Ahad Ha-Am on Jewish Terror
The great poet and philosopher Judah Halevi (1075-1141) lived at the height of Jewish powerlessness, eight centuries before the establishment of the State of Israel and the Jewish return to power, what the late philosopher Emil Fackenheim called “the Jewish return to history.” In his Kuzari, a fictional dialogue between a rabbi and the King of the Khazars, Judah Halevi wrote:
The Rabbi: The Christians and Muslims claim to act modestly and to “turn the other cheek,” but for hundreds of years have killed and conquered much of the world. We are closer than they are to God.
The Khazar King: That would be the case if your powerlessness were voluntary, but it results from coercion, and when you have power, you will also kill!
(The Kuzari I:113-114, my paraphrase)
Judah Ha-Levi’s challenge to Jewish moral smugness has become all the more pertinent today, as we in Israel are now in the period leading to elections, with increasingly extreme political verbal violence, as if verbal violence were totally innocent and unrelated to physical violence. At the same time, physical violence, arson, and attacks by Jews on Palestinian-Arab civilians, their homes, property, and agriculture have sharply escalated in the past year or two. On top of which, there have been increasing incidents of verbal and even physical harassment of Christian clergy by Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem. Are we Jews really better than other people, or is the message of the prophets of Israel that we must become better people?
After two millennia of powerlessness, the Jewish People in the State of Israel again have power. However, power is neutral; the question is what one does with it. The same gun can be used for legitimate self-defense or for murder. As George Bernard Shaw wrote in his play “Major Barbara” (about a pacifist, Christian member of the Salvation Army, whose father was an industrialist arms manufacturer): “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil, too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
Has the State of Israel, and before it the pre-state Jewish Yishuv, always used its power responsibly?
In a recent article, Prof. Warren Zev Harvey documented the reactions of Hebrew University professors Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz to the retaliatory attack on the Arab village of Qibya, some 30 kilometers north-west of Ramallah (and directly north of today’s city of Modi`in) in what was then the Jordanian-annexed “West Bank” on 14 October 1953. In the attack, which was led by (then) Major Ariel Sharon, 69 civilians (many of them women and children) were killed, and more than 40 houses destroyed.
Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz certainly differed in their ideological views and life-styles, but both reacted with profound moral disappointment to the Qibya attack, and had a shared concern for the moral foundation and Jewish character of the new State.
There were, of course, other incidents prior to this (and regrettably, since then), which have raised difficult and serious moral questions, as well as harsh reactions in Israel and abroad. One example, cited regularly until this day by critics of Israel and Zionism, was the operation in Deir Yassin, some five years before the Qibya operation, in the battle for the road to Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence. Like the Kastel on the top of the opposite mountain, Deir Yassin controlled the road leading to Jerusalem from the coastal plain via Sha`ar Ha-Gai / Bab al-Wad. Deir Yassin was conquered on 9 April 1948, and some 100 (or more) of its residents were killed, including women and children.
To this day opinion differs about the Deir Yassin operation and the number of civilians killed. The operations at Deir Yassin and at the Kastel aimed at breaking through the Arab siege on Jerusalem in order to permit regular access and provisions to the besieged city. Historically, Deir-Yassin was located on the top of the mountain where today’s Har-Nof ḥaredi neighborhood is situated, and it’s doubtful whether most of its inhabitants are aware of what happened there.
However, long before Israeli independence, the question of the moral character of Zionism and the hoped-for Jewish State had already been raised by a major intellectual figure in the history of Zionism, Aḥad Ha-Am (Asher Tzvi Ginsberg, 1856-1926).
Even before his first visit to the country, Aḥad Ha-`Am sharply criticized the “political Zionism” of Herzl in his 1897 essay, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem.” In his view, political Zionism only dealt with the material problems of the Jewish People (poverty, political impotence, antisemitism), while ignoring the spiritual and moral problem of Judaism, as addressed by his own Ḥibbat Tziyyon (“Love of Zion”) trend.
Writing about the small Jewish “settlement” at the time, which as yet had no organized military power, Ahad Ha-Am foresaw moral power being replaced by the power of arms, and the abandonment of Jewish culture, which is the Jewish people’s “national spirit.”
