On Zion, Revisited

Martin Buber’s On Zion has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for a number of years.  It seems fitting then that the first time I read it was in my hotel room in Jerusalem on a recent trip to Israel as a fellow with the Sinai Temple Israel Center Fellowship.  As we met with politicians, journalists, activists and scholars, I thought of Buber often.  I felt that his voice, his perspective, has been missing from the overall discourse surrounding Israel in its current crisis, which often seems focused on the political to the exclusion of all else.  Buber’s voice takes us back to the early days of the modern Jewish state, to the thoughts of a nascent nation—its hopes, anxieties and fears—in all its many varied dimensions.

“The significance of the regaining of the land of Israel by the people of Israel is to be understood on three levels,” Buber writes, “each of which, however, only reveals its full meaning in connection with the other two.”

These three levels are politics, philosophy and religion.

“The first stage, taken by itself,” says Buber, “results in a narrow political view, the second by itself in a narrow intellectual view and the third by itself in a narrow religious view.  All three must be taken together if we are to understand what is meant by the re-birth of the Jewish people.”

Because the connection between the three, Buber says, is of “such a vital and original nature, because the land is so ‘attached by its innermost qualities to the reality of the people,’ neither its holiness nor the love for it can be understood by reason alone.  One must honor the mystery as a mystery in order to approach it.  Because this basic attitude and thereby the knowledge of the mysteries has been surrendered, knowledge of the holiness of the land of Israel has become ‘blurred.’”

Buber’s fear, prior to 1948, was that if Israel became a nation like all other nations, it would succumb to profanity, and thus relinquish the true potential of Zion.  Once Balfour had been declared, Buber accepted the turn of events even though it had not produced the results he had hoped.  And yet, he did not give up hope.

“The reality of the holy can only be grasped from the standpoint of the mystery,” he writes, “then one sees that the holy is not a segregated, isolated sphere of Being, but signifies the realm open to all spheres, in which they alone can find fulfillment.  The face of the holy is not turned away from but towards the profane; it does not want to hover over the profane but to take it up into itself.”

Even though Zion has profaned itself as the modern state of Israel, as Buber suggests, all is not lost, for the profane can always be made holy.  Isn’t that what Judaism has always been about?  Sanctifying the world in God’s image?

“The mysteries always teach us to combine the holy with the profane,” Buber writes.  “The strict division between them has its place not in the character and attitude of the holy but in those of the profane; it is the profane which makes a fundamental and unsurmountable division between itself and the holy, and on the other side the inadequate ‘usual’ holiness consists only in being separate from the profane, whereas the perfectly holy thinks and wills nothing but unity.”

What is the point of all this?  If we think of the holy as that which is not profane, we are imbibing only usual holiness.  Which is to say, worldly holiness.  Which is to say, profanity.  Whereas, Buber suggests, real holiness, whole and undiluted, consists not only of holiness but of all that is profane.  That’s what makes the holy holy.  And if we can understand that aspect of Israel which appears blurred, chaotic and profane not as an element to be partitioned or expunged, but as a necessary component to its ultimate holiness, then, Buber suggests, we may reestablish the essential mystery that is Zion—knowledge of the holiness of the land of Israel—not only for itself, but for the world.