The child is theirs: Secular Zionism

Amos Biderman’s cartoon of Herzl and Ben Gurion looking at their baby, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and asking a doctor, “Check if the baby is ours,” is one of the most thought-provoking cartoons I have seen in a long time.

Most Israelis immediately understand the joke.

The cartoon references the Assuta Hospital embryo scandal, in which a woman was implanted with the wrong embryo. Herzl and Ben Gurion, representing secular Zionism, look at Ben Gvir and assume: this cannot possibly be their child.

More broadly, the cartoon reflects a deep anxiety felt by many secular Israelis: that the Israel emerging around them no longer resembles the country they believed they were building.

But when I saw the cartoon last week, my reaction was almost the opposite.

I looked at the “child” and thought: of course he is theirs. Because Zionism did not only revive a language or create a state. It revived an entire civilization.

Hebrew.

Tanach.

Jewish memory.

Shared fate.

Land.

Power.

History.

And what I would call covenantal consciousness.

The secular founders of Israel often hoped to create a “new Jew” disconnected from what they saw as the weakness, passivity, and exile-centered nature of Diaspora Judaism. The dream was a sovereign Hebrew identity rooted directly in land, labor, language, and statehood.

But civilizations do not work that way.
You cannot revive Hebrew, rebuild Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, fill public life with biblical language and memory, and then expect Judaism itself to remain a thin private hobby disconnected from national life.

Values without structure rarely survive more than a generation or two. And this is where I think many secular Israelis misunderstand the moment we are living through. The danger facing Israel is not that it is becoming “too Jewish.”

The danger is that thoughtful, rational, liberal Israelis increasingly disengage from Judaism entirely, leaving the shaping of post-exilic Jewish civilization to narrower and more absolutist voices.

Too often, Israeli secularism defines itself primarily through separation from religion: not learning Jewish texts, not participating in Jewish intellectual life, not seeing Judaism as something that belongs to them.

But Judaism was never only obedience. It was also argument.

Philosophy.

Interpretation.

Moral struggle.

Internal criticism.

And wrestling with God and society.

“Israel” itself means one who wrestles with God. That is not accidental. It may be one of the deepest ideas in Jewish civilization.

The Jewish tradition contains law and mysticism, but also fierce debate and rationalism. Maimonides tried to reconcile Torah and philosophy. The Talmud preserves minority opinions alongside accepted rulings. Jewish civilization historically evolved through argument, reinterpretation, and tension between competing visions.

A living Judaism needs not only believers and traditionalists. It also needs skeptics, rationalists, critics, and what Jewish tradition itself would call apikorusim. And I mean that seriously. An engaged apikorus who studies, argues, critiques, and participates in Jewish civilization is far more valuable to the future of Judaism than a disengaged Jew who knows nothing about the civilization at all.

Because the real danger is not atheism. The real danger is civilizational illiteracy. Today, many secular Israelis inherit: Hebrew, Israeli culture, national belonging, and historical memory, without deep access to the civilizational library beneath them.

And if Israel’s rational, creative, liberal, and philosophically serious communities abandon Judaism completely, then eventually the public face of Judaism will be shaped only by narrower sectors of society.

That would be disastrous not only for secular Israelis, but for Judaism itself. I am not arguing that secular Israelis should become religious. In fact, I think the opposite instinct is important. Israel needs secular Jews.

It needs skeptics.

It needs internal critics.

It needs rationalists.

It needs people willing to challenge religious authority and inherited assumptions. But they must remain inside the Jewish conversation. Because Jewish civilization was never built by one type of Jew alone. And this brings me to a distinction I increasingly believe Israel must grapple with: the distinction between Judaism and Israel.

Judaism is a civilization that carries within it the 2000 years of Diaspora: rabbinic tradition, halacha, philosophy, mysticism, ethics, communal memory, and centuries of survival without sovereignty.

But Israel is broader. We did not return only to Judea. We returned to Israel.

A covenantal Israel must be able to include not only religious and secular Jews, but also Druze, Christians, Muslims, and others who participate loyally in the shared Israeli story.
That does not mean erasing Jewish rootedness. On the contrary. Israel without Jewish civilizational depth becomes hollow very quickly. But covenantal Israel also cannot become a narrow tribal or theocratic project without betraying something fundamental in the prophetic tradition itself.

The Hebrew Bible repeatedly insists that power without morality corrupts. The prophets did not reject Israel. They criticized Israel in the name of the covenant. That prophetic self-criticism matters now more than ever. Because the real question facing Israel today is not: “Should Judaism exist in the Jewish state?”

Obviously it should.

The question is: What kind of Jewish civilization will shape Israel’s future? One that is broad, rational, morally serious, self-critical, and open to argument? Or one that becomes narrower because too many thoughtful Israelis walked away from the conversation entirely?

The cartoon asks: “How did this strange child appear?”

But perhaps the more uncomfortable questions are: What exactly did secular Zionism revive? And can secular Israelis find their way back to Judaism on their own terms and help shape the future of Jewish civilization?