On June 7, 1967, Rabbi Shlomo Goren stood at the Western Wall with a Torah scroll in his arms. His voice went out over IDF radio. A shofar sounded against the stone. “The vision of all generations is being realized before our eyes,” he told the soldiers around him. He recited Sheheḥeyanu, the blessing for reaching a long-awaited hour, in the name of Jews in Israel and the diaspora. Then he changed the line repeated at the end of every Passover seder. “This year in Jerusalem, rebuilt.”
In Brooklyn, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar began preparing an explanation for why Jews should distrust what they had just seen. His book appeared before the year was over. Al Ha-Geulah ve-Al Ha-Temurah, “On Redemption and Its Counterfeit,” argued that victory could prove nothing about Zionism. An apparent miracle might be a test sent to tempt the faithful. Defeat would have confirmed Satmar’s theology. Success endangered it.
Jerusalem had returned. The Jews no longer agreed on what it meant.
They had disagreed this way before.
The Jewish people have suffered two inverse traumas: the destruction of Jerusalem and its rebuilding.
The first removed the Temple, land, and sovereignty around which biblical religion had been organized. The second restored Jewish agency after the Jewish tradition had learned to live without it.
Expulsion created the need for a Judaism that could survive powerlessness. Return has created the need for a Judaism capable of wielding power and sovereign responsibility.
Destruction and return possess no moral equivalence.
One was catastrophe - a churban. The other a restoration. Yet trauma also names an event that overwhelms the categories through which a community knows itself. Even desired events can do this. The disturbance lies between the world a people learned to inhabit and the world into which it wakes. Change - even desired change - involves loss. The success of Zionism, even or especially among its proponents, requires a mourning of the loss of post-Temple Judaism. Meanwhile, those who remain indifferent to or actively hostile to Zionism can be understood as denying this loss.
Psalm 126 had imagined the moment in a single uncanny line: בְּשׁוּב ה׳ אֶת־שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים, “When the Lord restored Zion, we were like dreamers.” The dreamer has received the world he prayed for and has not yet learned that he is awake. (Psalm 126:1)
Thomas Kuhn, the twentieth-century historian of science, called the governing world of a community a paradigm. A paradigm supplies more than conclusions. It determines which questions count, which methods can answer them, which cases deserve imitation, and who may speak with authority. Most intellectual work leaves this frame undisturbed. Kuhn called that work “normal science.” A crisis begins when anomalies accumulate, when facts the paradigm should explain continue to resist it. A revolution changes the questions along with the answers. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that paradigm shifts occur when denial is no longer possible, when the pressure caused by clinging to an old regime is no longer possible.
Kuhn described scientific communities. But his structure reaches further. A religious paradigm also distributes authority, identifies exemplary lives, and teaches its members which experiences are intelligible. Its greatest strength eventually becomes a form of blindness. A paradigm solves its founding crisis so completely that later generations forget the crisis and mistake the solution for reality itself.
The Second Temple did not disappear in an afternoon. Its world decomposed over centuries. Persian, Greek, Hasmonean, and Roman power altered the conditions of Jewish rule. Priestly authority competed with scribes, sects, pietists, revolutionaries, and messianic movements. Rome burned the Temple in 70 CE. The defeat of Bar Kokhba two generations later closed another road back to sovereignty. The rabbinic calendar preserves the drawn-out character of the loss. In tractate Taanit, the Romans enter the Temple on the seventh of Av, desecrate it through the ninth, and set it on fire near evening. It burns into the tenth. Catastrophe exceeds the date assigned to hold it. (Bavli Taanit 29a)
The 10th of Av - like October 8th - reminds us of a symbiosis between memory and history. Memory enshrines peak moments, while history describes the complexity of their aftermath.
Three major responses emerged from the breaking world.
The Essenes withdrew. They regarded the Jerusalem establishment as polluted and built communities of intensified law, purity, discipline, and expectation beyond its control. Their separation preserved holiness from a compromised center.
Christianity moved along a different path. It retained Israel’s God, scriptures, Messiah, and moral vocabulary while loosening the bonds joining them to Jewish law, land, and national continuity. Destruction accelerated a universalizing movement already underway. What belonged to Israel could now be offered to humanity without Israel’s collective form.
