“I do not worship the sacred cow of ‘national unity’. I know nothing of value that was achieved by unity.” – Yeshayahu Leibowitz
For JD and IK
Today we as Jews stand at a precipice, or is it a crossroads, I am not sure which image best applies? A crossroads suggests two divergent paths, each one leading to a different, often unknown, place. A precipice is a place where one retreats and re-accesses, or one falls into an abyss. I will let both images sit, and each reader can decide for themselves.
Throughout the past three years many of us on both sides of the political spectrum have determined that October 7 and Gaza (October 7 and Gaza – in my view, both must be seen in tandem) is an inflection point – not only for Israel as a state, but for Jews and Judaism as a people and a religion. The arguments are more broadly about which path to take (if it is a crossroad) and whether to jump, or fall, into the abyss (if it is a precipice).
One of the issues that is very much at the center of today’s discussions/debates is “Zionism.” What is it? What is it not? What has it accomplished? What has it become? What is its relationship to the state? To Judaism? Of course, any discission about Zionism begs a discussion about anti-Zionism which was largely a Jewish response to Zionism when it emerged in the late 19th century. The zero-sum game approach of many in these discussions re-labels anti-Zionism as “antizionism” that is, removing the upper case “Z” to imply that “Zionism” is really a stand-in for the Jew. This sleight of hand which has gained some traction today is, in my view, a deep misunderstanding, not only of anti-Zionism, but of Zionism itself.
The question of what Zionism is, what it tried to accomplish, what it succeeded in accomplishing, and what it has become today is for me perhaps the most crucial debate in the Jewish world today. Much of the debate unfortunately refrains from seriously engaging these questions, flattening both Zionism and anti-Zionism into pre-packaged and convenient catchphrases used to defend one’s stance or identity and de-legitimizing the other. This makes each side feel justified but produces no new traction toward understanding.
As a scholar of these issues, I see my contribution as offering some context, historical or philosophical, to this moment, not to do anything in particular (here I follow Hannah Arendt) but to try to understand where we are to better negotiate the choices before us, and the decisions we will make.
There are times when re-examining thoughtful responses to a proximate moment, different yet not categorically so, from ours, may help in the on-going process of clarification. Below I engage with two such attempts, one from 1959 and one from 1966-69. The first in an essay by Adin Steinsaltz (1937-2020) entitled “Like all the Nations?” published in Hebrew in the Israeli journal Reshafim 37-38 (1959). The second essay is an interview done by Ehud Ben Ezer with Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) entitled “Jewish Identity and Israeli Silence” part of which appeared in Moznayim in February 1966 and part of which was done around 1968. This is important as part of it speaks to Israel before the Six Day war and part of it speaks to Israel after the Six Day war.
Both Steinsaltz and Leibowitz were Israelis. Both considered themselves Zionists, meaning that both believed that Zionism accomplished something very important for Jews. Yet both were acutely aware of the dangers, challenges, and failures of Zionism and its prospects for the future.
Adin Steinsaltz – “Like all the Nations?” (all translation are my own, all quotes are in italics)
In 1959 Israel had been a state for only a decade. While most of its citizens were still immigrants, many were survivors from the Nazi genocide, there was a rising generation of young Israeli born Jews who began investigating this new state project they felt comfortable criticizing precisely because they were integral to it. Adin Steinsaltz was one of these young Jews. Steinsaltz was raised in a secular Zionism home. His father Avraham was a great-grandson of the first grand rabbi of the Slonim Hasidic dynasty but became secular and was both a communist and a member of the Jewish terrorist group Lehi, a militant offshoot of the Irgun. Steinsaltz became a baal teshuva (a newly religious Jew) in his teens and thus when he wrote this essay, “Like all the Nations?” he was already a newly religious Jew.
Steinsaltz is not known for his political writings, devoting much of his career to teaching Torah, writing on various topics, and translating the Babylonian Talmud into modern Hebrew with his commentary. He maintained a strong connection to Chabad most of his life. Thus, his essay examined below, was written when he was 22 years old, a few years after embarking on his new religious life.
