Zionism Reclaimed
Sermon, Rosh HaShanah Morning 5785
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha
“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked long ago in Shakespeare’s play of love and tragedy. “That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” But as young Juliet did not yet understand, names can have their meanings changed, and the most mellifluous terms may be twisted into epithets, just as the sweetest smelling scent can be fouled by corruption.
I’ve been thinking about the way that names, really any words, become tainted, and turn from simple descriptions into insults. Sometimes this is accidental, an ordinary word becoming negatively charged because of events. Sometimes it’s the result of a concerted campaign to take a perfectly normal term and use it against someone you don’t like or want to defeat in an election. And sometimes it’s because an underlying level of bias emerges in the way that words are used, and there is a deliberate effort to hide a malign design using a cover word to signify negative qualities without revealing the hatred hidden behind the usage.
An example of the first way a name changes meaning is the word “steroid.” It was originally just a category of drug prescribed for inflammation and illness. But during the baseball scandals of the early 2000s it became clear that some players, and athletes in other sports, too, were using steroids to gain an unfair advantage over their non-steroid abusing peers. “Steroid-user,” originally a medical description, became a hostile phrase, a way to name-call someone a cheater, a bad apple. Steroid-users can’t get into the baseball Hall of Fame, and when they retire or die the fact that they were identified as “steroid users” is always included in their obits. “Steroid” became a kind of evil name, not quite as bad as “Opioid” in recent years, but for similar reasons: people abusing a substance led to the word itself becoming understood as a representation of evil.
An example of the second kind of name transformation, in which a normal name is deliberately transformed into something negative, is the way our politics turned the term “Liberal” into an epithet. Originally, there were liberals and conservatives and moderates, and no one thought any of those terms were moral judgments, just political orientations. They simply meant you had differing perspectives on politics and economics and perhaps social norms. Then, in the 1980s, political operatives discovered they could snearingly say someone was a “Liberal,” and if they did it with enough attitude and frequency the idea it meant something bad would stick to it. The terms conservative and moderate weren’t treated the same way, and so being called a “liberal,” once a non-judgmental way to recognize ideology, became a harsh criticism. This wasn’t a logical change, or something based in policy; it was a way to take a normal word describing people on the other side of a political issue and make it sound as though they were evil. Soon obviously liberal people were running away from the name. All you had to do was label someone a “liberal” and they were in political trouble. It was a way to turn a normal word into a weapon.
The third way that a name changes meaning is when people use it as a code word to express deep antipathy, even hate, without saying the words they would really like to use. That usage is what we address today, the coded recalibration of a term so that it hides a malign intent behind a clever effort to re-brand something good into something officially evil. It is the fiendishly designed desire to take a word and twist it into a weapon.
The word “Zionism” has gone through this awful transformation several times over the years, but particularly so since October 7th. As we learned in our recent class on the history of Zionism, the word “Zionism” simply means we Jews have a right to return to our homeland in Israel and create our own country, as nearly every other people on earth has its own nation.
The name “Zionism” has a peculiar pedigree; it turns out that the word “Zion” itself predates Judaism, and it is not of Hebrew origin. Tziyon may have been a Jebusite word—they were Canaanites living around Jerusalem—meaning tower or fortress. “Zion” worked its way into Hebrew after King David’s general conquered Jerusalem 3000 years ago, and David made it his, and our, capital city.
Generally, “Zion” referred to a small mountain or, really, a hill. In fact, the precise location of “Mt. Zion” moved around the region of Jerusalem over the centuries. At first, Mt. Zion referred to the hill on which the Ir David, the City of David was constructed. It was just south of the current city walls of Jerusalem, near where the king built his royal palace. Later, after his son King Solomon constructed the First Temple around 950 BCE, the term was enlarged to embrace what we call Har HaBayit, the Temple Mount, and “Zion” came to broadly mean the central shrine area of Jerusalem. After the destruction of the First Temple nearly four hundred years later, and then the destruction of the 2nd Temple 600 years after that, around 2000 years ago, Mt. Zion ended up referring to a different, more western hill just outside the current walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Today’s Mt. Zion is a few hundred yards south and west of its original location in the City of David. It’s the location these days of the Dormition Abbey, of a place imaginatively called “King David’s Tomb” and the room where the Last Supper supposedly took place.
