Israel And Hope: What Else Is There?

As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
And forward to the East,
To Zion, an eye looks,
Our hope will not be lost.
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

I’ve been chanting Ha-Tikvah – The Hope, Israel’s national anthem- since I was a first grader. Since that time when I learned to spell the word hope and find Israel on a map, I have connected my hope with my connection to Israel. Given the hopelessness, at times the outright antipathy, that currently surrounds much of the talk about Israel and Zionism, you may ask me why I’m hopeful? Especially since the brutal massacres of October 7, 2023, and their horrendous aftermath in Gaza, Zionism and Israel have become words spoken of with hopelessness by some people. Others have come to mouth them as dirty words, catchalls of condemnation for anything Israel does or says, anyone Israeli or who loves the land and its people.  What about Zionism and Israel is so powerful, so hopeful, that I continue to make these words integral parts of my identity, not with blind loyalty but with abiding pride? What do I mean when I say that I’m a Zionist? How might I help all of us to clarify the meaning of Israel in our lives, as a politically diverse group of Jews and fellow travelers? My aim is not to tell anyone how or what to think about these things. My aim, as part of our internal Jewish communal conversation, is to offer my perspective on this basic question:

What does Zionism mean to me?

To me, Zionism means the ancient idea made new that we Jews chart our own destiny, take our lives into our own hands, express our deepest creativity and Jewish culture, and find security and refuge from antisemitic hatred, in our long-time national home; the home whose promise has been hard wired into our Jewish psyche since the days of Abraham our founder who left his home and followed God to this new home. The idea that the Jewish connection to the land of Israel is nothing more than a twentieth century fabrication by colonialist oppressors is a blatant falsehood. Our history, our archaeology, our ancient and modern literature, our music, our dance, our lives, are rooted in an ancient relationship with our land.  I take no issue with the claims of Palestinians or others to having deep roots in the land; and I refuse to allow anyone to delegitimize our authentic claim to having deep roots in the land.

To me, Zionism means holding steadfastly in that land to the core values of the Torah that our ancient prophets taught their fellow leaders in the Jewish states of their time. They made clear that a sovereign Jewish society with power could not hope to sustain itself for long if it failed to treat the poor, the widow and the stranger – anyone without power and subject to the state – with justice and God-given dignity. Remember that our prophets, like the Torah itself, called out the actions of their governments not out of hatred for their land, their people, their nation, but out of love and the deepest concern. I am one Jew, not a prophet, but like them, I believe we must assist our fellow Israeli Jews in taking their government to task for its actions when they are indefensible on Torah and democratic grounds. I believe this precisely because I love and support Israel as a Zionist.

To me Zionism means balancing responsibility to ourselves and responsibility to others. Both values are woven integrally and authentically into the fabric of Judaism, and they both need nurturing to make us a healthy, safe people. We must demand of the world that it uphold our absolute rights as the Jewish people to protect ourselves, to maintain our dignity and autonomy, and, through Israel, to take our place proudly among the family of nations; without Jew hating harassment, without demonizing Israel and Jews. We must help others to understand that we, not anyone else, determine our past, our present and our future. We alone get to determine who we are and what we need to live, no differently from any other nation. We need to help others understand that what Hamas did to us on October 7, 2023 was not glorious liberatory decolonization. It was mass murder of Jews for being Jews, and of others for being connected to Jews; it was cynically repurposed as high-minded revolution against an oppressor state and cynically used by Hamas to ruthlessly exploit Gazans and others around the world in its battle for power. The idealization of Hamas’ actions and demonization of all things and people Israeli go well beyond thoughtful critique of Israel as a sovereign nation responsible for its actions. They have unleashed international Jew hatred that masks itself as moral outrage. We need to respond to these excesses with purpose and clarity, to defend ourselves.

