Shavuot and Jewish Power
On the holiday of Shavuot, Jews all over the world celebrate God’s revealing of the Torah at Sinai to Moses and the Israelites in ancient times. Whether one considers this revelation as an event in history or as a foundation mythology of the Jewish people, the ramifications of God’s revelation transcends simply a religious phenomenon. In fact, the covenant so central to the Sinai experience was as much a political drama as a theological one. Through the Sinai revelation, the ancient Israelites—whether as a group of ex-slaves in Egypt or as tribes native to the land of Canaan—moved from the margins of ancient political and religious life in the Middle East to the center of history.
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The Torah paints a picture of the Israelites as God’s treasured and chosen people despite their small numbers. While the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians played their role as dominant superpowers in the Middle East, the theology of the Hebrew Bible relegate these empires to the status of being God’s tools to chastise the Israelites. The Sinai covenant established the Israelites as the only true power in the world, standing at the center of history, because the God Who chose them was the Creator of the Cosmos and the most powerful force in the universe. Geo-politics was no longer the issue—what mattered was that God played an active role in history and focused all of His energy on the promotion or demotion of the people He chose. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, eventually the Israelites did move to the center of history, with Judaism developing as the mother religion of the great traditions of Western faith, Christianity and Islam.
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Since the Hebrew Bible is the lens through which most people view the world of ancient Israel, most of us assume that in 2500 years ago the Israelites were at the center of Middle East politics and theology. But the archaeological record tells a much different story. The first reference to the Israelites outside of the Hebrew Bible is one of devastating defeat. In 1209 BCE, the Pharaoh Merneptah commissioned a monument in which he celebrates his repression of a rebellion against Egyptian control of the Land of Canaan. After boasting of destroying rebellious cities such as Ashkelon and Gezer, the Egyptian king boasts that “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.” Many of the ancient monuments discovered by archaeologists in the Middle East indicate that the Israelites were the losers of history, forced to bring tribute to the kings of more powerful states. Even at the height of power of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Israelites are never fully in control of their destiny. Yet, in the end, the Sinai covenant assured the defeated and marginalized that, actually, they were the most powerful people on earth due to their status as the chosen people of God. This was an amazing denial of the realities of geo-politics and the domination of the Israelites by regional superpowers—in the end, however, it succeeded brilliantly as a defense mechanism that would enable the people of Israel to survive to this day despite the long-gone Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenists, and Romans. The Israelite movement from the margins of the world to its center was not a conscious decision by the ancestors of today’s Jews. This movement was simply a central part of a belief system that Jews celebrate on Shavuot.
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As we move from ancient Israel to Jewish life in the Diaspora, we see that the survival mechanism of the centrality of Jews in history continues to fortify and strengthen continuity. The Jews may be inferiors to the dominant Christians and Muslims on a legal and theological level, but they never abandon Judaism in large numbers as long as they believe that they are the chosen people of God bound by the Sinai covenant. The Jewish martyrs along the Rhineland during the First Crusade could never imagine converting to Christianity—in their eyes it was a false religion they could never embrace—and they killed themselves and their children in the name of the God of Israel. Whether it was Judah Halevi in Muslim Spain defending the integrity of the Sinai revelation in the face of Arab philosophy or it was Moses Maimonides attempting to reconcile Jewish faith with the science of Aristotle, Jews never gave up the belief going back to their ancient Israelite ancestors that the bond between God and His people could never be broken. The Sinai strategy of Jewish centrality in history was, and remains, a powerful force in the life of the Jewish people.
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Yet, the theological concept of a marginalized people moving to history’s center is also a very dangerous concept. By ignoring the reality of politics and investing all their belief in their theological transformation at Sinai, the Jews became weakened and, to a certain extent, passive. Theologically, the Jews and their God were the center of the universal drama. The political reality, however, was one of Jewish weakness and powerlessness. This is not to deride ancient Israel or the Jewish Diaspora as failures. Quite the opposite is true. The Jews did have long periods of sovereignty in ancient Israel and did succeed economically and religiously in the Diaspora, but eventually the political realities have overtaken the theological fantasies. The truth of the matter is that, despite all their influence and success, Jews have never been all-powerful. We would like to believe that, as a people, we are at the center of history. Perhaps we are. Eighty years ago, no matter what were our religious beliefs, the theology of the Sinai covenant failed our people. The theology of a Jeremiah—that the enemies that destroyed us were actually tools of God to punish us—remains a theology that most Jews can no longer accept. We must revise out understanding of Sinai centrality in the post-Holocaust epoch.
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With the modern emergence of the Zionist revolution, the notion of centrality of the Sinai covenant has shifted. With the founding of Tel Aviv 100 years ago, Zionism moved the Jewish people toward a new understanding of the Jews’ place in the world and the relation of the people Israel to God. The Zionists replaced the empowerment of theological centrality with a new idea of Jewish power that was rooted in the realities of geo-politics and the realities of human history. This shift did not mean that Jews were no longer at the world’s center nor necessarily meant a rejection of God. In the modern, post-Holocaust epoch, however, it became clear to many Jews that the traditional answers of Jewish theology no longer worked for the well being of the Jewish people. While in a world of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas there is still a place for calling on God’s protection for a vulnerable Israel, Jewish understanding of power must be based on the realities of politics and history in the region. The Jewish State’s enemies cannot be fought based on an understanding of verses from the Torah alone but on the dictates of realpolitik. We do not need deny the importance of the Sinai covenant and should celebrate revelation on Shavuot. Yet, at the same time, we must always keep our eyes on the reality around us, a reality quite different than that espoused for centuries by Jewish tradition.
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