Let me begin with a teaching from a few years ago by one of my teachers, Arnold Eisen, former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Eisen is a professor of American Jewish thought, a deeply devout human being, and a profound believer in Jewish history, Jewish theology, Torah itself, and the rebirth of our people in the State of Israel.

He begins a comment on this week’s parashah in a way that feels very instructive. He writes:

“The book of Bamidbar, which aims to help readers navigate the chaotic wilderness in which the children of Israel have always lived and wandered, deals more directly than any other book of the Torah with what the great sociologist Max Weber called ‘Politics as a Vocation.’”

He then describes two different dimensions of Jewish existence, two ways of being Jewish that are always in tension. “Jews,” he reminds us, “have no choice but to be concerned with politics.” In the language of Zionism, these are matters of surviving and thriving, of normalcy. But we are also a faith community obligated by covenant. These two truths are always, always in tension.

The challenge of understanding ourselves as “normal” within history was part of the goal of Zionism. In the historical context of the birth of modern nation-states, the founders of political Zionism believed that the answer to the so called “Jewish problem” was Jewish self-determination. Jews were no longer safe as a self-regulating community, nor were we protected as citizens under the new nation-states (who had promised Jewish individual safety at the cost of communal Jewish identification).

We were not safe this way or that way. And so the pioneers of Zionism determined that only way for Jews to achieve safety was to become responsible for ourselves through political power. And of course, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and so many others have taught, the challenge of this necessary Jewish power is precisely this: once we accept the premise that Jews need power in order to survive and thrive, the next question becomes, how do we use that power?

But we must remember: the complexity of power is only bequeathed to those who survive to wield it. We could imagine ourselves in pure and pristine ways before we had power. But once we acquired power, our ideas are tested. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we succeed. And the challenge of seeing ourselves within the context of real history is to understand that this tension is precisely what we asked for.

Professor Eisen offers a wonderful illustration of this tension from 1949: a conversation between Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber, famous for his volume I and Thou, offered a language of encounter, relationship, and sacred availability to the other. He also believed in the possibility of a binational state during the founding years of Israel, a vision that proved politically unfeasible, but one deeply rooted in his theology of relationship. His conclusions are worth studying even if, in the end, one disagrees with them.

In the conversation Eisen cites, Buber challenges Ben Gurion for using religious language, especially the word “redemption,” to describe secular state processes. Ben Gurion was not a religious leader. He was the first prime minister of the State of Israel. But the religious meaning of the State was, and remains, an urgent Jewish question.

Buber says: “We said redemption of the soil and meant to make it the soil of Jews.” Jewish soil for what? Ben Gurion answers: “To bring forth bread from the soil.” Buber asks: “For what?” Ben........

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