At the same time, we must demand of ourselves that we confront the hard questions about our responsibilities to others as a sovereign nation. As a Zionist, I look at what the war after October 7 wrought and I’m obligated to ask these questions. How could Israel’s leaders, whose most basic obligation is to protect the Jewish people from harm, have been so unprepared for the attack on October 7 that left more than 1200 people brutally murdered? Why did so many Gazan civilians – many children among them -suffer and die during this war? Why are extremists from among our people currently terrorizing Palestinian villages and families on the West Bank with such impunity, in contravention of Torah law and the democratic rule of law? Why did so many of our young people who were serving as soldiers never return home to their loved ones? Why were the hostages put at such unconscionable risk for so long? As a Zionist, I want to help our brothers and sisters in Israel to confront these questions so we can heal, do better as a nation and a people, and work toward better, safer, freer, more peaceful lives for all residents of the region.

To me, Zionism means supporting Israel with hope as She works toward fulfilling the ideals of Her Declaration of Independence. Listen to some of its words:

The state of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of shrines and holy places of all religions…

It is so easy to fall short of such grand ideals in the real world. In 250 years of striving to fulfill our founding ideals, we Americans have not only fallen short of them at times, in some respects we’ve fallen backwards. Democratic state building, especially in an era of rising authoritarianism, polarization, and mass disinformation, is hardly a linear endeavor. In Israel’s case, add to this a list of mortal enemies seeking Her elimination that we Americans can’t even imagine, and the fulfillment of those ideals can seem like a pipe dream. Yet what gives the ideals of Israel’s Declaration an ironclad moral and political claim on Israelis and all world Jewry is not that they’re easily and instantly realized, but that they demand that we never lose sight of them as our goals to be realized.

To me, Zionism means constantly building an Israel that is Jewish and democratic. I have heard too many people on the right and the left agree on at least one thing:  this idea that Israel can be both is dead because it was always based on the illusion that majority Jewish sovereignty and full, equal rights for all people in the land could coexist. For them, either Israel is a Jewish ethnostate that privileges Jews and Jewish life or it is a democratic state that gives neither Jews nor anyone else such priority. It cannot be both. As a Zionist, I don’t agree. Israel is neither the first nor the last nation to struggle with promoting a full democracy that is also the creation of an ethnic majority; as such, why does She get singled out for such strident and damning political condemnation? Many of Israel’s most complex challenges might make it very hard at times to contemplate Israeli democracy surviving. Yet is it truly harder than to contemplate American democracy surviving, given our current crises of democracy? After 250 years of taking the tortuous, zigzagging path to our highest democratic ideals, we Americans are rightly terrified about our political circumstances, but we mostly aren’t spelling America’s death knell. Why after a mere 78 years of Her existence are we allowing ourselves or others to hopelessly toll the final bell for Israeli democracy? As the Hasidic master, Nachman of Bratzlav teaches, assur l’hit-ya-esh, we must not despair.

To me, Zionism means recognizing that Israel and its neighbors are millions of real people living real lives, not political or military abstractions. In Israel’s case, simplistically conflating Israeli government and politics with the three-dimensional lives of actual human beings who live there is unhelpful. All these people need to have their individual and collective voices that include political expression but that are more complex than it. It is wrong to lump together all Palestinians or to assume that we can easily extract the Palestinian view of Jews and Israel. This same lumping together of all Jews or all Israelis as some nameless, faceless abstraction is equally wrong; we shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t tolerate it coming from others. Jewish people, all people are far more than their politics or their nations of residence.

I end as I began. To me, Zionism means hope. Hope that we will continue to be a free nation in our land, the truly miraculous land and reality of  Zion and Jerusalem; hope that other people among us and living alongside us will be free in their land; hope that we will break the vicious cycles of mutual violence and achieve a lasting, just peace with our neighbors: because, we aren’t going anywhere and they aren’t going anywhere; hope that the world will treat the Jewish people and Israel with fairness and understanding, and that even if the world won’t, we will treat ourselves with fairness, understanding, and healthy self-criticism; most importantly, hope that the current deep, poisonous divisions within our own Jewish people around Israel and Zionism will begin to be healed and replaced with respectful arguments and genuine listening for the sake of heaven; hope that we Jews will cease weaponizing each other’s ideas and stop calling each other names, and that we’ll do so out of pure ahavat Yisrael, love for each other as fellow Jews; hope she od lo avdah tikvateinu, that our hope will not be lost, as Jews, Palestinians, America, the Middle East and all nations look toward a new era of peace in this coming year.