Can Jewish religiosity blend with Zionism without ending up in messianism? Through this personal reading of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest essay, Mishnaic Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture[1], Noémie Issan-Benchimol introduces us to another way of thinking about Jewish existence in the land of Israel: the Safed model, for which there is no outside of exile.
It’s very rare, and absolutely exceptional, for a book to fill a gap for its reader, and in one go to give meaning and coherence to hesitations and procrastinations dating back to his childhood, enabling them to understand that after their ideological, intellectual and religious explorations, everything was already there, at home. This is exactly what happened to me when I read Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s book.
I grew up in a religious family with a Sephardic tradition. Piyut, prayer, Hillulot and Tikunim were part of my natural environment. When we came to Israel, it wasn’t primarily to Tel Aviv or Ashdod that we went, but rather to Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberias. My mother made deals with various sages from the Mishna period. When my sister found herself an aguna (a woman whose husband refused to grant her a divorce), she negotiated with Rabbi Meïr Baal Haness and asked for his intercession, without stopping herself from doing all the worldly and legal things that needed to be done, since prayer has never prevented a Sephardi from consulting a doctor (the best) or a lawyer (a tenor). When my sister finally received her hard-fought for guet, we had to go and thank Rabbi Meïr, by organizing a huge Seudat Hodaya (a meal of gratitude) on the site of his tomb. As a teenager, I went to pray at Yonatan Ben Ouziel’s tomb, half-seriously because I was already too philosophical to find a husband. Whether half-seriously or not, I was married within the year. So, from time to time, I go to Amuka to say hello to this wise man, a disciple of Hillel the Elder.
From this natural environment and this religiosity, I’ve experienced several estrangements, as we used to say in old French. The first was my ultra-Orthodox school, born of an unlikely mix of Moroccan rabbis and Ashkenazi Lithuanian Judaism, which was very anti-Zionist. On Israeli Independence Day, we were forbidden to come in any costume that alluded to the state of Israel. So no blue and no white. On Yom Hashoah, we were treated to a lesson on the moral and religious decadence of German Jewry before the Shoah, tales of miracles at Auschwitz, and an explanation that true Jewish heroism was not to be found in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but only in those who managed to fast a Yom Kippur in the camp, or recite a page of Talmud in the heart of hell. All this aroused in me, as a child, a dull revolt, a presentiment that this was a false conscience and a theological scandal. So naturally I turned to the religious Zionism of the Bnei Akiva, only to find myself quickly at odds with it too, a stranger to those pioneer songs about Hebron “which is ours, yes that too”, the glorification of settlements, the blindness to the Palestinian people and, more generally, the over-determination of ideology over everything else. The last disturbance came from philosophy, and particularly medieval philosophy, whose rationalism I adopted with the faith of a new convert, despising or feeling obliged to despise those “superstitions” that still stirred my soul and which I tucked away in a little corner of my life. Then I came to live in Israel, and my research took a turn towards Tannaitic sources, while at the same time being an unlabeled Zionist, Zionist and religious but certainly not Zionist-religious, left-wing but Sephardic and therefore unable to recognize myself in the secular Ashkenazocentric left-wing culture, whose link with Hebrew culture was already in decadence.
Tragic versus epic consciousness
The Tannaim, the Sages of Eretz Israel who lived through the Great Revolt and the Revolt of Bar Kochba, the destruction of the Temple, can be characterized by their ability to construct as jurists a world of law that would preserve a little of the destroyed world, that of the Temple, of rites and sacrifices, while enabling its transition to the world after. Their center? Galilee, not Jerusalem and its Temple. Their conscience? An awareness of crisis, tragedy, rescue and survival. Their heroes? Wise men modeled on Roman jurists, not soldiers or warlords. That’s why Amnon Raz calls the model embodied by 16th-century Safed a Mishnaic consciousness:
“The gap between the importance of Safed’s culture and its minor and despised place in the national narrative allowed me to think of these two different consciousnesses: the hegemonic Zionist consciousness on the one hand and the Safed consciousness on the other. I would present Safed as an alternative model of Jewish existence in the land of Israel, a model that has the power to illuminate certain aspects of the hegemonic Zionist consciousness. I would call this model embodied by Safed “mishnaic consciousness” or “tannaitic consciousness”. I would call the Zionist model that has shaped modern Hebrew culture “biblical consciousness”. The former sees the land after destruction, the latter sees itself as a continuator of Joshua and Judges.” (p.12)
The consciousness of Safed is not so much a past moment that embodies an unrealized possibility, but perhaps, at its core, the de facto consciousness of a part of the Jewish people living in the Land of Israel without a consciousness of redemption or messianism.
