The Jewish Story That Refuses to End

At the Cave of Machpelah, a class of Israeli schoolchildren offered a more profound explanation of Zionism than a thousand political arguments ever could.

My young grandson lives in Israel. Recently, his class completed its study of Bereshit, Genesis, the first book of the Torah. As Jewish children have done for generations, they marked the achievement with a siyum, a celebration of learning, attended by their parents and teachers.

But this was no ordinary school celebration. The siyum took place at the Cave of Machpelah, in Hebron. The place where, according to the biblical account, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are buried.

A group of young Jewish children, living in the modern State of Israel, speaking Hebrew as their everyday language, completing their study of a book written about the origins of their people, and celebrating that achievement at the burial place of the very people whose lives they have just studied.

The characters in their textbook are their ancestors. The places in their stories are places they can visit. The language of their learning is the language of their national revival.

Three thousand years of Jewish civilisation, compressed into one extraordinary afternoon.

And I found myself thinking: if you want to understand what Zionism really means to the Jewish people, begin here. Not with the United Nations. Not with the pronouncements of politicians. Not with the angry slogans of demonstrators who have appointed themselves authorities on Jewish identity.

Begin with a child, a book and a cave.

Because what happened at Machpelah is the heart and soul of Zionism. A people whose history is also their geography, because there is something almost miraculous about the Jewish relationship with the land of Israel.

Most ancient civilisations have disappeared, absorbed into the cultures that succeeded them. Their languages survive in museums, their gods in archaeological collections, their national stories in the work of historians.

The Jewish people are different. We are still here after 3 millenia.

And more remarkably, we are still reading the same foundational texts, invoking the same ancestors, observing the same festivals, speaking a revived form of the same language, and locating ourselves within the same geography.

Genesis is not merely a collection of religious stories. It is the opening chapter of a national autobiography. It tells us who we are, where we came from, how we came to understand ourselves as a people, and why a particular stretch of land became inseparable from our collective consciousness.

When Abraham leaves his birthplace and journeys to Canaan, geography becomes destiny. When Sarah dies, Abraham purchases a burial place in Hebron. Genesis devotes extraordinary attention to the transaction: the negotiations, the witnesses, the price paid for the field and cave.

Why such detail? Because the story is not simply about a burial. It is about establishing a permanent relationship between a family and a place. When Jacob approaches death in Egypt, he makes his sons promise to return his body to that same cave.

Even in exile, the connection remains. And that becomes one of the defining themes of Jewish history. We could be expelled from the land. We could lose our sovereignty. We could be scattered across continents, subjected to persecution, forced conversion, massacre and genocide.

But we could not be separated from the memory of who we were and where we belonged.

The astonishing achievement of Jewish civilisation is that it turned memory into a form of national survival. Every Passover, Jews concluded with the hope of returning to Jerusalem. Every wedding recalls Jerusalem. Every day, prayers turned towards Jerusalem. Our calendar followed the seasons of the land. Our festivals remembered its harvests.

The land of Israel was never simply somewhere our ancestors had once lived. It was the place around which Jewish time, Jewish prayer, Jewish law and Jewish hope continued to revolve. The Jewish people carried their homeland with them, even when they could not live there.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish connection to Israel.

One of the great intellectual distortions of our age is the attempt to portray Zionism as an artificial political ideology, invented in nineteenth-century Europe and imposed upon a land to which Jews had no meaningful prior connection.

It is an argument that requires the deliberate erasure of Jewish history.

Modern political Zionism certainly emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, responding to nationalism, antisemitism and the manifest failure of emancipation to secure Jewish safety and equality.

Theodor Herzl did not invent Jewish longing for Zion. What he did was to help transform that longing into a modern political project. The difference is fundamental. For centuries, Jews had prayed for return. Modern Zionism sought to make return a political reality.

For centuries, Hebrew had been preserved in religious learning, literature and prayer. The Zionist revival helped make it once again the everyday language of a living society. For centuries, Jews had imagined a restored national life. Zionism sought to build the institutions through which that life could be sustained.

