Neshama Carlebach, daughter of the revered Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, issued a noteworthy message this week: “Two weeks ago, The Forward honored me with a request to perform their new version of our timeless and beautiful ‘Hatikva,’ the Jewish national anthem. My intention was not to make a political statement of any kind but to speak to the hearts of people from all faiths and backgrounds with love.”
And who can blame him? Why should an Israeli Arab, no matter how patriotic, sing “As long as Jewish spirit yearns deep in the heart”? (The Forward’s version, for example, says “an Israeli spirit yearns deep in the heart.”) Why should he say “Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two millennia, to be a free people in our land…”? One can readily understand Justice Joubran’s respectful silence.
In typical American fashion, which cannot easily abide cognitive dissonance and which believes that every problem has a readily apparent solution, American Jewish voices leapt to the rescue. Leonard Fein, to cite but one example, wrote an article to which The Forward gave the title “Judge’s Silent Protest of Israeli Racism”; to accompany the article, The Forward selected a photograph of a young boy, probably Arab, holding a gigantic sign that read “Jaffa says NO to racism.” [pictured here] 
Whatever one wants to say about the “Hatikva issue,” though, the issue isn’t racism. Justice Joubran, after all, is on the Supreme Court. He had an absolute right not to sing, and even Moshe Ya’alon (hardly a leftist, to put it mildly) came to his defense. Israeli society certainly has its racists, and it is far from as tolerant as it needs to be. But “Hatikva” is the wrong example to pick if one wants to talk about Israeli racism; for whatever the issue is here, it is not racism.
What is the issue, then? And why would intelligent people such as those at The Forward make the mistake of thinking that the issue is racism?
THE PROBLEM stems from the often unspoken but widely held American Jewish assumption that Israel should be a Middle Eastern version of the United States of America. If the US does not mention Christianity in its anthem, the logic goes, then Israel should not mention Judaism. And if Jewish members of the US Supreme Court live in a country in which they have no problem singing their anthem, then surely Israel Arab justices should be accorded the same respect.
But matters are not that simple. For the United States and Israel have utterly different purposes, as indicated even by a comparison of their Declarations of Independence.
The difference between “Hatikva” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” is just one reflection of a much deeper issue, which all the histrionics about racism miss entirely.
The American Declaration of Independence says that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
God is mentioned, but Christianity is not.
There is a purpose to the United States: It is to provide its citizens with the opportunity to realize their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” without regard to their religion or ethnic background. And in that, of course, America has been an extraordinary success.
Now let’s look at Israel’s Declaration of Independence. In this document, by contrast, God does not appear (unless you read “Rock of Israel” at the end to mean God, which some of its signatories clearly did).
But what does get said? “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”
There is a purpose to the State of Israel, too, and it is utterly different from America’s.
Israel obviously does not object to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, but that is not its purpose. Its reason for being is the restoration of political freedom to the Jews, and the revitalization of the Jewish People that that freedom has wrought. In that, Israel has also been an extraordinary success.
The challenge for us is to honor Israel’s citizens who are not Jews and who are loyal citizens without pretending that Israel is just a Hebrew-speaking America.
Canada solved the problem by having two versions of its anthem, one in English and one in French, with intentional differences to satisfy the populations who would recite it. Should Israel have a version in Arabic that Israeli Arabs can sing with pride? Perhaps. Is some other solution possible? Maybe.
True, today’s “Hatikva” is not the song’s original wording. But changing the anthem now to accommodate those who cannot feel the power of 2,000 years of Jewish yearning would be utterly destructive to communicating Israel’s very purpose. Would we also change the flag, which was consciously designed to look like a tallit?
Email
Print
Tags:
Dr. Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel...
The Jewish State must end, say its enemies, from intellectuals like Tony Judt to hate-filled demagogues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even average Israelis are wondering if they wouldn't be better off somewhere else. 
Wonderful piece. Fein engages in the customary destruction of the meaning of the word racism. This article clears up any lingering intellectual confusion, by disposing of the egregious and nonsensical accusation against the Jewish State. By Fein’s logic, there should be no Jewish state in the middle east, as most of the inhabitants (if there were a single democracy encompassing much of the region) would vote it out in an instant.
What Rabbi Gordis forgets to mention in his piece is that the changed wording of “HaTikvah” was initially proposed in The Forward by the language columnist “Philologos”, who is known to be the Israeli writer Hillel Halkin. The proposed changes did not come from Carlebach or The Forward’s editorial team.
There is a purpose to the United States: It is to provide its citizens with the opportunity to realize their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” without regard to their religion or ethnic background.
This is wrong in two senses.
First, of course, the purpose of the US was not at first “to provide its citizens with the opportunity to realize their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” without regard to their religion or ethnic background” — the notion, given the reality of slavery, is ridiculous. Rather, the working out of the American ideal brought this into its purpose — or, if you prefer, found it there as a contradiction — an “American dilemma” as Myrdal put it — which had to become that to be resolved.
But leave that aside.
