It has been unfolding slowly for decades, but the recent war between Israel and Hamas highlighted and accelerated our crisis.
We are breaking along the same fissures as a century ago. The fault line is, as it was back then, our sense of Jewish identity. Do we belong to the Jewish people? Are we anchored in Jewish particularism – an identity rooted in Jewish peoplehood – and from there, do we pursue Jewish universal values of social repair? Or are we Kantian universalists who pray in Hebrew, and who regard the insistence on Jewish distinctiveness as an embarrassment at best or, at worst, an impediment to and a contradiction of universal values?
For years I pondered how could it be that the founders of Reform Judaism would simply abandon the concept of Jewish peoplehood. I couldn’t get my mind around it. How could they turn their backs on our people? With single-minded conviction that now seems like a form of messianism, our movement asserted, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community.”
The first Jew to assert this understanding of Judaism was the Apostle Paul. The early Christians were the first to insist upon a religious creed divorced from the Jewish nation. It is this that finally led to the irreparable split between these two strands of Judaism. Two thousand years later, liberal Jews voiced similar sentiments. It would have led to our marginalization and ultimate disappearance from Jewish history had we not come back to our senses and understood Jewish liberalism to be a blend of Jewish peoplehood that looks inward and outward in pursuance of our mission to improve both the Jewish and human conditions.
Naturally, the anti-peoplehood Reform movement of the 19th century was ferociously opposed to the 20th-century Zionist movement that placed the concept of Jewish peoplehood at the center of its political philosophy. “Zionism is poison instilled in sugar-coated pills; it is un-Jewish,” said the early-20th-century president of the Hebrew Union College.
For years I was perplexed. How could we have been so wrong? No one could have predicted the dimensions of the Holocaust, but antisemitism was rampant, both in America and especially overseas. Pogroms were ripping Jewish communities to shreds throughout Europe. How could we have ignored the realities of the Jewish experience? How could we have been so blind to the basic Jewish worldview that Jewish universalism does not supplant Jewish peoplehood; it reinforces it. We did not look upon dispersion and exile as a blessing. It was a tragedy to overcome, all the while struggling desperately to keep the Jewish people alive.
WHAT I REALIZED through my 12 years of leading the North American Reform movement’s Zionist efforts – interacting with so many in our movement who could still barely utter a positive word about Israel or Jewish peoplehood nearly a century later – is that this anti-peoplehood, anti-Zionist worldview of liberal Judaism never actually disappeared. To the contrary, it is the default position of liberal Judaism.
Liberal Judaism is uniquely susceptible to a rejection of Jewish peoplehood, either by word or by deed or both, because we straddle the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism. It is a good place to be, but it requires clarity of beliefs and strength of Jewish convictions. It requires that we speak to our own people with audacious honesty and to warn that we are constantly at risk of regression back to where we started. Jewish peoplehood speaks the language not only of peace, justice, righteousness and mercy, but also the language of Jewish solidarity, responsibility, identity and mutuality.
Audacious honesty requires that we press Reform Jews: Are you committed to the Jewish nation – and what does that mean to you? Do you believe that the Jewish people, like all other nations, have the right to self-determination, or are Jews somehow different? Do we tell ourselves, “What applies to others does not apply to us because Jews, in the words of our Reform predecessors, have a higher mission: the dissemination of the dreams of universal brotherhood. All this ugly human interaction that requires actually dealing with the real world – this is not for the Jews. State power is corruptive and corrosive. We must put our trust in European Enlightenment to protect the Jews. Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger will ensure that Jews will be safe in every enlightened corner of the world.”
This is the real fault line, and we must be honest with ourselves if we want a future for liberal Judaism in North America. The future of Judaism is Jewish peoplehood, and all those who abandon Jewish peoplehood will be as the leaves falling from the tree.
The growing inclination among liberal Jews to deemphasize Jewish distinctiveness is the gravest threat to the future of liberal Judaism. For what are the prospects of the continuity of the people if the people is not committed to its own continuity, and does not even agree philosophically that it is a legitimate objective and a social good? Is it possible to sustain the Jewish people without being committed to the Jewish people? Can Judaism survive without Jews?
It is the will to Jewish distinctiveness that ensures Jewish distinctiveness. It is the will to continue that has led to continuity. There is a ferocity to Jewish survival instincts, an indomitable sense of Jewish destiny. When these are lost, the future is lost.
In the modern world, those who are not committed to Jewish survival will not survive as Jews.
The writer is the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on New York City’s Upper West Side.