Then Torah will flow: Reclaiming Tziyon
Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari
Rosh Hashanah Day 1
Sept 12, 2026
Watch
Today I want to share words of Torah that in some ways complete a trilogy of sermons that I have shared over the past three years since October 7, 2023. The first two were about reframing Jewish safety and Jewish peoplehood. And today I would like to reframe our relationship to the idea of Tziyon, or Zion in English. Taken together I am hoping to offer a usable framework for developing a liberatory theology for all of us.
May it be so. [1]
--
Just before I began rabbinical school, a mentor gave me a parting gift. I still remember it was mysteriously lightweight and wrapped in white tissue paper. I opened it gently and held in my hands a traditional white and blue tinseled atara - the adorning collar of a tallit, embroidered with the Hebrew words, “Ki miTziyon teitzei torah”.
I was at once touched and flustered.
As a thus far DIY Jew, this was my first piece of “normal” Judaica.
There was something so classic about this ritual object.
But I was also totally confused by its meaning -
What was this elder trying to tell me?
Where or what is Tziyon?
As someone who opposes a Jewish ethno-state state in Israel/Palestine, what would it mean to wear a tallit that said that Torah flows from Tziyon?
When I arrived in Boston I placed the fabric on my altar, beside my shabbat candles and other delicate ritual objects. And despite the fact that I made many tallitot, I never felt able to affix that particular atara.
A few years ago a congregant was making a tallit and looking for inspiration for the atara. I decided to regift the one from my altar. I was happy for it to be used and honestly relieved of the burden to figure out if I would wear it myself.
But even after I rehomed the ritual object, the spiritual questions remained.
And they have only grown more urgent.
--
Ever since I first spent time in the West Bank in 2006, I have struggled to separate the idea of Tziyon from the modern State of Israel and its violent occupation of Palestine. In the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, each liturgical mention of Tziyon touches a nerve – I am like a porcupine with my prayer quills up. And the mentions abound!
Before the shema we pray: Or chadash al Tziyon tair.
In the Kedushah of Amidah we call out, matai timloch b’Tziyon?
During kabbalat shabbat, we sing שָׁמְעָה וַתִּשְׂמַח צִיּוֹן …
And then in Torah service we chant, Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah …
--
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah - What do these words really mean?
We actually just sang them this morning at the beginning of the Torah service. You can see them on p. 185 in your machzor, towards the bottom.
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah (stop to chant them)
According to our machzor, they mean:
“For out of Tziyon shall go forth Torah…”
Though let's be honest, even in English,
I still don’t know what that means.
--
For many of us, our experience of the word Tziyon is determined by Zionism’s use of the term. Zionism, a 19th century spiritual and political movement, appropriated the idea of Tziyon, of Zion, transforming the spiritual concept into a nationalist movement. It was radically empowering to Jews suffering in the pale of settlement looking to draw close to the idea of Tziyon and the promise of safety. Zionism was in part contagious because it spoke to an existential longing for home, for a homeland, for safety, for a place to belong unconditionally.
In her book The Colors of Jews, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz of blessed memory, explains,
“For more than [half] a century, Zionism has typically been represented as the solution to the problem of anti-semitism, and Zion as the authentic seat of Jewish culture” (195).
The existence of the state of Israel changed, for some of us even degraded, what it means to sing Ki MiTziyon Teitzei Torah. I have been grateful to realize that the discomfort some of us may feel is actually not unique to our community, or even our generation. [2]
Since its inception, Zionism has also always been controversial. Jews were as divided then as we are now. Then, like now, the opposition to Zionism was secular and religious. Jewish socialists, German Reform and Satmar Hasidim, all otherwise unlikely allies, all ardently opposed the idea of Jewish nationalism and the establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine.
In the early 1800’s, Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi and scholar who is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism, was an uncompromising foe of Jewish nationalism and struggled endlessly with the words of the Torah service. [3]
Geiger wrote, “Jerusalem and Zion are places whence the instruction went forth, and to which holy memories are attached. But on the whole, they are to be celebrated more as a spiritual idea, as the nursery of the Kingdom of God, than as a certain geographical locale connected with a special divine providence for all times.”
He felt this so strongly that he actually amended the Hebrew to say “from Tziyon Torah went forth,” in the past tense, rather than will go forth, in the future tense. Geiger resolved his spiritual concerns by locating these words in the past. As if to say, Tziyon was once an ancient spiritual center, a reference to the temple in Jerusalem, it is where Torah came from, but no longer.
In the wake of World War 2, organized opposition to Zionism faded and the history of it was buried. [4] I was taught that Zionism was the only and necessary response to antisemitism.
In the postscript to her new book, Here where we live is our country, Molly Crabapple offers a new understanding:
Rather, Crabapple writes, “The Western world failed the Jews of Europe when they refused to provide the basic solidarity that the historical moment demanded – the solidarity upon which the Bund’s humanism relied. This betrayal allowed Zionism to present itself as the only possible salvation. If the world came down to strong predators and weak victims, Zionism at least offered Jews the possibility of strength…Seventy-odd years after they stuck their state upon another people’s ruin, the inheritors of Zion would liquidate their very own ghetto in Gaza beside the sea” (381).
