we are now existentially facing because of the 300,000 non Jewish Russian olim.
Also consider this, perhaps half of these people will not consider converting anyways. So why are we prostituting ourselves?
In the absence of the Torah, both Written and Oral, the existence of Israel boils down to what Chaim Weizmann told a British committee in 1946: to resolve the issue of who gets the land, there will be injustice, either against the Jews or against the Arabs. The only question then is which injustice is less.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, without the Torah and Judaism, Israel is simply the lesser of two evils. And now that the Holocaust is a faded memory in the rest of the world, it has become the greater of two evils.
Without Torah and Judaism, Israel cannot continue to exist with any justification. It must evolve into at least a binational state or an Arab one with a sizable Jewish minority that will quickly see its rights to worship and public expression eliminated while the world looks the other way.
It is only through understanding that Torah and Judaism make Israel a morally justified state that the state of Israel can continue.
"It is only through understanding that Torah and Judaism make Israel a morally justified state"
ReplyDeletePlease elaborate on the Torah's moral justification for persecuting monotheistic inhabitants of the Land of Israel.
This included/includes expelling civilians from their homes, seizing their land, murdering 10,000 civilians, raping women and girls in order to incite enough terror that the majority of the native population would flee (Deir Yassin), bulldozing houses of monotheist worship (mosques) and cemeteries and driving human beings like cattle to the borders as was witnessed and documented by many Jews at the time.
(This is also very well documented from IDF achives by Meron Benvenisti former mayor of Jerusalem in his book "Sacred Landscape:Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. And also by Ilan Pappe in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" which is a non editorialized collection of archival sources).
Please explain your source for the Torah justification for taking the Land of Israel by force in light of the Three Oaths.
I agree with most of Bartley Kulp's very thoughtful response.
ReplyDeleteWhere he says "It is degrading to the torah to have beiti dinim that are not autonymous and are subject to government pressure."
That's a good point, but what are we to do/think if the Beit Din in question is led by Rabbeim who see the nationalistic needs of the U.N. created country of Israel as a compelling reason to permit conversion?
It is very noble to provide protection from unjust religious persecution to people who might be suffering in their native countries for being Jewish even when they are not. By including these people in the law of return, Israel is responsible to protect them from religious discrimination.
So, Israel brings them in, and then encourages them to change their religion so that they can fit with the majority.
We'd sure hate that if it were done to us!
> Please elaborate on the Torah's moral justification for persecuting monotheistic inhabitants of the Land of Israel.
ReplyDeleteYou mean: Persecuting monotheistic inhabitants who daily shout out loud for the destruction of Israel and use whatever means they can to bring it about. I don't think you'll find a functioning state on this planet that wouldn't "persecute" such a group.
> This included/includes expelling civilians from their homes,
Well at least you're sympathetic to the exiles from 'Aza.
> seizing their land
That they in turn originally seized from us. Yes, please continue.
> murdering 10,000 civilians
Only in your dreams. You've been reading too much Al-Jazeera.
> raping women and girls in order to incite enough terror that the majority of the native population would flee (Deir Yassin)
You probably also believe that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an authentic historical document. Well, as PT Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.
> This is also very well documented from IDF achives by Meron Benvenisti former mayor of Jerusalem
Who was all for Israel and Yerushalayim until he lost his chance to become mayor of the Holy City and then, in what seems to be de rigeur for failed Israeli politicians, became a bitter enemy of the state willing to spread any and all lies about it. Sour grapes indeed.
> Please explain your source for the Torah justification for taking the Land of Israel by force in light of the Three Oaths.
The Torah tells us to stay away from false matters. By rejecting all the... oh he'll just censor the word... you've spewed, I'm doing just that!
Garnel Ironheart said...
ReplyDelete"In other words, without the Torah and Judaism, Israel is simply the lesser of two evils."
I would point out that almost everything that we consider good is just the lesser of alternate evils. That is the fact of existence in a state of golus.
This is relevant to the issue of autonomous batei din in Israel. In America we have "autonomous" batei din, i.e. batei din have little, if any, power to enforce their decisions. Clearly not the ideal situation.
In Israel batei din have real power, but that comes at the price of dependence on the secular government. Also far from ideal.
There is, quite simply, no satisfactory solution to the problem. And again, a reminder that, even in Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish people are in golus and, frequently, there are no satisfactory solutions to serious problems. That is, in a sense, what golus means.
