Judaism Was Never Just a Religion

We are in a stretch of the Jewish calendar that, if you take note, tells us exactly who we are. We have just completed the celebration of Pesach, where we retell the story of leaving Egypt, the moment that transforms a family into a people. We then moved into Yom HaShoah, a day established by the State of Israel to commemorate the Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe, and then, within days, we will observe and celebrate Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, marking sacrifice and independence on behalf of the modern Jewish state. These are different moments, different experiences, different histories, and yet they all point to the same underlying truth. Before anything else, we are a people.

And now we are living through a moment that feels genuinely unsettled, and I believe these uncertain times are asking something of us. The rise in antisemitism, the ugly discourse on campuses, and the disengagement of so many Jews from Jewish communal life are not isolated issues that can be separated or easily addressed. They are all pointing to something deeper, and we owe it to ourselves to take them seriously.

I do not believe the problem is that people don’t care. Most Jews I know care deeply. But for a generation or more, we have not done the work of giving Jewish children, and many Jewish adults, a clear and confident understanding of who they are, what Judaism actually is, what story they are part of, and how they belong within it. Too many people have grown up with fragments of Judaism. Maybe some holidays, some rituals, perhaps some history, but generally without a coherent framework that holds it all together. When that framework is missing, identity becomes shallow, and when identity is shallow, something else inevitably fills the space.

In America, what fills that space is a borrowed idea that Judaism is a religion, something you either practice or you don’t, measured by synagogue attendance, ritual observance, and belief. This is a category shaped largely by Protestant Christianity, which remains the dominant framework for understanding religious life in America. And because it is often the only framework many Jews have been given, a great many have concluded that Judaism simply does not speak to them. That conclusion is not just unfortunate, it is based on a false premise.

Judaism does not fit neatly into the category of religion as Americans understand it, and actually, it never really did. Judaism is a people, a civilization, a shared story that you enter by birth or by choice, and that carries with it memory, responsibility, and connection that no act of disbelief can erase. You can be a secular Jew and be fully Jewish. You can be an atheist and be fully Jewish. The tradition has always understood this, even when our communal institutions have not. The question is: Is Jewish identity defined only by what you believe, or by who you are, who your people are, and your relationship to them? The answer has never been only belief.

You can see this most clearly in Israel, where many Jews describe themselves as secular, as hiloni. And yet they still sit at a Passover seder, still mark Yom Kippur in some way, still gather for Shabbat meals, not because they feel commanded, but because it is simply part of who they are, embedded in the culture and the rhythm of daily life. Research from the Israel Democracy Institute has consistently shown that even among Israeli Jews who identify as secular, participation in Jewish practices remains widespread, because identity and practice in Israel are not split into the neat categories of religious and non-religious. They are deeply intertwined, in ways that most American Jews have never been given the language to understand or claim for themselves.

That is what was lost when American Jews adopted the structure of the society around them, when the synagogue became the center and observance became the primary marker of Jewish seriousness. What was lost was the understanding that Jewishness is something you live, not something you perform. It belongs to you even if you are not fluent in its rituals, and it can be expressed in ways that are no less real for being less traditional. The Shabbat table, the sukkah, the seder, the Hanukkah candles, these are often framed narrowly as religious obligations, but they are equally expressions of belonging, ways of connecting yourself to a people and a story that stretches back thousands of years and continues to unfold. You do not have to do them perfectly for them to matter, and you do not have to do them “religiously” for them to count. Many Jews engage in Jewish holidays and practices as a way to connect and to belong as an expression of identity and culture.

Recovering this understanding feels to me like some of the most urgent work American Jewish life needs to do right now, because if we do not give the next generation a clear and confident sense of who they are and what they belong to, we should not be surprised when they conclude that Judaism is simply not for them. But I want to be clear, when young people walk away, they would not be leaving the Jewish people. They would be leaving a definition of Judaism that was never quite right to begin with and that distinction matters more than we have yet to admit.