This was precisely what the Bund and Geiger feared. And while it may be what I hear when I sing the word Tziyon, it is not what it was meant to conjure.
For most of Jewish time, Tziyon was not primarily a geopolitical term. It was a place and a possibility.
--
Ki MiTziyon teitzei Torah
These words were first spoken by the prophet Isaiah [5], son of Amoz, who lived in Jerusalem in the 8th century before the common era. Isaiah is arguably the most often quoted prophet.
Isaiah’s prophecies often emphasised social and economic justice. On Yom Kippur we will be held accountable by his rebuke of a symbolic fast that does nothing to feed the hungry and cloth the naked. He despised iniquity and the gross accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the impoverishment of the many.
The words Ki MiTziyon teitzei torah, in particular, come from the second chapter of Isaiah which is largely concerned with prophecies about Jerusalem itself. It begins with a prophetic vision of the world to come, acharit hayamim - the end of days, in which all people will experience the radiant light of God’s house.
And all kinds of people will say, let's go check out God’s house, and study her ways so that we can walk in her paths.
כִּ֤י מִצִּיּוֹן֙ תֵּצֵ֣א תוֹרָ֔ה וּדְבַר־יְהֹוָ֖ה מִירוּשָׁלָֽ͏ִם׃
Because Torah comes from Tziyon and the word of God from Jerusalem.
The poetic structure here makes clear that Tziyon and Jerusalem are largely the same thing by different names. Both the ancient city and the imagined ideal.
Isaiah continues:
Then…
The Holy One will resolve all conflict
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
לֹא־יִשָּׂ֨א ג֤וֹי אֶל־גּוֹי֙ חֶ֔רֶב
וְלֹֽא־יִלְמְד֥וּ ע֖וֹד מִלְחָמָֽה׃
Nation shall not take up sword against nation;
They shall study war no more.
Seeing these words all in a row is a revelation.
These words – lo yisa goy – which are so important and so familiar, which we just sang as we paraded the Torah around the room, which inspired the refrain of the famous African American spiritual Down by the river side, which have been an anthem of the Ceasefire movement, these words are inseparable from Isaiah’s prophecy Ki miTziyon teitzei Torah! – that Torah will flow from Tziyon.
For all these years I have been fearing that this liturgy is suggesting a vision where all legitimate Torah flows from Tziyon, from Zion, from Jerusalem.
But Isaiah is expressing something quite different - something devastatingly relevant. Isaiah’s prophecy is at once one of heartbreak and hope.
Isaiah was living in a time that bears too much resemblance to our own. A time when the city of Jerusalem had been desecrated by greed and violence. And he was dreaming of a time when Jerusalem might live up to its name and be an actual city of peace - Ir Shalom, Yerushalayim. Isaiah’s words have traveled across millenia to express the devastation I feel about Tziyon in our times, and the just peace I long for.
The way I understand Isaiah, he is imagining a time in which there shall be no more conflict, and no more war, and people will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. He is describing an aspirational future which doesn’t yet exist. That is when we will experience the flow of Torah from Tziyon, a city governed by justice, a city of peace! And only then can the Divine presence really dwell and be felt in that place.
--
But then came the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem which changed everything. We are forever living in its aftermath. In fact the second half of Isaiah was written by his disciples living in exile in Babylon.
Tziyon became not just the promise of a future time when Jerusalem and the whole world would be full of peace and justice, but the locus of our spiritual longings.
In the words of Psalm 137, by the waters of Babylon, there we wept as we remembered Tziyon.
Jewish culture and creative thinking has forever been shaped by the idea, even more than the experience, of exile.
About the experience of exile, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, of blessed memory, writes:
Exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever…true exile is a condition of terminal loss…” [6]
We have imbibed the crippling sorrow of estrangement and ritualized insurmountable sorrow. We have religiously transmitted this condition of terminal loss from generation to generation.
In my early 20’s as I was reckoning with the reality of settler colonialism here in the U.S., I asked myself what it might mean to divest from Turtle Island, to return to my own ancestral homelands. But where might that be?
My mother’s family came from the pale of settlement around the turn of the 20th century. We don’t have many details but it's hardly realistic to imagine repatriating to Ukraine at this moment. My father’s family is from Rome and Rhodes, by way of Turkey and Spain. Over the course of the past 20 years, I have visited each of those places, I think subconsciously looking for home. Like a little bird, asking, “Are you my motherland?” [7]
In each city I have sought out Jewish life, and each time I felt the distinct feeling that I make no sense in this place and time.
Our longings for home are very real. And very human. They lead us to traverse oceans and continents, searching for our place in the cosmos and on the earth.
For each of us in different ways, descendants of immigrants and slaves, survivors of tyranny and exile. Some of us carry intimate knowledge of migration and displacement. For some of us it is distant. But likely for most of us it is existentially hard to know where we are from and where we belong. This uncertainty is painful. And not easily resolved. And Tziyon gives us a container for such spiritual expression.
