10: Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro

I grew up listening to conversation on Christian Zionism. This idea developed after the Reformation, received clear articulation in seventieth century England, flourished in the 1840s and has continued down to our own day anchoring much of the support for the policy of the Israeli government among North American evangelicals and others. Christian Zionists believe that the gathering of Jews in Israel is a requirement for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the unfolding of the end of history. In my home province of Alberta several forms of this teaching flourished. In the 1930s both the Premier of Alberta from 1935 - 1943, “Bible” Bill Aberhart, and L.E. Maxwell, founder of Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills Alberta spread this teaching through their radio ministries and Bible teaching. It took root and continues to inform a relationship to Israel, a peculiar understanding of the Jewish people of whom Jesus Christ was a part, and is used as an effective political tool garnering support for a whole range of issues. Historians have argued that it also migrated into Jewish, largely secular Jewish circles, and seeded forms of Zionism that are foundational to the Israeli state. One of the foremost Jewish scholars of this matter is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. He forcefully argues that Zionism has moved Jewish identity away from the Covenant and Commandments, which called the Jewish people, as the scriptures tell us, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”. Zionism has grabbed the limelight and confused the question of what it means to be a Jew. Is Jewishness an ethnicity, a tribal identity, a national identity of one nation among others? Or, is it, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”? Rabbi Shapiro is Emeritus Rabbi, Bais Medrash of Bayswater, Queens, New York. After graduating high school at age 16 he entered a traditional Orthodox program of education and intellectual formation.