Season 2: Episode 20 - Heralders of Zion

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And I, a mute person, says Shaul Chernikovsky, will stand and listen. What is for me? Who is for me? A foreigner, a stranger in their world, a foreigner, only narrowly plotting my path. Well, stranger that I am, I see the path ahead, but we've still got a ways to go. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 20, Heralders of Zion. So we've finally begun to talk about the Z word. Though Zionism has yet to emerge in our story as the central term for the coming movement. Nevertheless, our momentum is turning toward Zion, as we've seen from a number of sources. Sources that later Zionist historians will call the Heralders of Zionism. By which they mean those people who, even before the official birth of the Zionist movement, pushed the notion that the solution to the Jewish problem was to be found in a national return to Zion.

At some point, maybe, we'll speak about the full consequences of Zionist historiography to my education and yours, but for now, one element of its worldview is critical to understand, because it illuminates the nature of the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, where we find ourselves now. And that is what the new Jewish historians call the lacrimose view of Jewish history. And I'm sure we've mentioned it already. This is the notion that it has been a miserable downhill trip since we were exiled from our land. Downhill, rolling over thrones, broken glass, and flaming tar. Miserable. It's a vision of history that defines exile as wholly negative and whose litany of woes lends an urgency to the goal of national re-embodiment in the land.

Because in light of such a view of history, Zion becomes a long-sought and much-deserved refuge from the persecution of the nations. And we've mentioned, and we'll speak at length at another time, about how well this meshes with the Zionist ethos of Shlilat HaGalut, the negation of exile, and their need to create a new Jew. But for this particular chapter of our story, I just want to let it pose the question, does Zionism need anti-Semitism? Now, Jew hatred made a major comeback in the 19th century, and in a particularly virulent form, and it drove many of these men that we call the heralders of Zionism to change their views on how to solve the Jewish problem. Remember Moshe Hess, who started out as a passionate socialist and cosmopolitan, convinced that the Jews would find peace when they dissolved their particularity for the sake of world economic justice.

But eventually, life taught him a different lesson. And he realized that the real problem was that the Germans hate not so much the Jewish religion or the Jewish names as the Jewish noses. and therefore in his eyes the solution became to get out of Germany and return to Zion. Last episode, we met Leon Pinsker, ardent assimilationist, who really believed that the solution to pollution is dilution, meaning that if the Jews become culturally indistinguishable from the majority, in his case, the Russians, then we'll suffer no more. But a few too many pogroms convinced him that this was not so, that humanity suffers from what he in his medical terminology labeled as Judeophobia, which he defined as a hereditary psychic aberration caused by the disembodied ghost-like state of a people who persists without a land, like a soul that lives on without its body, and everybody is afraid of ghosts.

So the solution to this phobia in his eyes was to rid the nations of the ghost by re-embodying it in its land. And of course, Depensker actually wasn't its land per se. That land didn't have to be Zion. And that's a notion that will be shared by a number of other Zionist thinkers, as we'll see along the way. And there are more to come. Herzl himself will write about the formative influence of anti-Semitism on his thought. And it takes a prominent place in his book, The Jewish State, as will Max Nordau, just to name two of the more famous. And so this is why I say that the lacrimose view of Jewish history, this idea of the unending litany of woes of the last 2,000 years, which culminates not in the anti-Semitism of the 19th century, by the way, but rather the genocide of the 20th, begs the question of whether Zionism needs anti-Semitism.

Because in its origins, most of Zionism was a problem-solving movement, the Jewish problem. And in the eyes of these men, the pressing problem which the Jews faced in the 19th century was the rise of political anti-Semitism. In 1879, Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet entitled The Victory of the Jewish Spirit Over the German Spirit Observed from a Non-Religious Perspective. Marr was a journalist and petty politician, and so he didn't in himself represent any threat to the well-established Jews of Germany. But the book made him quite popular. After all, it went through 12 editions in only 6 years. That's two a year if you can't do the math. Marr's real impact was in the frame that he offered for the hatred of Jews, and a language that allowed that hatred to leap out of the Middle Ages and fit quite nicely into modern society.

And by the way, there's a big scary question that we're going to have to consider at some point as we approach the Holocaust. And it is, how is it that an era which began with an attempt at emancipation ended with an attempt at elimination. But for now, the major frame that Marr presents in his pamphlet is that the Jews and the Germans have been locked in an existential struggle for 1,800 years, and that the Jews have already won. And a key part of Marr's frame was his rejection of the religious nature of this struggle and the Jew hatred which it evokes. Hence his subtitle, observed from a non-religious perspective. Marr wasn't moved by theology. He was far more interested in the new racial sciences of his day.

