The false choice: Why Tikkun Olam without Israel betrays both

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently presented Ruth Messinger, the legendary former president of American Judaism’s premier international development organization, with a Lifetime Achievement Award, I imagine some observers saw an uplifting moment. Here was a progressive mayor honoring a pioneering figure in Jewish social justice. Many others, I believe, joined me in seeing something else: the crystallization of a long and costly mistake.

Mamdani, whom Messinger endorsed and campaigned for, does not believe Israel should exist. That is not a characterization of his politics; it is a fair summary of his stated position. Israel, home to half the world’s Jewish people, is the site of a remarkable “return of the exiles.” More than half of Israel is made up of Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern or African. Much of the other half consists of descendants of Holocaust survivors and Jews whose identities survived seven decades of Soviet attempts to erase them.

Israel, facing regional enemies sworn to destroy it since its birth, continues to struggle with profound ethical dilemmas – and sometimes fails. It is also a place of extraordinary cultural richness, Jewish diversity, learning, and dynamic politics. It is the most vibrant and intense Jewish place in the world. For a major American Jewish leader to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from someone who believes Israel should be undone is not a political difference of opinion. It is a statement about what, and who, matters.

Ruth Messinger is not a minor figure. As president of American Jewish World Service for two decades, she built an organization that mobilized thousands of young American Jews around global development, humanitarian aid, and human rights. She raised many millions of dollars, which AJWS distributed to hundreds of local organizations across the Global South. She deserves credit for those achievements. Her understanding of the ways global economic policy affects the poor has been an inspiration to me.

But I have also found part of her intellectual legacy disturbing. When I was in her office years ago, I noticed a large framed photograph of Desmond Tutu, and I understood something about the world she inhabited. Tutu was a man of genuine moral stature in many ways. He was also someone whose attitude toward Jews often dripped with disdain. Among other libels, he claimed that Israel practiced apartheid, and that its apartheid was worse than what South Africa endured, a claim that is both historically false and deeply offensive. Yet for Messinger, and for the movement she represented, Tutu was an ally and an icon. That photograph told me something about the alliances she valued, and those she was willing to overlook.

The Binary That Broke Something

After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became central to American Jewish life, an understandable response from a people who had just witnessed what statelessness meant and whose pride had been restored by Israel’s remarkable achievements. The State of Israel was not merely a political project; it was a theological and existential one, a living answer to the question of Jewish vulnerability.

But something else was happening among many American Jews in the decades following the postwar period as well: assimilation and intermarriage. Embarrassment about Jewish particularity, along with ignorance of Jewish practice and history. For a generation of American Jews who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s – shaped by civil rights, Vietnam, feminism, and a broader universalist idealism; young people who may have attended Reform temples but for whom Jewish identity was not at the center of their lives – the centrality of Zionism could feel provincial and particularistic.

Many of these Jews wanted a Judaism that was non-sectarian, one that spoke to challenges such as extreme poverty and environmental devastation. Tikkun Olam – a modern adaptation of a Kabbalistic concept, reframing a spiritual vision as a progressive social ethic – was recovered and redeployed as the organizing framework for this alternative Jewish identity. American Jewish World Service became perhaps its primary institutional home.

The binary that emerged, mostly unspoken but powerfully real, went something like this: You could be a Jew who cared about Israel, or a Jew who cared about the world. There was even a joke: “There are two kinds of Jews: those who believe in Tikkun Olam and those who speak Hebrew.” One path led to AIPAC; the other to AJWS. One was parochial; the other was universal. One was ethnic; the other was ethical.

This binary was false.

And it has been destructive.

I know how destructive it has been because I have experienced it directly. Tevel b’Tzedek, the organization I founded, has worked with impoverished farming villages in Nepal, Haiti, and Burundi since 2007. Today, our main project is in rural Zambia, helping transform the economies of villages whose populations would otherwise be drawn into urban slums. We are an Israeli NGO. Our staff is local, and we work alongside subsistence farmers, government officials, and community leaders.

In 2009, Ruth approached Tevel about partnering in Ethiopia and sent two AJWS employees to meet us there to explore possibilities for collaboration. But in the end, AJWS decided against a partnership between two Jewish organizations working in Africa, one Israeli and one American. The reason Ruth gave me was that AJWS’s board did not want to partner with an Israeli organization.

Let that sink in. A Jewish organization committed to repairing the world would not work with another Jewish organization because it was Israeli. The logic of the binary, followed to its conclusion, produces exactly this result: the one group excluded from the circle of concern is the Jewish people in their own land.

Thick and Thin

The philosopher Michael Walzer drew a distinction between “thick” and “thin” morality. Thick morality is the morality of a particular community – rooted, dense, and full of specific obligations, histories, and relationships. Thin morality is the minimalist universalism we can extract from those thick traditions: shared commitments to life, fairness, and human dignity that cross cultural boundaries. Walzer’s crucial insight was that thin morality is always derivative. It lives off the moral energy generated by thick traditions. It cannot sustain itself.

AJWS’s Israel-free Tikkun Olam makes it inevitably thin, because it abandons the history and experience of the “thickest” Jewish community that exists today: the place that contains the most Libyan Jews and the most Indian Jews, the most Holocaust survivors and Jews from Soviet Asia, the most Polish Jews and the most Ethiopian Jews, some of the most ideologically secular Jews, and the most extreme ultra-Orthodox. AJWS uses the vocabulary of Jewish ethics while stripping away the particularism of contemporary Jewish history that gave those ethics their substance. It wants a Judaism that is universal, concerned with all people equally – except its own.