Adin Steinsaltz’s “Like all the Nations?” is a strongly worded immanent critique of Zionism from someone who was deeply invested in the state of Israel. In the middle of the essay he wrote,
The establishment of the state was the true apex of Zionism, a movement that succeeded in manifesting its goals and many of the issues and challenges it confronted it succeeded in resolving. But at the end of the day Zionism is solely a political movement – good or bad – and said nothing to the individual.
The problem Steinsaltz had with Zionism was two-fold. First, it attempted to normalize the Jews and in doing so undermined, even subverted, Judaism; and second, it falsely presented itself as a solution to problems it could not solve, for example, the existential plight of the individual Jew. Here one can sense his newly religious sentiment, and the way he felt Judaism and Zionism were diametrically opposed, not categorically opposed as in the anti-Zionist case of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar but opposed in ways that he thought could be reconciled, if Zionism could be seen for what it is in its limited scope. For both reasons, Steinsaltz will call Zionism a form of “idolatry” (elilut) that I will attempt to explain below. Not idolatry in itself, but rather idolatrous in the way it is adapted by many Jews.
Material normalization was certainly a byproduct of Zionism and Steinsaltz supported that. His problem lies elsewhere,
Beyond the desire for material normalization lay a deeper desire for the normalization of the Jews as a people. That [normalization] no longer included the yoke of Israel’s destiny that is in the mitzvot, and Judaism more generally The desire for normalization of the life of the people was hidden beneath all this – to liberate the special nature of the Jew more generally. The material normalization was really an opening to make the Jews a people like all other people.
More than a religious critique of Zionism, Steinsaltz is pointing to what he thinks is a subliminal utilization of Zionism as the desire of Jews to use Zionism to free them from the burden of Torah. Thus, Zionism and assimilationism worked in tandem as two forms of a modern apparatus to liberate the Jew, in the case of Zionism, by offering material normalization through sovereignty and in the case of assimilation, by folding one’s Jewish identity into the material life of others. The indictment here is not of Zionism itself but of Zionism as a vehicle. He continues,
Zionism is fundamentally a secular movement that placed Jewish nationalism on a secular foundation, a nationalism just like other nations. Even for religious Jews who are connected to Zionism it is a secular connection; there was really no religious connection to Zionism as a movement. It is not simply that Zionism is a secular movement, it is more than that. In its essence it is anti-Judaism. This of course is not to say that the desire for Zion is anti-Jewish – the opposite is the case. Rather, Zionism is anti-Judaism because it is founded on the normalization of Jewish existence, as desire for normalization that it not only physical but spiritual (ruhani) and religious (dati) as well.
Of course, Steinsaltz admits, this Zionist project won, and in doing so in some way dismantled Judaism. What I think Steinsaltz means here by dismantling Judaism is the dismantling of the existential quality that Judaism as a religion provides, for him, the price of normalization. He writes, “abandoning Judaism is not distancing oneself from Jewish destiny but more fundamentally from religion,” by which he does not mean simply mitzvot, but the existential posture of the individual in this world toward a transcendent Other, leaving what he calls an “empty hole” (halah panui) in the Jewish soul.
The problem with Zionism for Steinsaltz is that instead of simply providing material normalization through a political project, which he was in favor of, “it achieves a kind of ‘religious’ dimension and serves as a substitution for the Jewish religion.” That is, Zionism becomes an act of superseding Judaism, in effect if not in intent.
Here we come to his use of the term idolatry (elilut – notably not avodah zara).
According to Judaism, idolatry is giving religious meaning to something that does not contain that meaning, even things that may be important in and of themselves…The spiritual substance (tokhen nafshi) of idolatry is the elevated state of any “ism” – Zionism, Socialism, Marxism, and all the other “isms.” None of these solve the most important problems of human existence, even as they are all important…Zionism and other ideologies that have no true relation with the internal life of the human, these ideologies are simply dry ideas that do not speak to the soul of the individual person. In what way does Zionism or Socialism speak to those needs?
Writing a decade after the founding of the state, after achieving its material goals, Steinsaltz weighs in on how – now wedded to a state project – Zionism is being misappropriated to represent something it is not, thereby subverting the very thing (Judaism) that can answer those human needs. Not unlike Aaron Shmuel Tamares, who abandoned Zionism after attending the 1900 London Zionist Congress, Steinsaltz, a native-born Israeli writing in the Land, is expressing frustration that this project of material normalization is corroding the religion he has adopted as his own.
