"Rabbi on a narrow bridge" tries to throw the great Shlomo Sand into the boiling cataract, but only adds strength to Sand’s argument. Rabbi’s argument that We are a people is politically based (he is trying to anchor Israel’s sources of strength in the diaspora) and yet his actual personal account hardly shows that Jews are a people. What connection does he really demonstrate to the Moroccan Jew? in the story below. What his story does underline is that we are a great religious civilization, just what Sand said. I did just what Rabbi did when I visited Cairo recently, I visited the synagogue, and bought trinkets and books. But peoplehood, nationality, as Sand demonstrates, are political definitions, in a world of nations, drawing on unifying identity sources such as language, food, culture, and geography.
Here’s Rabbi on a narrow bridge, helping me out (he writes poetically, in short paragraphs, but my software didn’t let me import the paragraphs)(oh and hat tip to Alex):
Two years ago Josephine and I visited Tangiers for a day, popping over from the South of Spain on a speeding hydrofoil for a couple of days away from Carmi who was quite happy playing on the beach with his grandfather. What did we do? We looked out for the Shul, the Jewish trinkets in the market, we went looking for the notions of kinship. I wasn’t trying to touch people who had the same ‘Jewish gene’ as I do. Because I don’t believe that Judaism exists in the genes. I wasn’t even trying to find a minyan or a kosher butcher I could use to fulfil various religious requirements of faith, as important as religion is in my Jewish identity I was trying to connect to people who connect to Jewish peoplehood the same way that I do. People who wanted to stand in the same edah, People who wanted to be part of the same kehillah. In many ways I was doing exactly the same thing Binyamin MiTudela was a thousand years previously, though my journey from Morroco to Spain would have been speedier than his. And I know this sort of tourism, This sort of seeking out connections, to our past, our present, our future, is at the heart of the identity of so many of us here. And has been part of the identity of Jews for, not hundreds, but thousands of years. So what is the point? Sand is wrong, factually misleading and blinded by his desire to strip from Israel its Jewish nature. But he’s not the first person to try and write off the Jewish people, he’s not even the first Jew. So what? The point is this. We ARE part of a people, a great and mighty people with an extraordinary great, mighty and LONG history.
