Earlier this week in the city of Basel in northwestern Switzerland, the World Zionist

organization convened the 125th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress, which was conceived

of, organized by, and presided over by one of

Zionism's founding fathers, Theodore Herzl. The condition of European Jewry seemed to Herzl,

precarious and degrading, and the solution, he thought, was not to be found in the animating Jewish impulse of the age,

assimilation. Herzl thought that no amount of assimilation could cure the Jews of anti-Semitism,

and that a political solution could remedy Europe's Jewish question.

That political solution, of course, was to establish political sovereignty in the land of

Israel. As he put it in his opening remarks, we wish to lay the cornerstone of the house in which

the Jewish nation will one day find shelter. Now, it's easy to categorize Herzl as a political

Zionist, because he did indeed think that the organization

of national life was essential for Jewish survival. But I want to read you another sentence

from his opening address, which is this. Zionism, Herzl said, means a returning home to Jewish

identity before the return to the country of the Jews.

In other words, Herzl's Zionist ambition was political, yes, but also more than political.

It was also spiritual. And that wasn't his view alone.

The most famous Zionist intellectual of the day, Max Nordau, spoke

after Herzl, and, observing that, wherever Jews are settled in relatively large numbers among

the Gentile peoples, we find the Jews in distress. But then he went on to clarify that

distress takes two forms, one material and one moral.

Now, this is not to downplay the political significance of the First Zionist Congress,

but it does suggest that the highest purposes of the First Zionist Congress went beyond

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