So how did this peripatetic hill, this movable mountain of a place come to mean the national aspirations of the Jewish people?
Again, it’s a little obscure. What is clear is that after all these relocations, the term “Zion” became a poetic way of referring to the general area of Jerusalem, and the whole land of Israel. It implied an emotional attachment to the Promised Land, a deep desire to return to it. It was a word that evoked not just a specific spot, but a kind of general longing for home.
Now long before the modern Jewish nationalist movement came to be called Zionism there was a profound desire among Jews everywhere for a return to Israel and reestablish the Jewish nation there. Remember, from 1200 BCE until about 70 CE, close to 1300 years, there was Jewish sovereignty in Israel—a Jewish state, and sometimes, two Jewish states, in the land of Israel. That’s more than five times as long as the United States has existed as a nation. Yes, as the Hativkah says, we dreamed of returning for nearly 2000 years; but we had a nation there for 1300 years before that.
Now from the time of the forced exile of Jews from Israel at the hands of various conquerors—most notably the Roman Empire, but that disaster was followed by many other invasions, persecutions and forced expulsions from Israel—Jews everywhere in the world prayed to God three times daily for the Jewish state to be restored. Those prayers remain in the Siddur and Machzor, the prayer books of our people, and have been there for nearly 2000 years. The return to Israel might not often have been a realistic goal, but it was surely an aspiration, to restore us to our lost land and sovereignty.
And there was never a time when there wasn’t a Jewish community living in the Land of Israel, whether in the Galilee, or in Jerusalem, in Hebron, on the coast, or in other parts of Israel. We never fully left Israel, no matter who held power over it at any one time or how miserable the conditions were. Today, when you go to Israel every tour guide likes to tease tourists into reciting a litany of the conquerors of the Land of Israel after we were forced out: the Romans, the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks, the British. Zion wasn’t always the center of the Jewish world that it had been, because that wasn’t politically possible. But some of us always lived there, and the rest never gave up the dream of returning to our eternal homeland.
Now the modern term “Zionism” was not applied to that dream until the year 1890. “Zionism” was coined by a 26 year old Austrian-Jewish journalist and activist named Nathan Birnbaum, and it quickly stuck. He used it in his translation of the Hebrew phrase, hovevei tzion, that is, “lovers of Zion.” The name was rapidly adopted across the spectrum of all who wanted a Jewish state in the land of Israel, especially Theodore Herzl and the Zionist Congress he convened.
For the next fifty eight years the term Zionist meant someone who wished to see the revival of a Jewish nation in Israel. While the idea of a modern, democratic, secular-but-Jewish nation was controversial even among many Jews in the years leading to the creation of Israel, the term “Zionism” was not particularly so. It simply meant the Jewish dream and movement to create a real country for our own people, a homeland where we would be safe from the brutalities inflicted on us so many times in so many places over our long and challenging history.
You know the modern history: in the mid-20th century the Holocaust destroyed most of European Jewry, and the survivors who had no place to escape from it, still had no place to go at the end of it. In 1947 the United Nations approved the creation of Israel as a state in a partition plan that pleased no one, but was accepted by Zionists in the Yishuv, the Jewish parts of the Land of Israel; it was violently rejected by the Arabs everywhere. Then, in 1948 the British withdrew from their colonial hold on the Middle East, Israel proclaimed independence, and all the neighboring Arab countries declared war on the new Jewish state, as did the local Arabs. Against all odds, and at a high cost, the new nation of Israel survived that war aimed at destroying the “Zionist entity” and “pushing the Jews into the sea.”
After the creation of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the other Arab states continued to promise to each other, and the world, that they intended eventually to annihilate and murder all the Jews in the “Zionist entity.” Note that term, “Zionist entity”—all Arab countries swore they would never recognize a Jewish state called Israel, and used the word “Zionist” as an epithet. After the 1967 Six Day War, when a real opportunity arose to make peace in exchange for territory lost to Israel’s armies, the Arabs again affirmed their no’s: “no peace, no recognition, no negotiation with the Zionist entity”, still refusing to call the Jewish state “Israel.” They sought to demonize the Jews who had recreated our nation, and to make Zionism a dirty word.
