`Zion` beyond the spiritual significance (a community of religious people) and utopian (Heaven, The Holy Land, the place of rebuilding the Temple for the Second Coming of Messiah), also has a geographical dimension. On the one side, it is associated with the City of David and Mount Zion, precisely the southeast hill of contemporary East Jerusalem.[1] But with the territorial expanding during king Solomon and Herod, it became synonymous with the city of Jerusalem itself.[2] On the other hand, the term `Zion` can be associated with the biblical Land of Israel (Heretz Israel) as a whole, which brings with it a religious dimension to the geographical comprehensiveness of` Zion`.[3] [4] `Zion`, or the Land of Israel here presents clear boundaries which ecompasses the biblical lands of Israel: Sinai, Gaza, West Bank, old city of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as united with the 1948 independent State of Israel.[5] In this matter, geographical Zion not only goes back to biblical myths of the Land of Israel but it puts in motion a long process of redemption of the Jewish people.[6] Therefore, as long as Zion is fragmented there would be no complete redemption.[7]

Over time, `Zion` forged different geographical boundaries, borders directly proportional to the level of redemption achieved. According to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in 1913, when referring to the Jewish settlements and colonies in Palestine at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, ``there is no doubt that this return to Zion is the beginning of redemption`` .[8] Here, `Zion` does not expose explicit boundaries but more universaly the `return to the Holy Land`. Decades later, Kook`s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook presented the newly independent State of Israel in 1948 as a platonic ideal state, awaiting redemption.[9] In his religious interpretation, the political boundaries of the State of Israel immediately after independence have not represented the fulfillment of God`s will, or the complete redemption of the Jewish people, as far as the other biblical lands of the Eretz Israel were to be found outside State of Israel`s authority.[10] As his father saw the Balfour Declaration aimed at creating a Jewish home in Palestine, the victory of Great Britain over the Ottoman Turks and the establishment of the Mandate of Palestine as divinely ordained, young Kook interpreted the World War Two and the establishment of the State of Israel as signs of Jewish redemption.[11] [12] Following the 1967 Six-day War in which the State of Israel conquered Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem from the hands of the Arabs, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook saw this as God`s intervention in history and the completion of redemption.[13] After all, how could the redemption be complete if between 1948 and 1967, the Old City of Jerusalem was under Jordanian authority and inaccessible to Israelis.[14] The full redemption was thus associated with the geographical fulfilment of the boundaries of the promised Land. When in 1978, following the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations for peace, the State of Israel ceded Sinai to Egypt, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook`s followers saw this as a betrayal of the cause of biblical Land of Israel (`Greater Israel` in political terms), and a setback of redemption.[15] [16] When in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the destruction of Jewish settlements, many within the Religious Zionism interpreted the current events as furthering away from the redemption.[17]

But not all Jews saw the geographical and political fulfilment of the boundaries of Zion as part of the redemption process.[18] Kook, father and son, were representative for the Religious Zionist movement, that tried to reconcile secularism associated with the formation of the Jewish nation-state with religious Jewish traditions, its formation as divinely ordered.[19] For Kook, father and son, Zionism was an inherently religious idea, with Zionist history and politics as rooted in a redemptive ideology.[20] [21] For the Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews, the return to Zion does not explicitly imply return to the Greater Israel as a precondition of redemption, but rather return to the Torah as essential for Jewish redemption.[22] [23] These Orthodox Rabbis oppose young Kook`s interpretation of the formation of the 1948 State of Israel and the 1967 conquest of the other biblical lands as signs of redemption.[24] For those Rabbis, the Talmudic dictum of the Three Oaths forbid all human efforts to redeem the Land of Israel, implicitly here the 19th century Jewish settlements in the Land of Palestine, as the beginning of redemption, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1920, followed by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as a turning point in the redemption process and the 1967 conquest of the other biblical lands as its completion.[25] According to Shalom Goldman in the book `Zeal for Zion`, ``anyone who points to a specific historical event as the beginning of redemption are claiming that they are in communication with God and know the future, which would make them false prophets ... The true content of the Jewish messianic and redemptive idea is the return to the Torah``.[26] 

[1] Annabel Jane Wharton, `Jerusalem`s Zions`, Material Religion, Vol 9, issue 2, 2013, pp. 218-243.

[2] Ibidem.

[3] Shalom Goldman, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press, pp. 276-277.

[4] Ibidem, pp. 280-283.

[5] Shalom Goldman, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press, pp. 280-283.

[6] Ibidem, p. 276.

[7] Ibidem, 280-283.

[8] Ibidem, p. 276.

[9] Ibidem, p. 280.

[10] Ibidem, pp. 280-283.

[11] Ibidem, pp. 276-277.

[12] Ibidem, p. 280.

[13] Ibidem.

[14] Ibidem, pp. 282-283.

[15] Shalom Goldman, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press, pp. 287-288.

[16] Ibidem, pp. 296-299.

[17] Ibidem, p. 288.

[18] Ibidem, p. 277.

[19] Ibidem, pp. 277-278.

[20] Ibidem, p. 275.

[21] Ibidem, p. 286.

[22] Shalom Goldman, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press, p. 277.

[23] Adam Rovner, `Introduction` in In the Shadow of Zion – Promised Lands Before Israel, New York University Press, New York, 2014, p. 10.

[24] Shalom Goldman, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press, p. 277.

[25] Ibidem.

[26] Ibidem, p. 289.

Bibliography:

Goldman, Shalom, `Zeal for Zion, Christian, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land`, The University of North Carolina Press.

Rovner, Adam, `Introduction` in In the Shadow of Zion – Promised Lands Before Israel, New York University Press, New York, 2014.

Wharton, Annabel Jane, `Jerusalem`s Zions`, Material Religion, Vol 9, issue 2, 2013.