Why Jerusalem Day is Anti-Messianic: On ‘Negative’ and ‘Positive’ Unification

(thoughts from the Jerusalem Day sermons of Rav Shagar)

We Jews are not in a good place

We Jews are not in a good place. For many reasons, and in many ways. In a previous Substack I suggested that October 7 was the inverted finale of 1967. I want to suggest here it may extend back even further; dare I say to the prophets themselves. When you talk to Jews today on the political right, one hears expressions of exasperation, anger, and fear about the rise of antisemitism, and the various reasons that caused it. When you talk to Jews today on the political left, you hear exasperation, anger, and even horror of the acts committed in their name in Gaza, the death, destruction and seemingly disregard for innocent life.

Jonathan Tobin recently published an essay in JRN (May 20, 2025) with the title, “The Ugly Truth is pro-Palestinian now means antisemitic.” The title itself is startling in various ways for anyone truly interested in Zionism. Tobin, of course, bases this alleged phenomenon on forces external to the Jews. What is happening to the Jews, while not focusing on what the Jews are doing (in this case, the war on Gaza) that may be complicit in this rise in antisemitism. When Hannah Arendt made such a claim of complicity in the 1950s and later in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was excoriated for even suggesting such a thing,

As I read Tobin, Jews bear no responsibility, even as they are in the throes of a war that is destroying an entire society. These actions seem to be beside the point, or at least defensible. In his article, Tobin never once mentions the devastating war on Gaza, only “the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks of southern Israel.” He never mentions the 56-year occupation, land expropriation, Palestinians in prisons for years without being charged with a crime, or expulsions. Not once. He simply regards Palestinian resistance, and by extension pro-Palestinianism, in all its forms as an example of age-old antisemitism. This is all intentional. I cite Tobin’s essay not because it is exceptional but because it is typical. It is as startling as it is predictable.

This external analysis, that is, what is happening to us, is often convenient and self-serving. I would call it “self-affirming secularism.” I would rather focus on what is going on inside us, that is, I want to give us agency to see where we are, as sovereign actors, partially responsible for where we are. This I would call “self-critical prophetism.” This approach is not about “blaming the victim” precisely because what Zionism was supposed to accomplish, and what sadly it has not, is that we do not see ourselves as victims. Those who see Hamas, or the protesters, as the sole causes here actually undermines the entire Zionist project of agency in my view. In their presentation, our agency is only in our reaction to negativity, it is never agency that initiates, or is at least complicit, in such reactions.

This itself illustrates the way in which a Zionist approach combines the new sense of responsibility (sovereignty) with the older stance of victimhood (persecution). This is implied in those who argue that protesting a devastating war and standing for the cause of a people who have been demonstrably persecuted and oppressed for most of our lifetimes, regardless of if you agree with their protest or not, is “antisemitic.” You can strongly disagree with it, but claiming it is antisemitic seems highly problematic (slogans that may indeed cross over into antisemitism should be duly acknowledged and contested). In a sense, it implies the state has now fully replaced, embodied, and become indistinguishable from, a people? Think about that? Israel (and by this argument, the Jews), can act in any manner it sees fit, and one cannot stand up and contest that without being accused of antisemitism? If that exceptionalism is not a double standard, what is?

Anyone interested in antisemitism would be upset with that for three reasons. First, it fully collapses “the Jews” and Israel (antisemites like to do that), or as others have said “Israel is the collective Jew.” Second, it creates a reversal of an age-old set of priorities, now suggesting that Judaism no longer dictates the primary force of Jewish life, nationalism does. Judaism now serves the state. Third, the acquisition of power that stood at the very center of the Zionist project and the challenges it, have now born some fruit. For many of us, this is a dark picture. And those choices are very much a part of where we are. Pure survivalism. “Untouchable Israel” is precisely the “abnormality” Zionism sought to alleviate. It is simply the mirror image of “Indefensible Israel.” Here Israel’s defenders of this war, and its antisemitic detractors, are reading from the same playbook.

