What Kind of State Is a Jewish State? Michael \Walzer ait and see? may well be the best answer to the question posed by my title. The citizens of Israel (Jews and non-Jews alike) are actively engaged in a political process through which the meaning of their statehood will emerge. The process has no ?xed or necessary endpoint; the ?emergence? of meaning is continuous, incomplete, always contested. But at some point in the future, probably the near future, we will see more clearly than we now can what the weight of Jewishness will be in the life of the state. Conceivably Israel will simply be an Israeli state, Jewishness a feature of its founding but a declining in?uence on its existence. Or, by contrast, Jewish statehood may turn out to be as normal as early Zionist writers hoped it would be, providing a center for Jewish life and opening the way for a new national culture. Or, by contrast again, Jewish statehood may turn out to be as abnormal as (some) religious Zionists believed it would be??the dawn of our redemption.? In any case, the contest will continue through our lifetime, and while only Israeli citizens can participate in the successive decisions (for the third outcome, however, they would require divine assistance), Jews in the Diaspora can hardly help but have hopes and opinions. What follows is my own Opinion. I put it forward with the humility of an onlooker and the passion of an interested party. I. How shOuld the adjective ?Jewish? modify the noun ?state?? The view of religious Zionists is that ?Jewish? is a' strong or authoritative modi?er, so that a Jewish state is one governed, so far as possible, by the require- ments of halakha, by the laws of traditional rabbinic Judaism. But this is a curious view, since rabbinic Judaism first took shape as a response to the collapse of state- hood. It represented a creative adaptation to new and Michael W/alzer is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is coeditor with Irving Howe of Dissent and author most recently of The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 1988). This article was originally given as a tal/e at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. 34 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 dif?cult circumstances (the Roman Conquest and the destruction of the Temple), and one might think that further adaptations are required as circumstances change. What is today called ?Orthodoxy? provided the hege- monic structures of Jewish life from the loss of inde- pendence until the beginnings of emancipation?but not before and not since. Even during those long centuries of statelessness and oppression, Orthodoxy?s hegemony was never total. The authority of the Rabbis was chal- lenged by Karaite schismatics, Sabbatean messianists, Hasidic pietists, and an ever-renewed succession of rationalists and mystics. But in the politics of exile?in communal government and in the legal control of every- day life?the rabbinic understanding of Judaism was dominant. It was the Rabbis who held the Jewries of exile together. Before the exile, national independence provided the necessary conditions for partisan conflict and political opposition?thus the struggles for power between Sad? ducee aristocrats and Pharisee sages, and the ?erce sectarianism that marked the two centuries before 70 CE. And today emancipation provides the necessary conditions for dissent and separation?by Reform con- gregations, for example, whose members decline to be ruled by halakha, or by individual Jews or members of havurot, who design their own Judaism, protected by a secular and liberal state. In the years between inde- pendence and emancipation, however, the possibilities for Jewish life were cramped and limited. The scattered communities were small, vulnerable, beset by enemies; unity was the ?rst prerequisite of their continued exis- tence. Though there were many con?icts within the communities?between rich and poor, rabbis and lay leaders?sustained political opposition would have been very dangerous. And separation was virtually impossible short of conversion; even intimations of separation?the resort to non-Jewish courts, for example?were viewed as a threat to communal security and were strongly condemned. So each exilic community was, in a sense, a ?Torah state??-but only because of the statelessness and un- freedom of Jewry as a whole. Gentile rulers, who simultaneously tolerated and exploited these Jewish communities, found their unity convenient; it made for easy tax collection and cheap government. The great premodern empires practiced a kind of corporate pluralism, and sometimes, at least, the Jews were allowed to organize themselves as one corporation among many and to live according to their own traditions, subject to their traditional leaders. Though the tradition certainly changed over time?more than contemporary Orthodox Jews are ready to acknowledge?it was also remarkably stable, for the conditions of corporate life were repeated in one Diaspora home after another. But emancipation, and now statehood, has changed all that. ShOuldn?t it also change the role of the modi?er ?Jewish?? II. he Jewish state has its origins in the disruption of the old Jewish ministates?the autonomous communities that ?rst took shape in Babylonia and ?nally disintegrated, several millennia later, in czarist Russia. No doubt these communities served the Jewish people well, but it is important