Season 1: Episode 31 - Independence Day

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To be or not to be may be the opening question, but there are a number of other important ones which keep us company along the way. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is a special episode of The Jewish Story. Yom Ha'atma'ut, Israel Independence Day. Every once in a while, you have to deviate from the program. And depending on who you ask, history kind of works the same way. because social and economic historians will tell you that history is the work of tidal forces, that the cumulative acts of millions are the real channel through which time flows. And if you're going to look for drivers of change, they're going to be found on the grand scale. In today's day and age of data streams and deep computer learning, I get that.

I can understand why the great man of theory of history is all but dead. the idea that one person really makes it happen, be he Napoleon or Gandhi or whatever. Because with the scale of our awareness being what it is, I hear the notion that one person doesn't make history. Even President Trump is at best expressive of currents which his society produced and drive him. Nevertheless, part of the bread and butter of historians is pointing out critical moments. You can call them turning points, watersheds, what have you. Points at which things change. And at least in hindsight, we can see two different worlds which lie on either side of the divide. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Columbus crossing the Ocean Blue.

The atom bomb on Hiroshima. And in the Hebrew calendar, there are several such historic moments which were fixed for observance for all time. And the word that the Torah uses for such a critical junction is a moed, moedim, are times of appointed meeting. These are the times when God invites us to show up. Times in history, when his presence was made clearly available, and when his will was expressed in the human story. We as a people are invited, truth is, commanded, to keep these sacred times as a living memory every year. or even every week because the Torah actually has two types of moed of the sacred times meeting and the first is Shabbat Shabbat as we say is it's a memory a reconnection to the act of creation it's a constant reconnection actually to the notion that creation is itself an expression of God's will not just the details of it but the very fact of existence and Shabbat as we say is Kaviyah the Kaimah.

It is fixed and established. Before there were ever any Jews, there was Shabbat. And therefore, if, God forbid, there were no Jews, there would still be Shabbat. It's part of the fabric of creation. That's the first level of the Moed. The next level are the festival holidays. Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, and everything which goes with them. These all have a root in our national historic experience. and in the agricultural cycle of the land of Israel. But, they're expressive of an aspect of the divine will that actually transcends history or geography. And therefore, wherever Am Yisrael has found itself, down through the generations, we've come to God at these fixed times in the calendar to reconnect to his will, which is expressed through each of these particular times.

Now, there's an important distinction between Shabbat and the festivals, because whereas Shabbat exists even without the Jews, so to speak, because it's part of the fabric of creation these Moadim, these sacred times of meeting are in our hands to actualize because though they're written in the Torah and as such have a certain top-down commanded form and essence their timing in the world is meant to be fixed by the Jewish courts and if the courts change a month add a month in the calendar or switch when exactly the month begins then that is when this date actually exists the festivals are expressive of the divine will that within creation Am Yisrael is the vehicle for its story so Shabbat is a connection to the fact that creation itself expresses divine will and the festivals are an expression of the fact that this creation has a story and there's one more level before we get down to Yom HaTzmuth, to Independence Day because the Hebrew calendar of course didn't end with the Torah The holy days of Purim and Hanukkah aren't there, and yet they're critical in every year.

These are days whose roots are entirely in the journey of Am Yisrael through time. But what makes them different than so many other transformative experiences we've had is that the sages undertook the task of deriving the essential meaning from these particular historical events. The message of Hanukkah, that miracles happen. The message of Purim, the blessing of God's hidden face, these are eternal messages which are directed at Am Yisrael, but derived from our historical experience. They're bottom up. They're sacred times when we show up and insist that God is always present. And it's important to note that the light of Hanukkah and the joy of Purim have actually been our mainstay in this long exile, but that a new opportunity to meet God is appearing on the horizon right now and the question is, will we take it?

because today, Yom Ha'atzma'ut still needs no explanation of what it's about because not only do we still have the remaining few of a generation that recalls the reality of what it was to be a people without a home we're also faced sadly daily with the reality of the tragic sacrifice that our return demands That's why Yom Hazikaron, the memorial day for the fallen of Israel's wars and the victims of Terah, is bound up so closely with Yom Hazmut. For those of you who don't know, it actually is back-to-back. There's a moment of transition when you go from the deepest mourning to the highest joy, which is expressive of so much of the Jewish experience. If you've never been in the land of Israel for it, come now.