As he wrote, there must be no question here of parading religious prejudices when this is a question of race and when the difference lies in the blood. And if we want to appreciate the rise of racial theory in the 19th century, and if you want to understand history, you ought, because it relates quite closely in our story to anti-Semitism and to the world's story, to colonialism. If we want to understand it, we have to mention Darwin. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, square in the middle of our era. And within two decades, his understanding of evolution, that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection, was already gaining wide acceptance throughout the scientific and general intellectual communities.

And there are huge implications for general human consciousness in the advent of evolutionary thinking, of which I'm a big fan, I should say. But for our story, I want to zero in on its implications as seen in the full title of this famous work. Everybody knows On the Origin of Species, but it's really On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. And it's this recognition that life is a struggle between races which led to the famous formulation of Darwin's theory as the survival of the fittest. Except, Darwin never said any such thing. In fact, if he had wanted to articulate his theory in a more simple phrase, he would have said it as the survival of that which is most fit to its environment, not the survival of the fittest.

It was Herbert Spencer, father of social Darwinism, who coined the phrase survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism is a very broad concept, but in essence, it's founded on the idea that humans, like plants and animals, are in a struggle for survival, and therefore it views human social development in terms of biology and natural law. And of particular interest to our story was the tendency by many social Darwinists to therefore explain the historical evolution of social groups into nations, principally through their success in conflicts with other groups. You see why this matters to Mara's struggle between the German spirit and the Jewish? Because in other words, those that win are those most fit to survive according to the immutable laws of biology, and fair on your so-called morality.

You see how this could lead to some pretty nasty consequences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Now, we'll go more into Social Darwinism and the role it really plays in Zionism as well when we speak about Max Nordau. But for now, and just for emphasis, note the title of a well-circulated anti-Semitic work published not long after Maher's pamphlet appeared by the German philosopher, who was considered quite important in his day, Eugene Doring. it's called the Jewish problem as a problem of race, morals, and culture and it's an attempt to once again on a philosophical basis remove the Jewish question from the historical and theological and make it into the racial and evolutionary Durin calls the Jews the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race and he says that the Jewish question is not a religious issue but one of the inherent and unchangeable character of the Jewish people.

From this, he draws a very simple conclusion, that the solution to the Jewish problem, which everyone is so pressed by, is the elimination of the false idea of tolerance for the Jews. Tolerance, he says, of such a base nature, is actually a contradiction of the true principle of human tolerance. Quote, You see where this is heading? So racial antisemitism is going to give a tremendous impetus to the desire to solve the Jewish problem one way or the other. and the Zionism that emerges from it is largely a problem-solving movement. But there's one heralder of Zionism that we haven't mentioned. I mean, there's a number of them, but I'm thinking of our father Abraham, Abraham Avinu. And after all, he was the first to hear that call, Lech Lecha, go, and to receive the promise that only in the promised land will Israel become a great nation.

Now you should know this is not a joke. The Rav of Meshul gives a sermon every year on Lech Lecha, on the state of religious Zionism. But even if you think it's funny, all jokes aside, there's a continuity of religious connection to the land of Israel, which may or may not deserve to be included amongst the heralders of Zionism. And not just the spiritual or ritual aspects of religiosity, those that have abstracted the idea of the land of Israel and the people of Israel into divine conceptions which could be carried to the four corners of the planet as part of a religious practice, but the national aspects as well. The deep-seated sense that flows from anyone that learns the Torah in Am Yisrael is not just a community of faith.

We're more than a group of people scattered by exile, but held together by our religion. We are one national soul, meant to be embodied in the land in a literal sense. So today, I want to trace a bit of the backstory which will produce that powerful force which is known today as religious Zionism. But as we do, I want you to keep your eye on this problem of the Jewish problem. Because for both the political and cultural streams of Zionism, which has already begun to form even though those terms don't exist yet, the Jewish situation is a problem to be solved. And therefore consciously or not they going to take a problem culture which will beg the question which is so pressing in our society today of what happens when you succeed in solving the problem Whereas, maybe the goal isn't to solve the Jewish problem, but rather to fulfill the Jewish mission.

