Adapted from a speech delivered on Shavuot.
There is a strange modern habit of speaking about Zionism as though it were a recent political invention, a nineteenth-century slogan, a colonial ideology, or an embarrassment that Jews are expected to explain before being allowed to participate in polite society. Yet before Zionism became a modern movement, before Herzl stood beneath that famous beard, before Basel, or the British Mandate, before the United Nations, or the State of Israel, and before every contemporary political argument that now crowds the word, there was Zion. Zion was not born in Europe. Zion was not invented by diplomacy. Zion was not manufactured as a public-relations phrase for Jewish statehood. Zion is a word in Tanach, a word in Jewish prayer, in prophecy, in mourning, in weddings, in exile, in return, and a word embedded in the very grammar by which the Jewish people understand Jerusalem, covenant, kingship and divine presence.
The Torah says, in the tochacha, after exile, suffering and dispersion: “Vezacharti et briti Yaakov… veha’aretz ezkor” — “I will remember My covenant with Jacob… and I will remember the land.” Not only the people. Not only the commandments. Not only ethics. Not only memory as an abstract spiritual category. The Land. That phrase is devastating to every ideology that wants Judaism to become a floating morality without geography. The Torah does not allow Jewish identity to dissolve into a university department, a humanitarian mood, or a set of universal values with no mountain, no valley, no spring, no border, no stone and no ancestral name. Jewish memory has geography. It has direction. It has inheritance. It has Jerusalem. It has Zion.
This is why the modern opposition to Zionism so often depends on ignorance. If someone says, “I oppose Zionism,” the first question should be: which Zion are you opposing? The Zion of King David? The Zion of Isaiah? The Zion of Tehillim? The Zion of Jewish prayer? The Zion toward which Jews turned their faces for generations? The Zion for which Jews broke glasses under the chuppah? The Zion mourned on Tisha B’Av and invoked to comfort mourners? Or are you opposing a word encountered last semester in a badly photocopied political pamphlet? Those are not the same thing. To oppose Zion while refusing to learn what Zion means is not moral clarity. It is a refusal to read and learn.
We live in an age in which ignorance travels quickly and with great confidence. Before social media, ignorance had to walk to the marketplace; today it has Wi-Fi. A person may stand in New York, London, Sydney or Melbourne and declare, with impressive moral seriousness, that Jews have no indigenous connection to Zion, while standing in a city named after a colonial governor, speaking a language exported by empire, and drinking coffee harvested by people whose names they will never know. Then they lecture the Jews about colonialism. One has to admire the chutzpah, but one should not confuse it with knowledge.
Of course Jews may debate Israeli politics. Jews debate everything. Three Jews in a room can produce five opinions, seven WhatsApp groups, and one person insisting that his cousin in Ramat Beit Shemesh knows the real story. There can and must be arguments about governments, policies, borders, strategies, mistakes, personalities and moral responsibilities. That is normal. That is healthy. But the modern political debate is not the origin of Zion. Zion is older than the State. Zion is older than modern nationalism. Zion is older than the political categories now imposed upon it. Zion is the name of a primordial Israelite reality, the place where land, covenant, memory, kingship and divine purpose meet.
In Tanach, Zion first emerges explicitly in the story of David: “David captured the stronghold of Zion; it became the City of David.” That verse alone should stop the conversation from drifting into abstraction. David does not capture an idea. He does not capture a metaphor. He captures a place, a stronghold, a real location, and that place becomes bound to the identity of Jerusalem and the destiny of Israel. Later, when Shlomo gathers the elders of Israel, Melachim again identifies the City of David with Zion. Isaiah then gives us one of the most astonishing prophetic phrases: “Ki ayin b’ayin yiru beshuv Hashem Tzion.” Usually this is translated as “they will see eye to eye when Hashem returns to Zion,” but the Hebrew can be read with greater accuracy and force: “they will see eye to eye when Hashem returns Zion”, when Zion itself is restored to its proper place, and only then do we see eye to eye.
