May 13, 2014 Saskatoon, SK, Canada Symposium: Doing Theology in Occupied Territory A Blessing or a Curse: Judaism’s Zionist Dilemma By Stephen H. France Hello, it is great to be here in Saskatoon and I am very honored to be asked to lead this session. I thank the organizers for inviting me and the United Church of Canada for sponsoring this important symposium. I’d like to offer two propositions: 1) The Zionism that produced the State of Israel is a terrible distortion of the Jewish Bible and tradition; but paradoxically, 2) The crisis that the so ‐ called Jewish State has caused by subjugating the Palestinians offers Jews – in fact requires them – to rediscover and put in practice the heart of God’s Biblical commands. Here’s how I came to believe these two things: I was sitting at a traffic light in 2005 when words of the Bible entered my mind: “Not like the nations. Not like the nations.” I looked for the passage and found the prophet Ezekiel speaking in God’s name: “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve idols. But what you have in mind will never happen.” Ezekiel and God were addressing the People of Israel, of course, but I had been thinking about the State of Israel and I heard Ezekiel saying, “Not Zionism.”
Then, in July 2006, as Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon and Gaza, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote in a column, “Israel was a mistake,” a statement he soon regretted, of course, but in which I heard the echo of Ezekiel. I realized that forming a state like all the nations was not just a mistake, it was the mistake, the original sin that the Bible aims to expose to God’s truth and redemption. From the very first pages of the Bible, humanity is linked to land, but land is only a medium for the relationship between God and humanity. The original promised land, of course, was the Garden of Eden. In Gen 2–3, God creates the land before creating the Human Being, who is formed from the earth (“Adam” is from the Hebrew word for “earth,” adamah ) to take care of the Garden of Eden for God and with God. The garden is made for Adam and Eve, and they are made for the garden. This arrangement expresses God’s loving nature. By living well in the garden, the humans are given a concrete way to love God back, just as God’s gift of the garden is a concrete expression of his love for them. The garden is what brings the Human Beings and God together; it is what they share. Adam and Eve’s most precious way of showing love for God is to respect God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—to accept and respect that God is God and they are God’s creatures. The original sin is Adam and Eve’s decision to treat the garden simply as the object of their desires, rather than as the medium of a relationship of trust and transparency with God. The medium of their friendship with God becomes the medium of their alienation from God, from whom, in a final insult, they attempt to hide. The first social sin, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, is framed by God as a sin against the land, and Cain’s punishment is mediated through the land. God says that Abel’s blood “cries out to
me from the ground,” that Cain is “under a curse and driven from the ground,” and that Cain’s punishment consists in his alienation from the ground, both in his perpetual itinerancy and in the hardship of tilling infertile soil. God’s promise to Abram of the Land of Canaan is the central dynamic of the Hebrew Bible, but it’s not so much about land as it is about a plan to reestablish the friendship lost in the garden and the peace broken by Cain. It involves “all peoples on earth” (Gen 12:3), who God says will be blessed through Abram. And, paradoxically, Abram’s original virtue is to give up his home and his nationality to live as a sojourner in a strange land. And God is in no hurry to make good on the promise Abram will become a great nation admired of all the peoples on earth. It takes a miracle for Abram (now Abraham, the “father of many nations,” Gen 17:5) and Sarah even to have an heir. God grants them a son in their barren old age in reward for Abraham’s faithfulness (Gen 17:15). Then, to underscore the point that the object of the promise was not an end in itself, but an expression of the beginning of a new relationship of trust between God and humanity, God demands that Abraham offer up that son, Isaac, the father ‐ to ‐ be of Jacob/Israel, whom one must assume Abraham loves more than his own life. In the offering and near ‐ sacrifice of that heir, Isaac, Abraham proves his ultimate trust in God is greater than his desire for land and progeny. Again, God is really taking his time. The Hebrews begin to develop a sense of identity as a people while in bondage in Egypt, where they no longer are connected at all to the land. The point of the Exodus from Egypt is to exalt God over Pharaoh. He is the Anti ‐ Pharoah. (in Exod 14:17, God says, “I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his army”), who represents the
state—that is, the proud possession of land through might, wealth, and idolatry. When Pharaoh’s armies pursue the fleeing Hebrews, the people are not an army, nor do they win a military victory. Rather, God singlehandedly intervenes to wipe out the danger. God, not weapons or skill, protects and forms Israel. Moses as a man is pointedly described as not up to the task of leading his people, except as a follower of God’s commands. And God’s purpose is not simply to favor the Hebrews. Rather, He calls them back to the Promised Land to be “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). But not right away. First, they spend 40 years in the Wilderness, in complete, powerless, landless poverty they are formed by God’s precepts, providence, and their own many mistakes, so that when they come into the Land they will be free not just of Pharaoh but also of Pharaoh’s ways. Nor do they live off the land; this is not Wanuskewin. Instead, God feeds them and as Walter Brueggemann wrote, they see that “life ‐ giving resources do not come from land but from Yahweh.” The next key moment comes many generations after they have been struggling in the Land, which had been developed by others before they arrived. The people decide to establish a monarchy, disregarding God’s stark warning about how monarchs will create a state that will usurp the place of God and community. The prophet Samuel warns the people of the perils of statehood and all the evil that kings do to their people (1 Sam 8:11–17), but they insist, “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations , with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” God tells Samuel, “It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king” (1 Sam 8:7). Under David and Solomon a state among the states is established, with impressive early results,
but the pursuit of national power has deadly side effects, blinding and deafening rulers and the elite to God’s will as they violate the covenant commitment to justice and mercy, as the great prophets chronicle and denounce. This brings on the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE), and then the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom of Judah (587–538 BCE). Ironically, the exile experience, with its longing for return and mediation on loss, generates tremendous spiritual creativity, including the Book of Genesis, and locks in many prophetic insights. The land of promise is alive in the minds of the wise men and women. Actually, from this point on, practically from the point that the Jewish people enter history, exile, including the sense of internal exile felt by Jews in the Second Temple period, becomes the norm of Jewish experience and the ground of their theological meditations. In fact, even during the kingdom period one can see a deep ambivalence in the attitude of the people of Israel toward the Land. Consider the fierce hostility to Canaanite and Philistine earth ‐ oriented fertility cults, which were linked to state power. Going back even further, in the Garden or with Abraham, the Land is a somewhat abstract reality, a symbol and token of relationship to God, whereas with other peoples (the nations) land was sufficient. These others, with their nature gods and Mother Earth myths, might almost be thought to have grown out of their land. In contrast, Abram is brought from outside into a land that others have loved and nurtured—a land he did not know or choose. For him, as for his descendants, it has no intrinsic value; God could reassign a different land. It’s about something more. But what? How did God intend to keep his promise? What were his people supposed to do? Those questions exploded in the ferment of the First Century, when the Romans tried to co ‐ opt the Jewish religion in their usual melting pot/mosaic Pax Romana way, while the vast Jewish
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