And it's this distinction that will help us consider whether the ancient dream of a return to Zion is really deserving of the title heralder of Zionism. And if not, then we can ask the question of where this particularly active section of our present society may be taking us. So if we want to consider the religious roots of Zionism, it's an open question of where we ought to begin. I mean, my comments about Abraham aside, I encourage you to go back to the opening episodes of Season 1 of the Jewish Story and to delve into the story of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the men of the Great Assembly who led the original return to Zion after the Babylonian exile. There are a lot of powerful parallels there to be explored.

Just to name a few of them, the need to reconstruct history in a manner that would serve as a proper basis for present identity, the tension that they faced between the idealist notions which drove the returnees against the pragmatic concerns that they actually faced and the other tension between religious and civil rule. Like I said, just to name a few. And maybe someday we'll take time to do this in depth. It is quite illuminating our present situation. But for now, we're going to skip forward a bit closer to our era, to the Golden Age of Svot. And back in episodes 6 and 7 of this season, We spoke about the Arizal, the mystic master of Tzfat, and the great Yosef Karo, Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the definitive legal work, the Shulchan Aruch.

And, I hope you'll recall, that then I painted a picture of the tension that exists between tradition and experience, between the weight of the past and the power of the present as sources of authority in the halachic, the Jewish legal discourse. And in a sense, the name Shuchan Aruch, the set table, says it all on one end of the poll. We have all we need. All that's required is to come and learn. The table is set. Sit and do your business. And part of me knows that this is true, by the way. I know it. After all, no one alive today could even hope to touch the toes of Rabbi Yosef Karo in questions of Torah. So what could we possibly add to his table? At the same time, there's a major problem with locating all legitimate authority in the past.

First of all, it's a posture that drives us toward a stance of preservation. Toward really the orthodoxy of the chatam sofer that we've spent so much time speaking about. The one who charged us, Hadash Asur Min HaTorah, that we should never change anything, and perhaps inadvertently elevated the aspiration that my children should be just like me to a religious ideal. It's a stance of preservation. And me, I want more for my children than I have, whether it's materially or spiritually. So the goal of Orthodox religion may be preservation, but the goal of the Torah is redemption. The Torah's vision of the future is not a replication of the past or even the present, but rather a society which through its righteousness merits to bring the Spirit of God to rest on earth again.

and since I've never seen such a thing I don't think the Torah wants my children to be just like me and therefore the authority of the past may be necessary but it's not sufficient and so the Arizal brought a different spirit to Rabbi Yosef's set table because he was of course a master of Torah and he was instrumental in reviving the prophetic spirit in Am Yisrael in returning divine experience to its rightful place as a source of authority in the discourse of Torah. And for this reason, I would start the tale of religious return to Zion with him. Now, it's true that once you open the Pandora's box of legitimating experience as a source of authority, there's no knowing what will come out. I mean, don't forget our discussion back in episode 9 about the false messiah Shabtite's feet and the role which the Ariz Torah played in his development and the Sabbatean movement which emerged after his apostasy and death.

And though I didn't name it explicitly, but it was the experience of the conflict between tradition and modernity that drove the leaders of the reform movement to seize the reins of religious life and lead their communities in very new directions, directions that the set table crowd were not so fond of. And of course, the Zionists will be convinced that their experience of ongoing anti-Semitism even after the advent of emancipation indicates the need for a national solution to the Jewish problem and they will do it in the face of everyone's objections. So Shabtai Tzvi, the Reform Movement, and Zionism can all look to the Holy Ari as a turning point. But in addition to the elevation of experience perhaps even above tradition as a source of guidance there's another closely related element which all these movements absorb from the Arizal's worldview, if not from his actual teachings.

And that is the belief that redemption lies in our hands. Because as much as I wonder about how mainstream religiosity reconciles the conundrum I named between the desire to preserve a pure and unchanging practice and the dream of redemption, I actually know the answer. It's well known. until our righteous Messiah comes shut up and toe the line. You can call it faith if you will. But I would also name it as a particular type of magical thinking. In fact, magical thinking at its finest. How redemption will come is not our concern. Our concern is to hold fast and simply know that it will. And there's a beautiful nobility in this but it does tend to retard the desire to take action. And the holy Ari taught the redemption actually is in our hands, and that its time is now.

You know, they tell a story that the Ari once walked into the Beit Midrash, the house of study, where his holy Hebrai, all his students were gathered, and learning, and shtayaking away. And he announced in a loud voice, the Messiah has come now to Jerusalem. All we must do to bring redemption is to arise and greet him. So the students immediately burst into songs of praise and jumped up. But when their holy master began to actually usher them out the door toward Jerusalem, one said, wait, I have to pack. And another protested, I can't leave without telling my wife. And a third said, weed along the way. And suddenly the Arizal stopped. He dropped to the entrance of the door and began to weed. That was it, he said.

