Questioning the meaning for our own time of the Jews’ ‘election’ and in this specific form points up the emotional and intellectual difficulty of opening the subject at all after the Holocaust. And this difficulty testifies in turn to the deep fracture which has broken the historical continuity of the Jewish sense of identity. The Jews’ idea of themselves as a people chosen to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”,  or “a people uniquely dedicated” to the God of the Universe, the One and Alone, to be the instrument by which all nations would know Him as their king, this idea has always marked out the Jews, both in their relations to the peoples around them and in the pattern of their communal life. It seems to have taken its place as an element in Jewish consciousness after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah (yehuda) and its Temple and the exodus of its inhabitants (known thenceforth as ‘Judahites’ — yehudim), into exile in Babylonia. Historians know that this ‘election’ and its significance has been a bone of contention within Jewry and between it and the peoples of the Persian and Roman empires, and later of the Christian and Islamic empires, throughout the centuries of turmoil from the first Return to Zion to the second one (in the 20th century). This peculiar feature of Jewry’s religion and Jewry’s singular fate under the dominion of competing religions, which even as they oppressed it took from it fundamental components of their own identity, became the focus of internal dispute over the people’s collective identity. Yet this identity united the people’s quarrelling elements for as long as they could stick together. Even Jews who, while remaining Jews, rebelled against the very idea of election had no choice but to hold on to it, if only in a way that reversed its original intention.Had we asked, then, a different question — if after the Holocaust there were still movements holding the idea of Israel’s election as a dogma of faith, the reply would have been an obvious ‘yes’. All of Orthodoxy is so committed, just as it is to the dogma that “Torah was given by Heaven”. And Orthodoxy is not alone. Reform Jews and Traditional Jews are likewise committed, albeit to a different formulation, and so to a certain extent are the secular national-Zionist movements. However, commitment to an assumption sanctified by generations of tradition or by cultural–historical memory is not the same thing as explicitly professing a belief which shapes one’s current thinking and behaviour. We have to know: Does a consciousness of election determine the goals a movement is trying to achieve? Is it an issue in the disputations currently waging in Israel and the Diaspora over the constituents of Jewish identity? Does this idea set out a clearly defined mission which the people of Israel should now be engaged in fulfilling? The last question, it seems to me, is the one that gets to the heart of the problem.

1. Election and Mission
If there is election there is mission. The question we face in our times is: after the Holocaust, does the Jewish people still retain a living sense of mission to the world? Does the continued existence of this people in the world that has arisen on the ruination of the Second World War retain for the Jews themselves (and for the peoples around them) any ethical message which demands fulfilment, and for the sake of which Jewry will keep repelling the threats both of its still existent enemies and the ever-increasing temptations of assimilation?
Judging by the issues now on the active agenda of Jewry’s major movements the answer is ‘no’. The religious movements make the dogma of Jewry’s election fundamental to their political platform only in reference to the Jews’ own land and state: two things concerns them — the status of the Jewish religion in the State of Israel and the status of Israel’s non-Jewish minorities. Over against them, stand a range of movements which, opposing religious Jews’ positions as immoral, condemn the idea of election on which these positions rest.
Given the Jews’ experience in the Holocaust, many argue, they should disown any ‘consciousness of superiority’ as racist and leading them to treat Israel’s minorities unequally and unjustly. Does this mean that these critics demand that their fellow-Jews adopt this disowning of national and religious egoism as their new mission in the post-Holocaust world? The possibility is there, but in reality even this self-arrogated role looks to most like self-righteous superiority in a new guise. It is not a sense of mission, they would argue, but a lesson drawn from the Jews’ fate down the generations as a persecuted minority. We must conclude, therefore, that those who still cling to the idea of election as dogma prefer to evade any discussion of it as much as do their denouncers, and for the simple reason that, in the eyes of the post-Holocaust generation, the idea of election is incompatible with Jewry’s reality both past and present, both from the religio-theological viewpoint (God’s relations to His people) and the humanist viewpoint (humanity’s relations to the Jewish people). From both viewpoints, the idea of election conceals the snare of absurdity. In existential terms, the post-Holocaust  generation has not derived from the tendency of its life in post-Holocaust Jewry any consciousness of being chosen, certainly not chosen to fulfil a mission to the world.
The questions then that need a clear answer for the sake of Jewry’s future are, first and foremost: What brought about the present situation? What are the implications of a consciousness of being chosen to fulfil a mission? and lastly: After the Holocaust, or, even more importantly, because of the Holocaust, can we find in the continued existence of the Jewish people the message that its unique character is still to fulfil a positive mission to the world? To answer these questions fully we need to examine the reversal in attitudes to the issue of election which occurred in that period when all the movements now fragmenting Jewry were founded. In that same period we will also find both the causes of the Holocaust and the divergent responses to what it did.
The roots all modern Jewry’s rival movements, including Ultra-Orthodoxy, go back as we all know to the Emancipation crisis. That two-faced revolution in the Christian nations’ attitudes to the Jews and the parallel revolution in Jewish attitudes to them made the meaning of election an issue again and the focus of a dispute of a new kind, which also had two faces — internal to Jewry and between Jewry and its hosts. Two things now gave the issue even greater relevance than it had had in the Middle Ages: Jewry was internally more fragmented, and more complexly so, and the Jews themselves had internalized the negative attitude which Christianity and European nationalism manifested towards Judaism and Jewry.

2. The Idea of Election: Judaism and Christianity
The dispute rested on a number of points of agreement. Jews and non-Jews alike were of one mind that the Jews’ collective existence  — define it how you would: in national or ethnic, religious or class terms  —  was clearly ‘out of joint’ with their social environment. All parties agreed — the Jews too, having internalized their host society’s stance towards them — that this ‘out of joint’ state was the cause of a problematic ‘otherness’, all the more glaring because the Jews were a  minority group in all socio-political settings. Modern European nationalists were finding it even harder to absorb this ‘other’ group than ancient and medieval religions and states had done. All parties agreed that this difficulty in accepting the Jews as citizens in a modern state, in particular the difficulty, given their special identity, of blending them into ‘society at large’, distorted relations between the minority and the wider society. The questions were — who was to blame and what was the solution? At all events, hatred which spilled over into violence provided both sides more ‘evidence’ to justify their positions and eventually both came to agree that it was the Jews’ self-identification as the chosen people, in the face of other peoples all competing for the status of elect religion or nationality, that was at the root of this insoluble dispute.
