Passover Reflections: Between love of Israel and love of Judaism
Despite nearly continuous potentially existentially disagreements within the Jewish world, probably the last time there was an irrevocable split among different factions occurred at a time scholars described as the Karaite schism – when a sect of Jews rejected what had become normative Talmudically-based Rabbinic Judaism in favor of more literal interpretations of Biblical text. I wonder if we are on the precipice of a similar divide with a segment of our community increasingly taking their cues from literal readings of Biblical texts (in both word and spirit) and moving farther away from the mode of Judaism that has enabled Jewish continuity for millennia.
Just when we imagine that the post–October 7 fractures within the Jewish world might be healing, a new episode has reopened them. The most recent catalyst being the joint Israeli‑American attacks on Iran—operations framed as preemptive strikes against nuclear and ballistic threats, but accompanied by an explicit willingness to tolerate high civilian casualties in Tehran and Beirut. Additionally, the Israeli government just passed a law that allows for capital punishment for Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks on Israelis. These developments again force Jewish communities worldwide to confront deep internal tensions about power, sovereignty, and the ethical limits of force within the context of how we understand Judaism.
As we approach Passover—the most widely observed and arguably the most quintessentially Jewish of holidays—these tensions take on renewed urgency. Passover’s core narrative of liberation, of God bringing the Jewish people “from slavery to freedom,” has for millennia shaped Jewish self-understanding. For Diaspora Jews especially, living in subservient or minority positions, the Seder’s themes provided both solace and identity: a people exiled yet redeemed, powerless yet held by divine promise, perpetually yearning for return.
I recently had the pleasure of touring the new National Library in Jerusalem, and included among the exhibits are many hundreds of years of Passover Haggadoth – the same text dating back to Mishnaic times. Although the Passover ritual, the Seder activities and narrative, have remained relatively unchanged (perhaps notable exceptions of some Israeli innovations on the latter), in truth, 1948 altered that dynamic or yearning for return. Indeed, with Jewish sovereignty restored, Jewish thinkers—both in Israel and abroad—wondered whether the very nature of Judaism might change. Would a political state require a political religion? Should traditional fast days marking historical defeat, like Tisha b’Av, remain? And what ought the relationship between Jewish law and the modern democratic state be?
Acknowledging the tension between the Diaspora framework of Rabbinic Judaism and the challenges of sovereignty should not require lapsing into passivity or celebrating Jewish victimhood. Zionism’s revolutionary thrust was not merely political; it was civilizational and Rabbinic Jews (that we are) embraced that revival. The Zionist movement sought to restore not only a Jewish state but also a Jewish self—reviving the image of the fighting Jew, rejecting Bialik’s “City of Slaughter” and refusing to cower in basements. But the question now confronting us is this: Did the early Zionist visionaries—Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, Ben-Gurion, even Jabotinsky—seek the kind of militarism that defines today’s Israeli strategic posture – invoking the isolationism of Sparta and not the principles of Yavneh?
For decades, when teaching college students and adult learners, I have been asked: How did Judaism survive when so many civilizations vanished? The answer is multifaceted, but one key factor is the unique intertwining of Jewish religion and Jewish national identity—and just as importantly, the Rabbinic rejection of political sovereignty as the organizing principle of Jewish life. After the Temple’s destruction, Jews reimagined their tradition as a decentralized, denationalized, and depoliticized system rooted in halacha rather than territory, sacrifice, or statehood. In rabbinic lore, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, the great preserver of Jewish peoplehood, asked for “Yavneh and its sages,” rather than preserving the Temple or Jewish sovereignty. Even if that was an act of pragmatism and realpolitik, it set the stage for the Judaism we inherited.
This Diasporic Judaism—2,000 years in the making—became the Judaism we practice today across denominations: a Judaism premised on the absence of a state, the absence of an army, the absence of political coercion. The early Rabbis transformed the state-centric perspective of the Hebrew Bible into an ethical, legal, and spiritual discipline grounded in human behavior, interpersonal justice, and compassion.
