(Continued from p.7)
the successor states, the states that absorbed parts of Poland, sought to break up Jewish ways of life in the East, and as Jews fled their old communities because of increasing political and economic pressures, fled particularly westward, to western Europe and America, efforts to reestablish a meaningful, stable Jewish communal existence were only partially successful. They were most successful where Jews were able to establish themselves in large concentrations; but even in such communities, typically low birth rates and some significant attrition meant erosion of populations, with numbers being maintained, if at all, primarily through further immigration from the East. In all the new communities of central and western Europe and the western hemisphere, through the last century and the first decades of the present one, large numbers of Jews saw their Jewishness, their ties to Judaism, as a dead weight and their futures elsewhere.And for all we hear today of American toler-
I, for one, cannot imagine Jews surviving very long should Israel be lost.
In any case, the idea that Jews survived for 2,000 years without a politically significant communal existence, as merely religious communities, is a distortion. Jews were a people with a sense of the meaningfulness of their peoplehood, a sense reinforced for much of that time by their political, legal status, and this was crucial to their survival. And the loss of the Jews' former legal, official standing as a community, the reduction of Jewish communities in the modern era to more purely religious entities, placed what were potentially overwhelming stresses on Jewish communal existence. Israel's creation reduced in part the stresses on Jewish communal existence by providing, again, an affirmation of Jewish vitality, of the Jewish people, as a people, having an ongoing place in present and future history. And I, for one, cannot imagine Jews surviving very long should Israel be lost. And not only because Israel's loss would put us back to the corrosive, community-eroding conditions we faced before Israel's creation, but also because we would have to deal as well, of course, with the overwhelmingly dispiriting, disheartening fact of having regained Zion only to lose it again; an experience of defeat so demoralizing, so reinforcing of the perception of ourselves as a people whose time in history had indeed passed, that it could only increase defections and hasten the disappearance of the Jews as a community from the world stage.
Norman Podhoretz, in a Commentary article in 1989 entitled "Israel: A Lamentation From the Future," considered the condition of the Jews in the wake of their acquiescing, both in Israel and here, to pressures for territorial and other concessions to Israel's enemies that threatened her existence; the condition of Jews then having to deal with the consequences of their failure of will, the demise of Israel. What he was talking about is, of course, very much what we are seeing today, the potentially suicidal acquiescence of Jews both in Israel and here to pressures that can be countered were there only the will, and the courage to resist self-delusion. He writes of the Jews, in the wake of their failing to resist vigorously enough Israel's destruction, being "left with this burden of shame and self-disgust that is undermining our will to go on as Jews and that is dragging the glorious history of our ancient people toward an ignominious end." It is a vision of what would follow on Israel's demise that is hard to dispute.
None of this is to suggest, of course, elevating Israel and Zionism to the status of an alternative in Jewish life to connection with Jewish faith, Jewish history, and Jewish traditions, including the evolution of the faith, history and traditions through the sojourns in exile. On the contrary, there is evidence that among Americans, even though visits to Israel early in one's life appear to be one of the most effective experiences in assuring an ongoing valuing of and holding to one's Jewish identity, the connection to Israel may not of itself necessarily suffice to hold the young to their Judaism without sufficient Jewish education and familiarity with Jewish history and traditions.
More dramatically, we can see very clearly in Israel today how neglect of Jewish history and traditions is no less a threat to Jewish survival than neglect of Zion. Indeed, Israel is in such danger today in no small part because the political elite has strayed so far from connection with Jewish history and tradition. The socialist builders of the State, the founders whose political successors are now the leaders and adherents of the parties of the Israeli left, Labor, Meretz and the others, thought they were building a new Jew separate and apart from the Jewish past, and placed little value on that past. They wanted to construe all of Jewish suffer-
(Continued on p.11)
Outpost - 10 - April 1999