Israelites and Jews

Most American Jews do not practice the Jewish religion. As a matter of fact most Israeli Jews are not observant either, and neither are their brethren around the world.
Now if a Baptist, or better yet a Catholic, will cease to attend religious rites, that person will become a lapsed Catholic or no Catholic at all. But a Jew is always a Jew.
Why? What makes a Jew Jewish?
The answer given by fundamentalist rabbis is that a person whose mother is Jewish, or one who was converted according to the ancient rituals specified in the "Halachah" is Jewish. Taking that centuries-old tradition one step further the Palestine National Charter declares that "Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own."?
The answer given by fundamentalist rabbis is that a person whose mother is Jewish, or one who was converted according to the ancient rituals specified in the "Halachah" is Jewish. Taking that centuries-old tradition one step further the Palestine National Charter declares that "Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own."
In my humble opinion both fundamentalist rabbis and extremist Palestinians are equally wrong. Of course part of the blame is our own because we still consider religion as the controlling factor of our Jewishness. We are not merely a religious congregation -- we are a nation in Israel and a nationality in other countries.
In view of the changing historic nature of nationalism and nations, would it be wrong to consider the laws of Moses as the forerunners of a modern-day constitution and Bill of Rights? After all, those laws transformed a group of people whose only bonds were their blood ties, and their faith, into a nation.
It seems to me that when Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, his purpose was not to create a new religious group -- after all the descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs had been practicing a unique monotheistic religion for hundreds of years by then -- but to build a nation; and the laws of Moses, in addition to codifying the existing religious practices, established the social and political canons necessary to govern a nation.
We might bear in mind that Moses did not start his life as a religious leader, but as a political one. Having been raised, and presumably educated, in the court of the Pharaoh, he probably was acquainted with Egyptian law and might have been familiar with the codes of the Babylonian King Hammurabi. The uniqueness of the laws of Moses is their inclusion of monotheistic religious aspects.
Although religion was an important part of the Jewish national heritage, it was by no means all of it. Every nation and many tribes of that era had in addition to their rulers, their own Deity to worship. The Jewish religion was used as a unifying code of conduct for tribes of semi-nomads to weld them into a nation and to protect -- and separate -- them from the many different cultural influences outside their fluid borders, as well as from the alien population within.
But it also had its drawbacks. The Jewish religion, demanding almost total subjugation to the highest divine authority, frowning on proselytization and asking its adherents to be passive and submissive to the will of God, contrasted sharply with the needs of a Jewish nation to defend itself in the many wars waged against it.
It is therefore understandable that when the Jewish tribes formed a kingdom -- disregarding the religious leaders disapproval -- the first king, Saul, tried hard to separate the state from the church, or at least to establish the primacy of the monarchy -- but like so many later rulers in world history he found out that he was battling a formidable institution. His successors, David and Solomon also had their disputes with the religious establishment, as did all the following Israeli Kings, and many other royal heads of state throughout history.
Later, when the Kingdoms of Israel were overrun and defeated by the Romans, Rabbinical Judaism took over the vacuum created by the lack of political authority. The task that the Rabbis faced -- keeping the Jewish nation alive -- necessitated shifting the focal point of the unifying codes of the nation. Thus holidays that once had a national meaning were modified to emphasize their religious aspect. The exodus from Egypt, which marked the beginning of Jewish nationhood was transformed into a celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage by the Lord, with services that omitted any mention of Moses. The liberation of the country from Hellenic rule by the Hashmonaim and the restoration of the Jewish kingdom was turned into the miracle of the pure oil for the lighting of the Menorah. The harvest festival became a commemoration of the giving and receiving of the Torah.
It worked, we managed to retain our identity for two thousand years under extremely adverse circumstances. However, even the priesthood realized the needs of the nation and incorporated nationalistic themes into the religious rites. The result was that the Jewish religion also preached the return to the homeland ("Next year in Jerusalem".)
The claim that Judaism is solely a religious expression is far removed from reality. It is a fact of modern life that there are some Israelites, all over the world, that do practice the Jewish religion -- just as there are many that do not, but we all trace our historical roots to the land ruled by the ancient prophets and kings of Israel.
Even the Star of David that many of us wear to denote our Jewishness has no religious significance. Unlike the crucifix, it does not play a part in religious services, and if we call it by its Hebrew name -- Magen David -- which means the shield of King David or his coat of arms, we refer to a national symbol. It is, of course, no accident that the Star of David is displayed on the national flag of the State of Israel.
In the twentieth century there was only one country that acknowledged Judaism as a nationality -- the Soviet Union -- and its reasons for doing so were not entirely motivated by enlightenment, but in the attempts of the Communist regime to curb religion and rampant anti-Semitism.
Today a great many citizens of the United States denote their roots and heritage by hyphenation. We have Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and just about every other nationality-hyphen-American. At times the hyphenation process evolved through many stages as in the case of the Afro-Americans that went through period of referring to themselves as Negro, Colored and Black, before arriving at the present designation.
We should join the ranks of the hyphenated nationalities and start referring to ourselves as Israelite-Americans. Being a Israelite-American does not signify, to me, merely a religious affiliation -- it proudly states that I am a direct descendant of an old and honorable nation. A nation that contributed greatly to the advancement of humanity for thousands of years. It is hard to imagine the state of Western Civilization today if it were not guided by the teachings of the writers of the Bible, the preaching of Jesus, the interpretations of Maimonades and Spinoza, the insights of Freud, or the inquiring mind of Einstein -- to name but a few great fellow Israelites in the last two thousand years.
Of course during most of that time we had no state of our own, except in our hearts and minds, and it was our nationalistic religion that kept us united and acted as a buffer against assimilation among our host nations. Today things are different -- the State of Israel re-emerged and the role that religion plays in our lives is greatly diminished. That presents us with a modern dilemma.
The Israelite-Americans face a long-term problem of diminution and dilution. As mixed marriages are on the rise and religious affiliation is on the decline, it is not a far fetched assumption that in two or three generations our numbers will diminish greatly. It is a historic fact that among people that do not actively practice their Jewish religion the rate of assimilation and loss of national identity is almost total in three or four generations.
Do we want this to happen? Do we want to be the penultimate generation of Jews, do we have to? I, for one, do not wish for it to happen.
We cannot instill religious observance in our children and grandchildren, if we ourselves do not practice that religion. But we can, and we should, at the very least, raise them to be aware and proud of their national Israeli heritage.