BETTINA PRATOterms of its ethical significance. On the contrary, this event (like the creation of contem-
porary Israel) seems to be perceived by RHR rabbis who discuss the contemporary rele-
vance of Exodus as the disclosure of a possibility to redeem both past and present
‘‘strangeness’’ of the Jews from the Promised Land through the gift of Sinai, namely,
Mosaic law.
What can this mean, concretely, for contemporary Israeli politics? A possible re-
sponse is contained in the words of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, whose teachings are
used in the RHR yeshiva curriculum. According to Rabbi Hirsch, the story of exile in
Egypt means that ‘‘it is not race, not descent, not birth or country or property, altogether
nothing external or due to change, but simply and purely the inner spiritual and moral
worth of a human being, which gives him all the rights of a man and of a citizen.’’
Moreover, ‘‘your whole misfortune in Egypt was that you weregerim, ‘foreigners,’ ‘aliens,’
there, as such, according to the views of other nations, you had no right to be there, had
no claim to rights of settlement, home, or property.... Therefore beware, so runs the
warning, of making rights in your own State conditional on anything other than that
simple humanity which every human being as such bears within him.’’^50
If RHR were to apply Hirsch’s words literally to today’s Israeli state, it might conclude
that the state of the Jews (‘‘your own State’’) should be one in which strangers are not
really such, in the sense that none of their rights (including the right to expand and
occupy space freely, which Hirsch stresses elsewhere) should be based on Jewishness or
lack thereof. To Hirsch, all rights of citizenship appear indeed to be a matter of mere
‘‘human rights,’’ suggesting that even in a ‘‘state of the Jews’’ citizenship may be detached
from ascriptive identity, as potentially foreshadowed by the democratic strand in the
genealogy of Israeli statehood. Although Hirsch seemed to write with a rather unproblem-
atic notion of the state of Israel as one that would be self-evidently ‘‘of the Jews,’’ in the
sense of having a large Jewish majority (he was, after all, writing several decades before
the creation of modern Israel), a notion of citizenship that would de facto eliminate
strangeness might pose different problems were demographics to call into question the
Jewish character of the state, which presupposes a distinction between Jewish citizens and
‘‘strangers,’’ whether or not this affects state recognition of human rights. In such a situa-
tion, which is indeed Israel’s reality today, the exclusionary effects of defining Israel
merely as the ‘‘state of the Jews’’ could not be disregarded, and Hirsch’s interpretation of
the biblical call may no longer be as viable as it may once have seemed.
The difficulty of reconciling citizenship based on identity with the desire to overcome
divisions between self and stranger in the name of the legacy of Exodus is also visible in
the writings of RHR rabbis, whose views about the implications of that legacy for today’s
Israel appear ‘‘more moderate’’ than Hirsch’s. In a recent RHR newsletter, for instance,
Yehiel Grenimann writes about non-Jewish minorities in Israel and their rights in a lan-
guage that is characteristic of the group, that is, in terms of vulnerability and powerless-
ness, requiring the intervention of Jews to act and speak on behalf of these people. In his
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