{"id":59053,"date":"2019-07-08T21:23:19","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T18:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=59053"},"modified":"2023-01-30T17:02:07","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T15:02:07","slug":"one-of-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/one-of-the-people\/","title":{"rendered":"One Of The People"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[834,423,638],"acf":{"old_id":"59053","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":52019,"related_cahpter":"258","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Of David, Ahad Ha\u2019am, Herzl, \u201cwhite hat\u201d hackers and the question of protecting the kingship and the public good","content":"

David receives another opportunity to kill his pursuer Saul, but he again declines to do any harm to the king, \u201cthe anointed one of God.\u201d This would have been the simplest case of self-defense; Saul was leading an army of 3,000 men in search of David, but David ordered his nephew Avishai to stand down, warning, \u201cwho has ever cast a hand against the anointed one of God and been guiltless?\u201d Instead, David takes a spear and water jug from the sleeping Saul and, like a valiant<\/span> \u201cwhite hat\u201d hacker<\/span><\/a>, dutifully informs Saul\u2019s men of their security failure: \u201cWhy have you not guarded your master the king, when any anonymous one of the people (\u201c<\/span>ahad ha-am<\/span><\/em>\u201d) could have come to destroy the king your master.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1889, early Zionist intellectual Asher Ginsberg adopted <\/span>Ahad ha-Am<\/span><\/em> as a pen name for his first published essay,<\/span> explaining<\/span><\/a>, \u201cI am no author and have no intention to ever enter the community of authors, and only incidentally am I revealing my opinion in this matter, as an anonymous one of the people whose spirit is engaged with the concerns of the people.\u201d Decades later and widely regarded as one of the great Zionist thinkers, Ahad ha-Am was still writing under the same name.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ahad ha-Am did not explicitly tie his identity to the <\/span>ahad ha-am<\/span><\/em> invoked by David here or to the one referred to by King Avimelekh in Genesis 26:10. But his name was his destiny, and in time <\/span>Ahad ha-Am <\/span>became known for \u201ccoming to destroy the king.\u201d\u00a0 Ahad ha-Am relentlessly criticized the political Zionism of his nemesis Theodor Herzl, deriding the movement as overly preoccupied with power and insufficiently concerned with the sacred ideas of Jewish spirit and culture. He condemned Herzl\u2019s efforts to enlist support for a sovereign Jewish state by conducting diplomacy with world leaders, and he called upon the message of the Prophets, who<\/span> \u201csought with all their might to ensure that the ends would never be subjugated to the means and the \u2018flesh\u2019 would never rule over the spirit.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To the extent Ahad ha-Am saw any value in a Jewish state, he wanted it to be guided by its prophets, not its kings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, Ahad ha-Am did not \u201cdestroy the king,\u201d and he remains a footnote in the story of the triumph of political Zionism. The <\/span>ahad ha-am<\/span><\/em> of David\u2019s imagination also failed to harm the king, because David himself intervened, not out of concern for Saul in particular but because of his zeal for the institution of the \u201canointed one of God,\u201d the institution he and his descendants were chosen to control.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":59054,"id":59054,"title":"isam26-ahadhaam-herzl3","filename":"isam26-ahadhaam-herzl3.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/isam26-ahadhaam-herzl3.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/one-of-the-people\/isam26-ahadhaam-herzl3\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"isam26-ahadhaam-herzl3","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":59053,"date":"2019-07-08 18:22:24","modified":"2019-07-08 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