The effect of the October 7 atrocity and its aftermath upon Jews in the United States is the ostensible topic of Peter Beinart’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life.” Actually, Mr. Beinart demonstrates a rupture in the lives of Jewish leftists such as he, who discover that they can no longer be one with their non-Jewish comrades unless they denounce Zionism (i.e., the cause of Israel).
Beinart tells American Jews (those calling themselves themselves liberals, at any rate) to oppose the continued existence of a Jewish nation and homeland in the Mideast. Beinart depicts Zionism as some kind of fetish that American Jews acquired after the 1967 Six-Day War. “[I]t came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust.” Israel apparently never served that function at its founding or in the ensuing 19 years.
Quoting a leftist defender of the intifada, Beinart tells us that “American Jews…’have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.’” No, the Torah places Israel at the center of the Jewish faith. It is there that Moses leads the Israelites after they are chosen to receive the Ten Commandments.
As noted by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in his Jewish Literacy (1991): “The most widely observed of all Jewish rituals, the Passover Seder, concludes with the call, ‘Next year in Jersusalem.’” And, as Telushkin reminds us, the 137th Psalm proclaims, “’If I forget thee, O Jersusalem,/Let my right hand wither,/Let my tongue cleave to the roof of its mouth…’” There is no Judaism apart from Israel.
In such a document as John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” Sermon (1630), which President Reagan loved to cite, the founding of Israel is, moreover, associated with that of Western civilization in America. Winthrop said, “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies… For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us.”
And the sermon concludes “with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israell, Deut. 30. Beloved there is now sett before us life and good, Death and evill, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walke in his ways and to keepe his Commandements and his Ordinances and his lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possesse it.” The uncultivated wilderness of America and that of ancient Israel, according to the will of the Almighty, were both to be the final destinations of itinerant peoples.
New America
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