Israel and Enlightenment
1 May 2001


In 1784, when the Age of Reason had almost run its course, the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as "man's emergence from self-imposed tutelage," and offered as its motto, Sapere aude - "Dare to know." Yet, few took this motto very seriously, and Diderot, in a moment of rare lucidity, exclaimed to Hume: "Ah, my dear philosopher! Let us weep and wail....We preach wisdom to the deaf, and we are still far indeed from the age of reason." Today, the world - always full of noise - is still largely a desert of understanding, and the vast majority of nations continue to endure as if by accident, stubbornly indifferent to necessary expectations of serious thought. A perfect example of this unreason is the State of Israel.

More than anything else, Israel needs enlightenment. Despite its many technical and industrial successes, the so-called Jewish State has yet to emerge from an entirely self-imposed blindness. Of what use is so much light of reason if there are no eyes, or if those with eyes resolutely keep them shut? The French philosophes liked to speak of a siecle des lumieres, a century of light, but Israel in the twenty-first century remains mired in the bruising darkness, captivated only by shadows of what is important. What is important? First, Israel must learn to recognize that it can disappear. Such learning, in turn, will require that Israel begin to feel, palpably, the pain of its possible disappearance. Presently, Israel is generally unaware that it is on a dreadful journey to the end of misfortune; that the consequences of its misnamed "Peace Process" are apt to be genuinely existential.

Second, Israel must recognize that things are as they are. The Arab world will always despise Israel, at least for the forseeable decades. It follows that Israel must now reconcile itself to the persistent absence of peace and to the corollary persistence of war. It must now prepare to conduct war against shifting coalitions of Arab and Islamic states, and to defeat such coalitions. Strategically and tactically, this means an obligation to fight offensively; to structure its Order of Battle accordingly; and to resist dependence on inherently problematic systems of "multi-layered" defense. It also means having the political courage to carry out, as needed, appropriate preemptions.

Third, Israel must decide, soon, if it wishes to become a truly Jewish State, or whether it wishes to remain merely a State of the Jews. Now the Jewish character of the State of Israel is withered and well-hidden, an ironic debility that should call into question the very reason for maintaining statehood. Israel has abandoned itself to the instant, to cathartic crises and ecstasies that make it, alarmingly, like all other states. Largely devoid of Jewish meaning and Jewish faith, it carries forward without any real conviction, like a worm in the fruit, content to "fit in" the cruel and vulgar world, utterly without distinction. Not surprisingly, rejecting the very lifeblood of its own particular Jewish identity, Israel exudes a kaleidoscope of shame, abjection and spiritual degradation. In the end, this characterless presence in the world will create a condition of indefensibility for which no anti-tactical ballistic missile could ever compensate.

Israel's reality must be a synthesis of dynamic opposites. Truth and falsehood are always in a reciprocal relationship with one another. Each engenders its own dynamic contradiction.

To be a distinctively Jewish State may, world-historically, be insignificant; indeed, it may be absolutely nothing, infinitely nothing. And yet, yet, this is the only true and ultimate significance of Israel, so much so as to make every other significance an illusion. Israel is the state in which there still dawns the possibility of a thoroughly unique consciousness; that a nation's struggle with its intimate and individual destiny is never merely a matter of politics, but rather an absolute and sacred task.

Things are as they are. Should Israel fail to address these three interrelated imperatives, it will be punished far in excess of its expectations. Should it continue to surrender, bit by bit, to fawn slavishly, disgustingly, upon its own doom, sending generations of young soldiers to die for no reason, for no reason at all, its many enemies will shortly feast greedily upon the rotting carcass of the self-defeated State of the Jews.

Tragic drama instructs us that the spheres of reason, order and justice are painfully limited, and that no progress in science or technology can ever compensate for the "otherness" of the world. For Israel, the time has now come to escape determinedly from the primeval forest of evasion and to acknowledge, fully, that enlightenment has both intellectual and spiritual dimensions. Only then can it "Dare to know," to endure, and to endure with dignity and meaning.