If we had acted now, redemption would have come. But now, who knows how long? We'll have to wait. And we saw the awesome destructive form that this belief in my own power to be Messiah took through Shabtai Tzvi. And we'll discuss it further as the Zionists pursue their path of auto-emancipation, as Pinsker named it. But for now, I want to pick up the thread of the religious turn to Zion with the students of Likra, the holy Gaon of Vilna. So we've seen throughout our story that periodic upwellings of Messianic hope sent waves of Jews crashing over the land, no matter how small they may have been. And whether it was the Sabbatean hopes of Rabbi Yehuda Hazid in 1700, or the more traditional Messianism of Chaim Luzato and Yor Haim Akodesh in the mid-18th century, or simply the love of the land that the Holy Baal Shem Tov suffused into his students at the beginning of the 19th?

These were all traditional religious returns. Go to Zion and wait for the Messiah. And though little in the way of what we would call nation-building was done, these early movements nevertheless did serve to increase the Jewish population of the land, so that, as far as we can tell, by 1800, of the estimated 300,000 souls living in Eretz Israel, 5,000 were Jews. Percentage-wise, it might not seem enough. But we were never really a people of numbers. And because of the spiritual, the particularly religious forces that drove them home, most of these Jews were concentrated in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Tzvat, Tiberia, and Hevron. But at the beginning of the 19th century, a new type of return began.

In 1808, Rav Menachem Mendel of Shechelov led the first group of the students of the Vilna Gaon back to the land of Israel. And over the next few years, he was followed by a number of waves of the Goan's disciples and their followers until almost the majority, some even say five out of six of his primary students had actually settled in the land of Israel with hundreds of followers and their families. Only Rav Chaim of Olozhin, who we discussed, remained behind. And while he was laboring to establish the Harvard of Jewish education in the Pale of Settlement in order that it imbibe his teacher's vision of Torah learning. These other students had come to the land of Israel in order to imbibe the Grah's vision of redemption.

Because they taught that the Gaon would often say of the Divine Presence that in this hidden redemption, the Divine Presence cannot rise of its own accord from the dust. In other words, he taught them that redemption will only come about through the ingathering of the exiles, who pick themselves up and come, and their building of the land. And furthermore, they reported that with great emotion he would add that though it would demand tremendous suffering, only through building the land will we be saved from the dreadful torments of the birth pangs of the Messiah. And this led one of the Graz students, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi Edel, to say for in the future the redemptive process will be conducted in a natural way, without miracles.

And this is why the main body of the Gras students who settled in Jerusalem began to reoccupy the Jewish quarter, to rebuild what we know as the Hurva, the Yehuda Hasid synagogue, and to make incredible efforts to build new neighborhoods and increase the economic resources of the city. Driven by the belief that practical actions were actually the means for bringing redemption. They even sought to buy up any field or vineyard which became available. Now, this was a very hopeful and extremely difficult path, but its momentum was actually broken in the year 1840, or 5,600 in the Hebrew calendar. We mentioned this year in a previous episode as a time of great messianic expectation, based on a prophecy of the Zohar, that 400 years before the millennium, that the gates above and the gates below would open.

But it was also, aside from the Messianic fervor, a time of incredible hardship, economically famine in the land of Israel. And without going into details, we'll just note that the students of the Grah largely turned away from this path of natural redemption toward a more spiritual means of bringing about the end at this time. and they joined with the Hasidim and the native Sephardic community in forming the core of what's known as the Old Yeshuv, the Old Settlement. It's the traditionalist community which will clash so strongly with the waves of secular Zionist immigration that lie ahead. But they'd set a mold, a vision of practical return which did not die with their efforts in 1840. And you know, 1840 is a year that carries a lot of weight.

Perhaps the best known and maybe even most tragic event of that year was the Damascus blood libel. On February 5th of that year a Capuchin friar and his servant disappeared in the city of Damascus and almost immediately the members of the friar's order spread rumors that the two had been murdered by the Jews of the city in order to use their blood in the preparation of the Passover matzahs. It was a blood libel of the classic medieval type but this time in the Middle East instead of the Middle Ages and at the heart of modernity in the 19th century A Jew was arbitrarily arrested by the authorities and under torture named seven perpetrators of the crime, who were then themselves seized. One happened to actually be a Jew of Austrian citizenship.