to recognize that their disintegration was welcomed by a great many, perhaps by most, of their members. The old corporate structures, already in decay, were now felt to hinder rather than protect individual and collective creativity. ?Emancipa- tion? was not a sectarian label; nor was it, by and large, a merely partisan choice. The generally liberal/leftist politics of modern Jews expresses first of all a strong preference for states and parties committed to freedom and equal opportunity. Certainly, Jews seized upon the new possibilities of the emancipated life?not only eco- nomically but also politically and intellectually. The last two centuries have seen a proliferation of sects, parties, movements, and schools of thought unlike anything in Jewish history except, perhaps, for the sectarianism and party con?icts of the Second Commonwealth. Having been emancipated by choice, Diaspora Jews are now liberals by necessity. Our commitment to civil rights and liberties, to individualism and pluralism, derives partly from the fact that we are, in all the countries of our exile, a small and still vulnerable minority. But it derives also from the fact that we are now a dz'wded minority. The liberal state not only protects us against coercion by non-Jews: special taxes, the denial of political rights, limits on economic activity, intermit- tent violence, social degradation?all. the things that made the old communities so important to Jewish sur- vival. It also protects us against coercion by other Jews, against the community itself. I will offer only easy and familiar examples of this double protection; the list in fact is very long. In the United States today, Orthodox Jews are not compelled to send their children to state (secular) schools, and, at the same time, secular Jews are not compelled to send their children to religious schools. Conservative and Reform Jews organize their congregational life without constraint either by state of?cials or by Orthodox rabbis. Jews who wish to do so submit themselves to the rabbinic courts; those who don?t, don?t. American Jewry can be conceived of as a voluntary association; or as a series of voluntary associations, loosely connected; or as a collection of individuals, differentially committed and identi?ed. In any case, it isn?t a corporation, a single, self-governing community, or a ministate. And this is true throughout the Diaspora, even where such old corporate of?ces as the chief rab- binate still survive. Everywhere, the Jews are divided; the forms of Jewishness (and of Judaism too) are many and various; the institutional structures of Jewish life are independent of one another; no central or authori- tative leadership exists. The liberal state tolerates all the versions of Jewishness. It doesn?t judge their relative value, nor does it act to enhance or reinforce whatever internal discipline particular groups of Jews accept for themselves. This is what it means to be emancipated. ow should the Mame ?Jewry/9? modqu t/ae noun ?Cttate?? Only in Israel do Jews now have a corporate existence. But this is a highly problematic corporatism, for the emancipated Jewishness of the Diaspora has been ?in- gathered? by, and must now be accommodated within, the new state. All the vibrant variousness of contempo- rary Jewry has come home, and as a result Jews in the Third Commonwealth are as divided as they were almost two thousand years ago in the Second. And political independence provides once again a public space within which these divisions can be acted out. What kind of an adjective can ?Jewish? be in these circumstances? Those who believe that ?Jewish? should be a strong modifier would use state power to reverse the process of emancipation, that is, to favor, sponsor, and eventually enforce a single version of Jewishness; or, less ambitious and a little more realistic, they would ask the state to set clear limits on the range of difference. The crucial sign of their intentions (and of their partial success) is the rule of religious courts in matters of personal status: one set of courts, legally authorized to apply halakhic law, with jurisdiction over all of Israel?s Jewish citizens. But these courts confront more than one set of Jews. What the Diaspora has bequeathed to Israel is a number of ways of being Jewish. (Zionism was originally one of the ways, though it soon became apparent that there was also more than one Zionism.) The number includes what was once unimaginable?not only different nonreligious ways, emphasizing language or culture or WHAT KIND OF STATE Is A JEWISH 35 nationality or politics, but also different religious ways. For obvious reasons, though nonreligious difference is politically more signi?cant, religious difference is intel- lectually more threatening to the Orthodox?hence the heatedness of the battle over Jewish identity and mem- bership. Should Israel set out to reduce the number of ways of being Jewish? Is that what it means to come home? These questions are not so easy to answer; they point toward a dilemma. If that?s what home means, then Jews could ?come home? simply by restoring the corporate rule of the old Diaspora communities. And if that isn?t what it means, then Jews can stay home (as they are in fact doing) wherever they already enjoy the fruits of emancipation. What difference do statehood and sovereignty make? In practice, the restoration of corporatism is not a real possibility, not