Let me begin with a teaching from a few years ago by one of my teachers, Arnold Eisen, former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Eisen is a professor of American Jewish thought, a deeply devout human being, and a profound believer in Jewish history, Jewish theology, Torah itself, and the rebirth of our people in the State of Israel.
He begins a comment on this week’s parashah in a way that feels very instructive. He writes:
“The book of Bamidbar, which aims to help readers navigate the chaotic wilderness in which the children of Israel have always lived and wandered, deals more directly than any other book of the Torah with what the great sociologist Max Weber called ‘Politics as a Vocation.’”
He then describes two different dimensions of Jewish existence, two ways of being Jewish that are always in tension. “Jews,” he reminds us, “have no choice but to be concerned with politics.” In the language of Zionism, these are matters of surviving and thriving, of normalcy. But we are also a faith community obligated by covenant. These two truths are always, always in tension.
The challenge of understanding ourselves as “normal” within history was part of the goal of Zionism. In the historical context of the birth of modern nation-states, the founders of political Zionism believed that the answer to the so called “Jewish problem” was Jewish self-determination. Jews were no longer safe as a self-regulating community, nor were we protected as citizens under the new nation-states (who had promised Jewish individual safety at the cost of communal Jewish identification).
We were not safe this way or that way. And so the pioneers of Zionism determined that only way for Jews to achieve safety was to become responsible for ourselves through political power. And of course, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and so many others have taught, the challenge of this necessary Jewish power is precisely this: once we accept the premise that Jews need power in order to survive and thrive, the next question becomes, how do we use that power?
But we must remember: the complexity of power is only bequeathed to those who survive to wield it. We could imagine ourselves in pure and pristine ways before we had power. But once we acquired power, our ideas are tested. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we succeed. And the challenge of seeing ourselves within the context of real history is to understand that this tension is precisely what we asked for.
Professor Eisen offers a wonderful illustration of this tension from 1949: a conversation between Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
Buber, famous for his volume I and Thou, offered a language of encounter, relationship, and sacred availability to the other. He also believed in the possibility of a binational state during the founding years of Israel, a vision that proved politically unfeasible, but one deeply rooted in his theology of relationship. His conclusions are worth studying even if, in the end, one disagrees with them.
In the conversation Eisen cites, Buber challenges Ben Gurion for using religious language, especially the word “redemption,” to describe secular state processes. Ben Gurion was not a religious leader. He was the first prime minister of the State of Israel. But the religious meaning of the State was, and remains, an urgent Jewish question.
Buber says: “We said redemption of the soil and meant to make it the soil of Jews.”
Jewish soil for what?
Ben Gurion answers: “To bring forth bread from the soil.”
Buber asks: “For what?”
Ben Gurion says: “So as to eat.”
And Buber asks again: “For what?”
At which point Ben Gurion says: “Enough.”
Eisen uses this exchange to describe the argument that all of us must continue to have. How normal do we allow ourselves to be? Do we understand that this experiment in Jewish self-determination would have been unfathomable during our journey through the desert? We could not possibly have imagined that we would one day have the chance to live forward as a nation again, to fail and to succeed as a nation again.
This is a beautiful challenge. And we rarely get it completely right.
Buber’s question, “for what?” is a question every one of us must ask. Our goal as a people must be to move our destiny forward and to carry our values forward. Covenant obligates us in two directions. Covenant obligates one Jew to the next, wherever we find ourselves in the world. We are obligated to our people. And covenant obligates us to our values. Both must remain true.
When those obligations come into conflict, we face a complicated dynamic. We are here as a people to live our values forward, and to stand together in defense of those values.
We are a people. That means that when we believe the State of Israel is not making good on the commitments we believe must be upheld, we should find ways to articulate that. But never at the expense of our family’s welfare. And given the moment in which the Jewish world now finds itself, this is a supreme challenge.
I have been in public dialogue (through essays) about the Jewish Theological Seminary, where I received ordination in 2002, which feels both very recent and very long ago. JTS invited the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, a beloved teacher to so many of us and a positive representative of our People, to deliver this year’s commencement address. A small group of undergraduates protested that choice, accusing him using language often deployed by anti-Zionists.
I do not believe these students are themselves anti-Zionist. They are part of a school with a long and strong record of supporting the State of Israel. JTS has a campus in Israel. Many leaders in Israel have been shaped by JTS. There is no question that JTS, through its history, has established a firm devotion to the welfare of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
But because of the heat of this moment, what these students did opened the door to attacks on the Jewish community.
President Herzog does not represent a narrow political position within Israel. President Herzog represents the State of Israel. To suggest that he should not be a commencement speaker is, I believe, a severe mistake.
As Weber points out in Politics as a Vocation, and as Chancellor Emeritus Eisen reminds us, Jews have no choice but to be political. But covenant requires us not only to affirm the faith, but also to protect the welfare of the people.
Ben Gurion’s answer to Buber matters. We plant so that we might eat. As we eat, we gain strength. As we gain strength, we work to affirm our values.
Yes, there are profound problems in Israel’s political life at this moment. It is complicated. But we asked for that complication. We asked for it when, after wandering in the wilderness, and then wandering through history, we embraced political Zionism, the rebirth of Jewish dignity, and decided to be wanderers no longer.
It is good that there are prophetic voices like Martin Buber. And yes, it is good that there are students who want to hold Israel to a high moral and ethical standard.
But have they themselves served our people in battle for our lives? Have they themselves farmed the land to make bread to feed our children, children who have been running to bomb shelters for a very long time?