--
But for the rabbis, living in Diaspora for millenia, Tziyon evolves even more. Tziyon becomes a playful paradigm for what is possible.
There is this moment in the Babylonian Talmud where the rabbis invoke a line from Psalm 87 about the gates of Tziyon and one rabbi says, “don't read it as the gates of Tziyon, read it as the gates of metzuyanim – the gates of everything that is excellent.”
Because the word metzuyan (מצוין) means excellent and sounds a lot like Tziyon. This is classic rabbinic word play with deep theological implications. Here Tziyon is not a place, not even a prophecy, but the embodiments of everything excellent in this world.
In another place the rabbis of the Talmud dislocate Jerusalem and Tziyon entirely.
Rabbi Natan of Babylonia says, [8]
“For from Babylonia will go out the Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Paqod.”
And the rabbis in Jerusalem respond, wait a minute, that's not what Isaiah said.
Ki miTziyon teitzei torah…“For from Zion will go out the Torah, and the Word of God from Jerusalem”
Later rabbis chime in and jump on the Diasporist bandwagon.
Well actually, the people of Bari, Italy, say, "For from Bari comes Torah, and the Word of God from Otrano."
The Sages of Ashkenaz and France say, "From France Torah will go forth, and the Word of God from Ashkenaz."
To imagine rabbis arguing across time and space like this,
tickles me.
It is undoubtedly a reflection of religious decentralization and the spiritual power of the diaspora.
The rabbis knew that Torah comes from everywhere Jewish life flourishes. Because they knew that Tziyon was no longer a physical place nor a political ideology. It was a spiritual construct.
As if to say,
Ki mi-Kol Tzedek teitzei Torah udvar Hashem mi-West Philadelphia!
–
Tziyon exists in the past - as the ancient city of Jerusalem, the devastated city from which we are exiled. And it exists in the future, through Isaiah’s prophecy.
But Tziyon also exists in eternal time and Rosh Hashanah is when we reach for it.
These very words from Isaiah actually appear a second time in our machzor in the heart of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service.
The musaf service is an invitation into deep time, to eternal time - to the is, was, will be. Often considered long and boring, at Kol Tzedek it's an immersive journey.
It is our custom to begin the musaf service by making a shinui – a change – to cue the heart that change is possible, in us and in our world. I often take off my shoes and socks, feel the ground beneath me, place my tallit over my head so I can focus inward.
We begin with the prayers of Malchuyot which call our attention to the present tense. Tziyon and the world as we know it. Razed and broken. Once a year we prostrate fully for the Grand Aleinu, lowering ourselves to the ground, humble, vulnerable, opening ourselves to the call of the shofar.
We then move to the prayers of Zichronot which is a journey into the past tense, Tziyon of old, the world of memory, but even more so, the longing to be remembered. Here we pray the Holy One will take notice of us, write us in for another year.
And finally we arrive at Shofarot, which invites us to call forth the future we long for, to dream of a world that is free and whole. And that dream is inseparable from Isaiah’s prophecy in which peace and freedom will abide in the land with righteousness and justice.
And here, when the rabbis are dreaming big, about the world they long for, a world that is free of cruelty and oppression, a world that is whole and peaceful, they once again invoke the words of Isaiah.
Ki miTziyon teitzei torah!
Then Torah will pour forth from Tziyon…
You can see it on p. 273 of our machzor.
By the time we approach these words in the Shofarot service we have begun to unravel; our pleas to transform ourselves and the world have grown desperate. The call of the shofar is insistent, penetrating.
More than once I have been told that our Rosh Hashanah musaf service resembles a rave. I can’t argue. It is ecstatic on purpose. By the end of it I am usually a sweaty mess. I will likely have lost my tallit and Rabbi Mó will have to remind me what comes next.
But the ecstasy is inseparable from the longing, from the grief and trauma and loss. The power of Musaf, and Tziyon, is that it can contain it all. I can actually feel that the boundary between me and the world is porous, that I am finite and that I am part of something infinite and eternal. I don’t feel right or wrong about anything. Everything is more connected, and I am more connected to everything. And from this place, even for a moment, I can glimpse the self I seek, the world I seek. And I memorize that feeling. [9]
The rabbis repeated the prophecy of Isaiah
because it points us to the essence of everything we are praying
for on Rosh Hashanah!
--
Tziyon exists in eternal time, it is a container for our deepest longings, our most urgent cry. And it also contains the seed of hope we desperately need, where everything is possible.
Tziyon endures beyond the snare of zionism because it contains an essential spiritual paradox.
The experience of both home and exile.
In the conclusion to her book, Molly Crappapple asks and answers a question close to my heart:
“What does [the Bund’s idea of doykait], hereness mean in our age of bloodsoaked mass displacement?”
Her answer, “An attempt, I believe, to find the self in exile, to square homeland with the freedom to leave” (p. 381).