That is not a newspaper slogan. That is a prophecy. Prophecy is dangerous because it refuses to let politics become the whole story. Politics says: this is about power. Prophecy says: no, this is about memory. Politics says: this is about competing claims. Prophecy says: no, this is about covenant. Politics says: this started recently. Prophecy says: no, you arrived late to a very old conversation. Once one asks what Zion actually is, the argument changes. The Jewish relationship to Zion is not merely emotional, although it is emotional. It is not merely religious, although it is profoundly religious. It is not merely historical, although history cries out from every layer of Jerusalem’s stones. It is textual, ritual, liturgical, geographical, archaeological and covenantal.
That is why Zion cannot be reduced to modern nationalism. Modern nationalism speaks in the language of statecraft: flags, armies, institutions, borders, elections, sovereignty and diplomacy. Zion speaks first in the language of memory, covenant, sanctity, longing and return. Political Zionism may have built the practical structures required for Jewish survival in a world of empires and nation-states, but it did not invent the Jewish claim. It operationalized an older memory. It translated ancient longing into the machinery of modern power. That translation can be debated. It can be criticized. It can be morally refined. But the older claim cannot honestly be dismissed as a nineteenth-century fantasy when Zion is already woven through the deepest strata of Jewish consciousness.
This is especially important on days when the Jewish people celebrate words inscribed in Torah. The Torah is not only a book of private spirituality. It is a national covenant. It is the constitution of a people meant to live a moral life in a particular land. That makes some people uncomfortable. They prefer Judaism as a set of universal values with a pleasant soundtrack. They like the Ten Commandments, but they become nervous once one mentions borders. Yet the Torah gives no permission to separate covenant from land. Avraham is told to go to a land. Yitzchak is told not to leave the land. Yaakov dreams in the land and returns to the land. Moshe leads the people toward the land. The mitzvot constantly point toward life in the land. And even in exile, Hashem says: “I will remember the land.” The Land is not the optional side salad of Jewish identity. It is part of the covenantal meal.
From there the question moves to Zion itself. There is a deeper tradition, drawn from Zohar and from Rav Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, that Zion is not only a physical place but a deeply spiritual location and an indigenous, perpetual memory that David sought to rediscover. In Kabbalistic language, Zion is invoked in Yosef; it shares the same gematria, 156. It is the spiritual and emotional attribute of Yesod or foundation, layered in form. There is an upper Yesod associated with Yosef’s land and a lower Yesod, the inner covenantal point, associated with his brother Binyamin’s land, together considered the Periah of Milah or covenantal circumcision. This parallels the northern border of Binyamin’s land with Yosef and opposite southern border with Yehuda. Jerusalem is Malchut or kingdom, the outer covenantal expression on Yehuda’s land, whose northernmost tip, on the lower slope of Mount Moriah, intersects Binyamin. This is considered the Orlah of Milah or covenantal circumcision. In simpler terms, the sacred geography points to a meeting-place: on the lower slope of Mount Moriah, the foundation stone, Zion converges at the northernmost land-tip of Yehuda at the south-east corner of the altar, while the other corners are associated with the land of Binyamin. Zevachim preserves the memory that the altar consumed one cubit from the portion of Judah. From that origin, Zion expands outward into the whole covenantal land. This is Zion's GPS.
It's a holistic idea that asks us to read geography, family history, tribal inheritance and spiritual structure as one system and that is precisely how Torah works. The personal drama of the forefathers is never merely personal. It becomes land, tribe and boundary. It becomes destiny. Prototypical Zion begins In Mitzrayim, at the beginning of the Jewish nation’s exile and ultimate journey to receive Torah. Yehuda approaches Yosef about Binyamin's retention. Each brother carries hidden guilt before their father Yaakov. Yehuda knows the brothers have concealed a dark secret about Yosef from their father. Yosef knows the full story, but did nothing to relieve his father’s suffering. Binyamin remains innocent, the one brother not implicated in the sale of Yosef, and yet he will have to co-opt and subdue their dark secret in order to uphold family unity. This is Yosef’s Yesodian moment, he comes out of concealment for revelation and unity to preserve fracture, uphold their father’s honor and rebuild family unity.
