Yeridah: Highest Form of Zionism
New Zionist article about yordim.
I know that this is idealistic and far off.
Background: To "make aliyah" means "to ascend" in Hebrew. This phrase is frequently used to describe the process by which a Jew from the Diaspora becomes an Israeli. Such an immigrant is called an oley. To "make yeridah" means "to descend," and is used to describe both moral lapse and emigration from Israel. One who makes yeridah is called a yorod. Mainstream Zionism considers aliyah to be an integral part of Zionism, and is valued in the demographic war with the Arabs. Making yeridah is discouraged and considered an unpatriotic betrayal of Zionism.
In recent years many of the young, intelligent and motivated Israelis have been making yeridah, leaving Israel for the USA, Canada and Germany, seeking professional/educational opportunities, cultural experiences, the thrill of the big city, safety from terrorist attacks and distance from "the situation." Many yordim don't consider themselves to be anti-Zionist or unpatriotic. They carry their Israeliness with them and feel as if they are liberated from Diaspora oppression by their state of mind regardless of the fact that they do not live in Israel. Most Israelis, and yordim in particular, are not religious. Their sense of Jewishness is secular and very refreshing, reinvigorating the cultural life of the Diasporic Jewish communities with which they come into contact. I like the yordim, and feel that their presence in the American Jewish communities is very valuable.
Perhaps if the Israeli government weren't so absorbed in HaMatsav, "the conflict," it would be able to see this, encouraging young Israelis to make yeridah to bring the "new jew" mentality to the Diaspora. They are casual, argumentative, energetic, intelligent and knowledgeable about practical things, combining Germanic technical competance, Mediterranean verve, and a Middle Eastern sense of historical context and purpose.
Possible Vision: Having Israel as a cultural base from which to spread this way of being Jewish would be in keeping with Cultural Zionism, maintaining a small Israeli population (maybe 1-2 million) to support academic and artistic institutions along with the kibbutzim (which I wish weren't dying). Such a place would not necesitate Israeli political control, only equal rights and access to visit, live in and travel across the land. Tel Aviv would be a major Jewish city. Jerusalem would continue to be home to the Haredi orthodox. Jewish college students from around the world would come here to study, and some would make aliyah, and then yeridah to carry the values back to the Diaspora.
[In Haifa maybe a new identity could be formed. Palestinians and Israelis could intermingle to make a new sabra identity. Sabra means cactus, and is used to describe native-born Israelis. I think it should be applied to Palestinians as well. No longer Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, Muslims, Christians, or Druze, the people of Haifa and the Galilee could all become sabrot, speaking a mixed Hebrew-Arabic language, intermarrying until they can't be untangled. Seeing as the land is small and short of water, it may be best for many of the Palestinian refugees to join in this yeridah movement. While I can now only clearly see this applying to Israeli Jews, it may some day be that there could be "new sabrot" in Israel/Palestine and the Diaspora who could also follow this aliyah-yeridah formula.]
Yeridah is the highest manifestation of Cultural Zionism.
Now I have the problem of how I could someday make aliyah for the purpose of making yeridah. I have a feeling that it would be very difficult to become an Israeli as a conscientious objector. It would be hard to become a citizen without serving in the military or paying taxes that are used for the fighting (militarism is the single biggest problem with the Israeli culture; I'd have to be careful to make sure they don't sink their hooks into me and militarize me or dissuade me from making yeridah). There may be ways around it though. I may have to settle for continually renewing visas for as long as it takes for me to feel that I have Israelified myself well enough to make yeridah. Although, I don't know if I'll want to return to the USA, if the wars are still going on, and I'd have to pay taxes to that. I might go to Spain or Canada. If that all works out, there is proposed legislation that would allow me to vote in Israeli elections even as a yorod.
posted by Isaac at 11.9.05
11 Comments:
Isaac, you write well, and I wanted to invite you to expand on this post and submit it to us. If you are interested, email me through the email on our website and we can talk details. We get about 10K active readers a month and rapidly growing, so it would be interesting to get your take on the posting that we made (the one you linked to).
Yoav
www.newzionist.com
1:13 AM
Israel — Population: 6,276,883
USA — Population: 295,734,134
In Israel one person (i.e. you) equals about 1.6 times ten to the negative seventh of a percent of the population In the USA you're only 3.4 times ten to the negative ninth percent. Therefore the amount of difference you could make in Israel versus here is two orders of magnitutde greater.
I have mathematically proved that you should make aliyah.
10:28 AM
Yeah, it does seem that Israel is a small place where a lot is happening. I mean politically, culturally, artisticly it seems that in a few days it could all change. You could wake up one day and it's all be different.
