Two Jewish women for whom I have unbounded respect have recently undertaken the task of instructing the larger world as to what the Jews offer mankind. The first is Ruth Wisse, who turns 90 this week, and continues to teach and write regularly under the auspices of the Tikvah Fund. She was chosen to deliver this year's Jefferson Memorial Lecture, the highest honor of National Endowment of the Humanities. The second is Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, whose "Zionism for Everyone," created an intellectual uproar.
As befits the Martin Peretz Professor emerita of Yiddish literature at Harvard, where she taught for over two decades, Wisse begins with a discussion of a poem by Avrom Sutzkever, a survivor with his wife of the Vilna Ghetto, where the Nazis, ym"sh, suffocated their infant son immediately after birth and murdered their mothers during the ghetto's liquidation. Subsequently, the young couple joined the partisans in the forests. The Yiddish poems from that period dealt with resistance and tenacity.
Thus, Wisse testifies to her surprise when on a 1959 tour of America, Sutzkever introduced G-d into an attempt to answer all those in need of reassurance that the Nazis had not rendered thousands of years of Jewish civilization in vain: "If nothing remains, what was it all for?"
The first line of one of the poems recited on that tour, "Ver vet blaybn? – Who will last? And what?," addresses the above question of the survivors. The poem concludes, "Who lasts? G-d abides – isn't that enough?"
Here is Wisse's summary of Sutzkever's message: "This Avraham, who outlived not only the trauma of testing by G-d but also the sacrifice on millions of sons and daughters in Europe, was not satisfied with mere survival. To find lastingness, he insisted, you must look to its source. Trust in eternity can be sought only in the eternal."
And that is Wisse's first lesson for her adopted country: Take seriously the words inscribed on our coins, "In G-d We Trust" as the true coin of the realm.
For her second lesson, Wisse turned to the Shema. She makes an acute observation. After the initial proclamation of Hashem's unity, in the opening verse, the first paragraph is devoted almost entirely to the means by which that message is to be transmitted: You shall teach them to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be a reminder between your eyes. And you what write them upon the doorposts of you house and upon your gates."
The command to teach them to your children is a pedagogic directive for national coherence. Nor are they to be muttered only in private, but rather to be spoken in public. Do not be embarrassed to demonstrate your distinctiveness. "A covenantal people is explicitly directed to live openly as Jews among the nations," showing no embarrassment about our unique heritage or identity. That the Nazis may have used mezuzahs to identify Jews, tells us only about the Nazis, but nothing about our duty, as we come into our homes and go out of them, to remind ourselves constantly who we are and what is expected of us.
The teaching of Torah is our ongoing task, and for that we ourselves must be literate. That is Wisse's second lesson for America today: Focus on providing the young with an understanding and appreciation of the achievement that is our Constitution. For most American's today, literacy about America's foundational documents is lacking. Even most law students have never read the Constitution, beyond the Bill of Rights, if that. And fewer still have delved into the Federalist Papers to understand the basic principles up which America was built.
Once, would be new citizens were required to demonstrate a basic grasp of the American system of government. Today, they are not even required to be able to read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in English. With a greater understanding of the genius of the Constitution, Wisse suggests, young Americans would be a lot less eager to tear down what they have.
THE MAIN POINTS of Ruth Wisse's Jefferson Memorial Lecture are relatively easy to state. Alana Newhouse's broad-ranging essay, "Zionism for Everyone," drawing on anthropology, political theory, history and modern technology is more demanding.
Let us start with the Jews' gift to the world of the idea of a nation-state. Jean Bodin, the 16th century French jurist and the first great theoretician of national sovereignty, has long been suspected of Jewish ancestry due to his prolific use of illustrations and prooftexts from the Talmud. Jews can trace their existence as a distinct nation farther back than any other nation.
But our timing in the modern era has been bad. When nation-states were the ideal, observed political theorist Mark Lilla over two decades ago, the Jews were without a state of their own. And now that the Jews finally have a state, much of the world has moved beyond the idea of a nation state, and is even hostile to it. Jews are mocked for their insistence on their national identity and entitlement to sovereignty, including the most important right of a sovereign people – the right to defend itself.
In the wake of the Holocaust, nationalism, in the form of the nation-state, was identified by many as the culprit. Thus, the push for international organizations like the UN, and supra-national organizations, like the EU.