The Rabbis stayed inside the wreckage and changed its use. They retained Torah, commandment, peoplehood, Hebrew time, and the memory of sacrifice. They developed institutions and genres that could carry those inheritances into a world without the Temple. Their achievement looks conservative because it succeeded.
Tractate Gittin gives us the rabbinic self-portrait. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai escapes Jerusalem disguised as a corpse, reaches Vespasian, and asks for Yavne and its sages. Later rabbis criticize him for asking too little. Rabban Yohanan calculates that a demand for Jerusalem might lose even “a small salvation.” He saves the people who can continue the argument. (Bavli Gittin 56a to 56b)
The argument required a new form. Mishnah classified a life that could travel. Midrash taught scripture to address circumstances it did not name. Talmud placed contradiction inside the canon and made unfinished dispute a mode of continuity. Prayer inherited the hours of sacrifice. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says in tractate Berakhot, תְּפִלּוֹת כְּנֶגֶד תְּמִידִין תִּקְּנוּם, “the prayers were instituted corresponding to the daily offerings.” The altar disappeared. Its schedule entered the body. (Bavli Berakhot 26b)
The Rabbis negotiated Judaism away from a Temple-centered world while insisting that they were carrying Sinai forward. A shift in genre made that feat possible. A code would have announced conclusions. Talmud preserved the pressure under which conclusions changed. It kept the discarded answer on the page. It allowed a civilization to cross a rupture without describing itself as a new religion. And it dramatized the dialectic by which the rabbis carved out a middle way between Essene zealotry rooted in a denial of the future and Christian supersessionism rooted in a negation of the past.
Rabbinic Judaism became a brilliant technology for exile. Think about it. The Jewish people survived for 2,000+ years with no land, no sovereignty. What majoritarian people has endured for so long? What minority group has maintained its identity for so long - in exile. And then returned? The Jewish people are a statistical outlier. The rabbis saved Jewish civilization from oblivion.
But its success also became totalizing such that many Jews came to mistake a Judaism adapted to exile for Judaism as such.
Return to Zion, just like the expulsion from Zion, came in waves. Neighborhoods, farms, Hebrew schools, labor federations, militias, courts, universities, and a public language preceded the state. In 1948 a council in Tel Aviv declared that the Jewish people had regained its right to be “masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” The same declaration promised freedom, justice, peace, and equal social and political rights for every inhabitant. Agency and obligation entered the founding document together.
The Chief Rabbinate placed the new state inside Jewish prayer that year. The text associated with Chief Rabbis Isaac Herzog and Ben-Zion Uziel called Israel רֵאשִׁית צְמִיחַת גְּאֻלָּתֵנוּ, “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” A parliamentary government with ration books, ministries, elections, and an army entered the synagogue as an unfinished shoot of redemption.
1948 still fit a familiar Jewish story. Europe had murdered 6 million Jews. Arab armies invaded the new state. Sovereignty meant refuge and defense, the repair of a condition the nations had made lethal. The Jew remained history’s endangered object, now carrying a rifle.
1967 altered the scale.
Three weeks before the war, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook stood in the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva and recalled the night of the United Nations partition vote. The country had danced. He could not. “Where is our Hebron?” he asked. “Where is our Shechem, our Jericho?” The state had returned while the biblical landscape remained divided. Within weeks Israeli soldiers controlled all three.
The victory changed the kind of fact Israel was. A precarious refuge became a regional military power. The rebuilding of Jerusalem had reached its next wave. The old Jewish responses returned with it.
The modern rejection of Zionism appears in two nearly opposite forms. Haredi anti-Zionism rejects the state in the name of Jewish particularity, following the purism of the Essenes. Ironically, Haredim do not appreciate that the rabbinic project they now count as traditional was once radically inventive and historically sensitive.
Leftist anti-Zionism rejects it in the name of secularized Christian ethics.
One argues that a secular state cannot influence God’s redemptive process. The other argues that a Jewish state cannot exercise power without betraying justice.
