In a recent article from the Jewish News Syndicate, “The Great Divide” by Malka Eisenberg (https://www.jns.org/the-great-divide-2/), the author insists, in contradiction to those who claim that the ICJ’s rulings against Israel explain the hostility of Israel’s legal system and left-wing politicians to the religious and “right-leaning” supporters of the current government led by Netanyahu, that “the animosity from the minority anti-right, fervently secular population [of Israel] is focused on dividing the nation of Israel.”
Indeed it is obvious that the Israeli left, which has opposed—so far, successfully—this government’s attempts to rein in what has amounted to a judicial dictatorship over the (unwritten) constitution, and as a consequence, over all legislation passed by the Knesset and all administrative decisions to enforce it, is also the source of the more recent demonstrations insisting on bringing home the remaining hostages at any cost, with the inevitable result of abandoning the Gaza war’s key goal of permanently destroying Hamas’ military capacity by retaining Israeli control of its external supply lines, particularly the Philadelphi Corridor connecting Gaza with Egypt.
But Ms. Eisenberg’s real point is not political but religious. The focus of her polemic is the “fervently secular” attitude typical of many of the original settlers from Europe and their descendants, whose Jewishness was in many cases more imposed on them by the Nazis and their allies than embedded in their lives through religious practice. And indeed, this division has become exacerbated in recent years, now that this originally dominant group is outnumbered by Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East, most of whom are more observant than their Ashkenazi predecessors, and whose natural allies in this latter group are the communities of traditional Jews like the Chassidim, those who wear religious garb and strictly observe the principles laid down in the Shulchan Aruch, the Orthodox code of Jewish law.
Yet Ms. Eisenberg’s essay is not an expression of despair. On the contrary, its uplifting theme is given in these paragraphs:
The heart and soul of the Jews—the coalesced nation of Israel—are held together and sustained by adherence to belief in God, Torah and the centrality of the Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
Despite the left’s strenuous battle to remove much of Judaism from Israel’s secular schools, many secularists have been turning to Judaism to add meaning and focus to their lives. As Rabbi Berel Wein, a scholar and lecturer, stated: “As Jews, we have to know where we come from to know where we are going.”
In other words, the current conflict is bringing Israelis back to their original Jewish roots, not just ethnically but religiously. Times of crisis do have such effects, and to this extent the Gaza war is from this author’s perspective a near-providential event, reminding Israelis before it is too late that the destiny of Israel is not to provide Jews with the opportunity to live as Americans still imagine themselves, in a comfortable and generally peaceful “global” world, but to let them, or make them, live as Jews, no longer dispersed as they were over the millennia of the Galut, but as a people defending itself resolutely from its enemies—and in that role, relying on faith in the providential divinity who has kept them going through all the horrors that have marked their history.
The real Jew, in other words, is not the demonstrator for the left-secular Ashkenazi legal dictatorship that the pre-Netanyahu government was able to impose, and that the current majority has still not fully thrown off, but one who, whether or not observant of every detail of his religious tradition, is guided by a linked sense of place and divine purpose to help carry out his people’s mission in the world.
In 2024 one might question what new lesson can be learned from this exhortation to return to a religious as opposed to a secular perspective. Certainly one cannot speak of this return as embodying a new understanding; it is rather a reaffirmation of geographically grounded sectarian values in a world that most hope to see evolving toward universal, “humanistic” ones. Yet I believe nonetheless that at its core, generative anthropology is engaged by this reaffirmation.
For GA’s conception of the sacred, understood from an anthropological perspective, must not be seen as a transcendental or theological “construct,” but as in the first place derived directly from the originary shared intuition that individual desire must be deferred in deference to the needs of the community. The secret of this intuition’s success is that it is in principle neither selfish nor self-sacrificing. There may be times when one must sacrifice one’s own pleasures, or even one’s life, for the community, but that cannot be the normal outcome, as Girard’s emissary murder anticipating the Crucifixion would suggest. The originary event’s fundamental point is that the survival of each individual human depends on that of the community of which he is a part; any exception to this rule is temporary and for the most part accidental.