in the Diaspora and not in Israel. Emancipation is an irreversible experience, very much like the Reformation in Christian history: there is no way back to a single uni?ed faith. Hence the establish- ment of Orthodoxy as the only legitimate version of Jewishness (or as the only legitimate version of Judaism) would make Israel into something other than a Jewish state. We would need a second adjective: an Orthodox Jewish state, which is to say, a state for some Jews, uncongenial to the greater number, who would be more free to express their Jewishness in the (liberal) Diaspora than in the homeland. ?Jewish? cannot be a strong modi?er without also being a divisive modi?er and itself requiring modi?cation. A state that was simply ?Jewish? would have to re?ect the experience of the entire Jewish people, not simply of some subgroup within it. But can there be any substance in such a re?ection?anything we can put our hands on, tahhlz's, concrete, practical?given the extraordinary diversity and the internal contradictions of that experience? I will try to answer this question, but ?rst I need to answer another. brief digression on Who?Is-a-Jew?the issue is politically and intellectually unavoidable. And it is in answering this question that we are forced in the most dramatic way to recognize the impact of Diaspora experience upon Israeli state poliCy. The question has to be answered because of the Law of Return, which establishes Israel as a refuge for Jews in trouble anywhere in the world. Zionism isn?t only a rescue operation, but it is importantly that. Nor does the Zionist state rescue only Jews; it participates along with other states in international efforts to help different groups of persecuted or stateless men and women. Still, it acknowledges a special commitment to Jews. 36 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 Hence, who is a Jew? To whom is the commitment made? Who bene?ts? The most obvious answer is that the bene?t belongs to anyone who meets the traditional requirements of Jewish law?who has a Jewish mother or who has been converted according to halakha. But there is one over- whelming dif?culty with this answer. The people who make trouble for the Jews have never felt themselves bound by Jewish law. And if the persecutors ignore the halakhic criteria, how can the rescuers adhere to them? Anti-Semitism has regularly extended to people who have only Jewish fathers (or only Jewish grandfathers) as well as to ?irregular? converts. And surely all those to whom it extends are entitled to the refuge that Zionism promises. It may sound perverse, but in deciding who is eligible for Return, the Nuremberg laws are more relevant than halakha. And if those upon whom Jewish identity has been forcibly imposed are eligible, all the more so are those who voluntarily join the Jewish people and agree to share its destiny. Recall the case of Rina Eitani in the woman who had followed her Jewish husband into a German concentration camp but was denied admission to Israel under the Law of Return because her subsequent conversion did not meet halakhic standards. I would suggest that she became a Jew the moment she entered the camp, for that act bespoke a commitment above and beyond the law: Your people shall he my people. . .. To put the matter less dramatically, the Law of Return must cover all those men and women in the Diaspora who suffer or who might suffer as Jews, whether Orthodox rabbis think they are Jews or not. Admissions policies can?t be governed by the need to preserve the purity of the refuge, only by the need to help the refugees. IV. Beyond the requirements of the Law of Return, there is no reason for the Jewish state to take an interest in the religious status of its citizens. But then, again, in what sense is it a Jewish state? What can ?Jewish? mean if it is a weak or, perhaps better, a liberal modi?er? Contemporary American political theorists commonly believe that a liberal state must be neutral in matters of religion, indeed, in all matters (Cultural, historical) in which particular forms of life might ?nd expression. That View is right to this extent: that the state provides a frame, a protective structure, and that within this frame individuals and groups cultivate diverse forms of life. The State of Israel, insofar as it is a liberal state, sponsors and underwrites a rich, lively, contentious civil society?which is made up, in its largest part, of Jews arguing with one another. There is no need for the state to resolve the arguments; they can be settled, if they have to be settled, in nonpolitical ways or, at least, without coercion. But this is not the whole meaning of statehood. A state also provides public places and public occasions for a common life, and this is always a life of a particular sort, determined by the dominant culture of civil society. Every state has a particular character; a literally neutral state, a state whose common life was evacuated of all content, while (perhaps) not conceptually impossible, is radically improbable in practice and without example in history. So even if the adjective ?Jewish? is a weak adjective, it still must modify ?state? in some determinate way (that?s what adjectives do). Not that ?Jewish state? must take on a meaning something like ?Islamic republic? in its present Iranian usage. ?Islamic? is currently a strong modi?er, but one can imagine its being weakened, much as ?Jewish? has been weakened through the effects of emancipation, sectarian division, and modern secularism. In any case, given these effects, a Jewish state today cannot enforce a singular and uniform Jewishness. It can, however, express in public places and on public occasions?in its of?cial calendar, its evocative symbols, its formal ceremonies, its historical celebrations, its school curriculum?a version of Jewishness (loosely structured, latitudinarian) common or potentially com- mon to all the varieties of Jews. I suppose I should say ?almost all,? for there are bound to be ideologically driven refusals of commonality: sectarian schism, alien- ation, and withdrawal. Under conditions of freedom, Judaism will produce its own versions of Amish and Mennonite sectaries, say, just as it once produced the Essenes. But won?t this ?common? Jewishness represent the lowest common denominator of Jewish life? Yes, that is exactly what it will and should do, though it need not be ?low? in the sense of base or coarse; nor need it be simplistic, sentimental, and empty. Israel?s common Jewishness should be, to change my metaphor, a distil- lation of Jewish history and values in which all (or almost all) Jews can recognize themselves. What content the distillation will have, how rich it will be, depends on the creativity of Israeli Jews?on the continuing work of poets, philosophers, artists, historians, and novelists. Bialik?s poems, studied by schoolchildren, suggest one possibility; the appropriation of the Amalek story by right-wing politicians suggests another. The rabbis and halakhic sages of Israel will also participate in this construction of a common Jewishness. But the effectiveness of their participation must depend upon their persuasiveness. They shouldn?t be able, any more than the poets are able, to call upon the coercive power of the state. The sages can be legislators for Israel only in the extended sense given to that word by Shelley, when he called poets the ?legislators of the world.? Under the conditions of statehood, halakha must become a speculative endeavor, an articulation of a certain kind (not the only kind) of Jewish idealism or even of Jewish perfectionism. It has a possible in?uence on the common life?of roughly the same sort that Catholic natural law doctrine has on American life when it is applied by American bishops to nuclear deterrence or to the ordering of the economy. Statehood gives the rabbis a new reason to extend and elaborate halakha and to address as wide a range of issues as the bishops do. But the rabbis cannot claim, in the open society that the state frames and protects, the same authority that they once exercised in the closed society of the medieval commune. They have only the authority of their arguments. Israel represents, as the early Zionists hoped it would, a triumph of the ordinary?which is to say that it occupies the largely unexplored theoretical landscape between exile and redemption. What this means in practice is that in a Jewish state, where ?Jewish? is a weak or liberal modi?er, the religious courts (Islamic and Christian, of course, as well as Jewish) can judge only those who agree to be judged. The judicial system should be like the educational system, with parochial institutions always available but never compulsory. State courts will of course be in?uenced? though to what degree we can?t predict?by the Jewish legal tradition; but they will also be in?uenced, given the history of the Middle East, by Ottoman and British traditions. And, similarly, state schools will teach the history of the Jews but also a more general history. The contrast between what goes on in the parochial insti- tutions and what goes on in the public institutions will never be an absolute contrast between Jewish particu- larism and civic neutrality. Rather, there will be a variety of particularisms and an always unfinished but nonethe- less recognizable common life. The contrast is partial and endlessly contested. One can imagine a number of stopping points in this ongoing contest, all of them temporary. Jewish Israel may one day look like Catholic Ireland in the days of Joyce?priest-ridden and parochial, the largely negative inspiration of its greatest writers. Or it may look like Catholic France in the age of Jaures and Clemenceau, anticlerical and secularist, home to the cultural avant- (Continued on p. 126) WHAT KIND OF STATE Is A JEWISH 37 of child-support enforcement can claim recovery of no more than 15 percent of expenditures for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). While some fathers choose not to ful?ll their familial obligations, on an annual wage of less than $6,500 a year (the minimum wage) some fathers of kids on AFDC simply cannot. At best, child-support payments taken out of a minimum-wage paycheck will have only symbolic value. If policy makers believe that a token payment has moral value, then who are we to argue? Proposals now on the table, a $1,000 tax credit for poor families with chil- dren, for example, will not address the life circumstances of underclass Ameri- cans who either can?t wait for a tax refund or couldn?t care less about complying with something as irrelevant as an Internal Revenue Service ?ling deadline. Similarly, liberal proposals focused solely on providing ?decent work opportunities? for the underclass are inadequately conceived so long as the proposals fail to recognize that