British Jews are increasingly asked to prove their loyalty to Israel by suspending judgment of the Israeli state. This demand is presented as solidarity, but it reverses the Hebrew ethical order. Israel does not exist to release Jews from judgment. If the state is to remain Jewish in any serious covenantal sense, its power must remain answerable to a relation it did not create, cannot own, and has no authority to exhaust.

The modern state presents itself as the condition of collective existence. It tells the people that without its institutions, army, and borders, they would become defenceless matter: dispersed, persecuted, and eventually destroyed. For Jews, this argument carries exceptional force. Yet historical necessity can quietly become political idolatry. An institution created to protect Jewish life begins to present itself as the source of Jewish life. The state no longer serves the people; the people become the human material through which the state reproduces its power.

The Hebrew tradition begins elsewhere. It does not begin with a state, but with departure from a system that counts human beings as units of production. Pharaoh does not merely hate the Hebrews. He administers them, measures their labour, regulates their reproduction, and converts their bodies into infrastructure. Egypt is a political form in which life has value only insofar as it can be extracted, mobilised, and replaced. Israel leaves Egypt not to construct a Hebrew Pharaoh, but so that no earthly power may again say: your lives belong to me because only I can save you.

The people of Israel are not first constituted as a sovereign collective that subsequently enters into the Covenant. Israel is set apart as a people through the Covenant itself. At Sinai, the words are precise:

וְאַתֶּם תִּהְיוּ־לִי מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ

“And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

The decisive word is לִי, “to Me.” Israel’s distinction is relational before it is national. It is not an ethnic substance, territorial possession, or historical entitlement, but a continuously renewed exposure to obligation before Hashem.

This distinction grants no immunity. It imposes responsibility. It does not mean: you are different, therefore you may do more. It means: you have been set apart, therefore you cannot reproduce the political logic........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)