October 7, 2022

On July 4, 1974, Anatoly Sharansky and Natalia Stieglitz got married in a friend’s apartment in Moscow. Both planned to move to Israel, but Stieglitz had to leave immediately because she had an exit visa that would expire the next day. Sharansky hoped to receive a visa soon thereafter. And so Anatoly went with Natalia to the airport, where they pledged to each other: “next year in Jerusalem.”

After that, life changed dramatically for both of them. Anatoly, who was soon known by his Hebrew name Natan, was refused an exit visa and eventually arrested, spending nine years in prison. Natalia, or Avital, led a worldwide campaign for Natan’s release. After 12 years apart, the United States secured Natan’s release in a spy exchange, and on February 11, 1986 Natan was finally reunited with Avital. When he first saw her, Natan made reference to that promise they had made 12 years before, and said to Avital: “Silchi li she’icharti k’zat” (“Sorry I’m a little late”).

Redemption isn’t always on time. Jews prayed for “next year in Jerusalem” for 1,900 years of exile; but even when we knew it would take quite a bit longer, we sang the song anyway. Big dreams are often a little late.

At first glance, Sukkot commemorates a non-event: After the Exodus from Egypt, the Jews spent 40 years in the desert, dwelling in huts. Why is this celebrated with a holiday?

Perhaps the best way to understand Sukkot is to compare it to Pesach. The Talmud (Sukkah 27a) notices and derives halakhic practice from the unusual symmetry between the two holidays; both are a week long, and both begin on the 15th of the month exactly six months apart.

Thematically, there is much in common between the two holidays. On Pesach, the central ritual is the Korban Pesach, the Passover sacrifice, which symbolizes the protection God gave the Jewish homes on the night of the Exodus. The Sukkah commemorates the protection God gave the Jews while camped in tents during the years of the desert.

In both holidays, the theme of protection is combined with a memory of the difficulty and adversity. On Pesach, it is remembered through the bitter herbs, which are eaten together with the Korban Pesach; even on the very night of redemption, the years of slavery are not forgotten. On Sukkot, the tent, which symbolizes protection, is specifically built as a diraat aray, a flimsy, temporary structure. God may have protected the Jews in the desert, but they were at the same time homeless and vulnerable. Both Pesach and Sukkot connect us to the ups and downs of redemption, to moments of distress and deliverance at one time.

Both Pesach and Sukkot connect us to the ups and downs of redemption, to moments of distress and deliverance at one time.

But the analogy between Pesach and Sukkot ends with matzah. This quickly baked bread is all about chipazon, hurry, a redemption so rapid that one leaves the house in surprise, grabbing some unbaked dough on the way out the door.

Matzah offers a vision of instant redemption; doors fling open, seas split, former slaves march forward to freedom. Everything moves at lightning speed. By contrast, Sukkot is about a point in history when things more or less stood still. For forty years, day in and day out, the Jews lived in the same tents, with the same food, and the same complaints. Only at the very end, after barely crawling through the desert, do they finally arrive at the doorstep of the promised land. Sukkot commemorates a redemption that moves at a snail’s pace.

Pesach is a story made for the silver screen, with high drama and a conclusion that is miraculous. Sukkot, on the other hand, seems to be a celebration of tedium, of forty years when not much happened. And the question remains: What exactly are we celebrating on Sukkot?

Redemption is a topic fraught with preconceptions. Our default is to expect the most of redemption. It should be immediate, transformative and astonishing, a moment of clear divine intervention. If the Messiah doesn’t ride in on a white donkey, it’s not a true redemption.

When the Zionist movement arose, some Orthodox Jews adopted an anti-Zionist stance. One of the arguments they used against Zionism is that it runs counter to a passage in the Talmud (Ketubot 111a) that (according to a manuscript cited in Rashi) says that the Jews should not “push forward the redemption.” This is seen as a prohibition against the Jewish people taking redemption into their own hands; they are obligated to wait for the Messiah.

From this perspective, any attempt to create a Jewish State before the arrival of the Messiah is a fraud and a heresy. Every redemption should be absolute. When the Messiah comes it will feel like Pesach, with a new Moshe and many miracles.

But other rabbis had a very different perspective on Zionism. Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer, who was an early-19th-century proponent of the return to Zion, pointed out that the Talmud Yerushalmi (Berakhot 1:1) states that “such is the redemption of Israel, at first it is bit by bit, and as it proceeds, it gets larger and larger.” These religious Zionists saw the hand of God in every step forward. Because of this, they could appreciate the contribution of unusual heroes. Rav Kook famously said that when the young secular Zionist pioneers played sports to strengthen their bodies, their exercise was as holy as reciting Psalms. Their newfound strength would build a new country. A slow motion redemption doesn’t follow the ordinary script, with ordinary heroes.

And this is exactly what we are celebrating on Sukkot. What the early Zionist rabbis are describing in their writings is precisely what Sukkot commemorates: a redemption that comes bit by bit, one that is halting, imperfect and at times confusing. On Sukkot, the distance between one step and the next on the road to redemption is measured in years, not feet.

As we approach the 75-year anniversary of the State of Israel, we can say that what we have seen is a Sukkot type of redemption. On a daily basis, Israel is imperfect and tests our patience, but when we see it in the context of the last 2,000 years of Jewish history, we recognize that it is miraculous.

Sometimes redemption arrives a bit late. Sukkot reminds us that we need to cherish every step on the road to redemption.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.

Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” edited by Gil Troy, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. This is seventh in a series. 