Ironically, for Steinsaltz just at a time when Zionism achieved its goals and should have become more powerful, it is becoming weaker, in part because it has extended itself into areas where it cannot provide answers. “The crisis of Zionism (this is 1959) is not a crisis of ideology, but a crisis of emptying,” a crisis whereby the idea itself is weakened by being misappropriated.
The Zionist idea and its realization makes clear that it isn’t (and can’t be) more than its simple content, it cannot resolve the numerous problems of the Jewish people. This realization causes the idea itself to become weakened in the Jewish individual. That is, the realization that the idol is not (and was never) more than a piece of wood…the first path out of this emptiness is to recognize that the emptiness itself is an illusion, and to seek out that which can, in fact, answer those questions. And the second way is to accept the abnormality of the people, and become a ‘nation of priests’ (mamlekhet kohanim) and a ‘holy nation’ (goy kadosh)…
For Steinsaltz, as I read him, the way to move beyond all this is to de-idolize the Zionist idea, and allow it to be what it is, and nothing more. Idolatry begins not with the thing itself but by its misappropriation. A piece of wood is not an idol until it is misappropriated to be something it is not. In fact, I think he is suggesting that idolatry is precisely the act of misappropriation. By limiting something to its self-described confines, one can then continue to search for other pathways that can answer the exegetical questions of the individual. This would also require stripping the Jew of the false normalization Zionism provides, or leaving the normalization to the material plane, and return to the destiny of becoming “a light to the world.”
All of this was written before the rise of Kookean Zionism, which Steinsaltz did not particularly like (he wrote one very critical essay on Rav Kook some years later). And yet the Kookean fusion of Judaism and Zionism, or the subsuming of Judaism into Zionism, would not solve the problem Steinsaltz was addressing, in fact it may exacerbate it. The exceptionalism built into the religious Zionist modality whereby the political takes on a theological resonance, is not a severance of normalization the way Steinsaltz hoped, but a negative iteration of abnormalization. To make “divine election” a political program, or to make the “negative election” of victimhood a form of exceptionalism, is simply another form of idolatry.
In this essay, Steinsaltz points to a series of ways Zionism’s positive contribution of providing material existence to Jews through sovereignty, gets derailed by being expanded beyond its narrow, but important, limits transformed into a “false god” that can address human questions it is not equipped to address. As a result, it becomes weakened, and empty and, perhaps, cannot be sustained unless it is once again reduced to its original state.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz – “Jewish Identity and Israeli Silence”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a biologist by training and a gadfly of Israeli politics, is famous for his minimalist definition of Zionism as “the choice of the Jew to no longer live under the aegis of the gentile.” That is, for him, Zionism is purely a political project with no religious, theological and certainly no concrete identarian goals. It does not solve the Jewish problem because for him, the only problem for Jews is Judaism, and the state is simply an administrative body serving national sovereignty, no more. When asked whether he was disappointed by Zionism, he responded,
I am not disappointed with Zionism because I never imagined it would provide a solution to the Jewish people’s problems. Moreover, man’s essential problems are not political ones. Any solution of social and political problems solves nothing but the problems with which it deals, rather than man’s problems from the standpoint of his essential being.
You asked me if I am concerned with the Jewish people? I am concerned only with the Jewish people. The State of Israel interests me only insofar as it serves as the State of the Jewish People, for otherwise it is not only superfluous but even harmful.
Minimizing the state as purely political and, as he says, simply an “administrative” apparatus and then widening Zionism to be about “the Jewish People” Leibowitz is actually opening up the possibility that when Zionism or the state seeks to solve what it cannot solve, if becomes vulnerable to failing in what it can solve, and endangers any solution to the problem itself. And it no longer represents the Jewish people.
And in order to bring about this revival [of Judaism] the State has done nothing; it has contributed nothing to Judaism…The State of Israel is a governmental and administrative apparatus that is void of all content.
