American, world Jews face contradictions of contemporary Israel

Jewish history is a temperamental affair. Jews like to look back on the mythical Exodus from Egypt as a glorious and foundational moment. But in truth God decided that the millions of Hebrews who fled weren’t worth his time, and he made them wander in the desert until they, with a couple of exceptions, died.

Sounds pretty brutal.

Then came the conquest of Jericho and Canaan and the establishment of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. But at the end of the Second Book of Kings, Judeans, fleeing the Babylonians, flee back to Jericho where the Judean king is captured and the Hebrew refugees seek safety in Egypt. Hundreds of years and back from where they started.

The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been destroyed because the people continually misbehaved. Another century and the Judean First Temple is destroyed because the Hebrews continue misbehaving. Hope is always off in the distant future for a mythical saving remnant. Later the Judeans build a Second Temple which will also be destroyed. Take your pick: either the people had continued to misbehave or their own awful internal politics did in that Temple.

What followed for the next two millennia was either total misery or various good and bad times in multitudinous places. Rabbis and Zionists often go for the former, ignoring the successes in the Moslem Middle East, Spain, Poland, Western Europe and the United States. I firmly think, as with most cultures, there are good and bad times. Yes, the bad times were truly awful.

That brings us to a nostalgia for something called the Maccabean period, a short time of so-called Jewish independence and national freedom. This period became an ideal for modern Zionism. The Maccabees and their dynasty were really nothing to admire, just another fractious Hellenistic group, doing terrible things to their Jewish opponents.

Now American Jews and world Jews are faced with the contradictions of contemporary Israel. In the simplified version one can always justify the policies of the Israeli state. But in the historical world that contradiction continues to lurk.

As Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League, has said, if the current Israeli government does what many predict it will, acting in an enormously illiberal way, a large percentage of American Jews will just turn away in embarrassment and indifference, “If Israel is no longer a liberal democratic Jewish state.” A recent survey shows half of Jewish Israelis fear the loss of a democratic state.

Whereas the theology always had the Jews remaining passive with the belief that in the future a messiah will come and the world will be brighter, the reality can be much grimmer. It is not a time to be passive. Jews need to recognize the actual history and not allow American Jewish institutions nor those “machers” (VIPs) who claim to speak for American Jews to remain quiescent.

Steinberg