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I’d like to share a reflection flowing out of a monthly course I’m teaching here at Society Hill Synagogue on Zionism: Understanding The Yearnings For A Jewish State.
For the moment, I don’t want to get hung up on defining the word “Zionism;” people often mean different things when they invoke the word, oftentimes when shouting past each other. The course itself, relying on an anthology compiled by Gil Troy as an update on Arthur Hertzberg’s classic, The Zionist Idea, explores the “internal moral and intellectual forces in Jewish life” that animated the yearning for a Jewish state and that have since informed its development and its ongoing responses to internal and external challenges. In so doing, we are reviewing texts from across the political, cultural, religious, and geographic spectrum that make the case for different understandings of Israel’s past, present, and future.
Regular readers of this column may observe that after the horrors of October 7, 2023 and for months following, I rarely missed a week in sharing my heartbreak, wrestling, and reflections about what had happened and was happening in Israel, Gaza, and the broader Middle East, as well as its reverberations for Jewish life in this country and around the world.
I didn’t do so with a sense that I had a monopoly on the correct opinion — though I certainly had and have my passions and biases on the subject, as many of us do — but out of a sense that we are being confronted with what it means to be Jewish in new ways since October 7.
Judaism is certainly a religion, and if you come to Society Hill Synagogue for a Shabbat service on Friday night or Saturday morning, you’ll see that the focus then is on what you might term traditionally “religious” matters (though what is religion, really, if it has no relevance to our lived experience?): To what extent does a relationship with the Divine bear on our lives? What are the obligations to others, to the world around us, and beyond, that flow from having a relationship to the sacred? What does it mean to pray? And much more.
But despite Judaism’s — the Jewish religion’s — centrality to what it means to be Jewish, that is not all there is to it. Many Jews feel deeply Jewish despite feeling not at all religious. That is because, at least in part, to be a Jew means to be a part of a people with a story — a story that has traveled through time, with Jews having had a very distinctive experience throughout the millennia of their existence, oftentimes being suppressed and subjugated, though often responding to that subjugation with resilience and creativity, while maintaining an empathy with others on the margins of society.
In today’s world, one of the topics at the center of Jewish peoplehood is Israel, the sole Jewish state. It doesn’t mean one needs to engage with Israel to be Jewish, but to the extent that being Jewish is about being part of a people, and not only about having a religion, Israel is among the most prominent features of that peoplehood right now and is a pretty inescapable part of modern societal discourse, in some places being lifted up, in others denigrated.
So week after week, as part of my role as rabbi, I shared my perspective on, as I saw it, what this moment means for the Jewish people.
Of course, Israel is no simple topic. There is probably no public Jewish communal issue that activates our “emotional nervous systems” in a more pronounced way. Whether it’s because, for some of us, we feel that the broader world just doesn’t understand what it means to be Jewish and what Israel is up against, or, for others of us, that we feel deep pain about actions Israel takes that we disagree with.
So I have received deep reactions to what I wrote over the course of the months, sometimes with profound agreement and appreciation, sometimes with disappointment and anger. And so I want to tread lightly. Not because I don’t think this conversation is important and urgent — it so obviously is. Hostages remain in captivity 461 days after October 7; there is widespread suffering in Gaza. Iran and its proxies remain bent on Israel’s destruction; Israel strikes back in defiance of international pressure. Innocents are subjected to fear and violence throughout the region.
I want to tread lightly because Jewish community is so important. As I shared in my opening note, Jewish community is where I and so many others feel rooted and draw strength and nourishment from; I believe that spiritual community provides a form and nourishment that are more essential to the human experience than many of us realize, and not easy to come by.
And so, I would never want my own writings on a topic to signal to someone that they are not welcome here — that if we are out of step on an issue, even an issue as core to our Jewish identities as Israel, that we cannot still support one another in attending a shivah minyan to help a community member in grief; or toss candy at a B’nei Mitzvah student and their family celebrating a rite of passage; or visit the home of someone experiencing an illness or struggle. Having this fabric of our lives together is so important that I wanted to step back (and, frankly, from a time and energy perspective, needed to) to recalibrate how to approach this part of my work.
So here I am re-entering the fray. But in doing so, I want to name the obvious, which is that it’s okay if we disagree. In fact, it would be very un-Jewish if we had total agreement; the Talmud, the template for Jewish learning for millennia, is essentially a record of our foundational rabbis’ disagreements. A recent New York Times columnist argued that he is not doing his job well if readers are finding themselves in 100% agreement; the same thinking holds true in Jewish life. Back-and-forth dialectic helps us better discern the core of our thinking and hone in on what we find to be good and true. It’s true that there are limits to this notion. An overly-simplified example is that some Jews think you should pray with a mehitzah (a partition separating the men’s and women’s sections of a prayer space), and some think you shouldn’t, and on fundamental values questions for which no compromise is plausible, sometimes different subcommunities are created. But we still all recognize ourselves as all a part a broader Jewish community, all of us created in the image of the Divine.