That transformation is already visible in the biblical prophets. Jeremiah warns the people not to rely on the Temple itself as a talisman of protection, but to reform their actions:
“Do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. Do not shed innocent blood in this place.”
Hillel distills the entire Torah into a rule of radical empathy: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.”
This moral orientation, not aggressive sovereignty, became the foundation of Jewish survival, and the surviving political/religious outlook from an earlier era of sectarianism. For most of modern Israel’s history we managed to avoid any serious debate between the ethics that shaped the Judaism that became normative the demands of modern statehood, but it is growing increasingly difficult to do so. How do we reject the passivity of old-world Judaism on the one hand while also avoiding an over-compensation and embrace of physical power on the other?
Judaism has always allowed space for disagreement. Rabbinic Judaism is built on it. Even ancient sects that differed over core beliefs still saw themselves as part of a shared people. But when disagreement moved from theology to violent rebellion, the ruptures became existential. Before 1948, the last time Jews organized militarily as nationalist Jews was the Bar Kochba revolt. While modern Zionists celebrate Bar Kochba as a model of national heroism, Rabbinic memory emphasized something quite different: not failed sovereignty, but the tragic loss of scholars and Torah students. For the Rabbis, political defeat was survivable; the destruction of Jewish learning, and by extension Jewish (Rabbinic) observance, was not. One is not inherently better than the other, but the tension is difficult.
Jewish life, of course, did not remain static. Diaspora communities evolved—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi; Hasidim and Mitnagdim; Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist. Mordecai Kaplan aptly described Judaism as an “evolving religious civilization,” but evolution implies both continuity and a relatively slow pace of change (biological evolution happens so slowly as not be unnoticeable), not rupture. Those of us who love both Judaism and Israel should be able to recognize that the creation of a sovereign Jewish state—especially one engaged in modern geopolitics—represented not continuity but a significant break. Maybe that break is necessary to disrupt the cycle of victimhood, and the pathway that led to the Shoah. But must such a break inevitably result in serious consequences for both Judaism as a way of life, even in Israel, and the relationship between Diaspora Jews and their host communities? We may be headed that way.
Anti-Semitism long predates Zionism or Israel. But it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that today’s surge in anti-Jewish hostility is bound up with perceptions—fair or not—of the state of Israel’s actions. Unlike in the 1930s or 1940s, when accusations of Jewish global power were delusional, today Israel is a powerful state, and its military policies inevitably shape global attitudes toward Jews. That is not justification; it is reality. Of course, we thus confront the dilemma of both recognizing anti-Semitism as both ubiquitous and unchanging regardless of anything Jews do or say and also acknowledging the impact of Israeli actions, policies, and public statements on public perceptions of Jews and Israel. We are in a really tight spot on this one.
This is the heart of the internal soul-searching many Jews now confront: Judaism as a religious and ethnocultural community was not built to absorb the global consequences of a modern Jewish state’s actions; and the Jewish people struggle to maintain a sense of unity under the weight of this tension. For most of Jewish history, Jews lived dispersed, often on opposing sides of wars, serving loyally in their respective countries’ armies. Their fate was not tied to a central Jewish geopolitical actor. Today it is, whether we like it or not.
While the political implications of this analysis are perhaps unavoidable, can we frame the current moment within a broader assessment of internal Jewish ideological evolution over 2000+ years? Evaluating specific military actions or strategic decisions belongs to the realm of political analysis, and from a strictly political or geopolitical perspective, one can reasonably make a strong case in support of many, perhaps all Israeli actions. States exist to protect their citizens, and sovereign governments—Israel included—are routinely forced to make decisions in which survival, deterrence, and national interest override other considerations.
