שִׁירוּ לַיהוָה, שִׁיר חָדָשׁ; שִׁירוּ לַיהוָה, כָּל-הָאָרֶץ

Sing to the lord, a new song; sing to the lord, all of the earth

Psalm 96

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This essay presents a vision for Judaism in North America, with themes of myth, diaspora, environmentalism, and the role of religion in modernity. The audience are Jews and allies looking for meaningful, vital expressions of their tradition and their faith.

I. Introduction

The world is at a crossroads. The neoliberal promise of peace through trade has proven, if not empty, then half-empty. We are failing to avert the climate crisis, with dire consequences for this generation and the next. Our social discourse has devolved into tribalistic mud-slinging, with rising inequality making the lure of populist demagogues stronger by the day. Cast adrift, people find metaphysical orientation through accessible new belief systems. Each day there is less to hold on to: postmodernism gave way to neo-romanticism, which brought us to an end-point of cynicism and irony. The only winning move is not to play.

Or is it?

Despite these challenges, our moral consciousness is bursting at the seams. Our desire for justice exceeds even our language for describing it. Tremendous progress in the arts and sciences have deepened our understanding of our minds and our capacity for understanding, growth, and relationship. New technologies hold great promise, if only we had the collective capacity to control and deploy them.

Creative cultural vision is needed, and in this historical moment, the Jews of North America have a role to play. This population in particular is well-equipped to emerge as exemplars of a more nuanced relationship to land, learning, and spirit.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously wrote in his 1951 The Sabbath, Judaism was the first religion to sanctify time in lieu of space. By building a “palace in time,” a Jew can observe the Sabbath in any physical place: time itself is made holy. It follows that, as time exists at all places on earth, any place on earth can be made equally holy. Jewish practice in North America, and indeed Jewish practice anywhere on earth, is equal to Jewish practice in any other place. 

This view is non-exceptionalist (with “exceptional” used not in the colloquial sense of “very good,” but in the specific sense of “mysteriously and irrevocably unique”). While some might feel otherwise, no one people has an exceptional destiny; no one place has an exceptional quality. While some may prefer to practice Judaism in particular places, these are only that – preferences. The concept of a mystically-deficient “exile” was broken from the start.

The North American continent is a creative ground. It is home to a rich liberal tradition of thought, and has welcomed cultural innovators from all walks of life. Peopled for thousands of years by an indigenous population, it has in recent centuries become home – often through displacement and violence – to a striking diversity of people and cultures. It is an appropriate place to undertake the creative spiritual work this era calls for, and North American Jews in particular possess attributes and characteristics suitable to this moment.

The first is that the climate crisis represents an existential threat requiring major coordinated action. It is increasingly clear that capitalist society alone cannot create the level of cooperation needed to address this crisis. Faith communities, with their sophisticated organizing abilities, are able to provide this leadership. By recognizing environmental conservation as the overarching spiritual project of our times, faith communities, such as North American Jewry, can help millions rise to their urgent task.

The second is that Jews across the continent are looking for a spirituality which resonates and feels relevant in the context of an advanced technological civilization. As the authority-claims of the great faiths collapse, they leave behind a spiritual void, increasingly filled by magic, divination, and pursuit of altered states. These expressions provide clues: as grand narratives ebb from history, the spiritual impulse seeks a return to the earth. Jews, possessing ancient and often forgotten traditions of nature-worship, have a rich body of practices to draw upon, helping to structure and shape these new/old impulses.

The third is that many Jews of North America are yearning for creative new expressions of their faith. The orthodoxy, while potent in its unity, often produces isolated communities engaged in zero-sum interactions with the world. At the same time, liberal (non-orthodox) Jewish denominations, while more inclusive and progressive in their methods, have yielded much of Judaism’s spiritual power. There is an appetite for a Jewish life that integrates the mythic power and communal toolkit of orthodoxy with the liberal and universalizing ethos of tikkun olam into an expansive new identity.

The fourth is that mainstream Jewish life in America is often reduced to a tribalistic defense of Israel, with the supermajority (circa 2020) of American Jews feeling “strongly identified” with the country, and the majority (circa 2024) supporting the actions and policies of its government and urging US involvement. Jews with minority views are often marginalized.

These views did not come about by accident; rather, they are the result of an intentional and coordinated policy. The drafting of American Jewry into a conflict not of their choosing has flattened and divided its inner life, suppressing its potentialities. North American Jews deserve an independent vision for their lives, not one in which their experience is taken as fundamentally less-than.

The rest of this essay will develop these themes. It will develop conceptual foundations, and excavate common beliefs regarding antisemitism, Israel, and America. The goal is to stimulate debate, provide perspective, and challenge assumptions. Judaism has survived for 3,400 years by evolving with the times while staying true to its core. It should continue to do both.

II. Foundations

While every sociological phenomenon is complex, it is often useful to present them in essentials. Here, these can be articulated as land, learning, and spirit.