Now two of the Jews died under questioning. One converted to Islam to save himself, and the others confessed, quote-unquote, after tremendous suffering, and were subsequently condemned to death. But this wasn't the Middle Ages any longer. The friar was a French citizen, and as I said, one of his purported murderers in Austria, and therefore the libel quickly became an international affair. Protests were lodged by the diplomatic community against the barbaric methods. Various European governments attempted to get involved for and against the judgment, and all the pressure came to rest on the Egyptian government led by Muhammad Ali, not the famous boxer, because they had power over Damascus. And even the Jews themselves rallied themselves into an international delegation, which included Moses Montefiore and Adolf Kremu, in an attempt to intervene, and they in fact eventually succeeded, if not exonerating, at least in freeing, those prisoners who remained alive.

but the shock of such an event to the Jews of the West was not so quickly effaced it wasn't just that a blood libel had erupted in so unexpected a place it was much more associated with Christian Europe than Muslim Damascus and at such a surprising point in time really it was that most of the press of continental Europe where the Jews were, remember, by and large emancipated citizens took it for granted that the accusations were true and printed them over and over. Now the repercussions of the Damascus blood libel were broad and multifaceted, particularly if you follow Zionist historiography. Maybe we'll speak a little bit more later of the Alliance Israelite-Méniecelle. If you speak French, you can call me and tell me how bad that pronouncing was.

The International or Universal Alliance of Israelites. The international organization founded by Adolf Kremu, after his experience for the sake of protecting the rights of Jews worldwide. But for now, we're interested in how it affected Rabbi Yehuda Al-Khalay, Serbian rabbi, author, and yet another heralder of Zionism. Rabbi Al-Khalay was moved by Damascus libel, as few others were, because his studies in the Kabbalah had prepared him for this great awakening in the year 1840. And he had been teaching his students that this year would begin a hundred year period of the days of the Messiah, which he said, by the way, we better jump on board and bring redemption. He woe to us. If we miss this hundred years, he said the next hundred years will be filled with suffering.

Ooh, it makes my blood run cold. In the wake of this libel, he actually wrote a work called Minchat Yehudah in praise of Montefiore and Premio's efforts to rescue the Jews of Damascus. And then, so moved by what had happened there, and awakened to the awareness that the Jews needed a land of their own simply to be safe. And furthermore, impressed by the usefulness of foreign support in gaining the success that had happened in Damascus, Aglai wrote his book Ragley Mevaser, The Footsteps of the Herald. And here, and in various other pamphlets, he detailed a plan for practical national redemption, one which included many of the elements that would actually become central to the vision of the future founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl.

As he says, Israel's redemption will be brought about by kings on earth, for salvation is the Lord's alone, and he will cause it to be realized by human beings, just as he caused salvation from the exile in Babylonia to be brought about by Cyrus, and in the future will cause Israel's redemption to be brought about by the kings of the Gentiles. for the Lord will awaken their spirit to let them go. For the leaders of Israel will establish an opening like the eye of a needle and the Holy One, blessed be He, will make that opening as broad as the entrance to a hall and will incline their hearts to do their behests. And this wasn't just poetry. Rabbi Agulai called for the founding of an association of leading Jews to enter into diplomatic negotiations with the leaders of the nations.

And furthermore, he called for an education of the masses of the Jews who he knew would not immediately support his vision. Now, it seems that Rav Alkhali was also quite close with Theodor Herzl's paternal grandfathers, and there are scholars who claim that it was his works which had a significant impact on the young Theodor. But what's beyond doubt is that Rav Alkhali was calling for Zion before the word Zionism had be coined. And he knew that in order to reach there, we had to get ourselves on board. And finally, he faced the almost universal opposition of the religious world. Hear the pathos he felt at being rejected by the rabbis around him. For 25 years now, the beloved country of our sacred patriarchs has burned in my blood, and I call ardently for the settling of the land.

And although I've heard it said that there are some rabbis who are not inclined to look favorably on settling the land, I have not retreated from my position. For I say, may this be written down for a coming generation, and what is not accomplished by good sense will be accomplished by time. You know, there are many other religious personalities we could add to these heralders of Zionism. But I want to close out with just one more. someone who was prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of Zion. Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer was born in the Prussian province of Posen in 1795, and it was clear from the start that he was destined for the rabbinate. And in fact, he quickly became a close student of one of Europe's leading rabbinic figures, Rabbi Akiva Eger.

