For from the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.
Bamidbar 23:9
In studying the Jewish people, one is confronted with something that does not sit easily within the categories of history or sociology. Empires rise and fall; cultures flourish and vanish. But Israel remains — small, often powerless, often scattered, yet stubbornly present.
“Everything is miracle in this incomparable people,” writes Christian author S.R.L Gaussen:
Its history, its origin, its fall, its dispersion, its stubbornness.
The contempt with which nations treat them who owe everything to them, who know the glamour of their past and the still greater brilliance of their future.
Add to this the unprecedented fact that this people alone, among all the other nations, forms one family and that this family though homeless and miserable kept itself isolated from the rest of mankind….
This fact alone would be an undeniable miracle, even if the prophet Bilaam thirty-four centuries ago, at the frontier of Moab had not said: “For from the top of the rocks I see them, and from the hills I behold them: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”[1]
Bilaam’s strange prophecy is not a blessing of isolation, but of persistence. Israel is “alone” not because it wishes to be alone, but because it carries something that cannot be fully translated into the language of other civilizations. It needs to stay separate out of necessity.
The Maharal of Prague writes that Israel exists not merely within history but it also beyond history—bound to a covenant rather than to a cycle of rise and decay.[2]
This refusal is neither nationalism nor a sense of superiority. It is something far more unsettling and far more demanding: a sense of being bound to a task. Judaism is not merely a culture, a religion, or a civilization. It is a vocation.
Identity is not chosen
Modern culture insists that identity is something we choose. We are expacted to choose our affiliations, our values, and our commitments as if selecting a product from a shelf. Judaism insists on something deeply countercultural: that identity is received long before it is chosen.
A Jew does not invent his or her calling. A Jew answers a call.
Rav Kook writes that holiness is not something we construct; it is something we uncover by aligning ourselves with a deeper current of being.[3] When God calls Avraham, He does not say: “Create yourself.” He says: Lech lecha — “Go toward yourself.” That is as if to say: you do not invent who you are. You uncover it by walking.
Modern man wishes to choose his identity. The Jew is asked to receive his. This is not a comfortable place to be! It leaves little room for reticence. It leaves little room for neutrality. It demands that one stand somewhere — and therefore that one stand out.
Perhaps this is why Jewish existence has always been uneasy. And perhaps this is also why it has lasted.
The dignity of non-adaptation
The modern world has tried to tell the Jews a seductive story: adapt, and you will be safe. Translate yourself, and you will be loved. Become less strange, and you will belong.
It has never worked.
When the famous Jewish writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970) and mathematician Professor Robert Aumann (1930-) received their Nobel Prizes in 1966 and 2005, what struck many was not only their intellectual achievement, but their refusal to translate themselves into a more comfortable social situation. After celebrating Shabbat according to Jewish law, praying the evening prayers and making havdalah as Jews have done for thousands of years, they each proceeded to the hall where the King of Sweden waited for them to grant them this unprecedented award.
Here stood two Jews who had pride in showing their dedication to religious Judaism in front of all mankind, as few Jews have ever been able to do. They did not hide their observance of Shabbat. They did not apologize for their Judaism. They simply carried it with pride.
They appeared before the King of Sweden wearing a kippah, recited the brachah said upon seeing a non-Jewish king, and, sitting among the nobility and famous gentiles of the world, they ate kosher food at the festive meal.
Unlike so many other Jews who’ve received the Nobel prize, S.Y. Agnon and Professor Auman did not act like “Maranos”—Jews in hiding. This is not about dress or ritual. It is about posture. Throughout Jewish history, survival has depended less on adaptability than on resistance.
The Jews of Alexandria adapted — and vanished. The Jews of Qumran resisted — and vanished too. But the rabbinic Jews, who neither dissolved into the world nor actively rebelled against it, survived by carrying tension rather than resolving it.
They learned Greek but prayed in Hebrew. They spoke Persian but studied Torah. They lived among others but not as others.
This balancing act between isolation and assimilation is Judaism’s fragile genius.
Obligation as freedom
The modern world associates freedom with the absence of obligation. Judaism, on the other hand, associates freedom as living with obligation.
The Torah does say that Israel was freed from Egypt in order to be free of all bonds, but so that Israel may be bound to a different Master, the God of Israel.