It illustrates that the forces of victimhood remained so strong, that instead of extinguishing victimhood, as Zionism sought to do, it morphed into a different register. The register of power. Always defended, as all exercises of power are defended. We cannot correct course if we don’t first recognize we are off course. And that is why we are not in a good place.

It seems to me that we Jews, from all walks of life, beliefs, and practices, are walking, yelling at one another, toward a cliff. We are so taken up in the stakes of the argument we don’t see that we are even walking toward a cliff. And if we fall off the cliff, as we are falling, each side will blame the other for the fall.

I am not advocating unity or even solidarity here. I do not believe in either definitively. If we would stop arguing, we would die. As Nahman of Bratslav teaches, the argument is the very source of redemption. “There is an argument (makhloket) for the sake of heaven that is very high, higher even than peace, because this argument is the embodiment of love and a great peace.” (Likkutei Moharan I:56.8). But that is not where we are, or where we are going. To paraphrase something Jacob Neusner said about Jews’ relationship to the Holocaust, if we don’t change course, we will become worse then irrelevant; we will become uninteresting.

Jerusalem Day

I want to use this as a frame to look at Jerusalem Day. Jerusalem Day is a day set aside to celebrate the “unification” of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. If Israel Independence Day was about 1948, Jerusalem Day is about 1967. I put “unification” in quotes here because, as I see it, that is part of the problem. Jerusalem Day has become Jewish Nationalism Day. And Jewish Nationalism Day has become a day where Jews are permitted to celebrate by parading through the streets of Jerusalem, even, or specifically, East (Arab) Jerusalem, and chant nationalist, and sometimes openly racist, slogans. If people like Tobin think “From the River to the Sea” is “antisemitic,” what would he think of “death to the Arabs,” which is chanted every Jerusalem Day with no consequences?

I want to explore the anti-messianism of Jerusalem Day as celebrated through a series of Jerusalem Day sermons Rav Shagar a religious Zionist rabbi highly critical of religious Zionism who died in 2007 at the age of 57. It is well-known that Jerusalem Day celebrates the ostensible “reunification” of Jerusalem. This “unification” inserted the religious, and messianic, elements into the Zionist project that has resulted in Jerusalem Day being a celebration of messianic nationalism throughout the city. Is this a good thing? Does is move things more toward a messianic vision of peace, or a (false) messianic vision of conquest? Framing them as a distinction between negative and positive unification, borrowing from Isaiah Berlin, I offer my thoughts below.

Berlin’s Negative and Positive Liberty

I frame my reading of Shagar through Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty in his famous essay “Two Types of Liberty.” Isaiah Berlin created an important and much debated distinction between negative and positive liberty (or freedom, he uses freedom and liberty interchangeably). Briefly put, for Berlin, negative liberty is expressed through the lack of external constraints or interference from others to enable me to do what I want. Berlin defines positive liberty as “the wish…to be one’s own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not in any external forces of whatever kind I wish to be an instrument of my own, not of other’s men’s, acts of will.” (“Two Concepts of Liberty” in Berlin, Liberty, 178). Negative liberty suggests lack of restraint, positive liberty, self-realization. Each has its benefits and detriments. Below I use Berlin’s frame to understand Jerusalem Day as celebrated today as an anti-messianic act where the shortcomings of both negative and positive liberty are manifest.

Rav Shagar on Jerusalem Day

In May 2005 a few months before the Gaza disengagement, Rav Shagar gave a sermon on Jerusalem Day. The disengagement from Gaza was looming, Shagar was already suffering from a disease that would take his life two years later, and the time was particularly fraught for his religious Zionist community. His focus in this sermon was to suggest that Jerusalem represents more than a city, Jerusalem embodies an experiment. And more specifically, its “unification” invariably inserts religious and messianic meaning into the entire Zionist project, raising the stakes considerably. The city is contrasted with the land, both in terms of its sanctity and its role in the redemptive vision of the tradition. He writes,

“Jerusalem Day celebrates numerous aspects of the people. To some, it appears as the problem of dwelling in Zion. Why is Jerusalem to heart of the conflict? Why is it viewed as the core of the discrepancy among the Jews themselves and other nations around us? The answer is that the conquering of Jerusalem (in 1967) overturned, or exposed, the religious roots of our struggle with the Palestinians (‘aravim). Jerusalem overturned the entire Zionist project or, from the perspective of religious Zionism, the messianic process… Jerusalem is the center of the project of ‘returning to Zion’ for the right, and fear (of its repercussions) for the left. (Shagar, Bayom HaHu, 341).”