people without essential work skills and inclinations will not take advantage of them without some compelling reasons. So, back to our premise: Why not cashier the public welfare bureaucracy for some bold experiments in social re- construction? Unfortunately, liberals who remember the turbulent days of the Community Action Program are unlikely to embrace a community devel- opment strategy for welfare reform. Yet the times are propitious for doing just that. There is little doubt that Jack Kemp will place Urban Enterprise Zone legislation before this Congress, and that offers liberals a chance to offer some creative proposals for con- tending with the underclass problem. Of course, liberals can opt for con- ventional prescriptions for alleviating poverty: pumping megasums into pro- grams that are irrelevant to many of the poor, and that are administered by an archaic bureaucracy that has no stake in whether these efforts suc- ceed. That route is familiar and safe. But liberals have to do more than that if they are to command once again the middle ground in the welfare policy debate. Liberals must jettison traditional income-maintenance strate- gies and deal seriously with problems presented by the underclass and the welfare bureaucracy. Progressives ul- timately stand to gain more from being realistic about the substantial problems confronting American social welfare than by indulging in romanticism. Cl WHAT KIND OF (Continued from p. 37) garde. The adjective ?Jewish? doesn?t by itself rule out these (or many other) possibilities. But if we give it its broadest sense, allow it to incorporate the full range of Jewish experience in the modern world, then it points toward a liberal state in which clerics and anticlerics, rabbis and secular intellectuals, peacefully (I don?t mean harmoniously) coexist. iberalism, however, isn?t only for the Jews. We still need to ask how the adjective ?Jewish? can modify a state that includes Arabs as free and equal citizens. Obviously, if ?Jewish? is a strong adjective, the inclusion of Arabs is impossible; at best, they would be granted the same kind of corporate autonomy that Jews enjoyed (some of the time, in some places) in the centuries before emancipation. Like the Jews again, they would be denied civil rights. But we have reason to know that arrangements of this sort make for a precarious and vulnerable existence; having ourselves escaped from them, we would have difficulty explaining why we were prepared to impose them on another people. In any case, corporate autonomy works best under conditions of benevolent absolutism or imperial rule; it isn?t compatible with democratic self-government. So: How can aJewish state, committed to democracy, include Arabs? Some people, worrying about this ques- tion (it needs to be worried about!), decided long ago that it was necessary to ?nd another adjective. Since 126 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4 states need adjectives, since political communities must be identi?ed in some determinate way with their own citizens, we must look, they argued, for an identity that predates or transcends the Arab/Jewish distinction. The number of possibilities is fairly limited?Semite, Canaanite, Hebrew, Israeli?and none of them is quite satisfactory. For names of this sort are not matters of mere willfulness, used and disused as we please. Of course, they don?t correspond to essences; names and identities are social constructions. But they are con- structed over many years and many generations; they tap into the deepest levels of collective self-consciousness. There is no contemporary (or, for that matter, historical) group of Arabs and Jews that answers to the name of Semite or Canaanite; Hebrew is the name of a language that Israeli Jews and Arabs speak, but not the name of a people or a culture; and Israeli is a name still to be tested, an indication of civic status, not yet of cultural or (for the Arabs at least) of national belonging. It is probably better to acknowledge the separate identities of the two peoples rather than to search for some arti?cial unity. The Arabs are a minority that should be included in Israel much as Jewish minorities, after emancipation, are included in states where most of their fellow citizens are non-Jews. Or, more generally, Arabs should be included much as any national minority is included in a ?liberal? state shaped by, and in some sense for, the majority nation. There are many examples of such inclusion, enough of them problematic, however, so that'some further description is required. I will try to indicate the conditions that might justify this particu- lar kind of majority rule. But I don?t mean to suggest that these conditions already exist, either in Israel or anywhere else. Consider, then, the life of an ethnic minority in a country, say, where the public calendar, the evocative symbols that mark public occasions and public spaces, the history taught in the public schools are all of them alien to the minority members, all of them determined by another ethnicity. The minority members are citizens, nonetheless, with full rights not only of ethnic associa- tion and religious worship but also of political partici- pation; they are not discriminated against in either public or private employment, nor are they subject to any special laws that don?t apply to everyone else. They can organize, publish, petition, agitate, and vote. But because