“You shall be an Israeli, you shall be a soldier” — Borges, Israel, 1969

This poem reads like a prophecy. It was something older — a vocation encoded in a name.

In 1969, Jorge Luis Borges visited Israel for the first time. He arrived as a blind man and left, by his own account, seeing more clearly than before. The trip produced one of his most luminous poems, titled simply Israel, 1969. In it, he imagines what the land demands of every Jew who returns to it — not comfort, not gold, not gardens — but the renunciation of all previous selves, and a single, unambiguous mandate:

…You will forget who you are. You will forget the other you left behind. You will forget who you were in the lands that gave you their evenings and their mornings and to which you will give no nostalgia. You will forget your fathers’ tongue and learn the tongue of Paradise. You shall be an Israeli, you shall be a soldier. You shall build the homeland with swamps; you shall raise it with deserts. our brother, whose face you have never seen, will work beside you. One thing only do we promise you: your place in the battle.

— Jorge Luis Borges, Israel, 1969

Borges was not Jewish. But he was, as he once admitted with a trace of longing, someone who had always felt the pull of that identity: “I have always regretted not being Jewish.” What he captured in those verses was not mere reportage of a young state at war. He captured something structural — a vocation, not a circumstance. A way of being in the world that precedes any particular battle and survives every particular defeat.

The word “soldier” in the poem is a key that opens more than a military door. Borges was drawn to the etymological depths of things. It is worth asking, as he surely did, what the word Israel itself contains.

The Name That Is a Program

The name Israel appears first in Genesis, at the ford of the Jabbok, where Jacob wrestles through the night with a mysterious figure — man, angel, or God — and refuses to release his grip until he receives a blessing. His name is changed: Yisra’el, from the root sara, to struggle, to contend, combined with El, God. Israel means, literally, the one who wrestles with God.

This is not a name that promises victory. It promises engagement. It does not say: the one who obeyed God, or the one who pleased God, or the one who was saved by God. It says: the one who did not let go. The one who stayed in the fight.

If a people takes this name as its collective identity — not as metaphor, but as foundational vocation — then something follows that is both obvious and extraordinary: life itself becomes a form of struggle. Not war, necessarily. Not confrontation. But an active, responsible engagement with the world as it is, in the name as it could be.

The election is an agreement: those who choose this path are chosen because they choose.

Jewish history, read through this lens, is not a series of catastrophes interrupted by calms. It is an unbroken argument — with God, with history, with power, with injustice, and at times with itself. That argument has been conducted in the Talmudic academies of Babylon, in the laboratories of Berlin and Boston, in the dissenting pamphlets of the Haskalah, in the courts of medieval Córdoba, in the kibbutz fields and the high-tech corridors of Tel Aviv. The setting changes. The posture does not.

A Life That Is Not Given, but Taken On

Many peoples understand existence as something received — from nature, from gods, from history — and the good life as living it well within the terms given. Judaism encodes something different: existence as responsibility. Life is not a gift that asks only for gratitude; it is a calling that demands response.

This is not the same as saying that Jewish life is harder, or that Jews suffer more, or are more virtuous. It is to say that the Jewish understanding of what it means to be alive carries an irreducible charge of obligation — toward the other, toward the world, toward the unfinished work of making things better. The Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, repair of the world, is the most familiar expression of this, but it runs deeper than any single doctrine. It is a structural feature of how Jewish ethics conceives of the self: not as a sovereign individual first, but as a responsible agent, always already in relation.

This orientation has expressed itself differently across the great transformations of Jewish history. When the Temple stood, it was ritual and sacrifice. After its destruction, it became text and law. In the medieval world it expressed itself through philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and the creation of dense networks of exchange and mutual obligation across dispersed communities. In modernity it erupted across every field where the world could be questioned, reordered, or reimagined — with a force wildly disproportionate to the community’s size. This is not coincidence. It is the same energy expressing itself through the available channels of each era.

The wrestling vocation is not a medal. It is a weight. And like any weight, it can be carried as burden or as ballast — the difference being whether it is internalized as responsibility or experienced as imposition.

None of this makes the Jewish person good. The vocation is real; the execution is human. The Hebrew Bible, unlike many sacred texts, makes no effort to conceal this: its heroes lie, its kings murder, its prophets despair, its patriarchs manipulate. David commits adultery and orders a man’s death to cover it. Jacob deceives his father. The text does not flinch. That unflinching quality is part of what makes it endure: it depicts people as they actually are, not as they ought to be. There are generous Jews and cruel ones, visionary ones and petty ones, those who carry the obligation with grace and those who invoke it as cover for ordinary selfishness. The covenant is not a certificate of moral achievement. It is a structural orientation — available to be lived well or badly, honored or betrayed. What distinguishes it is not the guarantee of goodness, but the impossibility, for those who take it seriously, of pretending the obligation does not exist.

Other peoples have their own ways of contributing to the world — with their achievements and their failures, their moments of generosity and their moments of destruction. Some have done more harm; others more good. The covenant of Israel is not a claim to uniqueness in that contribution. It is this people’s particular way of taking on the work.