Land

The field of vision is the North American continent. Orienting around the continent, and not its countries, emphasizes the inhabiting and stewarding of physical land as the orienting concern. This return to land creates a virtuous cycle: the Jews cultivate and enrich the land, and the land cultivates and enriches the Jews.

The Jews cultivate the land

Since the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the world has been engaged in a fight against environmental degradation. While our capitalist mode of organization brought many benefits, including a greater emphasis on individual agency and a widespread increase in material wealth, it has failed to cultivate a shared sense of responsibility, in particular towards the physical environment.

The past few decades has seen the emergence of several notable Jewish farming and nature organizations, including Adamah, Wilderness Torah, Eden Village, and the Jewish Farmer Network. This emergence reveals a widespread impulse to express Jewish cultural energy through the language of right relation to land. This work can take many forms, from running educational programs to creating retreat centers to developing new technologies to operating working farms, and more besides. Further, “cultivating the land” can be taken metaphorically to refer to many kinds of professional labor: work in finance, business, law, technology, development, policy, and more can all contribute to a positive-sum stewardship of the earth. The defining feature of this work is its creative, not extractive, nature.

Just as Quaker innovations in meeting process influenced community organizers around the world, what is incubated in the periphery of a faith community can over time mature into the mainstream. Jewish environmental leadership can bring society-wide benefits.

The land cultivates the Jews

The Jewish experience from late antiquity through the middle ages was one of political and social marginalization. Jews in both Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East were variously tolerated and oppressed, but never true equals in their societies. Isolated in shtetls and ghettos, they were denied the right to own land and co-create civic and cultural life. This long experience had a profound impact on the Jews of that time, who developed both severe neuroses and a rich inner life of the spirit.

The early Zionists understood this suffering when they formulated the “New Jew” as the ideal of an agentive, integrated person. This New Jew became a core archetype in Zionist consciousness and the source of much of its early appeal. Rightly so. Access to ownership and opportunities for creation spoke to the Jewish mythic consciousness, exerting a powerful effect on those populations.

Such vitalization can occur on any land, however, not only in Israel. Across North America, Jews are rediscovering the act of cultivation – not just of soil, but of identity itself. This transformation — the synthesis of embodiment and intellect, land and spirit — has deep precedent in Jewish tradition. And no figure embodies this transformation more than Jacob.

The story of Jacob

Some Jewish thinkers, such as historian Daniel Boyarin, argue in books like his 1997 Unheroic Conduct that passive intellectualism is an essential characteristic of the Jewish people. As Martha Nussbaum writes, Boyarin juxtaposes the “weak” Jew with the “strong” Roman, arguing that the ideal Jew is the gentle scholar stooped over dusty tomes, not the hardy farmer building society – a striking interpretation. It is neither right nor wrong, but a thought half-finished.

Understanding the book of Genesis as laying the mythic foundation for the Jewish psyche positions Jacob as the central dramatis personae. Abraham and Isaac, Jacob’s forebears, are the last of the primordial titans. Joseph, Jacob’s son, is the divine child, reflecting a Jewish people already elect. It is around Jacob that the human drama revolves.

Much is made of Jacob’s role as the gentler brother, contrasted with Esau, the strong and hairy man-of-war. In the 1943 epic Joseph and his Brothers, Thomas Mann poeticizes Jacob’s development, telling that “he had known moments of humiliation, of flight, of naked fear — situations in life that proved to be the very ones transparent to grace.” Only a mild man, the argument goes, can develop spiritual capacity.

There is substance to this claim. Anthropologist David Graeber argues in the Utopia of Rules that the less power one has, the more they must cultivate faculties of empathy to survive. While physical weakness can lead to the development of manipulative tendencies, it can also lead to the cultivation of emotional strength.

Jacob’s story does not end there. He flees his fearsome brother and settles in a far-off land, spending decades cultivating his spiritual, financial, and physical body. Years later, en route to reconcile with his brother, he meets — and wrestles — an angel. Jacob prevails, and only after overcoming this physical trial does God bestow onto the now-complete Jacob the sacred name of Israel.

This reading of Jacob reveals not that Jews are essentially weak, but rather that in Jacob, and thus for the Jews, the dialectic poles of physical and spiritual are reversed. This is the essential characteristic of Judaism, and the true distinction vis a vis Nussbaum’s Roman, for whom strength is primary and mind secondary. Jacob’s story — the Jewish story — begins with the mind, but it is fulfilled only through the body.

Jewish strength does not lie in rejecting the physical, nor in brute force, but in the integration of the two. Just as Jacob struggled to unite body and spirit within himself, so too must contemporary Jewry wrestle with how to revive the spirit of its tradition in a world that often feels severed from both.

Learning

As physicist David Deutsch writes in The Beginning of Infinity, knowledge is the most powerful substance in creation. Weightless, colorless, and shapeless, it has the power to transform the darkest void of space into airy paradise.