they are a small group, easily outvoted, they have a very limited capacity to shape the culture of their ?own? country. There are, I suppose, kinds and degrees of ?own-ness.? Arabs and Jews in France do not expect to ?nd their own history taught in the public schools?as they would, say, in Algeria or in Israel. French men and women who have stayed behind in Algeria and chosen Algerian citizenship do not expect public celebrations (or a holiday from work) on Bastille Day or on Christmas. But none of these people are de- graded by their negative expectations, nor does liberalism require us to deny the place of French history in French schools or of the Islamic calendar in Algerian public life. Standard American liberalism holds that the state is allowed its civic symbols and historical celebrations only so long as they are narrowly political, focused on itself. But it must not appropriate the symbols and celebrations of any subgroup of its citizens. The citizens have their own social, cultural, and religious life, which the state systematically ignores. This is a View that nicely ?ts the American experience, where the state is, almost from the beginning, independent of the groups that supply its citizens and where all its citizens belong, so it is commonly said, to one or another minority. But the American experience is historically uncommon; most states are closely connected to a particular national majority; symbols and celebrations are shared by the state and the nation, and it is hard to mark off what is civic or political from what is social or cultural or even religious. A state of this sort can still be liberal, open, and pluralist, guaranteeing the rights of individuals and groups without discriminating among them. But it will have a particular identity that isn?t shared in the full sense by all its citizens. Members of minority groups will argue about this identity?as ?Third World? Americans do, for example, when they hold that Western culture should be de-emphasized in the public school curriculum (an argument suggesting that even the United States has its public particularism). But they cannot be guar- anteed victory in such arguments: they have only the right to make their case as persuasively as they can. To study someone else?s history in school, so long as the student is free to study his or her own history outside of school, is neither degrading nor oppressive. The particularities of public education can certainly be made degrading for this or that minority, but that is an outcome relatively easy to avoid. There is, then, nothing necessarily discriminatory in the inclusion of Arabs in aJewish state (where ?Jewish? is a weak or liberal modi?er). The fact that the Jews are a religious as well as a national entity, however, makes for special dif?culties. Who can imagine, for example, Muslim and Christian Arabs ever joining with goodwill in the singing of Hatikva/a, a song that expresses a peculiarly Jewish yearning for Zion, as much religious as nationalist in spirit? How does one teach the history of the Jews, which is also, but not only, the political history of the State of Israel, to both Jewish and non- Jewish citizens? I can?t answer such questions, though I can imagine a number of accommodating and liberal answers. The greatest dif?culty, however, lies in the constant temptation to ?nd some institutional match for the coexistence of nation and religion, to move Judaism to the center of the political stage?and so to drive non-Jews to the margins. The Jewish equivalent of the church?state con?ict pits those who would yield to this temptation against those who would resist or repress it. Though the con?ict is obscured by external dangers, it is likely to grow more intense in coming years. But it doesn?t have to be resolved (nor does the state have to be triumphant) before there can be a liberal regime. As the history of the French Third Republic suggests, the con?ict can itself be acted out in a liberal fashion, through the characteristic arrangements of democratic politics. This means, of course, that Arab citizens will play a part in determining its outcome, just as Jews and Protestants played a part in the French case. But this defense of the liberal nation-state will succeed only in countries where national minorities are relatively small?like the Jews in the United States or the Arabs in France or, if we turn to near-liberal though non- democratic Third World countries, the Copts in Egypt or the Chinese in Indonesia. What we might think of as liberal particularism won?t work, or won?t readily work, with very large minorities. For then statehood would need two distinct and possibly inconsistent modi?ersw that is, it would have to be binational in character. Binationalism is obviously not impossible; Belgium is a relatively successful example of it. But Cyprus and Lebanon are examples closer to the realities of the contemporary Middle East. The alternative to bi- nationalism is partition: two states, each with its own adjective. In both these cases, politics follows culture; and follow it must, unless the state undertakes a Kultur- kampf against some subset of its own members. TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 127 Hence the choice that faces Greater Israel today: it can become a non-Jewish or a half-Jewish state (what- ever binationalism means), or it can become a small Jewish state living side by side with a