Twice-Promised Land

To be clear about the ground from which I speak: I am passionately committed to wrestling God as part of the people named Yisrael—"Israel, God wrestler." I feel connected with Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Joshua Heschel (their memories be for a blessing) in the last generation, and I look forward with eagerness and trepidation to the coming of Messiah—be it speedily and in our own day!

When I address the issue of the land of Israel, my first thoughts are:

• That God promised that land to the people of Israel on permanent and irrevocable but intermittent loan (for ownership of that land, like all land, belongs to God);
• That Israel's actual possession of the land is intermittent because possession depends on how well Israel follows the commands of Torah to hallow the earth and human society;
• That every intervening exile from the land, caused by Israel's failure, no matter how long the exile will be followed by another chance;
• That the contemporary state of Israel is the form the Jewish people's continuing experiment in fulfilling Torah in the land takes, in our generation;
• That Israel is commanded also to live among the nations, in order to learn from them and teach them; in order through dialogue-in-action to renew its own, and their, holiness and creativity.

These are my first thoughts. I hold them out of my own reading of God's Word as revealed in Torah, in the human heart, and in history. These first thoughts are not unusual in the Jewish community, though the last one among them is not universally accepted.

My second thought is held by far fewer people in the Jewish community. It is that in some sense God has also promised a relationship with the same land—not necessarily the same kind of relationship—to another people: the children of Ishmael, in our generation represented by the Palestinian people.

This too I learn from God's word revealed in Torah, in the human heart, and in history.

Isaac and Ishmael
Why would God promise the same land twice to two different peoples, even if the two promises are somewhat different? And why do I say there are two promises, anyway? First, in the text of Torah (Genesis 16-17 and 20-21), the story of the struggle between Abraham's two wives and their two sons—Hagar and Ishmael, Sarah and Isaac—is the paradigm of the struggle between Jews and Arabs. According to the traditions of both peoples, the Jews are descendants, physically and spiritually, of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac; the Arabs, physically and since the coming of Islam spiritually as well, are the descendants of Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael.

In that story, Sarah insists that for Isaac's good, Ishmael and Hagar must leave the family. Abraham is troubled, but God upholds Sarah's wishes. God promises to continue the covenant of Abraham through Isaac; but God also promises to make of Ishmael a great nation, and prophesies of Ishmael that he will be a wild jackass of a man (that is, a nomad); he will lift up his fist against everyone and all will lift their fists against him; and finally "he will dwell face to face with all his brothers" (Genesis 16:12).

Somehow, somewhen, Isaac and Ishmael must learn to live in each other's presence after being separated. Indeed, in their own lifetimes the two are reconciled when Abraham dies (Genesis 25). They meet again at their father's grave in Hebron, the grave that in our generation has become the scene of bitter contention, of raised fists and worse, between their descendants.

Why were the brothers separated? And how can they be reconciled?

To understand, we need to remember that Isaac was the younger of two sons and that over and over in the Book of Genesis, there can be peace between brothers only after a period of enmity and strife. So it was with Jacob and Esau and with Joseph and his older brothers.

To understand, we also need to know that Isaac's name (in Hebrew YiTzChaK) means "Laughing Boy." And we have to know that when Sarah accuses Ishmael of "making sport with" or "mocking" Isaac (Genesis 21:9), the word she uses is "MiTzaCheyK"—from the same root of "laughing." The same root. Ishmael is acting out the "laughter" that is at the root of Isaac's soul, and this playful aspect of Ishmael is playing havoc with Isaac's identity.

How can we experience this agony, this havoc? Take a mirror. Hold it close to your mouth, breathe warm upon it. Now look. Watch your own image, your own identity, waver in the steamy mirror. Or remember when someone mimicked your words, repeated them a few seconds later—tone and all. Now imagine someone mimicking your very essence. Feel crazy? So did Isaac—and Ishmael. The difficulty is that Ishmael is a cloudy mirror to Isaac, and vice versa. The problem is that neither son can grow up to be his own person unless they can grow up separately. The problem is not that the two brothers are so different; it is that they are so similar (though not identical). The danger is that their similarity will drive both of them crazy.

And that is what we see before us now. Israelis and Palestinians love the same land. They cannot, either of them, bear to recognize that the other also loves the land. That the other also has a claim to the land. That the other is more like them than different. Each of them seems to feel that "if the other does, I don't." Neither seems able to grasp the possibility that the land has—somehow, somewhy—been promised twice. And not only in relation to the land, but also in their experience of exile, there are some similarities. The Palestinians in their short exile have suffered a (milder) version of the torments that the Jews have suffered in their age-long exile. The Palestinians have even become the alternately upwardly mobile and downwardly victimized "Jews of the Middle East" (as many Arabs call them, with mixed respect, envy, and hatred—just as some Western Christians speak of the Jews).