It was not the invention of an identity nor was it was the restoration of agency to a people whose identity had endured without sovereignty. Because for much of our history, Jews were permitted to exist only on terms determined by others. We could be tolerated or expelled, emancipated or persecuted, converted or massacred. Our safety depended, ultimately, on the goodwill of rulers and the changing moods of societies in which we lived.

Zionism represented a refusal to accept that powerlessness as the permanent condition of Jewish existence. It asserted that Jews were not merely a religious minority awaiting the tolerance of others, but a people entitled to national self-determination. That assertion remains revolutionary.

We live in an age in which almost every community insists upon the right to describe its own identity, history and experience. Except, it increasingly seems, the Jews. And it remains deeply offensive to those who believe that Jewish legitimacy must always be conferred from outside. Who else but the Jewish people themselves gets to define the Jewish people?

People with little knowledge of Jewish civilisation confidently explain that Judaism is merely a religion, that Jews are not a people, that Jewish nationhood is an invention, and that Zionism is necessarily a doctrine of racial supremacy or colonial domination.

Of course, Jewish people have always argued about Zionism, just as we have argued about almost everything else. Jewish identity is not politically uniform. Nor is Zionism a single, unchanging ideology.

But disagreement within a people is not permission for outsiders to erase that people’s history.

There is a difference between challenging the policies of the Israeli government and denying the legitimacy of Jewish national existence. There is a difference between opposing settlements, criticising military conduct, or advocating Palestinian statehood, and insisting that the Jewish relationship with Israel is a fabrication.

And there is a profound difference between debating Zionism and treating Zionists, the overwhelming majority of whom understand the term through Jewish peoplehood and self-determination, as morally contaminated simply because of that identification.

When demonstrators chant against Zionism, I wonder whether they understand what they are asking my grandson to renounce.

The connection between his language and his ancestors? Between his people’s prayers and the land to which those prayers have always pointed? Between the book he has studied and the cave where he celebrated its completion? Do they really imagine that these relationships can be abolished by a slogan?

There is another dimension to the story, one that matters profoundly.

Hebron is not an empty biblical landscape. It is a living city, home to Palestinians whose families, memories and attachments are also deeply rooted there. The Cave of Machpelah is also the Ibrahimi Mosque, sacred to Muslims. The city is marked by conflict, competing national claims, restrictions, fear and suffering.

None of that disappears because my grandson has a legitimate and ancient connection to the place. And it should not. To recognise Jewish historical belonging is not to deny Palestinian belonging. To affirm the Jewish right to national self-determination is not to suggest that Palestinians should be denied theirs.

Indeed, if Zionism is to remain faithful to its most compelling moral promise, the restoration of Jewish national agency must be accompanied by an equally serious commitment to the dignity and rights of others.

There is no contradiction between saying that Hebron occupies a profound place in Jewish history and acknowledging the rights of the Palestinians who live there today.

There is, however, a contradiction in demanding that Jews surrender their historical identity as the price of peace. Reconciliation cannot be built on the erasure of either people.

The challenge is not to determine whose memories are sufficiently ancient to cancel the other’s. It is to find a political future in which neither people must deny its own story to recognise the humanity of the other.

And this is where Jewish education has something important to contribute. Because Genesis does not describe a world populated by saints. Its central characters are flawed, conflicted, jealous, frightened and frequently mistaken. Brothers deceive brothers. Families fracture. Parents favour children. Fear produces cruelty. Power is misused. Reconciliation is difficult.

The Torah does not conceal the moral failures of our ancestors. It makes us study them, and perhaps that is part of its genius. Jewish continuity is not merely the preservation of identity. It is the preservation of an argument about how human beings ought to live. A people that has carried its history across millennia must also carry the responsibilities that history imposes.

Education, as Rabbi Sacks would put it, is how a civilisation defeats time. There is a Hebrew word that captures something essential about all this: mesorah. Transmission.

