In an age when Israel may be on the verge of altering fundamentally
the role that religion plays in public life and when courageous
Israeli scholars are questioning the very premises of Zionism, the
time may be ripe to take a fresh look at Jewish history and to
learn from it.
Except for a few extremists on both the Jewish and Palestinian
sides, most people today accept the fact that the land between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is inhabited by two nations
and that neither is likely to go away. But coming to terms with the
current situation is only the first step on the road to a lasting
solution to a crisis that will not be resolved without serious
changes in the way each people sees itself. Despite their leaders'
willingness to sit down and talk about a two-state solution, many
Palestinians have yet to come to terms with the fact that Jews do,
indeed, have an historical connection to the country, albeit not
the same historical connection that is professed by Judaism. On the
other hand, Jews need to be reminded that during none of the
periods when their ancestors ruled the land was the population ever
homogenous, ethnically or religiously. I would argue that the
country was at its best during times when all of the groups were
encouraged to exist side-by-side, with no claim of superiority by
one over the others.
The taboos the rabbis encouraged against mixing with the outside
world certainly helped Jews to survive as a people and,
significantly, to preserve Jewish teachings so that they might be
studied in a modern, planet-wide society than can stand to benefit
from many of them. But in an age when the center of Jewish life is
no longer in the Diaspora, the rabbinic religion is quite damaging
and nowhere is this more evident than in Israel itself. The
combination of a ghetto mentality and the emergence of the modern
State of Israel has turned the historical homeland into an abode of
racism that should be seen as an insult to the concept of the
pursuit of justice, the central theme of Jewish thinking for more
than two millennia.
Does this mean that the anti-Israel propagandists are correct that
Zionism is racism? Not at all, for in its pure form, as it was
understood by the members of the First Aliyah in the 1880s, and by
other immigrants in the succeeding decades, Zionism meant that Jews
should return to their historical home and live in harmony with the
environment and with the native populations, both Jewish and
non-Jewish. So then, if Zionism is not racism, why does Israel
discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens? Why have some
Zionists come to support racist policies? Because, we must consider
that the source of racism in Israel is not Zionism, but Judaism -
not the moral values and legal guidelines of the Torah, but the
theological context in which they have been framed. In other words,
the problem as I see it is connected with monotheism, a belief
that, of course, is not limited to Judaism. Nevertheless, Jews
should be among those who lead humanity away from it, remembering
that it was not always the belief of the Jewish people.
The Omrides
In recent years, archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near
East have been debating the question of whether or not there was
ever a united kingdom of David and Solomon and little by little it
is looking as though there was not. Instead, it appears Solomon may
have been some kind of tribal chieftain in the southern extreme of
what would become the Kingdom of Israel and that David may have
been a mercenary employed by a powerful Philistine city-state.
Nevertheless, the descriptions given of the organization and
affairs of Solomon's reign, which the writers of the text preserved
in the biblical Book of Kings, portray an age of peace, wisdom, and
architectural accomplishments, which seems to fit perfectly with
another kingdom that was just as much Israelite, though quite a bit
more historical. This was the kingdom of Omri, who ruled Israel
during the ninth century B.C.E., not from Jerusalem but from
Samaria, in the north.
Apparently, Israel as a monarchy did not catch the attention of the
surrounding world until Omri's time, when references began to
appear in the inscriptions of the various kingdoms of the region.
Unlike many of the leaders of modern Israel, Omri understood that
strength came not from separating yourself from the other, the one
who is alien, but from making the other a part of you. So he
arranged for his son, Ahab, to marry Yzbaal, daughter of the King
of Tyre, which at that time was the major maritime power of the
eastern Mediterranean. Under the Omride dynasty many peoples and
religions were welcomed into Israel and the result was a strong,
stable, and productive society, which went into a decline only
after the Omrides were overthrown by a religious zealot, who
instituted a policy of worshiping only the god, Yahweh (YHWH or
Jehovah), and who was probably allied with a competing kingdom,
Aram-Damascus, which soon turned on the zealot anyway.
Now, as it turns out, the writers of the Kings text were also
worshipers of Yahweh and for this reason they put a negative spin
on everything having to do with the religiously and ethnically
tolerant House of Omri. They even punned visciously on Queen
Yzbaal's name, changing it to Jezebel, which has a vulgar
connotation in biblical Hebrew. And that is probably how the myth
was born, the myth that the people of Judah, the heirs to the
Kingdom of Israel, needed to separate them selves from that which
was alien. But, each time they did this, their society crumbled and
they were conquered.
I do not mean to idealize the cultures with which ancient Israel
associated. Indeed, Omri's Tyrian allies practiced human sacrifice.
However, as even the Bible hints, so did the Israelites, including
the ones who worshipped Yahweh. In fact, critical analysis of the
patriarchal narratives suggests that in an early version of the
famous binding of Isaac story, Abraham does not stop at the last
second, but kills his son. This is corroborated by a story from the
Midrash - a collection of Jewish traditions related to, but not
included within, the Hebrew biblical narrative - wherein Isaac does
in fact die by his father's hand. The greatness of the Omrides was
their wisdom to recognize that their people were no more ethical,
no more chosen, than anyone who lived around them. And so, they
welcomed aliens, they absorbed and assimilated all of the people,
and in doing so they built a society that was developed and
organized enough to begin to reform itself. I would not be at all
surprised if that core of legal and moral guidelines that we have
come to know as the Covenant Code and which is preserved in the
Book of Exodus, chapters 21-23, was written in some form during the
Omride period. After all, the code mentions, several times that one
must help the alien - exactly the policy for which the Omrides were
condemned! Leaders of both Jewish and Christian belief systems have
been taken in by the propaganda of Kings and have thus forgotten
the Omride lesson.
