Are American Jews in Exile, or “What is Exile anyway?”

SYNOPSIS

Jewish memory has traditionally framed Jewish history as a story from homelessness to home. “Next year in Jerusalem” Yet most American Jews do not consider themselves homeless or in exile. For most American Jews, the story of America is unique in the annals of Jewish history. Even with recent anti-Semitic events, most Jews do not consider Aliyah. In our exploration, we will address three questions:

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What are the salient issues that arise in the room, regarding the place of Israel in the American Jewish consciousness? Do you think this group is typical or atypical for American Jews?

EXILE AS PHYSICAL DISLOCATION

Nachmanides Notes on Maimonides' Sefer HaMittzvot, Mitzvah #4

The fourth commandment is to inherit the land, for the verse states, And you shall inherit the land and dwell within it, for I have given the land to you to dwell within it (Numbers 33:53), and it is oft repeated. [Ramban then continues to argue that the spies rebelled against God and the people ‘did not obey His voice’.] This is proof that when the verse states ‘you shall inherit’ it is not a promise but a directive. [He explains that inheriting the land is to conquer it.] And do not assume that this is the same as the commandment to destroy the seven nations, as we are commanded “you shall surely destroy them”. This is not the case. For we are only enjoined to destroy them if we go to war, but we can make peace with them and leave them where they are under certain conditions, but the land should not be allowed to remain in their hands or those like them for eternity. [Ramban is talking of the idolatrous nations who do not recognize God.] Similarly, if they left the land of Israel… and went to the land of Shinar, and we decided to pursue them and conquer them, we would not be allowed, for the commandment Is to conquer and settle in the land…. And the sages are emphatic to the extent they say anyone who leaves Israel and lives in a foreign land is like one who worships idols, and it is said [by David when he must flee Saul], “They have driven me today from my share in the Lord’s inheritance and have said, ‘Go, serve other gods’.” [The Talmud asks ‘who told David to worship other Gods?’ The meaning is that leaving Israel is like worshipping other Gods.] … If so, this is an eternal mitzvah which obligates every Jew even during periods of exile. The Sifre relates a story of Yehudah ben Beteira, Rabbi Mattiah ben Charash, Rabbi Chananiah ben Achai, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Natan that went out of Israel and when they arrived at the frontier they raised their eyes, tears flowed from their eyes, and they tore their clothing, quoting the verse “and you shall posess the land and dwell within it”. They said that living in the land of Israel is equal to all the other commandments combined.

….The oppression we endure does not improve us, for we are not a whit better than ordinary people. It is true that we do not love our enemies; but he alone who can conquer himself dare reproach us with that fault. Oppression naturally creates hostility against oppressors, and our hostility aggravates the pressure. It is impossible to escape from this eternal circle.

"No!" Some soft-hearted visionaries will say: "No, it is possible! Possible by means of the ultimate perfection of humanity."

Is it necessary to point to the sentimental folly of this view? He who would found his hope for improved conditions on the ultimate perfection of humanity would indeed be relying upon a Utopia I referred previously to our "assimilation". I do not for a moment wish to imply that I desire such an end. Our national character is too historically famous, and, in spite of every degradation, too fine to make its annihilation desirable. We might perhaps be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a period of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace. For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again. The world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken. In its ignorance and narrowness of heart, it fails to observe that prosperity weakens our Judaism and extinguishes our peculiarities. It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more. Thus, whether we like it or not, we are now, and shall henceforth remain, a historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all.

We are one people--our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State. We possess all human and material resources necessary for the purpose.

This is therefore the appropriate place to give an account of what has been somewhat roughly termed our "human material." But it would not be appreciated till the broad lines of the plan, on which everything depends, has first been marked out.

Embattled French Jews have mixed feelings about Israel’s Aliya calls- Uriel Heilman

...In the United States, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua ignited a firestorm in 2006 when he told the audience at a centennial celebration of the American Jewish Committee that American Jews are only “partial Jews” because they live in the Diaspora.