Reconciliation? Living face to face? Let us come back to that after I explain how modern Zionism fits into the picture I have sketched. In the last century there have been many modern Zionisms. Some have been explicitly religious, others explicitly secularist and anti-religious. Some have been left wing, others right wing in their version of the new Jewish community they were building. (That should concern only Jews.) Some were fraternal, others domineering in their outlook on the Palestinian Arabs. (That must be of concern to everyone.)

All of them, even the ones that called themselves secular, drew on the religious-Jewish passion for the land of Israel; on the two millennia of Jewish prayers, three times a day, to return and there be permitted to build a holy society; on the knowledge that God's covenant with Israel had never been revoked and never would be—that the diaspora was both an exile and an education, was both in order that the Jews could learn God's teaching deeper and teach God's teaching better; and on the knowledge that someday the exile would end.

Is it possible for modern Christians or Muslims—for anyone except perhaps Palestinians—to understand this passion? Maybe. Try this. Imagine—if you empathized with the Vietnamese during the American war against them—that the United States had "won." Had poisoned the land and decimated the people and driven out those who were left. The Vietnamese, as those Americans who met them recognized with awe, loved their land with an awesome passion. How long would they have insisted on remembering it? How long would they have prayed, mourned, celebrated, walked, flown, in efforts to return? How long before they would have stopped planning to return? How long before others would have said they had no right to return? Twenty years? One hundred? Five hundred? Two thousand?

The Roman empire did that to the Jews. And the Jews remembered for two full thousand years. And not only remembered but planned, acted.

It is true that others—Christians and Muslims especially, out of religious theories of having supplanted the Jews—soon concluded that the Jews had lost any right to return. But that notion the Jews did not accept. Always, there were efforts to return.

To what end? So that the Jews should not remain forever luftmenschen, "air people," floating above reality, full of hot air, "spiritual" without mattering to material life. For the Jewish vision has always been that the most soulful holiness does not matter unless it is applied to "matter"—to body. The command to share out all the wealth and let the land rest in the year of Jubilee should not remain forever a lot of hot air blown across the lips of Torah scholars. Someday it must be done, and we need a land to do it with. Or fail to.

And here we come to the heart of the covenant, and why God promised the land twice. God wanted, wants, the Jews to be a holy people, a kingdom all of priests—a "vanguard" people, you might say. A holy people that teaches by example all the peoples how to be holy peoples.

Such a people needs a land to be holy with. That was why Martin Buber was a Zionist. He did not, in the beginning, want there to be a Jewish state, but he did want a self-governing Jewish community in the land of Israel. And when its history took the form of statehood, he acquiesced.

That need for a land is a "right," as well as a responsibility, an obligation. And by giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel, God teaches that every people has a right, and an obligation, to a land on which it can live out its particular pattern of holiness. The Jewish people in its quest for self-determination in a land of its own is a vanguard for all the peoples—all of whom must, and may, seek self-determination in lands of their own. Palestinians too.

But surely each people to its own land? Palestinians to some land other than the land of Israel?

But the vanguard people has a special fate. A land for every people, a people for every land—yes. But the earth has no rigid "natural" boundaries between the lands and peoples. Every people must learn to share the earth with other peoples.

So the vanguard people must learn to share its land with another people. It may even be true—mysteriously true, mystically true, and geopolitically true as well—that only if the Jewish people learns to share its land with another people will the peoples of the earth learn to share the earth with each other in peace. And in our generation, it may even be true that if the Palestinians and Israelis cannot learn to live face to face with each other, the peoples of the earth may not live to work the earth at all. Perhaps it is no accident that many scenarios for World War Last begin with an Israeli-Palestinian collision.

Am I saying that God's promises to the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael are the same? I doubt it. If we use both history and the human heart as guides to God's will, along with Torah, it seems to be that the kind of relationship the Jews and the Palestinians have to "that land" may not be the same. Jerusalem is unique to the Jews, very special but not absolutely unique to Muslims. The point that many Israelis make is also true: Arabs have many sovereign states, the Jews but one—can't Palestinian Arabs find some self-expression in the others? Some, it seems; but not enough. In other words, there may be differences between the promises. But that both peoples have a stake in the land seems obvious now—except to both of them.

Now suppose we come down to earth. What shall we do? (A Jewish question!)

