A People That Dwells Alone: Destiny or Decree?
Between Har Hamor and Rabbi Meir Kahane, a conception is taking shape that turns isolation from a value imposed from without into an ideological goal — even at the cost of collision with reality
In a Dvar Torah for Parshat Balak, Dr. Zvi Elchaiani offered a reading of “Behold, a people that dwells alone and is not reckoned among the nations” as the secret of the Jewish state’s strength, a solitude that is not a curse but a source of dignity, modesty, and inner identity. This reading, in the spirit of Har Hamor circles, seeks to argue that the people of Israel cannot realize itself through the recognition it receives from the nations of the world. In Elchaiani’s words, “solitude is not weakness but self-strength deriving from inner order,” that is, the source of power is entirely internal and requires nothing of the world’s regard for the nation. Solitude is not a price, but a rung on the ladder.
A few weeks ago, my friend Dr. Elad Caplan sharpened the same conception from another direction, when he brought quotations from Rabbi Kahane’s teaching according to which political isolation is not a challenge but a goal. In the original: “It cannot be that God will bring the final redemption so long as we have even a single ally.” When one sets the two voices side by side, a shared, and troubling, logic emerges.
Building strategic alliances necessarily involves negotiating with reality, a reality that may determine, for instance, that certain aspirations of Religious Zionism are simply not realistic strategically. Here the mechanism kicks in. Both Kahanism and Har Hamor seek to persuade us that any such friction is merely a temporary glitch. Provocation toward one’s allies becomes a badge of honour, and when the result is yet more diplomatic damage, they leap to say: we told you so, the world is against us.
This is a logical failure before it is a diplomatic one. If isolation is a blessing, no failure can any longer refute the approach, it only confirms it. In this way Religious Zionism would be converted from a movement that takes responsibility for outcomes into a movement measured by fidelity to a position. And when the measure is purity rather than achievement, there is no longer any corrective mechanism. This is the difference between faith and a responsible political ideology.
And there is a more troubling side effect. A principled indifference to world opinion, including toward broad segments of the Jewish people itself, does not stop at the border of foreign policy. When external recognition is dismissed in advance as irrelevant, and the internal recognition of Jews who do not share the outlook is treated as weakness, the moral restraint toward minority populations within the State of Israel falls away as well. In Kahanism this is no accident: that teaching is in any case not built on democratic values or civic equality, and withdrawal from the world merely removes one of the few remaining brakes that might yet restrain it. “Dwelling alone” is no longer merely a stance toward the outside, it becomes a license to be used internally.
And here is the sharpest irony. Elchaiani leans on Dr. Yaacov Herzog’s book, A People That Dwells Alone, as though it were testimony to solitude as destiny. But it seems he misses Herzog’s point. Herzog was a gifted statesman, an adviser to Ben-Gurion, ambassador to Canada, and at the same time a genuine Torah scholar. He certainly did not see himself as a religious statesman seeking isolation. His famous debate with the historian Arnold Toynbee was intended for precisely the opposite: to establish Israel’s place within the family of nations, and to refute Toynbee’s claim that the Jewish people is a historical anomaly, a “fossil” that has outlived its time. Herzog fought against the conception of solitude as a decree, not for it. Dwelling alone, a particular national identity that must be preserved and leveraged for the sake of Israel’s relations with the world. To enlist him as a key witness for the Har Hamor position is almost a complete inversion of his intent.
And not by chance. Zionism at its core is precisely the opposite movement to solitude-as-destiny: an exodus from “a people that dwells alone” as an exilic decree, and a return of the Jewish people to real, political history, to sovereignty, to responsibility, to negotiation with reality at whatever cost. The Har Hamor position turns the paradigm upside down. Outwardly the form of sovereignty is preserved: the state, the army, the settlement enterprise, but inwardly it is reinterpreted as a “false consciousness.” And here the heart of the matter is revealed: when Elchaiani writes that the strength “derives from inner order,” he is precisely articulating this move. The real move, on his view, is not in relations with the nations of the world but in inner consciousness, in overcoming “confusion” and ripening a consciousness of faith. World opinion, the strategic alliance, the price of isolation, all these are no longer data to which one must respond, but raw material for inner clarification. These are terms at the core of the Har Hamor mystic culture war rhetoric.
And it should be enough to remember how the State came into being. Not through withdrawal from the world, but through stubborn diplomatic and political work in the international arena: from the Balfour Declaration, through the UNSCOP committee and the November 29th vote, to mustering the support of rival great powers alike. The declaration of independence was not the act of a people that turned its back on the world, but the climax of a journey in which the people of Israel learned to speak the language of realpolitik and to translate a vision into political power. Without international recognition, there would have been no state. The Har Hamor position not only reads history differently, it seeks to engineer in us a false consciousness that is the exact opposite of the one that made sovereignty possible in the first place.
For the avoidance of doubt, there is no claim here that Israel should bow its head to every international pressure or apologize solely according to the mood of the nations of the world. Quite the opposite. Ben-Gurion, who well understood the value of international recognition, was also the one who knew how to say “Um-Shmum“ (referring to the UN) when the national mission demanded it, and throughout Israel’s wars fateful decisions were resolved out of independent sovereign judgment, not out of obedience. In the end, Israel decides what is good for Israel. But that decision is reached from within the relationship with the world and within reality, not out of disconnection from it. This is not surrender but political wisdom: distilling Israel’s mission as a sovereign Jewish state, alongside the recognition that true sovereignty operates within history, not above it. The difference between the two positions is not the question of whether to heed the world or not as in both, Israel decides for itself. The difference is whether the decision derives from a realistic responsiveness to reality and from responsible, outcome-oriented judgment, or from a principled indifference that disqualifies reality in advance as irrelevant.
And so, through the back door, precisely what Zionism came to abolish returns: a people that is not truly within history but observes it from above, as a backdrop for a metaphysical drama. Sovereignty is preserved as a shell; the core — the realistic responsiveness to reality — is abandoned. This is, in a sense, post-Zionism wrapped in Zionist language.
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This post was originally published in Hebrew in Besheva
