Last week I resigned from the Jewish religious denomination to which I had belonged for half my life. My main reason for taking this hard step is that the Jewish Reconstructionist movement – which for decades unequivocally championed Zionism and the State of Israel – has become a welcoming home for anti-Zionist rabbis.
Why did Reconstructionism’s two institutional organs – Reconstructing Judaism (of which the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is a major part, helping to direct Reconstructionist congregations along with rabbinical students) and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association – choose to support Jews opposed to Israel’s existence?
Driving that decision was the sincere belief that making room for anti-Zionists will afford a strategic benefit for Jewish peoplehood (a core Jewish value, according to the movement’s founding rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan) and advance Judaism’s ethos of diversity and inclusiveness (also central to Reconstructionist thinking).
The Reconstructionist movement’s leaders are wrong on both counts. I will explain why by way of parable…
In a magical forest live creatures who dematerialize if attacked, remaining alive when an enemy’s sword stabbing at them cuts through ethereal plasma into which they’ve been transformed. But they pay a price for this defensive adaptation: While invisible, over time they lose their life force; it can only regenerate if they rematerialize, exposing themselves again to risk of bodily damage at the hands of vicious, unrelenting foes.
When, over the centuries, hostile forces repeatedly tried to run their sword through us, we Jews would dematerialize (i.e., go into exile and political quiescence, muting our yearning for national sovereignty) to avoid total destruction. But, as the founders of modern Zionism well understood, exercising this “supernatural” power century after century had sapped our strength.
We couldn’t stay that way forever: only abstractly present; constantly translating ourselves into languages, cultures, places not truly our own; assimilating to elude detection; and for our survival dependent upon an unworldly divine being.
Keeping up this make-believe had drained our life force. Spread us thin. Uprooted, we became denatured. Jews’ soul essence dwells in the material world – a real physical environment. Eretz Yisrael is where Jewish people’s spiritual energies converge. Anti-Zionist Jews won’t acknowledge this fact.
They refuse to come out of hiding and rematerialize to live again in their own skins. They have gotten used to living in fear of exposure, all the while pretending they’re not afraid.
Jews, while acculturating to numerous places where our wanderings in exile took us, cannot afford to forget the land of Israel. Rabbi Kaplan, while affirming of Jewish life in other countries, emphasized that, no matter where we reside, that place and our commitment to national sovereignty there are central and vital to all Jewish experience.
He pictured the Jewish world as a wheel whose hub and perimeter represent, respectively, Israel and other nations; spokes from the hub, representing the land of Israel spreading out to the perimeter, representing other nations.
If Jews accept this model, Kaplan argued, they may call “home” wherever they are on the perimeter and benefit from its connection to the hub. Otherwise, he implied, they weaken their Jewish identity, forfeiting its unique cultural and survival advantages. For, how can Jews remain dedicated to Jewish peoplehood if they abandon love of Zion?
How can they be for diversity and inclusivity if they exclude, from among the world’s diverse nations, Israel itself (home to nearly half of all Jews) and if, by volunteering for Jewish national extinction, they seek to reduce rather than increase the number of participants in that international culture?
Jewish Anti-Zionists’ sympathizers (among whom the official Reconstructionist movement now firmly counts itself) are not evil, just tragically misguided.
They do not realize how they’re playing right into the hands of Jewish people’s most hideous antagonists fixated on our extermination. Trying to remain Jewish while severing ties with the land, people and state of Israel serves our adversaries’ genocidal agenda quite handily. Effort to keep up the make-believe scenario – in which we continue to exist without calling negative attention to ourselves – is running out of oxygen.
Jewish life outside the land of Israel has been on emergency life support for longer than has been safe. As exilic Judaism’s life force rapidly dwindles, anti-Zionist Jews will discover that they can’t hide but must, along with every other Jew, either face down the hatred or succumb to it.
The diasporic magic is wearing off. As a murderous sword stabs and stabs at us, we’ve reached the point of exhaustion – can no longer miraculously muster the power to be in a dematerialized, ethereal state of denial.
The time has come for the entire Jewish world to rematerialize. Would that my former RRA colleagues, in the same spirit, came back to their senses.
(https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2020/03/19/17/10/desert-4948106_1280.jpg)
(https://www.myjewishlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/pomegranate-orchard.jpg)
i love it that you actually reply...very unusual and comfortiing
interesting,,,,,,,