In college I'll have to spend some time there, and then decide what I want to do. But, I do think it would be good to live there a few years. But my real interest is in making yeridah. Later in my life I want to be able to a Canadian-Israeli or Spanish-Israeli (this has to do with some of the alternative takes on nationalism in the Rushdie essay, but also Buber's Zionism).
4:05 PM
Pertaining to the mathematical proof for aliyah, I think that would work well for a place like Iceland as well. The difference is that everyone watches what happens in Jerusalem, but not in Rekijavik.
4:09 PM
Hi,
I read your post in New zionist, and came up with a "counterarticle", if you will ;).
http://vko.weblogs.us/2005/08/10/what-zionism-means-to-me/
6:17 AM
As you can see my submission to New Zionist was posted today (btw, go check it out). Also, I have just added a response to the response to me at the vko blog linked to in the above comment.
7:16 AM
Non-statist Zionism has at least some historical credibility. From a book I started reading yesterday, Bernard Avishai’s The Tragedy of Zionism:
“Weizmann’s chief aide, Nahum Sokolow, wrote, ‘It has been said and is still obstinantly repeated by anti-Zionists again and again that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent “Jewish State.” This is wholly fallacious. The ‘Jewish State’ was never part of the Zionist program.’ Achad Ha’am went so far as to suggest inviting Arabs into a joint venture: ‘The Balfour Declaration does not affect the right of the other inhabitants who are entitled to invoke the right of actual dwelling. Palestinian Arabs, too, have the right to a National Home, have the right to develop national forces to the extent of their ability . . . In such circumstances it is no longer possible that the national home of one of them could be total. The management of the whole has to be directed in agreement with the interests of all.’”
States are bad for a nation just as they are bad for religion. States baby nations and cultures the same way a religious state prevents any real theological debate. A movement is weak when it has a military to crush enemies it cannot meet with words. We need open discourse between nations, religions and other identity groups. Why is it that many Zionists fear that their cuture is not strong enough to stand on its own? Why do we fear that our people will always assimilate, never thinking that some gentiles may rather wish to assimilate into a Hebrew culture?
Early nationalist theory thought that a state was needed to define a nation. Nations, by their own line of thinking, were organic. Thus, states did not define them, but rather constricted them, making them internally homogeneous and outwardly closed-off. Otto Bauer thought that a national socialism was necessary (his was not like the later Nazi movement) to lift up the impoverished to allow them to participate in culture. While national socialism seems to make sense, the only place free market ideas work fully is in the realm of ideas (because, unlike resources, they are unlimited and easily reproduced and distributed). Thus, governance should be multinational, as should the socialism, placing rival ideas and cultures on equal economic and political footings so that the contest is between their ideas, not their wealth. In this manner I would take Switzerland to be a model of such a country, in which dialogue between different national groups has pushed both (actually all 3) foward and worked for their mutual progress. I believe intermarriage to be vital to such open competition because it allows the children to chose freely among multiple identities, allowing them to act as an unbiased judge of what parts of what identities they wish to assume. I hope this starts to happen in Israel some day.
If an Israeli merely visits the Diapora, but does not live there, he/she will not have Israeli children in the Diaspora, and so will not truly integrate Israeli identity into the Diaspora Jewish consciousness. There is no reason to believe the move permanent even if it is for an individual person; their children and grandchildren may retutrn, unreturn and rereturn to Israel.
Though it is difficult to maintain a Jewish consciousness in America, it is possible. I argue that we need the yordim to help us and that it is this struggle that makes our nation stronger. Zionism was most innovative and brilliant in the years before the state, and the years immediately following its establishment.
10:00 AM
I aslo just got listed on Semitism too. Their page takes a while to load, but its really great. This page is listed under the "Israel-Palestine Peace Bolgs" section. A lot of big news for this blog. I think both of these recent developments will prove more helpful than the PBA.
10:12 AM
That's really profound what you're saying, especially, as cultures and tribes become less and less defined through geographical boundaries, and more through shared and sharing ideas. clap clap clap!
5:05 PM
Thank you. Most of these ideas formed as I realized two separate personal interests were concurrent. I was interested in Zionism, and used to be of a more mainstream persuasion (still somewhat left and dovish). Martin Buber's Zionism and other Cultural Zionist writers got me thinking on one track, and Rushdie (in Midnight's Children in particular) plus a book called Mapping the Nation (a brief survey of nationalist theory) got me thinking on the other. Then they sort of crashed together.