Oh, it's a little bit late for this year, but next year is always there. So they're so closely bound up together because the pain of Yom Hazikron actually erases the need to explain at all the meaning of our joy at independence. The two are one. But in my eyes, Am Yisrael is always playing the long game. And I personally dream of a time when the death of so many precious people, their sacrifices whose blood soaks the altar of our independence, is actually truly a memory. A sacred, honored memory. But one whose painful immediacy lies well in the past. There doesn't need to be. death forever, because of course the vision is that nation won't lift up sword against nation, and they won't learn war anymore.

So this is the task that has to begin in our time. To dig deep into history, into consciousness, into our own godly souls, and find what new element of divine will is expressed in this special day of Yom HaTzmaut of Independence Day. And it's a new element that's going to have to be fixed for all time in our sacred calendar, so that our children's children's children will know to meet God there. Now, I'm going to get to the rise of Zionism, and the revival of the national spirit in a proper fashion in this series, but I can't pass up the opportunity to deviate from the program right now, and just look a little bit at the rise of Zionism and the whole story. So, for now, if we look at the historical momentum that gave the context and also provided the tools for the present fulfillment of the divine promise that Am Yisrael will return to the land of Israel, it was driven actually by quite a simple question.

And it a question I want to take the rest of this episode to really consider with you And that is what is an am Now careful by answering the question with translation because if I ask people what is an am I'll generally get two replies. It could be a nation, or it could be a people. Now, in answering that question, we have to remember that the context for the rise of Zionism as a modern political movement was largely European Romantic nationalism. And that was a political process that went through its own evolution, transforming the very amorphous notion of peoplehood into the extremely powerful vessel of the nation-state. Meaning, a lot of it was about asking the question of, what is an am? Are people and a nation the same thing?

And is a nation perforce embodied in a nation-state? So let's take a little bit of a look at this question, and perhaps gain some insight into the importance of this day. So the first appearance of the word at all in the Torah, which is always an important thing to do if you're trying to nail down meaning, is in the book of Genesis in Bereshit, in the 11th chapter, the sixth line. And there, in the introduction to the story of the Tower of Babel, it says, they are one Am, and they all have one language. Interesting, one Am, which I'll avoid translating for now, and one language. When you put that together with the first time the term is used in reference to Am Yisrael in the first chapter of Exodus in the ninth line, when Pharaoh turns to his people, there's the translation, he says to his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we are.

And this is where Egypt turns on Israel and begins to enslave them. It's fascinating. the first is the first element of European nationalism which is language that we're going to touch a little bit more and the second is the definition of self through the rejection of other Pharaoh says to his people behold these people are dangerous to us and in that Egypt and Israel are both born as an Am you know this piece of language is not secondary If you look in the writings of Herder, the godfather of German nationalism, he taught that language is a primary shaper for the patterns and frameworks of thought of a people. Therefore, he argues, to attain a purity of peoplehood, it's essential to gain a purity of language.

As he said, and I quote, Spew out the ugly slime of the saying. Speak German, O you German. he was worried about the influence of French language and therefore French thought and therefore the dilution of German culture and peoplehood. Yeah, it didn't play out well between them either. But either way, now you can have a little bit of an insight into why the reinvigoration of the Hebrew language was actually one of the first steps in the return to a full sense of Jewish peoplehood that could return to the land. As a movement, Zionism was clearly rooted in the awakening of the Hebrew language, the revival of a national culture, and the rebirth of that tricky spirit of the Maccabees we've spoken about.

That strange notion that our divine mission as a people, indeed our existence as a people, is bound up with sovereignty over particular territory. And in the end of the day, all these elements were really about the question, what does it mean to be an Am? To be a people? but the truth is this question of what is an Am has been floating around for thousands of years in Am Yisrael we already touched a bit of the roots as I said it's origins in the Torah and it is actually critical to know that Am is not the only term in play here I mean I can't keep dancing around people, nation, etc because God's promise to Avraham which really gets the whole story started is go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house to the land that I will show you and I will make you into a great nation.

Now there the word is goi kadol. And it's critical to remember that Abraham's mission is unique in its national dimension. We see that up until now, God had had relationships with individuals and I imagine that any people within it holds individuals who have a capacity to reach the highest possible spiritual state. I think that's part of the human condition. But what God's plan for Avram and his children was, was to create a nation. Somehow, a national existence of holiness, where from the plumber to the president, there was an embodiment of the divine will that had not yet been seen in creation. So, it's also important to note that this promise to Avram is actually redeemed at Sinai, where the covenant that precedes the giving of the Torah was the promise that if we keep the laws, we will be, and once again I quote, a treasure out of all the peoples, there's that Amim, and you shall be to me, Mamleche Kohanim, the Goy Kadosh, a kingdom of ministers, and a holy people, holy nation really.

