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BackThe transcendent can help cultivate a shared appreciation for the land and its significant sacred sites, rather than the sectarian divisions created by the zero-sum game of colonialism and nationalism.
In his discussion of religion and sovereignty in various contexts, Robert Yelle (2019) stresses the ambivalent relationship between the modern state and transcendence. Despite Max Weber's argument that modernity disenchanted the world of its gods and demons, modernity is actually obsessed with transcendence, managing it, controlling it, and affirming it in certain forms while excluding it in others. Moreover, in contrast to various scholars, from Carl Schmitt through Georges Bataille to Rudolf Otto, which highlighted the connection between the sacred and the sovereign during times of political and social instability, Yelle argues that the sacred, as it manifested by religious institutions, not only reinforces the social order, but also encompasses individual and collective acts of protest, dissent against, attack upon, or efforts to dissolve and remake it.
This utilization was examined by William Cavanaugh (2024) as the conversion of the divine into "Gods of our own making" – means the sovereign state. Therefore, the sovereign state embodies the transfer of the holy from the divine God to the nation-state and the national collective. This phenomenon also applies to the transformation of collective consciousness into a national 'we', an idolatrous expression of collective narcissism, leading to racism and a readiness to commit acts of violence on behalf of the national collective. In the Jewish-Zionist context, this transformation was described by Yaacov Yadgar (2024) as supersessionism – a political theology of replacement, where Zionism in general, and the State of Israel in particular, are understood to be assuming the role and position of historical, traditional Judaism. In this process, the transcendent God is transformed into an immanently political one. It does not imply the absence of God, but rather the replacement of God with an alternative ultimate power: the sovereign state. Consequently, the state is divine in nature, embodying unlimited power. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Hebrew term sovereign (Ribon) was transformed from a divine meaning (Ribon Ha'Olam) to a national collective one only by Zionists in the 1920s (Kaminer, 2019).