--
This tension between home and exile appeared in another book I read this summer, a beautiful coming of age novel about two Mexican American teenage boys in El Paso Texas coming out and falling in love.
The protagonist, Aristotle Mendoza, who happens to go by the ever relatable name of Ari, is trying to find his place as a newly out gay student in high school. He finally has friends and a boyfriend, but he is still so anxious about being different.
At the start of the new school year, Ari’s boyfriend places a folded note in the palm of his hand.
The note reads,
“My mom said that we will always live between exile and belonging. Sometimes you’ll feel the loneliness of exile. And sometimes you’ll feel the happiness of belonging.” [10]
As I closed the book, I imagined Reb Simcha Bunim reading this queer YA novel and teaching:
Perhaps we are meant to have a note in each of our pockets.
In one pocket it says we are in exile.
And in the other it says we are home.
--
I once thought it was preferable to just omit every reference to Tziyon and Zionism from Jewish life. But this approach has its limitations, both politically and spiritually.
Politically we cannot claim to be a voice for justice but remain silent on one of the most grave injustices being committed with our American tax dollars in the name of our safety as Jews.
And spiritually, we cannot deny that we too need a locus for our longings – for home, for safety, for belonging. And for thousands of years, Tziyon has been that locus.
Each shabbat, we sing in the kedushah,
מָתַי תִּמְלוֹךְ בְּצִיּוֹן בְּקָרוֹב בְּיָמֵֽינוּ לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד תִּשְׁכּוֹן:
When, Holy One, will you dwell in Tziyon?
Draw us close to that time!
God, when will your presence be felt here, there and everywhere?
When will there be actual peace, here, there and everywhere?
And while some of the peace I pray for is specific to Tziyon, it is also symbolic – as if to say, when there is peace in Jerusalem, the most spiritually potent and politically volatile city, there will be peace everywhere. Including in our own hearts.
--
I leave you with one final teaching that comes from commentary on the book of Isaiah,
Rabbi Levi teaches, [11]
עתידה ירושלים להיות כארץ ישראל וארץ ישראל ככל העולם כלו
“In the future, Jerusalem will be like the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will be like the whole world.”
From this teaching we can learn that the holiness we seek is not specific to eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Quite the contrary. Just as in the world to come all time will be imbued with the holiness of Shabbat, so too every city and all lands will be treated as holy ground.
Yes, Tziyon is prophetic. Yes it is a paradox. But most importantly Tziyon is a paradigm.
The entire reason to ascribe holiness to any land is so that we can learn to relate to all land as holy, wherever we live.
This is perhaps a religious rendering of the Bundist idea of do’ikayt – Hereness. The belief that there is holiness everywhere. A commitment to cultural solidarity with all the people, in all the places we call home.
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah
Ki mi-Kol Tzedek teitzei Torah
Then Torah will flow from everywhere we call home and back to Eden once again!
L’shana tova, anyada buena, dulci i alegre!
Footnotes
[1] I did not write this sermon alone. I wrote this sermon in deep conversation and collaboration with Dr. Elsie Stern, Abby McCartney, Rabbi Benay Lappe, Jon Argaman, Shosh Ruskin, Laynie Soloman, and Rabbi Mónica Gomery. I am indebted to Rabbi Ebn Leader for exploring these ideas with me while I was in rabbinical school and to all of the Kol Tzedek members who over the years have asked me what to do with the idea of Tziyon.[2] In 1989 Reconstructionists found the liturgy of the Torah service “reflects an ethic of resentment and vengeance that is inappropriate in the modern world.” So much so, that they actually printed alternative verses to be sung instead - words from Psalm 118 - “Open to me the gates of Justice”.
[3] Interestingly, Geiger was also the founder of the academic field of Quranic studies.
[4] There are two brand new forthcoming books on this topic that I look forward to reading and learning more: Antizionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser and Jewish Antizionism: A historical anthology, edited by Shaul Magid and Zev Mishell.
[5] We should not be surprised that these words come directly from Tanakh. I like to think of the prayerbook as the lyrical highlights of the Hebrew bible. Many of the words we pray are actually quotations from the Tanakh, in particular from the 5 books of Torah, the prophets and the book of psalms. You can see all of those sources reflected on page 185 of our machzor.
[6] Edward Said, from Reflections on Exile, 1984
[7] In his book A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, Daniel Boyarin points to yet another amazing text that claims Babylon is in fact our motherland. Such that when we were exiled there, we were actually being sent “home” to our mother’s house. Quoting, “Babylonia can even be described as the motherland of the Jews: ‘Rabbi Hanina says, ‘It is because their language [Aramaic] is close to the language of Torah [and therefore good for the study thereof].’ Rabbi Yohanan says, ‘Because [God] sent them to the house of their mother…” (43).
[8] Y.T. Nedarim 50a. See here.
[9] The practice of memorizing a feeling I learned from my teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe.
[10] Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, p.271-2.