And so, in one stroke at Sinai, Am Yisrael completely uprooted the ancient world's notion of blood, God, and land, which defined peoplehood. What do I mean? Well, blood is the genetics, and that's quite obvious. Land was the geography that constrained that genetics into an immediacy of association that allowed us to ask the questions about the mysteries of the world that we call God. Blood, God, and land. That's the triad of the ancient world. But here, the Jewish people, when they got to Sinai, the sages say that we all converted. What does that mean? We went down to Egypt as 70 people, one family. We came out as a nation, and what's critical is the acceptance of the Torah, our relationship to God, was a conceptualization of what up until now had been a family relationship.

You can actually convert to being Jewish. How do you convert into a peoplehood? So, not only that, but our relationship to God was deliberately forged outside of the land. and ultimately what we end up with is two vessels that hold our relationship with God the land and the Torah and the former, the land, is dependent on the latter on the Torah, because the land will spit us out if we don't live by the dictates of the law and so moving forward rapidly through 3,000 years of history and our question of what it means to be an Am we went into the land a phase that had its own rich history of answering the question of what is an Am? And it was the voice of the prophets which prevented us from settling, from striking roots so deep, too deep, that we would become like the nations of the lands around us, because the prophets kept alive the question, what is an Am?

If you want to take a deep dive into the question, you should learn the whole book of Isaiah in particular. But for now, just a few of his words will suffice, from chapter 43. Where all the nations gathered together, the prophet says, and the kingdoms assembled, notice the language, who of them would tell this or let us know of the first event? Who's still telling the story? Let them present their witnesses, and they shall be deemed just. And let them hear and say, it's true. You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and my servant whom I chose, Atem Edai. That's what you are, Am Yisrael, my witnesses. in order that you know and believe me, and understand that I am he. And in case you missed the point, a little later in the chapter, the prophet says, this people, this am, I formed for myself, they shall recite my praise.

It's very clear, in the voice of the prophet, in the mind of God, that what it is to be an am, is to sing the praises of God, in order that the whole world know that we all products of his will But for better or worse we couldn hold the question And the history of the first kingdom and the second of well is really one of becoming a nation like any others I mean, as I say, Jews are just like everybody else only more so and so much so to the point where our collective existence in the land actually became a barrier to our ability to live out the divine vision of the Torah and thus began the long exile the beginning of Huzan, please God were tasting even now. But it was quite lengthy up to get here.

And there are way too many voices which addressed our question over the last 2,000 years of what is an am to hear them all now. Hopefully you've been listening. If not, there's only 22 episodes you can go back and catch up on. But I want to pick out one who stood at a particularly important junction and who can add, I think, a real insight in answering our question of what is an am. Rabbi Yehud HaLevi was the great poet of the end of the golden age of Spain talking about 11th century Spain he was actually born in Muslim Spain which then became Christian Spain and then he moved back to Muslim Spain and moved back to Christian Spain and eventually onwards but he wasn't just the great poet he was also one of its most profound thinkers but for the purposes of our discussion now what matters most was his revolutionary approach to what it means to be an Am It's important to note that he rejected the exile mentality of his age, of the Jews who simply sought to make their way amongst the kingdoms of the Christians and the Muslims.

I mean, a lot of the Golden Age was all about how good it was for the Jews, at least in the upper echelons of these societies. He longed for a return to peoplehood in the land of Israel. And there was a critical, if somewhat edgy, thought that underlies his aspiration. Now, his great work was the Kuzari. If you want to know more, you should go listen to episode 20. My heart is in the east, I highly recommend it. There's a section of the Kuzari, of his beautiful, powerful work of faith, which is essentially a commentary on what's known as the Sefer Yitzira, the Book of Creation. It's the oldest mystical work that we have in our hands. And there, Rabbi Yehuda Alevi, in his comments, describes creation as a progressive, layered unfolding of divine will.

What do I mean? It begins, this is what's known, for those who are familiar with, it begins with the inanimate, the Domem in Hebrew. And by the way, it's important to note that each level of the unfolding will, which finds its expression in creation, has a particular attribute, a new aspect of the Divine Will, and then each level above it will incorporate that and add. So therefore you have the inanimate, And the primary expression of will is that there should be. The inanimate is solid. It's an expression of God's desire that there should be something which exists. On top of that, you get the Tzomeach, the vegetative world. And of course, this takes the solidity of the inanimate and adds to it life.

