Sacks - Future tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first century

ALSO BY JONATHAN SACKS

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism

Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected PlacesThe Chief Rabbis HaggadahCommunity of Faith

Covenant and Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Genesis, the Book of Beginnings

Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust

The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

Faith in the Future: The Ecology of Hope and the Restoration of Family, Community, and Faith

From Optimism to Hope: Thoughts for the Day

The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society

The Koren Sacks Siddur

A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the Worlds Oldest ReligionMorals and Markets

One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity

The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age

The Politics of Hope

Radical Then, Radical Now: The Legacy of the Worlds Oldest Religion

To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility

Tradition in an Untraditional Age

Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?: Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It

11.

Yesterday, said the fabled politician, we stood at the edge of the abyss, but today we have taken a giant step forward. Jewish history can sometimes feel like that: danger, followed by disaster. It does today.

Sixty years after its birth, the state of Israel is deeply isolated. It faces missiles from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, two terrorist groups pledged to Israels destruction. It has fought two campaigns, Lebanon in 2006, Gaza in 200809, whose outcome has been inconclusive. In the wings is Iran and the threat of nuclear weapons. Rarely has its future seemed so fraught with risk.

At the same time it has faced a chorus of international disapproval for its attempt to fight the new, ruthless terror that takes refuge among civilian populations. If it does nothing, it fails in the first duty of a state, to protect its citizens. If it does something, the innocent suffer. It is a conundrum to perplex the most inventive mind and trouble the most thoughtful conscience.

The existence of the state of Israel would, thought Theodor Herzl, put an end to antisemitism. Instead, Israel has become the focus of a new antisemitism. The emergence within living memory of the Holocaust of a new strain of the worlds oldest hate is one of the most shocking developments in my lifetime.

Were these the only problems facing the Jewish people, they would be formidable. But there are others that weaken from within. There is the crisis of Jewish continuity. Throughout the Diaspora on average one in two young Jews is, through outmarriage, assimilation or disaffiliation, choosing not to continue the Jewish story; to be the last leaf on a tree that has lasted for four thousand years.

There is the eclipse of religious Zionism in Israel and modern orthodoxy in the Diaspora, the two forms of Judaism that believed it was possible to maintain the classic terms of Jewish life in the modern world. Jews are either engaging with the world and losing their Jewish identity or preserving their identity at the cost of disengaging from the world. There are continuing divisions within the Jewish world, to the point that it is difficult to speak of Jews as one people with a shared fate and a collective identity.

This book is about all these issues, but it is also an attempt to get beneath them. For there is something deeper at stake, something fundamental and unresolved about the place of Jews, Judaism and Israel in the world. A picture held us captive, said Wittgenstein, speaking about philosophy. The same, I believe, is true of Jews. An image of a people alone in the world, surrounded by enemies, bereft of friends, has dominated Jewish consciousness since the Holocaust. That is understandable. It is also dangerous. It leads to bad decisions and it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jews need to recover faithnot simple faith, not nave optimism, but faith that they are not alone in the world. The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for his wish to leave and go to Israel, tells the story of how his wife, Avital, gave him a Hebrew book of Psalms to sustain him in the hard years ahead. The Russians confiscated it and he fought for three years to have it returned. Eventually it was.

Sharansky knew little Hebrew, but he treated the book as a code to be deciphered, which he eventually did. He recalls the moment one line yielded its meaning, the verse from Psalm 23: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me. It was an epiphany. He felt as if someone had written those words directly for him in that place, that time. He survived, won his freedom, and went to Israel. He carries the book with him to this day.

Sharansky is a living symbol of the Jewish people through time. Often enough they too lost their freedom, but as long as they felt I will fear no evil for you are with me, they had an inner resilience that protected them from fear and despair. It was not a nave faith, but it was awesome in its power. Jews kept faith alive. Faith kept the Jewish people alive. Faith defeats fear.

Fear, on the other hand, generates a sense of victimhood. Victims feel themselves to be alone. Everyone is against them. No one understands them. They have two choices: either to retreat within themselves or to act aggressively to defend themselves. Victims blame the world, not themselves. For that reason, it is a self-reinforcing attitude. Victims want the world to change, forgetting that it may be they who have to change. The victims fears may be real, but victimhood is not the best way to deal with them.

Fear is the wrong response to the situation of Jews in the contemporary world. It is easy, surveying the news day by day, to believe that they are the worst of times, but in some ways they are the best. Never before in four thousand years of history have Jews enjoyed, simultaneously, independence and sovereignty in Israel, and freedom and equality in the Diaspora.

The very existence of Israel is as near to a miracle as we will find in the sober pages of empirical history. Israel has had to face war and terror, but it has transformed the Jewish situation by the mere fact of its existence as the one place where Jews can defend themselves instead of relying on the all-too-often-unreliable goodwill of others. At the same time Jewish life in the Diaspora is flourishing, culturally, educationally, even spiritually, in ways that would have been unimaginable a century ago.

In truth, these are not the worst of times, nor the best of times, but the most challenging of times. Jews today are in a position they have rarely if ever been in before in four thousand years of history. They face the world, in Israel and the Diaspora, on equal terms or, at least, on Jewish terms. What terms are they?

That is the question I address in this book. My argument is that we are in danger of forgetting who Jews are and why, why there is such a thing as the Jewish people, and what its place is within the global project of humankind. In the past Jews lived through catastrophes that would have spelled the end of most nations: the destruction of Solomons temple, the Babylonian exile, the Roman conquest, the Hadrianic persecutions, the massacres of the Crusades, the Spanish expulsion. They wrote elegies; they mourned; they prayed. But they did not give way to fear. They did not define themselves as victims. They did not see antisemitism written into the fabric of the universe. They knew they existed for a purpose, and it was not for themselves alone.