For Shagar, Jerusalem inserted a religious-messianic element to the rationalism of Zionism as the normalization of the Jews for the simple reason that according to tradition, Jerusalem is the dwelling place of the shekhina, or God manifest on earth. In some ways Jerusalem threatens to undermine the secular Zionist project of “normalization” more than is often acknowledged. But it also presents an opportunity to reframe the Jews’ return to the land in a (universalistic) “messianic” way, to embrace the notion that the city of God is inhabited by another people who claim legitimate rights to it. Or more broadly, it inserts the universal components of the particularistic Zionist project, as the prophet Isaiah envisioned Jerusalem as a place for worship for all peoples. Yet one of the central tenets of Jerusalem Day is the opposite; it is this notion of ownership, unification, completion. Shagar resists that and considers it a tragic, and as I read him, anti-messianic, error.

Two Types of Unification

I want to borrow Berlin’s two types of liberty, positive and negative (and admittedly take it out of context), to suggest that there are two types of unification. There is unification that absorbs, and unification that erases. The first is constructive unification, I would say “messianic unification,” the latter destruction unification, or “anti-messianic unification.” It seems clear to me that the unification that erases has won out as we see through the parades in the streets of Jerusalem, a unification of “Jerusalem is ours.” It embodies Berlin’s “negative” model expressed as “a lack of external constraints or interference from others to enable me to do what I want.” Sovereignty over Jerusalem is interpreted as the removal of political constraints of justice. It presents itself to be messianic, but in fact is just the opposite. It is a unification that erases, and as such it is anti-messianic, because Jerusalem is a symbol not of erasure but absorption. On this point, Shagar writes,

“The deep problematic that Jerusalem presents us with points to a solution that will require new vessels, and a new light. Jerusalem can be a city of all peoples, where all religions can call on God’s name. A national place – the inheritance of our ancestors – and an international place – in one. The messianic vision merged with the general vision of universal peace merges in this city. The spiritual essence of the Jewish people, that merges with the other who is also created in the divine image. These two merge in Jerusalem, “a city of righteousness, a city of faith.” (Isaiah 1:26).

It is only the merging of these two – the particular and the universal – that will bring redemption whereby Israel will become a light to the nations, and not only to itself. (Shagar Bayom HaHu, 344).”

Shagar rejects the notion that the universal is set aside for the future as prophesied in Isaiah. Positive unification is, as Berlin defines positive liberty, “a wish to be an instrument of my own, not of other’s men’s, acts of will.” That is, as Shagar reads it, to embrace and make room for the other as part of a universal vision of peace in the now. Only when the universal becomes an integral and active part of the very vision, both in its process, and implementation. He writes,

“The uniqueness of Jerusalem is the ability to contain opposites, The sages intimate this in its very name. Jerusalem is the combination of the name given to it by Abraham “fear” (yireh) and the name given to it by Melchizedek, “peace” (shalem). The “fear” refers to its national nature, and the shalem to its universality.”

Any unification that does not contain both is a negative unification that does not move us toward redemption but undermines the very notion of redemption. There is no ownership of Jerusalem that does not embrace its universality, as that is precisely the nature of Jerusalem. There is no Abrahamic Jerusalem without a Melchizedek Jerusalem. On the ground, he rejects any notion of unification that does not also embrace its Palestinian residents, not as objects of Jewish sovereignty, but as subjects of Jerusalem itself. The erasure of the other is antithetical to the very nature of Jerusalem. If Jerusalem is unified, it is not unified from someone else, it is unified with someone else.

