The Holy Land, A Land of Theo-Political Ambiguities
In his work on the concept of the Holy Land, Martin Buber emphasizes that holiness belongs to God alone and cautions against the hubristic pretense of adorning one's political actions with religious tropes and rhetoric.
By Paul Mendes-Flohr
The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring [or seed] I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7) as an earthly dwelling of God, a “Holy Land” (Zechariah 2:16)
The current Israeli government is a coalition of secular and religious political parties firmly committed to affirming the “geo-theological” integrity of the “Holy Land.” Since the Spring of 1967, that “Holy Land” has encompassed the biblical regions of Samaria and Judah, which constitute the very heart of Israel’s divinely appointed inheritance.
Reclaimed–-or redeemed, as the votaries of Netanyahu's government would put it--–in the wake of the Six-Day War with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Samaria and Judah–known in international law as the West Bank of Palestine–happens to include a population of some three million Arab Muslims and Christians. For Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the demographic reality of the West Bank is most inconvenient. As a Holy Land bestowed to the Children of Israel as an eternal possession, the redemption of Samaria and Judah overrides secular, political consideration. Indeed, securing the “geo-theological” integrity of their Holy Land is of critical importance to the Israeli government’s religious-cum-political agenda.
The tension between telluric theo-political pragmatics and the transcendent holiness of the Land of Israel is said to be inherent in the Zionist project. Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Kabbalah and mystical messianism, sought to alert his fellow Zionists to the catastrophic consequences that this tension would ineluctably have, if not duly tempered by secular judgment. In his very first scholarly publication in Hebrew–on the topic of the heresy of the sixteenth century antinomian messianic pretender Shabbatai Tzvi–he obliquely questioned whether redemption could be attained through sin. Meanwhile, Scholem’s colleague at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Martin Buber, shared his political anxieties, and devoted a Hebrew monograph to a theological and phenomenological clarification of the concept of the Holy Land.
In the early 1940s, Buber delivered a series of Hebrew lectures on the centrality of Zion–a poetic denotation for Jerusalem and, by extension, the Holy Land–to biblical and Talmudic thought, and how it inspired medieval thinkers and mystics, as well as the spiritual fathers of Zionism. In these lectures–later published as a book under the title Beyn Am ve’Arzto [Between the People and its Land]–he implicitly addressed what he called the theo-political problematics of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel. With indirect reference to Zionist politics, Buber argued that modern Protestant Biblical scholarship errs in attributing holiness exclusively to the space of public worship (“Introduction,” xviii). A careful reading of Scriptures, he averred, indicates “holiness still belongs to God not merely to religious symbols and time and place consecrated to public worship…. It is only later that the category Holy becomes restricted to public worship…” (ibid.). In its pristine, primordial denotation, holiness is a “theopolitical rather than a strictly religious concept.” (xviii) In “the matrimony of people and land (i.e., Zion)” there is a “matrimony of two separate spheres of Being” – that is, nature and history, or space and time (xx). Thus, according to Buber, Holiness is intrinsic neither to time nor to space. Holiness is the province of God alone, to whom we are ultimately accountable in our political judgements.
Buber elaborated this theo-political thesis in philosophical anthropological reflections on the synergetic relation between divine holiness and the temporal, human sphere–fraught perforce with cognitive imperfection –and, alas, all-too-often the hubristic pretense of adorning one’s this-world actions with religious tropes and rhetoric. In his 1938 inaugural lecture as a professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University, “What is Man?” Buber subtly sought to ground the Zionist quest for spatial-temporal security in constructions of a transcendent “home” that resist conceptual and thus quasi-theological reification. Yet, beholden to divine holiness, we are not relieved of political and ethical responsibility to draw the world to God who, in the words of the prophet Micah, “has shown you, O mortal, what is good: To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Founder of the Global Lehrhaus and Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago Divinity School and The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Paul Mendes-Flohr, PhD. currently resides in Jerusalem. In 2019, Mendes-Flohr published Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. The German translation appeared in 2022 and in Hebrew in 2023. His most recent work, Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities, was published in 2021.
