FAITH AND REASON

Crossing the piety divide (Hillel Halkin, Jerusalem Post, September 25th, 2004)

Yo'eli is a lovely young fellow, if you can call someone "young" who is already the father of several children. He's friendly and intelligent and I'm fond of him. He lives in one of the most isolated settlements in the Gaza Strip, in a house that - so he told me at the wedding - has been hit five times by Palestinian mortar fire. (No one, baruch hashem, has been hurt.) He grinned to see me look aghast at that. There is a gulf, perhaps indeed humorous, between those who do and those who don't count on God to protect their wives and children from mortar shells.

I asked Yo'eli what he thought of the Gaza disengagement plan. He was, of course, against it. As a member, he said, of the central committee of the Likud, he would do his best to prevent it.

"Fine," I said to him. "You're against it. You want to hold on to the Gaza Strip because it's part of the Land of Israel, and seven or eight thousand Jews have the right to go on living there in the midst of close to a million-and-a-half Palestinian Arabs. I understand the principle. I even sympathize with it. But what do you propose to do with all those Arabs?"

What did he propose to do with the additional two-and-a-half-million Arabs of Judea and Samaria who, together with the Gazans and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, are already half of the total population west of the Jordan and will soon, because of their far higher birthrate, be a clear and steadily growing majority?

"Don't let the numbers scare you," Yo'eli said. "When Zionism started out in this country, we Jews were barely 10%."

Yes, I answered. But there were then millions of Jews living in precarious circumstances in the Diaspora to whom Zionism offered a way out. And Zionism was then, in any case, a desperate gamble that had started with nothing and therefore had nothing to lose. Today a Jewish state is on the line.

"What happened then will happen again," Yo'eli said. "Millions more Jews will come. Millions of Arabs will leave."

"Come from where? Leave to where? You're dreaming," I said. "There are no countries left in the Diaspora that Jews are going to leave in droves - and even if anti-Semitism gets bad enough to make some Jews want to leave some places, say France, most have and will prefer other options, like the Jews emigrating from South Africa and Argentina. And since the Palestinians have no such options, every country in the world being closed to them, they will stay right here no matter what."

Yo'eli didn't try to argue with that. He couldn't because he had no arguments. He still had his grin, though. He said, "Your problem is that you have no faith. If you did, you'd leave it to God."

Now I was really aghast. [...]

I have no particular quarrel with those who see the hand of God in history. Give "God" a generous enough interpretation, and I might even agree with them. But I expect them to be consistent. You can't count some fingers of the hand of God and not others. The God that gave us the undivided land of Israel in the Six Day War is also the God that gave us the destruction of the First Temple, the destruction of the Second Temple, Auschwitz. And if Yo'eli and his friends are asking us to put our faith in the God of Auschwitz, they are asking us to commit a supreme act of folly, not because the God of Auschwitz does not necessarily exist but because His calculations are not the same as ours.

The belief in God can be a form of piety. But the belief that God is in one's pocket and will perform His duties like a trustworthy valet is a form of impiety.

Perhaps Christian comedian Brad Stine is trying to make the same point when he asks those sporting “God is my Co-pilot” bumper stickers whether, if God really is in the car, it might not perhaps be more respectful to let Him drive.