"The Redemption Has Begun"

Fourth in the series "The Kippah and the Flag," on religious Zionism and how it fits, or does not fit, into the Jewish religion. Earlier installments are here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The last article ended with a puzzle. The flag beside the ark, the state holiday in the prayer book, the ground kissed because of who governs it: each of these fails Judaism's own test for what belongs in the religion, and the Torah authorities said so when it all started. Yet many sincere, learned, observant Jews adopted all of it anyway. Ordinary reasoning does not carry a person from the Torah to those practices. A doctrine carried them, and the doctrine concerns the end of the world.

To understand it, a reader first needs to know what Judaism itself teaches about the end of the world, because the doctrine is a departure from that teaching, and the departure is the whole story.

What the tradition teaches, and how carefully

Judaism believes that history has a destination. A pillar of the faith, recited daily in the prayers, holds that God will one day redeem the world: the Messiah will come, the scattered Jews will be gathered home, the Temple will be rebuilt, and mankind and the world will be repaired. No traditional Jew doubts this, and the longing for it saturates Jewish prayer.

But alongside the belief, Jewish tradition maintains a discipline, and the discipline is just as old. The timing of the redemption is God's alone and cannot be calculated. Its arrival will be by God's hand, not manufactured by political movements. And the tradition firmly refuses to read the news as the script of the end unfolding. This restraint was learned at terrible cost. More than once in Jewish history, waves of messianic enthusiasm swept Jewish communities, certain that the end had begun, and each wave broke in catastrophe and mass despair. The Sages concluded that announcing the redemption is not piety. It is the oldest trap in the faith's history, and the tradition built fences against it.

Keep both halves in mind: total faith in the redemption, total sobriety about declaring it. But what happened with the advent of Zionism removed the second half.

The new reading

In the early twentieth century, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the rabbi of Jaffa and later the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, developed a different way of reading the events of his time. He was a man of recognized learning and personal piety, a mystic and a poet, and his followers loved him. None of what follows questions any of that. What it questions is the doctrine.

Rabbi Kook taught that the secular Zionist movement, the same movement whose founders' rejection of Judaism this publication has documented at length, was in truth the visible machinery of the redemption beginning. That's right — the Zionist pioneers who broke the Sabbath and mocked the Torah were somehow, without knowing it, God's instruments. In his famous image, drawn from a mystical text, they were like the donkey of the Messiah: impure on the outside, holy within, carrying the redemption forward against their own intentions. Their very love of the land, he wrote, revealed the hidden holiness inside their heresy. History itself, in this reading, was moving the Jewish people home on an unstoppable sacred current, and the wise would recognize the current and join it.

Scholars who study the religious Zionist movement have long noted where this way of thinking about history comes from, and it is not Judaism. Academic specialists describe the doctrine in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century German philosophy, in which history advances through a hidden logic that uses human actors for purposes they do not intend. Readers of this publication's first series will recognize the family. It is the same European current that supplied Zionism's other borrowed ideas, here arriving in rabbinic dress.

Rabbi Kook's son and successors carried the reading to its conclusion. Once the State of Israel was founded, the school declared the political state itself sacred. The father had written, before any state existed, that an ideal Israel would be "the pedestal of God's throne in the world"; the disciples applied the phrase to the republic founded in 1948, secular government, army, and all. His son and heir, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, taught his students plainly that "the state of Israel is a divine entity." A leading rabbi of this school of thought in our own day teaches that the redemption is well underway, that the Jewish people are "already in the throne room, not the anteroom." Others in the movement declare their certainty of the imminent redemption as a matter of religious principle: doubting that the end has begun is treated as the error, and the sober tradition of waiting is treated as a failure of faith.

What the doctrine does

Grant the premise for a moment, and watch how everything from the earlier articles falls into place. If the state of Israel is the beginning of the redemption, then the state is not a political fact but a holy one, and a flag beside the ark is not decoration; it is testimony. A war is not a war; it is a birth pang of the end. Conquered territory is not a policy question; it is prophecy being fulfilled, and giving any of it back is not a compromise but a rebellion against Heaven. The army must be an instrument of the redemption. This is the engine inside religious Zionism's most visible behavior, from the settlement hilltops to the ascents of the Temple Mount that readers of this publication have already seen up close. The next article follows those consequences in detail.

But notice what the premise required. The tradition's ancient discipline, the refusal to announce the redemption, had to be set aside. And the authorities of the era said exactly that. The witnesses of this series' second article rejected the "beginning of the redemption" claim in plain terms, and they were joined by the Rebbe of Ger, leader of the largest Chassidic community in Poland, who examined Rabbi Kook's teachings during his lifetime and wrote publicly against them.

The tradition also has an older answer standing behind them: its own theology of exile, which holds that the dispersion was decreed by God and will be ended by God, in His time, and that the Jewish people are not authorized to end it by force of politics. That teaching, stated in the Talmud and carried for centuries, is the standing background of everything the authorities ruled, and it is enough here to state it without entering the legal debates around it.

A familiar engine

One more observation belongs in this article, offered with respect. Many Christian readers will recognize this doctrine, because Christianity produced its own version in the very same era. The system of end-times interpretation that reads the founding of Israel and its wars as a prophetic clock ticking toward the last days was developed in the nineteenth century and spread widely in the twentieth, and it moves millions of believers today. A Christian is free to hold that reading as a matter of Christian faith; that is not this publication's business. The observation is narrower. The two enthusiasms are siblings, born in the same century, reading the same newspapers as scripture. So when a viewer sees religious Jews treating a war as the unfolding redemption, he is not watching ancient Judaism. He is watching a modern doctrine, one his own culture happens to have a twin of, and the tradition that predates them both declines the reading in either language.

The series' question was how observant Jews came to place a secular state inside their religion. Here is the answer in one sentence: a doctrine taught them that the state was the beginning of the world's redemption, and once that was accepted, everything else followed. What it produces on the ground, in the settlements, in the army, and on the Temple Mount, is the subject of the next article.