Jews and Israel: a tribal connection

Jews and Israel: A Tribal Connection

Tonight we sit down to the Seder. We’ll eat the matzah, dip the herbs, sing the songs. The children will ask why this night is different from all other nights, and we’ll tell them - as our parents told us, and their parents told them - the story of how we left Egypt. Slavery to freedom. It’s the central story of our people, told the same way, at the same time of year, for longer than almost anything else in human civilisation has been done continuously.

And at the end of the evening, when the food is eaten and the songs are sung and the children have finally gone to bed, we’ll say the same words Jews have said at the close of every Seder for as long as the Seder has existed: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Those words speak to me, every year, about what we are - about what it means to be a Jew. And it’s worth trying to articulate it, because a great deal of what’s being said about us lately - about our identity, our attachments, our relationship to a small piece of land on the eastern Mediterranean - is said by people who, I think, simply can’t relate to what they’re describing. So let me try to describe it as I understand it.

What are Jews? We’re not a religion - you can be entirely secular and still Jewish. Nobody’s going to throw you out. We’re not a nationality - you can be British or French or Ethiopian and still be one of us. We’re not an ethnicity, either - a Yemeni Jew and a Lithuanian Jew and a Jew from Mumbai look about as similar as a Cornish fisherman and a Kyoto ceramicist. What we share isn’t, it seems to me, blood. It’s story. And while we don’t seek converts in the way that Christianity or Islam does, we welcome anyone of any background who has sincerely joined.

None of the standard categories quite fit. The best word I can find - the one that makes sense of everything else - is older than the categories. I think we’re a tribe.

A tribe is a specific thing. It’s a collective that functions like an extended family. It has a shared story that its members carry, whether or not they can recite every chapter. It has customs and obligations that bind members to each other - including members they’ve never met. It has loyalty that isn’t earned transaction by transaction but inherited. And it has a place - a homeland that anchors the tribe’s identity, whether or not every member lives there.

The concept is familiar enough when applied to others. The Navajo have their Dinétah between the four sacred mountains; even Navajo who’ve lived in cities for generations maintain that connection. The Aboriginal Australians have over sixty thousand years of continuous relationship between people and country, expressed through Songlines that map both the physical land and the spiritual identity of the people who belong to it. The Māori introduce themselves not by their job title but by their mountain and their river, because that’s what tells you who they are. Nobody finds these connections strange. Nobody asks these peoples to separate their identity from their land.

This isn’t as unusual even today as people in the modern West tend to think. Most of the Gulf Arab states operate on essentially tribal principles. Take Qatar. If you’re a foreign man living there - and nationals make up barely twelve per cent of the population - the path to citizenship requires twenty-five consecutive years of legal residence, during which you may not leave for more than two months in any given year. You must speak Arabic, demonstrate good character, and have a lawful income. Then you may apply - entering a process with no defined procedure, overseen by Emiri decree, with a cap of roughly fifty approvals per year for the entire country. If granted citizenship, you must renounce every other nationality you hold. And even then, you will never quite be what a born Qatari is. There is a legal distinction between citizens by descent - those whose families were in Qatar before 1930 - and everyone else. The tribe knows its own.

In the post-Westphalian settlement, the West reorganised itself around the state-citizen contract and civic principles a few centuries ago, and then forgot that most of the world didn’t. I raise Qatar not to criticise - they’re entitled to organise themselves as they see fit - but because it makes what follows easier to understand.

If I’m right that we’re a tribe, I want to dwell on that for a moment before I say anything about place, because there’s a richness in it that gets lost when the conversation turns too quickly to geopolitics.

Being a tribe means we have obligations to each other. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh - all Israel are responsible for one another - isn’t a slogan. It’s an operating principle. When a Jewish community on the other side of the world is in trouble, we feel it in our stomachs. When the Haggadah says tonight “let all who are hungry come and eat,” it’s talking to the extended family, wherever they are.

Being a tribe means we carry a shared story. The Haggadah we’ll read tonight includes an image I love: the rabbis sitting up all night in Bnei Brak, so absorbed in discussing the Exodus that their students had to come in and tell them dawn had arrived and it was time for the morning Shema. Five of the greatest scholars in Jewish history, and they talked through the night - not because they didn’t know the story, but because they knew it so well that every detail generated another question, another interpretation, another argument. That image says something, I think, about what kind of tribe we are: one that considers the interrogation of its own story to be an activity so important you might accidentally do it until sunrise.

Being a tribe means we have customs that mark us out - not as superior, but as us. The rhythm of Shabbat. The way we mourn, with shiva and kaddish. The fact that a Jewish conversation almost never arrives at a conclusion but always generates three more questions, and everyone considers this a feature rather than a bug.

And this tribe - our warm, argumentative, exasperating, resilient extended family - has, I believe, a place. The place is Israel.

I don’t say this as theology, though you could. I don’t say it as politics, though others will try to make it so. I say it as something I believe the evidence - historical, archaeological, narrative, and practical - overwhelmingly supports, and that has been continuously expressed for at least two and a half thousand years.