The Jewish emphasis on learning is one of its defining characteristics. From the archetype of Jacob the intellectual, through the long tradition of Talmudic study and debate, to the extraordinary array of achievements made by Jews in the secular arts and sciences, the association of Jews and intelligence runs deep.

In his seminal 1966 After Auschwitz, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein asks why this should be the case. Writing in the postwar United States, Rubenstein sought to explain this remarkable tendency without appealing to a “divine covenant” or magical blessing from God. He argues Judaism’s cultural emphasis on critical thought — initially applied to religious study, but generalizing to all fields of endeavor — explains this stellar track record.

This capacity for critical inquiry is a source of Judaism’s greatest contributions. Looking forward, there are a number of areas where this capacity could be productively applied.

Organizational studies

One of history’s through-lines is the story of human organization. It is evident that our democratic institutions are buckling under enormous strain. Illegitimate elections, gridlocked legislatures, and inefficient administration are risk factors for state decline. More effective organizations, making better decisions at lower costs, would benefit all levels of society.

North American Jews are not new to this work. In Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, Sarah Imhoff juxtaposes the 20th century Israeli and American visions of Jewish power and agency: “[American Zionism] transcended geographical boundaries and … centered on nonphysical traits, such as courage. … Building and securing a society for the vulnerable was the central task of American Zionist masculinity…” Where the Israeli Jew defeats its enemies, the North American Jew builds a better society for all.

More effective organizations also broaden the reach of Jewish communal life. As far back as his 1934 Judaism as a Civilization, thinkers like Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrestled with the high cost of religious participation, discussing the risks posed by expensive and inaccessible Jewish institutions. As the costs of sustaining schools, synagogues, and community centers increased, Kaplan worried that Jewish life would increasingly be the prerogative of an upper middle class; a niche hobby instead of a vibrant cultural force.

In this regard, Chassidism in particular has much to offer: innovation in grassroots organizing is one of that movement’s trademark achievements. When the cost of religious life is reduced to that of a potluck dinner, Jewish communal life once again becomes accessible, dynamic, and relevant.

Religious studies

Judaism’s tradition of written debate is a key to its resilience over time. While Sigmund Freud in his 1939 Moses and Monotheism ribs the orthodoxy for what he sees as collective neuroticism, he concedes that the meticulous care they showed their holy books guaranteed their continuity over millennia.

This process, however, was not pure repetition. There was also periodic revitalization. In his 1960 On The Kabbalah and its Symbolism, pioneering biblical scholar Gerschom Scholem describes the ways mystics transformed their communities by both honoring and subverting their texts:

Recognition of the unaltered validity of the traditional authority is the price which mystics pay for transforming the meanings of the text in their exegesis. As long as the framework is kept intact, the conservative and revolutionary elements in this type of mystic preserve their balance, or perhaps it would be better to say, their creative tension.

Some more liberal Jewish denominations permit themselves to dispense with halacha, religious law, entirely and to pick and choose from without the values to embody. This rejection of tradition is understandable, but puts them in the periphery of the Jewish canon. A bolder approach would be to engage in classic exegetical processes with a visionary spirit, reinterpreting tradition from within. Many stand to benefit.

Taking up the example of gender, one could say that Orthodox Judaism, for all its majesty and longevity, has faltered in its encounter with modernity. Its continued rejection of homosexuality, and difficulties admitting women into the rabbinate, are failures of religious thought and leadership. Rabbis will cite texts to bolster their arguments; but as Scholem writes, a key message of the Zohar, Judaism’s core mystical work, is that:

Every word [of the Torah], indeed every letter, has 70 aspects, or literally, ‘faces’. … The different aspects are the secrets that can be discovered in every word. … The meaning of the holy text cannot be exhausted in any finite number of lights and interpretations, and the number seventy stands here of course for the inexhaustible totality of the divine word.

This author is not a rabbi, and can only bring the perspective of a liberal education. But one might venture, given the mystical nature of divine revelation and the combinatoric potential of the holy letters, that our rabbis, if they really wanted to, could find new interpretations of ancient texts which made space for all of their people.

Another area of useful inquiry would be kashrut, the kosher laws. Ancient rabbis were conservative legalists, building “fences” in the form of extraneous rules to ensure that even absent-minded Jews would not transgress. This resulted in a complex web of idiosyncratic restrictions, functioning more to isolate Jews than to promote their health and well-being. Just as basic innovations in time-keeping reshaped holiday observance, so should new discoveries in science and biology inform dietary laws — by way of new mystical experience.

The reimagining – rather than ignoring – of kashrut would bring many social and environmental benefits: reduction in the cost of communal life, reduced reliance on single-use disposables, and better health through easier access to whole foods, to name only a few.

These two examples suggest to us how a renewed engagement with Judaism’s textual canon could allow a re-weaving of Judaism’s disparate strands. Organizations like Yeshivat Hadar, Svara, and the Torah Studio have been doing this work for years; more should join them.

