Jewish Quarterly, No. 189, Spring 2003

"Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes - The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century" by Marc Ellis

Book Review by Deborah Maccoby
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What do we mean by "a Jewish State?" Do we mean a theocratic state, ruled by orthodox rabbis according to Jewish ritual? Do we mean "a state of Jews", an ordinary state inhabited by people who happen to be Jewish? Or do we mean a state based upon Judaism's universal moral values of justice, equality and peace? If the phrase has this third meaning, what happens when the Jewish State becomes a state based upon nationalism and military power alone and abandons all aspirations towards universal morality? How does this affect mainstream Jewish Diaspora communities around the world, all of whom feel a close identification with Israel? What does it mean for Jewish identity? How does it affect Judaism as a religion?

The outbreak of the second intifada, the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the rise to power of Ariel Sharon, the embodiment of nationalistic militarism - now elected as Israeli Prime Minister for a second time, in a big victory for his Likud party - have given rise to much political analysis and argument; but very few people have discussed the theological implications of the crisis. Religion generally seems to enter into the debate from the angle of Jewish and Islamic religious fundamentalism, rather than - as Marc Ellis puts it in this book - "the side of each religion that embraces harmony, peace, justice and inclusion".

However much people may argue about the causes of the present situation, it is surely clear to many people that it is a tragedy for both Jews and Palestinians; and we must ask ourselves what is happening when Ariel Sharon is elected so resoundingly for a second time and his policies of military force are supported by the majority of Israelis and Diaspora Jews, because they despair of any alternative. In this time of desperation for both Jews and Palestinians, it is of vital importance to consider the deeper and wider significance of the current disaster and to look beyond the present short-term arguments and narrowness of vision.

For years, in many books and articles, the American-Jewish theologian Marc Ellis has been warning that Judaism has become what he calls "Constantinian Judaism" - a religion which has accommodated itself to state power, just as early Christianity accommodated itself to the state power of the Roman Empire. The present dire situation seems to be proving his warnings right.

Ellis is not against state power and Jewish empowerment as such. He does not hold the view that any kind of empowerment necessarily corrupts. Rather he is pointing out that the establishment of the Jewish State involved (as Israeli historians have uncovered) a major injustice to the Palestinians - the displacement and in many cases expulsion of the majority of the Arab inhabitants of the newly-created Jewish State. And he is pointing out that, after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 war, an "expanded state of Israel" came into being. Despite all the talk of a two-state solution, he claims that the policies of Israeli governments, both Likud and Labour - as has been apparent in the expansion of settlements under both parties - have been to keep possession of this expanded Israel. And the Jewish communities of the world have since 1967 been increasingly "mobilised and militarised" in support of this injustice by the Jewish State - a support which has deeply affected the nature of Jewishness and Judaism.

Not that Ellis argues that there has been no hope at all in the peace process. It is true that he points out the many and deep flaws inherent in the Oslo peace process and - along with many others - he stresses that Barak's so-called "generous offer" at Camp David was "less than generous": he quotes Sara Roy, Research Associate at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University: "As for the Camp David proposals, Roy concludes that they lacked the following crucial elements: contiguous territory, defined and functional borders, political and economic sovereignty and basic Palestinian national rights...for Roy the problem began long before Barak as occupation was the structural and policy cornerstone of the Oslo Accords." However, Ellis also states that the handshake between Rabin and Arafat was nonetheless a genuine facing of "the other" which created a real dynamic for change:

"The facing of the 'other' - the new 'other' of Jewish history - was recognised as a rendezvous in Jewish history. Such a facing of he 'other' should be seen in the context of the Holocaust and the 1967 war as the possibility of ending a cycle of suffering and violence which the Jews have endured and now have perpetrated. When Rabin spoke of ending that cycle, one felt an opening toward a responsibility grounded in history and hope."

With Rabin's assassination and the complete breakdown of Oslo, however, it seems that the drive to complete Israel's conquest of the Palestinians is about to be openly realised, with the support and complicity not only of Israeli Jews but of most of the Jewish Diaspora. Ellis's point is that this is not a sudden collapse, out of the blue or something which can simply be blamed on right wing and religious extremists; it is the overt expression of the "mobilising and militarising" of Jewish life over decades. And Ellis's essential message is that this complete destruction of the Palestinians as a people must also entail a complete destruction of the true meaning of the Jewish people and Judaism. Both peoples are in "the ashes": "In the destruction of Palestine, the Jewish tradition as it has been known and inherited - a tradition that emphasised ethics and justice - has come to an end."

Ellis defines true Judaism in terms of the tradition of the covenant with God by which the Jews dedicated themselves to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy people" committed to upholding the spiritual values of morality, justice, equality and peace in a world of power and injustice. This dedication can be summed up in these words from the Prophet Zechariah: "Not by power, nor by might, but by My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts". In turning to power and might, the Jews have lost their essence as a people.

