Summer is a busy time in the arrivals hall at Ben Gurion Airport. In addition to the tourists coming to the Holy Land and the vacationers returning from trips abroad, thousands of new immigrants arrive every July and August, most of them families timing the move so their children can begin the school year in September.
Moving your whole life across the world is overwhelmingly expensive. Alongside the Jewish organizations that provide help and support, a number of Christian organizations offer financial assistance to Jews making aliyah as well.
Read that last sentence again with two thousand years of Jewish history in mind. Christians paying to bring Jews home.
Our Torah portion this week appears to leave no room for such a thing. Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12–11:25) is Moses at his most uncompromising. Burn the carved images of their gods, he tells Israel (Deuteronomy 7:25). You shall devour all the peoples the Lord your God delivers to you (7:16). And lest anyone mistake the conquest for a reward, he adds that Israel is not entering the land on account of its own righteousness at all, but because of the wickedness of the nations already living there (9:5). Where in that speech is there room for a gentile partner?
The answer sits in a different verse in the Torah portion.
Notice how strange the construction is. Moses is about to make the boldest claim in the Torah — that out of all humanity, God selected one family. Before he makes it, he insists on something that would seem to work against him. Everything is God’s. The heavens, every acre on earth, every nation standing on it. Only then does he say: and He chose you.
Moses is not being modest. He is telling Israel what its chosenness is made of. A god who belonged to one people alone would be a tribal deity, and being picked by him would mean nothing outside the tribe. The God who selected Abraham’s grandchildren is the same God who owns the Assyrians and the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and that is precisely what gives the selection its weight. Election here is not a preference. It is an assignment handed down by the Owner of everyone.
Three verses later Moses drives the point past the possibility of misunderstanding. The God of gods and Lord of lords, he says, shows no favoritism and takes no bribe, executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him bread and clothing. Therefore you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (10:17-19). Moses has just finished telling Israel it was chosen above all peoples, and now he tells Israel that God cannot be bribed and that He loves the outsider. Both statements belong to the same paragraph, and the verse sitting between them commands Israel to circumcise the foreskin of its heart (10:16). The quarrel Moses is picking with Canaan was never with nations. It was with idolatry.
This is the ground on which Universal Zionism stands. Israel’s particularity is real, permanent, and not up for negotiation — and it exists to serve a purpose that reaches every nation on earth. The nations are not asked to become Jews, and the covenant is not transferable. What is on offer is a share in the work.
Which brings us to the haftarah (reading from the Prophets), the second of the seven prophecies of consolation read between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year).
It opens with Zion’s accusation. “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14). God answers that a mother could sooner forget her child, that Zion is engraved on His palms, that her walls stand before Him always. Then He tells her how the return will actually happen:
Rashi explains that the standard is a physical pole with a cloth fastened at the top — the signal an army raises to muster scattered forces. God does not merely permit the nations to help. He hoists a flag and calls them in, and what He assigns them to carry is Jewish children.
The word Isaiah chooses to describe those kings is omnayich, from the root meaning to foster or nurture. It appears at another unforgettable moment in Scripture. Out in the wilderness, worn down by a complaining nation, Moses turns on God and demands, “Did I conceive all these people? Did I bring them forth, that You should say to me, carry them in your bosom, as an omen carries a child, to the land You swore to their fathers?” (Numbers 11:12). Moses cannot do it alone, and he says so in exactly those words. Centuries later Isaiah supplies an answer. Kings of the nations will do the carrying.
Zion’s complaint was that she had been forgotten. Isaiah answers that God has not forgotten her — and that He will summon the nations of the world to prove it.
So when a family walks into the terminal at Ben Gurion this August with everything they own in four suitcases, and some part of what got them there came from a church on the other side of the world, we are not looking at charity, or at interfaith goodwill, or at a public relations win for the State of Israel.
We are looking at Isaiah’s prophecy in action. We are looking at Universal Zionism.