Gender Studies

In addition to a new halacha, there is deeper work to be done in the domain of gender. Jews played significant roles in the civil rights and feminist movements — Rabbi Heschel marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and many early feminists were Jewish women. As the United States experiences troubling regressions in women’s rights, and protections for transgender individuals become fraught political issues, fresh thinking is as necessary as ever.

Jews are well-positioned to engage with these questions, inasmuch as gender is not abstract in the Jewish experience, but personal. For decades, North American congregations across the denominational spectrum have worked to reconcile restrictive biblical language with contemporary equalitarian consciousness. As previously discussed, liberal congregations have by-and-large managed to harmonize these values, while the orthodoxy follows at a distance. This is an unambiguous good, bringing new perspectives to Jewish life, and has given Jewish communities tools they can share with others doing similar work at larger scales.

There is a need for new visions not only for women and queer folk, but men as well. In her 2004 The Will to Change, bell hooks warned her sisters that their backlash could go too far, missing the forest for the trees and cruelly negating the equally complex and varied male experience. As the hot blood of #MeToo cools, folks of all genders are looking around and asking themselves whether cisgendered men are also deserving of empathy and curiosity, and might also benefit from positive and relevant new models. This is urgent work.

Spirit

As Jews settled throughout North America, they clustered in major cities. New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and Mexico City all boast Jewish populations in the tens or hundreds of thousands. These Jews are active and engaged in business, arts and sciences, and politics. Yet, apart from the orthodox for whom Jewish life is a complete experience, liberal denominations in North America often find that their spiritual life lacks vitality. Their Jewish practice, oriented around cathedral-like synagogues, is a controlled and practical affair.

In his seminal 1966 After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein analyzes this transition. To Rubenstein, liberal Jews cribbed notes from the Protestant playbook: by trading God for moralizing, impediments to participation in the marketplace were removed. This resulted in a “desiccated, unimaginative moralism with little symbolic or mythic power,” casting adrift Judaism’s spiritual seekers. Rubenstein writes:

With an intuitive feeling for authenticity in all domains of the human spirit, the creative artist could hardly regard bourgeois, moralistic Judaism as an ‘advance’ over the older and more traditional forms. … the new Judaism was as barren of artistic creativity as it was of emotional depth. … The estrangement from the Torah and the life of the synagogue of those possessed of artistic creativity has remained a problem throughout modern times.

These more spiritually-inclined Jews looked elsewhere: to other traditions, other lifestyles, and other practices. As Madison Margolin writes in Exile & Ecstasy, Jews of all denominations began traversing the paths of eastern mysticism or psychedelic counterculture, finding meaning where and how they could. Often, they caught glimpses of what their Judaism could be.

Beginning with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s 1960’s experiments with Jewish Renewal, grassroots movements have explored the spiritual potentialities of the diaspora. Under the radar of institutional Judaism are vibrant communities weaving ritual and culture into contemporary forms, shaped by local challenges and opportunities. Among the brownstones of Brooklyn, progressive Jews are gathering in “traditional egalitarian” minyans: movable feasts where lay-leaders lead services for communities of friends. Among the palms of Venice, families open their homes to yogic rabbis looking to bring ancient messages to modern audiences. These groups reflect an emerging consensus, mixing a love of tradition with a creativity and openness borne of a lived experience of safety and opportunity.

In The Magic of the Ordinary, Rabbi Gershon Winkler makes the case that ancient Jewish practice had more in common with what is often thought of as North American indigenous spirituality than it does with the pageantry of western Christianity. Winkler bridges ancient Hebrew texts and Native American practices, identifying parallels in symbolism, cosmology, and values. His message is that the root emotional impulses of Judaism are best expressed in natural settings, through practices that help the Jew feel more deeply connected to their physical environment.

As Winkler argues, city life cannot sustain a Jewish spirit. A Jewish spiritual life in North America must revolve around seasonal returns to nature. Just as Judaism’s traditional calendar revolved around the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage festivals, modern Jews should gather on farms, in cabins, on lakes, and in deserts to partake in grassroots multi-day spiritual gatherings. It is during these times that communal bonds can be rooted; bonds which can then be nurtured during the intervening months in the city. An organizing of spiritual life around a cycle of seasons can be seen as a rediscovery of Judaism’s indigenous roots in a new physical and cultural context. 

Rather than pilgrimage to a holy temple in Jerusalem, Jews can celebrate Sukkot in the Berkshires, Passover in the Mojave, and Shavuot in Tepoztlán. The Jewish community is blessed with an abundance of spiritual teachers and experienced organizers, able to cultivate the festival culture necessary to drive this cultural revival.

In Genesis 2:15, Adam is commanded to work the earth (l’ovdah) and to guard it (ul’shomrah). Intimacy with the earth is not merely a “nice-to-have” or a “hippie preoccupation” – rather, it is the sine qua non of spiritual life on earth.