In fact, many early Zionist thinkers anticipated precisely this tension. They understood that Jewish sovereignty would inevitably require political, military, and ethical decisions that could not be guided solely—or even primarily—by the teachings and traditions of Judaism. A modern state, operating in the often brutally pragmatic arena of international politics, would be compelled to act in ways that the rabbinic imagination—shaped by diaspora realities rather than political power—could never have envisioned.
The point of this little exploration is not to judge Israeli policy through the lens of contemporary partisan debates. Rather, it is to examine the deeper civilizational and religious implications of recent geopolitical developments: how Jewish ethics, developed in an era without political power, interface with the realities of modern statehood and its impact on Jewish life globally; how a tradition built on decentralization, restraint, and Diasporic minority nationalism adapts—or fails to adapt—to the demands of military strength and national self-defense.
The question is not whether Israel is justified in its actions as a state. The question is whether Judaism, as a moral and religious system shaped over two millennia of statelessness, possesses the categories necessary to make sense of, absorb, and sustain those actions without fracturing.
This tension becomes acute when considering the ethics of force, including the death penalty. The Talmudic sensitivity to the value of life is profound, and the evidentiary requirements for capital punishment were effectively prohibitive:
“A Sanhedrin that executes once in seven years is destructive.”
“Once in seventy years,” counter others.
“If we had sat on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever be executed,” say Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva.
Contrast this with current strategies of targeted killings that accept large-scale civilian collateral damage and the new Knesset law. Precise operations like the Mossad’s pursuit of the Munich terrorists once reflected a moral commitment to limit harm; the proactive engagement that allowed for Israeli success in the six-day war was limited to purely military targets; today, entire neighborhoods are destroyed in pursuit of a single leadership figure. The Bible itself not only demanded an Eye for an Eye, but provided extensive bases for execution and even wholesale slaughter. Even if such actions are justified militarily, they reverberate morally and politically, fueling cycles of hatred and undermining Jewish security globally. The fact that our enemies would gladly inflict the same damage on Israeli civilians and Jews around the world provides the requisite moral justification for some, but seems to run counter to these basic Rabbinic principles that had moved beyond the avenging tenor of earlier Biblical texts.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fantasy. But today’s accusations of war crimes, even if not accurate, do not derive from the imagination of conspiracy theorists. Again, this is not to deny the necessity of self-defense. It is to say that the old paradigm—all criticism is anti-Semitism—is no longer tenable when the slaughter of innocents is visible in real time. The changing perceptions of younger American cohorts and the long-term damage that could inflict on the Israeli-American relationship and anti-Semitism in America should worry us all, including Israeli leadership. The young spiritually committed Jews turning away from Israel are channeling the same Diasporic Rabbinic tradition that maintained Jewish peoplehood in the absence of a state.
Given all we have endured over millennia, given the Rabbinic project that sustained us without sovereignty, we might hope for a middle ground—a Jewish self-defense that does not devolve into unrestrained militarism; a Jewish sovereignty that does not abandon Jewish ethics.
And this leads to the final question: Are we witnessing the emergence of a new Jewish paradigm—a return to a more literal, biblical, nationalist ethos that views Rabbinic Judaism as a passing phase? One might call it a kind of neo-Karaism, a revival of scriptural literalism -what might be described as fundamentalism – an ethnic-national self-assertion not mediated by the rabbinic tradition’s layers of interpretation, ethics, and restraint. Of course, so far this ethos has not extended to religious observance, which still bears the mark of rabbinic interpretation, but if militarism derives its ideology from Biblical precedent, one could extrapolate from there. More importantly, whereas in the previous schism the basis for disagreement was precisely those ritual behaviors and prohibitions, the current fault lines align with more primal perceptions of justice and morality.
Judaism survived for two thousand years precisely because it evolved away from kings, conquest, and sacrifice, and toward learning, law, and ethics. Whether the Judaism that I love – as a unified religious civilization – can survive the pressures of the modern Jewish state that I love – fighting for its survival, undertaking self-preservation on a global stage – is far less certain.
