Israel is not Made in Germany (Derashah Naso 5769)

These words from this past Thursday are now famous:

[T]he aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

I appreciate President Obama’s earlier re-statement of the ‘unbreakable’ bond between the US and Israel, but I must protest this re-writing of the birth of the modern state of Israel.

Israel was not built in Roman brutality. Israel was not manufactured by Muslim massacres at Khaibar and along the Mediterranean. Israel was not created by Christian Crusades or European expulsions or the Catholic Inquisition or the pogroms of the Cossacks, and Israel certainly was not made in Germany.

Israel was made in Israel, thousands of years ago. We have more than our own Torah as evidence; we have the testimony of pottery shards and the Mesha stele and the historical memory of numerous races.

Israel is not a product of our enemies’ venomous anti-Semitism, but a product of our proud Torah and our proud ancestry.


Of course, President Obama’s speechwriters were not the first to view Israel, primarily, as a haven from our enemies.

Moses Hess wrote in 1862, [T]he Jews in exile, at least the majority of them, cannot devote themselves successfully to productive labor: in the first place, because they lack the most necessary condition - an ancestral soil; and, secondly, because they cannot assimilate with the peoples among whom they live without being untrue to their national religion and tradition. The irony, of course, is that Hess fulfilled his own dire prediction by marrying a Catholic woman.

Leo Pinsker wrote, twenty years later, We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers, a piece of land which shall remain our property, from which no foreign master can expel us. This was the idea behind the Uganda movement, which sought to acquire territory in East Africa for a Jewish land at a time when a return to Israel seemed unlikely.

Certainly, this approach of “Israel as Safe Haven” has an internal logic as well as a legitimate pedigree in modern Jewish and world history – but serious weaknesses undermine its meaning and application today.


First, what are we to make of a Jewish nation which so values its own survival that it will ride roughshod over the survival of other human beings in order to achieve it? If we desire Israel for the sake of our own security, do we not have a responsibility to help Palestinian Arabs find their security? Indeed, that was part of the president’s point of moral equivalence.

Second, in an age when millions of Jews feel comfortable and secure living outside of Israel, do we have the right to demand a homeland for our safety? Even if the world is not entirely safe for the Jew, we don’t see the Jews of North America or Australia expressing concern for their future!

And third, and most crucial for me today: Israel in the Torah was never meant to be a function of our enemies’ hatred; rather, Israel is supposed to be a positive expression of Judaism. It is the place where, as recorded in the Torah, our ancestors walked. It is the place where, according to the gemara, we can achieve purification from our sins. It is the place where, as Ramban noted, our mitzvot are real. It is the place where, as Rav Kook wrote, the Jewish heart can connect to Gd.


Indeed, in our own parshah, this is what the Nazir fails to understand regarding the Torah itself.

The nazir vows to abstain - for a period of time or indefinitely – from drinking intoxicating beverages, from contact with impurity, and from cutting his hair. These abstentions guarantee one thing: The Nazir will withdraw from society. He will drink with no one, he will mix with no one lest they contaminate him, he will grow his hair until it is long and tangled and dirty; he will become a hermit.

The gemara paints nezirut as a safety option taken by a Jew who feels that he is out of control, threatened by his own desires, but the gemara goes on to argue that this is not the purpose of Judaism and its Torah. The Torah labels nezirut a חטא, a sin; the Torah and its mitzvot are not about escaping this world for a spiritual place of our own, they are about developing and growing into model human beings.

And the same is true for Israel. Our homeland is not a mousehole to which the Jew can run and hide from the big bad Nazi. Israel is a place for the Jew to be a Jew.


But there’s a catch. If we really disagree with the President and believe what I just said, if we really believe that Israel is not only about safety but rather about creating a place where a Jew can live and develop as a Jew, if we buy the arguments of Tanach and the gemara and the Kuzari and so on, then we should all be rushing to live there, now.

Were Israel only a mousehole for protection, we could stay out of the mousehole until the cat came along. But if Israel is truly a religious imperative, then why aren’t we there, now? I don’t speak of those who have medical or financial or family reasons and the like for remaining in galut, but for the rest of us, is there any question as to where we belong?

The president’s speech should not be a simple opportunity for politicking; rather, it should be a challenge to us, all of us, a chance for us to think. If we don’t accept his narrative, if we do not view Israel as the nazir views Judaism, as an escape hatch, then let us ask ourselves what narrative we do accept, and put it into practice.

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Notes:
1. Before you ask, "What about you, Torczyner?" know that I am in one of the categories mentioned above.

2. You can find the president's remarks here. Pinsker (Auto-Emancipation) and Hess (Rome and Jerusalem) are excerpted in Herzberg's excellent The Zionist Idea.

3. Re: Nazir - I presented the midrashic rationale for nazir, but I wonder about another type of nazir, someone who chooses nezirut as a way to fuel passion and direct intensity, as might arguably be observed in Shimshon, Shemuel and Avshalom.

The Mantle of My Ancestor: Jacques Torczyner

The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California has an article in its March 27 08 issue, on six Jews who “put their lives on the line” for the formation of the State of Israel. I am proud to note that my father’s first-cousin, Jacques Torczyner, is featured in the article:

Jacques Torczyner
Names, places and dates. It was Johnny Cash who sang “I’ve Been Everywhere,” but Jacques Torczyner really has — and he’s got the names, places and dates to prove it.

