The Jewish People Forgot Why They Returned

The Jewish people did not merely survive history. They gave history one of its organizing ideas: monotheism, the belief that reality is governed by one God, one moral order, and one ultimate source of truth. But over the centuries, the Jewish people lost control over the transmission of that idea. What began in Israel passed through other hands, other empires, other languages, and other theological systems. The result was both magnificent and monstrous. We created something that transformed civilization, but we also lost the monopoly over its meaning.

For thousands of years, the transmission of monotheism moved without us. It was carried by Christianity, Islam, empires, missionaries, theologians, philosophers, and states. In that process, the original Jewish idea was translated, expanded, distorted, weaponized, universalized, and often turned back against the very people from whom it came. The Jews became the persecuted authors of a spiritual revolution whose later interpreters often treated them as obsolete, guilty, or cursed.

This is the deep historical wound: the Jews did not only lose sovereignty over land. They lost sovereignty over the idea.

Only now, with Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty restored, can we begin to reclaim ownership over the mechanism of transmission itself. This does not mean coercion. It does not mean conversion. It means something much deeper: the creation of Jewish houses of learning in Arabic, English, and other languages, directed toward the nations of the world. Centers of Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Hasidic thought, Hebrew civilization, and Semitic wisdom. Not as propaganda, but as spiritual diplomacy. Not as self-defense alone, but as a renewed act of civilizational teaching.

Israel, however, has doubled down on a different logic. The State of Israel says, correctly and justly, that the Jewish people deserve protection. After centuries of persecution, this is fair, necessary, and historically obvious. But there is a problem. Israel became so obsessed with security, statehood, military power, and survival that it forgot that the mission of being a light unto the nations must pass through something internal that it has largely abandoned: Judaism itself.

Modern Israel often assumes that one cannot be both deeply Jewish and deeply security-minded. If Jewishness is associated with exile, weakness, provincialism, pre-modernity, and vulnerability, then the Israeli instinct is to choose security. But the cost of that choice is spiritual amnesia. Israel becomes stronger physically while becoming less articulate spiritually. It protects the Jewish people while forgetting the purpose of the Jewish people.

And here lies the great paradox. Israeli Jewishness believes it must liberate itself from Judaism in order to defend the Jews. But the moment it liberates itself from Judaism, it forgets the Jewish vocation. It falls back into victimhood: we are the victims of the nations, the hated people, the surrounded people, the people who must survive. All of that may be true, but it is not enough.

The alternative is not weakness. The alternative is not surrender. The alternative is to build hundreds of Jewish educational centers around the world, just as China built Confucius Institutes to project Chinese civilization. The Jewish people should become ambassadors of the organizing idea they gave the world. We should teach Torah not only to ourselves, but to humanity. We should teach the nations to understand Judaism from the Jewish source, not only through the distorted inheritances of others.

This would be the real restoration of Jewish sovereignty: not only sovereignty over territory, borders, and armies, but sovereignty over meaning.

Because of its particular fear, the Jewish people is missing its universal mission. And paradoxically, that universal mission can only emerge from its particular holiness. The Jewish people cannot serve humanity by dissolving itself into humanity. It can only serve humanity by becoming more deeply itself.

But because the Jewish people fears that its particular holiness includes religion, and that religion may endanger its physical particular existence, it abandons both: the holiness of its own particularity and the universality of its mission.

That is the tragedy of modern Israel. It has returned to history, returned to power, returned to sovereignty, and yet it often does not know what it has returned for.

The miracle is that Israel exists at all. The task now is to remember why.

From being scattered we must become scatterers

For this you need land. And a book.