I promised some folks on Facebook an explanation of the various ways people currently use the words Zionism and Zionist. Two years ago, I checked with around 200 people and discovered around eight definitions. This is a perfectly normal number. Look up the Oxford English Dictionary (its biggest and most detailed versions) and so many words have six to eight definitions. Those definitions fell into three groups. To understand where someone was coming from, it was simply a matter of finding out which definition they related to.
Now, there are a lot more. Language is an ever-changing glory, and when things come into the public gaze and when there are groups actively trying to bring down standard definitions shifts will happen quite quickly. When they happen in many countries and in many different cultural and political groups, those changes create a really fuzzy world that’s difficult to navigate.
I’ll do the best I can to explain what I see, and I hope it helps. I’ll begin (in this post) with 3 Jewish ideas that inform various Jewish views of what Zionism is. These ideas that make it easier for most Jews to determine their relationship with their own definitions of Zionism.
In the next post, I’ll describe the three groups of definitions, from two years ago to lay a base for understanding why everything is so apparently chaotic right now and conversations are stymied.
After that, in my final post, I will introduce some of the current definitions of Zionism as I see the word used. Think of the last section as a snapshot of a moment in time. The changes in meaning are that turbulent. Understanding now, however, helps understand future uses of the words. This is (if you’re curious) one of the approaches to culture that I use as an historian. When I need to analyse a text (medieval or modern or something else entirely) I often make a private snapshot of the use of key words and phases. This gives me a grounding for understanding the views that are being expressed. It also helps me understand the path language takes after that snapshot. Thank my historian self, then, for leading you astray, and not my novelist self.
Part One: Jewish concepts
The three concepts I want to introduce here are Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael. Not all Jews know them as words, but they hold so much of our everyday together. Our relationship to them shapes so much of our lives, whether we make aliyah or are proud and happy with being Diaspora Jews is probably the second most important one in this context. The most important one… I’ll get to.
Just to make it clear, these are my views of those concepts right now, in relation to the current wave of antisemitism. Jews like to discuss these things and I’d be very happy to see other views in your comments on this post.
Am Yisrael
This is the “O Israel” in our most famous prayer. It’s us, the people (‘Am’), anywhere and in any state. It takes an awful lot to not be part of Am Yisrael. We’ve been in Diaspora and out of Diaspora and in Eretz Yisrael on and off since the Babylonian Empire. This makes it a strong and complex construct that most antisemites rail against but do not understand.
Am Yisrael is the chief reason why so many people were happy to see Herzog when he visited Australia. It had a lot to do with Israel for some Australian Jews, and others were happy to see him for quite different reasons.
If you have a very big family and it’s spread everywhere, it’s meaningful when a senior family member visits to support you in an impossible time. And a senior family member from Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael (both!) shows us that we are loved and that we will get through this dark time. It wasn’t a religious visit, but the visit was connected, profoundly, to Judaism.
How do we express Am Yisrael everyday? Well, there are the prayers. Many prayers talk about all of us as part of our own nation. Some people call it tribal, but it’s rather more complicated than that, because it’s informed by cultural practice and religious practice and the assumption that the enxt Jew you meet might be a long lost relative.
One element of the cultural side is the welcome most Jews give other Jews. We check if we’re related, if we have ancestors in common or religious practice or recipes in common (so often we exchange recipes as part of this) or if we know each other in some other way.
Jewish culture is often about making connections, and not all of them are within the synagogue. Rabbinical Judaism only goes back 2000 years, after all, and Am Yisrael goes back to our origin, those twelve tribes, those ancient people. We still connect and we still care. We do it in a hundred thousand different ways, but the Shema, with its mention of ‘Am Yisrael’ is still our most famous prayer.
Other Jews will argue with me. This is also a part of that culture. Why? Because the argument and discussion is help connect us and grow our learning and understanding. Some Jews have to agree with everything and some don’t, but Rabbinical Judaism is all about discourse. It’s another form of that connection.
Eretz Yisrael
Eretz Yisrael (Eretz literally means land) is the spiritual aspect of that piece of land everyone’s fighting about. It’s part of the Covenant.
I wish people would stop telling me about the covenant without knowing what it is. It’s a “Yes, we’re going to behave and be good people and learn lots” kind of promise, not “We are holy and special and love ourselves to pieces” kind. It’s also not about going to Heaven or Hell. Judaism has quite different notions of these tings to Christianity.
Eretz Yisrael is best known by Jews who are religious (even slightly) and is part of a conversation that began thousands of years ago. We know this because texts that date back to the time of David and Solomon are also part of that conversation. Most of our religious texts and interpretative texts in some way are part of that conversation. What does that conversation do? It gives us a bunch of cultural tools that express our relationship to the land.
I have spoken with Indigenous Australians about this and we have overlap in some of that culture, especially in the sense sense of country and being custodian. I have spoken to people from the various colonies of Britain (yes, I spoke to myself as part of this) and the US doesn’t have this sense, but First Nations in North America do.
Most Commonwealth countries used to have a different aspect of this sense of land to which we belong: the notion that Britain is ‘home.’ I wrote an essay on that once, and if you’re interested, I can share it here one day. Not on the Jewish side, but on how some Commonwealth folks used to see Britain as “Home’ and their own country as ‘home.’ That’s changed and mostly not true, but it was true for fifty years after Britain released its hold on most of its Empire.
The way Jews maintain the memory of that relationship with a particular piece of land is rather wonderful. The more observant a Jew is, the more connected they are to Eretz Yisrael. Even anti-Zionist Jews who are religious have that connection.
Why is this so? That connection flows through our prayers, as I’ve said, but also through our calendar. We can tell you planting times and harvest times and even our leap year was instituted to align the calendar with the sun because the needs of the land are more important than neatness of numbers. We don’t learn the current year of the land from our calendar. We know the land cycle as it was the last time when that region had Jewish rule. There are so many interesting things inside our calendar – you can trace much of Jewish history by it. Right now, though, the fact that any Jew who uses the traditional calendar knows the farm cycle and lives it every single year means that we are connected to Eretz Yisrael. And it still works. I checked with a chazan (synagogue cantor) friend and he says that the prayer for rain comes after a dry period and the prayer is said and lo, the rains come. If you go to synagogue for the right festival, you know when the rain comes in Israel.
Medinat Yisrael
Medinat Yisrael doesn’t need a long explanation. It is, quite simply, Israel the modern country.
Next time… the groups of definitions and where they come from.