Vayigash is the moment of hishtavut, transcendence and revelation. Yehuda offers himself in exchange for Binyamin. Yosef reveals himself — “Ani Yosef!” — and cries upon Binyamin’s neck. The Torah uses the plural “necks,” and Rashi famously links this to the destruction of the Temples. On the surface, one may ask how Binyamin can have more than one neck. But in the geography of their future land inheritance, Binyamin does have two necks: One facing Yosef to the north and one facing Yehuda to the south. The oscillation between these necks expressed as tears over the future Temple destructions that would be underwritten by the tension between Yosef and Yehuda for the permanent Temple location at a point where these spiritual, family, land and covenantal roles meet. Yosef is the hidden tzaddik who sustains life in exile. Binyamin is innocence sacrificed and the lower covenantal point, Yehuda is kingship, Malchut, leadership revealed in the open. The union of Rachel’s only sons Yosef and Binyamin with Leah’s Yehuda is the first step in the deep architecture of return.
This is why Zion may be described as Israel’s enduring singularity. The Jewish people are not only meant to carry memory internally. They are designed to reveal it externally. We are not only meant to believe. We are meant to build. We are not only meant to remember Zion in our hearts. We are meant to return Jerusalem to its history. And that is precisely what many cannot tolerate. A Jew who remembers Zion privately is charming. A Jew who sings about Zion is cultural. A Jew who writes poetry about Zion is acceptable. But a Jew who returns to Zion, builds in Zion, digs to uncover Zion, and says, “This is not a metaphor,” becomes a problem. Why? Because Jewish memory has become physical again.
The world is often more comfortable with dead Jews than living Jews, more comfortable with ancient Jews than sovereign Jews, more comfortable with Jewish suffering than Jewish agency. The museum Jew is admired. The biblical Jew is studied. The Holocaust Jew is mourned. But the living Jew who says, “This is my ancestral land and I intend to live here,” suddenly becomes controversial. That is the real problem. Not Zionism. Jewish continuity.
This does not remove moral responsibility. It intensifies it. If Zion is holy, Jewish sovereignty must be morally serious. If Jerusalem is sacred, power in Jerusalem must be disciplined. If the Land is remembered by Hashem, then Jews must act in the Land with humility, courage, justice and restraint. But humility does not mean self-erasure. There is a strange expectation placed on Jews, that they prove their morality by denying their own story. No other people are asked to become historically homeless in order to be considered ethical. The Irish may love Ireland. The Greeks may love Greece. Indigenous peoples may speak of ancestral land, sacred geography, dispossession, memory and return, and rightly so. But when Jews say Zion, suddenly the room becomes tense.
So again: what is the problem? If the problem is with a particular policy, government, military decision or political leader, then say so. Let the argument be specific. But if the problem is with Jews remembering Zion, longing for Zion, praying for Zion, returning to Zion, building Zion and uncovering Zion, then the problem is not politics. The problem is that Jewish memory survived. And that is not a Jewish problem. That is someone else’s problem.
This is why anti-Zionist politics must flatten Jewish history. It must turn Zion into a recent claim. It must pretend Jewish longing began in Basel in 1897. It must ignore Tanach, ignore Hebrew, ignore prayer, ignore archaeology, ignore exile, ignore return, ignore the Gihon, ignore the City of David, ignore David’s stronghold, ignore Isaiah’s prophecy and ignore the Torah’s own declaration that Hashem remembers the Land. That is a great deal of ignoring. At some point, ignorance becomes ideology.
The Jewish response should not be anger alone. It should be our education, our confidence and our memory. We should be able to say: you may oppose a policy, but do not tell us Zion is foreign to the Jewish people. Zion is in our sources. It is in our prayers. It is in our bones. It is in the geography of our ancestors. It is where David turned Jewish longing into kingship. It is where the prophets located redemption. Zion is where Jewish memory refuses to die.
One should remember that Torah was never meant to produce a people embarrassed by its own covenant. A tired Jew may not be ready for a full geopolitical debate. But every Jew should be ready to say this: Zion is not an insult. Zion is not a colonial invention. Zion is not a modern embarrassment. Zion is one of the oldest names of Jewish identity and of Jewish destiny. If Hashem says, “I will remember the Land,” then perhaps our task is also simple. We must remember our covenant with it too, not with arrogance, not with hatred, not with slogans, but with knowledge, courage, faith, humor and enough coffee to keep learning until morning.
Beshuv Hashem Tzion. Hashanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim.