His early years were marked by an incredible productivity in Torah. He wrote commentaries on the entire Torah, on large sections of the Shuchan Aruch, on the Haggadah and various tractates of the Gemara. And this is to say nothing of the numerous articles in the Hebrew language periodicals that had begun to spring up even within the religious communities of Europe. But the first indication that Rav Kalasha was not your standard religious thinker came when he addressed a question to his teacher, Rabbi Akiva Eger, asking him whether it was feasible to restore the sacrifices on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. now Rabbi Kiva passed the question on to his son-in-law you might think it's strange that he handed it off to someone younger than he except his son-in-law was of course the Hatam Sofer who pointed out that the question was purely academic as the Muslims would never permit such a thing however he went on if they did agree there was no problem with the pre-Messianic restoration of sacrifices though they might have to be limited to only the Pesach, for various reasons that he lists.

And that means, what he's telling you is that you don't have to wait for the Messiah in order to re-begin the temple service. And the Chatham Sover may have thought this was an academic question, but it wasn't. Rav Kalashar had become convinced that correctly understood the tradition indicated that it was a Jew's duty to participate in bringing the redemption, not to wait for it to happen. And in his eyes, the primary vehicle for this would be the renewal of the offerings. When the Jews prepared for redemption by offering a sacrifice, then God's compassion would be aroused and he would bring the Messiah. Let it be soon, let it be now. Later that year, Mofkalsher actually sent his Messianic theory, along with a review of the halacha response on the question, to Amschel Meir Rothschild, eldest son of the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, along, of course, with a request for funding.

He received no response. His hope, however, did not die. Don't give up just because you don't make money on the first shot. Nor did his belief that redemption would only come when we took the first steps toward it. In 1860, an otherwise unknown doctor, Haim Luria, organized the Society for the Colonization of Palestine, whose goal was to foster Jewish settlement in the Holy Land. And Rav Kalasher joined the group along with Rav Yehuda Al-Khalay. Now the organization was short-lived and really had no practical achievements that we can identify. But its purpose, along perhaps with the opportunity to meet Rav Al-Khalay, fired Rav Kalasher with a new understanding of the human element needed to bring about redemption.

And in 1862, Rav Kalasher published his work, Drishat Zion, Seeking Zion. And there he laid out a vision for a partnership in redemption. And it happened to have been one of the first books published on the subject of modern Jewish cultural settlement in the land of Israel. So his book centers on three theses. Number one, that the salvation of the Jews, as promised by the prophets, can only come about in a natural way through self-help. that's auto-emancipation 20 years before Pinsker and furthermore number two, that this process depends on the immigration of Jews to Israel, you gotta get up and go and number three, that the offering of sacrifice in Jerusalem is not only permissible in the present day, but it's an integral part of the redemptive process.

And once the work was published, Rav Kalashar began to travel throughout Western Europe in order to promote his vision, and of course to combat his detractors. Because as with Rabbi Al-Khali before him, the mainstream religious world was far from receptive of these practical messianic notions. And again, this is another topic that we'll have to take on head-on. But for now, whether it was the lingering fear of the Sabbatine movement that had done such damage, or the wounds still being licked from the fight with the progressive reform movement, or simply religious conservatism, the rabbis of Europe united against this redemptive momentum in a way that they rarely did. But though Rav Kalischer failed to convince the religious world to join him in bringing the Messiah, many more emancipated Jews felt free to hear his words.

And in fact, it was owing to Rav Kalischer's enthusiasm that the Alliance Yisraelite Universelle, originally founded, as we said, to advocate for Jewish rights on the international stage, now became interested in practical settlement of the land of Israel. And in 1870, the Alliance founded Mikveh Yisrael, the first agricultural school in the land of Israel. In fact, they actually offered Rav Kalashur, the rabbinate of this new settlement, but he was just too old to accept it. The school was called Mikveh Yisrael after the name of God. In Jeremiah 14.8, O hope of Israel, its deliverer in time of trouble, why are you like a stranger in the land, like a traveler who stops only for the night? And indeed it was a hopeful act, one that played a significant role in transforming the people of Israel from strangers just passing through their land, those whose actions could make it bloom.

And in Rav Kalasher's vision, one that transformed them into a place where the hope of Israel would no longer be a stranger in his land, but rather one who doesn't stop for a night, but comes to rest in Israel forever. for decades, Mikve Yisrael, which still functions today, sent its graduates out across the length and breadth of the land of Israel. And they were instrumental in establishing the villages, farms, and collectives that reawoke the agricultural basis of our peoplehood. And it was actually at the gates of the Mikve Yisrael school where Herzl had his famous meeting with the German Kaiser in 1898. But that's a story that we'll save for another time. So here we have the heralders of Zionism.