And moving outwards, we get Bal Chayim. You have the living animals, the moving, breathing. And what do they add? They, of course, are solid and alive. What they add is will. The difference between a tree and a dog, amongst other things, is that if a tree doesn't get what it needs, it dies. A dog will go looking. That's will. And so, as we move outwards, we get to humanity. But humanity receives a particular description in this structure. It's known as the midaber, the speaking creature. because of course we're solid and we're alive and we have a will, but we are able to conceptualize and communicate our existence in that wondrous miraculous medium that we call speech. Each of these points are a new expression of a different aspect of God's will.

Now the Sefer Yitzhira actually stops there, but Rebbe Yehudah Levi adds a fifth level and that is Israel. This is where it gets edgy because you could read this as the Jew being a new species the exact opposite of the Jews are just like everybody else. And indeed, many people point to this as the root of what's known as Jewish particularism and even Jewish supremacy. But I've been taught to look at it consistently and therefore somewhat differently. Because in moving upwards and outwards, it means the level of Israel, which seems to be more particular, notice we're getting more and more incorporative. humanity is solid alive, has a will and adds language Israel seems to be a subset of humanity how is it still moving outwards?

because if this level incorporates language what it adds is it adds the collective construct we're no longer just human individuals there's something which binds us together and if there's something that binds us together through language note the resonance with European nationalism that we spoke about before. Well, what it is, is that a people is a product of its story. The new level of divine will is to take the speech and consciousness and turn it into a conversation between man and God, which tells a story that can take creation in a shared direction. That's the structure of peoplehood. it's what allows us to be together because on a certain level the word am in Hebrew also means im it means with it's a sense of withness of a collective story and that's how in a phenomenal fashion Jews in North Africa in Poland and in Babylon who'd never seen each other who didn't dress alike who didn't even really share a vernacular language nevertheless shared a story that allowed them to be together.

So, though Rabbi Yehuda himself actually merited to die in the land of Israel, and like I said, go listen to episode 20 if you want the story, it would take many more centuries until his dream of a return of the people to the land became viable. Many, many more centuries in which the questions of what is an am became more or less synonymous, or at least its answer, with the practice of the Torah, and thus we have Judaism and the Jews. We became a religion in exile. But it was important to note that specifically those who broke away from the laws of the Torah were the ones who sought their selfhood in peoplehood and decided to come home. Zionism is, after all, also a product of the Enlightenment, and the bulk of the Zionist thinkers saw religion as a phase of Jewish life which preserved us in exile at best, and at worst as a product of the exile that had to be abandoned in order to return to our status as an Am.

And at the risk of jumping too quickly to the close, the great religious thinker of the early 20th century who put his heart and soul into our question was Moreno Rabbeinu Rav Avram Yitzchakon Kuk, Rav Kuk, who spilled more tears and more ink over the question of peoplehood than perhaps any other thinker before him. And in his work, The Mahalach Ha'idiot Bi Yisrael, the progress of ideas within Israel, Raul Cook describes the history of Am Yisrael and in truth the history of all humanity as the interplay between two fundamental conceptions, the national conception and the divine conception. Meaning, there's a divine reality, and there are human constructs which are both products of it and vessels for receiving its reality.

And as he traces the evolution of the national vessel of Israel and how it is able to express the divine conception, Rav Kook notes that what we call religion is actually a product of exile. Because exile shattered the national vessel. and perforce shrank the all godly ideal which it used to hold into a set of beliefs behaviors and practices which negotiate our relationship with God Be it personal or at most communal that's what religion is. And instead of an existence of an Am who could hold a divine presence, giving voice to it through prophecy, we became a community of the observant. It's certainly not a bad thing, and he describes actually why this was a necessary process of refinement. but nevertheless, it's not the definition of an am.

But now you do the math. If religion is a product of exile, then redemption will require what? Well, clearly the secular Zionists finished the sentence by rejecting religion. Rav Kook would never do such a thing. He saw the Torah as we knew it as necessary, but not sufficient. He said that the Torah of exile was a Torah of katnut, literally of smallness, but in the sense of a narrowness of focus. It was an expression of the narrowness of the scope of our existence in exile because when the context within which the Torah grows is that of other nations, then what it produces will be a narrowly focused way of life, inevitably so. But, replanted in its native soil, it becomes the Torah of gadlut, a Torah of greatness, an expansive Torah, and this is the Torah of Eretz Yisrael, an expression of the godly ideal which is broad and as deep as human experience can offer and whose full extent we can't even imagine.