small Arab state? ?Little Israel? and littler Palestine, each including an Arab or a Jewish minority while also claiming its own national identity. There is, of course, a third possibility: Greater Israel can become an illiberal or an antiliberal Jewish state. Then the Arabs would have to be wholly excluded, not only culturally but also politically, their fate either sub- ordination or expulsion. For the Arabs of Greater Israel can?t plausibly be called a national minority; they are substantially a nation. Hence there is no way, so far as they are concerned, in which ?Jewish? can be a liberal adjective; it indicates not merely an unfamiliar public culture but an actively oppressive politics. I am inclined to argue that, given current conditions, it can?t be a liberal adjective for the Jews either; that is, as the Jews? relationship to the Arab minority now stands, it can?t represent a distillation of Jewish history and values in which all Jews might recognize themselves. Jews who are fully aware of their own (Diaspora) history might well come to identify with the Arabs rather than with the Jews of Greater Israel. Indeed, if the policy euphemistically named ?transfer? were ever put into effect, wouldn?t the exiled Arabs be more like the Jews of Spain in 1492, and the Jews more like the Spaniards? VI. ears of exile and persecution have bred among the Jews, or rather among some Jews, a burning desire for a turnabout of just this kind. This desirehas left its mark on religious literature and also on some versions of secular?for example, Revisionist? politics. Religiously, this desire takes the form of a mes- sianic triumphalism, a vision of redemption as hegemony, the rule of Israel over the ?nations.? All this, thankfully, only in the end of days, after Armageddon; and, like one of the Rabbis cited in the Talmud, I hope not to live to see it. If there is redemption short of Armageddon, it will have to take a very different form, more like those pastoral and peaceful visions that also ?gure in the Jewish tradition. In any case, the dichotomy between exile and redemption isn?t very helpful in our present circumstances. The Jewish State of Israel is neither the one nor the other. It really represents, as the early Zionists hoped it would, a triumph of the ordinary? which is to say that it occupies the largely unexplored theoretical landscape between exile and redemption. One has only to visit Israel to learn what most of its citizens know very well and are more than ready to say: these are nothing like messianic times. All that the 128 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 present moment offers is a chance, a chance, for a normal Jewish life. For many Orthodox Jews, however, Jewish normality includes religious coercion?much as Christian and Is- lamic normality does in the eyes of zealous believers. What can we say to such people? There are two argu- ments against coercion. The ?rst, which I have not tried to make here, holds that religious commitment and personal freedom are closely, perhaps necessarily, con- nected. Faith must be free. This is an argument that can be read into the Jewish tradition, on some nonstandard interpretations of that tradition. But it probably pre- supposes a liberal understanding of both religion and personality, and it won?t appeal much to people with different understandings. The second argument is more practical and institu- tional in character: it holds that coercive methods, in the aftermath of emancipation, are radically ineffective. There is no going back, as I have already said, to medieval corporatism; nor does coercion offer any way forward to a redemptive politics. It can make only for local ugliness: cruelty and high-handedness tempered by hypocrisy and corruption. What is necessary now? what life in a Jewish state both requires and makes possible?is halakhic revisionism. Just as the Rabbis reconstructed biblical law to meet the conditions of statelessness, so now rabbinic law must be reconstructed to meet the conditions of liberal statehood. This reconstruction will leave Judaism without an overt political role?without a claim on the resources of the state to punish blasphemy, say, or idolatry, or violations of the Sabbath, or to enforce the rulings of rabbinic courts on such matters as marriage and divorce. Halakhic observance will be, as is true in the Diaspora, entirely free. Still, I have tried to deny what many liberals take to be the necessary corollary of religious freedom?that is, absolute state neutrality. I see no reason why Judaism, and secular versions of Jewishness too, should not play a part in shaping the political culture of the Jewish state. It should be an occasion for pride, not moral anxiety, for example, when talmudic conceptions of equity are invoked in the course of a Knesset debate about taxation. We should be eager to have the Hebrew Bible read and critically discussed in the state schools. The public celebration of a holiday like Hanukkah should not be taken as an affront to liberal sensibilities. At the same time, of course, tal- mudic conceptions of equity will have to compete with other conceptions; Plato?s Republic should also be re- quired reading; no one can be compelled to celebrate Hanukkah. Jewish statehood requires nothing more than this. But we can also say, without embarrassment or apology, that emancipation, liberalism, and pluralism don?t require anything less. El