Zionism= The return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel to found there a Jewish State.
Many people today — friends and enemies of Israel alike — think that Zionism is a modern, secular, European invention. In this article I want to show that the idea of Zionism is much older than its name: it is written in the Torah itself, and it has a Biblical name: Teshuvah.
This Shabbat we read Parashat Nitsavim, and in it one of the most extraordinary chapters of the Torah: Debarim (Deuteronomy) chapter 30, known as “Parashat haTeshuvah,” the section of the Return. In these few verses the concept of Teshuvah — literally, “return” — is mentioned eight times. And here comes the surprise: the Teshuvah of this chapter is not the Teshuvah most of us have in mind.
When we hear the word “Teshuvah” we think of personal repentance: regretting our mistakes, confessing them and abandoning them. But that is not the peshat, the plain meaning, of our parashah. For Maimonides, personal repentance is the mitsvah of Vidui, confession, and its corresponding pasuk is in the book of Bemidbar: “and they shall confess the sin they have committed” (Bemidbar 5:7). In Debarim 30 the Torah is speaking about a different Teshuvah. Listen to the text itself: “Then HaShem your God will return your captivity and have mercy on you, and He will return and gather you from all the nations where HaShem your God has scattered you. Even if your dispersed are at the end of the heavens, from there HaShem your God will gather you, and from there He will take you” (Debarim 30:3–4).
The primary meaning of Teshuvah in the Torah is the return of the Jewish people to its land, after a long exile in the farthest corners of the world. The chapter describes a process: first a collective repentance, then a national reconciliation with HaShem, and then Teshuvah defines the way HaShem will “return” the Jewish people to their land. Just as the exile in the previous chapter (Debarim 29) was the result of the Jews abandoning HaShem, the return to the land of Israel is presented as the result of the reconciliation between Am Israel and HaShem, our God.
Now, this reading of Parashat haTeshuvah is not a modern invention created to justify Zionism. It is the opposite: modern Zionism was born from this reading. Let me introduce you to the man who saw it first.
While the term “Zionism” was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890, Rabbi Yehuda Bibas (1776–1852) should be credited with the idea of modern Zionism. Rabbi Bibas was born in Gibraltar (an English colony). From his mother’s side, he was the grandson of the famous Moroccan rabbi Rabbenu Hayim ben Attar, the Or-haHayim-haQadosh (1696–1743), author of one of the classic commentaries on the Torah. His father belonged to the prestigious Bibas family of Tetuan, Spanish Morocco — a family of Rabbanim (rabbis), Dayanim (rabbinical judges) and Shohatim (ritual slaughterers). Rabbi Bibas was for many years the rabbi of the prominent and affluent Jewish community of Corfu, a beautiful island that today belongs to Greece.
Rabbi Bibas saw the opportunity for the Jewish people to have their own state in the fact that many countries in those years (1820–1835) revolted against the ruling empires and thus gained their independence. Living in Corfu allowed Rabbi Bibas the privileged perspective of being a direct witness to the revolution of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire and the victory that led to the creation of the independent Greek State. Israel, then called “Palestine,” was also under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Bibas estimated in 1835 that the Jews were able to gain their own independence, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly weak politically and militarily. Rabbi Yehuda Bibas opined: “The Jews must conquer the land of Israel militarily from the Turks, just as the Greeks conquered their own land from the Turks.”
Rabbi Bibas traveled through Europe and North Africa, visiting Turkey, the Balkans, Vienna, London, Germany, Hungary, Prague and many more Jewish communities. And the main message he preached to all the Jews of the world was one word: “TESHUVAH” — a call to return as a Nation to the land of Israel and to found there a Jewish State. Rabbi Bibas was not giving the word a new meaning. He was recovering its first meaning, the meaning of Parashat Nitsavim.
Rabbi Bibas explained that by dwelling in the Diaspora: “We are turning our backs on HaShem (the opposite of ‘teshuvah,’ i.e., ‘facing’ HaShem. YB), as our rabbis explained: A Jew living outside Israel is like a Jew without God. And why are we living in exile? In order to seek our sustenance? Did not the Torah say that the land of Israel is a land that HaShem constantly monitors, a land in which bread will not be eaten with poverty, is it not a land that will not lack anything? Day after day, when eating a meal with bread, we thank HaShem for the land of abundance, Israel, that He has granted us…”
And Rabbi Bibas did not only preach Teshuvah: he lived it. At the end of his life he left his position and his community, went up to the land of Israel, and settled in Hebron, the city of our Patriarchs, where he passed away in 1852. He returned.
Rabbi Yehuda Alqalay (1798–1878) brought the ideas of Rabbi Yehuda Bibas to writing. Unlike Rabbi Bibas, who did not get to publish his ideas (or his books did not reach us, or were not spread…), Rabbi Alqalay was a prolific writer. Like Rabbi Bibas, Rab Alqalay did not conceive the return of the people of Israel to their land as a solution to the eternal problem of anti-Semitism, but essentially as a way of fulfilling the Jewish aspiration for political normalization: that is, the Jewish people, living in its land, Israel, ruled by its law, the Torah. Both rabbis understood that the people of Israel did not need to wait passively for the arrival of the Mashiah to realize this aspiration. Rather, we should actively seek the re-establishment of an independent Jewish State in the land of our ancestors as a way of advancing and facilitating the arrival of the Mashiah.
Rabbi Alqalay, inspired by Rabbi Bibas, formulated his plan and ideas for the restoration of the Jews in Israel in his book “Goral laHaShem,” published in Vienna in 1857. In this book Rabbi Alqalay designed a comprehensive plan with the religious foundations and the practical steps to bring to fruition a national “TESHUVAH”: the return of the Jewish nation to Israel. The book was published in three different editions and translated into many languages, including English.
And here history gives us a beautiful final detail. For decades Rabbi Alqalay served as the rabbi of Zemun, a small city near Belgrade. Among the members of his community was a Jew named Simon Loeb Herzl — the grandfather of Theodor Herzl. The ideas that the world would later know as “Herzl’s Zionism” were heard, a generation earlier, in the synagogue of a Sephardic rabbi. Rabbi Alqalay, like his teacher Rabbi Bibas, ended his days in the land of Israel: he settled in Jerusalem in 1874 and passed away there in 1878.
We read Parashat Nitsavim every year on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, in the middle of the season of Teshuvah, when every Jew is occupied with his personal return: examining his actions, confessing, correcting. That personal work is indispensable. But as we do it, the parashah reminds us of the first and primary Teshuvah of the Torah: the return of Am Israel to its land, from the farthest corners of the world — a prophecy written more than three thousand years ago, which our generation has been privileged to see with its own eyes.
