FPRI Wire

The Sacred and the Profane: Judaism and International Relations

The 2001 Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs

Volume 10, Number 1
January 2002

by Harvey Sicherman

Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.

This lecture, delivered on February 21, 2001, was the sixth annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs. The previous lectures in this series were: James Billington on Religion and Russia’s Future; George Weigel on Pope John Paul II and the Dynamics of World History; James Kurth on Religion and Globalization; Dale Eickelman on The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World, and George Gallup on Religion and Civic Virtue at Home and Abroad.

Judaism’s approach to international relations can be seen through several dimensions: (1) the narrative, rules and ideas found in the Bible, (2) the record of statecraft in ancient sovereign Israel, (3) the development of Jewish political thought that, after two thousand years of exile, shapes the modern state of Israel.

Briefly summarized, the Bible shows a realistic understanding of international relations and provides specific rules of conduct in both peace and war. Judaism, the religion of the Jewish people, is assigned a specific territory, the Land of Israel, which became the focal point of the covenant between God and His Chosen People. Much of the Biblical narrative relates the vicissitudes of this covenant and the relations, domestic and foreign, of the Jews in their land including eventual exile.

Alongside the realism, however, the Bible also contains a prophetic vision, one of redemption and return from exile, that proposes a transformation of international relations. After the Romans destroyed both Jewish sovereignty and the Second Temple, this Messianic idea became further entangled with the restoration of Jewish sovereignty. Two medieval authorities epitomize opposite approaches to this highly charged issue. Maimonides (d. 1204), who saw Jewish rule in the Land of Israel as a sign of the Messianic Age; and Don Isaac Abarbanel (d. 1508) who insisted that the Messianic Age required a radical change in the human condition, not just Jewish statehood. As we shall see below, Zionism is heir to both of these approaches.


Land, Peace, and Treaties

Space allows only a few brief observations about international relations in the Bible. As noted earlier, the Land of Israel is the sacred legacy of the covenant between God and the Jewish people. But what are its exact borders? The matter is much less clear than we might think. The Bible offers fluctuating definitions: some broader, some narrower; some religious (for taxation), others political, still others that are military. When the rabbis in the Talmud, for example, had to define the land as sacred or non-sacred, they determined that what Joshua took had been sacred because he conquered it in accordance with God’s command, but after Israel’s first exile (586 BCE), its sanctity had to be reestablished. Ezra the scribe returned by consent of Cyrus and the Jewish people. The Talmud therefore concludes that the relatively small area of Ezra’s time, because it was consensual rather than conquered, established an enduring sanctity. These borders are different from either the Davidic Kingdom (c. 1000 B.C.E.) or the Hasmonean (c. 1st Century B.C.E.).

Peace and regard for other nations are very highly prized in the Bible. The High Priest’s daily blessing calls for God to grant peace to the people of Israel. At every tabernacle festival a series of sacrifices were offered for the 70 nations then thought to make up the rest of the world. Alongside this is a very high regard for human life, which can be seen in the Talmud’s enumeration of rape and murder, along with idolatry, as the three things for which a Jew should allow himself to be killed rather than do.

Oaths, treaties, and covenants are inviolable. For example, even when the Gibeonites deceived Joshua into entering a peace treaty. Joshua nonetheless held to its terms. Much later, when the Israelites did attack the Gibeonites, in violation of the pact, King David compensated them for the damage.


Of Wars and Kings

There are numerous wars in the Bible, and two types are permitted. One was the so-called obligatory war, when God commanded the Israelites, led by Joshua, to conquer the nations then occupying the land of Canaan. The other was the “optional” war sanctioned by human authority. The rules, many from Deuteronomy and some from Leviticus, specify among other things the obligation to offer peace for surrender, the sparing of fruit-bearing trees, treatment of captive women, and many military exemptions, including newlyweds. A curious example is found in Judges 49, when the warrior Gideon ensures that no one practised in worshipping idols can serve in his army.

