Zionism with the second half put back

You can love this country, argue for it, serve in its army, bury people for it, and never once be told what the prophets say the place is actually for. That is not a failure of loyalty. It is a gap in what got passed down. This page closes it in about four minutes.

What does Zion actually mean?

Strip the name back and צִיּוּן, tziyun, is an ordinary noun meaning a marker, a signpost. Yechezkel uses it for a man who finds a bone in a field after a war and builds a marker beside it so the burial crews can find the spot later. In halacha graves are marked with the same word, and the marker is set beside the grave rather than on top of it, because a marker built over a thing becomes a roof and transmits what it was put there to warn about.

The name enters the story as a fortress David takes, and the verse records a renaming in the same breath: he captured the stronghold of Zion, that is the City of David (Shmuel II 5:7). Two names on one hill, and only one of them was given by a person.

Tzion: the place the world came out of

What goes out of Zion?

Two prophets, writing centuries apart, left the same sentence. What they say comes out of the place is not territory and not sovereignty.

כִּי מִצִּיּוֹן תֵּצֵא תוֹרָה וּדְבַר יְהוָה מִירוּשָׁלִָם

For from Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem. Yeshayahu 2:3 · Michah 4:2

What goes out is instruction, and the tradition gives instruction a physical property.

כִּי נֵר מִצְוָה וְתוֹרָה אוֹר

For a mitzvah is a lamp and Torah is light. Mishlei 6:23

Zion, then Torah, then light, in that order. The first spoken act of creation was light, and the Sages place Zion earlier still, with the world founded outward from one stone standing there (Yoma 54b).

Zion before the word

Then why is the peace verse quoted against us?

Across the street from the United Nations in New York there is a wall with Yeshayahu 2:4 cut into it, the swords beaten into plowshares. It is quoted at Israel far more often than it is quoted by Israel, usually as a reproach.

Verse 4 does not open that thought. It finishes the one in verse 3. Instruction goes out of Zion, the nations come to be taught, and only then does the metal change jobs. Read in the prophet’s own order, the sentence on that wall is not a complaint about Israel. It is a description of what happens downstream of a book coming out of this city.

Swords into plowshares, and the verse above it

Is Zionism religious?

The movement does not have to be, and many of the people who built the country were not. The name is a different matter: it carried a job for three thousand years before anybody organised a congress around it, and the job in the text is teaching.

None of that makes a secular Zionist wrong about anything. It is a note that the word has a second half.

Is Zionism religious?

Did the ancients know any of this?

Every old culture stacks the world on something, and the stack always needs a floor under the floor. Chagigah 12b builds exactly that stack, pillars on water on mountains on wind on storm, with a verse under every layer, and then refuses to add a sixth. The last term is an arm, and a page later it is one righteous man. Iyov goes further and hangs the earth on nothing at all.

Turtles all the way down, and the verse that cut the stack