“Avadim hayinu le-Pharaoh — ata bnei chorin.” We were slaves to Pharaoh — now we are free.
But free for what purpose?
Rav Soloveitchik once wrote that covenantal man is not free from duty, but free for duty.[4]
This is why Judaism is experienced by many modern Jews as a burden. It is indeed heavy. But it carries the weight of meaning. A life without thinking, said Socrates, is not worth living. Judaism responds: a life without obligation is not worth to be born for.[5] To refuse our children that merit is like denying them life altogether.
In the spirit of Hamlet, our Kingdom may be bound by a nutshell and still count ourselves kings of infinite space. One is reminded of the great non-Jewish literary historian, A.L. Rowse (190-3-1997), who ended his memoirs with the following surprising sentence: “If there is any honor in the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.”[6]
The courage to be a people
It is often assumed that the great danger facing the Jewish people today is assimilation, that Jews are slowly disappearing into the surrounding world. This may be true — but I am not certain it is our biggest problem.
I am more troubled by something quieter and harder to see. I am troubled by the possibility that Judaism itself is becoming lighter. Not less visible — but less heavy. Not less present — but less commanding.
In the modern world we have learned to celebrate identity. We are less willing to accept obligation. We cherish memory, but we fear discipline. We speak passionately about meaning, but then grow uneasy when meaning begins to make demands upon us.
It is clear that many secular Jews do not reject Judaism for intellectual reasons but because they are afraid of the demands that Judaism makes on them.
But Judaism was never meant to be easy. It must be carried. An identity that can be carried easily can just as easily be left behind as inconsequential. An identity that insists on being carried with effort, with care, with inconvenience, may survive and have substantive influence.
Ambivalence cannot sustain an identity. Trying to walk between multiple identities has created havoc in all of the Jewish world, including Israel. Attitudes which may have made sense to our grandparents have proven to be dysfunctional and in fact unrelated to the world in which we live. As Jews we have to face this and resolve the crisis before this destructive mentality overtakes us.
Perhaps this is what Bilaam saw from the mountains. Not a people that was proud, but a people that was bound—bound not by blood or land alone, but by a mission that refuses to loosen its grip.
And perhaps this is the secret of Jewish perseverance: not strength, not brilliance, not even faith — but an unwillingness to become weightless. A people that refuses to disappear. A people that refuses to dissolve. A people that dares to remain summoned.
And as long as Jews are willing to be bound by something greater than themselves, this small, difficult, and scorned people will continue to walk its lonely and blessed path through history.
Notes
[1] The Christian author S. R. L Gaussen, in Die Verkundnung des Evangeliums unter den Juden, quoted by Joseph Bloch, Israel and the Nations (Benjamin Harz, 1927), 376.
[2] Maharal, Netzach Yisrael, chap. 1.
[3] Rav Kook, Orot HaKodesh, vol. 1.
[4] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith.
[5] Bereshit 12:1; Shemot 20:2.
[6] A. L. Rowse, Historians I Have Known (Duckworth, 1995).
Questions to Ponder
- Do you feel that Judaism can survive as a “lifestyle” rather than a culture? Do you feel privileged to live a covenantal identity in a world of chosen identities, or do you feel your Jewish identity to be a burden?
- What do we owe our children more — freedom to become anything they want, or an inherited identity that gives meaning to their lives? Do you see a middle way between these extremes?
- In his poem “Caminante”, Antonio Machado once wrote: “Wanderer, your footsteps are the path and nothing else; Wander, there is no path, the path is made by walking.” Rav Kook’s reading of Lech lecha suggests something similar. And yet, he also suggests that becoming oneself requires submission to something beyond oneself. Have you ever felt in your own travels that some higher power was directing your to choose one path over another? How does this challenge modern ideas that our identities are autonomous choices?
- The essay claims that adaptation has never saved the Jews. Do you agree? Are there historical moments where adaptation seemed to work—or did it only delay disappearance?
- Rabbinic Judaism survived by maintaining tension rather than resolving it. What tensions do you think contemporary Judaism is trying—perhaps too hard—to resolve?
- Rabbi Cardozo writes that he fears the dilution of Judaism more than assimilation. Do you agree with this hierarchy of threats? Why or why not?