In July of that critical year of 1896, when he became “a sort of poor man’s lawyer for unfortunate Jews,” Theodor Herzl returned to Vienna, becoming the Neue Freie Presse’s feuilleton editor. Herzl would spend the rest of his life as a full-time Zionist and a part-time journalist, just to keep some income streaming in. He felt enslaved to the newspaper but proud that he earned nothing from the movement. His diaries track the meetings he pursues and has, the articles he conceives and writes, the strategies he ponders and follows, the relationships he makes and leverages, and the ideas for this new Jewish state he keeps generating, refining, spreading. 

With his manifesto “Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State,” the talk of the Jewish world, Herzl started thinking about how to give this Zionist movement forming around him official status and organizational shape. In mid-June 1896, Herzl had to note how far he had traveled in barely a year. He visited Constantinople with his diplomatic agent Philipp Michael de Newlinski, an impoverished Polish aristocrat turned journalist. Although he initially failed to secure an audience with the Sultan, who controlled Palestine through the Ottoman Empire, Herzl met with the Vizier and received the “Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Medjidie.” This man came with no formal organization, a stateless people, and only a popular pamphlet behind him. Nevertheless, the Turks took Herzl seriously. When Herzl stopped in Sofia on his way home, hundreds of Jews cheered their new Messiah. Herzl was encouraged – the Jewish masses were awakening. 

Such adulation gave Herzl “strange sensations. I saw and heard my legend being born.”

By August 29, 1897, then, when Herzl convenes the First Zionist Congress, momentum has already been building for two years. More Zionist circles are forming, expanding a network that started decades earlier, especially after the Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1884. Characteristically, Herzl has already established a Zionist newspaper, Die Welt. And equally characteristically – for the Jewish people – the backlash is growing: from “Protest Rabbis” in London and Vienna, to refused invitations from the more culturally-oriented and settlement-focused Hovevei Zion rival group in England, to the refusal of the Munich Jewish community to host this first Zionist congress. Reform and Orthodox rabbis, who rarely agree on anything, agree on one thing: they do not want the Zionists in their city.

That is why Herzl shifts the Congress to Basel, Switzerland. But that, of course, solves only one of his many headaches. As the Congress approaches, Herzl’s agitation increases. On the train to Zurich in late August, he catalogs the invisible “eggs” he is juggling in this excruciating “egg-dance” threatening his dream. They include the eggs of the Neue Freie Presse, of the Orthodox, of the modernists, of Austrian patriotism, of Turkey and the Sultan, of the skeptical Edmond de Rothschild, of the rival Hovevei Zion, of the colonists in Palestine whose financial subsidies “must not be queered.” Herzl adds the “egg of the Russian government, against which nothing unpleasant may be said, although the deplorable situation of the Russian Jews will have to be mentioned” and the “egg of the Christian denominations, on account of the Holy Places,” along with the eggs of personal differences, envy, jealousy. This whole endeavor “is one of the labors of Hercules,” he sighs.

Thanks to Herzl’s tortured journey and his still deeply inadequate, obviously scarred, sense of self, he makes one of his great moves. He insists that the 197 delegates – including thirteen women – attend the Congress in formal eveningwear. “These people should consider this Congress as the most superior and festive of all,” he explains to an even more prominent enlightened European Jew turned Zionist, Max Nordau.

By impressing the outside world, it launched Herzl’s feverish diplomatic efforts, which many historians today say put the Zionist movement on the international agenda and by 1917 resulted in Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration. 

The Zionist Congress’s pageantry was doubly effective. By impressing the outside world, it launched Herzl’s feverish diplomatic efforts, which many historians today say put the Zionist movement on the international agenda and by 1917 resulted in Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration. But it also stirred the Jewish masses. It took a Herzl – a Western, assimilated Jew, mastering the symbols of modernity while refusing the Enlightenment’s cover-up-your-Judaism bargain – to impress the beaten-down Eastern European Jew that this movement was credible – and able to spawn a New Jew, not just a solution to the Jewish Problem.

One delegate from Odessa, Mordechai Ben-Ami, wrote: “Before us rose a noble, almost angelic figure whose deep and piercing stare mixed quiet majesty with unutterable sorrow. This was … not the elegant Dr. Herzl of Vienna, but a royal scion of the House of David, risen suddenly from the grave in all his legendary glory.” 

In those “three days of awakening Jewish history,” Herzl proclaimed, “Zionism introduced itself to the world.” Before Basel, the movement “remained in the ghetto. … Now it has entered the public arena and engages public opinion around the globe. Many hundreds of newspapers wrote of it during the past week.”

Building on dozens of other initiatives, including the farming villages already being established in the Holy Land, the First Zionist Congress voted in the Basel Program, proclaiming: “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” Four essential “means” would achieve that goal: promoting settlements in Palestine, organizing Jews “into local or general groups,” strengthening “the Jewish feeling and consciousness,” and appealing to governments to help for “the achievement of the Zionist purpose.” Most practically, the Congress adopted “HaTikva” as the national anthem, accepted a blue-and-white flag with a six-pointed star in the middle as the Zionist standard, and established the Zionist Organization, with Theodor Herzl elected as president.

Looking back, Herzl admitted that “when I started out, I was only a ‘Jewish Statist.’” Gradually, he became “a Hovev Zion [Lover of Zion]. For me there is no other solution but Palestine for the great national question which is called the Jewish Question.”

Professor Gil Troy is the author of The Zionist Ideas and the editor of the three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress.