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Jewry’s Journey

to a Second Shavuot

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ל״צז

In June 1997 – 100 years after the First Zionist Congress – the Jewish Chronicle published
an article written by (then) Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about a new kind of Zionism
which hinged on the question of Jewish identity and the sense of belonging.

ometimes, the most contemporary On Shavuot, we recall a quite different a common history of suffering but by a
debates in Judaism are also the text. At Mount Sinai, prior to receiving the shared commitment to a unique way of
most ancient. That is certainly Ten Commandments, the Israelites heard life.
Strue of the most fundamental of these words from G-d: “Now, if you obey The Hebrew for such a group is edah, a
all – the question of Jewish identity. What Me fully and keep My covenant, then out congregation. An am is defined by what
is it to be a Jew? Today, that debate rever- of all the nations you will be My treasured happened to it in the past. An edah is
berates throughout the Jewish world. Is possession, for all the earth is Mine. You defined by what it is called on to do in the
being a Jew simply living in a Jewish will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a future. An am is a community of fate. An
state, or, in the Diaspora, being part of holy nation” (Shemot 19:5–6). edah is a community of faith. The Torah
an ethnic group? Is it a matter of belong- According to the first text, Jews became a does not suggest that Jewish identity is
ing rather than of believing? Or is Jewish nation in Egypt. According to the second, exclusively one or the other. To be a Jew
identity something essentially religious, they became a nation only when they left is to be both part of an am and a member
a faith and a way of life? Egypt, traveled into the desert, and were of an edah. More precisely, it is to journey
The most interesting of all answers is offered the Torah as their covenant with from the first to the second.
given by the Torah. At a certain point, G-d. How are we to reconcile the texts? Moshe discovered his Jewish identity
Jews ceased to be a family – the children There are two ways in which individuals when he saw his brothers and sisters
of Ya’akov – and became a nation. When come together to become a nation. The suffering in Egypt and knew his fate
did this take place, and how? To this, the first is when they face a common enemy; was joined to theirs. But he did not stop
Torah gives two different accounts. They that is what happened to the Israelites there, not even when he had led them
could be called the Pesach and Shavuot in Egypt. They were different. They were out of slavery. He took them onward to
definitions of Jewish identity. enslaved. Their suffering forged them as Sinai, where they became the people of
a group. They shared a collective fate. In the Torah. That is the journey we retrace
On Pesach, at the Seder table, we expound Hebrew, we call such an entity an am, a
the following passage: “A wandering people. But at Sinai, Jews became a nation from Pesach to Shavuot. It is also our jour-
Aramean was my father, and he went in a quite different sense. They became a ney as modern Jews.
down into Egypt, and sojourned there, body politic, with G-d as their Sovereign, One hundred years ago, in the summer of
few in number. And there, he became a and the Torah as their written constitu- 1897, a gathering took place in the small
nation…” (Devarim 26:5). tion. They were brought together not by Swiss town of Basel that was to change

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