And if that's Torah Yisrael which grows out of Eretz Yisrael what does the Am Yisrael which embodies it look like? So I hope at this point you recognize that this is a very important question what is an Am? And even if you yourself aren't a member of Am Yisrael, you're living in a world today which is struggling with this question. Part of the world has said, Ha! Nations? That's so 20th century. It's just a bunch of drum-beating, chest-thumping, chauvinist, patriarchal, you fill in the rest of the adjectives. Another portion of the world is actually saying, Hey, get your cosmopolitan, globalist, universalist hands off my culture. I want to be who I am. So the tension between these poles of particularism and universalism places the question of what it is to be a people right in the center.

And it's such an important question that we have to own the fact that we haven't gotten to the answer yet. And perhaps that itself is my answer to my original question, which is what are we celebrating? And what can we continue celebrating for a thousand years to come on Yom Ha'atzma'ut, the Israel Independence Day? Because to me, the essential lesson of Yom Ha'atzma'ut, the thing which transcends even the astounding particular historical circumstance that gives us this day, is our commitment to the process. you know, every day twice a day, a Jew is called to say the declaration of God's unity, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one and it's a strange thing why hear O Israel the Lord our God shouldn't it just be, hear O Israel the Lord is one, it's supposed to be the declaration of God's unity, why stick in the our God piece if you really want the deepest answer you should go look at Rashi and by the way, if you want his story, check out episode 22 but meanwhile, he has an amazing thing to say in his commentary on this verse he says, the Lord, who is now our God and not the God of the other nations he will be declared in the future the one God as it said, for then I will convert the peoples to a pure language that all of them call in the name of the Lord.

That's from the prophet Svanian, the third chapter, ninth line. What's Rashi telling us? He's saying that every time we declare God's unity, we're also admitting that we're not there yet, that we're in the process. And he's also telling us that our national vessel, our particular embodiment as a people, is meant to be a vehicle for a universal godly ideal. And further and finally, that this ideal will find its ultimate expression in a shared language, so that when we ask questions like, what is an am? we can actually understand each other's answers. On a deeper level, Yom Ha'at-Turut isn't just about celebrating our commitment to process. Grit your teeth, push through, we're not there yet. It's actually about tasting the sweetness of the product in the process itself, because this is a great day of celebration.

Just like Rav Kook teaches us, that on the third day of creation, God commanded the ground to bring forth, I quote, fruit trees producing fruit. Eitz Pri, Ose Pri. Meaning, that the trees themselves were meant to taste of their own fruit. They were supposed to taste like fruit, and produce fruit which tasted sweet as well. In other words, the process, that which produces, is supposed to taste of the sweetness of the product. But the first sin was the ground's failure to do so. Because instead, if you look at the next verse, it brought forth trees producing fruit. And, says Rav Kook, from that moment on, the process was forever estranged from the product. And Rashi notes, when the whole story comes to its culmination with Adam eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that when God punishes him, in Genesis 3.17, it says, Cursed be the ground for your sake.

With toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Oh, who doesn't regret that one, toiling away? It's a strange thing. Autumn is the one that ate from the tree. Why should the ground be cursed? What's going on here? And why should the ground be cursed? And its expression is the fact that he, through toil, will actually eat. It's very simple, because it was the ground that divorced the process from the product. Just imagine if you could taste the sweetness of the results as you labored away for what really mattered to you. Because if you could taste the success in every drop of sweat, it wouldn't be toil at all. And furthermore, you'd never give up on anything. And your life and the whole world would be a much better place.

and this I believe is what Yom HaTzmut is really about we have to celebrate not just the process the fact that we're not there but that we're moving along but it's sweetness because we're not there yet but we're on the way and if we can taste the sweetness of the Prada as we labor away to build a better people a better nation a better world then our return to our land is the redemption not just of our people but of Adam, of humanity as a self. And truly, the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption. I just want to thank you for listening. And everybody else out there who helps make this happen. If you want to join the people to make this happen, please go right now to www.patreon.com and find my M.

Foyer page. And you can hit donate for a little per-podcast support. I also want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for providing a platform that allows me to touch so many hearts and minds out there. I want to thank the folks at pardes.org.il for giving me a home to teach the Jewish people. I also want to thank Suomiakov, suomiakov.com because it is actually my spiritual home. You can find me on Ralph Mugfoyer at Facebook because this is The Jewish Story. .