A Painful Teshuva for a Broken Congress
In his acclaimed book for the High Holy Days, Rabbi Alan Lew tells us, “The nature of our pain points us to the nature of the transformation we need to make.”
As we embrace the month of Elul, when we are asked to reflect, to make cheshbon nefesh, an accounting of the soul, it is hard to know which pain to focus on: the 50 hostages still in Gaza, the tens of thousands of reservists straining under an impossible burden, the hundreds of thousands of Gazans yearning to be free of Hamas and the endless fighting.
Maybe the suffering closer to home: the millions of undocumented immigrants living in fear, the high-profile and lesser-known victims of political persecution, the tens of millions of Americans facing financial insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and missing meals while living in one of the wealthiest countries in human history.
But today, on the Gregorian anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, 128 years after Theodor Herzl convened 208 delegates in Basel, my pain spans the distance from the Zionist Supreme Court in Jerusalem, to the offices of the American Zionist Movement in New York, all the way to my home in Los Angeles.
Yesterday the Zionist Supreme Court issued one of the most consequential rulings in its history, denying an appeal by a broad alliance of American slates and world unions. We had asked the Court to correct the historic injustice committed by the American Zionist Movement Tribunal in overturning the decision of its election committee to sanction five of the six slates implicated in an unprecedented fraud against the American Jewish community.
Instead, in a short-sighted and embarrassing ruling, the Court allowed the 2025 US-area election to the 39th World Zionist Congress to be forever marred by scandal, eroding the historic achievement of our best ever turnout by refusing to sanction slates which benefitted from an overwhelming number of illegitimate votes – almost 10% of the total ballots cast.
The injustice will now persist into the next election cycle. Four of the implicated slates had seats on the Area Election Committee. Next time, five slates implicated in fraud will sit around the very table where we will design the rules. Having learned that the consequences for cheating are non-existent, the incentive for the 2030 election will be for more fraud, more rule-bending, more scandal.
Voter suppression happens not only when we gatekeep the ballot box, it is also a direct result of undermining voter confidence in the integrity of the election process.
“The nature of our pain points us to the nature of the transformation we need to make.”
The World Zionist Congress must now take matters into its own hands. It must reject this woeful conclusion to this embarrassing chapter in Congressional history. The five implicated slates must not be allowed to join with any world union.
We cannot reject their delegates, but we can isolate them. It is true that in this difficult time we seek unity within our peoplehood. But, even more importantly, we must show the Jewish people worldwide that to am Israel “no high end will ever justify low means,” as the great Judah Magnes wrote 95 years ago.
Our democracy must be protected.
Our oldest and most vital national institutions must not be corrupted.
Parashat Shoftim opens with the exhortation: “You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that your God יהוה is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.”
The judges of the Zionist Supreme Court may have lost sight of due justice.
But the People of Forever must pursue justice so that we may thrive, even when our shoftim fall short of our eternal aspiration.