This is not Tikkun Olam. The original concept, in Lurianic Kabbalah, is precisely about how each particular soul, each particular community, does its particular work – and, in doing so, repairs the universal fabric. The repair happens through particularity, not despite it. A people that has abandoned its own story cannot repair anyone else’s. And Israel, for all its many faults, has been a central part of the Jewish story since its founding.

What Israel Actually Offers

There is a history that has been largely erased from the consciousness of progressive American Jews, and it is worth recovering.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel sent agricultural missions across Africa and Asia. These were not charity operations or soft-power maneuvers – they were genuine people-to-people exchanges between nations newly finding their footing after colonialism and nations recently emerged from statelessness and siege. Israeli agronomists, engineers, and educators worked in Ghana, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Burma, and dozens of other countries. They were welcomed. They were celebrated. The African leaders of that era – Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta – saw Israel as a kindred spirit, a small nation that had survived against the odds and had something real to teach about building a state from scratch.

That history ended, largely, with the 1973 oil crisis and Arab diplomatic pressure. African governments severed ties with Israel under economic duress, not genuine conviction. The memory of those missions – what they accomplished, what they represented – is still very much alive in many countries of the Global South. But in the United States, it has been allowed to fade.

It should not have faded. Because Israel is still offering things that the world desperately needs. Drip irrigation, developed in Israel, now feeds hundreds of millions of people in water-scarce regions from India to sub-Saharan Africa. Israeli desalination technology is among the most advanced in the world. Israeli expertise in arid-land agriculture, community-based water management, and resilient farming systems – these are not abstract claims. Neither is the Israeli emphasis on community, youth activism, youth movements, and youth-led social and economic transformation. All of these are the product of a people that had to learn both how to build a nation through ardent solidarity and how to grow food in a difficult land, under difficult conditions. Israel succeeded in both.

At Tevel, we bring some of this knowledge to rural villages in Zambia, not only the hardware, the tech, but also the inspiring software – the Jewish emphasis on community and youth, which catalyzed Israel’s development and growth. We work with Zambian small farmers not because we have all the answers, but because we have some relevant experience, and because partnership between peoples is itself a form of repair. We are not embarrassed to be Israeli while we do this. In fact, we are proud – because what we know, we know because of where we come from.

You Cannot Repair the World by Abandoning Your People

There is a sentence from the Ethics of the Fathers – Hillel’s formulation – that has always struck me as the necessary corrective to the false universalism I am describing: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

The first clause is not selfishness. It is a recognition that a self that has been hollowed out, that has abandoned its particular obligations and relationships, has nothing to offer anyone. You cannot give from emptiness. You cannot repair the world if you have allowed your own world to be broken.

When Ruth Messinger accepted an award from a man who believes Israel should not exist, she was not striking a blow for universal justice. She was enacting the message that particular loyalties are an embarrassment, that one’s connection to the Jewish state is a liability, and that the price of admission to the progressive coalition is the sacrifice of Jewish peoplehood on the altar of abstract humanity.

I have protested and fought against the particular Israeli government now in power for years. Diaspora Jews have the right, even the obligation, to protest such phenomena as settler violence. But to embrace a man who believes Israel should be destroyed, who cannot bring himself to say that Hamas should be disarmed, and who has nary a word to say about the dictatorial, anti-feminist, and anti-gay Islamic ethno-states that surround Israel, does not repair anything. It merely diminishes us – and it deprives the world of what we, as a particular people with a particular history and hard-won knowledge, have to give.

The Judaism That Could Exist

I want to close with a vision, because I believe it is achievable.

There is a Judaism that is both deeply Zionist and deeply committed to global healing. It holds its connection to the incredible diversity and creativity of the people of Israel and its obligation to the suffering of peoples across the globe not as contradictions but as expressions of the same root: the conviction that human dignity is indivisible, and that we, a people who know what indignity means, have a particular calling to defend it everywhere.

This Judaism would be thick, in Walzer’s sense. It would bring to the work of global development not a thin universalism but a dense, rooted, specific Jewish identity – with all the history, the texts, the arguments, the humor, the grief, and the stubborn hope that entails. It would be proudly Israeli when Israeli knowledge and experience are relevant, which is often. It would partner with the State of Israel not despite its commitment to justice but because of it.

These kinds of Israeli organizations exist. Tevel b’Tzedek is one such organization. There are others, including NALA, a pioneering health organization; IsraAID, focused on disaster relief; Innovation Africa, which has brought drinking water to thousands of poor villages; and Gabriel Project, working in urban and rural India.

But awareness of the kind of Tikkun Olam that also speaks Hebrew has often been crowded out of the American Jewish conversation by the false binary that American proponents of universal Judaism tried to promote. The winds may be changing. Tawanda Mutasa, the newly appointed first non-Jewish president of AJWS, has openly embraced the possibility of AJWS cooperation with Israel, touting Israel’s record of technical and social innovation.

Ruth Messinger spent her career building something big. I respect that. But the Lifetime Achievement Award from Mayor Mamdani is a fitting, if painful, symbol of where that project led. It is time for a different project – one that refuses the choice between Israel and the world, insists that you can love your people and repair the world at the same time, and understands that the second is, in fact, impossible without the first.