All these points of consensus, it should be noted, were in fact fraught with ambivalence, on both sides of the barricade. For generation on generation, from the earliest time the peoples of Europe could call themselves peoples, the Jews’ had challenged them with their (the Jews’) ‘otherness’ and it was over against this otherness that the Christian nations had defined their own religious identity. Jew-hatred had only been exacerbated by this ambivalence. The presence of the Jews’ at the centre of European spiritual life was a constant reminder of the traumatic conflict at the heart of the cultural-religious identity of both Jews and the nations united under Christianity’s all-conquering banner. On both sides there was love and hate, which explains why, despite the mutual antipathy, their coexistence persisted for generations.
However, in the modern period, in the reality of crisis of brought on by secularization most movements, national, class and religious, came to a basic agreement on their position on Jews and Judaism. From all three points of view, religion, nationality and class, the Jews’ belief in their election was regarded as a mark of their inferiority. This inferiority they explained in various ways. The differences between the explanations in terms of how Jews were treated were significant but in terms of attitudes to Judaism itself were negligible. At best, Judaism’s inferiority was explained in historical terms:
he misfortune of a people created in conditions of slavery and remaining enslaved for most of its history. The consequence was — an ignorant and narrow-minded people, stiff-necked and full of bitterness for its oppressors, seething with visions of vengeance and with a tendency to compensate for its sufferings by fantasies of a superiority endowed by election. Some even went further: the Jews were a people that had turned hatred for it into a resource, an instinctual power which gave it the strength to withstand the hatred and defend its separate identity. No one should be surprised therefore at their stubbornness in denying the ruling faith of their host nations and insisting on the exclusivity of their own. It was of huge significance that the theological and philosophical basis for this assessment of Judaism as an inferior faith was furnished by two men of Jewish extraction, Paul, one of the founders of Christianity, and Spinoza, a founder of the Haskalah.
At worst, Jewish inferiority was explained in organic terms: an degraded inherited spirituality or a congenital baseness. Whatever the terms used, the idea of election was taken as a mark of their contemptibility and the cause of their calamities, and since Jewry’s adversity was patently connected to its status in its host nations, its troubles were taken to be a major cause of their own troubles, internal and external. In the Middle Ages Jews had been made the ‘sacrificial cock’ for every disaster that visited their hosts, plagues, economic depression, wars and revolutions. In the modern period, they were the scapegoat for painful socio-economico-cultural consequences of the industrial revolution and the secularization that followed it. When modern nationalism brought about a profound identity crisis in Europe, the ‘otherness’ of the Jews became even more insufferable, for it was seen as impeding the formation of new national identities for peoples who, having liberated themselves from a religious hegemony, now sought unity in a sphere beyond religion.
It has to be admitted that the Jews’ obduracy in clinging to the outworn mother-religion that had given birth to Christianity, and in bluntly denying validity to the daughter-faith just when the new European elites were making efforts to free themselves from the daughter which had fashioned their cultural identity, this must have made the Jews’ separatist collective existence within Christian society a terrible provocation. All the more so because, pointing out the shared inheritance of mother and daughter, the Jews claimed equal rights in the creation of Western civilisation and culture and even claimed this achievement as the fulfilment of their mission as the chosen people.
From the Jews’ point of view these claims were a matter of their own self-respect and desire to prove that their creativity had made a vitally relevant  contribution to the new age of modernity. From the point of view of Christian society this was effrontery of the worst kind, poking painfully and revealingly at the traumatic fault line in their sense of identity. Christianity had been imposed on them in the name of a religio-imperial unity which they now wanted to throw off. But their cultural identity had been so profoundly and for so long moulded by this Christian system that they could now only be free of it by fusing it into a new secular national synthesis.
That Judaism was at one and the same time Christianity’s mother-faith and the faith that would not cease denying the grown daughter’s authority made it insufferable to all rebel Christians, both those who rebelled in the name of the universal humanist values of Greece and Rome and those who rebelled on behalf of Europe’s original pagan values from before the victory of Christianity. That the Europeans who still professed Christianity as their faith found Judaism insufferable, it goes without saying. From all three points of view, therefore, the Judaism that persisted in its claim to be the sole and true faith destined for humanity was pure incitement, inflaming the fissures in their sense of cultural identity and so a prime obstacle impeding the new redeeming synthesis. All the more so because the Jews who embraced emancipation were not satisfied with claiming recognition for their heritage as a legitimate component of the new cultural synthesis. They went further, claiming that by making creative and universal contributions to the new national cultures — contributions of astonishing scope and depth, and in all fields — they were carrying out Judaism’s new mission to the world.

3. In the Shadow of Emancipation
These are the origins of the tragic dialectic central to Emancipation’s magnificent success and dreadful failure in the 19th century and the first half of the twentieth. The harder Jews tried to be a universal, integrative, mission-fulfilling force in Western culture, the more non-Jews singled them out as a disintegrating, particularistic, power-seeking element that had to be taken out of the equation. The condition attached to the Jews’ liberation from social and political discrimination and for their host nations’ liberation from this insufferable ‘otherness’, was that these ‘others’ recant their self-
esignation as a chosen people, that they confess the inferiority of their civilization and its irrelevance to the modern age, that they surrender all features of collective separatism, and that they thoroughly internalize their host civilization and culture and admit its superiority. In other words, they should vanish as individuals into the generality of society.
An alternative was available: that Jews interested in preserving their uniqueness withdraw as an organized group and form an independent nation. On this basis anti-Semites and Zionists had their ironic (or tragic) ‘meeting of minds’. A third possibility was a “final solution”, of the sort that was indeed later attempted. We know it as the Holocaust.