[11] Yalkut Shimoni on Isaiah, 503. Yalkut is a collection of midrashim on the Tanakh. The author and the date of compilation is unknown and debated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalkut_Shimoni
Rosh Hashanah Day 1
Sept 12, 2026
Watch
Today I want to share words of Torah that in some ways complete a trilogy of sermons that I have shared over the past three years since October 7, 2023. The first two were about reframing Jewish safety and Jewish peoplehood. And today I would like to reframe our relationship to the idea of Tziyon, or Zion in English. Taken together I am hoping to offer a usable framework for developing a liberatory theology for all of us.
May it be so. [1]
--
Just before I began rabbinical school, a mentor gave me a parting gift. I still remember it was mysteriously lightweight and wrapped in white tissue paper. I opened it gently and held in my hands a traditional white and blue tinseled atara - the adorning collar of a tallit, embroidered with the Hebrew words, “Ki miTziyon teitzei torah”.
I was at once touched and flustered.
As a thus far DIY Jew, this was my first piece of “normal” Judaica.
There was something so classic about this ritual object.
But I was also totally confused by its meaning -
What was this elder trying to tell me?
Where or what is Tziyon?
As someone who opposes a Jewish ethno-state state in Israel/Palestine, what would it mean to wear a tallit that said that Torah flows from Tziyon?
When I arrived in Boston I placed the fabric on my altar, beside my shabbat candles and other delicate ritual objects. And despite the fact that I made many tallitot, I never felt able to affix that particular atara.
A few years ago a congregant was making a tallit and looking for inspiration for the atara. I decided to regift the one from my altar. I was happy for it to be used and honestly relieved of the burden to figure out if I would wear it myself.
But even after I rehomed the ritual object, the spiritual questions remained.
And they have only grown more urgent.
--
Ever since I first spent time in the West Bank in 2006, I have struggled to separate the idea of Tziyon from the modern State of Israel and its violent occupation of Palestine. In the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, each liturgical mention of Tziyon touches a nerve – I am like a porcupine with my prayer quills up. And the mentions abound!
Before the shema we pray: Or chadash al Tziyon tair.
In the Kedushah of Amidah we call out, matai timloch b’Tziyon?
During kabbalat shabbat, we sing שָׁמְעָה וַתִּשְׂמַח צִיּוֹן …
And then in Torah service we chant, Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah …
--
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah - What do these words really mean?
We actually just sang them this morning at the beginning of the Torah service. You can see them on p. 185 in your machzor, towards the bottom.
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah (stop to chant them)
According to our machzor, they mean:
“For out of Tziyon shall go forth Torah…”
Though let's be honest, even in English,
I still don’t know what that means.
--
For many of us, our experience of the word Tziyon is determined by Zionism’s use of the term. Zionism, a 19th century spiritual and political movement, appropriated the idea of Tziyon, of Zion, transforming the spiritual concept into a nationalist movement. It was radically empowering to Jews suffering in the pale of settlement looking to draw close to the idea of Tziyon and the promise of safety. Zionism was in part contagious because it spoke to an existential longing for home, for a homeland, for safety, for a place to belong unconditionally.
In her book The Colors of Jews, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz of blessed memory, explains,
“For more than [half] a century, Zionism has typically been represented as the solution to the problem of anti-semitism, and Zion as the authentic seat of Jewish culture” (195).
The existence of the state of Israel changed, for some of us even degraded, what it means to sing Ki MiTziyon Teitzei Torah. I have been grateful to realize that the discomfort some of us may feel is actually not unique to our community, or even our generation. [2]
Since its inception, Zionism has also always been controversial. Jews were as divided then as we are now. Then, like now, the opposition to Zionism was secular and religious. Jewish socialists, German Reform and Satmar Hasidim, all otherwise unlikely allies, all ardently opposed the idea of Jewish nationalism and the establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine.
In the early 1800’s, Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi and scholar who is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism, was an uncompromising foe of Jewish nationalism and struggled endlessly with the words of the Torah service. [3]
Geiger wrote, “Jerusalem and Zion are places whence the instruction went forth, and to which holy memories are attached. But on the whole, they are to be celebrated more as a spiritual idea, as the nursery of the Kingdom of God, than as a certain geographical locale connected with a special divine providence for all times.”
He felt this so strongly that he actually amended the Hebrew to say “from Tziyon Torah went forth,” in the past tense, rather than will go forth, in the future tense. Geiger resolved his spiritual concerns by locating these words in the past. As if to say, Tziyon was once an ancient spiritual center, a reference to the temple in Jerusalem, it is where Torah came from, but no longer.
In the wake of World War 2, organized opposition to Zionism faded and the history of it was buried. [4] I was taught that Zionism was the only and necessary response to antisemitism.
In the postscript to her new book, Here where we live is our country, Molly Crabapple offers a new understanding:
Rather, Crabapple writes, “The Western world failed the Jews of Europe when they refused to provide the basic solidarity that the historical moment demanded – the solidarity upon which the Bund’s humanism relied. This betrayal allowed Zionism to present itself as the only possible salvation. If the world came down to strong predators and weak victims, Zionism at least offered Jews the possibility of strength…Seventy-odd years after they stuck their state upon another people’s ruin, the inheritors of Zion would liquidate their very own ghetto in Gaza beside the sea” (381).
