234 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Zion, Buber writes that the proclamation of the State of Israel required no change
to his work, which “is intended to shed light not on the history of a political en-
terprise but on that of a religious idea or rather on the spiritual history of a faith.
How much of the latter the political enterprise and its consequences will be able
to realize will naturally be revealed only over the course of several generations.
But it is only right that, as long as such a spiritual reality lives, history should be
responsible to it rather than that it should be responsible to history.”^134
The introduction to On Zion notes that the national concept of the Jews is
named after a place, not a people. It is not even named after the entire land, but
only one site within it: “Zion is ‘the city of the great King’ (Psalms 48:3), that is of
God as the King of Israel.” This age-old concept was not born, like other national-
isms, with modernity and the French Revolution.^135 The concept of Zion denotes
the marriage of a chosen people with a chosen land. This land can no more be
exchanged for another than can its people. But the idea of election contained in
the concept of Zion cannot be understood as a conferral of a benefit or as a sign
of preexisting merit:
In the tribes which united to form “Israel” this concept developed and became
transformed in a special way: holiness is no longer a sign of power, a magic
fluid that can dwell in places and regions as well as in people and groups of
people, but a quality bestowed on this particular people and this particular
land because God ‘elects’ both in order to lead His chosen people into His
chosen land and to join them to each other. It is His election that sanctifies the
chosen people as His immediate attendance and the land as His royal throne
and which makes them dependent on each other. This is more a political, a
theopolitical than a strictly religious concept of holiness: the outward form
of worship is merely a concentrated expression of the sovereignty of God.^136To regard the land as the eternal property of the people, as a God-given deed,
ignores the mission to make of it what God intended. Such an understanding
pretends to piety but is actually rebellion. The people’s relationship to the land
is characterized partially by futurity, because the people have not yet fulfilled
their mission. But because the land is a partner in the relationship, it is rooted in
nature. “The holy matrimony of land and people was intended to bring about the
matrimony of the two separated spheres of Being,” nature and history.^137
Thus the Jews are only a people, like any people, and the land is just a land
like any other. Only the elected mission is special; Jews deserve special consid-
eration only in their performance of this mission. To return the people to the
land but ignore the mission is to attack the idea of Zion: “The secularizing trend
in Zionism was directed against the mystery of Zion too.” By insisting on Jew-
ish engagement with the idea of Zion, Buber seeks not to hekhsher the Jewish
state, like court priests of old, but the opposite: to save Zion from Zionism. This
task, too, is age old. Buber writes: “With every encounter of this people with this