RPL Webinar Discusses the Dilemma of the Nation-State Through the Work of Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares
The Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School hosted the first in the five-part series of public conversations, exploring how an expansive understanding of religion can inform just peacebuilding. It was hosted by David Holland, Interim Dean of Religion and Public Life, and featured Shaul Magid, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies.
What does it mean to draw upon faith to build not only peace but a just peace in a world fractured by nationalism and violence? In his lecture, Magid engaged with 19th- and 20th-century thinkers like Ernst Renan, Hannah Arendt, and most notably the enigmatic ultra-Orthodox rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares (1869–1931) to explore this question.
At the heart of the discussion lay a pressing dilemma: Can the pursuit of national sovereignty and collective liberation coexist with the moral and spiritual aspirations that make us human? Or, as Tamares provocatively warned, is nationalism itself a “cancerous growth” that risks extinguishing the light religious communities are called to bring into the world?
This tension between nationalism and ethical responsibility has long been a subject of philosophical inquiry. Magid proposed Ernest Renan’s essay "What is a Nation?" as an essential framework for arguing that nations are not eternal but rather ongoing historical constructions. For him, their legitimacy was dependent on a shared moral consciousness, stating that “so long as [a nation’s] moral consciousness demonstrates its strength by the sacrifices that the abdication of the individual for the benefit of the community demands, it is legitimate and has a right to exist.” For Renan, nation identity was not solely a matter of shared history or language, but of collective will.
However, Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of totalitarianism, was more skeptical. She observed that “the experiences of recent decades have shown many times over in numerous countries that, once it has been united as a nation, a people seem prepared to fall under almost any tyranny, as long as its national interests remain protected.”
Magid places Tamares in dialogue with these perspectives, as “an important intervention into the dilemma of the nation-state, of Jewish nationalism, and of what has become of the Jewish nation-state, which Tamares understands as a subversion and not a fulfilment of the Biblical covenant of the Jews.”
Tamares’ radical pacifism—developed during the first Russian Revolution, the Young Turk revolt, and the Great War—critiqued nationalism’s violent tendencies and its impact on Jewish ethics, arguing that Jewish identity and liberation are rooted in religious and ethical traditions rather than political sovereignty. Magid contextualized these views within broader philosophical frameworks, drawing on Kant, Renan, and Arendt while connecting Tamares’ critiques to contemporary debates on nationalism and state power.
For Tamares, Zionism primarily adopted European nationalist frameworks that undermined Jewish ethical and covenantal responsibilities. He saw nationalism’s focus on sovereignty and power as incompatible with the Jewish mission to serve as a “light to the nations.” In his view, “homeland is idolatry,” meaning “not the concept of homeland itself, but the essentialization of homeland and the use of homeland as a tool to rule over others and as a weapon to attack the rights of other.” Tamares asserted that such idolatry was eroding the ethical principles central to Jewish tradition. Rituals such as the Seder, he argued, preserved these ethical commitments by recalling and reenacting the liberation from Egypt:
“We strive to achieve our freedom through the enactment of the Seder… recalling and reenacting the liberation from Egypt.”
Exile, commemorated in the Seder, was not merely a historical condition but an existential state fostering humility, ethical responsibility, and reliance on divine justice. Magid contrasted this with the dominant discourse on ‘peace’ in nationalist systems today, which is often rooted in political domination, violence, and exclusion. He connected Tamares’ critique to Peter Beinart’s recent argument in The New York Times that “states don’t have a right to exist, people do,” situating Tamares within contemporary discussions on nationalism, state violence, and human rights.
Magid ended his lecture by reminding us that Tamares was not a historian but a rabbi trying to use the template of scripture to create alternatives to destructive political realities:
“What Tamares is suggesting in that maybe we’ve gotten it backwards. The enlightenment posed reason as the solution to the primitive nature of religion, as the liberation from religion. But perhaps it’s religion all along—understood in a more evolved, creative, and yet selective way—that really is the solution to the corrosive nature of human reason and where we are today.”
Following Magid’s presentation, Holland moderated a lively Q&A that raised questions about nationalism’s inherent moral character, its compatibility with religious ideals, and whether Tamares’s views, though already informed by the pogroms, might have evolved in the wake of the Holocaust. The discussion also explored the practicality of Tamares’s pacifism and of finding alternatives to the nation-state in today’s world.
Magid closed with a reflection on the value of engaging with the ideas of Tamares:
“It is worth it to take this far-flung Rabbi from the early 20th century, who was an idiosyncratic Jewish pacifist, and think a little more carefully about what the possibilities are. . . . There are many people who think he’s completely naïve. But I don’t think that his naïveté is a weakness. I think his naïveté is actually a strength, and I hope that his work, and the work that I’m doing on him, can extend beyond the Jewish community and create resources for a larger conversation about how to change the world.”