This was precisely what the Bund and Geiger feared. And while it may be what I hear when I sing the word Tziyon, it is not what it was meant to conjure.
For most of Jewish time, Tziyon was not primarily a geopolitical term. It was a place and a possibility.
--
Ki MiTziyon teitzei Torah
These words were first spoken by the prophet Isaiah [5], son of Amoz, who lived in Jerusalem in the 8th century before the common era. Isaiah is arguably the most often quoted prophet.
Isaiah’s prophecies often emphasised social and economic justice. On Yom Kippur we will be held accountable by his rebuke of a symbolic fast that does nothing to feed the hungry and cloth the naked. He despised iniquity and the gross accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the impoverishment of the many.
The words Ki MiTziyon teitzei torah, in particular, come from the second chapter of Isaiah which is largely concerned with prophecies about Jerusalem itself. It begins with a prophetic vision of the world to come, acharit hayamim - the end of days, in which all people will experience the radiant light of God’s house.
And all kinds of people will say, let's go check out God’s house, and study her ways so that we can walk in her paths.
כִּ֤י מִצִּיּוֹן֙ תֵּצֵ֣א תוֹרָ֔ה וּדְבַר־יְהֹוָ֖ה מִירוּשָׁלָֽ͏ִם׃
Because Torah comes from Tziyon and the word of God from Jerusalem.
The poetic structure here makes clear that Tziyon and Jerusalem are largely the same thing by different names. Both the ancient city and the imagined ideal.
Isaiah continues:
Then…
The Holy One will resolve all conflict
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
לֹא־יִשָּׂ֨א ג֤וֹי אֶל־גּוֹי֙ חֶ֔רֶב
וְלֹֽא־יִלְמְד֥וּ ע֖וֹד מִלְחָמָֽה׃
Nation shall not take up sword against nation;
They shall study war no more.
Seeing these words all in a row is a revelation.
These words – lo yisa goy – which are so important and so familiar, which we just sang as we paraded the Torah around the room, which inspired the refrain of the famous African American spiritual Down by the river side, which have been an anthem of the Ceasefire movement, these words are inseparable from Isaiah’s prophecy Ki miTziyon teitzei Torah! – that Torah will flow from Tziyon.
For all these years I have been fearing that this liturgy is suggesting a vision where all legitimate Torah flows from Tziyon, from Zion, from Jerusalem.
But Isaiah is expressing something quite different - something devastatingly relevant. Isaiah’s prophecy is at once one of heartbreak and hope.
Isaiah was living in a time that bears too much resemblance to our own. A time when the city of Jerusalem had been desecrated by greed and violence. And he was dreaming of a time when Jerusalem might live up to its name and be an actual city of peace - Ir Shalom, Yerushalayim. Isaiah’s words have traveled across millenia to express the devastation I feel about Tziyon in our times, and the just peace I long for.
The way I understand Isaiah, he is imagining a time in which there shall be no more conflict, and no more war, and people will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. He is describing an aspirational future which doesn’t yet exist. That is when we will experience the flow of Torah from Tziyon, a city governed by justice, a city of peace! And only then can the Divine presence really dwell and be felt in that place.
--
But then came the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem which changed everything. We are forever living in its aftermath. In fact the second half of Isaiah was written by his disciples living in exile in Babylon.
Tziyon became not just the promise of a future time when Jerusalem and the whole world would be full of peace and justice, but the locus of our spiritual longings.
In the words of Psalm 137, by the waters of Babylon, there we wept as we remembered Tziyon.
Jewish culture and creative thinking has forever been shaped by the idea, even more than the experience, of exile.
About the experience of exile, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, of blessed memory, writes:
Exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever…true exile is a condition of terminal loss…” [6]
We have imbibed the crippling sorrow of estrangement and ritualized insurmountable sorrow. We have religiously transmitted this condition of terminal loss from generation to generation.
In my early 20’s as I was reckoning with the reality of settler colonialism here in the U.S., I asked myself what it might mean to divest from Turtle Island, to return to my own ancestral homelands. But where might that be?
My mother’s family came from the pale of settlement around the turn of the 20th century. We don’t have many details but it's hardly realistic to imagine repatriating to Ukraine at this moment. My father’s family is from Rome and Rhodes, by way of Turkey and Spain. Over the course of the past 20 years, I have visited each of those places, I think subconsciously looking for home. Like a little bird, asking, “Are you my motherland?” [7]
In each city I have sought out Jewish life, and each time I felt the distinct feeling that I make no sense in this place and time.
Our longings for home are very real. And very human. They lead us to traverse oceans and continents, searching for our place in the cosmos and on the earth.
For each of us in different ways, descendants of immigrants and slaves, survivors of tyranny and exile. Some of us carry intimate knowledge of migration and displacement. For some of us it is distant. But likely for most of us it is existentially hard to know where we are from and where we belong. This uncertainty is painful. And not easily resolved. And Tziyon gives us a container for such spiritual expression.