It’s with that in mind that I wanted to share a text I encountered in this Zionism class that I am teaching.
As I discovered later, the author of this piece, Leonard “Liebel” Fein, was the founder of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, a national organization fighting to end hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds in the United States and Israel.
As an aside, in his role as founder of Mazon, Fein interviewed and hired Rabbi Daniel Kamesar, my father, to be director of Mazon’s New York region, just a few months before my father’s death, and Fein attended my father’s funeral. I discovered all of this only after determining that I wanted to share the contents of this piece with you all.
A prodigious Jewish intellectual and activist, Fein also founded, with famed author Elie Wiesel, the Jewish magazine Moment, as well as the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy. He composed the following piece in 1982:
There are two kinds of Jews in the world. There is the kind of Jew who detests war and violence, who believes that fighting is not “the Jewish way,” who willingly accepts that Jews have their own and higher standards of behavior. And not just that we have them, but that those standards are our lifeblood, are what we are about. And there is the kind of Jew who thinks we have been passive long enough, who is convinced that it is time for us to strike back at our enemies, to reject once and for all the role of victim, who willingly accepts that Jews cannot afford to depend on favors, that we must be tough and strong.
And the trouble is, most of us are both kinds of Jew…
We want to be normal, we want to be special: we want to be a light unto the nations, we want to be a nation like all the others. We have still not figured out which we want more, and haven’t figured out how to be both at once. And the circumstances of our lives don’t give us much freedom of choice. They are nasty and brutish circumstances, and they require of us — or seem to — that we set aside our dreams of the heavenly Jerusalem, insure instead that the ramparts of the earthly Jerusalem are impregnable. Behind those ramparts, some day, perhaps, we shall dare to reach for the stars. For now, to turn our eyes toward the heavens is to risk not seeing the enemy as he approaches.
Yet the vision persists…
There are those who believe only in the Zionism of the soul, in a disembodied Zionism that floats in abstract space. They prefer the Zionism of yearning, the rich imagining from Pinsk or from Boston, of what it might be like. A soul that has no body, no substance, is called a dybbuk [a Yiddish term for an ill-natured, possessing spirit], and is recognized as an untenable estate.
And there are those who believe only in the Zionism of the body, who have long since wearied of all this talk of “soul,” who want us to be not a light unto the nations, but a nation like all the others. A body without a soul. Normal.
I vastly prefer a people that chooses to risk a collective nervous breakdown, as we do, by endorsing both visions, both versions… Muscle and conscience, body and soul… A people cannot live exclusively on its reactions. No, a people must stand for something, for something beyond its own survival. We live in a real world, and we cannot get by on dreams alone, but we cannot get by without dreams. Do we seek to protect and defend the Jewish body? The best defense we have — not the only defense, but the best defense — is to look to the health of the Jewish soul. For otherwise, will our children not be bound to ask why it is we care so much, what it is we seek so strenuously to preserve?
Those who prefer “normalcy” will be deaf to that prayer. But… if it’s normalcy we want, being Jewish is a very roundabout way to get there.
I welcome your thoughts, disagreements, plaudits, rejections, etc.
Finally, I want to share that our hearts go out to the victims of the devastating fires in southern California.
In particular, the Pacific Palisades neighborhood — which has been among the hardest hit, with over 1,000 homes destroyed and more at risk — is the hometown of our Rabbi Emeritus, Avi Winokur. There, in 1952, his father, Abraham Winokur, was the founding rabbi of Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist congregation which is thriving to this day. I spoke to Rabbi Avi Winokur this morning, and while his loved ones have long since departed from Pacific Palisades, so everyone he knows is safe, the hometown he knew has been destroyed. “It’s like my childhood has been burned to the ground,” he told me. His spirits are good, but I’m sure that he would appreciate your love and support.
Meanwhile the community itself and surrounding neighborhoods are devastated. While Kehillat Israel is still standing, the homes of its rabbis have been destroyed, as have the nearby Chabad of the Palisades and the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, not to mention thousands of acres of land and homes beyond the Jewish community, along with the deaths of five people. We can feel helpless at a moment like this, but I know that reaching out to anyone you know who has been affected always means a lot, and charities like the California Fire Foundation are helping provide direct support to victims and are accepting donations.
Praying for a full healing for these communities, and wishing everyone a Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