They disagree about almost everything except the status of return. Neither permits Jewish sovereignty to become a new normative condition of Jewish life. Like the Essenes and Christians of old, one turns inward to the point of irrelevance, the other turns outward to the point of self-erasure.
The Essene response has a modern rhyme in Haredi Judaism, though the Haredi world contains an important range. Satmar treats Zionism as a theological rebellion, an attempt to seize redemption before God grants it. Lakewood simply practices non-Zionism than anti-Zionism. Rabbi Aharon Kotler built Beit Medrash Govoha in New Jersey around the primacy of Torah study and the scholar’s responsibility to sustain Jewish existence. Its world can recognize the State of Israel as a practical fact, but still maintain that Torah remains capable of generating a complete life without treating the state as a new theological condition.
The Essene leaves Jerusalem because its holiness has been compromised. Satmar rejects the rebuilt Jerusalem because human beings have mistaken political success for redemption. Lakewood carries Jerusalem into the study hall so that holiness need not depend on building a Torah-based nation. It remains content with Yavneh - originally achieved as a concession to Rome, not as an evergreen ideal.
The leftist form of Jewish anti-Zionism has a different ancient rhyme in early Christianity. Jewish Voice for Peace describes Judaism through justice, equality, freedom, opposition to ethno-nationalism; just as Christians rejected circumcision, kashrut, and ultimately peoplehood, today’s Christianized Jews maintain that Judaism is a religion, but not a people. So even if they keep Jewish law (or, as Moses Mendelsohn calls it, “ritual”), they do so from within a Protestant horizon.
Christianity preserved Israel’s scriptures while carrying them beyond Israel’s collective law. Leftist Jewish anti-Zionism seeks to abstract Jewish values from Jewish peoplehood.
Haredi and leftist anti-Zionism therefore reject return from opposing directions. The Haredi says Jewish sovereignty is too secular to bear covenant. The leftist says Jewish sovereignty is too particular to bear justice. And the Lakewood non-Zionist has an analogue in the diaspora-based liberal Jew who accepts Israel as a fact, but assigns no theological significance to its existence or flourishing. Conservative and Liberal Diasporic Jews might disagree on whether the best strategy for surviving in the diaspora is separation or accommodation, but both agree that the existence of Israel makes no new theological claim on Diaspora Jews.
The Rabbis have their modern rhyme in Covenantal Zionism, a move that is both traditional and inventive; a trauma response that seeks to preserve the old by making it new.
Trauma theory explains why the pattern carries such force. Jeffrey Alexander, the sociologist of cultural trauma, argues that events acquire collective meaning through competing interpretations. Groups struggle to establish what happened, who was injured, who may speak for the injury, and what obligation follows. The event does not narrate itself.
Israel’s success destabilized and still destabilizes identities formed around the assumption of Jewish powerlessness and the aspiration to mere maintenance of Jewish identity, rather than the application of Torah values to shape society at scale.
The Torah places this danger inside its law of kings. Israel may appoint a king after entering, possessing, and settling the land. The king then meets a sequence of limits. He may not multiply horses, wives, silver, or gold. He must write a Torah scroll and read it throughout his life, לְבִלְתִּי רוּם־לְבָבוֹ מֵאֶחָיו, “so that his heart does not rise above his brothers.” (Deuteronomy 17:14; 17:20) Power receives its discipline at the moment of possession.
In tractate Sanhedrin, Solomon believes he can master the consequences the Torah fears. “I will multiply and I will not turn aside.” Scripture records his failure. (Bavli Sanhedrin 21b) The king’s scroll is a second sovereignty inside the palace. It follows the person whose success makes him least inclined to need it.
Religious Zionism has ventured a theology of return, a culture of national service, and a substantial body of state-oriented Jewish law. Yet the reconstruction still lacks a form equal to its claim.
The Rabbis answered the loss of Jerusalem by developing Talmud.
This genre could preserve inherited authority, register changed conditions, retain defeated positions, and expose the reasoning through which continuity was remade.
The first Talmud taught a people how to carry Jerusalem after Jerusalem was gone. Somewhere after the shofar blast in 1967, the inverse work began. The discursive form that can teach Jews how to carry that fact has yet to be invented.
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