--
But for the rabbis, living in Diaspora for millenia, Tziyon evolves even more. Tziyon becomes a playful paradigm for what is possible.
There is this moment in the Babylonian Talmud where the rabbis invoke a line from Psalm 87 about the gates of Tziyon and one rabbi says, “don't read it as the gates of Tziyon, read it as the gates of metzuyanim – the gates of everything that is excellent.”
Because the word metzuyan (מצוין) means excellent and sounds a lot like Tziyon. This is classic rabbinic word play with deep theological implications. Here Tziyon is not a place, not even a prophecy, but the embodiments of everything excellent in this world.
In another place the rabbis of the Talmud dislocate Jerusalem and Tziyon entirely.
Rabbi Natan of Babylonia says, [8]
“For from Babylonia will go out the Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Paqod.”
And the rabbis in Jerusalem respond, wait a minute, that's not what Isaiah said.
Ki miTziyon teitzei torah…“For from Zion will go out the Torah, and the Word of God from Jerusalem”
Later rabbis chime in and jump on the Diasporist bandwagon.
Well actually, the people of Bari, Italy, say, "For from Bari comes Torah, and the Word of God from Otrano."
The Sages of Ashkenaz and France say, "From France Torah will go forth, and the Word of God from Ashkenaz."
To imagine rabbis arguing across time and space like this,
tickles me.
It is undoubtedly a reflection of religious decentralization and the spiritual power of the diaspora.
The rabbis knew that Torah comes from everywhere Jewish life flourishes. Because they knew that Tziyon was no longer a physical place nor a political ideology. It was a spiritual construct.
As if to say,
Ki mi-Kol Tzedek teitzei Torah udvar Hashem mi-West Philadelphia!
–
Tziyon exists in the past - as the ancient city of Jerusalem, the devastated city from which we are exiled. And it exists in the future, through Isaiah’s prophecy.
But Tziyon also exists in eternal time and Rosh Hashanah is when we reach for it.
These very words from Isaiah actually appear a second time in our machzor in the heart of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service.
The musaf service is an invitation into deep time, to eternal time - to the is, was, will be. Often considered long and boring, at Kol Tzedek it's an immersive journey.
It is our custom to begin the musaf service by making a shinui – a change – to cue the heart that change is possible, in us and in our world. I often take off my shoes and socks, feel the ground beneath me, place my tallit over my head so I can focus inward.
We begin with the prayers of Malchuyot which call our attention to the present tense. Tziyon and the world as we know it. Razed and broken. Once a year we prostrate fully for the Grand Aleinu, lowering ourselves to the ground, humble, vulnerable, opening ourselves to the call of the shofar.
We then move to the prayers of Zichronot which is a journey into the past tense, Tziyon of old, the world of memory, but even more so, the longing to be remembered. Here we pray the Holy One will take notice of us, write us in for another year.
And finally we arrive at Shofarot, which invites us to call forth the future we long for, to dream of a world that is free and whole. And that dream is inseparable from Isaiah’s prophecy in which peace and freedom will abide in the land with righteousness and justice.
And here, when the rabbis are dreaming big, about the world they long for, a world that is free of cruelty and oppression, a world that is whole and peaceful, they once again invoke the words of Isaiah.
Ki miTziyon teitzei torah!
Then Torah will pour forth from Tziyon…
You can see it on p. 273 of our machzor.
By the time we approach these words in the Shofarot service we have begun to unravel; our pleas to transform ourselves and the world have grown desperate. The call of the shofar is insistent, penetrating.
More than once I have been told that our Rosh Hashanah musaf service resembles a rave. I can’t argue. It is ecstatic on purpose. By the end of it I am usually a sweaty mess. I will likely have lost my tallit and Rabbi Mó will have to remind me what comes next.
But the ecstasy is inseparable from the longing, from the grief and trauma and loss. The power of Musaf, and Tziyon, is that it can contain it all. I can actually feel that the boundary between me and the world is porous, that I am finite and that I am part of something infinite and eternal. I don’t feel right or wrong about anything. Everything is more connected, and I am more connected to everything. And from this place, even for a moment, I can glimpse the self I seek, the world I seek. And I memorize that feeling. [9]
The rabbis repeated the prophecy of Isaiah
because it points us to the essence of everything we are praying
for on Rosh Hashanah!
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Tziyon exists in eternal time, it is a container for our deepest longings, our most urgent cry. And it also contains the seed of hope we desperately need, where everything is possible.
Tziyon endures beyond the snare of zionism because it contains an essential spiritual paradox.
The experience of both home and exile.
In the conclusion to her book, Molly Crappapple asks and answers a question close to my heart:
“What does [the Bund’s idea of doykait], hereness mean in our age of bloodsoaked mass displacement?”
Her answer, “An attempt, I believe, to find the self in exile, to square homeland with the freedom to leave” (p. 381).
--
This tension between home and exile appeared in another book I read this summer, a beautiful coming of age novel about two Mexican American teenage boys in El Paso Texas coming out and falling in love.