At all events, the modern European nation-states ‘elected’ the Jewish people to be their sacrifice of atonement for the troubles they were having in putting on their new national and societal identities. Jews’ prominence in the elites which were leading the social, political and cultural revolutions and the anti-Semitism inflamed by this very prominence together created the conditions for a renewed sen[...] the first along two parallel axes. Firstly, was the uniqueness of the Jews’ fate and cultural identity to be considered in the nature of a mission-fulfilling ‘election’ and testament to an exalted spiritual-moral quality, or were the gentiles right that it in fact betrayed inferiority and degradation? Secondly, what was the mission for the modern age for which the Jews were marked out (if their election were indeed for the purposes of a mission) or (if the election betokened inferiority) what was the  s’ organic defect?
The answers all Jewry’s factions gave to these questions mirrored the gentiles’ ambivalence towards the Jews. Jews who, having internalized gentile attitudes, had dismissed the idea of election now backtracked and endorsed it as part of a counter-critique of the oppression and injustice inflicted on them. By contrast, the adherents of election expanded it to embrace the gentiles’ demand that Jews assimilate and renounce any separate collective identity. By one route or the other the ideas of election and universal mission came to take their place on the central axis of the Jews’ sense of identity throughout the period leading up to the Holocaust.

4. Spinoza’s Response to the Idea of Election
The herald of opposition to the concept of election in the modern period was Spinoza. It was part of his demonstrative withdrawal from his people and his adoption of the Christian-Protestant stance towards them. He did not take the further step of converting to Christianity because only political grounds gave it any preference in his eyes over Judaism. His pantheism elevated him to a vantage point above all religions. To their continued existence he reconciled himself only for pragmatic reasons: they met a psychological need of the masses, one that it was to the state’s advantage to satisfy for its own purposes. Scientific truth made such a thing as a transcendental God impossible and if there was no such God then no one had elected a people to be ‘His own people’. Arguing another way, every people was by nature equal to every other  and none had the right to claim election, unless it were accepted that each was an elect in its own estimation.
The break-up and reorganisation of peoples into nationalities was for Spinoza a natural process. Likewise the  appearance of religions. Even for religions claiming a revealed transcendental God there was a natural origin — ignorance, passion, fear, fantasy, a deceiving imagination and an appetite for power. The rationale at the root of all such religions was the universal drive of all natural life for more power, and the disparities between peoples and religions in this respect were merely the outcome of the causative determinism manifest in their evolution as collectives.
In this respect the Jews were no different from other peoples. Like them, they had their own historical fate. Like them, they had established themselves as a people and devised a national religious identity and a strategy for preserving it. Spinoza could also explain scientifically why the Jews thought themselves a chosen people: it was a deliberate choice justified by  the practical benefits it brought, as long indeed as it continued to serve the people’s territorial interests. Did the Jewish people indeed have a universal mission? Although Spinoza, as a prophet of secular ethics and the values of the secular state, was full of a sense of his own personal mission, the concept itself he rejected. Every human in nature was activated solely by the dictates of his/her own nature. If they possessed reason they were motivated by the force of reason to the extent of their educational level and reasoning skills. But of course there were also people of undeveloped intellect, who could fantasize themselves as mission-sent. The Law of Moses, was merely the voice of a subjective feeling of religious missionhood. If the tools of science were deployed to probe the factors which gave rise to this feeling, the ways the idea was applied in practice, and its results, then we should find that this consciousness of mission served particular national interests, the desire to settle a territory, for example, unity for the sake of conquest, or material prosperity.
The question which this explanation at once raised was, naturally, when did this consciousness stop justifying itself by its results? In Spinoza’s opinion, the early success of the Pentateuchal laws afterwards engendered more failures than successes, taking into account both the nation’s socio-political organization within its own frontiers and the balance of power between it and neighbouring states. Its end was to see its state destroyed, its Temple demolished and its people exiled. All this testified that the “mission” had in effect become null and void, had lost any objective justification. The persistence in clinging on to it served only to sustain existence in a state of unqualified degradation, which could not be understood, according to Spinoza’s analysis,  except as the outcome of the people’s own degraded state, made manifest in ignorance and a walled-in religious fanaticism. Spinoza, enabled as an individual to escape this state of siege by his scientific education and philosophical rationality, drew the necessary conclusions: he abrogated the articles of his faith, threw off the yoke of the commandments, and abandoned community and people. But he knew his people and knew that most would not follow in his footsteps. So he prophesied that the political changes overtaking their host nations, especially changes in state-religion relations, would leave them no choice but to return to their own land and re-establish a state in conformity with the Law of Moses  and thus prove that they were again a chosen people.
By dint of his ironic dismissal of the idea of election Spinoza became in the eyes of many Jews the leading prophet of the national conception of Jewry, and hence of political Zionism. But it can also be argued that, by his personal decision to withdraw from his people and fulfil his personal-political mission as prophet of the secular democratic state, he also made himself the prophet of a renewed sense of election and mission for those modern Jewish religious movements which wanted emancipation without religious conversion. Looking back, we can argue that, while all sectors of modern Jewry absorbed the influence of Spinoza’s rejection of his people and faith, the most affected was the secular-nationalist movement which emerged from the Eastern European Haskalah, vehemently rejecting all idea of election and bent on pursuing political Zionism.

5. A People Like All Others
It was Spinoza’s assumption then that the Jews, resolved to cling to their faith and election, would return to their own land to set up a Jewish state. But the influence of his thinking was strongest in fact on Jews like himself, who sought emancipation and a broader educational curriculum in the Europe of their birth. Their identification with Judaism as nationality and not Judaism as religion stemmed from their desire to escape the fate and isolation of exiles, but not at the price of abandoning their people: they wanted Jewry to find a new coexistence within its host nations. In a nutshell, they wanted normalization, which they defined, endorsing the non-Jews’ critique of Jewry,  as a return to the “natural state” enjoyed by “natural peoples”.  These Haskalah Jews, good Spinozans all, endorsed the  view that the Jews’ consciousness of election derived from the degradation of exile. It was also to blame for the Jews’ betrayal of their first and original identity as a natural people, for the destruction of their state and for their removal from their own land to generations of wandering among the goyim. This ‘repudiation of exile’ repudiated all the unnatural features of Jewish life, all embodied as these Jews saw it, in the religion. The basis for their future life as Jews by nationality was to be Israel’s pre-monotheistic culture, the culture on which, in their view, the two biblical-period kingdoms were founded (and later also the Hasmonean kingdom in the Second Temple period), a culture which actively meshed with those of its neighbours. Although the prophets and, after them, the sages of the mishnaic-talmudic period had taken control of this culture and suppressed it, remnants were still alive in the Jewry of exile in popular practices and belief carried on beneath the layers of rabbinic practice. These remnants could be uncovered and rehabilitated in the spirit of modern secularism.