This is why, I think, Jerusalem presents both a problem and an opportunity. But I want to reverse the order. Instead of being a celebration for the right, and fear for the left (as Shagar suggested), it should be fear for the right and a celebration for the left. Inserting the religious component (which bring joy to the “right” and trepidation to the “left”) holds the potential for positive unification of self-fulfillment, not of exclusion, but the fulfillment of inclusion, since for Shagar there is no messianism that is not universal, not only in its vision but in its implementation. The land and the state do not unify, but the city, must.

In a previous sermon “The Sanctity of Jerusalem: Between the City and the Desert,” citing Maimonides, Shagar claims that the sanctity of Jerusalem after the second exile is perennial specifically because it is no longer essential (it lost its essential sanctity after the destruction of the First Temple). It awaits its fullness in the ability to see it as that which transcends the return to the homeland. By representing the divine on earth, it resists and then overcomes the propensity to slide into anti-messianic particularity. That is, to reverse Rav Kook’s aspiration, to enable the sacred to be sacralized by the profane.

In yet another Jerusalem Day sermon responding to Oslo, Shagar makes the point even stronger,

“Peace is not the product of the synthesis of two opposing forces but the accumulation of the critical mass of one side that brings it to a place of being able to offer a place to the “other.” That is, to “sacrifice its life” (masur et nafsho). The desired peace is not a compromise, of land, or of nationhood. To the contrary, it is a product of nationality in its fullness, the very foundations of the true covenant. Trust (betahon) and its depths make it possible for a person and community to open its inner strength to bring it to a place of relinquishing one’s right for the other. That is the true building of Jerusalem that emerges as the product of the determination to relinquish to/for the other. That is peace that is also a sanctification of the divine name, that comes from the deep recesses of the heart. (Shagar, Bayom HaHu, 331).”

The messianic vision of the prophets is nothing if not a vision of justice. This contains a certain irrationality. Can I, should I, sacrifice my own desire for freedom because in doing do the other is not free? Berlin asks this question. “If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which pronounces this is unjust and immoral.” (“Two Types of Liberty,” 172). But Berlin is less sanguine about the sacrifice. “But if I curtail or lose my freedom in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby increase the liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs.”

Here I would suggest Berlin’s caveat is because he doesn’t speak in a messianic register. His is a purely secular analysis of society in an Enlightenment register. But Jerusalem is that which rejects that purely secular analysis, an argument that one can make in a Zionism of the land, that is, in 1948 (setting aside for the moment the injustice of that act itself). Jerusalem upsets the rationality of Zionism and creates an irrational component necessary for moving it forward. Jerusalem presents us with an act of faith toward justice, and against an act of rationalizing toward justification. If the messianic means anything, it means acting against survivalism, as survivalism is not an act of faith, but a rejection of it.

What has happened to Jerusalem Day is sadly just the opposite, it has taken the prophetic nature of Jerusalem as an insertion of the messianic, secularized it, and made it an occasion for “negative unification.” That is, “releasing all constraints to do as I please,” through an act of force. Such “negative unification’ is not the sanctification of Jerusalem but the sacralization of the Jerusalem of the prophets. The negative freedom “to do what I want” is exercised through the prevention of others pursuing the freedom they too deserve. It erases the prophetic vision of Jerusalem as universal because it houses the divine, collapsing it into the “particular” as a celebration of false ownership, and the right to exercise power to maintain it. But Jerusalem is not “ours,” nor has it ever been. Jerusalem represents divine residence on earth. Jerusalem is, by definition, an international city, as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi proposed in his “Open Letter to Teddy Kollek” (included in his Paradigm Shift). But instead of reaching toward its prophetic purpose, Jerusalem Day has become the sacralization of Jerusalem in the rejection of its prophetic force, and potential.

We can, as many of us do, blame the other for our reactions, justify our behavior as legitimate forms of response, but that is an act of secularization that, with Shagar, I reject, in principle, and in practice. Jerusalem Day has become an opportunity missed, and it is no one’s fault but our own.