A Light Unto The Nations
On the Jewish nation-state
“But I will also make you a light to the nations - so that all the world may be saved.”
- Isaiah 49
“So all the elders of Israel said to Samuel now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”
- 1 Samuel 8
The ancient Israelites came to the prophet Samuel with a demand: give us a king, ״like every other nation״. God claimed this was a rejection of his kingship, and Samuel warned the Israelites that a king would conscript their sons into his armies, draft yet others to manufacture his weapons of war, tax their livelihood, and ultimately make slaves of the people themselves. They again demanded a king, to be like all other nations, so the king could lead them into war.
I realized the story was about me.
Growing up, I had learned that the Jews are the chosen people, designated as “the light unto the nations”. Israel was the epitome of that. Everything that Israel did, and was, was interpreted in that light. There was a time that I believed that killing or expelling all of the Palestinians would be doing mankind a holy favor, ridding the world of the evil of Palestinians and protecting the Western world from Islamic terror. Every win at the Eurovision, athletic victory, technological development, or high-tech exit was hailed as proof of our light.
At the same time, in high school civics, I learned that Theodor Herzl, the architect of the Jewish Zionist project, was an atheist and an assimilated Jew, devoted to the assimilation of the Jewish people. His diaries even reveal a proposal for a mass conversion to Christianity as a final means of assimilation. It was only after exhausting such alternatives that he arrived at the final solution of Zionism. For Herzl, the answer to the “Jewish question” was to be resolved by assimilating into a nation like any other, echoing the ancient Israelites’ desire for a king, “like all other nations”.
I had also persistently heard both privately and publicly that assimilation was itself a form of holocaust.
Over the years, I began to develop a cognitive dissonance regarding what Israel was doing in the world. I began to learn that Israel tested weapons of war on Palestinians to sell to the highest bidders, was a key developer of surveillance technology, a hub of sex trafficking and sexual blackmail, and the perpetrator of a brutal occupation and subjugation of another people. Each attempt to discuss this was met with apologetics and avoidance.
I began to wonder, what makes Israel different from any other imperial Western nation. Though Israel sells itself as the miraculous Western liberal democracy, I started to question what that meant. Israel governs itself with Greek democracy, Babylonian religion, Roman military, British legal system, and under the veneer of Jewish aesthetic prides itself on the systemic infrastructure of Western capitalism, with the same taxation, military, surveillance state, and consumer and pop culture, “such as all the other nations have”.
The concept of chosenness had made me blind to the national suicide of Zionism. By hiding myself behind chosenness, I could avoid the reality of sameness. From this place, I lost the capacity to judge actions based on their merit, and instead judged them based on the perpetrator. I used chosenness and our history of persecution to justify what I would have condemned in any other nation. I failed to realize that a two-ton bomb dropped with a Jewish star was no different from a two-ton bomb with any other symbol, but I could convince myself that mine was holy.
I realized that Herzl’s vision for the end of the Jewish people was being realized before my eyes. Zionism was successful as the ultimate assimilation that is collapsing the identity of the Jewish people because it exposes that there is no concept of chosenness. The story of unique victimhood I told myself crumbled under the reality of power. When the roles reversed, Jewish power functioned identically to all the empires we believed were persecuting us, and the idea of metaphysical chosenness could not survive.
By claiming a divine exception to justify its violence, the nation became indistinguishable from every other empire in history. It was only by dropping this metaphysical shield that real distinction became possible. I had to let go of the idea that chosenness is inherited through a group. Chosenness is a choice available to everyone, not an inheritance. By assimilating out of the national religion, I escaped the generic role of the nationalist and returned to humanity.
If I wanted to be different, I couldn’t be the same.
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Wonderful article as always Daniel.
Herzl may have been a cynic, viewing a 'mass conversion to Christianity' of his tribesmen as a means to an end. In that respect, he was not that different from Constantine with his subjects, or history's many other heads of state looking to have the masses compliant, malleable, tamed.
The masses - be it the Jewish state, ancient Israel, Christendom, the state, or any other collective - invariably failed.
Conversely, the individual, Christ Jesus, triumphed, in his obedience of the Law, in his atoning death, in his conquest over covenantal Death, and in his glorious parousia, which brought with it the final judgement against the adversary of mankind (1 Thess 2:14-16).
The first Adam - earthy, corruptible - remains dead; the new Adam (Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15) ushered in the new Heaven and Earth, the new spiritual birth, the incorruptible and eternal Life.
Religion is a relic of Death's legacy, and a reminder of the pit in which we were once entrapped. Christ Jesus, however, is our redemption and freedom from the dark; he is our Light (Isaiah 9:2; John 1:9) and our Life (Col 3:4).
Hard truths. Thank you