The paradox was that it was this heroic aspiration itself to restore a natural national life which, when the time came to put it to the test of reality, led instead to a revived sense of election. Two factors came together to bring about this reversal. The first was the gap between the weight of the task of restoring Jewry to its homeland and the resources and strength this movement could command. Second was what can be described as the contradiction between the necessity which the modern period revealed of returning to the Land of Israel and the very difficult social and national circumstances of galut life which the forces of modernity had brought about and which were crying out for solution. In other words, any return to normalcy was contingent on finding a solution to social and national problems which the whole of European society was struggling with. In retrospect, we can see that the Jews were faced with having to realise in their own land national, social and political ideals which the peoples of Europe were wrestling with without any sign of success. Thus came about the paradox that the Jews’ degraded situation in their European settlements compelled them to make a superhuman effort to be a chosen people, chosen to realise in its own homeland an exemplary solution to problems that had quite defeated the gentiles of Europe.

6. The Jewish People’s Mission
Every ideology that contributed to secular Zionism shows the same dialectic. I mention here some of the key leaders of Zionism’s constituent movements: Herzl and Jabotinski — Political Zionism; Moses Hess, Nakhman Sirkin, Baer Borokhov, Martin Buber, and A.D. Gordon — Social Zionism, which bore the brunt of the state-building effort; Ahad Ha’am and Ha’im Nakhman Bialik — Spiritual Zionism. 
But the selfsame dialectic can be seen in the Jewish religious movements which sought emancipation for the Jews where they were, in the states of the Diaspora. Despite the fact that the ideology of ‘repudiation of exile’ and ‘aspiration to normalization’ is associated with Zionism, all the pro-emancipation movements, it has to be emphasized, repudiated the ghetto form of exile and endorsed the normalization of Jewish life on the model of enlightened civil European society. The pro-emancipationists revolted no less than Spinoza against the idea of election, as rabbinic Judaism envisioned it. This is most obvious in those extremist tendencies which aspired to meet the demands of non-Jewish society by educating Jews to total assimilation. In France most Jews chose to define themselves as individuals (i.e. not members of any collective): no alternative was available. In Germany and to a certain extent in England, it showed itself in the shape of extreme Reform (on the Holdheim model), declaredly aiming at an eventual total assimilation. In Eastern Europe it took the form of enlistment in the general revolutionary Social Democratic movement, either directly or by way of the Bund, which was also in its early days looking for an avenue to total assimilation. The dialectic which turned the idea of election into the main weapon in the battle for emancipation is best seen in the movements which continued to insist on a certain degree of collective Jewish identity, a degree of identity which, they felt, a tolerance-preaching host society should accept. Here also two factors joined forces. The first was the need to define the parameters of Jewish identity in terms sanctioned by the liberal-humanist society which had made emancipation possible.* The second factor was the disparity that came to light between liberal society’s theoretical commitment to accept Jews who wanted to be accepted and its readiness to do so in practice. The more assimilationist Jews pressed for acceptance, the more Christian society hardened its resistance and the more alien seemed the Jew in its sight. Jews who had already enmeshed themselves in the host society’s culture and acknowledged it as their own reacted with a fierce criticism, deriving from the universal values of their “shared” culture. In their own eyes they authentically represented  that “universal” civilization which non-Jewish society, even self-proclaimed enlightened society, had yet to genuinely assimilate. For was it not betraying its own values by repulsing those from whom those values came. The conclusion was that the struggle for acceptance into “universal” society depended on the Jews’ own commitment to the struggle to bring that society about and that that was where the Jews’ universal mission to humankind was to be found. This realization, especially developed in Reform Jewry but also to varying degrees in Conservative Jewry and Modern Orthodoxy, reached its culmination in the crisis of humanism which set in in the closing decades of the 19th century. Given the failure of humanism under a recrudescent anti-Semitism the leaders of Jewry’s modern-minded movements reacted by abandoning assimilation for a re-emphasis on Judaism’s special and unique qualities. They now saw clearly that Judaism was humanism’s sole support and that only in a return to the ethical monotheism of the prophets was there a chance of seeing humanist values fulfilled in Western society. In this context the names of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Baeck, Nehemiah Nobel, and even Isaac Breuer stand out as spokesmen of a modern Orthodoxy speaking in Ultra-Orthodox language.
On the eve of the Holocaust there was not a movement in Jewry not animated by consciousness of a universal messianic mission. It derived on the one hand from the core of the movement’s national, religious or historico-cultural identity and on the other from the uniqueness of the Jews’ fate down the generations. The evidence is in the literature written during the Second World War, grappling with the facts of the Holocaust as it was proceeding. The sense of election for a mission was the spiritual source from which the Jews’ of all movements — and this time I do not except even the radically anti-religious Bund — drew the strength to withstand the campaign of dehumanisation the Nazi regime had unleashed as soon as it came to power. While the ideological explanation varied with the ideology of the movement the writer belonged to, the common denominator was the insight that the main enemy Hitler had declared war on was the Jewish people. Hitler, having raised the voracious Aryan race to power and ‘superman’ status, perceived that the Jews, with their consciousness of election for a universal ethical mission, were the very embodiment of the counter-forces to his vision. In his apocalyptic madness he waged a mythological war against Judaism and Jewry. Educated Jews from every trend in Jewry perceived the Second World War as the war of a man who had created himself in the image of the devil against man created in the likeness of God; the war of anti-morality against morality; the war of lie against truth. It was a war of self-crowned human egotism against the acknowledgement that man was subordinate to the authority of a truth and morality which stood higher than him. It was also a war of idols, embodied in the human wickedness and abomination brought to a peak by Nazi Germany, against faith in the one God, embodied in the Jewish people, as it was being degraded and destroyed.
