Zionism, the Eternity of God and the future of the State of Israel

Those Jews who believe in God and the timelessness of God – His unending existence – will produce the words of Moses’s Psalm, Psalm 90, as their evidence. Here, Moses uses an allegory to describe the eternal nature of God. This assertion – that God is eternal – is repeated by religious Jews down the years that follow, for example in the enjoining of those reciting the Shema to assert that His Kingdom will be for ever.

Yet, it can just as eaily be claimed that, to say that God is eternal – or not necessarily to say, but to allude to the fact that God is eternal – is to make a statement about who, what – and it should be added, where or when He is. And, of course, there are those who will claim that it is not possible to so describe God.

It is the author’s position that it can be held that God, assuming He exists, is eternal and, equally, it is possible to have the opinion that it is possible to claim it is – and so on and so forth, a statement to be qualified incrementally ad infinitum.

Similarly, it is possible to claim that it is not possible to claim that God is eternal, again, to be qualified ad infinitum.

So, if God is not, indeed, eternal, Zionism, both in its Religious and Political manifestations, will have to be thought about and articulated totally differently and the question of whether the State of Israel will survive may depend on how Religious Zionists apply the above definition of God to the southern Levant.

After all, God, it is asserted by Religious Zionists, promised Moses, and Abraham before him, the land known as the southern Levant in perpetuity. Was “perpetuity” to be understood as perpetuity, or sporadically?

Let us here assume that God exists.

Did God exist when the Israelites were exiled in Babylon? Has God always been? What about the period after the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple? Why did it take until 1948 for the State of Israel to be created? Did God exist in the intervening years? – throughout the pogroms? and throughout the Shoah?

It may be said that the author’s theories, individually and collectively, mirror the eternal nature of God, for they, also, convey thoughts which, when applied, are as eternal in nature and, therefore, allude to His timelessness, his enduringness.

But the author will say that her statements are directed at philosophers, theologians and other commentators and what these thinkers say about God – not the concept of God! And, in this way, her warnings still stand and should still be heeded.