Hallelujah for the Liberal Soul of Zionism

This the Erev Rosh HaShanah 5787 sermon, “Hallelujah for the Liberal Soul of Zionism,” delivered by Rabbi Steven Goldstein at The Reform Temple of Rockland in Nyack, New York on September 11, 2026.

High Holiday tradition calls upon rabbis to deliver an Israel sermon. For a rabbi as committed to both Zionism and social justice as I am, what a dream to deliver it at The Reform Temple of Rockland. We know that Deuteronomy’s command to pursue justice – tzedek, tzedek, tirdof – includes the justice of Jewish liberation.

But we also know that concept eludes too many.

Let me take you back to my rabbinic training. It included a year at the Reform synagogue in the Poconos under the mentorship of Rabbi Peg Kershenbaum, a beloved former member of The Reform Temple of Rockland.

She assigned me the Israel sermon, guaranteed to elicit strong reactions. My friends said, “If you come out alive, it’s training you’ll never forget.”

At best, I thought I’d come out looking like Moshe Dayan.

Sure enough, one congregant made some wrong assumptions. He warned me: “If you question Israel’s right to exist, I am walking out.”

But he stayed through the service, all right. At the end he bounded up to me, his face as flustered as could be, and said, “Who knew a liberal could be such a Zionist! Hallelujah!”

And that’s how this sermon was born: Hallelujah for the Liberal Soul of Zionism.

When David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel in 1948, he vowed it would ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

Those words matter not because any country has lived up to them perfectly, but because of Israel’s ideals that no other country in the Middle East comes as close to achieving.

Modern Israel has even outpaced the United States in the march toward equality – stunning when you consider the power of Israel’s fundamentalist parties. Israel does it anyway.

Women have served as Prime Minister, generals, and Chief Justices. An openly gay man serves as Speaker of the Knesset. Israel recognized same-sex marriages a decade before the US did. And today Israel is one of only two dozen countries in the world that funds gender-confirmation surgery.

There’s more. Israel remains the only nation in history to airlift tens of thousands of Black people from Africa not into slavery, but into instant, full citizenship with the promise of a better life.

None of this happened by chance. Isaiah called on Zion to be a light unto the nations. Driven by that same Jewish responsibility, Theodor Herzl energized Zionism with a progressive blueprint that became the State of Israel.

Are we supposed to believe a society fueled by social justice doesn’t also yearn for peace? Come on.

Israel, rooted in its Zionist ideals, has always been ready to coexist with its neighbors if they, too, chose peace. The Abraham Accords prove it, as does Israel’s enduring peace with Egypt and Jordan.

So what happened on October 7? Hamas tried to implement its long-planned genocide of the Jewish people. And the world responded with an Antisemitic inversion of victimhood.

We Jews are suffocating under a pandemic of hatred the world refuses to stop. And the only antidote for our survival, just as our history has proven again and again, is a sovereign state of our own.

Of course, if you’re making the liberal case for Zionism, sooner or later you’ll have to answer the charges against it. We’ve all heard Israel called a “colonial project.” But colonialism is what happens when one people conquers a distant land on behalf of an empire and ships the profits home to a foreign mother country.

Tell me — from which Jewish colonialist power did the Jews arrive in Israel?

From the ashes of Europe?

From the displaced persons camps filled with Holocaust survivors?

From Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus and Tripoli — the cities where ancient Jewish communities were stripped of everything they owned and driven into exile?

My God, Jews did not return to Eretz Yisrael as representatives of some other civilization. The word “Jew” comes from Judea!

Zionism wasn’t concocted in an ideological lecture hall. It was born in the Exodus and revived in the soot of train stations, the cold mud of refugee camps, and the tears of a people who learned that without a home of our own, our lives would forever hang on the mercy of a world that didn’t want us.

Picture a father on the deck of a refugee ship like the St. Louis in 1939, holding his young daughter as the lights of Miami fade into the dark horizon. He offers everything he owns to nation after nation. But every single one turns him and the other Jews away, forcing them to return to the death fires of Europe to incinerate as stateless Jews.

Picture a young woman freezing outside a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1946, clutching a scrap of paper with a dozen names of relatives. One by one, every name but hers has been crossed out. She has no home to return to, and no passport to her name. All she has is the crushing silence of being the last one alive.

Oh, the Jews who could have survived if Israel had been reborn in time.

Some say there would be peace in the Middle East and an end to global Antisemitism if Israel simply wouldn’t exist – if Jews weren’t linked to a Zionism that ceased. Have they never heard of the Holocaust? Of Russian pogroms? Of the Spanish inquisition? Of Pharaoh in Egypt?

