Torah Jews/In their own words
Zionism, in their own words.
Why do so many see the Jewish people as a nationality bound to a state? Because Zionism’s founders set out to make it so. With the rise of modern nationalism, they sought to “normalize” the Jewish people — to strip away the godliness of God’s people and recast the holy into a mortal nationality. They said so themselves.
i. The project
A revolt against the tradition.
From their inception, the early Zionist thinkers sought to reshape Jewish identity through the lens of modern nationalism — separating the Jewish people from the centrality of Torah, and transforming a spiritual covenant into a political framework centered on land and statehood.
ii. The architects of Zionism
They said it themselves.
One could hardly find a revolution that goes deeper than what Zionism wants to do with the life of the Jew… It is a revolt against a tradition of many centuries.David Ben-Gurion · Mimaamad Le’am, p. 252
Most of us want to be vital and alive — without the yoke of Torah and mitzvos, and without the lies and beliefs of religion.Yosef Chaim Brenner · early Zionist thinker · Reshafim
A great responsibility rests upon us, for everything lies in our hands! We are the last of the Jews, or the first of the Hebrews!Micha Yosef Berdyczewski · early Zionist thinker · Stira u’Binyan
To imagine what a true Hebrew is — to picture his image in our minds — we have no example from which to draw. Instead we use the method of ipcha mistavra: we take as our starting point the Jew of today and imagine his exact opposite. We erase all the personality traits so typical of him, and insert all the desirable traits whose absence is so typical in him.Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky · Dr. Herzl, 1905
Sources documented in “The Empty Wagon.”
They have the microphone. We have the truth.
The founders had the power to remake the Jewish image in their own time. But the Torah — and the people it made — outlasts every nationalism.