Daniel Gordis' latest "dispatch" from Israel is a response to the recently published Defeating Hitler by Avraham Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset, and the interview of Burg done by Ari Shavit, one of the most extraordinary interviews I've ever read regardless of this particular subject. Some quotes from the interview (Shavit in italics):

"The occupation is a very small part of it. Israel is a frightened society. To look for the source of the obsession with force and to uproot it, you have to deal with the fears. And the meta-fear, the primal fear is the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

That is the book's thesis. You are not the first to propose it, but you formulate it very acutely. We are psychic cripples, you claim. We are gripped by dread and fear and make use of force because Hitler caused us deep psychic damage.

"Yes." ...

The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf but you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.

"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish." ...

"The true Israeli rift today is between those who believe and those who are afraid. The great victory of the Israeli right in the struggle for the Israeli political soul lies in the way it has imbued it almost totally with absolute paranoia. I accept that there are difficulties. But are they absolute? Is every enemy Auschwitz? Is Hamas a scourge?" ...

Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel?

"I think it is already here."

There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you, and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meager. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul.

"Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most 50 percent. In other words, the Israeli elite has already parted with this place. And without an elite there is no nation." ...

That is not completely accurate. I am aware of the Jewish richness you are talking about. But I am also aware that the basic Zionist analysis was correct. Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization.

I don't know who is right. Having lived in Israel for ten years and left for reasons similar to Burg's, I certainly relate to his thesis. Intellectual-leftist notions of the EU as a "biblical utopia" aside, it is his deep personal sentiment that I am interested in. In particular the last line that I quoted: Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. It is the argument made, in various forms, by Zionists, secular and religious, for some 150 years. It is the argument that hits at the core of the Jewish contradiction.

That contradiction stems from the dual identity of the Jews: the Jews are an ethnic group with a religion, yet the majority of Jews (myself included) don't subscribe to that religion. Those who do subscribe to the religion insist on the religious identity superseding the ethnic one – for example, with solely matrilineal blood lines and entry into the nation via religious conversion. For the religious Jew, in fact, secular Jews are merely straying souls who will either “return” to the faith or be lost. The secular Jew can either agree with that exclusivist identity and have no part in it, or reject that identity and find a different one.

But forging a Jewish identity distinct from religion was and remains no simple task. Without religion, the historical alternatives were tribalism, assimilation or a mishmash of religiously-based secular “culture.” The first fit well in the early 20th century when eugenics theories and racism were almost universally accepted and the question was merely which race was superior. But as secular Jews found themselves losing the issue of superiority in the face of bullets and eventually gas chambers, they turned to the dream of Zionism, which was supposed to solve this “Jewish problem.” A Jewish state would create a political, geographic and cultural entity distinct from (but somehow also tied to) the religion, thus creating a home and identity for secular Jews. One did not have to insist on a secular Jewish identity in Germany or the Soviet Union; Palestine would make that identity automatic and worthy of pride, by building and defending a homeland. Soviet Socialist and German National-Socialist ideals were adopted into Zionist ideology. Skeptics of the need for such a haven were proven wrong by the Holocaust, and the Jewish State was founded. Assimilation in the new state was a moot concept, or so the theory went.

But the contradictions in Zionism – the most important being the role of religion – were never reconciled, and so that third option, the incoherent morphing of religion into “culture,” became the ill-defined standard. The secular Zionists could not eliminate religion from the modern Jewish culture they wanted to develop, because the historical narrative of the nation was so closely tied to religion. (I do not believe it was impossible to discern a non-religious historical narrative of the Jews; rather, religion was simply the most convenient thread to tie together the varying linguistic, political, and cultural experiences of the nation that was not really a nation for most of its existence. Never mind that at no point in Jewish history did the majority of Jews subscribe to anything resembling what is today considered Orthodox Judaism.) Needing religion to unify their historical narrative, but unable themselves to explain its meaning or value, there remained in the new Jewish-Zionist identity a vacuum for the self-proclaimed Orthodox to fill. Politically, the ultra-Orthodox hijacked the political entity while rejecting its secularism, while the "National Religious" movement turned Zionism into a messianic narrative, pitting Israel in a religious war against the Muslim world and fueling the similar narrative of fundamentalist Christians. (In many ways, in fact, National Religious Zionism is National Socialism on a smaller scale, limited only by political constraints. It is no coincidence that the rhetoric of its leaders is sounds so eerily fascist.) Philosophically, by defining their own Jewish identity in terms of the State, the secularists acceded to the Orthodox the claim that the only alternative identity was religion. (Who cares what their alternative is, the twisted logic went – it’s no longer necessary.) As Shavit explains: Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization.

These fundamental contradictions of Israeli society brought about a constant state of domestic conflict – between religion and secularism, between Messianism and realism – usually resolved with political compromises that exacerbated the contradictions but let society go on another day. Add in socialism, corruption and more than a healthy share of militarism (the result of necessity or ideology or both), and you get a place that, for many people lacking the die-hard Zionist ideology to begin with, is not a particularly pleasant place to live.

Myself, after living there for ten years (brought by my parents’ religious ideology), I left. My problem with Israel related both to religion and tribalism. I do not believe in God, and so the premises of all religions are absurd superstitions. I have an a priori problem with racially defined identities: they are genetic accidents, meaningless, needlessly exclusive. Any coherent, secular Jewish identity is necessarily tribal. So my inability (or unwillingness) to find a non-Zionist, non-Secular Jewish identity is of course hindered by those sensibilities.

The inability is also because of the hypocrisy that seems to be necessary to forge such a convoluted identity. Secular Jews often observe Jewish holidays in “secular” ways, knowing that their basis lies in a religion they do not adhere to. I can pretend, as many do, that Passover is a holiday of freedom – but who am I kidding, when the whole concept of “pass-over” stems from the “death of the firstborn,” the celebration of God’s smiting of a gentile nation. Reading books like “God-Optional Judaism,” which try to develop cultural symbols and rituals derived from religion but not actually religious, I can’t help thinking there is something absurd about the whole endeavor. The Jewish New Year, separated from its religious overtones of sin and Divine redemption (concepts I find absurd), is just another arbitrary anniversary. Sure, there is something nice about a day to look back and reflect on the year past – but the baggage involved with assigning this to religious holidays is not worth the gain. If reflection is the purpose, then do it on any other day, why that day? Because, of course, reflection is not really the purpose – the purpose is really the religious tradition as a value in itself – and that is irreconcilable with a secular worldview.

Ultimately, it comes down to that question of value. What is the value of possessing an ethnic identity? Specifically, what is the value of possessing a Jewish identity when that identity is so historically tied to ancient superstitions that have no place in a rational worldview? That is something no one has yet been able to explain, perhaps because values are by nature a function of a person’s sensibilities rather than reason. If Jewish identity across all its myriad communities has any universal principle at all, it is that Jews should not marry non-Jews. What is the value of such a restriction, apart from pure tribalism? The restriction is usually qualified with an emphasis on women – men should not marry non-Jewish women – in a deeply hypocritical nod to religious superstitions which the secularists who espouse this restriction don’t even believe in.

As a secular Jew, not interested in living in Israel, deeply opposed to religion, and wary of us-versus-them tribalism, the options available, were I to value a Jewish identity, are slim. So it is probably better that I have yet to be persuaded of the value of such an identity.