Opinion

How Oct. 7 is forcing Jews to reckon with Israel

To avoid oversimplifying would take a whole book — and in fact this essay is drawn from a book about being a Jew today that I’ve been writing for the past three years and thinking about most of my adult life. In it, I argue that the Jews are like a big, loving, sometimes dysfunctional family, united in their struggle to make sense of their relationship to God (whether He exists or not) and one another. Indeed, what makes the Jewish way of seeing the world distinctive is precisely that love and struggle are inextricably intertwined in it, as they are in most families.

This love-struggle is the key to understanding what’s going on for many Jews today, in the aftermath of Oct. 7. To understand it, you have to go back to what the classical, secular Zionists who dreamed up and first built Israel wanted it to mean. The Zionists wanted the Jews to be a sovereign nation, not a feuding family. For them, a Jewish state was not supposed to be an event in Jewish history. It was supposed to be the end of Jewish history, understood as a tale of suffering in the diaspora. Israel was meant to transcend and replace religious Jewishness and begin a new national era — picking up where Israelite sovereignty had ended at the hands of Rome, 2,000 years before.

In this way, the original Zionist idea of Israel intended to secularize the old Jewish idea of the messiah into a modern nationalism disenchanted with outmoded religious faith. The utopian, secular-messianic age and the ingathering of the exiles would put an end to the vicissitudes of Jewish survival and suffering that marked God’s intermittent reward and punishment of the Jewish people. A secular state would make the world’s Jews into an ordinary, normal nation, like France or Italy, not a far-flung people doomed to live as an oppressed, neurotic minority wherever they might wash up.

It didn’t work out exactly as planned. Over the years, bolstered by military success, economic growth and skillful statecraft, Israel grew increasingly secure. Yet, notwithstanding its nuclear weapons, it did not fully achieve the Zionists’ aspiration of being independently capable of protecting the Jews who lived there, much less all Jews everywhere. Israel remains partly dependent for its security on a close relationship with the United States, and this relies in no small part on the support of the American Jewish community.

What was more, the Jewish state did not end the diaspora. Most Jews who lived in the United States or behind the Iron Curtain or in other places did not flock to the country, at least not willingly. So instead of becoming the homeland of a single Jewish nation, Israel became its own nation of Israelis. Modern Israeli Hebrew became their national language, not the language of Jews everywhere. Jews around the world might care about Israel, but they were citizens of their own countries — and many of them, whether they were secular or Reform or Conservative or traditionalist Orthodox, chose not to define their Jewishness primarily in relation to Israel.

Meanwhile, inside Israel, religious Jewishness did not fade away as the secular Zionists had anticipated. Rather, Jewish religion experienced an unforeseen renaissance. Haredi Jews multiplied and flourished and used democratic politics to gain influence and state subsidies. Religious Zionists infused Israel with messianic meaning, regarding its advent as a miraculous sign of the messianic age as depicted by the biblical prophets and the ancient rabbis.

Eventually, over the past 30 years or so, the idea of Israel began to transform Jewish religious thought from within. Jews of various religious stripes all over the world, including those who are not sure they have a theology at all, have learned to see their Jewishness in terms of Israel.

To see how this happened, and to get a sharper view of the Jewish love-struggle today, dive with me into one subtype of Jewish thought: progressive American Judaism. This worldview, prevalent today among Reform Jews (37 percent of the American Jewish population), Conservative Jews (17 percent), Reconstructionist Jews (4 percent) and many unaffiliated Jews, finds its roots among 19th century Jews living in Germany who sought to reform Judaism along the lines of Reformation Protestantism. Looking back to the Bible, they found a God who loves not only his people but all the peoples of the world; who wants social justice, not ritualized obedience; and who teaches that to be holy is to love your neighbor as yourself.

The social justice strand of progressive Judaism transferred well to the United States. An iconic photograph, taken on March 21, 1965, sums up its essence. Seven people, arms linked, lead the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery: John Lewis, Sister Mary Leoline, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Fred Shuttlesworth. The Black men in the picture, all Southern ordained ministers except Bunche, a Nobel Prize-winning diplomat, are giants of the civil rights movement. Heschel, born in Warsaw in 1907, was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi and later earned a doctorate in Berlin. After fleeing from Poland in 1939, he became a renowned teacher and scholar of Jewish mysticism affiliated with the leading Reform and Conservative rabbinical schools. His participation in the march, and the progressive beliefs that put him there, stand for a vision of God derived from the ancient Hebrew prophets and the most foundational teachings of the rabbis.