In analysing the reasons for this turning of the Jews and Judaism towards power and might, Ellis - as is clear from the quotation about the Rabin-Arafat handshake above - lays great emphasis upon the Holocaust (and part of the meaning of the title "Out of the Ashes" is the ashes of the Holocaust) He is virtually the only Holocaust theologian to link the Holocaust with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. For this, he has been vilified by critics who seem to believe he equates the two national tragedies in terms of scale. Ellis does not in any way equate the Holocaust and the 1948 Nakba - "catastophe" (and continued destruction of the Palestinian people) in terms of scale; his main arguments are a) that, impossible though it is to compare them in terms of scale, these are both national tragedies, destructive of the ordinary life of both peoples; and b) that the Holocaust has been used to "mobilise and militarise" Jewish life and Judaism in the service of state power and to justify Israel's expulsion of and continued oppression of the Palestinians; as he writes in his Preface:

"It is ironic that the safe harbor of Jewish life, the claim to uniqueness and innocence and thus special privileges, has been and increasingly will be an event of such horrific suffering that, despite the repetitive images and public memorials, the mind remains unable to accept its horror. This safe harbor, however, is one of assimilation to the state and power, to dislocation and atrocity, and therefore to every lesson that the Holocaust is supposed to warn against."

Ellis analyses with respect and even with sympathy the work of Holocaust theologians like Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Irving Greenberg and Elie Wiesel, but has a major criticism of all their work - the entire absence of any mention of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians: he writes: "in fact, one way of defining Holocaust memorial culture as it has evolved is the ABSENCE of Palestinians". All these theologians see Israel as an answer to the Holocaust, a means of revival for the Jewish people and Judaism; Greenberg, for instance, sees Israel as a means of reconstructing the broken image of God. Ellis points out that Greenberg entirely ignores the Israelis' destruction of the image of God in their treatment of Palestinians; Greenberg's book was published in 1988, at the same time that "news media images showed Israeli soldiers beating and killing unarmed Palestinians."

It should be pointed out here that Israeli oppression in the second intifada is far worse than in the first intifada, as Ellis stresses; once again, he quotes Sara Roy: "During the six years of the previous uprising, 18,000 Palestinians were injured. In the first four months since the current uprising began, over 11,000 Palestinians have been injured. The Palestinian landscape has withered, wrenched of hope, suffused in rage and devoid of childhood..." Since the publication of "Out of the Ashes" this oppression has got even worse. Is this really a reconstruction of the broken image of God?

To return to the Holocaust theologians - Ellis's most complex, sympathetic and interesting analysis is of the Holocaust theologian Richard Rubenstein, who actually taught Ellis himself in the 1970s, when Rubenstein was a professor and Ellis an undergraduate at Florida State University. Part of the fascination of "Out of the Ashes" is that it is partly a personal, autobiographical statement. Ellis writes with great admiration about Rubenstein, whom he sees as a Jewish prophet wrestling with God and the agonising problems posed by the Holocaust and God's abandonment of His chosen people - problems which Rubenstein felt that most Jewish theologians had fudged. Essentially Rubenstein's message is that after Auschwitz, he no longer accepts the terms of the covenant and believes that the only solution lies in power. Rubenstein thus articulated the Jewish despair of the covenant after the Holocaust which led to the Jewish turning towards state power.

The young Ellis saw Rubenstein's person and work as a great challenge and problem - from which he was rescued by meeting another university teacher, William Miller, a Catholic historian who led Ellis towards teaching in the US Catholic missionary college of Maryknoll and travelling to Latin American, African and Asian countries, where he worked among the poor and encountered Catholic liberation theology, which seeks to attain justice for the poor and oppressed. Ellis writes of William Miller:

"In some ways, Miller was the polar opposite of Rubenstein - where Rubenstein had a brusque and definitive manner, so that there was no question of whom you were addressing and where you stood in his universe, Miller had a graciousness and openness that allowed a freedom in his presence. There were no answers from Miller."

Ellis points out that liberation theology is a protest against Constantinian Christianity and a return to Jesus and the Jewish prophetic tradition: "Christianity of empire has been challenged from the beginning by Christianity of community, primarily through the prophetic line featured in the Hebrew bible and in the figure of Jesus himself." What is needed among Jews today, Ellis argues, is a Jewish liberation theology.