The archaeology alone is inarguable in the way that rocks tend to be. The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription from around 1208 BCE, contains the earliest known reference to Israel - placing us in the land of Canaan over three thousand years ago. The Tel Dan Stele, ninth century BCE, mentions the “House of David.” Two tiny silver amulets found in Jerusalem, seventh or sixth century BCE, carry the priestly blessing from the Book of Numbers - the oldest surviving biblical text, four centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thousands of Hebrew inscriptions track the development of the language across the land over centuries. The whole country is, in archaeological terms, essentially a Jewish library buried underground.

But archaeology isn’t really the point. The point is how the tribe lived its relationship to this place - even in exile.

Three times a day, Jews face Jerusalem to pray. The Amidah, the central prayer, mentions Jerusalem. The Shema speaks of the land of Israel. The birkat hamazon, the grace mumbled through at every Friday night dinner from Golders Green to Buenos Aires, asks for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. At a wedding - the most joyful ceremony in Jewish life - the groom stamps on a glass in memory of the Temple’s destruction two thousand years ago, and the words spoken come from Psalm 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.”

If that sounds familiar, it might be because Boney M had a number one hit with the first verse of the same psalm in 1978. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.” One of the best-selling singles in British chart history, and the lyrics are a Jewish lament from the sixth century BCE. The yearning of our tribe for its place was so potent, so universally recognisable as a human emotion, that it became a disco anthem. People who’d never met a Jew in their lives sang along, because the feeling needed no translation: we had a home, we lost it, and we ached to go back. The whole world understood this. Danced to it, in fact. It’s strange, then, that the same connection which was obvious enough to sell two million records becomes, in other contexts, so controversial. You’ve probably danced to it yourself. Possibly at a Jewish wedding, which has a certain circularity I think the psalmist would have appreciated.

And it goes deeper than prayer and ceremony. The tribe has agricultural laws - orlah, chadash, terumah, maaser, shmitta - that apply differently in Israel, or only in Israel. Observant farmers there still give the land its sabbatical rest every seventh year. These aren’t abstract commandments. They’re the operating manual of a tribe in its homeland, and they assume, as naturally as breathing, that we will return to it.

Which brings us back to the Seder table. I should say clearly: I’m not asserting that the Exodus happened exactly as the Haggadah tells it. Scholars argue about the historicity and they’re welcome to. That isn’t the point. Every tribe has a founding narrative - the Navajo have their emergence story, the Māori their voyage of the great canoes - and what matters isn’t whether every detail can be verified by a footnote. What matters is that this is our story, the one we’ve told each other every year for millennia, the one that shapes how we understand ourselves. And the Exodus isn’t a story about freedom in the abstract. It’s a story about a specific journey from a specific place to a specific destination. From Egypt - slavery - to Israel - home. The tribe was formed in motion, walking towards a place. And every year we end the retelling with the same words. “Next year in Jerusalem.” Not next year in a better state of mind. Not next year in a metaphorical place of spiritual fulfilment. The city. On the map. Where it’s always been.

I want to be clear about what I’m doing here. There are many ways to articulate the Jewish connection to Israel. You can make a theological case, rooted in covenant and divine promise. A political case, born of Herzl and the necessity of a state. A legal case, grounded in international law. These are all real arguments, held by serious people, and I don’t dismiss any of them.

But that’s not what I’m doing tonight. As Pesach comes in, I simply want to notice what seems to me plainly there. That we are, in the way I’ve tried to describe, a tribe. That our tribe was formed in a story about a journey to a specific place. That for two and a half thousand years, every significant practice of the tribe - its prayers, its ceremonies, its agricultural laws, its central narrative - has placed that land at its heart.

When people tell me they have no problem with Jews, only with our connection to Israel, I try to take them at their word. But what they’re asking is for us to separate ourselves from the thing that has made us a tribe since before Babylon was a superpower and Rome was a village. Strip it away and you don’t get some purified, acceptable version of Jewishness. You get a people defined entirely by what has been done to them rather than by what they are - the wandering, rootless, grateful guest, whose existence depends on the continued hospitality of others.

We tried that. For two thousand years, we tried that. It didn’t go well.

Which is not a reason for self-pity. It’s a reason for clarity.

And it means something else, too, which I think needs saying. We cannot be expected - it isn’t reasonable to ask, and it isn’t possible to deliver - not to feel. When Jews are in danger, anywhere in the world, we feel it, because they’re our family. When something happens in Israel, we feel it, because it’s our place. This isn’t a political affiliation. It isn’t dual loyalty, that old slander dressed up in new clothes. It’s what being part of a tribe means. An Irish American whose heart clenches during a documentary about the Troubles isn’t being disloyal to America. A British Sikh who cares deeply about what happens in Punjab isn’t failing some test of Britishness. And a British Jew who feels an emotional connection to Israel and to Jews around the world isn’t choosing between identities. Those things coexist, as they always have, without the slightest friction - just as I wrote in a different essay about being British and Jewish at once. The tribe and the nation ask different things of you, and a person can honour both.

So tonight we’ll sit at the table. We’ll tell the story. We’ll eat the bitter herbs and taste the sweetness of freedom and sing Dayenu - “it would have been enough” - though of course it never is, because Jews always want one more verse and one more argument and one more piece of brisket. And we’ll say the words at the end, the ones we’ve been saying since long before anyone had heard of Theodor Herzl, or the United Nations, or the modern state of anything at all.

Next year in Jerusalem.

We are a tribe. We have a story. We have a place. These things are not separate. They have never been separate. And we made a promise, a very long time ago, that we wouldn’t forget.