On Zionism, DES, and the Discipline of Staying Together

Standing in Basel, it is difficult not to feel the weight of ideas.

In this elegant Swiss city, in 1897, Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress and imagined something extraordinary: that a scattered, argumentative, frequently rejected people might once again have a home.

Herzl later wrote in his diary, “In Basel I founded the Jewish State.”

He added that if he said this aloud at the time, he would be met with laughter, but that in fifty years, everyone would see it.

He was almost exactly right.

I visited Basel recently and found myself thinking not only about Zionism, but about belonging.

What does it mean to build a home for a people whose history has so often been defined by exclusion?

And what responsibilities arise when those who know what it is to be rejected begin, in turn, to reject one another?

The Jewish people have never been uniform.

We argue with one another in synagogues, around Shabbat tables, and across generations. The Talmud is, among many other things, a monumental record of disciplined disagreement.

We are Orthodox, Reform, Masorti, secular, Zionist, anti-Zionist, politically left and right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, gay, straight, certain, uncertain, observant, questioning.

And yet history has a brutal way of flattening nuance.

Those who hate Jews rarely pause to distinguish between denominations, politics, or lifestyles.

And that, in their eyes, is sufficient.

This does not mean our differences are unimportant.

Judaism has always honoured serious debate.

But there are moments when the urgency of collective survival requires us to remember what precedes all disagreement: that we are, first and foremost, one people.

Recent years have offered painful reminders of the cost of division. In Israel, internal disputes became so intense that many worried the social fabric itself was fraying. Reasonable people will continue to disagree about policies and politics, and history is always more complex than any single explanation. But one lesson is difficult to ignore: when a society becomes consumed by internal rupture, its vulnerabilities may become easier for others to exploit.

We saw similar tensions........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)