Ted Cruz and the Meaning of Israel (2)

In a clip that went viral, Texas Senator Ted Cruz told Tucker Carlson that defending Israel was personally important to him because of a verse in the Bible.

. . . as a Christian growing up in Sunday school, I was taught, from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things.

Interesting, isn’t it? We are all taught various things when we are children. As we grow up, we learn to think critically, to examine the evidence, to weigh opposing viewpoints, and to develop our own perspectives. In the process of growing up, we find that at least some of what we were taught as children doesn’t hold up to scrutiny; it may turn out to be completely wrong (the Tooth Fairy) or mostly wrong (Columbus discovered America). Or we may realize that an issue that was presented to us in a binary form (people are either good or bad) is actually much more nuanced. With the passage of time, our understanding of the world evolves in light of our experience, observation, education, conversations with other people, and so on. By the time we are in our 50s (Ted Cruz is 54 years old), a great deal of what we were taught as children has already been replaced with more mature views. At the same time, some of what we were taught as children does remain with us throughout our lives, typically because the lesson in question is repeatedly confirmed through our own inquiries and our own lived experience. Since Cruz still believes something he was taught as a child, one would assume that he has investigated the matter and has come to the conclusion that the lesson is, indeed, valid.

Let’s assume that Ted Cruz is telling the truth about what he learned as a child in Sunday school. The surprising fact is not that he still believes in it but that he is unable to coherently defend his conviction against a few probing questions. Cruz wants us to accept that a biblical lesson he encountered in childhood made such a strong impression on his mind that it has continued to inspire and motivate him throughout the decades—yet, he doesn’t know where the verse is found in the Bible, nor is he able to give a half-decent explanation of how he is applying it.

Put differently, from the time when he was a child all the way to the present, when he is 54 years old, Cruz claims to have held the belief that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed, and that this conviction is so near and dear to his heart that it continues to shape his politics, including his votes and advocacy in the Senate and beyond. Yet, when he is asked a few challenging questions about what this means, Cruz finds himself at a total loss. This is actually quite puzzling. How was he able to hold a biblical verse in the highest esteem for more than forty years without ever bothering to study its context and various interpretations? Why did he never thought of spending a little bit of time and effort to make sure that his childhood understanding was reliable? Or is it the case that Cruz has never doubted anything he was taught as a child? Perhaps Tucker should have asked the Senator if he still believed in Santa Clause.

What makes Cruz’s performance particularly feeble is that the questions he faced were quite simple and straightforward. In fact, Tucker only asked him one substantive question, repeating and emphasizing it in different ways, i.e., how does Cruz know that “the people of Israel” mentioned in the relevant biblical verse is a reference to the same “nation” that the modern state of Israel claims to represent? In other words, how is it that an almost three thousand year old text is referring to a political entity that only came into being a little over 70 years ago? One doesn’t have to be a theologian or a Bible expert to ask this question. Virtually anyone who hears the Senator’s claim would want to know exactly what Tucker asked him in the interview. In one instance, he challenged Cruz to define the word “Israel,” but the Senator reacted like this was a ridiculous question.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: Define ’“Israel”? Do you not know what Israel is? That would be the country you’ve asked, like, 49 questions about.

When Tucker asked for a definition of “Israel,” he was referring to the biblical term. In response, the Senator acted like he couldn’t believe that the word needed to be defined at all—doesn’t everyone know that Israel is a country in the Middle East? This response shows that Cruz doesn’t see any difference between a religious community mentioned in the Bible and a modern nation state. At this point, Tucker gives his guest another chance to clarify his position: Are you saying that, in the Bible, God is talking about a country that only came into being in 1948? The senator responds in the affirmative while also adding another twist to his argument.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: He’s talking about the nation of Israel, yes. Nations exist. And he’s discussing a nation. A nation was . . . the people of Israel is the nation. They’re the descendants of Abraham.

In Cruz’s mind, not only is there no distinction between a particular religious community and a particular nation state, but there is, in addition, no distinction between a particular religious community and a particular “nation” in the political sense. These two conflations create a huge logical gap at the core of his argument. Tucker notices the gap and challenges the Senator to bridge it. But Cruz cannot do that because he is unaware of his conflations and cannot find any problem in his argument. From Cruz’s viewpoint, the objections raised by Tucker make no sense. Cruz would rather stay in the safety of what he was taught as a child than risk cognitive dissonance by scrutinizing his own belief. In fact, he has never scrutinized that particular belief to any degree at all; if he had, he would have been able to provide some kind of explanation to bridge the logical gap.

Given that so many of our childhood beliefs don’t survive our own critical thinking as adults, Cruz seems to have put an unjustifiable amount of trust in his Sunday school teacher. This seems incongruous. One cannot achieve as much success in U.S. politics as Cruz has by being so gullible and naïve; on the contrary, I am sure that the Senator is quite suspicious of other people’s motives and doesn’t take anything they say at face value. That, in fact, is the appropriate mindset to adopt when dealing with politicians and their political statements. Applying some healthy suspicion, therefore, I think we can be pretty sure that the Senator is not being 100% honest here. As mentioned in the previous post, he is simply sending a message to his voters and donors, reassuring them that his loyalty to Israel is so deeply ingrained in his mind since childhood that he is incapable of acting otherwise. Since the Senator is making a political appeal disguised as a religious conviction, we need not worry about whether he actually holds that belief. In fact, it doesn’t matter at all what his religious beliefs are, so long as he can claim that they are the same as those held by his supporters.

Yet, this does not mean that we can ignore the religious argument itself. There are between 30 and 50 million Christian Zionists in the United States who are convinced that God wants them to give their unconditional support to the state of Israel, and that they and their country will be blessed so long as they maintain that support. Perhaps the most popular Bible-based argument used by this group is exactly the one that Ted Cruz just brought to the world’s attention.

Ted Cruz’s Christian Zionist argument can be broken down into several propositions, listed below as P1 through P4, along with the most important questions that we ought to ask for each proposition. I will use quotation marks to remind the reader that the words “Israel” and “nation” refer to concepts that need careful handling, given their polyvalent and contested nature.

P1. The Bible says that those who bless “Israel” will be blessed and those who curse “Israel” will be cursed.

What is the relevant text? What is the context? Are there competing interpretations? What does the word “Israel” mean in the Bible? Does it refer to a racial or ethnic group? Did its meaning change over time?

P2. The biblical term “Israel” refers to a particular “nation.”

What is a “nation”? Is it a generic term for any type of group, or does it carry a technical meaning? Can we use the term “nation” to describe a religious community? Does it apply to a racial or ethnic group?

P3. Today, the “nation” in question is the same as, or is represented by, the modern state of “Israel.”

Were the Jewish people always a “nation”? Do they constitute a “nation” today? Are they a racial or ethnic group? What is the relationship between the Jewish people and the state of “Israel”? Is the behavior of the state of “Israel” representative of the Jewish people?

P4. Those who support the modern state of “Israel” are blessed by God.

What does supporting the modern state of “Israel” actually entail? Why is this support unconditional? What are the consequences of such support? Does the biblical God approve of those consequences? Does the Bible provide any other criteria for divine blessing and divine curse?

I am sure that additional questions will arise as we continue this line of inquiry. Stay tuned for more.