Treasure Trove: Don’t Forget the Justice Part of Zionism (A Note for Tisha B’Av)

There is a Jewish story told about Napoleon.  He once travelled through a Jewish small town in Europe and entered a synagogue where he witnessed men and women sitting on the floor weeping.  Napoleon asked what terrible misfortune had occurred, why were these people crying?  He was told that it was Tisha B’Av and the Jews were mourning the destruction of the two ancient Temples that had occurred thousands of years before.

Napoleon responded “A nation that cries and fasts for over 2,000 years for their land and Temple will surely be rewarded with their Temple.”  This may or may not have really happened, but the story is a good one.  It is about the Jewish people’s remembrance of our ancient presence in the Land of Israel, and the desire to return to it.

This was the essence of the Zionist movement at its beginnings.  Zionism as conceived by its founder, Theodor Herzl, is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, aiming to secure the right for Jews to live freely and safely in our ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel.  Herzl believed that the Jewish people should have the same rights as all other people.

To advance this mission, Herzl organized Zionist Congresses bringing together Zionists from around the world to meet and plan towards this objective.  He attended six Congresses before he died in 1904 (22 Congresses were held before Israel’s independence in 1948 and the 39th Congress was held last year).

This is an invitation to a banquet organized by British Zionists extended to Zionists from other countries who attended the Fourth Zionist Congress in London in 1900.  See https://herzlcollection.com/london-1900  for more information about the Fourth Zionist Congress. The invitation depicts the destruction of Jerusalem with a Jew cowering before two Roman Legionnaires.  The purpose of Zionism is to ensure that this scene which occurred many times in many forms before 1948, would never happen again.

On the top left is a scene of farmers working the land in the community of Rishon LeZion and on the right is this verse from Isaiah 1:27 in Hebrew, “Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness”.  

Taken all together, in 1900 the organizers of the Fourth Zionist Congress were saying that the path from destruction and despair to independence, reflected by working our own land, is through justice and righteousness.  Herzl’s vision for the Jewish state was for it to be a model society, one that was just and inclusive.

Tisha B’Av begins at sundown on Wednesday July 22.  As we mourn the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem and the other calamities that have befallen the Jewish people on this day, we should also recommit ourselves to Isaiah’s prophecy which states that justice, repentance and righteousness are the conditions of our people’s redemption, and we should act to realize Herzl’s vision for a model, just and inclusive society. 

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Treasure Trove is a program of The Herzl Project. Another program is The #Herzl100. 100 Herzl artifacts will be posted over 100 days on Instagram, FaceBook and TikTok. Search #Herzl100 on any of these platforms to see the first 48 artifacts, with 52 still to go! A new one drops every day.

For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which has appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove