I read “Israel Is Real” while preparing for my son’s bar mitzvah. By “preparing,” I mean talking to tent people and mailing invites. On the spiritual side, I’ve done my usual shirk: ducking services, doodling during sessions with the rabbi and dodging queries about my own bar mitzvah of wretched memory, celebrated in a gloomy temple filled with old men waiting for me to blunder.
I mention this as preface because Rich Cohen’s book accomplished the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story. Not by breaking new ground or advancing a bold peace plan, but by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion.
On a light-hearted note, the wry dig at Rabbi Kook got a rare Monday-morning belly laugh from me (and yes, I know that only a Jew could get away with a joke like that).
On a more serious note, Cohen’s question about whether it is best for Judaism that there should be so much emphasis on Israel is a thought-provoking question for Christians also. About Israel the country they are either not interested, or they approach it from an evangelical viewpoint which streses end-times and the in-gathering of the Jewish people. But there is another perspective. Surely part of the message of the patriarch Abraham (who ‘set out without knowing where he was going’) is that God is found everywhere. No longer were there gods for localities, but one God. Then the message of Deutero-Isaiah and other later prophets is that this same God will draw to himself all peoples. I sometimes think that the vocation of the Jewish people is akin to the vision of the Church as sacrament: to be a people everywhere who witness to the love of God and to his mercy. As Christians we would add, also to witness to his redemption of us in Christ and his grace.
The difficulty is that Judaism is as much an ethnicity as a religion. And before we criticise the Jews for that we might remember that the Roman Empire forbade them to evangelise (we know that in Constantinople, for example, there were converts. There are also the ‘god-fearers’ mentioned in the NT). The result was that Judaism became a self-sufficient community that turned in on itself. The then Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, once caused uproar here in England when he suggested that Judaism could and should appeal to people who wanted to believe in God but could not accept the Trinity and the Incarnation. The protests came from the Jews – not from the Christians.