Upon returning from a visit to Israel, Joshua Karlip reflects on the country’s successes in light of the October 7 massacres:
The founders of Zionist ideology, from Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl onward, understood the creation of a Jewish state as the antidote to anti-Semitism. Even as a Jewish state would provide a safe haven for the Jewish people, statehood would allow the Jews finally to take their place amongst the family of nations. Tragically, these aspects of the Zionist dream have not yet come to fruition. Rather than taking its place amongst the nations, Israel has become the Jew amongst nations. Likewise, Israeli military strength failed to protect the victims of October 7th from the genocidal violence directed against them.
Still, in an even more fundamental way, the state of Israel has proven a great Jewish success. A century ago, the majority of the world’s Jews lived in deeply Jewish spaces. The shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, as the cities and villages of North Africa and the Middle East, functioned as the spatial context within which Jews lived a thick Jewish identity, manifesting itself through practices, languages (Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic), folkways, and values that deeply reflected the millennia-old Jewish textual tradition.
If the Torah, the text, stood at the heart of the Jewish experience, it only could survive within the context of Jewish space. The Communist destruction of Judaism, the Holocaust’s destruction of Europe’s Jews, and the Arab lands’ expulsion of its Jews forever ended these centuries-old Jewish spaces. It was Israel that provided a home not just to Jews from all of these lands; even more fundamentally, it restored to them a Jewish space in which they could live, speak, and study in the language of the texts and traditions that always had sustained them.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-i-came-to-israel-now-embracing-the-living-jewish-space/