This perception united the survivors of the Holocaust in a ‘covenant of fate’, sealed with the establishment of the new State of Israel. At no time in Jewish history, it seems to me, was the Jewish people united as it was in the first two decades after the Holocaust. The party political divisions which in the years up to the war had widened hugely were not healed. But the lessons of Jewry’s standing alone during the Holocaust were stronger than any difference of opinion or clash of interest. The establishment of the state symbolised in Jewish sight the true victory over what was symbolised by Nazi Germany in its war against humanity.

7. The Jews’ Consciousness of Election  — Pakenheim 
The philosopher Emil Pakenheim put the sense of mission uniting the whole of post-Holocaust Jewry into theological terms. With the recent founding of the State of Israel in everybody’s mind, he designated this mission the 614th commandment: its command — not to give the defeated Hitler the victory: in positive terms — to do everything necessary to prevent a second Holocaust. All Jewry’s resources and all the aid obtainable from the nations who recognized their debt to Jewry was to be invested in Jewry’s physical rehabilitation and especially in building up its powers of self-defence and deterrence.
In accomplishing this task all the nations that had learnt a lesson from the Holocaust had to play their part. The order of the day to the whole of humanity was to create a world in which a second Holocaust could not happen. Again the terms in which Pakenheim spoke are worthy of attention. He declared his deep disillusionment with idealistic humanism and all the secular messianic movements it had engendered and which had led in the end not to the realization of their mutually contradictory visions but to the Second World War. The 614th commandment was the lesson drawn from that loss of faith in humanism and its purpose was to make a better world in a different way, a realistic way not built on illusions about human nature and on empty dreams of the ideal world supposed to emerge from some intra-historical or supra-historical dialectic. Pakenheim’s conception was the striking of a just balance between national interests and collaborative solidarity, aim at preventing another descent to the depths of shame humankind had plumbed in the Second World War. He expected the states who had taken part in the war to help the Jewish people rehabilitate itself and become one of them. Not only did they owe as much to a people they had watched destroyed while they stood aside but it was their own interest, part of their effort at a form of post-war reconstruction which carried inbuilt international guarantees that such a war would not be repeated. He insisted on the point that the Holocaust was not only without precedent in human history but stemmed from the unique status of the Jewish people in the world of nations. It was the result of the Jews’ extraordinary [...] to Pakenheim — who until the Six-Day War was no Zionist — the full significance of his post-Holocaust interpretation of Jewry’s election. The Holocaust, he said, an event without precedent in human history, had exploded the idealistic philosophies which Jewish religious philosophers, himself among them, had relied on to give rational meaning to the myth of the Covenant at Sinai and to faith in God’s unsleeping providence. That the Holocaust could happen proved that creation had no leader. To continue to rely on divine leadership in any form at all would be unforgivably irresponsible.
Mankind alone bore full responsibility for its fate and so did every single people in it. The idea of the Final Solution could only have been thought of by an insane leader and carried through by an insane state because Jewry had no means of defending itself. It had relied on God or humanity’s humanity. His 614th commandment rested on this premise, among others.
In sum: Every nation must look to its own defence. No nation must not seek to harm another, but equally to be avoided was to be so weak as to invite aggression. Neither divine providence nor international solidarity were to be trusted, nor any law of historical progress. International solidarity could be relied on only when nations, each capable of defending itself, linked themselves in mutually binding alliances.
It was only after the Six-Day War that Pakenheim drew these conclusions about the Holocaust and this is why he only then arrived at his full understanding of it as an absolutely unique event. Only then did he become an enthusiastic Political Zionist. In the Six-Day War Israel had once again faced the threat of a Holocaust and had once again been abandoned alone. All its ‘allies’ had stood aside and allowed Nasser to put his threats into practice. Only this time Israel, having fully absorbed the lesson the Holocaust had taught it, took full responsibility for its own fate. To Pakenheim’s mind its course of action was of paramount  importance for international relations.
The wonderful victory of the Six-Day War proved that even a small people, isolated and surrounded by enemies, could by itself repel their attack, if it summoned all its strength and resourcefulness. For Pakenheim this was the proof that Zionism had been right from the beginning. It alone had seen the cataclysm coming and had proposed the only possible solution. If the whole of Jewry had then united around it and the democratic nations had aided it, the Holocaust could have been avoided. But what did it mean to adopt the teachings of the school of 'catastrophe Zionism' of Herzl, Nordau, Borokhov, Jabotinski and others now that the State of Israel was solidly established? It meant that political Zionism’s concept of normalization — that the Jews should be a people like every other —  was now the substance of Jewry’s universal mission. If that was not the absolute opposite of the mission laid down in the Covenant at Sinai, at least it was the absolute opposite of the way every Jewish religious movement had understood that mission prior to the Holocaust.Pakenheim himself stressed the radical nature of his conclusions when he fiercely castigated the criticism from the Israeli and international Left against the military tactics Israel was using to fight Arab terrorism. Given the history of the Jewish people, declared the critics, and given the message of the Torah, a Jewish state ought to observe higher standards of military ethics, higher than those of its attackers and higher than those that other ‘regular’ democratic states would observe in similar circumstances. Pakenheim rightly regarded these demands as not only hypocritical but as a disguised form of anti-Semitism. Rightly, he argued that when the nations fighting Hitler had abandoned Jewry to its fate they had lost all right to preach morality to a State of Israel now defending itself against a second Holocaust. He went even further: the Jewish people was not only entitled, it was obliged to defend itself in a manner that effectively met its enemies’ moral standards of warfare, like for like. Observing a superior morality would simply be taken as a sign of weakness which Israel’s enemies would exploit to inflict further injury. Showing weakness in the face of the enemy, Pakenheim argued, was not a moral act but a grave sin, in that it invited further immorality.
