The Jewish People and the Kingdom of Heaven: A Study of Jewish Theocracy

A structural review of Jewish history is undertaken in order to demon strate the continued dialectic encounter between the heavenly (theos) and the earthly (kratos) in Jewish political conception, which help in under standing the fundamental problems of the Jewish polity in general, and the Israeli polity in particular. ? Three constant trends in Jewish theocracy conflict, unity and prior ? ity are defined and presented in a historical survey from Pharaonic Egypt to the present day. The revolutionism of the various forms of Zionist philosophies lies not in the revolution of the traditional encounter between theos and kratos, but in the search for a new sacred content that accords with individual be liefs. The traditional approaches to resolving the theocratic dilemma were extended to the State of Israel. Philosophies as diverse as the theistic syntheses of Buber and Soloveitchik, the dichotomous approaches of the Canaanites and Leibowitz, and the unified approaches of Ben-Gurion and U.Z. Greenberg are presented. The dialectic continuum of Jewish history remains unbroken, with the aspiration of Judaism as always being to cling to eternal life without re linquishing the reality of territorial life. The kingdom of Israel has con stantly been faced with the challenge of realizing the kingdom of heaven. History has yet to prove whether this challenge constitutes the true ex cuse of Judaism, or whether it is an obstinate quest for the impossible.