For the Jewish people, the theology I have sketched above comes out this way: We must 1) build a holy society among ourselves in the land of Israel; 2) accept that Palestinians must have a place, should have a place within the land to build their own society under their own government (to me it seems clear that the West Bank and Gaza should be that place); and 3) celebrate the continuance of the diaspora in a dialectical and complementary relationship with the state of Israel.

And what should our cousins Ishmael do? They, the Palestinians, should begin by getting over their present unwillingness to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state to live in peace. I do not mean by accepting merely that Israel is, unfortunately, there to stay, but accepting that it should be there; that the existence of Israel, far from negating the Palestinians' right to self-determination in the same land, confirms that right. And then they should try to build their own society, by their own lights of holiness. Not for me to say, so long as they let Israel live in peace.

But those remarks are for us Jews and our cousins Ishmael. In Sojourners I am not talking to us or even to our cousins Ishmael.

What do I want of Christians?

First, that they judge both Israel and the Palestinians by the same standards that they do all other peoples. It is for me to apply the high standards of Torah to the behavior of the Jewish people. If, within our own territory, we do not carry out the Jubilee, that is for us to struggle over. God may throw us out of the land for our failures, but the Christian world should be dealing with the beam in its own eye.

In our behavior to our neighbors, of course, everybody has a stake, Christians too. But even there, the standards that Christians apply to the Jews should not be higher than those they apply to anyone else. I, a Jew, am in spiritual agony and political rebellion over the failure of the Jewish state to live up to Jewish standards—and I have both the right and duty to be so. But why do some Christians seem more pained now, and far more vocal about it, than they were 11 years ago?

Among Jews there is a deep suspicion that many Christians disguise their dislike, even their hatred, of the Jewish people behind an insistence that we Jews are noble. So noble as to be utterly dastardly when we fail to be noble.

I do not ask Christians to condone or ignore any oppressive acts that Israel may take against other peoples. I do not ask for extra moral credit for Jews because of the holocaust, or anything else. But I do ask Christians to ask themselves whether they are putting Jews on a moralistic pedestal as a first step toward dragging us in the mud afterward.

Secondly, I would ask Christians to affirm vigorously that the Jewish people does have a right to govern itself in the land of Israel. That right does not include the right to oppress another people, but even if we oppress another people we do not lose the right to govern ourselves. The American people, for all the horrible destruction their government visited upon the Vietnamese, did not thereby forfeit their right to govern themselves.

Of course I understand the psychology by which others, whenever we behave oppressively, may get angry enough to suggest that such behavior cancels our right to be ourselves at all. But just because I understand the psychology does not mean I condone it. Only if we feel secure, affirmed by others in our right to be ourselves, will we feel secure enough to be self-critical and to hear others' criticisms.

That is why it would make a great difference to the readiness of many Jews to listen to criticism if they discover that there are Christians who are prepared to affirm with great intensity the Jewish right of self-government in the land of Israel, and simultaneously to insist that we not abuse that right by oppressing others. To many Jews, the Christian churches seem to be divided into two camps:

On one hand, heavily secularized liberals who criticize Israel unjustly, side always with the Palestinians, have their doubts about the fundamental covenant beneath the Jewish state and, if you scratch them hard enough, confess that on universalist grounds they don't like the idea of a Jewish state anyway, and would rather have one that is "secular democratic"; and perhaps—this is our fantasy, at least—if you scratch still harder will finally mutter that God's covenant with the Jews was annulled 2,000 years ago anyway; And on the other hand, fundamentalists or evangelicals who celebrate the Jewish state and don't care a damn for the Palestinians.

It would be a new thing for serious evangelical Christians to affirm the continuing covenant of the people Israel with God, to celebrate the Jewish people's recovery of its ability to govern itself in the land of Israel, and at the same time to affirm that the Palestinians, children in the body and the spirit of Abraham through Ishmael and Mohammed, also have God's promise of some sort, out of which grows the right to govern themselves in part of the same land.

It would be a new thing, an unsettling thing—to some Jews an annoyance, to some an affliction, to some an attraction, to all an incitement to new thinking.

I do believe that if someone else can steadfastly see both the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac, that will help us see each other face to face, not as in a dark and cloudy mirror. I do not promise that it will be soon, or easy. The story was first lived, and written, about 4,000 years ago. But perhaps the endtime of this story is at last upon us, as world disaster or as reconciliation.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the author of Godwrestling and Seasons of Our Joy, was the editor of Menorah, a monthly journal of Jewish renewal, when this article appeared.