Some might balk at these suggestions. The post-war diaspora has fixated on assimilation and the dilution of tradition, while progressive discourse hesitates over appropriation. These concerns, though understandable, can become superficial anxieties. We should trust in Judaism’s vitality, and embrace its capacity for expression in different forms.

III. Excavations

Antisemitism

It is common in the Jewish world to hear antisemitism presented as a fact of life, a type of mystical law of the universe. This is wrong, and dangerous. Antisemitism is a complex phenomena, but one which is fundamentally explicable: it can be explained, and to some extent, managed. While a full treatment of antisemitism is beyond the abilities of this author, we can explore four contributing factors:

The first factor is the unfortunate role Jews play in the narrative and mythic structures of the world’s largest religions. Both Christians and Muslims see their faiths as improvements upon the revelations of the Jews; the continued existence of the Jew represents a rejection of their prophets. While modern adherents of Christianity and Islam have largely evolved past these atavistic attitudes, with Pope John Paul II telling the Jews they are “our elder brothers,” the fact remains that Jews play a core, and adversarial, role in two of the world’s central dramas.

While the extent to which this history is relevant in the 21st century is up for debate, as long as the world remains in its current religious paradigm this will remain a latent factor, resurging in stressful times. Like any chronic condition, this source of antisemitism can be managed, but the only “cure” would be a paradigm shift in world consciousness.

The second factor calls for collective psychoanalysis. In the tribal imagination, the Jew is both the strongest and the weakest, ruler of the world and most miserable of minorities. This contradictory dual-nature, or “paradoxical ontology,” is psychologically compelling: its hatred is both justified and safe. For a person frustrated in their own life, for a person looking to transmute psychic angst, the Jew is an irresistible target.

To this psychic impulse, the answer is defense. Jewish communities have at various points assembled shomrim, homegrown militias, to protect against opportunistic attacks. In recent years, Jewish institutions have taken to hiring security to protect their staff and services. While not ideal, this likely represents the best response. Most who perform antisemitic acts are not operating from a place of deep and studied conviction, but are cowards wanting to feel strong. Deny the opportunity, and opportunistic attacks will cease.

The third factor concerns the Jew’s economic and political status. Throughout much of Christian European and Islamic Middle-Eastern history the Jew was a dhimmi, a second-class citizen lacking rights and excluded from civic life. They were barred from owning land, forced to live in ghettos and shtetls, and restricted in the professions they could pursue. Christian restrictions on money-lending meant that Jews were often used to lend money and collect taxes — ensuring that most people’s limited contact with the local Jews would be adversarial, making Jews convenient scapegoats for incompetent administrators.

Jewish emancipation, the centuries-long process by which Jews acquired political rights and civil protections in Europe, resolved these fundamental issues. After the Enlightenment, Jews slowly acquired rights and protections, as the luminaries of the time began asking themselves why Jews were not as deserving of opportunity as they were. Jews began to build wealth, acquire land, amass political power, and make meaningful contributions to art, science, culture, and politics. All Jews, in one way or another, have been beneficiaries of this emancipation.

Zionists are quick to declare European emancipation a failure. They will cite the Dreyfus affair, the famous episode which inspired Theodor Herzl. They will cite, appropriately, the Holocaust, the most murderous genocide in human history. Antisemitism will never end, they say. Zionism for all Jews, and distrust of the gentiles, is the only way.

Provocative as this rhetoric may be, European emancipation, the work of gentiles, was not a failure. It is true that antisemitism was not eradicated. It has often resurged, with horrifying consequences. And yet, millions of Jews in Europe and North America would come to benefit from this emancipation and lead lives their ancestors could have never dreamed of.

Zionists argue that Israel’s military strength underwrites Jewish safety worldwide. Historical experience suggests the causality is reversed: Jewish influence globally underwrites Israel’s safety. Zionist eschatology imagines Israel a Masada, a final fortress.

Let’s not say the quiet part out loud.

The fourth is, put bluntly, the Jews’ own rhetoric, often saturated with chauvinist and exceptionalist language. Jews describe themselves as the “chosen people,” and chassids preach the doctrine of a “second soul,” a mystical quality possessed only by yidden. Jews rarely pause to reflect on how these fairly public attitudes might influence the way they are seen by contemporary non-Jews, who don’t appreciate hearing that they are essentially less-than.

Jews must release their pretense to exceptional superiority. Jacob’s son Joseph vocally and unselfconsciously declared himself to be better than his brothers; exasperated and insulted, they threw him into the pit. After much suffering, he learned that capacity can still move humbly. It is disingenuous to declare yourself superior and complain when others resent you.

The Jewish world often defends itself by asserting a double standard. Perhaps the Jews could accept the challenge. To call yourself a “chosen people” is to claim moral leadership. The Jewish world should hold itself to a higher standard, and accept this judgment as an appropriate response to its own attitudes.