5:11 PM
I've decided to house some of my comments on other pages (VKo and NewZionist).
This one comes from what I wrote at New Zionist and is my response to Zach's comments (also on New Zionist) regarding what I wrote on VKo's Blog (as a comment to her posted counter-article). In it I defend my original post made on New Zionist which grew out of a comment I left on Yoav's post there called 'Good' and 'Bad' Israelis.
{The original post here that these comments are filed under was made on the same topic as the ideas formed in my mind.}
Herzl by no means should be considered to be the model of Zionism, nor even within the early mainstream. If you are defining Zionism by Herzl’s beliefs, then Zionism has nothing to do with Hebrew or the land of Israel. He didn’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew, and thpught German or perhaps some other European language would be a better language for a new Jewisg nation-state. He supported looking into territories other than Palestine, most notably Uganda. Additionally he was anti-religious. Herzl really has nothing to do with Zionism other than that he called a meeting of Zionists which became the WZO, in which his views were in the minority.
Herzl followed closely the ideology of Pinsker before him. However, Zionists such as Achad Ha’am did not even wish for there to be a Jewish majority in the region of Palestine (at least in what was to him the forseeable future), let alone an independent nation-state. Achad Ha’am wanted Palestine to serve as the cultural base for global Jewry, who constitute the nation of Israel no matter where they live. Weizmann continued to favor binational confederation with the Arabs even during WWII, seeking to negotiate with moderate Arab leaders. Ben-Gurion started out opposing the idea of an independent state, then he began to support it in the 1930’s, only to offer partition and possible confederation again as late as 1945, advocating that Zionists not lay claim to Jerusalem, leaving most of the land to the Arabs (something along the lines of the 1936 Peel Commission plan for partition).
Even as Labor Zionists did begin to move toward favoring a state (constituting an outgrowth of or addition to Zionism, but not the movement itself), they sought to procede gradually, aware that haste would ruin the entire project, causing escalation of violence in the region. This may be observed as what actually happened. After winning the war in ‘48 Israel needed the discipline of the early Zionists to confine themselves to smaller borders and again offer confederation. The same happened in ‘67 with even more tragic results. It is perhaps this ambiguity about borders that made the Arabs most distrustful and wary. As Zionist leaders wavered between demanding all of Palestine and the Transjordan (like Jabotinsky), all of Palestine, part of Palestine, and none of Palestine, Arab leaders came to think they were being lied to by those making minimalist claims, causing them to staunchly oppose even minor concessions.
Culutural Zionists saw that even if a state were to be helpful to the Zionist cause that it could become easily mistaken for the goal in itself rather than a means to an end. Thus even as Zionists truly committed to the cultural implications of movement came to consider the prospect of a state, they were wary of militarism and statism. Jabotinsky, openly enamored with Italian Facism, in fact did become confused by statism, taking military culture and chivalric ethics to be the basis of the Zionist revolution rather than the cultural renewal and revival that actually was at the core of Zionism.
Also at V. Ko’s Blog I posted quotes from early Zionist leaders explicitly declaring that they did not seek a state and that this had nothing to do with Zionism.
Furthermore, I feel that arguements external to Zionism’s own logic provide further arguments against a Jewish state, or in fact any nation-state. It is my view that nothing that matters at all should be too closely tied to the state. Culture, religion and even political thought not only benefit from competition and dialogue unhindered by militaries and states that disallow such opportunities, but that the passivity (the very passivity that Zionism sought to overcome) can be greatly decreased in the absence of state involvement in such movements. Citizens of countries that honor human rights have the ability to do what they want as they want. In such a society the people themselves can become active participants in culture, religion and politics without government approval or direction. Rather than electing leaders to tell us to do what we are already allowed to do we can simply do it. We don’t need to be held by the hand and instructed how to worship or not wotship god, nor do we need to have our culture handed to us from above. The Histadrut for example is such mass direct action, and was a beautiful thing, though not a state of its own. The best movements are self-conscious, and voluntary. State involvement in culture allows people to cede responsibility for shaping and interacting with society on their own. We need ideological tension, a sense of purpose and responsibility that can only be found the pores of the liberal state, but that can not be bestowed upon us by politicians.
Political recognition is not the way things are headed. Statist nationalism is a retrograde nostalgia for Fin de Sicle era Europe with all its national pomp and ceremony. Internationalism is where its headed now. No one even stays in one place any more. People will intermingle and even intermarry, destroyingeven the possibility of such digressive nationalism. Indeed already individual people can, and are with increasing frequency, members of multiple identity groups simultaneously.
2:08 PM
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