These 20th century Arabs were simply reviving a use of the word “Zionist” invented by the Czarist Secret Police in the bad old days of the Russian Empire, when they forged the evil book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” That created the conspiracy theory that there was a secret society of Jews that controlled everything—an insane justification for the vicious antisemitism of the failing Russian regime and its sponsored pogroms, massacres, and arrests. Of course, that same anti-Zionist insanity has been adopted by lots of antisemites ever since, and here in America too, from Henry Ford to Hitler to people like Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, and Ilhan Omar.
For decades, the word “Zionist” continued to receive abuse; after the Yom Kippur War, in the midst of the Arab-generated oil crisis of the 1970s, the United Nations was convinced—with OPEC holding it at the point of the oil weapon—to pass a resolution in 1975 that equated Zionism with racism. This was quite like calling all nationalism of every nation racist. But it gave international imprimatur to the lie that the desire for a national homeland for Jews is somehow a different enterprise than everyone else’s nationalism, and morally worse.
In effect, the UN poured gasoline on the fire of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. Those darned Jews cooked up an entire ideology based on being better than everyone else, the UN implied, and have decided they deserve their very own country! A tiny country to be sure, with no natural resources, and yes, we, the UN, actually voted to create it—but still, why should the Jews have one? That’s racist!
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then US ambassador to the UN, warned, "The United Nations is about to make anti-Semitism international law." He delivered a speech against the resolution, including the famous line, "The United States does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act ... A great evil has been loosed upon the world."
It took 16 years for that infamous resolution to be revoked, this time in a massive vote of the same United Nations, under the leadership of US President George H. W. Bush. As he said, when sponsoring the revoking resolution, “the so-called "Zionism is racism" resolution, mocks … the principles upon which the United Nations was founded… Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel's right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.”
Of course, that did not end the effort to use the word Zionist in devious and derogatory ways, nor did it reform the UN permanently. That was over thirty years ago. And the effort to demonize Jews as evil and manipulative, and to blacken the word Zionist, continues.
Particularly since October 7th, 2023, the term Zionist—again, a word that simply means we Jews have a right to our own country, like every other people on earth; that the nation we have must be in our ancestral home of thousands of years; and that Israel should not be destroyed and its Jews all murdered in a second Holocaust—the term Zionist has become a highly controversial term. It is again being turned into a negative epithet, and rational people who should know better are running from being called “Zionists.”
That’s simply wrong. Being a Zionist is a proud label. It is a positive statement of Jewish identification and identity. It is not about genocide, except to prevent another genocide of the Jews. And when an evil, racist, totalitarian, theocratic Islamist regime like Iran condemns “Zionists,” and foolish people accept that on face value, they are being duped and conned. When young people find it fashionable to condemn Israel for defending itself, and claim “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” they are simply wrong.
To be an Anti-Zionist, or even a Jewish non-Zionist today means to oppose the Jewish right to our own nation. It is advocating for the destruction of a vital democracy with a thriving culture and civilization, a country of 9 million people, because you don’t think Jews deserve their own land. And to call it colonial and racist is simply mendacious, that is, a big lie.
Names can be dragged through the mud; but they can also be redeemed, reclaimed, cleansed and healed from that experience. So it must be with the word Zionist.
My friends, wear that word, Zionist, proudly: to be a Zionist is something powerful, positive, and meaningful in a world in which those labels are hard to come by. It is an affirmation of Jewish identity, a statement that we deserve our own dynamic nation, and the right to one Jewish nation on the globe.
It is time in this 5785 year to move the word Zionist, and Zionism, back into the positive, and use it to recognize all the incredible good that Israel has accomplished in its mere 76 years of modern existence.
Mind you, this does not mean accepting that everything an Israeli government does is right or perfect. That’s an unrealistic expectation for any nation, especially a nation at war. It does not mean endorsing Israeli leaders with whom we disagree, or who we believe are leading in the wrong direction. It simply means agreeing that being proud that we Jews have our own nation, that it must be protected from destruction, that it is our eternal homeland, is a good, legitimate and essential ideal, and a core element of Jewish identity today. It means being proud to be a Zionist, because you believe in our people, in our right to live and thrive in our own land, to seek to control our own destiny.
In this new 5785 year may we see the term Zionist embraced not only by all Jews, but by all honest people, as a proud statement of Jewish national identity, and of love for our homeland of the heart.