These and these are the words of the Living G-d

The Times of Israel Blogs section is an essential venue where the different voices shaping the Jewish future meet and engage.

Coming to the Blogs today, one finds Shaul Arieli’s blast against annexation, envisaging a “devastating chain reaction that would threaten Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state”. In this vision, “Israel would be forced to establish military rule and assume responsibility for 2.6 million Palestinians”. The “economic costs are staggering” taking into account the direct welfare costs and the indirect costs of international isolation. And “from a security perspective, the IDF would need to double its presence in the territory, severely compromising its readiness for war on other fronts.”

One also finds Avi Kamionski’s cry for the whole of the biblical land to become recognised as “the homeland of the Jewish people – whole and undivided”, based on the Bible “which not only informs our identity but establishes Israel as our rightful home” and exhorting us Jews to “stand together in declaring the entirety of Israel as our homeland”. In this vision, “Israel would unequivocally claim its historical and geographical boundaries, while making it clear that those Arabs who wish to live peacefully within Israel’s borders are welcome to do so.”

The way I look at it, Arieli’s call represents the battered Jewish body.

It speaks of the Jewish struggle to find a place as a parochial and accommodating people squeezed up uncomfortably alongside two universalising religions. It speaks of the 2,000-year struggle to balance acceptance and authenticity, between the G-d of justice and the G-d of mercy, and the pragmatic realism that our biblical forefathers displayed in dealing honorably with their non-Jewish counterparts, from Malchitzedek and Abimelech to Jethro and Hiram of Tyre.

And Kamionski’s counter-call represents the pristine Jewish soul.

It speaks of the unalienable attachment and connection of the Jewish people to our ancestral land, told through scripture, and over the course of an unwavering 2,000-year struggle for recognition and the dream of return in both its religious and secular variants – ‘hatikvah’, ‘shir ha-ma’alot’, ‘le’shana haba b’yerushalayim’. It speaks of a refusal to give up on the very heart of our ancestral Land – the tribal territories of Ephraim, Binyamin and Yehudah – which have ended up as the territories most of the international community recognise as Palestinian. It speaks of the willingness to stand like Abraham, alone against the world, to say ‘this is who we are and what we believe’.

But the point is, Judaism represents the fusion of both body and soul.

As I have noted many times in my blogs (see here, for example), if you look carefully within Torah, you will see how many opposites are fused within the Jewish religious totality, a whole range of opposites across which Judaism stands as a bridge. This is no accident.

Therefore my concern, and my recent writings, have sought to answer the following question: how can we as the Jewish people act authentically to fulfil the mitzvot incumbent on us from Torah with respect to Eretz Yisrael, to maintain our unalienable connection with the whole of our ancestral Land, without denying another people their freedom and their self-determination?

This is the vision I have been setting out here, here, here and here. These blogposts culminated in my previous blogpost which sets the scene for a new Trump Administration and the prospects not merely for the deal of the century, but rather for a much better Deal of the Millennium which does justice to the hopes and dreams of all the parties concerned.