Ultimately, prejudice and bias run deep in the human psyche. A prosperous and moderate world is a safe world for the Jews: the task before the Jews is to help create and preserve such a world. This essay’s earlier stated goals of stewardship, both of the land and its people, is coincident with the goal of mitigating antisemitism among the peoples of earth.

—

This essay was conceived and planned prior to the attacks of October 7, and despite the tragedies which followed, none of the arguments have needed substantive revision. That said, and while Israel will receive a fuller treatment in the next section, it is worthwhile to interpret the war in Israel-Palestine through this frame:

It is the case that for 75 years, Israel has been perpetuating an oppression of the Palestinian people. This can be attributed to a mix of geopolitical constraints, self-defeating violence on the part of the Palestinians, particular malice on the part of a fanatical minority of Israelis, and a lack of will and vision on the part of the rest. It is also the case that the Palestinian armed resistance is funded and heavily shaped by a theocratic regime which explicitly calls for the death of all Jews, and to whom the Palestinian people are no more than pawns. It is arguably the case that Palestinian activists in the west have effectively positioned themselves as heroes of a 21st century historical-materialist drama, weaving latent antisemitic impulses and actual Israeli-perpetrated injustices into a make-believe narrative of resistance against global Jewish domination, capturing the imagination of a generation of young progressives.

This quick synopsis demonstrates several of our themes. An exceptionalist attitude prevails among some Jews, who believe that on the basis of their special experience they deserve special rules. Real animus is directed at Jews by real enemies, who truly wish for their complete destruction. And the Jew’s paradoxical ontology manifests in how the conflict is perceived in the west, with Jews frequently cast as super-powerful oppressors, and Palestinians as innocent victims.

Anti-Zionism is not always antisemitism. Anti-Zionism without accountability for Palestinian leadership is.

Mythic Israel

The story of the Israeli state can be told as the story of two competing messianic visions. In their times, both visions were so dominant that few would have described them as messianic at all – they were simply the water in which Israelis swam.

Messianism I

In his 1960 essay “The Rebirth of Israel in Contemporary Jewish Theology,” Richard Rubenstein discusses the theological views of the early Zionists. These Labor Zionists, their secularism notwithstanding, saw their work in a messianic light. Rubenstein writes that “the goal of messianism is neither the end of man nor the end of civilization; its real goal is the end of historical man.” Returning to their ancient homeland and reviving their ancient practices, these pioneers on their kibbutzim sought not only to build a new country, but to exit history, leaving behind the historical / linear (i.e. always-evolving) world of guilt and acquisition for an ahistorical / cyclical (i.e. perpetually repeating) world characterized, notably, by a deeper connection with nature.

In this post-historical world, nothing would ever need to change or be invented. “In the religion of nature,” Rubenstein writes, anticipating Camille Paglia’s 1990 Sexual Personae by 30 years, “ahistorical, cyclical religion, man is once more at home with nature and its divinities, sharing their life, their limits, and their joys.” These early Zionists, their nation-building accomplished, could content themselves with passing their days reliving ancient agrarian cycles of the seasons, singing endless folk songs and dancing endless folk dances.

This visionary zeal proved potent. In their three decades in power, the Labor Zionists pioneered new organizational and technological forms, prosecuted major public works projects, developed the modern Hebrew language, and produced a significant new Israeli folk culture. The Labor Zionists operated under their own power, both physical and mental, and produced a social template which remains relevant to this day.

Ultimately, their messianic hopes proved to be more fantasy than reality. By 1966, Rubenstein had moved on from this utopian position (emphasis added):

Today I would be somewhat less enthusiastic about the messianic aspects of the rebirth of Israel. When I wrote this paper, I saw Israel’s rebirth as “the beginning of redemption.” I no longer so regard it. I see existence as co-terminous with exile and the grave as the real place of redemption. What I retain of this paper’s perspective is my fundamental belief that an insightful paganism, utilizing the forms of traditional Jewish religion, is the only meaningful religious option remaining to Jews after Auschwitz and the rebirth of Israel.

As it often does, this messianic social vision bore the seeds of its own unraveling: this idealized world was, from inception, a world for white Jews. The black and brown Jews had no place in it, and resented being less-than in their own country. As Yehuda Avner recounts in his 2010 The Prime Ministers, that era’s social consensus unraveled in the face of growing Sephardic and Mizrahi resentment. This frustration would ultimately transform Israel’s politics, propelling Menachem Begin to power in 1977 and exchanging one messianic project for another.

Messianism II

This second messianic vision is more pessimistic, and more particular to the Jewish story: that of the end of exile and a revival of the mythic kingdom of Israel. To these Revisionist Zionists, antisemitism is not an explicable social process but an exceptional phenomena: a mystical law of nature.

As poignantly retold in Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus, this revisionist Zionism was most significantly articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, fortified by the academic scholarship of Benzion Netanyahu, brought into politics by Menachem Begin, and bequeathed as birthright to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-standing prime minister, where it has enjoyed an extended reign as Israel’s dominant political and social vision.

