A Sad Day for Which Relations?

A topical companion to our series on Zionism, Judaism, and why the difference matters. Read the earlier parts here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This week the Church of England's General Synod recommended engagement with Kairos II, a document produced by Palestinian Christians that levels serious accusations against Israel's conduct in Gaza. Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, condemned the decision in unusually strong terms — "shameful" was his word — describing the document as false, extreme, and an obstacle to peace, and closing with this verdict: "This is a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations."

This article takes no position on the report itself. Its claims are for historians, jurists, and the reader's own conscience to weigh. The subject here is something quieter and, in the long run, more consequential: the premise buried inside that final sentence.

That premise is this — that a Christian body's verdict on the conduct of a state constitutes a verdict on the Jewish people, such that examining the one endangers friendship with the other. The lament only makes sense if Jews and the State of Israel are, for practical purposes, a single entity: criticize the state, wound the people; distance yourself from the government, and you have distanced yourself from your Jewish neighbors.

Readers of this series will recognize that equation. It is the founding claim of Zionism — that the Jewish people are a nation like other nations, that the state is that nation's true expression, and that the state therefore speaks for Jews everywhere. The previous articles traced where that idea came from: not from the Jewish religion, whose leading authorities opposed it, but from nineteenth-century European nationalism, adopted by founders who by their own account did not believe in the God of Judaism. What is striking about the present moment is watching the equation asserted not by a secular politician but by an Orthodox chief rabbi — and directed at Christians, as a condition of friendship.

What the office once said

There is a historical irony here worth pausing on. The office Rabbi Mirvis holds has not always spoken this way. Hermann Adler, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire during the very years Theodor Herzl was launching the Zionist movement, opposed political Zionism and regarded it as contrary to Jewish teaching. He was no outlier. Across Europe, the overwhelming majority of rabbinic authorities — from the Reform leadership in Germany to the great Orthodox sages of Eastern Europe — rejected Herzl's project, each for their own reasons, the Orthodox most forcefully of all. In 1898, a British Christian could have asked the Chief Rabbi of his day about Zionism and been told plainly that it did not represent Judaism.

A century and a quarter later, the same office informs British Christians that their relationship with the Jewish community runs through their posture toward the state that movement created. Between those two positions lies no new revelation and no change in the Torah. What changed was politics — and the extraordinary success of the Zionist project in installing itself, in the world's eyes and eventually in many Jewish institutions, as the voice of the Jewish people.

What the friendship actually rests on

Consider what Jewish-Christian relations consisted of for the many centuries before 1948. Jews and Christians were neighbors, tradesmen, physicians and patients, subjects of the same kings. The relationship had its dark chapters, and its repair in the modern era has been genuine and precious. But at no point in that long history was the friendship between a Jewish family and their Christian neighbors contingent on anyone's opinion of a government — because there was no government in the picture. What Christians owed Jews, and what Jews hoped for from Christians, was what neighbors owe one another: honesty, fairness, and peace.

That original understanding is still available, and traditional Jewish communities still live by it. Their relations with the Christians around them rest on shared neighborhoods and shared decency, and carry no clause about foreign policy. A Christian who concludes, rightly or wrongly, that a state has acted terribly has not touched that relationship at all — unless someone teaches both parties that he has.

And here is the uncomfortable truth about the Chief Rabbi's framing: teaching people that he has is the more dangerous course, including for Jews. If Jewish-Christian friendship is chained to the standing of a state, then the friendship must fall whenever the state's standing falls. Every war, every scandal, every atrocity allegation — founded or not — becomes a solvent applied to the bond between churchgoers and their Jewish neighbors. British Jews already live with the consequences of this logic in its ugliest form: synagogues attacked and schoolchildren harassed over events in Gaza they did not cause and cannot control. The proper remedy for that madness is to break the equation, loudly and permanently. A public lament that treats the equation as valid — that tells Christians their view of Israel is their view of the Jews — does not break it. Tragically, it affirms it.

A word about the authors of the report

One more feature of the episode deserves notice. Kairos II was written by Palestinian Christians. The question the Synod answered was, at bottom, whether the Church of England may listen to fellow Christians describing their own circumstances. Whatever one makes of the document's claims, the suggestion that hearing them out constitutes an offense against the Jewish people should trouble anyone who cares about either community. Jews are not implicated in what the report describes unless the state's actions are the Jews' actions — and that, as this series has labored to show, is precisely the proposition that Judaism never taught and that generations of Torah authorities firmly rejected.

The Synod has made its recommendation, and this article presumes to tell it nothing about the report. But on the question beneath the question, the historical record permits a clear answer. Christian friendship with the Jewish people long predates the State of Israel, owes it nothing, and is threatened not by scrutiny of a government but by the false doctrine that the State of Israel and the Jewish people are one. That doctrine arrived barely a century ago, from Europe's nationalists rather than from Sinai — and the surest way to protect both the friendship and the Jews is to reject it.