“Judaism cannot exist outside Israel,” he said, according to an account in Israel’s daily Haaretz. “Those who do not live in Israel and do not participate in the daily decisions that are made there … do not have a Jewish identity of any significance.”

Yehoshua hit upon a similar note in a February 2013 speech to a group of several hundred American Jews on volunteer and study programs in Israel when he said, “I’m happy to see so many Americans here. I hope you all become Israelis and don’t return to America.”

By: Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy July 9^th, 2018

….Most Jews live today live in different neighborhoods, and their neighborhoods—their environments—have shaped very different political sensibilities. If Israel’s far-left and electorally weak Meretz party were to run today among American Jews, in all probability it would win big, while Likud, Israel’s increasingly popular ruling party, would be marginalized.

In the light of that disparity, and in light of all we’ve written so far, realism requires still another acknowledgment: even if peace between Israel and the Palestinians were to break out tomorrow, and even if every Reform and Conservative Jew were suddenly to feel welcomed in Israel, American Jews and Israelis would remain discrete entities and still find many issues dividing them. The simple truth is that diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews have freely chosen to inhabit dissimilar political and social orders.

The history here is pertinent. In the great project of unifying a newborn state composed of Jews who had been scattered all over the world, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was obsessed with reducing differences among them. It was hard enough, for example, to forge a modern army that could accommodate all religious Jews and their ritual needs; at the very least, the IDF required common denominators, including a single standard of kashrut, a single way of observing holidays.

Most Israelis, of all stripes, have appreciated this unifying, collective impulse, not least where religion is concerned. Even for the secular, the regnant concept, inherited from Ben-Gurion and reflecting his nationalist strategy, is that “the synagogue I don’t pray in is Orthodox.” In general, Israelis may not care about the kind of prayer that takes place at the Western Wall in Jerusalem—about which, more below—but for them it is a given that the common religious denominator in Israel will be Orthodox. They therefore don’t understand why they should risk political stability, the religious status quo, and Israel’s own always-fragile sense of Jewish unity for a form of pluralism that looks like a foreign import.

After all, the major non-Orthodox movements emerged in Europe two centuries ago in the wake of Jewish emancipation, when the burning question was how, as newly enfranchised citizens in Gentile societies, Jews were now to live and conduct their Jewish lives—how they might continue to stick out, however modestly, while fitting in. That question is one that Israelis have never had to ask—which explains why even the 58 percent of Israelis who tell pollsters they support religious pluralism nevertheless vote based on many other economic, social, political, and security-oriented issues that they deem more pressing.

The majority of diaspora Jews, by contrast, inhabit Jewish communities in democratic societies where they are welcomed as fellow citizens but, just as often, implicitly encouraged to disappear as a distinctive ethnic minority. For diaspora communities bent on ensuring their own Jewish survival and identity, the task thus requires at once defending their country’s liberal character so that it remains a welcoming home while fighting assimilation by remaining in some ways different from the surrounding culture. For the non-Orthodox, the latter task is often seen as requiring the revision of various traditional forms of Jewish religious expression.

What’s true of the diaspora in general is also true of the Jewish community in the U.S., but with its own particular twist. Contemporary American Jews live in a culture that deifies individual choice; by that criterion, Ben-Gurion’s single-standard impulse is impermissibly authoritarian. In their update of the two-century-long conversation about how to preserve a distinctive tradition in modern, freedom-oriented cultures, most American Jews want a Judaism that demonstrates its resonance with modernity by being open, adaptable, even personally customizable. They therefore see their religious and denominational pluralism and experimentalism not as dilution or abandonment but, to the contrary, as being of the very essence; for them, trust in the principle of choice is the fundamental building block of identity.

For the first time in 2,000 years, rather than being united by a shared homelessness, most Jews live under two radically separate constitutional arrangements.