BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,987, April 6, 2021
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Passover was always a holiday of redemption, but in Israeli political discourse, the word “redemption” has been notable by its absence for decades. Around the Seder table, it must be said anew: without a real connection to the age-old striving for the redemption of Israel, the State of Israel will not be able to exist.
Generations of Jews prayed and hoped daily for the redemption of Israel. Israel’s Declaration of Independence ended with a call to the Jewish people “to rally around the Jews of Eretz Israel in the tasks of immigration and building and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream—the redemption of Israel.”
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first PM, never ceased speaking in the language of redemption. During WWI, while he was in exile in New York City, he wrote: “From the abyss of darkness that has encompassed our people in this hour of emergency, a beam of light is breaking through. The hope of redemption is forging a path in the heart of the nation…and out of the storm we hear the voice of the shofar of the Messiah.”
In the same vein he declared: “The ultimate goal of Zionism is none other than the full and complete redemption of the people of Israel in its land, the ingathering of the exiles, national independence” (February 1937). Even the establishment of the state, in his eyes, was no more than a means toward the timeless objective of the redemption of Israel and the ingathering of the exiles (October 1937).
What is “redemption”?
In the modern era, Jews have sought solutions to their troubles via different paths. With the emancipation in Central Europe, they were infused with hope by their new status as citizens with equal rights in their countries of residence. In Eastern Europe, not a few Jews were galvanized by the news of the Communist Revolution. By emigrating to America, Jews sought an answer to their problems in the freedom and prosperity of the New World. But none of these paths offered the Jews anything more than personal succor. Only the Zionist idea held out the promise of national redemption.
From exile to an ingathering of the exiles
Amid the historic upheavals of the twentieth century, the intimations of redemption faded in enlightened Europe and the great expectations of the communist redemption collapsed. There remained two competing claims on Jewish existence in Eastern Europe: the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel with its message of national redemption, and, across the ocean, the American Jewish path of private and communal salvation.
At the Seder table, when we compare our redemption in the State of Israel to the redemption of the Israelites in Egypt, it is worth attending to the great disparity between the different solutions that have been proposed for the travails of Jewish existence. We need to consider the difference between what Jews can seek in today’s US or Canada and all that is available to Jews only in Israel.
Of all the paths, only the Zionist endeavor bears the resonance of Moses’s call to redemption. Only it has the power to bring about a national redemption. The American path, despite the relief it offered to the distress of Jewish existence, does not provide an answer to the national needs of the people.
In its basic logic, the American path resembles the solution for the Jewish problem that Pharaoh proposed to Moses: a kind of recognition of the Israelites’ religious needs as a minority group, an improvement in work conditions, an upgrade of the quality of life in the Egyptian domain somewhere between Rameses and the Land of Goshen. Therein lay the revolutionary aspect of the redemption from Egypt that was unique in human history: Moses’s insistence on extracting the Israelites from their domicile across the desert and forming a nation of them to which was bequeathed a Torah and a way of life, and bringing that nation to its Promised Land.
The canonical “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King indicates how unique the Egypt redemption was in comparison to other dreams of redemption. As King described it: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
But Moses aimed for something else entirely. Not a change in the way of life in Egypt, but the removal of the Israelites from everything Egypt represented. And indeed, some Israelites expressed doubts about Moses’s powerful vision of redemption. It could be argued, after all, that it was entirely logical to settle for no more than an improvement of the Israelites’ basic rights in Egypt. It was here that the difference emerged between the path of Moses and that of those who persisted in their defiance: “Let us make a captain, and let us return to Egypt.” Herein also lies the singularity of the Zionist idea of redemption compared to all the other notions—in its call to leave exile and seek an ingathering of the exiles in the ancestral land alongside national independence. In this regard, the redemption from Egypt was an act of creation that went beyond nature, and the same is true of the redemption of Israel in the renewed state of Israel.
Independence as the basis of a state
In light of the aspiration to redemption, it is clear why Ben-Gurion insisted on linking the notion of “national independence” to the vision of the redemption of Israel. A state that enshrines independence cannot settle for “a country that’s fun to live in.” In the face of threats of extortion, a rich country can pay protection money and perhaps succeed in living well—but without dignity.
In the mentality of independence, as embodying self-reliance and national dignity, lies the meaning of the war against Amalek. The Amalekites were desert bandits who, after the parting of the Red Sea, attacked the Israelites’ encampment so as to extort ransom payments and protection money. The Israelites, who had grown rich from the spoils of Pharaoh’s army, had enough gold to pay off the Amalekites and avoid war. But Moses, who aimed for independence, ordered Joshua: “Choose men and go out, fight with Amalek.” Jewish existence in exile requires the ability to exist both physically and spiritually. Sovereign existence requires a mindset of independence that is prepared to fight.
This idea was well formulated by Gen. (res.) Benny Peled in his declaration for the year 2000: “I hope that in the coming year we will erase from the dictionary and from our minds what ‘Zionism seeks’ as defined at the First [Zionist] Congress in Basel in 1897: ‘a publicly recognized, legally secured homeland in the Land of Israel.’ I want this definition of the domain of Jewish residence, within recognized and secure boundaries provided by those who grant protection and money, to be erased, and replaced by a definition that accords with Theodor Herzl’s notion of the state of the Jews, namely, ‘to establish a state of Jews in the Land of Israel by those Jews among the Jewish people who are fed up with life in exile and sub-tenancy, and are prepared to give their lives for it.’”
That is the test the State of Israel is now facing in view of the spreading anarchy in the Negev and the Galilee. It is easier to give in to temptation and pay protection money to a violent ethnic/religious minority than to engage in constant confrontation and struggle. This touches a sensitive nerve in Jewish national identity: the difficulty of the continuing effort to achieve sovereignty. From the standpoint of the Jews in exile, particularly liberal American Jewry, criticism must be leveled at the “moral price” Jews are forced to pay in their fight for sovereignty. That sums up the difference between aspiring to no more than a life in exile in conditions of comfort and prosperity and aspiring to national independence in the ancestral homeland.
Around the Seder table, it must be said anew: without a real connection to the age-old striving for the redemption of Israel, the State of Israel will not be able to exist.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Israel Hayom on March 26, 2021.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for 42 years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.