The Usurpation of Israel
British Jews are increasingly asked to prove their loyalty to Israel by suspending judgment of the Israeli state. This demand is presented as solidarity, but it reverses the Hebrew ethical order. Israel does not exist to release Jews from judgment. If the state is to remain Jewish in any serious covenantal sense, its power must remain answerable to a relation it did not create, cannot own, and has no authority to exhaust.
The modern state presents itself as the condition of collective existence. It tells the people that without its institutions, army, and borders, they would become defenceless matter: dispersed, persecuted, and eventually destroyed. For Jews, this argument carries exceptional force. Yet historical necessity can quietly become political idolatry. An institution created to protect Jewish life begins to present itself as the source of Jewish life. The state no longer serves the people; the people become the human material through which the state reproduces its power.
The Hebrew tradition begins elsewhere. It does not begin with a state, but with departure from a system that counts human beings as units of production. Pharaoh does not merely hate the Hebrews. He administers them, measures their labour, regulates their reproduction, and converts their bodies into infrastructure. Egypt is a political form in which life has value only insofar as it can be extracted, mobilised, and replaced. Israel leaves Egypt not to construct a Hebrew Pharaoh, but so that no earthly power may again say: your lives belong to me because only I can save you.
The people of Israel are not first constituted as a sovereign collective that subsequently enters into the Covenant. Israel is set apart as a people through the Covenant itself. At Sinai, the words are precise:
וְאַתֶּם תִּהְיוּ־לִי מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ
“And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
The decisive word is לִי, “to Me.” Israel’s distinction is relational before it is national. It is not an ethnic substance, territorial possession, or historical entitlement, but a continuously renewed exposure to obligation before Hashem.
This distinction grants no immunity. It imposes responsibility. It does not mean: you are different, therefore you may do more. It means: you have been set apart, therefore you cannot reproduce the political logic from which you were brought out. Even the land cannot become an unconditional possession, because the Torah interrupts ownership with the declaration:
כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ
“For the land is Mine.”
Neither king, state, nor people can convert promise into absolute title without destroying the relation that gives the promise meaning.
The Covenant precedes the king, the army, and every particular government. The king does not make it on behalf of the people, own it, or embody it. He remains within a relation he did not establish. This is why the biblical suspicion of kingship is not a primitive hostility towards government. When the people demand a king “like all the nations,” Samuel describes the operational grammar of sovereign power: the king will take. He will take sons for his chariots and wars, daughters for his service, and fields, vineyards, servants, and animals for his apparatus. The repeated Hebrew verb is:
יִקָּח
“He will take.”
The warning is not merely that a particular king may become wicked. Taking belongs to the structural temptation of sovereignty. The state accumulates land, labour, obedience, memory, and death, then presents this accumulation as the greatness of the people themselves. Yet the Torah neither abolishes political authority nor permits it to become absolute. Deuteronomy allows a king and immediately limits his horses, wealth, and power. He must write the Torah for himself so that:
לְבִלְתִּי רוּם־לְבָבוֹ מֵאֶחָיו
“His heart may not be lifted above his brothers.”
The throne does not establish the measure by which the throne is judged.
The Hebrew king stands beneath a Torah he did not legislate, before prophets he does not appoint, and within a people whose existence he cannot exhaust. His authority can be real precisely because it is not whole. No fragment may claim the authority of the whole, and this is the specifically Hebrew meaning of political idolatry. An idol is not merely a false god. It is a finite fragment made to stand for a whole that it can neither contain nor exhaust.
Government becomes idolatrous when it no longer presents itself as one limited instrument of Jewish collective life, but as the source, guardian, and authorised image of Israel itself. It then uses the survival of the whole to secure the permanence of the fragment. It says, in effect: I am Israel; therefore my preservation is Israel’s preservation. Government defines the danger, expands its powers in response, and cites those powers as evidence of its indispensability. This is more than authoritarianism. It is political power attempting to provide its own foundation.
The State of Israel is not a party to the Covenant in place of the people of Israel. It is a historically necessary instrument situated within a relation it did not create, cannot own, and has no authority to exhaust. Political idolatry begins when the state inserts itself between Israel and Hashem, claiming to represent the people to the Covenant and the Covenant to the people. It may then multiply flags, prayers, biblical claims, and territorial declarations precisely as it removes the distance through which the Covenant can still judge power.
This danger is visible when indefinite mobilisation becomes normal, when military necessity cannot be distinguished from political convenience, and when soldiers and their families bear the cost of strategies producing tactical movement without political destination. A government can survive while exhausting a society. An army can dominate territory while losing the political capacity to end a war. Power must therefore be measured not only by what it can destroy, but by the forms of life that remain possible after its exercise.
The idolatry of the state is not the only danger. A fragment of Israel may also separate itself from the people and claim to embody Israel’s covenantal distinction more fully than the whole. Haredi withdrawal may begin as a refusal of secular state idolatry and an attempt to preserve an intense halachic life. Boundaries can protect a community, but a boundary becomes idolatrous when it ceases to protect obligation and becomes proof that the community possesses holiness.
No part of Israel can declare itself the true Israel. When Torah study is invoked to transfer common burdens to others while requiring the state to finance and defend communal autonomy, separation becomes a competing claim to sovereignty. The army and the yeshiva then mirror one another. Each may perform a necessary function, yet each risks saying: Israel exists because of us. Function becomes foundation, distinction becomes possession, and service becomes a demand for immunity.
The state may build its idol from strength, while an enclosed religious community builds its idol from separation. Both appropriate the covenantal power of setting apart. The state identifies Israel with sovereignty; the self-enclosed community identifies Israel with its own reproduction. What remains is national difference without covenantal differentiation: Israel marked off from the nations, but government no longer distinguished from Israel; a religious community marked off from society, but no longer exposed to a demand it does not control.
The prophet restores the distances that political and religious power attempt to close. Nathan can confront David because David is not the source of the measure by which he is judged. Elijah can accuse Ahab over Naboth’s vineyard because royal necessity does not annul the covenantal limitation of possession and violence. The widow, the orphan, the stranger, the indebted, the conscripted, and the dispossessed are not incidental beneficiaries of biblical compassion. Their condition reveals whether power remains within the Covenant or has made itself its substitute.
British Jews are now placed between two corrupt demands. One requires them to condemn Israel as the price of admission into progressive society. The other requires them to defend every Israeli government as the price of belonging to the Jewish people. British Jews should not be required to apologise for Israel’s existence, but neither should they be transformed into the external diplomatic reserve of its government. Refusing to identify the Jewish people with the temporary decisions of a state may be one of the most important forms of Jewish loyalty now available.
A government is not the people. Military capacity is not security. Territorial possession is not Covenant. Communal separation is not holiness. Even the name “Israel” cannot become an alibi protecting any fragment from Jewish judgment. A Jewish state remains Jewish in a serious covenantal sense only if it can be judged by something it did not create and does not own.
That measure is not an abstract morality imposed upon Jews from outside. It is the Hebrew refusal to let power declare itself sacred merely because it protects us, and to let separation declare itself holy merely because it preserves us. Jewish loyalty is therefore neither state obedience nor communal immunity. It is the determination that no government, army, territory, party, rabbinic institution, or enclosed community will be permitted to occupy the place of the Covenant between the people of Israel and Hashem.
No fragment is Israel.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
