The modern Jewish political imagination has long been organized around a seemingly unavoidable question: what political space is available to Jews in the modern world? For generations, the principal answers appeared clear. Jews could become equal citizens within democratic states, or they could establish sovereignty of their own. Assimilation, integration, minority rights and Zionism differed profoundly, yet they shared one assumption: Jewish existence had to be secured within the political geometry of modernity.

The twentieth century appeared to provide two extraordinary answers. The State of Israel gave Jews sovereignty, political majority and control over their collective destiny. The development of minority rights allowed Jews in many democratic societies to remain visibly Jewish without choosing between citizenship and identity. In that sense, the old Jewish Question seemed finally resolved. Yet its persistence suggests something more disturbing: perhaps the answers did not fail because they were badly implemented. Perhaps the question itself contained the mistake.

The question “what political space is there for Jews?” already assumes that Jewish existence must be translated into an ontology built around territory, citizenship, sovereignty, majority, minority and the nation-state. Even apparently opposed answers remain within this architecture. One proposes security through sovereignty; another through legal inclusion within someone else’s sovereignty. Both treat political space as the decisive field in which Jewish existence must become intelligible.

The Hebrew structure begins elsewhere. Israel does not first appear as a nation-state awaiting completion. It appears through distinction. Abram is called out, a people is formed, covenant establishes obligations, and memory, law, land, Sabbath, genealogy, prohibition, ritual, exile and return produce a configuration of relations that cannot simply be reduced to the categories of modern sovereignty. Distinction is not yet nationalism, land is not yet territory in the modern juridical sense, a people is not automatically a state, and law is not identical with sovereign legislation.

Once these categories are collapsed into one another, something profound changes. Jewish particularity becomes political nationality, covenant becomes collective title, land becomes territory, peoplehood becomes sovereignty, and historical memory becomes political legitimacy. The State can then begin to appear not merely as one political organization of Jewish life, but as its natural culmination.

Hebrew monism does not require this. One God does not mean one Humanity, but neither does one people mean one State. The unity of God does not require uniformity below, and the distinction of Israel does not logically require a sovereign apparatus capable of representing Jewish existence as such.

This is where idolatry should become politically explosive. The prohibition of idolatry is not merely a prohibition against worshipping several gods. Its deeper force lies in refusing the identification of the absolute with something finite. No image exhausts God, no ruler exhausts authority, no institution exhausts obligation, and no political form becomes transcendent merely by attaching........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)