In other words, the consciousness of a return to the glorious times of land conquest and charismatic biblical sovereignty can be contrasted with the tragic consciousness of continuity after crisis and destruction. This distinction, in addition to being highly structuring, also enables us to grasp paradoxical continuities: between secular, pioneering Zionism and religious Zionism, for example, both existing under the biblical paradigm.
It is important not to lend the author more than he sets out to do: “I make it clear that I am not proposing the Safed model as an alternative model for replacing Jewish existence in Israel, but as a mirror through which to examine modern national consciousness” (p.12). I believe, however, that Amnon Raz errs on the side of modesty. The consciousness of Safed is not so much a past moment that embodies an unrealized possibility, but perhaps, at its core, the de facto consciousness of a part of the Jewish people that lives on the Land of Israel without consciousness of redemption or messianism. Perhaps Amnon Raz is naming an existing, even important phenomenon here, giving it a visibility and individuality it may not have had before.
The Safed moment
In the early 16th century, more precisely after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Land in 1517, an exceptional group of eminent Jewish personalities gathered in Safed. The town attracted many outstanding figures from Spain, North Africa and Eastern Europe, who had a lasting impact on the Jewish world. It was a formative period, crucial for the subsequent development of Jewish culture, both in the Muslim world, particularly in North Africa, and in Eastern Europe, notably with the emergence of Hasidism. This community was unique in its intellectual originality, the high quality of its members and its lasting influence on Jewish tradition. Many of the scholars present were already considered great masters, and over time their reputations were established by subsequent generations as among the most eminent figures in Judaism.
Some of them considered themselves chosen, having had the privilege of experiencing divine revelations, mystical visions and even near-prophecies. Among them were the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria, emblematic figure of the Kabbalah; Rabbi Yossef Caro, author of the famous Shulchan Aruch code of halachic law, but also a mystic who wrote the Magid Meisharim under the dictation of a “maggid”, a kind of angelic guide; the liturgical poet Rabbi Israël Najarah; the kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero; and Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, composer of the famous song with which almost every Jew in the world welcomes the Queen of Shabbat, Lecha Dodi.
On the spot, this circle of thinkers instituted, conceptualized and produced works that profoundly marked Jewish tradition. Paradoxically, when the history of Zionism and its beginnings is recounted, it is usually traced back to the Lovers of Zion movement or the Aliyah of the followers of the Gaon of Vilna, without incorporating the intellectual ferment of 16th-century Safed, which can nonetheless be described as proto-Zionist in many respects. If we take a broader view of modernity, we can only conclude that this effervescent moment, rooted in a multi-ethnic context and surrounded by Sufi groups and practices, reflecting on notions of exile, sovereignty, people and nation, represented a form of alternative political modernity. This has not been fully recognized for its richness and originality, due to anti-religious biases that hold that anything that is not secularized, and worse, has the bad taste of being entirely mystical, cannot constitute genuine political thought worthy of the name.
The Mishna as a structuring metaphor
It is not simply by analogy that Raz-Krakotzkin describes the spiritual and intellectual model of Safed as “Mishna consciousness”. There are, in fact, several profound filiations and genealogical links with the Mishna, the collection of oral laws compiled by Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi between the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
First and foremost, an essential link runs through the Zohar, the medieval pseudepigraphic text traditionally attributed to the tanna Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai. The Zohar reflects and extends the oral tradition recorded in the Mishna, while interpreting it through the prism of Kabbalah, the mystical tradition. Law and mysticism, which disciplinary divisions have separated to the point of making them opposites, are inextricably linked here. The link, the unity, the cohesion can indeed characterize this Safed consciousness.
