The depth of the dispute between the Haredi worldview and the Zionist one is not about the return to the Land of Israel, and not even about secularism itself. It is about something far more fundamental: the return to earthliness.
To understand what “a return to earthliness” means, we must briefly understand the four revolutions Zionism carried out — and above all the fourth revolution, which is in fact the most radical of them all.
Zionism carried out four revolutions:
1: It restored Israeli nationhood
2: It returned the people of Israel to the Land of Israel
3: It brought Jews back to the tradition of Israel (yes, yes! Even though central parts of Zionism did not define themselves as religiously observant, Zionism kept Jews closer to their tradition than other movements did. Zionism succeeded enormously where the Haskalah failed massively. Thanks to it, even Jews who did not find themselves among the pages of the Talmud could now feel Jewish through their belonging to the Land of Israel and to the story of revival. As Herzl said at the opening of the First Congress, “Zionism is a return to Judaism even before it is a return to the land of the Jews.” Zionism saved Judaism.)
4: Zionism brought back earthliness.
And the fourth revolution was the most radical revolution of all.
What does a return to earthliness mean? What is so radical about it?
When many Jews imagined the return to the Land of Israel, they were in effect imagining the transplanting of exile life into the Land of Israel: Jews living on their land, trying to be good, keeping the commandments and living without fear or enemies.
But Zionism understood that returning to the land is far, far more than that..
Zionism wanted to bring a “redemption” much more sweeping than a gathering of Jews simply living in the Land of Israel. It strove for a repair of the world that most religious circles had not even dreamed of: a redemption of women, a redemption of nature, a return to life, a return to being a light unto the nations, a return to a different Torah — very different from the Torah of exile.
A return to earthliness means a change in a fundamental conception that reigned through most of the years of exile:
that the purpose of the people of Israel — is this world.
To many readers this statement seems very simple. But it requires explanation. Over the years of exile, Judaism withdrew further and further into the “four cubits of halacha.” After long years in which the Jews of the diaspora understood that they were drifting ever further from any real influence on this world, the aspiration for repair was transferred to “the world to come” — whether in the sense of a sublime heavenly world or in the sense of some utopian End of Days.
But the core of the Israeliness reflected in the Five Books of the Torah is the fundamental concept: tikkun olam — repairing the world. Repairing this world. Not a heavenly world to come, not the Garden of Eden, not a utopian vision of the End of Days. Be good and moral — and you will have rain in its season, the early and the late rains, peace in the land, a good livelihood. Fail to be good — and the land will vomit you out. The Israeliness of the Land of Israel claimed that the goal is this world. This was a people bearing a message whose essence was: here, in this world, a person can attain a moral and elevated life — through connection to material life and labor, not through detachment from them. The Torah was not interpreted as a value in itself — whose essence is its study — but in its plain sense: it instructs us what to do. It is the instruction manual for a whole material life. The entire Tanakh is full of this.
It is no accident that the Zionist movement returned in a big way to the Tanakh while pointedly skipping over all the Jewish thought created in exile. People sometimes mistakenly think that Zionism embraced the Tanakh because of its tales of heroism and war. But the deeper reason is that the Tanakh is a profoundly earthly book, suited to a model of life that strives to repair this world. Rachel the poetess, of Kinneret, expressed it beautifully:
“Here on the face of the earth —
not in the clouds above
on the face of the near earth, the mother..
Not the mists of tomorrow
but the day grasped in hand,
the day solid, warm, steadfast”
And so, Zionism is far more than a return to the land of our fathers. Zionism saw itself as the liberator of this world. The emphasis of secularism in its Zionist form is on the mundane — on repairing this world with earthly tools.
And the return to earthliness carried within it many revolutions that the Jews who dreamed of ascending to the Land of Israel never imagined. Zionism carried out many revolutions, all of which flow from the return to the stage of history as a people bearing a message — the message of the repair of this world.
Zionism was a movement that championed equal rights for women, and this was almost self-evident from the very beginning of the return to the Land of Israel. Women’s partnership in combat, in building, in creation, in poetry, in labor and in thought.
Zionism created a new relationship between Israel and the nations of the world. Not a relationship of fear, but one that makes it possible to accept them and to receive from them. To welcome them across the threshold of our home, our land, and to host them at ease and without apprehension.
Zionism raised up Jewish heroism, for whoever wishes to repair the world must also know how to fight for the things dear to him.
Zionism celebrated the connection to the soil, to agriculture, to the mud — without which no true culture can grow and no repair of the world is possible.
Zionism continued the tradition of progress and argued that without technology and the improvement of living conditions there is nothing to talk about in repairing the world. Tikkun olam will not be achieved through mysticism and mutterings but through real improvement in the way human beings live.
And so, what drove the Haredi worldview mad was not the return to the Land of Israel. Even atheism can somehow be dealt with. But people who say that the essence of Judaism is the repair of this world, the day grasped in hand — with all the far-reaching implications this carries — that is the most frightening thing of all.