“Political Zionism cannot satisfy those Jews who care for Judaism … The secret of our people’s persistence is … that at a very early period the Prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power, and not to admire physical power. For this reason, the clash with enemies stronger than itself never brought the Jewish nation, as it did the other nations of antiquity, to the point of self-effacement. So long as we are faithful to this principle, our existence has a secure basis: for in spiritual power we are not inferior to other nation … But a political ideal which does not rest on the national culture is capable of diverting the nation’s heart away from its spiritual power, and to give birth within us to a tendency to seek to glorify material power … Needless to say, if the political ideal is not attained, it will have disastrous consequences … In a word: Ḥibbat Tziyyon, no less than Zionism, wants a Jewish State and believes in the possibility of its being established in the future. But while Zionism looks to the Jewish State to provide a remedy for poverty, complete tranquility, and national respect … Ḥibbat Tziyyon begins with the national culture, because it is only through (national culture) and for its sake that a State can be established in the desired manner, beneficial to the national spirit.”
(My revision of the Leon Simon translation).
A REACTION TO REPORTS OF JEWISH TERROR
Twenty-five years later, and twenty-five years before the establishment the State of Israel (which he did not live to see), and long before the events at Deir Yassin and Qibya, there was an incident which shocked Aḥad Ha-Am to the core of his being. When he was 65 years old (less than five years before he died), an incident occurred – at least according to rumor – which led Aḥad Ha-Am to deep despondency and despair. In early 1922 he had immigrated and settled in Tel Aviv. For decades he had written dozens of essays (totaling many hundreds of pages) on diverse topics, many of which prominently presented his vision of a Jewish State founded on the moral values enunciated and taught by the Prophets of Israel. Was all his work, and were all his hopes, in vain?
Just a few months after his aliyah, on 30 August 1922 (6 Elul 5682), Aḥad Ha-Am wrote a heart-breaking letter to Leib Jaffe, editor of the “Haaretz” newspaper, in response to reports that had spread, according to which some Jewish youths had murdered an innocent Arab boy in revenge for Arab attacks on Jews.
The opening words of the letter expressed his profound shock:
“Since the report on which your article was based reached me, and especially when I saw the attitude of our community in the Land to the affair, my heart has been filled with gloomy thoughts, and I feel that all the foundations on which I built my views of Judaism and Zionism already in my youth are collapsing within me. What will be left for my old age of all my life’s work, except an empty heart and despairing soul? … Our blood was shed like water in the four corners of the earth for thousands of years, but we did not shed blood … This nation, persecuted in every place, with all of its external degradation, looked with revulsion at its neighbors, whose hands were stained with blood, and knew in its heart that it did not have, and never would have, any relation to such savagery, for it possessed the great moral truth, which is destined to spread throughout the world and put an end to savagery, cruelty, and bloodshed everywhere. Then it, too, will dwell in security in its land.”
(My translation)
The end of Aḥad Ha-Am’s letter is no less important. He concluded it by citing a saying in a Talmudic passage (Sanhedrin 98b) dealing with the predictions of sufferings and disasters leading to the messianic redemption, “the birth-pangs of the messiah” (ḥevlei ha-mashiaḥ). As a result, some sages concluded that it would be preferable not to live to witness and experience the messianic era: “Let him come, and let me not behold him” (yeitei ve-la iḥminei).
Out of his concerns for the future of the State which had not yet been established, and his personal frustration that his life-long literary work had been in vain, Ahad Ha-Am concluded his letter by citing the Talmudic saying:
If what this rumor tells is true … what are we, what are our future lives in this land, for which we should sacrifice the countless sacrifices without which this country will not be built? Is it truly only in order to add to one corner of the east yet another small nation of new “Levantines” to compete with the Levantines already here, with all their corrupt qualities – blood-thirstiness, revenge, competition, etc. – which are the content of their lives? If this be the “messiah,” let him come and let me not behold him!
Ahad Ha-Am’s personal despair is humanly understandable. But he died a century ago, a generation before the State came into being. We, who are fortunate enough to live and raise our families in Israel, do not have the luxury of giving in to despair in these critical times. The issue we face is not “what will the gentiles say” (mah yomru ha-goyim) – as if the animosity to Israel abroad bears any relation to the historic and military facts, so that repeating them at every opportunity will make a difference in our external relations. The ultimate challenge is internal, for as Ahad Ha-Am emphasized, our true source of power is our moral compass.