We saw in a different way with Steinsaltz, how the “Jewish” problem and the problem of the individual are “moral” and “spiritual” and the state, any state, does not, and cannot, solve those problems. When it claims to do so, it loses its purpose and can become harmful precisely because it will fail. And even on the question of survival, the state does not ensure survival – no state ensures survival, and it may be that, as Leibowitz says, “perhaps life for a Jew in the State of Israel is more dangerous than in New York or Brooklyn,” but for Leibowitz the Jew decides to live in Israel simply to be politically sovereign as a Jew, even if it is more dangerous. The notion of Israel as a refuge for Jews, is empirically false for Leibowitz.
Because the state of Israel is a state and no more, an administrative apparatus run by a Jewish majority, it can be as bad as any other state and any attempt to claim that it can’t because it adheres to “Jewish values” or because it is a state comprised of victims of genocide for Leibowitz is a dangerous illusion. This is why he freely stated that “there are Judeo-Nazis. Judeo-Nazis exist. I am not shocked. I am making an observation.” Leibowitz can say such a thing because he doesn’t think the state represents anything more than a state – here run by Jews – but Jews are no better or worse, given certain circumstances, than any other people. To deny that, to claim for a variety of reasons that a Jewish state is different, is to undermine the narrow contours of what Zionism is, and what it can hope to achieve. In short, it becomes idolatrous.
At the very outset, for Leibowitz, Israel undermined its own intended desire, that is, to be a state of the Jewish People. For him, outside of that, Israel has no need, or reason, to exist and he even goes as far as to say it has no right to exist. What it means to be a state of the Jewish People is a separate matter he addresses later (it’s not what you might think), but one of his initial points is that Israel as a state of the Jewish People (which he claims it is not by its actions) subverts the very notion of it being a normal state.
Therefore, he makes the provocative claim that he thinks Israel should not have joined to UN but modeled itself on Switzerland and become a neutral state. The complexities that would arise is not lost on him, but he uses this to suggest that the “normalcy” argument made by Zionists undermines its very reason for its existence. As a normal state, it can only be the state of its citizens. And if it is only a state of its citizens, it has no reason to exist at all as a “Jewish” state. For Leibowitz, it can’t be both.
What becomes even more relevant for our time is not that the state claims to address the problem of Judaism, but when the state is absorbed into Judaism, when one’s identity as a Jew becomes bound to a state, we enter dangerous waters. “[The state] has no value in itself, but is just an instrument for the realization and implementation of things that have to do with value. As far as we are concerned, the value of the Jewish people and its Jewishness.” The transformation of the instrument to become the value itself brings Leibowitz to the conclusion that the state can represent idolatry. He certainly makes this case about Kookean Zionism, but closer to our time, it might include the fusion of Jewish identity with Zionism or the state.
This all emerges for Leibowitz in the “Arab question,” that becomes more relevant for him after 1967 and lies precisely at the root of the internecine cultural wars happening among the Jewish people today, more than half a century later. He is quite explicit here,
If the present situation (1968), that is, the keeping of a million and half Arabs under our control, becomes stabilized, the results will be: first – the destruction of the State of Israel, second – the destruction of the entire Jewish people as a result of the severance of the State from the Jewish people and its total concentration on the problems of retaining control, and third – the subversion of the entire democratic and social structure of our society…
There is a lot packed into these sentences. If the normalization of state control over the Palestinians becomes “stabilized” or “normalized” that is, if “managing the occupation” succeeds in a variety of forms, the state, the people, and any sense of collective coherence will collapse. This may be for a few reasons. First, the state’s resources will become depleted in its effort to control a population it cannot control. Second, parts of the Jewish people will simply abandon the project because that state no longer represents their conscience. And third, the state will become more autocratic, less democratic, and more authoritarian, both by choice, and by need.
If you add a religious component to bolster this, you add a form of heresy whereby the state becomes an idol, in effect, if not in intent. Leibowitz does not hold back.
This is a latter-day Sabbateanism, a modern incarnation of false prophets, a prostitution of the Jewish religion in the interest of nationalist cannibalism and lust for power. It is the religion of people for whom that nation has become God, the homeland, the Torah, and national sovereignty – that is administrative power – something sacrosanct.
