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What Is a Jewish State?

By Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz

What is a Jewish state? That was the question that was first posed to Theodore Herzl over 120 years ago. When Herzl coined the famous manifesto called “The Jewish State” in turn-of-the-century Europe, it was right after the aftermath of the Dryfuss trial and the slander of a good man’s name and loss of his freedom out of blatant Anti-Semitism.
Herzl concluded that the Jewish people and Europe do not mix well and it will end in a disaster never before seen in our modern history. That, of course, was revealed in the ovens of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen almost 50 years later. The once-great community of European Jewry was gone in a short span of six years and thus the need for a Jewish state was recognized by the world after this tragedy.
Now Israel, founded in 1948, is approaching nearly 70 years of success and again we Jews in the world ask ourselves the question, ‘What is a Jewish State?’ The conclusion of Herzl’s book gives a great outline of what our Jewish state should look like, “The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes. The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.”
This was a powerful dream that we Jews realized through sweat and toil and, sadly, too much bloodshed. We accomplished this reality and built our state but we also must now ask ourselves what it means to have a country with a great army and what it means to those who live as minorities in that country, the Arab Muslim minority in Israel.
The truth is that as we Jews reclaimed our land, many indigenous Arabs fled from the 1948 war and lost their homes and their history in one great tragedy. Some fled in the hopes of reclaiming more when the Jews were tossed into the sea, some fled out of fear of a war and, yes, like in the case of the city of Lod, some were removed.
Yet, after almost 70 years, the true dream of Herzl was never realized: to be a free, safe people celebrated in our homeland and living just lives.
I bring up this question because this is something we Jews are asking ourselves again as a bill in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) was about to come up for a vote declaring Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.
This is not a new concept, it was written in the Declaration of Independence in 1948, stating that the new state of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish nation while guaranteeing full equality of rights to all regardless of race, religion, or gender. That is pretty open-minded for the Middle East, but is it necessary when 20 percent of the country is not Jewish?
I am not an Israeli, I am an American, but I am a Jew and a rabbi and my essential belief is that Israel is more than just a nation state for the Jewish nation, but it must be a just state living the values of Torah and democracy, open to all who live there regardless of religion.
I don’t think this law is right for Israel and even though I am not a citizen of Israel, I am a Jew who needs my Jewish nation to be just and respectful of its ethnic minority.
Somehow, some way, we must find a way to live together in our differences both of faith and narrative of our respective histories. During the last trip I made to Israel in the summer of 2014, I saw many wonderful aspects of Israel but I also saw something that was scary to me as a Jew and a rabbi.
After the death of the three kidnapped Israeli boys, I saw crowds protesting and chanting “Death to the Arabs” and then shortly after that a young man, Mohammad Abu Khdair, was killed in a revenge killing.
That act belittled everything about those boys’ faith that they were striving to learn and respect. Israel needs to make peace with itself and find a way to live as a Jewish country while respecting a very difficult minority in its presence. I am not saying it will be easy but our values in Torah demand that.
When, I first moved to Israel in 1993, I was volunteering in a settlement outside of Jerusalem in Judea (the West Bank), planting olive trees beautifying and expanding the settlement with trees. An old Arab man came to the gates of the settlement with an old Turkish map laying claim to the area we were expanding.
Our group was shouting at the old man, angry that he was belittling our efforts to grow our settlement and build something positive on an area that had been empty for hundreds of years. Still, he claimed it was his and his family’s. We yelled and he yelled back and so it went until one of our group took out his gun, put it to his head and told him to leave and then another in the group poured water on his face to humiliate him.
Nothing was accomplished in this exchange except for us to show who had the real power. I often think of myself at that moment, doing nothing and cheering with the rest of my friends. The next morning I looked in the mirror and asked myself, “What good did I do and how did I make this world a better place? How did this act of power and humiliation help bring redemption to this world as the Jewish homeland was attempting to accomplish? And how did humiliating an old man make the world a better place?”
I was not proud of the values I witnessed that day and I still feel shame that I did not speak up and stop it.
Israel is meant to be a state that demonstrates to the world the values of justice and righteousness, but it does not always act justly. I recognize that it is hard and that anger many times is understandable, but we Jews are commanded by God to act justly even when we find it difficult.
The Jewish homeland must be able to welcome all in our midst, the stranger and the orphan. We also must find a place in our hearts to limit our power over others. That is the struggle I see as the region is engulfed in hatred and fear.
I ask my people to step back from the abyss, look in the mirror, and ask what that dream of Herzl’s meant so many years ago and can we live up to it? We must try and if we will it; it need not be a dream.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood. He welcomes comments at dvjewish@rof.net.

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