Zionism and the Bones of Ezekiel

Last week I attended an elegant Friday night dinner gathering in Jerusalem’s Old City, a short walk from the Kotel. Over the course of the evening, between appetizers and dessert, the host asked guests to stand one by one and introduce themselves. The guests ranged from dewy-skinned Israeli soldiers to white-haired American businessmen, and after they’d presented a potted account of themselves, the host wanted to know one thing. “And… are you a Zionist?” he asked. It became something of a joke, so that the moment the next guest rose to speak, a cry rose from the table: “Are you a Zionist? Are you a Zionist?”

The host pressed on, asking each guest to explain what they understand Zionism means. Most, squirming under all those pairs of eyes, responded with something along the lines of, “Zionism means the Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland” or “It means Israel has the right to exist, just like any other nation.” This is how I’ve understood it since declaring myself a Zionist several years ago. I’d been steeped in the understanding that all nations have the right to self-determination. Once I saw that antizionists deny this principle to the Jews and only the Jews, it was obvious that antizionism is overwhelmingly driven by antisemitism, and Zionism is completely legitimate. I instinctively put a plus where the antisemites put a minus.

And all of this is true: Jews do have the right to self-determination, denying this right to the Jewish people alone is inherently antisemitic, and it’s right to object about being discriminated against. But I’m beginning to think this understanding doesn’t go deep enough. Part of the problem may lie in that bit about how Israel should be seen as “just like any other nation.” This plaintive Jewish wish runs far back in Jewish history. In the first Book of Samuel, the people, fed up with their existing leadership, demand that Samuel appoint a king to rule over them. Samuel tells them they’d come to regret it—that a king “will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves”—but the people are obstinate.

“No!” they say. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” And since the Jews ended up with King David, who is generally considered a flawed individual but great ruler, it might seem that the people were right to push for a king.

But there’s an inherent problem with the desire many Jews have to be like everybody else. Conforming is, in fact, what the non-Jewish world has often demanded of Jews, and it amounts to requiring them to effectively stop being Jewish. In the Greco-Roman world, Jewish men in the gymnasia felt huge pressure to reverse their circumcisions as a way of avoiding stigma. Napoleon granted the Jews civil rights but required them to drop outward displays of Jewishness. The Soviet Union forbade Jewish (and all forms of religious) worship. Today, Jews face relentless demands to disavow their state—to declare that although they have the misfortune of being Jews, they are not Zionists: a term deemed synonymous with “Nazi.”

As Gilda Radner said, It’s always something. The non-Jewish world will always find something rankling about the Jews, whether that’s monotheism, the original sin, or their stubborn refusal to die on command.

As Gilda Radner said, It’s always something. The non-Jewish world will always find something rankling about the Jews, whether that’s monotheism, the original sin, or their stubborn refusal to die on command. So maybe we should stop wanting to be like everybody else.

So we should stop wanting to be like everybody else. Embrace what makes Jews, and their state, different. Stop thinking of Zionism merely as an expression of national self-determination like any other. This is conceiving of it only in secular, political terms, when its beauty and strength stems from a different plane.

I write this in the shadow of Jerusalem’s old walls. From the balcony I can see the City of David, and if I wanted to, I could think about how that archeological site contains roughly a zillion refutations of the fashionable claim that Jews have no history in this land—that they swept in only recently to steal it from the Palestinians. But thinking this way only means that the ahistorical “anti-colonialists” have succeeded in colonizing my mind.

This is where King David walked. As a lifelong nonbeliever I’m supposed to be unmoved by this fact, or reflexively skeptical about how much truth there is in the biblical account. But thinking that way is also wearying and tedious. It robs me of a sense of majesty and mystery, the sparking of my imagination.

Jerusalem is not like any other place on Earth. The only way to experience it is to open yourself to its glorious strangeness, the dizzying juxtaposition between the transcendent and the mundane. The cats napping in the shade at Jaffa Gate. The reggae musician beating a drum at Zion Square. The bearded Jews in black hats and tallits hurrying through the stone alleyways of Old City. The souq, where a jovial merchant insists you marry him, and succeeds in getting you to hand over an insane number of shekels for a bag of paprika. The out-of-this-world wonder of the Kotel at dusk as Shabbat begins, a surge of humanity and song and prayer.

Jerusalem is not like any other place on the earth. The only way to experience it is to open yourself to its glorious strangeness, the dizzying juxtaposition between the transcendent and the mundane.

Newly stirring bones have been on my mind these past few days, ever since a visit to Jerusalem’s Friends of Zion Museum. It’s a wonderful, too-little-known place founded by Christians who advocate for Zionism with clarity and zeal. In one room, an artistically animated movie was played telling the story of the prophet Ezekiel—how he prophesied the destruction of the first temple in 586 B.C., but how he also prophesied that the Jewish people would eventually be restored to the land of Israel. This was Ezekiel’s vision after coming across a valley filled with dry bones. God commanded him to speak to them, promising that they would be restored to life. When Ezekiel did, flesh and skin formed over those bones, breath returned, and the dead lived once again.

As I watched that movie depicting this story, I knew how many people, including many dear to me, would smirk at the whole thing. I was raised to be allergic to anything resembling Bible-thumping. But this attitude increasingly feels like closedness, a deliberate stunting of the imagination and spirit. I choose to feel otherwise, and think I’m richer for it. I believe others would be, too.

My notebook contains a curious scrawled page, the source of which I didn’t note but I’m pretty sure I copied from a podcast with Yossi Klein Halevi. “The secular story of Israel is running out of juice,” it says. “And there’s something of the strangeness of the Jewish story that we need to reclaim.” That’s it exactly. Nothing about the Jewish story—with its then-revolutionary insistence that there is one God, its history of relentless suffering, its triumphant return to the land it was expelled from millennia ago—is normal, and we shouldn’t try claiming it is. The beauty lies in its incredibleness, those bones returning to life.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”