The Modern State

When I was a boy, I wondered why the Jews never re-established the state of Israel in accordance with halacha.

It made sense to me that the modern world looked askew at out thousand’s years old middle-eastern culture. It was weird enough to be a blue-eyed, white-looking, American kid studying an ancient Mesopotamian language (and, of course, Aramaic to study Gemara). Our ways must seem so strange to the modern eye.

But then again, we pre-date them. We pre-date America. We pre-date Islam and Christianity. We pre-dated and outlasted Rome and other Kingdoms and Empires. We’ve always been there, so I guess to some degree, the world just accepted the fact that there was a small displaced nation wandering the globe stubbornly maintaining as many laws as we could carry.

But we got our Land back – only a few decades before I was born.

Why didn’t we go all the way?

I’m older now and I’ve studied the history. I know what happened at least. The entire idea of reclaiming our ancestral land must have been almost inconceivable to us as a nation. The Jews actually controlling Israel?! It sounds ridiculous. What nation survives two exiles and two thousand years? What nation survives without a legislature? What nation survives without Land?

Nobody ever really thought about it that much when it came to the Jews. After all, we have always been here. There are very few cultures around today which have been around as long as we have. To them, we’ve always been here. The strangeness of our survival is as strange to the world as a giant ball of fire rising in the East every morning – it just is.

But shortly before I was born we got back the Land. To me, this was always the case. I always had the choice to travel to Israel. I even had the option to exercise my right of return. And it’s a democracy of sorts over there – the Jews have control of their state again.

But why did we stop there? Where is our Sanhedrin? Where is the realization of the laws we have spent millennia studying only in theory? Where are the Jews?

I thought about it more as I got older. It seemed to me that people had become accustomed to the way of the world. After all, I don’t even speak Hebrew. What attachment does a kid from New York have to a small piece of Land in the desert on the coast of the Mediterranean? I may be Jewish, but I’m not middle-eastern. I can understand Judaism in all its theoretical glory, but do I know the ins and outs of haggling at the Shuk?

So that made sense to me. People are comfortable with the status quo. They know how to navigate the places that we live as Jews and have accepted those places as their homes. But those are not our Home. They are not our Land.

So I accepted it. I accepted that the Jews just didn’t seem to care that much anymore. That the differences between us were too deep and the distances too far.

But I didn’t despair.

The Jews have always played the long game. We know of the prophecies of our return to the Land. We know that our return is inevitable. “So I’ll wait,” I thought. I may never see the full return. And perhaps my son wouldn’t either. But if I stayed the course and raised my son to remember our ancient culture, maybe one day he would see it or instruct his son the way I hope to instruct him.

And this was my approach. I talked to whoever I could (often being called crazy for liking the idea of a Sanhedrin or a Torah state), but my primary focus was to remember our culture and preserve it for the next generation. It was a good plan and I found the work satisfying.

But then the world was struck with a plague.

A plague the likes of which the world had forgotten.

The plague spread and the modern world we had all come to accept as unchanging, the world we had all accepted as fact, broke. It crumbled around us in a matter of weeks. This monolith of progress and modernity fell to its knees before the might of a microscopic half-living creation.

And I thought about how much more comforted I would be with a leader like David HaMelech. Taking decisive action out of care and concern for our people. A leader we followed because he was a man worth following. How such a man would respond to the plague. How he would show the utmost care for the ger, the yasom, and the almana. And I felt a great loss that we have no such leader today.

What excuse do we have now? We had clung to the false idol of modernity hoping that its wonders would protect us from harm for we had forgotten the teachings of our fathers that our protection only comes from One. We had forgotten who we are. This comfort has been taken from us – and I don’t know if we should be surprised that our mikdashim m’at have been taken from us as well.

The Rambam discusses the Torah’s response to crises. The prescription is fasting on an established day of communal reflection into our mistakes. But, curiously, the day is not devoted to a reflection of the causes of the disaster. We take the opportunity of communal crisis to reflect on any of our mistakes.

This plague has destroyed the status quo we once took comfort in, but there are, of course, other challenges. We need to be able to support ourselves in our Land. But then again, God kind of kicked us all into remote-working so maybe there is some good in that.

And, of course, there is still the problem of our fear of ourselves. Fear of a true Torah state. Fear of the Jews we disagree with. Fear of their liberalism and fear of the conservatism. Fear of their minhagim and fear of their approach to the modern world. I honestly don’t know what a modern Sanhedrin would look like.

But ever since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to know.