QUESTION: What’s the proper Torah attitude to religious Zionism?
ANSWER: Now when this question is put in such a form, I must always say I don’t know any proper Torah attitudes because I’m not an authority on Torah attitudes. But I’ll just tell you my attitude; that’s all I can tell you.
Religious Zionism means you’re settling for 50/50. You’re selling out partially. Because if you’re religious, that covers everything. The Torah, it has all the idealism in it. If a man has to hyphenate his Torah and say, “It’s nationalistic Torah,” so this man is selling out partly.
It means that he comes to the Basel Conference in Switzerland (site of first Zionist Congress in 1897, where the World Zionist Organization was established) and he sits there and they bring up on the program under Herzl’s leadership that, “We are not going to make a religious nation, a religious state. We are independent of religion. We have nothing to do with religion.”
So, let’s say the religious Zionist voted against it, but they are still in the organization. They still belong and show loyalty to an organization that says the Torah is not the national flag of the Jewish people. So, it means they’re settling for less. We cannot consent to be in an organization which says you can be a Jew without the Torah. You cannot be a Jew without the Torah! There are no two ways about it.
And therefore, there’s no question that anybody who belongs to such an organization has sold out part of his ideals. It doesn’t mean that he’s a rasha gamur (completely wicked person). He can still have a certain amount of yiras Shomayim and Torah, but there’s no question that this man is lacking some very important elements of true and genuine Judaism.
Reprinted from this week’s email of Toras Avigdor based on a Thursday night lecture delivered in June 1978.