The arrogance of thinking you know more than thousands of years of history.

Israel isn’t the cause of Antisemitism. Israel is our refuge from Antisemitism!

Today some oppose Israel’s existence because, they say, a state shouldn’t be based on religion. Those critics never take issue with the dozens of countries tied officially to Islam or Christianity.

That’s how we know anti-Zionism is Antisemitism.

Think about it. The British flag bears the Union Jack of crosses and the King heads the Anglican church – yet no one chants Free Britain from the River Thames to the Mediterranean Sea.

When anti-Zionists call us monsters, my God, it hurts. My Zionist heart bleeds for the thousands who lost loved ones in Gaza at the hands of monsters – the Hamas monsters who used their families as human shields to hide hostages, terrorists and munitions.

And my Zionist heart wept when I visited the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, take your pick, and met with gay Palestinians afraid for their lives because of Palestinian oppression. At their request, I helped them reach the other side of Jerusalem to breathe the supportive air of Israel.

All this said, we Jews need to explain better that Zionism is more than a religious movement.

We Jews are a nation in every sense – bound by a shared language, history and culture. We have a right to our homeland just as the French have the right to France and the Spanish have the right to Spain.

I’m not here to defend any Israeli politician. I’m here to defend Israel’s right to exist – just like I defend America’s, regardless of who is in power.

Debate judicial reform. Debate Yeshiva bochers in the IDF. Argue like every Israeli in Tel Aviv. Go ahead, make my yom! That’s democracy.

But don’t confuse healthy debate with the false equivalency between a democracy and terrorism. Hamas is not a partner waiting for compromise. Hamas has promised to repeat October 7th again and again. Is Israel supposed to do nothing?

Apparently yes, the new progressives say.

Then let me tell you something about the Hamas-Iranian axis as an old-time liberal.

There is nothing progressive about subjugating women, executing gays and dissidents, or Hamas’ enforcing the racism in its charter.

There is nothing progressive about murdering civilians in their beds in kibbutzim that stood for peaceful coexistence.

And there is nothing progressive about raping women in front of their husbands, and girls in front of their parents.

Those are not the values of liberalism. They are the enemies of liberalism.

Make no mistake: A liberal conscience determined to hold democracies accountable had better be honest enough to hold terrorists accountable.

Yet listen to how Israel’s critics turn the truth on its head. On CNN, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan declared: “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”

You have got to be kidding. If we are going to judge Zionism honestly, let’s judge it by its liberal achievements.

How about a vibrant, majority-minority nation, far from purely Ashkenazic, where Black Ethiopian Jews, Brown Mizrahi Jews from Morocco and Iraq, and others of every color build a thriving homeland together…

Hallelujah for the liberal soul of Zionism!

How about hospitals where Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Bedouins are treated together, universities where they study side by side, and a democracy where they serve in government together – the only place in the Middle East where all that is true…

Hallelujah for the liberal soul of Zionism!

How about Israeli search-and-rescue teams and field hospitals landing in Haiti, Turkey, Nepal, and disaster zones worldwide within hours, treating total strangers, friend or foe, before they’ve even unpacked their own bags…

Hallelujah for the liberal soul of Zionism!

We at The Reform Temple of Rockland see the truth. Liberalism and Zionism go hand in hand.

We know Black lives matter, Latinos make America strong, immigrants make America great, refugees give America heart, women’s rights are human rights, every LGBTQ person deserves equality, and Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people.

How dare anyone ask us to be the only people on earth expected to prove our humanity by surrendering our homeland!

In case you’re wondering, much of the world can oppose us but also be wrong.

As musician Mikey Pauker, with whom I studied at the Academy for Jewish Religion, has said: “The Jewish people without Zionism is Auschwitz.”

For 2,000 years, we have sung Psalm 126: B’shuv Adonai et shivat Tziyon, hayinu k’cholmim. When God returned the exiles to Zion, we were like dreamers.

My friends, our dream has carried us from ashes to rebirth and we have earned the right to live it.

We have earned the right to revive our language.

We have earned the right to defend our children.

We have earned the right to determine our own future.

Shema Yisrael:

We will never be Jews with trembling knees again.

We will never apologize for our prayers being answered after 2,000 years.

And so help us God, we will never apologize for living as a free people in our own land, lihyot am chofshi b’artzeinu, until the end of all time.

Shana tova, Am Yisrael Chai, and hallelujah for the liberal soul of Zionism.