The Bible authorizes a limited king. He would be the anointed one (Messiah in Hebrew)— not as a god but as a servant of God. He was responsible to a higher law— the Torah, the five books of Moses— and was required to carry with him a scroll containing the entire Torah and to read publicly once a year those sections that referred to him. These included restrictions on his property and a limit on the number of his wives. He could not usurp the role of the priests in taxation or the temple, nor that of the judges. According to traditional interpretation, he could not engage in optional war, or a war of state, without the consent of the Great Sanhedrin, numbering 71.


Domestic Affairs, Exile, and Redemption

All of these rules are wrapped around the assumption that Israel will observe its part of the covenant. If the Jews follow the commandments of God, all will be well; if they do not, then nothing will be well. The loss of domestic virtue leads to a great downfall, and indeed the latter part of the Bible is the story of Israel’s failure to practice domestic virtue. The Solomonic Kingdom split; the Assyrians conquered the Northern State and deported the ten tribes; the Southern Judeans were also exiled after the Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians (586 B.C.E.).

But the downfall is not permanent nor does it invalidate the covenant. The prophets take the reality of disaster and predict that after suffering and repentance, the people will be restored to the land and to sovereignty. This will be the key part of a dramatic change in human relationships. The wolf and the lamb will lie down together; nations will no longer learn war; the swords will be turned into ploughshares. An Anointed King or Messiah will lead the Restoration. The power of this idea grew as disasters multiplied. The Bar Kochba revolt of 132-135 C.E., sixty- five years after the destruction of the second temple by the Romans, found strength in Rabbi Akiba’s announcement that its leader, Simon Bar Kochba, was the Messiah.

Over the course of the 2,000-year exile, the more practical approach toward international relations found in the Bible gives way to the Messianic approach. For a people without a land, the religious and political precepts pertaining to sovereignty necessarily become objects of study and speculation and hope. Nothing could be more speculative or hopeful than the Messianic idea. And within that idea, the more remote the possibility of Jewish sovereignty, the more a restoration of the Jewish State appears to be the trigger that transforms not only international relations but humankind altogether.


Two Opposites: Maimonides vs. Abarbanel

The contrast between the practical and the Messianic may be seen in the writings of two medieval authorities. Maimonides (1135-1204) is known to the world at large as one of the first philosophers to reach an accommodation between Aristotle and religion. To the Jews, however, he was above all a great rabbi who left a brilliant judicial code summarizing all of the Talmudic legislation in one compendium. A practical man, he endeavored to show how each Biblical commandment could be translated into action. He followed this line when he came to kingship and the messianic era. Among the many statements made about the messianic era in the Talmud, he picked one, that of a Babylonian sage named Samuel, who said “The Messianic Era differs from the present in nothing except that Israel will throw off the yoke of the nations and regain its political independence."

Thus, the messianic era would not be the transformation of the universe but simply the resumption of Israel’s place among the nations in the course of history. By using Samuel as his authority, Maimonides tried to separate the resumption of Jewish political sovereignty from the notion that this in itself would transform human relations. A new state of Israel would be part of history not the end of it.

Against him, consider Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437-1508). He was born in Lisbon, served one King of Portugal but was forced to flee to Spain by another. There he became a favored advisor of Ferdinand and Isabella. He debated divine right theory, among other things, before their most Catholic Majesties, and left a short but highly interesting account of the attempt to persuade the king to rescind the 1492 decree expelling the Jews from Spain.

That was the holocaust of its era. The wealthy Jewish community, some 400,000 strong, was given three months to choose between conversion to Christianity or exile. Half chose exile, including Abarbanel. He wound up in Venice, where, when he died, he was given a state funeral — a remarkable honor for a Jew in that day.

A man of Renaissance talents, Abarbanel wrote philosophical tracts and a huge biblical commentary, often infused by political insights. Generally a defender of Maimonides, he broke with him on political issues. In his view, kings brought nothing but evil into the world. (He preferred the elected republic of Venice.) Abarbanel argued that the King- Messiah of the prophets could only be effective if accompanied by the transformation of human relationships and international politics. Thus the restoration of Israel’s sovereignty would have to trigger radical change if it were to be true to the prophetic vision.


