Israel: Not Reckoned Among the Nations

Sunrise at Mount Sinai. Photo: wiki commons.

The year is 1933. Two Jews are sitting in a Viennese coffee house, reading the news. One is reading the local Jewish paper, the other the notoriously antisemitic publication Der Stürmer. “How can you possibly read that revolting rubbish?” says the first. The second smiles. “What does your paper say? Let me tell you. The Jews are assimilating. The Jews are arguing. The Jews are disappearing. Now let me tell you what my paper says. The Jews control the banks. The Jews control the media. The Jews control Austria. The Jews control the world. My friend, if you want good news about the Jews, always read the antisemites.”

An old and bitter joke. Yet it has a point and a history and it begins with this week’s parsha. Some of the most beautiful things ever said about the Jewish people were said by Bilaam: “Who can count the dust of Jacob … May my final end be like theirs! … How beautiful are your tents, Jacob, your dwelling places, Israel! … I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a sceptre will rise out of Israel.”

Bilaam was no friend of the Jews. Having failed to curse them, he eventually devised a plan that worked. He suggested that Moabite women seduce Israelite men and then invite them to take part in their idolatrous worship. 24,000 people died in the subsequent plague that struck the people (Num. 25, 31: 16). Bilaam is numbered by the rabbis as one of only four commoners denied a share in the world to come (Sanhedrin 90a).

Why then did God choose that Israel be blessed blessings by Bilaam? Surely there is a principle Megalgelim zekhut al yedei zakkai: “Good things come about through good people” (Tosefta Yoma 4: 12). Why did this good thing come about through a bad man? The answer lies in the principle stated in Proverbs (27: 2): “Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips.” Tanakh is perhaps the least self-congratulatory national literature in history. Jews chose to record for history their faults, not their virtues. Hence it was important that their praise come from an outsider, and one not known to like them. Moses rebuked the people. Bilaam, the outsider, praised them.

That said, however, what is the meaning of one of the most famous descriptions ever given of the people Israel: “It is a nation dwelling alone, not reckoned among the nations.” (Num. 23: 9)? I have argued (in Future Tense) against the interpretation that has become popular in modern times, namely that it is Israel’s destiny to be isolated, friendless, hated, abandoned and alone, as if anti-semitism were somehow written into the script of history. It isn’t. None of the prophets said so. To the contrary, they believed that the nations of the world would eventually recognise Israel’s God and come to worship Him in the Temple in Jerusalem. Zechariah (8: 23) foresees a day when “ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’” There is nothing fated, predestined, about antisemitism.

What then do Bilaam’s words mean? Ibn Ezra says they mean that unlike all other nations, Jews, even when a minority in a non-Jewish culture, will not assimilate. Ramban says that their culture and creed will remain pure, not a cosmopolitan mix of multiple traditions and nationalities. Netziv gives the sharp interpretation, clearly directed against the Jews of his time, that “If Jews live distinctive and apart from others they will dwell safely, but if they seek to emulate ‘the nations’ they ‘will not be reckoned’ as anything special at all.”

There is, however, another possibility, hinted at by another antisemite, G. K. Chesterton (that Chesterton was an antisemite is not my judgment but that of the poet W. H. Auden).[1] Chesterton famously wrote of America that it was “a nation with the soul of a church” and “the only nation in the world founded on a creed.” That is precisely what made Israel different – and America’s political culture, as historian Perry Miller and sociologist Robert Bellah pointed out, is deeply rooted in the idea of biblical Israel and the concept of covenant. Ancient Israel was indeed founded on a creed, and was, as a result, a nation with the soul of a religion.

All other nations, ancient and modern, have arisen out of historical contingencies. A group of people live in a land, develop a shared culture, form a society, and thus become a nation. Jews, certainly from the Babylonian exile onward, had none of the conventional attributes of a nation. They did not live in the same land. Some lived in Israel, others in Babylon, yet others in Egypt. Later they would be scattered throughout the world. They did not share a language of everyday speech. Rashi spoke French, Maimonides Arabic. There were many Jewish vernaculars, versions of Yiddish, Ladino and other regional Jewish dialects. They did not live under the same political dispensation. They did not share the same cultural environment. Nor did they experience the same fate. When the Jews of Spain were enjoying their golden age, the Jews of Northern Europe were being massacred in the Crusades. When the Jews of Spain were being persecuted and expelled, the Jews of Poland were enjoying a rare summer of tolerance. Yet they saw themselves and were seen by others as one nation: the world’s first, and for long the world’s only, global people.

What then made them a nation? This was the question R. Saadia Gaon asked in the tenth century, to which he gave the famous answer: “Our nation is only a nation in virtue of its laws (torot).” They were the people defined by the Torah, a nation under the sovereignty of God. Having received, uniquely, their laws before they even entered their land, they remained bound by those selfsame laws even when they lost the land. Of no other nation has this ever been true.

Uniquely then, in Judaism religion and nationhood coincide. There are nations with many religions: multicultural Britain is one among many. There are religions governing many nations: Christianity and Islam are obvious examples. Only in the case of Judaism is there a one-to-one correlation between religion and nationhood. Without Judaism there would be nothing (except antisemitism) to connect Jews across the world. And without the Jewish nation Judaism would cease to be what it has always been, the faith of a people bound by a bond of collective responsibility to one another and to God. Bilaam was right. The Jewish people really are unique.

Nothing therefore could be more mistaken than to define Jewishness as a mere ethnicity. If ethnicity is a form of culture, then Jews are not one ethnicity but many. In Israel, Jews are a walking lexicon of almost every ethnicity under the sun. If ethnicity is another word for race, then conversion to Judaism would be impossible (you cannot convert to become Caucasian; you cannot change your race at will).

What makes Jews “a nation dwelling alone, not reckoned among the nations,” is that their nationhood is not a matter of geography, politics or ethnicity. It is a matter of religious vocation as God’s covenant partners, summoned to be a living example of a nation among the nations made distinctive by its faith and way of life. Lose that and we lose the one thing that was and remains the source of our singular contribution to the heritage of humankind. When we forget this, sadly, God arranges for people like Bilaam and Chesterton to remind us otherwise. We should not need such reminding.