We are in the desert. We have just begun reading the fourth book of the Torah, Bamidbar, The Book of the Desert. The Book of the Desert covers the 39 years of Israel’s wandering in the desert on the way to the Promised Land. There are a lot of difficult moments along the way. One of them is the rebellion against God and Moses, which took place after the spies went to check out the Promised Land. They brought back a less than optimistic report. The Jewish people said, “Well if that’s the case, let’s return to Egypt!” The generation that left Egypt then died out in the desert.

This summer, there is an anniversary that lends understanding to what happens when a few Jews or a Jewish community decides to sever their link to the Land of Israel. At the very same time that Theodor Herzl gave birth to Zionism-the utterly remarkable and successful Jewish national liberation movement-there emerged a sect, another group of Jews, who did the exact opposite.

This summer, we are living through the 100 ^th anniversary of that period between the abdication of the Czar in February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. One hundred years ago this summer, the Bolsheviks spent their time undermining the moderate, but woefully incompetent, Kerensky regime. In that group of Bolsheviks were some brilliant, active, and accomplished Jews. When they came to power they set about the destruction of Jewish life in a way unprecedented in Jewish history.

It was the Jewish Communists who led the assault on the synagogue, the yeshiva, and all of traditional Jewish life. This was still not enough to satisfy them. They also assaulted a whole variety of proud and remarkable expressions of Jewish secular national identity. They assaulted the Zionist movement, not just its right wing or center, but especially its left wing. They went after Socialist Zionists with zeal. They saw them as particularly dangerous because they were in fact socialists, who nevertheless asserted the national aspirations of the Jewish people. Indeed, when the Communists came to power they established central bureaus in order to bring the revolution to the national and ethnic groups within the Soviet Union.

Thus, Shimon Dimanshten, a traditional Jew who converted to Communism, became head of this bureau. His assault on traditional Jewish life, Zionism, and the secular Yiddishist Socialist Movement, the Bund, was vicious-and enormously successful. He was one of the great leaders of the dismantling of Jewish civilization in the Soviet Union.

The Jewish Bolsheviks abhorred Zionism because they were universalists. They believed that what united all people was their economic status and place as members of the proletariat. They saw all religious or national identities as serving capitalism. They denied the very national nature of the Jewish people as expressed in Zionism. They produced such grotesque works as the Red Haggadah, which instead of opening with the famous line, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God came and redeemed us…” They substituted, “We were slaves to capital and the October Revolution came along and redeemed us…” Communism provided a means by which some Russian Jews who wanted to assimilate could do so without converting to Christianity.

One of the most prominent and brilliant of these Jewish Communists was Rosa Luxemburg, who best articulated their credo in a letter that she wrote to a friend:

“I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering. Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.

“ Here then is a roster of some of these Jewish Bolsheviks who are now utterly lost to Jewish history and to the Jewish people: Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army; Sverdlov, the first President of the Soviet Union; Znovyiev and Kamenev, members of the Polit Buro; Yuri Larin (originally Luria), architect of Communist economics; Kaganovich, Stalin’s longest serving henchman. They, and others like them, enabled one of the single greatest upheavals in Western history, the Communist Revolution that resulted in the Soviet Union, which endured for 74 horrific years and for which the Jewish people paid dearly.

The lesson of their universalism should not be lost on us today. Those who do not see their very being and self-understanding as Jews bound up with the Land of Israel, and the exercise of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral homeland, are severing a connection which is almost, but not quite impossible, to reconnect. After all, Trotsky’s great-grandson does live in Israel today.

Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko is the Rabbinic Scholar of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago.