What They Won't (or is that Will?) Write About

Now we return to discussing Zionism as a political-theology – that is, as a conception whose basis is religious while its expression is political. The question remains, how can modern German thought and its investigation of secularization and its theological origins bear upon our understanding of Zionism? As noted earlier, Zionism was a modern-secular movement, and in this way it translated the sacred into the earthly medium. Zionism in this form remains, in Gershom Sholem’s vocabulary, a “dialectic of continuity and change” in relation to religious tradition. This point is rather obvious, as countless Zionist expressions incorporate such a dialectical duality – purchase of land as an act of “redemption of the land;” “the burning of old values” as the awakening of “a man of creation” according to Tabenkin or Berdichevski; the people of Israel’s responsibility to “remember” is found in Katznelson’s famous national poem, both carrying a Jewish religious origin, and simultaneously protesting it; and the secularization of the sacred tongue Hebrew (“Leshon HaKodesh”) to a vernacular. Yet given the dispute over secularization’s source, what is the source of Jewish secularization?

Zionism incorporates a radically dualistic vocabulary in a concrete political context. There is a radical disconnection between exile and homeland, the Diaspora Jew and the New Jew, assimilation and national independence. In this approach, the rebellion against the world conditions as such (the Diaspora existence) is absolute: it is a rebellion against all aspects of this reality in order to create a New Jew who bears a direct connection to his or her true Jewish identity otherwise lost during the years of exile. Bluntly put, the return to the land was conceived as an act of liquidation of the Diaspora; national independence as the realization of true Jewish-ness which stood in opposition to historical reality. Zionism claims to recover a hidden and lost true Jewish essence, one which stands over and against historical reality.

In this way, one can find in Zionism the same theological profile that was termed “Gnosis.” Dualism, the hidden essence, total estrangement from the world – these work together to form the very pillars of Gnosis as we saw in Blumenberg’s retrospective as based on Hans Jonas. However, in Zionism these terms are given a secular expression. For instance, the “hidden” divinity becomes the hidden essence within man, meaning the “original” Jewish nature that had been lost during years of exile and which according to Zionism needs to be renewed. In the same way, the dualism between God and the world becomes the dualism between two different kinds of historical reality – the reality of the Diaspora in opposition to a national one that must be built up from nothing. Finally, the Jew of Zionism recovers his true Jewish identity on the basis of his bonds with the land and the rejection of the yoke of halakha, perhaps the clearest appropriation of Gnosticism in an everyday context. From this point of view, even religious youth who race to the summits of hilltops (known as Children of the Hilltops or "Noar Hagvaot" in Hebrew) with messianic-political defiance in their hearts seem to represent a purer expression of this secular-modern value – the “secularization” of “Gnosis” – rather than being emissaries of a demonstration rooted in a halakhic imperative.

More here.