With Israel defending itself alone against seven Arab states, these worlds carried an authentic universal message for all humanity, but for Israelis the message was simpler. Like any ‘normal’ state Israel was obliged to make its physical power — military, economic and political — a first priority. Until that was achieved it must not make the mistake of entertaining dreams of some exemplary state embodying noble moral values because no state like that could survive in the world as it was. It had to invest the greater part of its resources and ingenuity in making itself strong until the time arrived when all its neighbours would understand that it was more worth their while to look for co-operation with it than its destruction.

8. Ultra-Orthodox Views
In the days after the Six-Day War Pakenheim’s arguments were no innovation. What was new was their expression in religio-philosophical terms and they were received with enthusiasm in Israel and the Diaspora precisely because he had elevated to a philosophical level the Zionist consensus uniting the Jewish world around the State of Israel since it had declared its independence. Even Ultra-Orthodox Jewry was, in effect, part of this consensus, even though it had not abandoned its opposition to Zionist ideology. Typical was the support for Israel, and especially for Tzahal, from the non-Zionist Khabad movement. But even the anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox sects modified the stance they had maintained since before the Second World War. Instead of turning their back on any national initiative in Israel, political, social or economic, to improve Israelis’ circumstances, even the sects’ own circumstances — on the grounds that these initiatives embodied the sin of trying to make Israel a nation “like every other” — they adopted after the Six-Day War the religious-Zionist idea that self-help “from below” was a necessary first step to bringing about God’s redeeming involvement in Jewry’s contemporary destiny. After all, they needed to rehabilitate the Ultra-Orthodox movements organizations destroyed in the Holocaust. Having at first simply taken advantage of the political and economic achievements of the hated modernist forces, they had gradually moved into Israeli politics and Jewish politics in the U.S.A. just like any secular party. The rationale for their activity was as secular as any other party’s and their attacks on secular ideologies had merely been for the purpose of reinforcing their own dogma against damaging secular influences, at the same time as they manoeuvred to exploit the seculars’ achievements.
The behaviour of the Ultra-Orthodox is important as the paradox in it reveals an inner tension common to all Jewry’s religious denominations. None of them would yield on the definition of the chosen people’s mission to the world as either “making the world a better place” (tikkun olam) or “working to the greater glory of the One God”. However, in practice they sought normalization, as much in the demographic and socio-economic spheres as in politics and national security. We come to the conclusion, therefore, that all the movements in modern Jewry, without exception, in practice endorsed Spinoza’s claim that the sole purpose of election was to serve the earthly interests of the Jewish people, that is, settling their homeland, national unity, victory over their enemies, and economic prosperity.
In this context two facts stand out. As soon as the new state was in being Social Zionism began steadily retreating from its utopian societal goals; Spiritual Zionism retreated from its goal of establishing a “spiritual centre” on the Land of Israel, even though its proponents still talked about it a lot; even Religious Zionism concentrated its efforts on strengthening its sectoral position (whereas it had started by trying to build a bridge between the secular nationalists and the Ultra-Orthodox, with the aim of uniting secular and religious Zionism into one force). After the Six-Day War this trend gathered momentum. Religious Zionism concentrated its resources on its settlements in the newly occupied territories, with the declared ambition of  taking over the leadership of the national settlement enterprise formerly held by the secular socialists. A similar trend was noticeable in the Diaspora. Diaspora Jews united around their financial and political support for Israel at the same time as they consolidated their established economic, political and cultural influence in their own countries. What they were doing can only be defined as normalizing their life in conformity with local civil norms.
As long as a great effort of will was required to close the gap between aspirations to normalcy and practical reality, the drive for normalcy could be defined, as we have seen, as a mission of universal significance. But once the process of physical rehabilitation had achieved its objectives to a satisfactory degree and it had become clear that no part of Jewry was threatened by imminent holocaust, the situation took on new meaning. Normalization is not an ideal of infinite dimensions. Once attained, it ceases to be an ideal and certainly ceases to be a force for unity. On the contrary. It becomes a catalyst for competition between individuals, groups and political parties to enjoy here and now the fruits of their achievements. In other words, brandishing normalization as a goal once it had already been attained (in retrospect the Six-Day War demonstrated that the process of post-Holocaust rehabilitation had more or less achieved its targets) was in effect to endorse competitive egotism as a guiding value in place of the values of solidarity on which the new state had been founded as the state of the Jewish people.

9. The Effect of Normalization on Jews’ Sense of National Identity
In the last decade almost all of Jewry, Israel and the Diaspora alike, has succumbed to this climate of competitive egotism. Jewry’s institutions and movements show it in their policy and education, art and culture are no exceptions to the rule. Memory of the Holocaust still has a role in shaping the national consciousness but its meaning is being ‘universalised’ with the aim of turning Israel from an outsider into one of the family of nations. At the same time the sense of a ‘covenant of fate’, which had united all of Jewry after the Holocaust, is crumbling away. In Israel we can see this in the new strength of the ideology of “Israeli identity”. This is an identity rooted in citizenship in the new State and tramples on old ideas of a collective identity embracing all Jewry. It turns its back equally on the historical continuity binding Jewry to galut and galut culture  and on the idea of a bond tying Israel and the Diaspora into one community. Diaspora Jews are regarded as a source of political and monetary support, not as partners in a shared responsibility for the fate of world Jewry.
As a result, the Zionist definition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people or as the Jews’ nation-state is being questioned. It is being argued that these designations are not compatible with the currently accepted conception of a normal democratic state. Normalization, it is being said, demands adopting the liberal designation of “a state of all its citizens” with all that follows from this — with respect to Diaspora Jews, with respect to Israel’s large non-Jewish minorities, and with respect to the constitutional legislation establishing the state’s Jewish character. 
In the Diaspora, normalization is taking the form, first of all, of a more rapid assimilation; secondly, in a falling off of existential identification with Israel; and thirdly, in the higher priority given to the needs of the local Jewish community, the clear trend being towards full integration into and identification with the country of residence. However, normalization is also raising serious problems with respect to relations between world Jewry’s rival denominations. The ‘covenant of fate’ which united Jewry after the Holocaust has broken up to be replaced by a multiple-front war of cultures. All the disputes which fissured Jewry from the Emancipation to the Holocaust have reopened with a violence- and hate-filled vengeance. The questions, Is Jewry still one nation? and Do we have a common culture and a common cultural language? have long been shouldered aside by the far graver question — Is it still possible to mend these divisions or have they become irreversible fact?