Theirs is a luxurious position. I say that with sadness. I myself am a graduate of List College, the undergraduate program between JTS, Columbia, and Barnard. And I am disappointed. I am disappointed that these students felt the need to protest the presence of Israel at commencement. And I am so sad that the President of Israel decided, because of all of this, not to come.
I raise this in the context of Bamidbar because this book reminds us how blessed we are to have this struggle. Self-determination was never going to be simple. We are not a simple people. We never have been. We are a people that has always cherished multivocality, multiple voices on the biggest questions.
What a big, beautiful family we are. What a complicated people we are. We joke about this, but we have almost never had the chance to do so from a place of confidence, self-determination, and dignity. We do now.
It has never been a better time to be alive as a Jew. Not because Jew hatred has disappeared. It has not, and it likely never will. But we have a dignity that our ancestors did not have. We have a sense of pride that our ancestors did not have. And they worked so hard for us to get this far.
Will we ever be perfect? No. But we have the chance to do more good than we have ever had before. And we are doing more good than we have ever done before.
Just yesterday, I met with Gidi Grinstein, founder of TOM, Tikkun Olam Makers, work that will allow 3D printers all around the world to create affordable, specialized prosthetics for amputees. He is an Israeli who has helped build this capacity in Israel and in New York City through TOM, so that Jewish ingenuity, rooted in Israel and supported by UJA, can become available in Africa, Saudi Arabia, and anywhere a prosthetic is needed, including wheelchairs for toddlers.
Just yesterday I met with leaders of Israeli NGO’s representing the gamut of Israeli society, including Christian Arabs, Charedim, Secular Jewish Israelis, mental health workers and civil rights activists, Jewish educators and business philanthropists, committed to each other as a family of fellow human beings, knowing, as one phrased it “that we disagree passionately. We come together knowing that we will hurt and be hurt, but we are unconditionally committed to each other.”
That is who we are too.
Without the strength we have in the State of Israel, without Israeli universities, scientists, makers, engineers, and dreamers, we would not be able to offer these gifts. One of the profound dreams of early Zionism was that we would go home and develop our own capacity to contribute to the world. That is, in a modern key, one way of fulfilling God’s call to Abraham: be a blessing.
And what prompted this prosthetics work? Israelis, including Jews, Druze, and others, fighting for the safety of our family. The injuries soldiers have endured over these past years, and since the founding of the State, and before, are beyond measure. And still, while taking care of our own children who have been protecting us, we have chosen to extend that gift to the entire world.
That is Israel too.
Do we always get it right? Of course not. Are we living in unfathomable circumstances? Absolutely. Have we let go of our dreams and our commitments to be a gift to the world, despite how hard the world makes it for us to give those gifts? No. Throughout it all, no.
We sing our songs at Eurovision. Israel is often the first to send international aid after natural disasters. We try to heal people. We defend our children. We build. We argue. We grieve. We hope.
Are we perfect? No. Definitely not.
Are we beautiful? Absolutely. We are so very beautiful.
I want to be clear: the students who wrote the protest letter are undergraduates. They are not the future rabbis of JTS. There were rabbinical students who wrote supportive messages. But we do have a responsibility in the training of our leaders to remind them of our beauty, and to teach them never to cause shame to our family in our name.
This is a sad moment. It deserves to be named. Our imperfection should never become a disqualification of public affirmation.
We are human. We do not always get it right. To pretend otherwise would be blindness. We know this. A state inquiry into October 7 is one way of holding ourselves accountable. Holding soldiers accountable when they do not counter extremist settler violence is necessary as well. But those failures are not the whole of who we are. They are mistakes that demand accountability.
And we are a people who believe in accountability because we knew we needed power. We never presumed that power would make us immune to corruption. We are people.
Even Ben Gurion, who fought for all of this, famously said that his definition of normalcy would be when a Jewish criminal could be brought before a Jewish judge in a Jewish city. He never presumed we would get everything right. But he knew, as we must remember, that we needed the freedom to make mistakes and then to hold ourselves accountable when mistakes were made.
When we say “Israel,” we are not saying that we always get it right. When we say “Israel,” we are saying that we are worthy of the chance to get it right, to get it wrong, to correct ourselves, and to get more right. Zionism was and remains the rebirth of and fight for Jewish dignity on earth.
So when Martin Buber and David Ben Gurion speak about redemption, land, wheat, and bread, and Buber asks, “For what?” our answer must be this: Because we are beautiful, and we are called to do beautiful things on earth. We must protect ourselves so that we can live, thrive, and eventually surpass being merely normal. But the only way to do that is to grow wheat, feed our children, and keep our families safe.
There is a “for what” that comes after survival. But it begins with survival.
In the desert, we depended upon God for manna so that we could eat. Now, we are called to plant, to harvest, to build, to defend, to repair, and to bless.
We are worthy of getting it wrong because we are trying to get it right. That is the definition of dignity.
And anyone who rejects our right to be because we sometimes get it wrong is deeply misguided. To them, I would ask Buber’s question: for what? Because you think we must be perfect before we deserve to exist? We do not hold anyone else to that standard. There is only One who can be held to perfection. That is beyond human.
May we be blessed to train our leaders more wisely. May we remind them of the heart of our people, of the love every Jew is obligated to show, and of the responsibility every Jew carries. A body in need of tending needs a whole heart.
That is who we are.
A free people is not a perfect people.
We have work to do.
And that, too, is a blessing.