In short, if this comes to pass (has it already come to pass in 2026?), Israel becomes a theo-fascist state. From Leibowitz’s perspective, since the state itself is only a function and not a fulfillment of anything beyond itself, seeing it as a fulfillment both undermines its function and enables it to become the worst case of itself. As he once said, “There is no reason in the world that Israel cannot also become Pharaoh.”
Of course, most pro-Israelists today would never identify with what Leibowitz says here, and in most cases, that is certainly true. But the real danger is in the subtlety of more genteel, reasoned arguments around “survival” (“what should we have done?”) or “security” (“any country would have done this!”) which really unwittingly conceals a darker reality that today we are arguably seeing surface, not in the Hilltop Youth (all countries have their bandits) but in state polices and military protocol, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.
Let us recall here that Leibowitz was a life-long Zionist. He never questioned it, he never abandoned it, he never considered living outside the Land. His critique is not in opposition to Zionism per se, but its misuse, its misappropriation, its abuse, and its misdirected goals.
In a sense, what Leibowitz is arguing and what I think we should pay attention to today is that Zionism accomplished something Jews had never truly accomplished (perhaps since short-lived Hasmonean kingdom). That is, the opportunity for real sovereignty as an expression of Jewish collective life (he never negated the Diaspora as many Zionists did). The challenge was whether Jews/Zionists would be able to understand the very limited scope of Zionism and not allow it to metastasize into an over-arching all-encompassing aspect of Jewish identity and existence. If it was presented as solving a Jewish problem that it could not solve, and if it tried to do so, it easily could slip into chauvinism and supremacy, using the Jewish people, either theologically or historically, as false justification. That is, an idol. And if Zionism or the state is simply a political program, it could fail, just as any political program could fail.
The “Arab question,” as it used to be called, was in some way the great test case, one which Israel has failed long before October 7 and the destruction of Gaza. Leibowitz and others saw this in 1967, Ben Gurion saw this in 1967, even the militant Moshe Dayan saw this in 1967. And 1967 was the first step to October 7. All the relief and triumphalism of 1967 hid the danger bubbling under the surface. And that danger has come back to haunt us. Leibowitz is quite clear on this. In 1968 he said,
The fact that we have an Arab minority in Israel that by nature has been and will be an enemy of the State – this fact is part and parcel of our State…The danger will increase if after a generation the twelve percent becomes twenty percent, and in two generations a third of the population, if not more.
The growing Palestinian population will not acquiesce to a “Jewish” state. Why should they? And if they are marginalized in that state, or controlled by that state, they will rebel, as Jabotinsky said they would in his 1925 essay “The Iron Wall” (the wall that failed to materialize on October 7). The fantasy of some rapprochement without a significant reconfiguring of the state, or the withdrawal from territory to create a Palestinian state, or some confederation, is a chimera. And if the state chooses other options such as ethnic cleansing, it will cease to be a state of the Jewish people because a sizeable segment of that people will abandon it. We are seeing this happening in real time. And then, from Leibowitz’s perspective, it has no reason to exist.
Religion is, for Leibowitz always in opposition to a state.
The essence of religion [is] to be in opposition to the State, in opposition to any State; religion is the eternal criticism of the State, of nationalism, of sovereignty, of rulers….
Martin Buber makes similar comments in his book The Kingdom of God in his reading of the Book of Samuel. In his anarchistic mode, Buber claimed the beginning of the demise of Israel was when the Israelites asked for a king, “like the other nations.” Religion is anarchic, and when it becomes fused with the state it easily becomes fascistic. When religion becomes an integral part of the state, as it is in Israel today, it ceases to be religious and simply becomes an arm of an administrative apparatus, as Leibowitz famously said, “If driving on Shabbat becomes prohibited in Israel, Sabbath observance becomes simply a traffic violation.”
The time for a serious engagement with these fundamental ideas is now. Crossroads or precipice, the future of the Jewish people hangs in the balance.
(Thanks to Carla Sulzbach and TF)
Shaul Magid is professor of Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard and rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue. His latest book is ‘The Necessity of Exile’ (Ayin Press, 2023). His forthcoming book is ‘Anti-Zionism as Political Theology: The Major Writings of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar’ (University of California Press, 2026).
This article was first published on the author’s Substack.
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