The protagonist, Aristotle Mendoza, who happens to go by the ever relatable name of Ari, is trying to find his place as a newly out gay student in high school. He finally has friends and a boyfriend, but he is still so anxious about being different.
At the start of the new school year, Ari’s boyfriend places a folded note in the palm of his hand.
The note reads,
“My mom said that we will always live between exile and belonging. Sometimes you’ll feel the loneliness of exile. And sometimes you’ll feel the happiness of belonging.” [10]
As I closed the book, I imagined Reb Simcha Bunim reading this queer YA novel and teaching:
Perhaps we are meant to have a note in each of our pockets.
In one pocket it says we are in exile.
And in the other it says we are home.
--
I once thought it was preferable to just omit every reference to Tziyon and Zionism from Jewish life. But this approach has its limitations, both politically and spiritually.
Politically we cannot claim to be a voice for justice but remain silent on one of the most grave injustices being committed with our American tax dollars in the name of our safety as Jews.
And spiritually, we cannot deny that we too need a locus for our longings – for home, for safety, for belonging. And for thousands of years, Tziyon has been that locus.
Each shabbat, we sing in the kedushah,
מָתַי תִּמְלוֹךְ בְּצִיּוֹן בְּקָרוֹב בְּיָמֵֽינוּ לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד תִּשְׁכּוֹן:
When, Holy One, will you dwell in Tziyon?
Draw us close to that time!
God, when will your presence be felt here, there and everywhere?
When will there be actual peace, here, there and everywhere?
And while some of the peace I pray for is specific to Tziyon, it is also symbolic – as if to say, when there is peace in Jerusalem, the most spiritually potent and politically volatile city, there will be peace everywhere. Including in our own hearts.
--
I leave you with one final teaching that comes from commentary on the book of Isaiah,
Rabbi Levi teaches, [11]
עתידה ירושלים להיות כארץ ישראל וארץ ישראל ככל העולם כלו
“In the future, Jerusalem will be like the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will be like the whole world.”
From this teaching we can learn that the holiness we seek is not specific to eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Quite the contrary. Just as in the world to come all time will be imbued with the holiness of Shabbat, so too every city and all lands will be treated as holy ground.
Yes, Tziyon is prophetic. Yes it is a paradox. But most importantly Tziyon is a paradigm.
The entire reason to ascribe holiness to any land is so that we can learn to relate to all land as holy, wherever we live.
This is perhaps a religious rendering of the Bundist idea of do’ikayt – Hereness. The belief that there is holiness everywhere. A commitment to cultural solidarity with all the people, in all the places we call home.
Ki mi-Tziyon teitzei torah
Ki mi-Kol Tzedek teitzei Torah
Then Torah will flow from everywhere we call home and back to Eden once again!
L’shana tova, anyada buena, dulci i alegre!
Footnotes
[1] I did not write this sermon alone. I wrote this sermon in deep conversation and collaboration with Dr. Elsie Stern, Abby McCartney, Rabbi Benay Lappe, Jon Argaman, Shosh Ruskin, Laynie Soloman, and Rabbi Mónica Gomery. I am indebted to Rabbi Ebn Leader for exploring these ideas with me while I was in rabbinical school and to all of the Kol Tzedek members who over the years have asked me what to do with the idea of Tziyon.[2] In 1989 Reconstructionists found the liturgy of the Torah service “reflects an ethic of resentment and vengeance that is inappropriate in the modern world.” So much so, that they actually printed alternative verses to be sung instead - words from Psalm 118 - “Open to me the gates of Justice”.
[3] Interestingly, Geiger was also the founder of the academic field of Quranic studies.
[4] There are two brand new forthcoming books on this topic that I look forward to reading and learning more: Antizionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser and Jewish Antizionism: A historical anthology, edited by Shaul Magid and Zev Mishell.
[5] We should not be surprised that these words come directly from Tanakh. I like to think of the prayerbook as the lyrical highlights of the Hebrew bible. Many of the words we pray are actually quotations from the Tanakh, in particular from the 5 books of Torah, the prophets and the book of psalms. You can see all of those sources reflected on page 185 of our machzor.
[6] Edward Said, from Reflections on Exile, 1984
[7] In his book A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, Daniel Boyarin points to yet another amazing text that claims Babylon is in fact our motherland. Such that when we were exiled there, we were actually being sent “home” to our mother’s house. Quoting, “Babylonia can even be described as the motherland of the Jews: ‘Rabbi Hanina says, ‘It is because their language [Aramaic] is close to the language of Torah [and therefore good for the study thereof].’ Rabbi Yohanan says, ‘Because [God] sent them to the house of their mother…” (43).
[8] Y.T. Nedarim 50a. See here.
[9] The practice of memorizing a feeling I learned from my teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe.
[10] Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, p.271-2.
[11] Yalkut Shimoni on Isaiah, 503. Yalkut is a collection of midrashim on the Tanakh. The author and the date of compilation is unknown and debated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalkut_Shimoni