The declaration does not say that this is the purpose of the United States. It says that it is the purpose of all governments:
“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…. when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” (Emphasis added.)
This was not a doctrine of the purpose of this particular state — but a doctrine of the purpose of all governments, that is to say, all states. If one takes those words seriously, then they apply to Israel no less than the U.S.
In response to your last line, American Jews suffer from cognitive dissonance, for the most part. Your articles are, as usual wonderful. The only thing that will get American Jews going is another round at the ovens.
Indirectly, Rabbi Gordis raises one of the great elephants in the room for modern noth american Jews – that we are essentially illiterate in the language and text of the Jewish people. With the weakening of formal, textual literacy, we lose access to the profound ideas of Jewish literature, art, cinema, thought leadership.. Instead, we cheer robotically at AIPAC rallies and join multiple causes with narrow missions. Who will demand that modern, college educated American Jews aspire to a higher, more sophisticated level of discourse regarding a foundational concept of the Jewish homeland
she does not represent her fathers view of the world and jewish identity. i knew reb shlomo for many years ‘ he wouldn’t do such a thing. he wouldn’t sell him self for money or politics. shame on you neshama. we are embaressed of your doing as jews and as your fathers followers.
Rabbi Gordis captures the essence of being Jewish– of belonging– of having impossible, yet incredible roots–more so than anyone I have read.
It is a great misfortune that his words are so seldom carried beyond the Jerusalem Post. He deserves a column in major newspapers throughout the world, where anti-semitism would then melt away to the kind of understanding so essential to a peaceful and viable future for the State of Israel and for our people in the diaspora.
There is no “a purpose to the State of Israel”.
Jewishness is central but democracy must be as well.
Our Jewishness matters and our democracy matters.
The Jewish soul is not without its healthy tension, of which the Jewishness – democracy paradigm is but a recent example.
Shabbat Shalom U’Mevorach.
Well of course Gordis is exactly right. But why would such an elaborate defense of Israel’s (very legitimate) existence as a Jewish state?
The answer is the relentless propaganda from Israel’s (many) enemies has enabled a narrative about the courageous little democracy that bears little resemblance to truth or reality–which of course is espoused even by some very misguided and probably self-hating Jews like this pathetic Fein character, desperately wanting to show the world hes’ really not that Jewish by bashing Israel.
What in the world is wrong with proclaiming Israel’s Jewish foundation–that’s the whole reason it was established. And look at the way they’re treated by the world–6 million citizens surviving on but a tiny sliver of land, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs in countries hundreds of times bigger than Israel–and somehow there’s something wrong with proclaiming its Jewish identity.
Why isn’t there the slightest concern about say Iran calling itself the “Islamic Republic of Iran”, for example? And totally intolerant of non-Islamic religions, unlike Israel which allows all other religions to practice openly.
And exactly what “race” are Islamic Arabs anyway, that’s in any way different than the “race” of Jews? This is just another hot button accusation frequently used to get people’s particularly Americans’, attention since it has such a freighted connotation-forget how absurd and dishonest the charge is against Israel–which doesn’t seem to bother the likes of Fein.
I actually think Israel should be MORE not less vigorous in pursuing its clear Jewish identity. Any Arabs or others who don’t like it are free to live in gigantic Arab world which surrounds Israel. Why are they the only country in the region which is supposed to ignore its fundamental raison d’etre?
I would just add that the I believe that the Israelis themselves have been so relentlessly bashed by the pro-Islamist propaganda and its proponents including unfortunately many in the liberal media, that sometime they behave almost like a “battered wife”, exhibiting behavior resembling the Stockholm syndrome.
The legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state is beyond argument, and the Israelis and disapora Jews should loudly and proudly proclaim the fact that it is!
A note on Canada’s French version of its national anthem. As a bilingual anglophone Jewish Canadian, I sing both versions, though — talk about cognitive dissonance! — the French version is highly Christian (which most Quebeckers, by the way, no longer are) and presents a distorted, heavily mythologized version of Quebec history. It says, for example, ” ton bras sait porter l’épée, Il sait porter la croix” (“your arm can carry the sword and the cross”), and “ton histoire est une épopée des plus brillants exploits” (“your history is an epoch of the most brilliant exploits” — surely untrue, given the French defeat by the English in 1759). The point is that people everywhere sing bombastic, flowery national anthems out of affection for their countries, often despite the lyrics. I can accept the Arab-Israeli Supreme Court Justice’s discomfort with the lyrics of Hatikvah, and certainly his right not to sing them. But I would suggest that he might have considered the alternative — to sing out of loyalty and affection for his country, and thus provide a model to other non-Jewish Israelis.
An excellent piece. It should be reworded,translated into Hebrew and published here in a a mainstream newspaper so that Israelis will also appreciate the differences between the US and Israeli constitutional aspects.
The Carlebach section is irrelevant, and should be deleted.
An excellent piece. It should be reworded, translated into Hebrew and published here in a mainstream newspaper so that Israelis will also appreciate the differences between the US and Israeli constitutional aspects.
The Carlebach section is irrelevant, and should be deleted.