The secular is religious
How can someone be secular when they base their identity and worldview on a religious text?
I want to add something else to my “zionism is Judaism” essay — a few words from David Ben-Gurion, Israeli’s first and most influential leader. Well maybe Netanyahu has taken the “most influential” spot now…
I mentioned Ben-Gurion in my essay, explaining how he — a supposedly secular socialist — believed in the Torah as a contractual document and also used the stories it contained to justify the zionist colonial project and to give new Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle Eastern a sense of unified identity. As I wrote…
in the 1950s David Ben-Gurion launched a project that brought together archeologists, writers, historians and politicians — and tasked them with figuring out how to use the Torah to force a sense of unified identity and purpose on what was then a largely confused, immigrant population that spoke different languages and came from different countries. This group settled on the Torah’s Book of Joshua, which recounts the violent and genocidal conquest of the Holy Land by the twelve Israelite tribes.6
Ben-Gurion and other secular zionists thought they could harness the power of an ancient religion and use it to forge a national identity. They thought they could bend the words of an ancient god to their will. But no matter much they tried to neuter the sacred, it never went away.
I want to expand on that a little bit.
While doing research for my novel I came across a book that edited interviews Ben-Gurion gave for a dramatized film of his life into a kind of memoir.1 It provides a nice window into “secular” zionist thinking about the Torah. I put secular in quotes because their secularism does not seem to be that secular at all. I mean, how can someone be secular when they base their identity and worldview on a religious text?
Reading Ben-Gurion confirmed something I’ve been thinking about the last year: he and other secular zionists — not just of his generation but today as well — are fundamentally religious. Not wishy-washy religious — but fanatical and messianic. Their religious fervor is of an updated variety, modernized. It has been stripped of the old Judaic rituals and the complex Talmudic laws. What it has kept, though, is the ancient nationalist messianism built into the deepest foundation of Judaism. And this ancient nationalism was transformed into a modern ethno-nationalist creed, into zionism. That’s the religion.
These speeches Ben-Gurion gave are interesting because they are directed at non-Jewish European audiences. The film that they were prepared for was a British production. This was early in the game still and so he thought he had to lay out a case, to convince people that Israel was legitimate. And the way he sold it is to point at the Torah, the book that serves as a foundation for two of the largest religions in the world. As he make clear, creating a modern Jewish nation is the realization of something religious Jews have been awaiting for for a long long time: the coming of the messiah, the redemption of Jews in the eyes of their Hebrew god, and the restoration of Jewish rule to Israel and Jerusalem as fulfillment of promises YHWH made to Abraham and Jacob and Moses. Except the messiah isn’t some mystical entity to Ben-Gurion. The messiah is the zionist political movement he helped lead. The messiah is him and his people.