That is precisely the significance of my earlier statement that the life experience of the generation of Jews educated and grown up after the Holocaust has not imbued it with any sense of belonging to a ‘world-wide people of Israel’ (clal yisrael), an entity which is not physically located in any one country and whose spiritual-cultural identity is located in a heritage constructed by hundreds of generations, most of whom knew only galut. The inevitable conclusion is that the experience of modern Jewish life in all the centers of Jewry around the world has not instilled in Jews the consciousness of a covenant embracing them all and founded in a chosen people’s mission to that wide world. We can go further and state that the post-Holocaust generation has absorbed a contrary message. Since we are talking about a message conveyed by the very experience of living and not by ideological indoctrination, we can only conclude that the ancient message of universal mission has not been passed on and has thus disappeared from the reality of this generation’s consciousness and life — which is to say that it is an affiliate in good standing of Western post-modernism.
It is in the nature of things that the implications of this turnaround for Jewish unity and for the pace of the trend to assimilation began worrying people long before they realised the depth of the spiritual change which had occurred. After all, that was not what our spiritual and political leaders had in mind when they brought about the change, and now they are filled with anxiety. But if the prospect of a fragmented national identity still worries most of those who identify themselves as Jews and if they comprehend that Israel cannot survive as an independent state unless it retains its Jewish identity — both as the state of the Jewish people and a state whose dominant constitutional, social and cultural elements affirm its own unique heritage — then they must re-examine the question of Jewry’s normalization, both in its own state and its Diaspora.

10. Are There No Models Available for a State of Normalcy for Jews?
The concept of normalization requires elucidation. Its incorporation into the ideology of political Zionism is not only the outcome of a one-of-a-kind national existence but also an expression of that existence. Every nation which thinks itself normal presents the parameters of its collective existence as factual data, not as a goal yet to be attained. Normalcy, in this sense, is a nation’s acceptance of itself as it is, as it was and ever will be and for this reason there is no one model one can point to and say: that is normalcy. The most one can do is construct a theoretical model comprising the features common to the majority of ‘normal’ nations. The majority, we advisedly say, because there is no nation which is not an exception on one count or other, and even the most outstandingly ‘normal’ will, of course, point to characteristics setting it apart from every other. Which tells us that Jewry’s recent preoccupation with “a normal national existence” springs from apprehension of its abnormality.
The big problem this conclusion gives rise to is that conformity to the norms of normalcy, as derived from this theoretical comparative model we have constructed from Western post-modern examples, requires the Jewish nation to give up the historical memory which makes it what it is. It also requires it to give up its religious and ethical values, its unique social, judicial and communal institutions, and the lifestyles and symbols by which it has been uniquely known from generation to generation. This does not mean, it must be stressed, that Jewry differs from other nations in every particular. On the contrary. As an ethnicity and a nationality, by the fundamental definitions of these two concepts, it has been a natural people from its outset. Within its own legislative and constitutional bodies it also defines itself as a nation. Further: in face of the very obvious disparities between it and its host nations, it always aspired to resemble them, and even, in the universal parameters of its civilization and culture, to identify with them. The trouble was that the ways in which it aspired to participate in their cultures in practice set it apart from them. It borrowed not to assimilate but to strengthen its peculiarity and endow its otherness with universal validity.
This is why normalization, as Zionism defined it, was perceived by both supporters and opponents as a violation of Jewry’s traditional bounds of normality, to the  point that putting Zionist ‘normality’ into practice was seen as turning the Jews into a people of a different kind. The question was asked: After putting itself through this sort of identity upheaval would Jewry still exist as a nation among other nations? Storms of controversy raged around this question within Zionism and between it and its opponents. Today, when political Zionism’s normalization objectives have become a reality over a large part of Jewry it can be stated categorically that the answer to the question is ‘no’. Like every other people in the world, Jewry will cease to exist if it cuts itself off from its collective historical memory, from the institutions which, uniting it, have differentiated it from other peoples. Especially so if it cuts itself off from the pillars of the covenant which has held it together even when it was scattered over the face of the globe, and held it together in spite of the revolutionary cultural changes its encounters with gentile civilisations have made to it and in spite of deep internal divisions concerning the idea of its mission.

11. How Jews Have Viewed Their Torah-Given Mission Since the Holocaust
Given the irreplaceable role in Jewry of collective memory and nation-wide covenant, the question demanding an answer is: In post-Holocaust reality, is it any longer possible to revive that consciousness and spirit of a unique mission to the world, the heart and soul of the covenant which made the Jewish people into the House of Israel (clal yisrael) for a hundred generations? Does that Torah which the people of Israel took as the ground and reason of its existence among the world’s nations still carry a truth which it is vital for Jews and all of humanity to hear? Can this message be renewed as a life-inspiriting teaching shaping both culture and way of life?
These questions take us back to how the Holocaust altered the way Jews viewed their heritage of a Torah-given mission, a heritage that till then had united the whole of Jewry. After all that the Jews and humanity have gone through during the Holocaust and in the reality it left behind it, is it at all possible to go back to the myth of the Covenant at Sinai, even one reinterpreted by a new midrash? Pakenheim, who took on this challenge too later in his life, proposed a post-modern midrash which would preserve the myth but stand on its head, refuted. To my mind his very definition of his self-imposed task foretold an answer in the negative: a midrash posited on the absurdity of existence cannot, from first principles, form the basis of a faith to unite a people. A glance at the shifts in mood and state of mind, that in practice determine how today’s Jews understand the world, will put this point beyond question.
Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy still cling to a fundamentalist understanding of the myths of the Exodus and the Law-giving at Sinai and, taking their theological pronouncements at face value, it would seem that the Holocaust has not only failed to make a crack in their faith in Divine Providence and its revelations throughout Jewish history but even made that faith stronger than ever. A comprehensive survey, however, of the dominant responses to the Holocaust across the Jewish world shows that the Holocaust has undermined the pillars of faith in Divine Providence beyond saving. First of all, that is the state of mind of most Jews who are actively shaping contemporary experience in non-Orthodox and non-religious Jewry. Having taken stock of what the Second World War and the Holocaust  have done to the circumstances for post-Holocaust Jewish life, an existential certainty stares them in the face. In the experience of humanity on earth there is no sign of the “fingerprints” of divine Providence, no sign of any programme or tendency pre-determined by any authority beyond that of the factious ambitions of human individuals and collectives. As most people in the West see it, Jews or non-Jews, any sort of reliance on Providence is more than blindness, it is sheer escapism. Even certain Orthodox thinkers who have absorbed the post-modern mindset, such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Yitzhak Greenberg, have expressed themselves in this vein, and they have more than a few disciples.
Further: the entrenchment of most of Orthodoxy in their fundamentalist fortifications seems to me self-refuting. Fundamentalism is the unthinking refusal to entertain critical thoughts, knowing full well that critical thinking undermines faith. A faith that can only be sustained in this manner is under incessant threat from within and needs an outward-turned fanaticism to subdue the inner rumblings. To my mind, Ultra Orthodoxy’s opinion-makers do not, in fact, understand contemporary reality very differently from most other Jews. Indeed, if the proof of belief is not in what people say but in what they do, then the post-Holocaust change in Ultra Orthodoxy’s attitudes to political activity and earthly values speaks volumes.
Pakenheim is also right to maintain that the Holocaust exploded the philosophical myth of idealistic humanism, which till then had identified Divine Providence with human reason and which was supposed to guarantee that humanity would steadily progress towards messianic goals. On this subject we may fairly say that Jews and Western non-Jewish society are of one mind: the experiential and philosophical foundations, on which modern religious movements erected their theology of mission, has crumbled. And the secular social movements founded in the pre-war period are in no better case, for they were predicated on the same ‘law’ of historical progress. 
From this it follows that in the social, cultural and political realities of the post-Second-World-War world the myth of a chosen people has lost the experiential and intellectual anchorage that the Bible and centuries of biblical commentary had provided, that is, that God had chosen Himself a people and given it His Torah, so that, living that Torah, it would bear witness to his Kingdom.
Pakenheim’s third conclusion was that humanity itself, and Jewry within it, bore the full burden of responsibility for what the Holocaust had wrought and that, from now on, it had to act in the full knowledge of its responsibility for what would happen if the lessons of the Second World War were not applied. If he was right in this too, then the path to be taken is not Jewry’s normalizing conformity to the post-modern criteria of the non-Jewish world but the ‘de-normalization’ of that world’s internal and external relations to conform to the criteria of the covenant of mission, as laid down in ancient times by the Mosaic law and since then repeatedly given practical illustration by the efforts of the Jewish people to live up to its Torah.
Evidence for this conclusion is all around us in the situation Jewry now finds itself in. We have seen that normalization is only leading to Jewry’s disintegration and disappearance. This is especially true if normalization takes the form of integrating with post-modern trends in interpersonal morality, society and state, international relations, and the shallowness of historical memory and of spiritual meanings, characteristic of modern life. Jews, for whom conformity to post-modern values is more than just ‘going with the flow’, for whom it is their consciously chosen goal, express this explicitly when they say that though they may be Jews by birth they have no Judaism and, moreover, don’t want any.

12. The Jewish People Will Not Survive If It Does Not Enter on a New Covenant of Mission
There is only one possible conclusion from this state of affairs: that the Jewish people’s continued existence depends on it making a 1800 turn on the issue of mission. It must unite around a new conception of how to fulfil the moral responsibility imposed on the human race, and its societies and peoples, for their own future as individuals and peoples, indeed their responsibility for the future of humanity itself. This new conception — in all its elements: values, morals, laws and constitution, civilization and culture —  is there ready and waiting for us, in the Covenant at Sinai. For the Jewish people this is one more fateful crossroads at which the covenant must be renewed. We are required to choose between ‘going with the flow’, which for all its present convenience is leading us to oblivion, and standing out against the flow and for the future of the people and of humanity. It is at junctures like these that Israel is commanded, as at all the like junctures it has faced in its long history, “And you shall choose life”.
But is there a basis in current reality for this about-turn? Can it be done at all and, if so, how? These questions require a separate analysis, but in general terms it can be said that the turnaround needed is not the ‘return to the bosom of Orthodoxy’ that the Ultra-Orthodox have made a platitude, that is, a return to some mythological-utopian past state. We are talking about reorienting our present towards a future, exploiting all the fullness and riches and continuity of a heritage renewed in every generation, ours included, and renewed in every sect and movement that has divided — and renewed — Jewry. The developments of the modern period, reviewed in part above, are part of this renewal process. Jews have created a broad platform for the renewal of Jewish life on the basis of the Covenant, a platform constituted not only of books but of a living socio-cultural enterprise and creativity, on which both the new State of Israel and Jewish communal life in the Diaspora firmly stand. From this platform we can extend the enterprise and creativity forward in time. Going against the flow in this way will be extremely hard and, it needs to be said, will not succeed without a committed pioneering leadership. 
The Jewish people’s continued existence depends on it making a 1800 turn on the issue of mission. It must unite around a new conception of how to fulfil the moral responsibility imposed on the human race, and its societies and peoples, for their own future as individuals and peoples, indeed their responsibility for the future of humanity itself.
I shall close this essay by a reminder from one particular renewal of the Covenant, the renewal made in formulating the new state’s Declaration of Independence: “To establish a Jewish state, which shall be the state of the whole Jewish people and shall bring to pass the redemption sought by all its generations, and, within this, a state which, by its laws and practical policy, shall fulfill Judaism’s universal values.”  In both these spheres, the Declaration of Independence fuses responsibility for the continued existence of the Jewish people  with responsibility for the future of humanity, and, doing so, takes its stand not only on the ‘eternal book of books’, on the longing of all Jewry’s generations for redemption, and on the great Zionist enterprise, but also on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. By both these ‘sources’ the founding fathers swore to establish a state “founded on the pillars of liberty, justice, and peace, as the prophets of Israel envisioned it”.a, for itself and for humankind.