The Persians and Inclusiveness
But the Persians learned it very well. In 539 B.C.E. they conquered
Babylon, and eventually everything from the Indus River to North
Africa and Ionia (eastern Greece) and put together the largest and
most ethnically diverse empire that had ever existed, one that
endured for two centuries. One of the secrets of Persian success, I
think, was the subtle way in which they accepted as their own the
cultures of each national group. In doing so, they united all of
the nations within a common ideology of the nascent Zoroastrian
religion. When the Persian king, Cyrus, marched into Babylon, he
made it clear that he did so in the names of Marduk and Ishtar, the
chief god and goddess of the city, he helped to rebuild temples,
and consequently he was seen as a friend and ally. Indeed, for 200
years Babylonians served the Persian Empire, even rising high in
the ranks of its administration. Cyrus and his son, Cambyses, dealt
with the people of Judah in a similar manner, building a new temple
and liberating Jerusalem in the name of Yahweh and in the name of
the goddess with whom Yahweh consorted (the Judahites had a
national goddess called Asherah).
The Persians also talked with the leaders of each ethnic group
living within the empire and studied their cultures and national
mythologies. In Babylon, they found a highly developed legal system
and great literature. When they came to the Judahites, they found
something very unusual, for the legalistic and the literary had
been combined into various written works, full of imaginative
parables that illustrated why the laws were necessary. But the
written works did not all tell the same story, nor did they include
the monotheistic theology the Persians had recently developed and
which they realized could be used to bind together their growing
empire. So, they continued to study Judah, inviting Judahite
priests, scribes, and storytellers and their families to study with
their Persian counterparts. Thus, the Judahites learned about the
Persian god, who was said to be the god of the universe.
We don't really know the details of what happened during the two
centuries of Persian rule. But it is during this time period that
the first two lasting monotheistic religions, Zoroastrianism and
Judaism, emerged and it happened in a setting in which Persians and
Judahites were living side by side and in which Judahites, like
Babylonians, were serving in the Persian court. Perhaps the
Judahites reasoned that the universal deity, who was called the
Ahura Mazda, had something to do with Aaron and Moses. Then, there
is a story preserved in the Book of Nehemyah, which tells of how
the priest, Ezra, is appointed by the Persian emperor to travel to
the land of Judah, renamed as the province of Yehud, to become its
religious leader and to introduce to the people something that Ezra
called the Torah. Ezra then read his Torah to the people, who
recognized only parts of what they heard.
Now if you were to ask a rabbi, particularly an Orthodox one, about
this, you would be told that according to Judaism there had been an
earlier Torah, authored by Moses, but that the Torah had been
destroyed by the Babylonians a half century prior to the Persian
takeover. With a straight face, the rabbi would then tell you God
had contacted Ezra and dictated the Torah, verbatim, just as he had
done for Moses, some 800 years earlier. However, reasoning
according to Okham's Razor you will suspect that, probably, Ezra
wrote the Torah himself - not from scratch but from those earlier
writings, which incidentally have been identified within the Bible
and separated by scholars in modern times. You will also begin to
suspect that the Persians and Zoroastrianism had something to do
with the birth of Judaism as we know it. It seems the early Jews,
my ancestors, were assimilated into the Persian mindset with such
success that they later came to believe it had been theirs from the
beginning. In the process, of course, the Persians became a little
bit Jewish, just as they became a little bit Babylonian, and a
little bit of a lot of other things.
A Canaan for Today
In my view, these lessons from history indicate there is an
alternative available to Israel and to the Jews of the 21st century
that involves not the forced deportation of people, nor the
division of the country into two independent states with the weaker
group tucked away behind a fence, nor the replacement of Israel
with an Arab-dominated Palestine that might become an Islamic
republic. Imagine if Israel were to adopt the outlook of the
Omrides and the Persians.
The first step would be to eliminate all of the discrimination the
state promotes against its Arab citizens. After that, Israel should
open its arms to all Palestinians, promote cultural exchange, and
offer them citizenship in what initially would be a confederation
of two states and perhaps, ultimately, a united country in which
Jewish or Arab ethnicity no longer mattered. At the same time, a
post-rabbinic Israel could promote to Palestinians a new kind of
Islam, one that emphasizes the many human values the two peoples
share and, I would suggest, one that contains no theology at
all.
Certainly, under current circumstances Israel would have valid
reasons - all having to do with security - to resist a
confederation. Similarly, Palestinians at the moment would not be
comfortable to confederate given the power of the Israeli military.
But I think that on a planet whose nation-states are becoming ever
more interdependent, there are ways to address these issues. First
of all, while there would be open borders between the two states
with some Israelis residing in Palestinian territory and some
Palestinians residing in Israeli territory, the Israeli army would
not be allowed to operate inside Palestinian territory without the
permission of the Palestinian government. More importantly, while
Israel would be responsible for the external security of both
states, the confederation as a whole could be made part of NATO (or
some new international military force) and this, I think, should
put both Israel and Palestine at ease as to their long-term
future.
Palestinians claim they come from a society that was distinctly
local, rather than simply Arab or southern Syrian. Let us offer
them a way to be just that, but in the setting of a pluralistic,
bi-national confederation, not in the pan-Arab sort of way that the
one-state solution usually suggests. In fact, since genetic studies
are beginning to reveal that Jews and to some extent Palestinians
are descendants of the ancient Canaanites, it may be quite
appropriate to name the new confederation Canaan.