Who are You, O Israel?

Klal Gadol: "That for Which all the Rest Exists"

Rabbi Akiva and his friend Simeon Ben Azzai, sometime in the early second century, debated the question "What is the most basic principle of Torah?" What is the teaching for the sake of which all the rest of Judaism exists? Akiva had a ready answer: "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18). Akiva was Judaism's greatest advocate for the path of love. He was the one who insisted that the Song of Songs was the "Holy of Holies" within Scripture, spoken by God and Israel at Sinai...But Ben Azzai disagreed. He said: I have a greater principle than yours. "On the day when God made human beings, they were made in the likeness of God; male and female God created them" (Gen. 5:1-2) is Torah's most basic principle. Every human being is God's image, says Ben Azzai to Akiva. Some are easier to love, some are harder. Some days you can love them, some days you can't. But you still have to recognize and treat them all as the image of God. Love is too shaky a pedestal on which to position the entire Torah. Perhaps Ben Azzai also saw that Akiva's principle might be narrowed, conceived only in terms of your own community. "Your neighbor," after all, might refer just to your fellow Jews. Or your fellow in piety, in good behavior. How about the stranger? The sinner? How about your enemy? Ben Azzai's principle leaves no room for exceptions, since it goes back to Creation itself. It's not just "your kind of people" who were created in God's image, but everyone.

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Israel: Principles of a State

I hesitate to comment further on the State of Israel in the context of a Jewish theology because I accord the state no theological meaning. I am a religious Jew and a secular Zionist, which is to say that I do not believe the founding of Israel to be "the first flowering of our redemption," as the chief rabbinate's prayer puts it. I accord no messianic or protomessianic meaning to the existence of a Jewish state.

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At a time of terrible inter-ethnic conflicts throughout humanity, in an age when the nuclear threat means that we can no longer afford to take such hostilities lightly, the Jewish people, this "kingdom of priests and holy nation," reclaims and returns to its ancient homeland, becoming a party to the seemingly most intractable of all these conflicts. What is the message in this situation? We have the opportunity here to teach our truth--that of Ben Azzai's principle--in the most powerful way ever. We can do so by generosity, by seeing the humanity, including the pain, of the other, and by concluding that the only way to live in a Holy Land is to share it with its other inhabitants. If we cannot find it in our hearts to do that, even in the face of real obstacles and sometimes atrocious behavior by the other side, we and our tradition will have failed a vital test.

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If a Jew finds him or herself in an unexpected place, according to many a Hasidic tale, it is because there is something to be done there that only his or her particular soul can accomplish. A classic Hasidic text claims that it is easier to enter God's presence in the diaspora than in the Holy Land, just as it is easier to approach the king out at a country inn than in his heavily guarded palace. The Reformers put it differently: they felt that we were scattered about the world in order better to fulfill our prophetic mission, to be a "light unto the nations" in teaching the values of justice and decency embodied in our prophetic heritage.

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