Back to the Stone Age: Further Reflections on Power

The twentieth century Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim wrote after 1948:

There are times in history when spirit is broken and impotent, and all that counts is power. But what is power? Money is power. So is influence. So is prudence. So is genius. Jews in their centuries of statelessness have used all these attributes, and sometimes one has helped, sometimes another. But during the Nazi regime … only a state that considered Jewish lives to be a top priority could have mustered planes, bombs, armies, and the other implements of state power that could have made a large difference.

(Emil Fackenheim, “The Jewish Return into History: Philosophical Fragments on the State of Israel, in Jewish Philosophy and the Academy, ed. E Fackenheim and Raphael Jospe, Madison, Teaneck, Fairleigh Dickinson U Press, 1996, pp. 223-240)

For Fackenheim and many others, the “Jewish emergence from powerlessness” represented the true meaning of the creation of the state of Israel.  However, the role of power in Jewish history is more complicated than Fackenheim’s simple power-powerlessness dichotomy. Here are three models for the role of power in Jewish history:

1. We are bombarded (!) daily with juvenile, bombastic declarations by Israel’s generals and politicians, about our overwhelming power of vengeance and deterrence, our “long arm,” our ability to “bomb them back to the stone age,” etc. etc. Now that we have state power we are invincible and will never again be victims.  However, for all the bombast, history is sobering.  States and even empires rarely succeed in surviving more than a few hundred years.  No state can ever have absolute power.  If we needed proof of the illusoriness and fleetingness of state power, we got it on October 7, 2023 – and in the ongoing quagmire in which Israel, for all of its overwhelming power (technological, intellectual, economic, diplomatic) has found itself stuck for almost a year.  If states come and go, depending on power balances and shifting alliances, then the Jewish state can come and go too.  Maybe the hopes Fackenheim placed in power were naïve.
2. In the apocalyptic tradition expressed biblically in the Book of Daniel, Israel’s national fate is not determined by power dynamics but by God’s secret plan.  Though God does not reveal the plan, it seems humans cannot resist the temptation to attempt to decipher it from current events, as we have seen in dozens of messianic movements through the centuries.  Israel’s governing coalition today is dominated by people who believe that the signs are clear that the redemption is at hand.  For example, if we do indeed have the power to “bomb them back to the stone age,” then God must have willed it and we should do it.  Having thus figured out our place in the drama of redemption, Israel is under no obligation to external, mundane considerations like international law, or common decency, or democratic norms – because we are essentially strapped to the speeding locomotive of redemption, which will carry us beyond history, beyond power struggles, beyond utopia, to a return to Solomon’s empire and temple sacrifices – but without the annoying, traitorous natterings of Isaiah and Jeremiah.
3. The Jews had a state in ancient times: David’s kingdom, and then the Hasmonean kingdom. In both cases that state was destroyed, losing its sovereignty – its state power – at the hands of more powerful polities.  However, the Jewish people did not see history as a simple power struggle; rather they saw the Jews’ fate as determined by their covenant with God.  The loss of state power was punishment for the nation’s sins, as the festival liturgy states: “On account of our sins were we exiled from our land.”  Therefore, any future restoration would depend on national repentance, and living a life according to the Torah’s utopian vision of social justice, thus justifying renewed state sovereignty.  According to this model, even if Israel has brave soldiers, clever generals, US weapons, and a nuclear option; even if we can “bomb them back to the stone age,” “total victory” is a chimera, for we will ultimately be undone by the faults in our own society, by chasing idols, by baseless hatred.  Power over history belongs to God.  Our only hope is to keep our eye on utopia, on building an ideal society, on finding a peaceful modus vivendi with the other nations of the region.

According to the covenant worldview we do have power – the power of agency to decide how to live as a nation, what kind of a society to build, what kind of a network of relations with other nations to construct. How we employ that power will determine our future.