Forming a Anti-Zionist Denomination of Judaism

[u/NAHTHEHNRFS850]

Seeing the stickied post regarding people seeking out progressive (particularly anti-Zionist) Jewish services, I wanted to talk about the formation of a progressive anti-Zionist Jewish denomination.

While there are progressive denominations of Judaism (e.g. Humanistic), these denominations don’t explicitly render themselves as anti-Zionist in the fact that they don’t declare “that there should not be a Jewish state”.

A new denomination such as this would need to remove practices phrases, statements and literature making overtures to the Holy Land and focus on community and belief in God. I see this as parallel to how some branches of Humanistic Judaism avoid using theonyms (names associated with God e.g. Joshua).

Thoughts?

[u/BrianMagnumFilms]

the problem is not the raw material of these “objectionable phrases” encoded into jewish history and theology, ones that deal with a form of jewish statehood and ethos of divine right in eretz yisrael. the problem is the way they have been employed to catalyze support for a modern jewish ethnostate which has been built on a prevailing vision of supremacy over the non-jewish inhabitants of the land under this state’s control. there is a post-zionist judaism, we are all working hard to envisage and build that, but the only way out is through. a desire to comb back through our history and our texts and pick out phrases that have uncomfortable recurrences vis a vis israel, imho, speaks to a failure of will to reckon with them.

[u/NAHTHEHNRFS850 → u/BrianMagnumFilms]

I don't see how identifying an issue is a "failure to reckon with them".

If anything I see it as the opposite, as I have identified the issue and and trying to address it.

I don't think not including the teachings of the various Mashiach claimants throughout history into the Talmud is a failure to address their claims to being the Mashiach.

[u/BrianMagnumFilms → u/NAHTHEHNRFS850]

well i don’t think the phrases in question are an “issue” that needs to be “addressed” in the sense in which you seem to mean it, i.e. a straightforwardly bad thing that must be removed from jewish thought in order to create a better judaism. attachment to and celebration the ancient jewish kingdoms, and desire to return to them once the messiah arrives, is kind of the entire underpinning of rabbinic, talmudic judaism. bound up with that is inevitable questions of statehood and agency (not modern national statehood necessarily, but statehood nonetheless). these cannot be mitigated or removed by the artless censorship of language which relates directly to it.

i guess my feeling is the same as it would be for censorship of any uncomfortable historical text; it should be left in and considered and remembered. and a key point here which it is necessary to remember, which i again reiterate, is that these things in their conception and raw material are not “bad.” they become “bad” when used as justification for religious strains of ethnonational supremacy. and for what it’s worth, i don’t even think zionism runs on as much relationship to these religious concepts as your call to strike them from the record posits; it’s a secular national ideology which stripmines any and all sources it can for the same purpose: to assert jewish control and supremacy over the land. these include archaeological findings, claims of geopolitical necessity (ie bulwark against islamic encroachment on the west), economic gain, etc, and on the same plane as these varied fields is theology, which is a complete rorschach test, and from which one can draw, from the countless sources of jewish religious thought over millennia-long history, ideas that in a modern context would be either zionist or antizionist or neither.

we cannot reshape the past. we must take what we are given from the past, the good and the bad, and shape the future with it.