Zionism

The founders of Zionism stated their goal as the desire to have a state where “Jewish criminals are arrested by Jewish police officers, tried before Jewish judges and incarcerated in a Jewish prison.” Basically, they wanted to have a nation like any other nation.

It has occurred to me that this goal is off the mark. The desire should be to have a state where there are no Jewish criminals, no need for Jewish police offices or Judges or prisons. We should be setting our sights higher than being a nation like any other nation – our goal should be to be “A light onto the nations”. Many years ago, the Jews brought to the world many important concepts.

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place." (Paul Johnson, Christian historian, author of A History of the Jews and A History of Christianity)

Our goal for the modern State of Israel should be no less lofty.