With startling alacrity, the 95-year-old Rossmoor resident rattles off the play-by-play from Zionist meetings on several continents or recalls long, windswept walks along the Seine with future Israeli heads of state.

It has been an improbable life for a man who would have been content simply carrying on his father’s Antwerp diamond business. But the Nazis had other plans.

The entire Torczyner clan fled Belgium, traveling on the lam from Paris to the Pyrenees, where they walked over the border to Spain. From there, the family took a boat to Cuba. And on Dec. 17, 1940 — Torczyner remembers the dates for everything — they landed in Miami.

“And we made such a big mistake!” he says. “We had cousins who asked us to buy land on Collins Avenue, but we went to New York. Oh, if we’d done that, we’d have made a lot of money!”

In New York, Torczyner soon maneuvered himself to the top of the political department of the World Zionist Organization. Before long he was the right-hand man of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the fiery and outspoken Zionist orator.

Silver told Torczyner to join the Republican Party — “there were no Jews there.” And that suited Torczyner fine. Along the walls of his flat are photographs of him in various stages of life with every major Republican figure from Sen. Robert Taft to President George H.W. Bush.

Silver’s name is not as well known as the men and woman currently pictured on, say, Israeli currency. But the Cleveland rabbi and Zionist Organization of America president was a powerful influence on the people and government of the United States regarding the formation of a Jewish state. And his man in the trenches was Jacques Torczyner.

It was Torczyner who oversaw the North American delegate election for the World Zionist Congress in December 1946. On the table were two courses of action: Should Israel declare statehood, or hold off in exchange for Britain’s promise of allowing 100,000 Jewish refugees into pre-state Israel?

This election was all about rounding up the most delegates. Torczyner had delivered the plurality of delegates to the plenum, and the vote went the ZOA’s way: A declaration of Jewish statehood was recommended. The decision came at 4 a.m., and Torczyner still remembers how future Israeli President Chaim Weizmann and his “moderates” slumped off into the night after losing the day to Silver and David Ben-Gurion.

It was a major day in Torczyner’s life, and for more than the obvious reasons. “Silver had said, ‘Jacques, in your campaign for the World Zionist Congress, if you don’t succeed, I’ll chop your head off.’”

Yet the groundwork for a declaration of Israeli statehood — and the inevitable war to follow — was long in the making.

On July 1, 1945, Torczyner, Ben-Gurion and 16 others filed into the East 57th Street apartment of Rudolph Sonneborn in Manhattan.

For nearly seven hours, Ben-Gurion spoke. At the end of the day, the Haganah had been founded. Sonneborn would soon be running weaponry to Israel.

“Ben-Gurion said something that nobody in America would like to hear. He said we cannot create a state without a war,” recalls Torczyner.

“And he explained how we must be able to defend ourselves — because don’t forget, America had made an embargo on weapons to the Mideast.”

Torczyner recalls walking the streets of New York with future Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, whose pockets were bulging with cash for purchase of guns on the down-low.

When asked where Kollek made his purchases, Torczyner gives a wicked grin.

“I don’t know, he didn’t take me there. This was illegal, don’t you forget.”

On Nov. 29, 1947, Torczyner sat in the stands at a former skating rink in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., that had been converted into a United Nations building. By a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions, the U.N. voted Israel into existence. It wasn’t a particularly nerve-wracking day for Torczyner. He knew the votes were there.

“Let me tell you, I know we had the votes and I’ll tell you why. On Thursday, it was Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, we didn’t have the votes. So we forced the U.N. to observe Thanksgiving and because of the weekend, they postponed [the vote] until Saturday,” he recalls.

Spotted a few days, Torczyner and his ZOA allies began working individual delegates. When asked what methods of persuasion they employed, he grins again.

“I won’t tell you. I don’t want to corrupt you. But the only way for some of them — you know how.”

He rests on his couch, surrounded by books and maps and photos of Silver, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. His more youthful self stares out from many of the photos as well.

“I think I can tell you that this was a historic moment in Jewish history. So I was part of Jewish history,” he says with a nod.

“And now, 60 years later, I am worried about the future.”

I have always believed in the words I have heard credited to Seneca, that a person who prides himself on the deeds of his ancestors prides himself on a mantle not his own. I didn’t do those things, I didn't help create a State that has saved millions of lives and generated so much Torah over the past 60 years - my father’s cousin did it. It’s not even as though I know him well; we may have met a few times, but not at all in the past 20 years.

So while I am happy that someone did this, why am I particularly proud that it was my relative? What does this distant blood relationship have to do with anything?

No long answers here.
I suppose that in some measure it’s pride in borrowed celebrity, the feeling that his accomplishments and fame automatically rub off on me.
And, of course, there's an element of זכות אבות, zchut avot, the merit of our ancestors; I get some kind of spiritual protection by riding his draft, as part of his clan.
But, perhaps it's also something more positive, more selfless. Perhaps it’s also the thought that if my cousin did this, then there’s a potential hero in me as well.