> And again, a reminder that, even in Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish people are in golus and, frequently, there are no satisfactory solutions to serious problems.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly with that statement. Now, my question: If there's no satisfactory solution, why tackle the problem? Wouldn't it be a better use of time to deal with problems that have satisfactory, albeit difficult solutions than to spend energy and effort pursuing one (peace in the Middle East) that's clearly impossible?
OR do we tackle unsolvable problems because otherwise we feel we're shirking our tafkid?
Garnel Ironheart said...
ReplyDelete"If there's no satisfactory solution, why tackle the problem?"
Well, while it may not be possible to truly solve a problem, this does not mean that we can't do anything to alleviate the problem. (Thus we give tzedaka even though we know we can't eliminate poverty.)
However, I feel you are onto an important point.
I have long wondered why there is a correlation between political conservatism (antagonistic to big government) and religious conservatism. At the first glance there wouldn't appear to be any connection.
After all, why should belief in God result in opposition to the welfare state? Why should "Pro-Life" be connected to opposition to gun control? Obviously, their are relgious people on the politically liberal side as well, but we do see a broad correlation of these views in the population. (As Obama put it, "religion and guns.") Why are they connected?
I think part of the reason is the attitude towards the issue we are talking about: accepting that some problems are unsolvable.
The Western religions teach that, ultimately, God controls the world and that the primary reason for the world's troubles is God's displeasure with human sinful behavior. It follows, therefore, that the primary means of solving these problesm is spiritual.
In the meantime, however, we must deal with an imperfect world. This imperfect world is called, in Jewish terms, galus. (Christians similarly believe that humanity is in a "fallen" state. The theology is, of course, very different, but in this regard the implications are similar.) We therefore have to accept that there simply is no natural solution to many of the worlds problems (poverty, war, crime, etc.). We, of course, do the best we can, in our small human way, to alleviate the problem, but we recognize that we cannot eliminate the problem.
Secularists (and those who absorbed its world view) generally will not accept this view. Although logically it is possible to be a secularist and also accept that there are no true solutions to the world's problems, emotionally this is very difficult. Most secularists believe, emphatically, that all of the world's problems can be solved ("If only people would listen to our wisdom!").
Thus, LBJ's "War on Poverty" and the modern welfare state, the United Nations (to eliminate war), assorted liberal policies to eliminate racism (affirmative action), socialize medicine, etc. WHile most of these goals are laudable, they are, in essence, attempts to solve the unsolvable. As a result these grand plans tend to just create new problems while exacerbating the old ones.
Fundamentally, what has happened, in my opinion, is a secular substitution for the Messianic age. Religious believers tend to believe that the Messianic age can only be brought about through Divine action. Secularists, who don't believe in the Divine, have put themselves in the Messianic role. Interestingly, the U.N. has been, almost explicitly, described in Messianic terms. Thus the famous "Swords into Plowshares" statue at the U.N. based on a messianic prophecy from Yeshaya HaNavi. (Even more interesting, the statue was donated by the atheist Soviet Union!)
Religious groups that have absorbed the secularist perspective (which includes various Christian factions, such as the Methodist church that mentored Hillary Clinton, and many Jewish groups, such as Reform Judaism) and have completely adopted their agenda as their spiritual purpose.
(Incidentally, while I don't have enough background on Islam to be certain, it seems to me that a similar process has led to the modern "radical Islamists." Today's radical Islam is a modern development, which was heavily influenced by secular Arab nationalism. In radical Islam we also observe the attempt to bring about a Messianic age through direct human action.)
Well, I guess I've rambled for long enough. Sorry!
Also enough of this business of expelling the Arabs from from their homes in 48'. Their leaders told them to do that. We had nothing to do with that(Not that I am unhappy with that outcome).
ReplyDeleteAlso the civilian casualties in Deir Yassin was an accident. The truth is they were participants in the fighting and were asking for It was also done on a much smaller scale than what the Jordanians did to the Jewish residents of the Etzion Block and the old city of Jerusalem. That was serious ethnic cleansing but nobody cries about that. Nor does anybody cry for for the inhabitants who were murdered by the Egyptians in places like Kfar Darom in the Gaza strip or Kibbutz Yad Mordechai.
Lazera everything that you are saying is fascinating. To put a vocabulary to what you are desribing regarding the secular who think that man can perfect the world with his own work and wisdom, these are called Utopian idealists. These as opposed to Machiavellians.
ReplyDelete