The Covenant as Mutual Necessity

Election is not a declaration of superiority. The Torah is explicit, at times almost brusque, about this: Israel was not chosen because it was larger, stronger, or more righteous than other nations. The election is prior to merit. It is an agreement, a covenant — which means it requires two parties, each of whom must continue choosing.

God, in this framework, needs Israel as much as Israel needs God. Neither can accomplish the work alone. This is one of the most radical theological claims in human history: a deity who is not self-sufficient, who enters into partnership with a particular people not to dominate them but to work alongside them toward a shared and unfinished purpose.

The mystical tradition in Judaism preserves this structure in its purest form. The Jewish mystic does not seek dissolution into God — does not seek to lose the self in the divine. The mystic and God remain face to face: two presences, both necessary, in permanent encounter. Responsibility cannot exist without an other before whom one is responsible.

This is why the covenant creates not just an individual obligation but a collective identity. The promise was made to the people as such, not to each person separately. Jewish solidarity — the intensity of mutual responsibility that persists across centuries, continents, and degrees of observance — is not mere tribalism. It is the structural consequence of a communal vow. The klal, the whole of the people, is itself the bearer of the covenant.

The only people born from a mission, not from nature. Other peoples have their destinies and idiosyncrasies. This is the one that belongs to Israel.

Resilience as Ontological Consequence

Jewish resilience — the survival and renewal of a distinct identity through millennia of dispersion, persecution, and radical transformation — is usually explained by pointing to external factors: the cohesive force of persecution, the preserving function of religious practice, the role of literacy and text. These explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They describe conditions. They do not explain the energy.

A people organized around survival will survive, if it is lucky. A people organized around a mission will renew itself, reconstitute itself, find new forms for old commitments — because the mission is not located in any particular place, language, institution, or practice, but in the relationship between the people and its calling. When the Temple fell, Judaism reinvented itself around the book, around the portable community of law and practice. When emancipation came and many Jews left the traditional framework, Jewish energy did not dissipate. It poured into new channels with a ferocity that astonished even those who produced it.

This capacity for transformation is the resilience that Borges saw. The oldest nation is also the youngest. The nostalgia is real, but it does not paralyze. The wrestling never stops.

The Particular and the Universal

One of the deepest tensions in Jewish existence is between the fierce particularity of a concrete people — with its specific language, its calendar, its foods, its wounds, its humor, its arguments — and the universal reach of its ethical ambitions. The covenant is made with this people, at this place and moment, in this language. And yet what it demands — justice, responsibility, repair — is addressed to the world as a whole.

This tension generates friction. It is not coincidental that Jewish communities, precisely because of their universalist ethical commitments combined with their specific communal identity, have frequently found themselves at odds with surrounding majorities, both in the diaspora living among other peoples and in Israel within the international order. The particular claim to peoplehood offends those who want universalism without remainder. The universalist ethical demand offends those who want particularism without accountability.

Anti-Jewish hostility, across its many historical forms, can almost always be traced to this friction. The people of Israel generates discomfort by existing as both: It is too Jewish for those who want pure universalism and it is too universally ambitious for those who want pure particularism. It fits nowhere cleanly, because it was not designed to fit. It was designed to wrestle.

This structural position has no real parallel among the world’s major religious traditions. Most universal religions carry, at their core, a truth to be transmitted — a message meant for everyone, and therefore a mandate, however gentle, to expand. Others are the religion of a single people but without universal ambition. Every person, every community, every civilization carries its own way of being in the world and its own limits. Judaism’s way of being involves acknowledging that limit explicitly: the work is not to bring everyone into the same framework, but to do the work that belongs to this particular people within a world that remains irreducibly plural.

This leaves Israel — both the people and the state — in a peculiar solitude. The great human communities today organize themselves around shared religious or civilizational traditions: Western Christianity, even in its secular forms; Islam; Hinduism; Buddhism. Israel shares many values with the modern West but not its religious framework, nor its particular sense of obligation. That gap is a real vulnerability. It is also, in its way, a form of clarity: a people that does not seek to universalize its own form cannot confuse its mission with the conquest of others. Weak and strong for the same reason.

The Weight That Is Not a Curse

The tradition is clear that the covenant imposes a greater exposure to judgment. To take on the obligation is to accept that failure is more costly, that the bar is higher, that protection is conditional on conduct. This is the logic of any genuine commitment: the more someone claims to stand for something, the more he is accountable for it.

Judaism, unlike the other great monotheisms, does not offer a strong central concept of salvation. There is no grace that arrives to resolve the ethical drama from outside. There is no submission that dissolves the self — no merging into the divine. There is no single truth to carry to the world and then be done. What there is, instead, is an endless sequence of irreducible situations — each one demanding a response that cannot be copied from a pattern, that must be chosen and created by a person who is present, who is responsible, who cannot delegate their answer to a theology. Jewish ethics, at its core, is not principled in the sense of deriving conclusions from a fixed premise. It is responsive — attentive to each situation as it actually is, and accountable for what it requires.

This responsibility extends in all directions at once: toward oneself, toward the community, toward the world, toward God. It is not a pure ethical abstraction distilled from history. It is always embedded in concrete people. The abstraction can illuminate. But what carries the obligation forward across centuries is not the idea — it is the practice, the argument, the calendar, the refusal to forget.