In the past half-century, the progressive teaching of divinely inspired social justice acquired a slogan: tikkun ‘olam, literally, repairing the world. The phrase echoed the much older Kabbalistic, mystical idea that in creating the finite world, the infinite God contracted, then shattered and broke into a multitude of shards. In the aftermath of that cosmic disaster, the ultimate, mystical purpose of the Jewish people is to repair the universe and the Godhead itself by redeeming the sparks of divine light that were lost or hidden in the process. As adapted by contemporary Jewish progressives, tikkun ‘olam has a this-worldly, concrete meaning. It calls for human effort, alongside God, to make the world more just.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the social justice vision of progressive Judaism acquired two new theological pillars: the centrality of the Holocaust and the redemptive narrative of the creation of Israel.

The slogan “Never Again” gave social justice guidance to the intuition that the Holocaust determined Jewish uniqueness. Jews must never again allow a Holocaust to occur.

Zionism, for its part, came to offer progressive American Jews a supplemental account of post-Holocaust redemption. The modern state of Israel had been born from the ashes of the Holocaust, so Israel redeemed the suffering of its martyrs. From destruction came rebuilding. And Israel’s existence would prevent another Holocaust from occurring by providing an escape hatch for diaspora Jews should antisemitic pressures make life untenable.

Progressive American Jews could thus integrate Israel into their theological picture of the relationship between God and the Jewish people.

This pairing made some partial sense of the deaths of the 6 million. And it enabled progressive American Jews to organize for two main purposes: memorializing the Holocaust and supporting Israel. Today 16 Holocaust museums and hundreds of public Holocaust memorials exist in the United States, with more planned to open soon. The United States Holocaust Museum, built on almost two acres of land allocated by Congress near the Washington Monument, has hosted 47 million visitors since it opened in 1993.

It would be crude and inaccurate to argue that the role of the Holocaust in progressive American Jewish thought is to drive support for Israel. The lessons of the Holocaust museums are meant to be universal. Yet the idea of Israel nevertheless comes into complex interplay with the idea of the Holocaust in progressive American Jewish thought. In the Middle Ages, Jewish theology around martyrdom existed in a complicated relationship with Christian ideas, even as Jews were being martyred by Christians. Today, progressive Jewish theology also exists in a complex relation with American Protestant thought. Seen in comparative terms, the Holocaust might stand in for the passion and the state of Israel for the resurrection. The social gospel of tikkun ‘olam can sit comfortably alongside this implicit theology.

To be clear, no progressive American Jewish thinker ever consciously intended to re-create the theological structure of American Protestantism. God forbid. What I am suggesting is that the enormous theological challenge posed by the Holocaust called out for a response. In the context of American religious thought generally, the attraction of Israel as a redemptive supplement to the Holocaust was overwhelming. The result was a coherent progressive Jewish theology of the Holocaust and Israel.

As you read these words, the community of progressive American Jews is going through a painful generational conflict — a family struggle tinged by love and pain. On one side are the people roughly my age: the Gen X leaders of the movement, rabbis and lay people alike. They are, for the most part, center or center-left Democrats.

Gen X progressive Jewish leaders are (still) liberal Zionists. They love Israel. They also criticize it. They wish Israel would be more just to Palestinians. They wish there were some solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. They often don’t identify with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which coordinates much pro-Israel lobbying by American Jews and allies itself closely with whatever government is in power in Israel.

Instead, Gen X progressive Jewish leaders have their own liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street, a lobbying body that calls itself “the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” and the New Israel Fund, which says its “aim is to advance liberal democracy, including freedom of speech and minority rights, and to fight the inequality, injustice and extremism that diminish Israel.” They publish anguished books justifying their positions with titles like “Fault Lines: Exploring the Complicated Place of Progressive American Jewish Zionism.” When Israel is attacked, however, they respond instinctively with solidarity and support. Their commitment to the Jewish state and to fellow Jews is unquestioned.

On the other side of the conflict are the kids, whose views on Israel are often very different. Some Gen Z progressive Jews participate in campus organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, a “collective of organizers that supports over 200 Palestine solidarity organizations on college campuses across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada).” On Oct. 12, as Israel began its response to Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, SJP’s national office posted on social media “condemning the Zionist project and their latest genocidal attack on the Palestinian people.”

Jewish Voice for Peace is a group that supports the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions and works alongside SJP. Its website boasts of 60 chapters, 200,000 supporters and 10,000 donors. The organization says it “is guided by a vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people.” It follows, for JVP, that “we unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.” On Oct. 14, the organization posted: “As U.S. Jews [we] believe that never again means never again for anyone, and that includes Palestinians. Never again is now.”

