What the Prayer Actually Says

Every year, at the end of the Passover Seder, Jewish families around the world say four words together: next year in Jerusalem. The same words close the Yom Kippur service. They are among the most recognizable lines in Judaism, and they are often produced as proof of a particular argument.

The argument runs like this. Jews have prayed for Zion and Jerusalem for thousands of years. Zionism is therefore integral to Jewish thinking, woven into the religion at its root, and anyone who separates the two is inventing a distinction that Judaism itself does not recognize.

It is a reasonable-sounding argument, and many sincere people make it. It also rests entirely on a couple of shared syllables.

Two things named Zion

Zion is an ancient name for Jerusalem, appearing throughout Scripture and threaded through the Jewish prayer book. Zionism is a political movement founded in Europe in 1897 by men who, by their own written testimony, did not believe in the God of the Torah and intended a national identity that would replace the religion.

Sharing a root does not make two things the same thing, and the way to tell is simply to read what the prayers request. The text is not obscure. Any Jewish prayer book has it, in translation, on the page.

What the prayers ask for

The daily prayer for the ingathering of the exiles asks God to sound a great horn for the Jewish people's freedom, to raise a banner to gather the dispersed, and to gather them from the four corners of the earth. The one who acts in that sentence is God, three times over.

The next requests continue in the same direction. Restore our judges as at first, and our counselors as at the beginning. Return in mercy to Jerusalem and dwell within it, and rebuild it soon, in our days, as an everlasting structure. Cause the offspring of David to flourish. Restore the service to the Holy of Holies.

Read that list and ask what is actually being requested. A restored Davidic king. A rebuilt Temple with its service resumed. Courts of justice restored as in the days of the prophets. The Divine Presence returning to dwell in Jerusalem. The scattered people gathered by God's own hand.

This is a prayer for the Messianic redemption, in which every single item is God's act. There is no request in it for a parliament, an army, a flag, a passport office, or sovereignty. Not because Jews of earlier centuries lacked political imagination, but because that is not what they were asking for. They were asking for the world to be repaired and for God's presence to return to the place He had withdrawn it from.

And notice one detail that settles the matter by itself. Jews say next year in Jerusalem while sitting in Jerusalem. Families in the Old City say it at the Seder table every year. If the line were a request for relocation, or for a state, it would be meaningless in the mouths of the people who say it most. It is not a travel plan. It is a plea for a redemption that has not yet come, said by Jews wherever they happen to be standing.

Eighteen centuries of evidence

Here is the fact that should end the argument, and it is a matter of plain history.

Jews said these prayers three times a day, every day, for eighteen hundred years. The same words, in the same order, in Babylonia and Spain and the Rhineland and Poland and Yemen and Morocco. Communities that agreed on little else all said them. Generations of scholars who wrote millions of words explaining every phrase of the liturgy said them.

In all of that time, not one of those communities organized a political movement to establish a Jewish state.

Consider how strange that would be if the prayers meant what the argument claims. If "next year in Jerusalem" were a national program, somebody would have noticed in eighteen centuries. Instead, Jews who longed for Zion with an intensity that saturates their entire liturgy consistently did something else with the longing: they moved to the Holy Land to pray and study and be buried there, they supported the communities already there, and they waited for God, because the same tradition that taught them to yearn also taught them who ends the exile and how.

The political reading of those prayers appeared in the nineteenth century, in Europe, at the same moment as every other European nationalism, and not one moment before. It is not an ancient Jewish idea. It is a modern idea in ancient vocabulary.

The name was chosen for a reason

There is a further point, and it is uncomfortable but well documented.

The founders of the political movement understood exactly how much emotional power the word Zion carried among Jews. Many of those Jews would never have joined a secular nationalist program presented plainly as what it was, and the movement's early leaders wrote frankly about the problem of making their project appealing to religious populations. The name did work that arguments could not.

Two facts show how loosely the movement was actually attached to the object of those prayers. In 1903, only six years after its founding congress, the Zionist Organization seriously debated a British proposal to establish the Jewish territory in East Africa, and voted to send a commission to investigate it. Whatever else may be said about that episode, a movement willing to consider Uganda was not the fulfillment of a two-thousand-year longing for Jerusalem. You cannot substitute a different continent for the object of a prayer.

And the man who coined the word Zionism, Nathan Birnbaum, eventually became religiously observant, left the movement, and spent his later years working with its Orthodox opponents. He had named the thing, and when he understood Judaism better, he walked away from it.

The other half of the confusion

One part of this dispute deserves a fair hearing, because people who make the argument above are often responding to something real.

The word Zionist is genuinely misused as a substitute for the word Jew. It happens on placards, in slogans, and in the mouths of people who have simply found a more acceptable term for an old hatred. When "Zionist" lands on a synagogue that governs nothing, on a kosher grocer who commands no army, or on a schoolchild in uniform, it is not political language anymore, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Jews who are alarmed by this are not imagining it.

But notice what the remedy cannot be. If the answer to antisemites collapsing Jew into Zionist is for Jews to collapse Zionist into Jew, then everyone has agreed on the same equation and only the intentions differ. One side does it with malice and the other with affection, and the outcome is identical: a Jewish family in London or New York becomes answerable for the decisions of a foreign government, and every criticism of that government lands on them.

The remedy is precision, held in both directions at once. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, because Jews faithful to the Torah have opposed Zionism since before the state existed. And "Zionist" aimed at Jews as Jews is antisemitism wearing a political costume, and should be named as such every time. Both statements are true, and holding both is the only position that actually protects anyone.

What is actually being asked for

So return to the Seder table, where the four words are said each year.

The family saying them is asking for the Messiah, the Temple, the return of God's presence, and the repair of the world. That request was made in the same words when there was no state, and it is made in the same words today, including by Jews who live under that state's government and consider themselves fully in exile regardless. Nothing in 1948 answered it, which is why the prayer has not changed a syllable since.