And I see all the problematic teleology in that term, as if all Jewish history were an inevitable stream leading to the first Zionist Congress in Basel And we also seen that though most of the secular Zionists set their sights on solving the Jewish problem there was another stream in the movement to return to Zion which wasn't looking to solve the Jewish problem, but rather to fill the Jewish mission. And rather to try to bring this to some cute narrative ending, I want to finish on a poetic note. Because, you know, undoubtedly the best known Hebrew poem, perhaps ever, but certainly of the late 19th century, was Hatikvah, the hope, written by Naftali Herz Imber in 1878, which of course went on to become the national anthem of the modern state of Israel.

Imber was born in 1856 in Galactia, and he began writing poetry at age 10. But already in 1882, he found himself in Ottoman Palestine, that's the land of Israel, as secretary of Sir Lawrence Oliphant, member of the British Parliament, Christian mystic, and early advocate of agricultural settlement in the land of Israel as the solution to the Jewish problem. And it was here, in 1886, that Imbert published his first work of poetry, Bar Kai, the Morning Star. And there was the final version of what he called Tikvatenu, our hope, which we call HaTikva, the hope, which soon became the anthem of the budding Zionist movement. But aside from the interesting and somewhat tragic details of Imber's life, I want to take a minute and consider one word of his poem, Tikvatenu, a word that's central to understanding how it was that this poem captured the imagination of the nascent Zionism and went on to become not just our hope, but Hatikva, the hope, the Israeli national anthem.

And that word is Kedima. The opening stanza, so long as in the inwardness of the heart a Jewish soul moans toward the east, kedima an eye looks toward Zion so kedima is a very interesting word we mentioned before that Hebrew is actually a relatively word-poor language compared to other major languages. Just to give you an idea, according to modern statistics, there are between 75,000 and 80,000 words and word combinations in Hebrew. And that's as opposed to the 171,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, an estimated 150,000 in Russian, or the whopping 370,000 words in Chinese. And that's why the Hebrew poets of every era, and particularly the modern era who seek to create a new republic of language and populate that republic in modernity with new Hebrew-speaking Jews had to be masters of the rich corpus of classical Hebrew literature.

Because even if, as we'll see, many of the great minds of the Hebrew revival rejected the values, worldview, and theology of classical Judaism, they still needed its texture and imagery in order to communicate with any richness and subtlety. And so the word kadima, that we're facing kadima, evokes three different nuances of meaning, all of which take us back to the roots of our story, and all of which can illuminate an important facet of the nature of Zionism as a movement and historic phenomenon. The first is most simple. Kedem, Kedima, can mean east. And when Imber said that the hope beating in the Jewish heart would live on so long as it faced east, on one level, this was simply a question of geography.

Because since the end of the Gaonic period, back in the 11th century, the bulk of world Jewry has been moving west. It's true, as we mentioned, we saw the rise of a spiritual center in Sfat, in the land of Israel, in the 16th century. and we saw how it contributed to the redemptive stream in the returns of Zion. Nevertheless, both in numbers and in the driving characters of our narrative, the Jews have been turning east to face Zion for almost a thousand years. As our first national poet, Nebuchadnezzar Levy said, my heart is in the east and I in the uttermost west. This east-facing momentum was transmuted over the centuries of exile into a spiritual long dream. Three times a day, Jews turned to pray toward Zion.

Prayed for health, wealth, redemption. And in Europe, that meant they were facing east. Even in Poland, by the way, where properly speaking, they ought to be facing more in the south, but whatever. And the political movement of Zionism will take this religious motion of body and soul and harness it for a more simple message. Pick yourself up and return to the place that you keep looking back toward. and even though we'll see it was not obvious to every Zionist that the return of the Jewish people to a national life had to be a return to the literal Zion still Imber knew when he wrote his poem that the European Jews were used to facing east when they dreamed so as it will be European Jews who shape Zionism largely drawing on European models of nationalism and peoplehood to do so by the way so the movement for the national re-embodiment of Israel faces east which by the way will cause problems all the way down to our day to say nothing of the Arab citizens of the state of Israel who hardly identify with the notion of the Jewish heart and soul lying at the base of this state the so-called Mizrahim, the Jews of Middle Eastern descent will find the Eurocentric nature of the east-facing part of that anthem deeply challenging especially as it becomes emblematic of the more problematic European attitudes about race and culture that will leave a bitter stamp on the early years of the state but for now one thing that Kedem means is east because that was the direction that the European Jews faced in order to pray but Kedem or as Imber uses it actually in the poem Kadima has another meaning forward Yala Kadima, get moving.