It seems probable that a relatively small proportion of Gen Z progressive Jews has been radicalized to the point of outright anti-Zionism. Many are conflicted about what they should think about Israel. Others would prefer not to focus on Israel at all. Yet it is fair to generalize by saying that many have been moved by the analogy, widespread on college campuses, between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa.

Today, Gen X and Gen Z progressive Jewish leaders and activists find themselves at odds with each other about Israel. The disagreement is painful for both sides, the way generational arguments often are. The middle-aged progressives think the kids have failed to learn how important Israel should be for them as Jews. The kids think the old folks are mired in a discredited ideology.

I want to suggest that the generational rift reflects not two different conceptions of progressive Jewishness but two different visions of Israel, refracted through a common commitment to social justice. Progressive Judaism gives expression to what it considers the biblical values of justice, equality, freedom and the like. When the Holocaust and Israel became part of this social justice theology, both had to accord with it. The Holocaust became a moral lesson of Never Again on par with the Hebrews’ slavery in Egypt. Israel became a model of aspirational redemption, a role it could play only because it was possible to imagine the Jewish state as liberal and democratic.

If Israel does not embody the values of liberal democracy, however, it cannot serve as a moral ideal for progressive Jews whose beliefs mandate universal human dignity and equality. In the starkest possible terms, a God of love and justice cannot bless or desire a state that does not seek to provide equality, dignity, or civil and political rights to many of the people living under its authority.

To progressive Jews, a state that denies equal treatment to its subjects is neither democratic nor properly Jewish. Nor is it democratic in the American progressive political sense. From this it follows that for sincere, committed progressive Jews, it would be a betrayal of their Jewish commitments to remain Zionists if Israel does not match the ideals of liberal democracy.

Zionists who are shocked by this development have forgotten that progressive Judaism was long skeptical of Zionism because Jewish progressives historically saw Jewishness as a set of moral teachings, not a national identity. Israeli Zionists often assume that progressives are irreligious (in Hebrew, hiloni), as secular Israelis typically describe themselves. This is mistaken. Today’s Israeli Zionists sometimes think and act as though American Jewish progressives owe Israel a duty of loyalty. For Jewish progressives, however, the higher duty of loyalty is owed to divine principles of love and justice.

One can feel sympathy for the generation of Jewish progressives who made Israel central to their theology. On one hand, the association is as powerful as ever: Images of Israelis murdered and taken hostage recall the horrors of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Israel is a real-world nation-state populated by Israelis whose beliefs and views differ from those of American Jewish progressives. With its geopolitical and domestic political struggles, Israel has driven the older generation of progressives into turmoil that can be resolved only by holding fast to an interpretation of Israel’s form of political governance that might not convince their own grandchildren.

The most thoughtful of the young progressives also face a deep challenge. They believe in the teachings of social justice that compel them to social action. But they also find that they cannot avoid what they see as the broken reality of Israel.

Their great-grandparents, if they were Reform Jews, had the option of de-emphasizing Israel, almost to the point of ignoring Zionism. Before the state of Israel existed, they did not need to reconcile their beliefs about Judaism as a private, diasporic religion with the aspirations of Zionist Jews. Even after the state arose, it was possible for a time to treat it as separate from Jewish thought, practice and identity.

The young progressives do not have this luxury. They inherited a form of Judaism that already incorporated Israel into its theology. They do not know how to be Jews without engaging Israel. Yet the content of their broader theology — their beliefs about Jewish morality and tikkun ‘olam — make support of Israel difficult or even repugnant.

Their solution — their Jewish, progressive, sincerely felt solution — is to express their belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity and human rights.

It emerges that young progressive Jewish critics of Israel feel an unstated connection to Israel even as they resist and reject it. They feel no commitment to the existing state. But they do feel a particular need to criticize Israel because it matters to their worldview as Jews. They cannot easily ignore Israel, as early Reform Jews ignored Zionism. So they engage Israel — through the vehicle of progressive critique. The phrase “not in our name” captures the sense of personal implication in Israel’s conduct that both marks and challenges their sense of connection.

This is why many young progressive Jews are at the forefront of the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses. Difficult as it is for older generations to accept, the cause is not self-hatred. It is, rather, that criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinian cause is the essence of their progressive Jewish self-expression.

As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership of their movements, progressive Judaism will have to work out its long-term attitude toward Israel. One possibility is for progressive Jews to tack away from the focus on Israel, to engage their Jewishness in other ways — familial, spiritual and personal. This would entail real theological change.

But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.

At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for any Jews to choose not to do so.

Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens, Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith, doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.