Why then make this point in particular with respect to the Jews of Israel? Because Hebrew religion is the source of Western monotheism, and its ability to survive when exiled from its original homeland has been the most striking demonstration that, just as the root of the sacred lies in the originary scene, the root of the Abrahamic religions lies in the scenic locus from which they emerged. The Old Testament tells the story of the establishment of Jerusalem and the two temples, and it is the tension between the specificity of this locus and the universality of the One God that is unique to Western religion.
Whence the retention of the sacred status of Jerusalem in all three Abrahamic religions—and the Muslim insistence that it was originally made sacred by them and not the Jews, as though to emphasize the necessity of memory even as a falsehood. The entire history of the West may best be understood as the struggle to absorb this sacral intuition of the Hebrews, that is, to realize in a potentially universal community an intuition of the sacred that was originally that of one people among others, whose worship of the One God of course welcomed new believers, but who understood its essential role in the wider world as an example rather than a universal norm. Not that Hebrew religion was tribal in essence, but it had emerged as the religion of a people whose self-definition under HaShem marked its liberation from the world of archaic empire, rather than, like Christianity and Islam, in competition with the ecumenical religions of the Axial era.
Or to put it more simply, the Hebrew religion emerged as the religion defined by monotheism, in which the “personality” of God could simply be understood as providentiality, concern for the survival and success of his people and on their example, the human race. The power of this example brought the West to dominance and thence to the conquests of modernity that has, or had, inspired its population with the hubris that they no longer need the sacred.
We have only been witnessing the most serious consequences of this illusion of desacralization since 9/11/2001, and particularly since 10/7/2023, when we discovered, much to our amazement, the powerful appeal of the most barbaric form of sacrality in our “atheistic” social order. Whence the significance of Ms Eisenberg’s point: crises like that caused by 10/7 and the ensuing war remind us that the sacred is not just a “humanist” abstraction, that concern for the human community is never just abstract care for “the human race,” but that it depends on the realization of a scene, and that the Jews are privileged to have established the prototype of that scene for Western civilization.
The broader point that this helps us to make is that the sacred is misunderstood when it is simply equated with “belief in God.” The sacred is our conscience, our “superego” if one likes, but not as some kind of impersonal structure in the brain, rather as the persistent remnant of the originary scene of human communality. Once one grasps this, the question of “belief” is in the most profound sense a secondary matter; we are the heirs to that scene and to the conscience that it first inspired in our ancestors.
I think that Jews are privileged in this respect, in that as a result of their “seniority,” they of all religious communities are the least obliged to focus on an “act of faith.” To be Jewish is in the first place to be part of the Jewish community and to share its long history, in which the sacred is so embedded that whether a Jew obeys every rule in the Shulchan Aruch or eats bacon and never sees the inside of a synagogue, he bears enough traces of his people’s memory to maintain a sense of the sacred’s communal nature. Whence the lack of any real barrier between Jews in their relationship to their common historical origin (which can be adopted as well as inherited), and in consequence, the point Ms. Eisenberg makes in the second quoted paragraph: we have to know where we come from to know where we are going. Indeed, all of us would do well to meditate on the wisdom of this objurgation: it embodies the truth of generative anthropology.
Coda
As a warning against the opposite view, I need only mention General Moshe Dayan’s deeply regrettable error in 1967, in the aftermath of Israel’s great victory, in leaving the Temple Mount entirely in the hands of the Muslim Waqf. (See for example https://jcpa.org/al-aksa-is-in-danger-libel/al-aksa-is-in-danger-libel-temple-mount/ .) Ever since, Jews have not been allowed to pray on what was the site of both their Temples; yet even without praying, the fact that they are “soiling with their filthy feet” the terrain of Al Aqsa has provided constant grounds for retaliatory violence, most horribly in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre of October 7, 2023.
As Sun Tsu well knew, the first principle of war is to know (first) your enemy and (then) yourself. Thus even if Jews had truly become indifferent to the Temple Mount, their enemies had not. But the more profound lesson is that on this point, it is the enemy who had the right perspective. Holy places are not just important to the “observant,” but to all members of a community. This is something that Hamas’ supporters have shown they well understand when they burn America’s flag and deface its national monuments. It is well past the time when the Jews as well should have learned this truth.