Because in the 19th century, Zionism was a progress. It was a progressive movement in the truest sense. It wanted to move the Jewish people forward, to shift them out of that fossilized posture, which so irked Arnold Toynbee. In this sense, Zionism was akin with many of the other European nationalist movements that sought liberation from historic rule by foreign powers, and, of course, shared their roots in Hegel's philosophy of the inevitable progression of history. And once again, Toynbee's insights of the progress of civilizations through time can help illuminate our story. Remember that his great work, A Study of History, is an analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, which he sees as the unit of measure for human history.

And he argues that a civilization can continue to grow materially and even culturally, even after it has passed the point of no return. It's a dead man walking. Because that point for Toynbee, the turning point between a civilization which is growing and one for whom the writing is already on the wall, can be identified by whether the civilization worships its past or its future, whether they seek their heroes in their ancestors or in their pioneers. And it's this idea that makes the meaning of the word kedim, kedima, go forward, so revolutionary in Imbr's poem. Both the political and the cultural streams within Zionism will be united in their desire to liberate themselves from the past. In their criticism that the Jewish nation has been lost to Judaism, to a religious fatalism which is founded on a sifting through the ashes of the past for any source of hope or inspiration.

They want to move forward, and the various ways in which they construct the new Jew of the future, this Jewish pioneer, who can replace our holy ancestors as an object of worship and praise, will be a source of a lot of our discussion in the coming episodes. So that's another meaning of the word Kedem. Kadima, let's get moving. But last, and certainly not least, there's the romantic power of the word Kedem, which means the mythic days of yore. Through the use of Kedema, Ember is summoning up our commitment to the mythic past as a source of hope and national identity. On one hand, this is consonant with the roots of Zionism in the European Romantic movement and its idealization of the past. To the European Romantics, the people, or the Volk, were an archaic essence and not just a political collective.

And the goal of connecting to the people was to reattain innocence, the good old days, that existential naivete whose moral purity and integrity are uncorrupted by cosmopolitan sophistication. And the goal of rooting oneself in their land is to tap the untamed forces of nature, which are the true source of healthy creativity. but Imber wasn't just a European romantic he was also a Jew and as such consciously or not when he used the word Kedem in this sense of the primordial past he was echoing the words of Jeremiah which closed the book of Eicha of Lamb Nemptations Chades Yameinu Kedem when he pleads with God to renew our days as Vold now realize for Jeremiah this was not nostalgia because when the prophet said these words, his eyes were tearing from the smoke of the burning temple and he'd been chief amongst the voices that condemned the kings, the false prophets and the fools that they led astray.

Jeremiah was no fool. He knew well that the first temple period had failed and that is why his dream of the future is not a restoration of the historic past but of the primordial, of the days of yore. In other words, his cry at the end of Eicha is that God graces us with a future which is the product of the past as it ought to have been. So we've tasted a bit of this vision already in our discussion of the religious roots of the return to Zion. The students of the Grah, Rav Al-Khalay, Rav Tzuhirsh Kalasher were well aware of the failures of the First and Second Commonwealth and why they occurred. For they were what my good friend Eshai Fleischer likes to call progressive restorationists. Their vision of the future was a reconstruction of the past, a redemption of it, in fact, by rebuilding it in an image of what it ought to have been, that their dream was to let the future redeem the past.

And so, Imber's image, his use of that word kedima, is of the hope beating in Jewish hearts, kept alive by our commitment to face the primordial past. To tell a story of that past of Yemei Kedem, the days of yore, as he and his fellow Europeans faced East Kedem in the present and marched Kedema forward toward the future of which they dreamed. Now before I get to my thank yous, I want to ask you to do something. We don't have too many months left until we get to the rise of the state of Israel. I want you to send me your questions. Whatever questions you have about the past, the present, the future, you can send them to rovmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can post them on my Facebook page, Rav Mike Foyer, or you can send them, I don't know, by steamship message.

But send me your questions and I'll begin to address them once we get past the linear presentation of history. So now I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to make this show free and widely available. and I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to robmike.com and in the upper right corner you'll see an invitation to become a patron. Click on it and follow through to make a little bit of per podcast pledge. I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute p-a-r-d-e-s dot org dot i-o for allowing me to teach and reach so many wonderful Jews.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.