The passing of a tradition from one generation to the next. It is the mechanism through which Jewish civilisation has survived. Empires have armies. States have borders. Civilisations have monuments.

The Jewish people have all those things in different forms, but our most enduring institution may be the relationship between a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, one generation and the next.

We do not merely tell our children that Abraham existed in our sacred history. We ask them to study his decisions. We do not merely teach them that Jerusalem is a tourist destination. We weave Jerusalem into the rhythm of their lives.

We do not merely commemorate the Exodus. At Passover, we instruct each generation to regard itself as though it personally came out of Egypt. This is education as identification. It turns the past from something that happened to other people into something that helps explain who we are.

And this is why my grandson’s siyum moves me so deeply. It represents an unbroken chain of transmission, not because every link has been identical, but because generation after generation has chosen to renew it.

I think of the Jewish parents who taught Genesis to their children in medieval Spain, in the towns of Poland, in the ghettos of Europe, in the communities of North Africa and the Middle East.

And of the teachers who continued teaching even as their communities faced persecution and destruction. Of the generations who learned about the patriarchs and matriarchs without ever imagining that their descendants might one day stand beside the cave associated with their burial.

And then I think of my grandson. He studies the same book. He learns the same names. But unlike so many generations before him, he lives in the land where those stories unfolded.

His Jewishness is not confined to the synagogue or the family home. It is part of the language, landscape, calendar and public life of the country in which he is growing up.

He does not have to imagine Hebrew as a living language. He speaks it. He does not have to imagine a Jewish society capable of governing itself. He lives in one. He does not have to imagine what it would mean for Jewish children to walk through the geography of their own national story. He has just done precisely that.

The extraordinary achievement of modern Israel is not simply that it created a refuge for Jews. It created the conditions in which Jewish history could become Jewish everyday life. That is an achievement of civilisation. A book that never really ends.

There is a beautiful paradox in the Jewish practice of a siyum. A siyum celebrates the completion of learning. Yet Jewish tradition regards completion not as an ending, but as an invitation to begin again.

We finish one book and turn to the next. We complete the annual Torah reading and immediately return to Bereshit. The story does not end because the responsibility to carry it forward never ends.

That is the meaning I find in a photograph of my grandson and his classmates at Machpelah.

These children are not relics of an ancient civilisation. They are its future. They stand at the intersection of memory and possibility, inheritors of a story that has survived conquest, exile, dispersion, persecution and attempted annihilation.

And they inherit something else. The responsibility to decide what kind of society that history obliges them to build. The Jewish national revival is not complete merely because Jews possess a state. Its moral achievement will also be measured by the character of that state, the justice of its institutions, the freedom of its citizens, and its capacity to live in security and dignity alongside its neighbours.

Zionism, at its most profound, is therefore not simply an assertion about the past. It is a commitment to the future. A commitment that Jewish civilisation will not become a museum exhibit. That Hebrew will not return to being merely an ancient language. That Jewish history will not once again depend entirely upon the protection of others. That Jewish children will be able to inherit their identity without apologising for it. And that the extraordinary survival of the Jewish people will find expression in a society worthy of that inheritance.

So when someone tells me that Zionism is nothing more than an ideology of oppression, or that the Jewish connection to Israel is a modern political invention, I think of my grandson.

I think of the book he has just finished and I think of the place at which his class gathered.

I think of the parents who brought their children there, and the countless generations of parents who kept those same stories alive when returning to that place was beyond their reach. And I think about the extraordinary arrogance of those who presume that a people with thousands of years of memory must accept a definition of itself devised by its political opponents.

You may challenge the policies of Israel. You may condemn its governments. You may argue passionately about its borders, its conduct and its future. But you do not get to erase our past in order to win an argument about our present.

As my grandson has finished studying Genesis, he learned something that no political slogan can extinguish: that the Jewish people are not merely the descendants of a history.

We are its continuation. And that, more than any flag, political manifesto or declaration, is the heart and soul of Zionism.

His first book is finished. But his and our story is not.