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October 2006
The Jewish Word
Searching for Zion
Evan R. Goldstein
“Zion” is everywhere. The lyrics of bass-thumping reggae music are peppered with references to Zion. It’s the name of the enlightened underground city in the futuristic film The Matrix. African-American churches from Harlem to the rural South bear its name. There is also a dark vision of Zion, like the book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian czarist forgery that remains a perennial bestseller across the Middle East today.
The term Zion may be ubiquitous, but do we really know what it means? Oft confused with Zionism—the Jewish nationalist movement—the word originated in the second millennium B.C.E., when Jerusalem was inhabited by the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe. The Jebusites called their hilltop fortress “Zion,” a Canaanite word meaning “hill” or “height.” The name first migrated into Jewish texts in II Samuel: “Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David.” The passage refers to King David’s conquest of the Jebusite hilltop fortress in the city he would rename Jerusalem.
History has since blurred many of these particulars, and Zion is now synonymous with Jerusalem, the Promised Land, the Jewish people and the messianic notion that a reconstituted Jewish nation will resolve all tension between the Jew and the world.
For almost 3,000 years, the idea of Zion has served as the touchstone of Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Every Amidah prayer contains the petition: “Let our eyes behold Thy return in mercy unto Zion.” In the homes of some Orthodox Jews living outside Israel, you can still find a vacant wall, a reminder of their mourning for the Temple and separation from Jerusalem. It is this centrality of Zion to Zionism—even for the secular minded—that necessitated that the Jewish nation be rebuilt on the land God promised to Abraham. Zion provides a platform on which non- and even anti-religious Jews can stand together with the pious.
Some scholars argue that the word tziyon derives from the Hebrew word tziyun, which means a sign or a mark. In this sense, Zion is a distinction. In 1791 when Jews were granted full French citizenship in the wake of the French Revolution and began their integration into the modern world, they were forced to reconcile the innate conflict between pining for Zion and becoming full-fledged citizens of a non-Jewish nation. From the Dreyfus Affair to the AIPAC scandal, charges of dual loyalty have plagued Jews and helped foster the notion that only in Zion can Jews be truly free.
In the mid-19th century, the ideal of Zion commenced its journey from the realm of metaphysical expectation to temporal history, from passive spiritual longing to political action. Gradually, the ingathering of the exiles became redefined as a human rather than a divine assignment. Spurred by vicious pogroms in 1881, secularist Jews in the Black Sea city of Odessa formed the underground Hebrew cultural society called Hibat Zion—“the Love of Zion.” Imbued with revolutionary zeal and the critical financial support of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, the immigration to Palestine began.
The Jewish national project was heralded by its advocates as an event suffused with holy significance, distinct from the multitude of rising European nationalisms at the time. In his 1862 pamphlet, Seeking Zion, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer writes: “All the other peoples have striven only for the sake of their own national honor; how much more should we exert ourselves, for our duty is to labor not only for the glory of our ancestors but for the glory of God, who chose Zion.” Zion, the city of David, was the idealized Israel.
The real Israel, as many pilgrims learned upon arrival in 19th-century Palestine, was something of a neglected provincial town. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert described it as, “Ruins everywhere, and everywhere the odor of graves… The Holy City of three religions is rotting away from boredom, desertion and neglect.”
It is a bitter irony of Jewish history that for some success in reaching Zion bred disillusionment. Consider this poem by Israel’s most famous poet, the late Yehuda Amichai, entitled “Mt. Zion”:
What have you piled on this mountain—
a trash heap of faiths,
like my hope that is no more.
It is terrible to see the land
from afar and not enter it,
but it is more terrible
to enter it.
Today, the concept of Zion has nearly been subsumed by “Zionism.” It is the ideological fashion to take the obvious—the Jew is not an angel, Zion no utopia—and condemn the whole enterprise and an entire people. Anger at “Zionist crimes” is a prominent feature of protest rallies around the world, where anti-Semitism often masquerades as anti-Zionism. Since its inception, of course, Zionism has had its Jewish critics, too—from religious Jews who wished the return to the promised land to remain a divine enterprise, to secular leftists who consider Israel’s current borders illegitimate.
Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, meaning “the hope,” speaks of the yearning “to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” Walking down the streets of Tel Aviv, one is greeted by a common graffiti message: “Know Hope.” Even in Israel itself, the search for Zion marches on.