By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM — Though official spokespersons for Zionist organizations have largely given up on shlilat hagolah, the rejection of the Diaspora, some Israelis still take every opportunity to make declarations that seek to invalidate Jewish life outsideIsrael. Two such pronouncements that got media attention have been made in the last few days.
The first came from one ofIsrael’s great novelists, A.B. Yehoshua. He has for decades argued that Jewish life in the Diaspora is neurotic and untenable. Jews who naively believe that they can stay Jewish there drive, as it were, on the wrong side of the road and vainly complain that, when they’re run over by oncoming traffic, it’s anti-Semitism. All Jews who want to be Jews, according to Yehoshua, should come toIsrael where everybody drives on the same side of the road, albeit dangerously at times.
More than 30 years ago I had an opportunity to debate the issue with him when I tried to make a case for neurosis as an authentic manifestation of Jewish existence. Speaking as a card-carrying Zionist, I suggested that the Diaspora was no less indigenous to Jewish life and no less part of the Jewish experience thanIsrael.
Not unexpectedly, I didn’t get very far. Only the other day in a lecture in Jerusalem Yehoshua insisted that Jews in the Diaspora are only semi-Jewish. American Jews, for example, are “partial Jews while I am a complete Jew,” he said. He considered living outsideIsrael “a very deep failure of the Jewish people.”
The other recent example of questioning life in the Diaspora came in the wake of the tragic shooting inToulouse that killed a rabbi, two of his children and the child of the principal of the school where the murders took place.
Ya’akov Katz, also known as Katzele, who is a Member of Knesset and the leader of one of the more extreme right-wing parties, took the seemingly cynical opportunity to declare that Jews in France – and seemingly everywhere else in the world – must now come to live in Israel in order to save their skins.
The fact that, over the years, many more Jews have died as a result of terrorist attacks inIsrael than abroad has apparently escaped him.
The fact that the President of France and the two contenders for his office in the forthcoming presidential elections there have said that the attack is a French national, not just a Jewish, tragedy doesn’t seem to matter to him.
The fact that, by all accounts, the gunman is a racist psychopath of the same ilk as the one who went on a rampage inNorway last summer has been ignored by our Katzele.
The sad truth is that Jewish existence has always been precarious. Even the establishment of the State of Israel, though essential for the survival of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, doesn’t guarantee our future.Israel’s understandable nervousness aboutIran’s nuclear ambitions, despite the rhetoric and bravado of some of its politicians and generals, is a telling reflection of the fears for the existence of the Jewish state.
Responsible Israeli leaders know it. That’s why they affirm the Diaspora not just by trying to raise funds there but also by accepting all Jews wherever they live as legitimate partners in the challenge of staying Jewish. As thinkers have argued in the past, Judaism is an ellipse with two foci. It behooves us to acknowledge that there’re only whole Jews, neither partial a la misguided nationalism nor half a la poisonous racism.
*
Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Now dividing his time between Canada and Israel, he may be contacted at dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com