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BETTINA PRATO

Israel, the existence of such a state was crucial to provide ‘‘a framework within which
the struggle over Jewish identity took place,’’ as this ‘‘would awaken something in the
consciousness of Jews throughout the world who have an interest in their Jewishness.’’^45
Such notions of Israel as an example to the world are neither foreign nor secondary
to the work of RHR. The way the group seems to interpret such notions, however, is
profoundly marked by trauma, in recognizing vulnerability as a decisive factor in the
environment in which the ‘‘torch’’ must be held up and seeing that Israel’s exemplariness
respects a traumatic grammar that defines what can be discussed (or become ‘‘speakable’’
at all). Against this backdrop, the language of human rights serves as a relatively ‘‘non-
traumatic’’ response to the predicament of noninnocent Jewish-Israeli victimization by
making room for limited but direct assumption of responsibility by individuals for what
can bechanged, that is, Israeli policies and perhaps laws and institutions, while standing
back from whatcannot(apparently) be changed, that is, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
The latter, in turn, is supposedly redeemed as a ‘‘just end’’ not through recourse to reli-
gious discourse but through a call for practical engagement with a present that may ‘‘jus-
tify’’ the past.
Is this sufficient from the standpoint of those who dispute the ‘‘justice’’ of the trajec-
tory of Jewish ethno-national and religious ‘‘ontology’’ toward statehood? Are human
rights a way to retroactively depoliticize certain historical processes and to normalize their
crystallizations in the present by reducing everything to the issue of how to ‘‘humanize’’
a polity that, more than any other, is often called upon to justify its origins? A way into
such questions may be found by following another thread of RHR discourse, namely, that
of Jewish exile and the exodus from Egypt as the pivot of the traumatic genealogy of
Jewish-Israeli identity that the group upholds, hinting at a constantly interrupted under-
standing of belonging to and citizenship in the state of Israel and at practices of dwelling
in the land haunted by the shared strangeness of all its inhabitants.

A Dwelling among Strangers

And for the sin which we have sinned against You through insolence—

Saying that only Jews have rights to the Land.

—RHR Vidui prayer for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement

As I mentioned at the outset, the Shoah and other moments of great suffering and
danger for a Jewish testimonial community occupy an important place in contemporary
authoritative narratives of Jewish Israeliness. In particular, the Shoah and the traumatic
connotations of the quasi-annihilation of the community have been repeatedly elaborated
in a variety of discourses and narratives, lending them the uncanny sense of a constant
proximity to catastrophe. In the religious realm, in particular, part of this elaboration has

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