Parshah Commentary

This week’s double parshah, Nitzavim-Vayelech, continues a multi-week thread of divine warnings about the dangers the Israelites will face once they cross into the Land of Israel. These admonitions focus on the existential danger of coming into contact with the tribes already living in the land; according to the text, this encounter is liable to lead the Israelites to adopt idolatry and immorality, and thus to endure God’s unrelenting punishment. The Israelites, God explains, “will go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them. Then My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance from them. They shall be ready prey; and many evils and troubles shall befall them.” The Torah is clear: Adopting the ways of the surrounding peoples will lead to our certain demise.

Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares (1869–1931)—an underappreciated Polish rabbi and philosopher who has recently gained more attention following the publication of a translated collection of his writing—makes a direct connection between the Israelites’ penchant for adopting their neighbors’ practices and the rise of Jewish political nationalism, which he traces back to the Israelites’ entrance into the Land of Israel and their decision to appoint kings as rulers. “The Holy Spirit,” he writes, “began to be driven away and separated from [the Jewish People] by the gross spirit of ‘political nationalism’ which took their hearts. And as the Holy Spirit fled from the people, the imprint of the Torah also faded.” Thus, the “Jewish People fulfilled its intention to be ‘like all the nations,’ and performed its part: it saddled itself with kings. And the kings performed their part: they involved the nation in cruel wars, and thus the people [became both] killed and killers, slaughtered and slaughterers . . . All of it, the whole business, exactly as carried [out] in the surrounding nations.” Rabbi Tamares links this ancient politicization to the Jewish embrace of 20th-century nationalism in the development of political Zionism. In his view, “Zionism understood in this way should be spurned and discarded,” for it represented the most recent fulfillment of our parshah’s grim warning: Inspired by the nations around us, who saw nationalism as the highest embodiment of collectivity, we, too, took on a nationalist ethos, despite God’s disapproval.

Often, Jewish commitment to separatism is seen as a root cause of Jewish supremacy, especially as enshrined in Israeli apartheid’s legal subjugation of Palestinians. And indeed, verses like the ones in our parshah that prohibit adopting the practices of the people around us can lead us to believe that we are fundamentally different from and superior to others—chosen for a higher and more sacred purpose, unlike them. But as Rabbi Tamares explains it, Jewish supremacy is not the result of our attempts to be distinct, but rather the manifestation of our sameness. It is what emerges when we, despite the Torah’s many warnings, embrace the practices of rulers and kings, seek protection and safety in idolatrous ideologies and states. This reading suggests that to counteract and uproot Jewish supremacy, we need not shy away from the particularity of what it means to be Jewish, but should instead interrogate the places where we—individually and collectively—have internalized and replicated the ways of oppressive nations and empires.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.