The covenant does not promise arrival. No one completes it. No one earns the right to stop wrestling. And no one is condemned to it forever against their will: a person may step out of the obligation, and in doing so may win and lose something. The reverse is also true: entry is possible, though rarely simple. The patriarchs took non-Jewish wives who became part of the people; Moses and other Israel’s leaders did the same. But the belonging spoken of here is not legal, religious, or cultural — it is the assumption of the covenant itself: the active, unguaranteed responsibility to wrestle with the world toward something better. One can be observant or atheist and still carry it; one can be deeply religious or culturally Jewish and not. What Israel resists — as the counterpart of having no mission to convert others — is dissolution: neither by mass exit nor by absorption. Because the irreducible particularity of this people, held together with its universalist mandate, is precisely what allows the covenant to continue. To remain Israel is the condition of the work.

There is a name, too, for the rest that the struggle requires. The observant Jew calls it Shabbat — one day in seven when the wrestling stops, because the wrestler must remember that he is not God. For the secular or non-observant Jew, Shabbat has no fixed hour: it is whatever moment of genuine stillness the struggle allows, when the weight is set down not in defeat but in trust that it will still be there to be picked up. The covenant does not demand perpetual motion. It demands that the return to the fight be willing. Rest is not the abandonment of the vocation. It is what makes the vocation sustainable.

Life is not something that is simply given. It is a charge, an absolute responsibility — not as punishment but as calling.

Your Place in the Battle

Borges ended his poem not with a vision of peace, but with a promise — modest and fierce in equal measure. Not victory. Not rest. Not the garden. Your place in the battle.

This is what the name Israel contains. Not an outcome but a posture. Not a destination but a permanent orientation toward the unfinished — toward knowledge not yet discovered, toward injustices not yet corrected, toward a world not yet repaired.

What Borges wrote reads, today, as prophecy. But it is older than prophecy. It is the structure of a name — and in the Jewish tradition, names are not labels. They are callings.

The wrestling goes on. In the rubble of the October 7th, in the hostage negotiations that dragged through interminable months, in the protest signs held on campuses from London to Los Angeles, in the synagogues and schools where security guards stand at the door, in the current wars— the same structural tension is playing out that has always played out. The world will never be at full peace with Israel because Israel will never stop struggling to improve it without diluting among the nations. Internalizing this spirit is what the covenant means and what is felt both in religious and nonreligious Jews.

But this moment presents a specific temptation, and it is worth naming it clearly: the temptation to seek recognition. To present the ledger. To argue, with statistics and Nobel prizes and historical grievance, that Jews deserve better treatment from the world because of what they have contributed to it in spite of what they have suffered. The argument is factually overwhelming. It is also, as a foundation for Jewish identity, a trap.

If the covenant is real — if the vocation encoded in the name Israel is genuinely assumed — then it cannot be conditional on the world’s gratitude. Responsibility is not a contract voided when the other party fails to reciprocate. The moment a people begins to justify its way of being by pointing to its achievements and asking to be credited for them, it has exited the wrestling match and entered a courtroom. And in the courtroom, the wrestler forgets how to wrestle.

The one who waits to be recognized for what they have given has already stopped giving. They have started accounting.

The risk is not only external. Antisemitism is real and present — on streets, in institutions, encoded in the language of movements that claim to oppose it. It causes genuine harm and must be actively resisted. But the specific danger it poses to Jewish identity is not hatred itself. It is the invitation to adopt, as a permanent self-understanding, the posture of the wronged. The benefactor who was not thanked. The victim who is owed. That posture carries a hidden premise: that the obligation was conditional on the world’s recognition. It was not. The covenant does not contain a clause about fairness. There is no deserving in it, and therefore no not deserving either. The world is simply there, and the obligation to act in it remains regardless of what the world returns.

The wrestler does not stop wrestling because the opponent fights dirty. He holds on until the blessing comes.

This is the challenge now. The antisemitism of this moment — its hypocrisy, its inversions, its indifference to Jewish suffering when that suffering is politically inconvenient — must be confronted. But the confrontation must come from a place of strength that is not borrowed from the world’s opinion. It must come from the interior certainty that the struggle is worth it regardless of outcome, regardless of applause, regardless of fairness. The alternative — a Jewish identity built on grievance, on the demand that the world finally acknowledge what Jews have given it — is not only strategically weak. It is theologically incoherent. It replaces the covenant with a transaction. And a people that lives by transaction will be dissolved by it.

At the ford of the Jabbok, Jacob limped away with a new name and a wound that never fully healed. He had not won in any conventional sense. He had not been thanked. He had not been compensated. He had simply refused to let go — and from that refusal, everything else followed.

You shall be an Israeli. You shall be a soldier.

Not because the world is at war with you — though at times it is. Not because you have earned recognition — though often you have. But because the name you carry is a verb, not a noun. A posture, not a destination. A permanent, active, freely-assumed engagement with a world that is not finished and a God who will not finish it alone.

That is the only place in the battle worth having.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)