Ellis's own message that the Jewish covenant with God, and therefore the whole meaning of Judaism and the Jewish people, is finished is, of course, very bleak and pessimistic. He offers little hope of change for the foreseeable future. And yet there is, paradoxically,a great message of hope in "Out of the Ashes". The two peoples are in the ashes together, but, Ellis argues, they can come out of the ashes together, to form together something new which is also a continuation of the old. It is as though only through the full, courageous realisation of the end of the Jewish tradition - devastating though this realisation is - can hope of a revival of that tradition emerge.

Ellis writes that the Jewish covenant with God can only be renewed by turning towards the Palestinians, acknowledging the injustices committed against them and sharing the land equally with them: "Could that covenant, promised to and accepted by Jews, a covenant carried throughout a long and difficult history, now be renewed by sharing it in the promised land with another people?...The new challenge of the covenant is to find Jewish chosenness within and among those who share the land often called holy". Ellis argues that Jerusalem should be "demessianised" - that is, freed of its fundamentalist Jewish messianic symbolism - but he envisages a true though secular messianism in which Jerusalem, belonging to and uniting the two peoples, can be a genuine embodiment of peace and justice: "the new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of light and justice, of peace, fraternity and sorority, in short the peaceable Kingdom so often referred to in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

In this idea Ellis himself, as he points out, is reviving an old Zionist vision of binationalist Zionists such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt; as he writes: "Few Jews know that Judah Magnes, the first president of Hebrew University, Martin Buber, the great biblical scholar and theologian, and Hannah Arendt, the philosopher of the mind and the human condition, were all binationalists, opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. They argued instead for a cooperative federation of Jews and Arabs."

Since mainstream Jewish life, both in Israel and the Diaspora, has become militarised and has lost the essence of Jewishness, Ellis envisages a community of marginal Jews, exiles from mainstream Judaism and the Jewish community, who cross over into solidarity with the Palestinians and in this way paradoxically regain the true meaning of Judaism and what it really means to be Jewish. It is an example of the complexity of this book that Ellis also envisages a group of Palestinian exiles fleeing from fundamentalist Islam - Constantinian Islam, the Islam of power - and from the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and joining with this community of Jewish exiles:

"Those who seek to call the community back from oppressing others are themselves oppressed and often exiled from the community even as it presumes to speak in the language of God and the covenant. Those in exile become mute, often inarticulate on the deeper issues of the community they flee, even as they carry the values of the community into exile. Romanticising indigenous communities can lead in the same direction: those who dissent, especially when the community gains some semblance of power, are themselves exiled. This is the fate of many Jews AND Palestinians within the expanded state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority that exists within and under that state."

Though Ellis has supported a two-state solution in the past, he argues in "Out of the Ashes" that this has now become unworkable; as he writes:

"Anthony Lewis, a Jewish columnist for the New York Times, recently came to the same conclusion that the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said came to some years ago: that the process of Israeli settlement of Palestine has gone so far as to make separation of Jews and Palestinians impossible. Even the declaration of a Palestinian state would be in name only. Lewis quotes Meron Benvenisti: 'All of Palestine is a binational entity, even though politics demands a different reality. It's one space."

Ellis proposes a unitary state founded on equal citizenship, no longer on ethnic or religious identity - though he argues that this would not preclude a sense of identity and peoplehood on the part of Jews and Palestinians. He sees the community of exiles gradually growing over the years and creating a new community underneath the mainstream communities until in time it can be ready to bring about this unitary state. He is vague, however on the actual workings of this state - and here we come to what seems to me the book's only real flaw - a flaw which is also a strength.

Like William Miller, Ellis does not give any answers. In his concern to avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that so troubled him in his teacher Rubenstein (even while he admired it and even felt it to correspond to something in himself) Ellis is open-ended, dynamic, complex, paradoxical. The flaw of this strength - as well as the lack of any definite account of how a unitary state would actually work in practice - is a very difficult style. In his analysis of the meaning of the prophetic and the covenant, he writes about the danger of the prophetic and the covenant becoming "sealed" - that is, smugly codified, so that they lose their inner meaning. He shows how again and again the covenant and the prophetic become institutionalised and how again and again this institutionalisation is broken through with a new genuine expression of the covenant and the prophetic. In this concern not to become "sealed," Ellis's style sometimes suffers from lack of clarity and can at times be too wordy, as though he is afraid of his ideas becoming too frozen and encapsulated in clear, succinct expression, and is also afraid of betraying the full complexity of the issues. Nonetheless, for all his complexity and subtlety and open-endedness, underlying the book is a deep and powerful conviction and faith in the essence of Judaism and a determination to define and revive this essence - indeed, it is his struggle to convey this essence with complete honesty which leads to such a difficult style. Despite this style, the book has a compelling quality; once started, it demands to be finished - and re-read.

This it is itself a prophetic voice which is vitally needed at the present time and to which everyone - but particularly Israeli and Diaspora Jews - must listen.
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