Recoil from the loss of tens of millions of lives in the world wars of the 20th century, however, is only one source of the turn from the nation-state among the elites. Another is new technologies that depend on the sameness of users across national boundaries. The flattening of cultures does not bring people closer together, argues Newhouse; it simply turns a large part of the population into cogs in a vast machine.
But most people do not wish to live in a post-nation state world, in which particularistic national identities have all been diluted and devalued. Again and again, the elites have been surprised by the rise of far-right nationalistic parties, opposed, above all, to unrestricted immigration, particularly of those from very different cultures.
Most people prefer the sense of belonging that comes from living with others sharing a specific ethnos or culture. The elements of any ethnos are numerous – race, language, religion, place, history – and vary from nation to nation, but whatever the particular combination of elements they serve to distinguish one nation from another.
Israel is often condemned as an ethno-state, but Newhouse points out that all nation-states, with the exception of those carved on a map by post-colonial European statesmen or "settler" states of European conquerors, are ethno-states. If those condemning Israel intend to disparage it as a racist state, they are on shaky grounds. The ingathering of the Jews has brought peoples of many hues, and joining the Jewish nation has always been a matter of affirmation rather than race or bloodlines.
AS NATION-STATES GO, Israel has been a remarkable success. Zionism would have been unthinkable without the uniquely strong ethnos of the Jewish people, including, first and foremost, devotion to Torah observance and study, which kept alive the dream of a return to Zion, while dispersed across the globe.
Since its founding, Israel has been surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction. It has never known a moment of peace. Yet it has built a thriving, modern economy. Cures for cancer and a host of other medical advances are as likely to come from Israel as anywhere else. With a population of only ten million, Israel has more companies on the NASDAQ than any other country, besides the United States and China. And every tech giant maintains a large research and development center in Israel.
Even in the midst of a war well into its third year, the Israeli economy has out performed almost every other OECD country over that period, despite losing a large part of its workforce to reserve duty on an ongoing basis.
Newhouse cites a multiplicity of ways in which Israel is distinguished from other nations. Alone among OECD countries, Israel has an above replacement fertility rate. Israel Jews bear the heaviest defense burden of any OECD country, and yet show up to fight whenever needed, even if it means returning home from across the globe and without being summoned. In short, the Jews of Israel are prepared to defend their country. And finally, despite the constant wars, the high cost of living, the societal fissures, Israelis always show up at the top of the world happiness index.
What all these distinguishing features betoken is a sense of purpose and an optimistic, future orientation. One only brings children into the world if one has something that one wishes to pass on. One only risks one's life on the battlefield if one feels part of a project whose survival is of great value.
Newhouse views that optimistic, future orientation as the key feature distinguishing the nation-state of the Jews from those nationalistic movements that gave the nation-state a bad name in the first place. The Nazis hearkened back to a mythical, pre-Christian volk, and Putin today seems largely driven by dreams of recreating the empire of Peter the Great. Christian nationalists in America paint a false picture of the American past, and ignore an American ethnos based on the easy absorption of new immigrants, regardless of religion.
The driving emotion of these movements is hatred, which is not an emotion given to building for the future. The optimistic, forward-looking aspect of Zionism, Newhouse speculates, is what has given rise to the current obsession with Zionism, whether among backward-looking nationalists or globalists. That obsession is an expression of envy.
But Zionism is also a model for a growing handful of national leaders, most notably Javier Milei in Argentina, and in that respect yet another gift of the Jews.
Whether the early Zionists, who were among history's great risk takers, recognized it or not, their optimism about the future and eagerness to build a better one drew on deep Torah sources. True, Torah Jews devote themselves to studying words of the sages of the Talmud who lived nearly two millennia ago, or more. But only because they are convinced that those words contain the answers to every question that may arise in the future.
Our orientation has always been towards a future in which knowledge of G-d is revealed to all mankind, and it is our task to do everything in our power to bring about that better future in which Hashem's presence is manifest.
Rav Ahron Lopiansky once described the teleology of Torah thought. In the Torah view the present is yonek, draws sustenance, from the future. Our belief in Hashem's ultimate plan for the world is what fills us with optimism and provides the resilience to keep struggling, even in the face of the greatest of obstacles.
"Sheva yipol tzaddik v'kam – the righteous man falls seven times, but rises again" (Mishlei 24:16) serves as the motto of resilience for us as individuals and as a nation. And it provides a model for others to emulate.