Zionism and the Messiah

Modern political Zionism has drawn upon these two streams sometimes unwittingly. Its founder, Theodore Herzl (1860- 1904), a citizen of the multinational Hapsburg empire, feared that the Jews would be caught among competing nationalisms. A renewed Jewish sovereignty would rescue the Jews, allowing them to resume their rightful place among the nations and thereby “normalizing” the dangerous abnormality of exile.

This political Zionism, less a religious doctrine than a rescue operation, was controversial from the start. To many traditionally religious Jews, it appeared to “hasten” the Messiah, an idea that in the form of false pretenders had brought nothing but grief throughout the long exile. To others, religious or not, Zionism threatened an identity crisis. Moreover the details of Herzl’s ideas seemed utopian: he wanted the Great Powers to agree on a neutral Jewish state in a strategic location, thereby relieving it of the necessity to play international politics.

Surprisingly, he almost made it, eventually obtaining British support after nearly winning over Kaiser Wilhelm II. But his real achievement was to bestow upon the Jews a political consciousness. At the first Zionist Congress in 1898, he wrote in his diary, “Today I created a Jewish state. Everyone will laugh at this now, but within 10 or 20 years, and surely within 50 years, everyone will recognize it as a reality.” Indeed, fifty years later his prediction came true. So while the great entrepreneur of a political idea, Herzl was not entirely bereft of the prophetic portion of it.

Another major Zionist figure, Asher Ginsberg (1856-1927) (pen name Ahad Ha'am), was something of a self-defrocked rabbi, a great scholar who lost his faith. He was interested in rescuing Judaism not only the Jews and was a great opponent of Herzl’s, whom he considered to be completely impractical. How practical was Ahad Ha'am himself? Toward the end of his life, when he had made it to Palestine but was unhappy at what he found there, he wrote, "Are we really doing Zionism only to add in an Oriental corner a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood? If this is to be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming."

This was a man bent on creating a new kind of Judaism— who had no time for Herzl’s attempt to arrange something in international politics that could not be arranged. And yet he ended invoking the same messianic idea that somehow the return of the Jews to Palestine would have consequences well beyond simply the creation of yet another small state.

It was the orthodox Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook (1870-1935), a poet and mystic and the first Chief Rabbi of mandatory Palestine, whose genius it was to be able to persuade a large number of religious Jews that the Zionist pioneers, no matter how anti-religious, were actually laying the ground for the messianic era. His impact may be measured in that to this day the official prayer for the State of Israel describes the state as “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” Here we see more than a hint of Maimonides. If Herzl emphasized the practical but had an element of the prophetic in him, Rabbi Kook emphasized the prophetic but had an element of the practical. After a particularly tumultuous period in Palestinian Jewish politics in the 1930s, he wrote “It is not fitting for Jacob, when statehood demands a talent for evil.” He thus also suggested Abarbanel’s view, that a state founded without a miraculous transformation of human nature might be many things but not the trigger for the Messianic era.


Judaism, International Politics, and Modern Israel

Let us turn now to two current issues where one can see the Biblical legacies. One concerns territory and the other Jerusalem.

When Israel successfully defeated a threatening coalition of Arab states in 1967, it seemed to Jews and others alike that this was a miraculous event that would have miraculous consequences. The Jews had now come into possession of the largest part of the geography of the ancient land of Israel and had captured the Old City, including the Temple Mount itself.

A settlement movement— Gush Emunim, or the Group of the Believers— led by Rabbi Kook’s son began to try to settle every part of the land of Israel, in order to hasten the coming of the messianic era. They found resonance with evangelical Christian groups in the United States, who believed that the settling of the Holy Land would indeed prefigure a messianic event — except that their Messiah would be different.

For these believers, a territorial compromise between Israel and any of the Arab nations is both a religious and political mistake, because instead of the Messiah-invoking trigger being pulled by settlements, the trigger is relaxed by allowing part of the Holy Land to come under non-Jewish Arab sovereignty.