As Cohen recounts, Benzion’s scholarly research into the Spanish Inquisition led him to believe that antisemitism could never be managed or overcome, that antisemitism was essentially a property of the universe, and that the only escape from perpetual persecution was the re-establishment of ethno-nationalist dominion in biblical Israel. In this telling, living in Israel is less a personal choice than a divine requirement, and the suggestion of peaceful co-existence with Arab neighbors becomes a failure of nerve and devotion. To quote a settler: “It has nothing to do with strategy or security or economics or anything. We need to go back there because it’s the land of Israel, and the land of Israel calls to us.”

The revisionist Zionist fantasy is just that: fantasy. In The Necessity of Exile, Rabbi Shaul Magid describes how, encased in a narrative of exceptional victimhood, these groups see their lifestyle as inherently virtuous, and are thus unable to consider their impacts on others. “The settlers viewed their [Arab] neighbors as part of the background, like flora and fauna.” Influenced by the romantic philosophies of the father-and-son Ravs Kook, Israel’s spiritual seekers are cosplaying an imagined golden age.

Understanding Myth

It is easy to judge from a distance. But we must stand in awe of myth, used in the mimetic sense of “psychologically compelling archetypes.” Paraphrasing Carl Jung in his 1952 Answer to Job, “we do not have mythic ideas, they have us.” Unlike normal ideas shaped by experience, mythic ideas shape experience: through myth individuals figuratively and literally become part of something larger than themselves. Myths can be soul-preserving, and they can be life-destroying. It is the work of mature consciousness to distinguish myth from reality, and to act accordingly.

Consider the Western Wall. In the mythic imagination, the wall is the last vestige of the holy temple, where for 700 years ancient Jews engaged in perfect worship of their lord. This mythology can evoke strong emotions, and while individuals are entitled to their experiences, those swept up in this myth often demand that others validate their feelings, and that they form the basis of government policy. That is fanaticism. In reality, the physical remnants were built only in the twilight decades of ancient Israel, by the unpopular Herod, and more accurately represent a failed effort to prop up an obsolete institution. The surviving stones have little to do with the ancient Jewish experience, and for Heschel’s religion of time, a fixation on physical sites is an atavistic distraction.

Temple Judaism is best understood as the groundbreaking moral innovation of its time. As French philosopher René Girard writes in his 1972 Violence and the Sacred, intra-group rivalries always erupt into violence, threatening survival, unless there exist coping mechanisms for relieving and redirecting this tension. Temple Judaism represented a groundbreaking bronze-age innovation, channeling social tensions away from homicide and human sacrifice and into animal sacrifice: a clear moral advance. Over a millenia, the temple system devolved into oligarchy, and its destruction set the stage for Judaism’s second great innovation: Rabbinic Judaism, the transcending of blood sacrifice, and sublimation of intra-group tension through study and prayer. Diasporic Rabbinic Judaism is not a consolation prize; it is the gold medal.

The temple, with its blood and pageantry, is compelling. But its reality is mundane: a once-innovative institution, replaced by something better. Perhaps the real moshiach are the friends you make along the way.

Understanding Reality

Since Israel’s founding, it has endured frequent attacks on its legitimacy. Israel’s defenders equate these attacks with base antisemitism. They are correct.

Political “realists” understand the centrality of power in world affairs, and they value concepts of “rights” to the extent that they bridge political divides and can coordinate behavior among self-interested parties. Political groups have the “right” to acquire and hold territory by leveraging the affordances of their contexts. The early Zionist organizations had the “right” to pursue a state-building project in conjunction with the international powers and attitudes of the time. They had the “right” to seize political and military opportunities in years surrounding 1948 to establish a state in their chosen territory. They had the “right” to defend themselves in the wars which followed.

There is little to be gained re-litigating Israel’s founding. In Telling Our Story, Einat Wilf characterizes these attacks as sour grapes by a losing team. In her telling, the Arabs of the region, accustomed to their “superior” existence, could not accept Jewish recapture of their ancient territory. In a psychological defense, Wilf argues, they insist that war was never lost, because the war has never ended. To the extent this is true, Palestinians bear responsibility for their continued marginalization.

Palestinian voices, like Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years War on Palestine, argue that this Zionist narrative of end-of-exile is disingenuous; the early Zionists were European in style and substance, pursuing their nation-building under the aegis of the British Empire, and in service of imperial goals. Whatever historical connection Jews had with their land was mere window-dressing: Jewish settlement at the time was fundamentally colonial in nature.

As Rashidi argues, both Israeli and Palestinian national identities were constructed only after the war; both groups drew on their cultural and religious histories to develop new national myths in service of sectarian goals. In the Israeli case, the radical work of scholars like Shlomo Sand, in The Invention of the Jewish People, takes this argument further.