Law and mysticism, which disciplinary divisions have separated to the point of making them opposites, are inextricably linked here.
But beyond these textual links, the “mishnaic consciousness” of Safed represented a specifically Jewish cultural form, designed to bring Jews consolation for their condition of exile and their aspirations for future redemption. Thus, for Rabbi Yosef Caro, one of the central figures of Safed, the polymorphous celestial entity revealed to him in his mystical visions embodied the Shechinah, the exiled Divine Presence waiting to be consoled.
This revealed figure took on a variety of guises, which Caro referred to in turn as the mishna (the codified oral law), the Shechinah, the Maggid (the angel-guide unveiling the mysteries), the “speaking voice” (the Kol Ha-Medaber) or the “redeeming angel” (Malach Ha-Go’el). But whatever its form, this epiphany urged Caro to work for the redemption of the Jewish people, thus linking the preservation of the spiritual and legal tradition of the Tannaim to the messianic hope of the end of the exile.
Exile and Sovereignty
In these circles of thought, exile was first and foremost the exile of the feminine figure of the divine, the Shekhina, who wandered in Eretz Israel, and upon whom various Tikunim, reparations, had to be made. Exile was thus par excellence a metaphysical state experienced in the Land of Israel more than anywhere else. In this vision, there is no outside exile. But exile is not in opposition to a Jewish national existence in the Land of Israel. The author clearly shows how the halachic debates on the renewal of the Semicha, the original rabbinic ordination to judge criminal cases that raged at the time, can be formulated as highly political debates on the establishment of a non-exclusive political sovereignty.
De facto binationalism
Amnon Raz has long been a proponent of a binational solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But since the publication of Exile within Sovereignty, in which he harshly criticized the “negation of exile” at work in Zionist thought, he has put some water in his wine. He is one of those thinkers who evolve in line with what they perceive to be reality, and do not remain bent on saving their theory at the expense of reality. He is also one of those prophetic voices driven by a love of this place, of the people who live here, of human beings. For example, he does not defend the old moon of a secular One State in which both peoples would live as equals, since nothing in history or in the region suggests that it is realistic and will not result in the crushing of one or other of the nations. He no longer proposes a political model that should be applied immediately, but now speaks of the urgency of binational thinking, thinking that emerges from below in hearts and minds, and that may succeed where vertical political attempts have failed.
We can find a counter-model for political and religious life in this land, which does not live under the banner of aggressive irredentism and territorial maximalism, but of coexistence and intense exchange.
I can’t think of any other way to describe the evolution of Raz Krakozkin’s thinking than to say that he has swapped a position of radical criticism for an intra-Jewish one. He repeats over and over again that the solution will be binational, since reality is binational, without prejudging the political form of this binationalism. Since the reality is religious, the solution will also have to take account of this religious reality, of both sides. But he also rejects with all his might the demonization of those on the right, whom he calls his brothers, and does not hesitate to criticize the powerful anti-religious prejudices of secular Zionism, from which he nonetheless comes.
A religious political possibility
Raz-Krakotzkin has a flair for rejecting the secular Israeli leftist stance that sees religiosity (often Edot Hamizrach and Sephardic religiosity) as the source of all Israeli society’s problems, a position that poorly conceals paternalistic, Orientalist racism. He shows that by criticizing the dominant Zionist historiography, we can on the contrary find a counter-model of political and religious life in this land, which does not live under the banner of aggressive irredentism and territorial maximalism, but of coexistence and intense exchange. We must visit these holy places still shared by Jews and Muslims which, like the tomb of the prophet Samuel, bear witness to a life intertwined and inextricably interdependent, for better or for worse, in order to take the measure of what could be, if only. It may seem absurd to speak of a Renaissance to come, when the spectacle is rather one of darkness, of a total degradation of discourse, of a victory of eradicating and exclusive visions that feed and reinforce each other in a mimetic race gone mad. The consciousness of Safed seems far away. Yet it is within reach.
Noémie Issan-Benchimol
Notes
| 1 | Editions of Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad and the Van Leer Institute, 2022 |