Within the Israeli rabbinate, the most prominent rabbi opposing this idea is Ovadiah Yosef, once the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel and now the mentor of the Shas party, third largest in the country. In his most famous ruling on the subject, he wrote said that the Jewish right to the land of Israel had to be weighed against the importance of human life. This approach clarifies the two competing legacies from the biblical period: the realism that puts a value on human life and compromise and limitations, and the prophetic view that the restoration of sovereignty is the trigger for a transforming event in international relations.

Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, offer another example. Maimonides wrote that the holiness of the Temple Mount remained intact because, unlike the rest of the Land of Israel, it derived from God’s eternal spiritual presence. And so Maimonides wrote, “Even though destroyed because of our sins, a person must respect the way he would behave were the Temple still built. He should not enter, except where permitted to enter."

The Temple, in ancient times, had places where only the high priest was allowed to go, and other precincts no one could enter except in a state of ritual purity, today practically unattainable. Maimonides therefore reasons that no one should set foot in the Temple area ruins. To this day, the majority of the rabbis in Israel have said that no Jew should go up onto the Temple Mount, nor should prayers be conducted there.

This does not mean, however, that one gives up political possession of the Temple Mount, pending the miraculous arrival of the Messiah. In 1967, when the Israelis conquered the area, then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, seemingly discovering Maimonides, quickly reached an agreement whereby the Muslims would retain custody of the mosques on the Temple Mount and the Jews would focus on the Western Wall, and so it has remained.

Under these unforeseen circumstances where Jewish sovereignty has returned but the Temple has not been rebuilt, Maimonides' solution has proved remarkably durable. The Muslims have custody of the mosques and the Temple Mount, but the state of Israel retains political sovereignty over the area. How much longer this status quo will last is another matter. But one can see in it the two elements of the tradition of Judaism, the practical and the potentially messianic.


Conclusion: Sacred and Profane

One way to look at Judaism and international relations is to envisage a continuum with a sacred ideal at one extreme and a profane reality at the other. The continuum begins with the ideal Jewish state, where the Jews fulfill the commandments of God. The Bible, however, is a record of the reality, a state that often did not measure up, but the covenant remains and so does its objective. Arguably then even a defective Jewish state offers a desirable and practical step forward, with its sacred potential.

A second ideal is the elimination of war and the transformation of international relations. The Bible seems to regard international relations as inherently sinful, tracing the origin of different nations to the tower of Babel. So the ideal would be the elimination of all of these conflicts, but because this is not yet the case, humanity needs rules and limits governing peace, war, sovereignty, contracts, and all the rest. The Biblical injunctions on these subjects offer the realistic counterpart.

A third ideal has to do with the unity of domestic and international affairs. The Bible suggests that a nation’s standing in the world ultimately depends upon the virtues of its domestic arrangements. Alas, the virtuous state is rarely the case. Judaism teaches the practical lesson that lack of domestic virtue will lead to a good deal of international trouble.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant of all, Judaism insists that beyond the state there is a higher allegiance; that the state and the ruler must abide by a set of rules that come from God. The reality, of course, is often very different. But the state is necessary nonetheless, for as the Jewish sages declared, even during Roman times, the absence of order makes a moral society impossible.

It is fitting to conclude with an observation on the relationship of Judaism and the State of Israel. What is the religious destiny of this embattled Jewish sovereignty? Will it be that of Maimonides, as an imperfect historical entity possibly in the messianic category? Or is it a trigger that will lead, as in Abarbanel’s or the prophetic view, to a transformation of all of international relations, and a completely different end of history?

Maimonides, after exhausting his discussion on the messianic era, wrote that “No one is in a position to give the details.” Nonetheless all of this reminds us that there may be a transcendental quality to the actions of statesmen and their peoples that goes beyond the passing moments of their lives.

You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.

If you receive this as a forward and would like to be placed directly on our mailing lists, send email to FPRI@fpri.org. Include your name, address, and affiliation. For further information, contact Alan Luxenberg at (215) 732-3774 x105.