The Israeli and Palestinian national stories are incompatible; as myths, they can lead only to violence. Pluralism is the way, and Israel must lead that way. Israel’s choice to pursue a policy of permanent deterrence in the decades after 1948, and the domestic politics this policy entailed, was exactly that: a choice, and one that cast a dark cloud over their project. Israel could have set before itself the task of ensuring dignity and opportunity for the population it displaced. It could have integrated its victim narrative and become the light among nations it imagines itself to be. But it did not.

“Next year in Jerusalem” is a catchy slogan — so catchy, in fact, that Jews say it while living in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, city of peace, is a metaphor. Israel is a proud and capable country. But claims of “eternal homelands” must be viewed skeptically, and Israel’s image of itself as saintly but misunderstood is more characteristic of narcissist personality than mature adulthood. Israel is a state like any other, and the exceptionalist attitudes prevalent since the country’s founding have done much harm.

Israel and America

Israel is a state like any other. It has the right to exist and the right to defend itself, as one among a community of states. And yet in North America, Israel is often more than that. Among many influential Jews and Jewish institutions, Israel is the sine qua non of Jewish identity: without Israel, the story goes, Jews have nothing. As A. B. Yehoshua told American Jews in 2006: “[If you] do not live in Israel… your Jewish identity has no meaning at all.”

Israel has many admirable characteristics. But it has also committed numerous abuses, even against its own people. Israel is not the last and best hope for the Jewish people, nor is it the one true source of Jewish spiritual experience. An obsession with Israel has flattened North American Jewish life, leaving many Jews with an identity devoid of content, and denying the next generation the opportunity to develop their own intellectual and emotional attitudes.

Shaul Magid observes that:

What matters most to those who want to marginalize critics of Israel from the Jewish community is the full Zionization of American Jewry: hegemonic support for Zionism as the national Jewish project… this line of thinking seems to place more value on completely secular, assimilated, non-practicing Jews who love Israel than on devout, observant Jews who do not.

For the mainstream Jewish establishment, from the wealthy donors of Birthright and Hillel, who strictly regulate speech in their programs, to the cynical lobbying of AIPAC, to the myriad Jewish Federations distributing funding in pursuit of ideological goals, this project of “forced Zionization” is their north star.

This project has increasingly begun to backfire, with the leadership of left-wing Jewish activist organizations reading like a who’s-who of disaffected scions. As commentators frequently observe in their discussions of these emerging Jewish leaders, much of their program can be seen as the rejection of a cynical establishment, which frequently imbues Jewish education with elements of propaganda, and operates on brazenly personal levels, placing young Jews in close contact with IDF soldiers to encourage a fetishization of Israeli people. In The Jews of Summer, Sandra Fox writes that Jewish leadership “would fuse those inevitable [romantic] interests with communal and ideological goals,” and in Camp is Life, Zoe Rudow writes that “a summer love affair becomes a love affair with the state.” Through the cultivation of uncritical attitudes and emotional codependencies, this establishment secures support for harmful policies.

While this analysis is harsh, there is room for sympathy. As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma — individual and collective — literally suppresses the imagination. Following the devastation of the Holocaust and the existential struggles of Israel’s early decades, it is natural to expect absolutist attitudes from the leaders of that generation. For them, nothing else matters.

And yet, as Viktor Frankl famously wrote in his 1946 Man’s Search for Meaning: “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Ultimately, while individuals are free to direct their energy wherever they like, and Jews across the world should engage in mutual aid, the larger Jewish communities of North America and Israel have become excessively intertwined. They are better off turning their focii inward, onto their own opportunities and challenges.

IV. Conclusion

In his 1945 The Open Society and its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper characterizes the narrow consciousness of the tribal member:

Surrounded by enemies and dangerous or even hostile magical forces, he experiences the tribal community as a child experiences his family and his home, in which he plays his definite part; a part he knows well, and plays well.

Narrow tribal consciousness looks backwards to imagined pasts, and lives in black-and-white fantasies of us-vs-them — an existence which ends, all too often, in violence. Expansive consciousness, on the other hand, looks to the future, and lives in the reality of subtlety and nuance, of creativity and good-enough.

This essay has traced out an expansive vision for North American Judaism: empathetic, courageous, and responsive to reality. Its core aspirations, that of a comprehensive reorientation of North American Jewish life around environmental conservation, and of a rediscovery of ancient Jewish spiritual practices in the North American natural setting, would create both internal alignment for Jewish energy and passion, and external alignment with the myriad populations of the continent. It reflects a reality in which Jews, providing creative and courageous cultural leadership, can truly become “a light among nations.” It is work anyone could be proud of, and a fine way to spend a lifetime. All that remains, is to begin.

And of course: next year in Jerusalem.

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Originally published April 7, 2024; updated for style Dec 4, 2024

Many thanks to Alison Rosenfeld, Dianne Weinthal, Joshua Krug, Martín Saps, Madison Margolin, Professor Alan Karras, and Julie Weitz for feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.