God, Orthodox Judaism, and Israel

When I was young American Jew, trying to figure out my personal relationship to my Judaism, I accepted some fundamental Jewish truths that had been instilled in me by family, school and community.  They informed and inspired my personal commitments to Judaism and what I believed would be the trajectory of my life as a Jew and a human being.  Over time, one by one, I had to change my mind about their truth.  Uncertainties have replaced those certainties. 

Those discoveries did not necessarily make me abandon the actions and ways of life I had pursued when I thought them true or to despair over where they had led me, but I grew more ambivalent about each one of them and this affected my sympathies to my fellow Jews who still claimed they were true.

Divine Intervention

As the only child of Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivors, I grew up in a family steeped in the conviction that the Almighty actively intervenes in history and that steadfastness in prayer and loyalty to Jewish tradition and ritual enable one to be in God’s grace. This first of my truths was undermined by life experience and a more mature understanding of Judaism.

When I started studying Talmud, I was plunged into the question of theosophy, as it envisions Moses asking God:

^{בבלי ברכות ז.} מִפְּנֵי מָה יֵשׁ צַדִּיק וְטוֹב לוֹ, וְיֵשׁ צַדִּיק וְרַע לוֹ, יֵשׁ רָשָׁע וְטוֹב לוֹ, וְיֵשׁ רָשָׁע וְרַע לוֹ?

^{b. Berakhot 7a} Why are there some good people who experience good things, and some good people who experience bad? Why do some wicked people experience good things, and some wicked people experience bad?

I gave up the belief that prayer and engaging in ritualized Torah study were ways to remain in God’s good grace, seeing them as an immature understanding our relationship with God. Prayer became instead a way to keep the divine within my heart and to remind me I believed in God’s everlasting presence in my life. And I studied Torah because it was personally edifying and a way to share in the Jewish chain of history.

Being Observant Means You’re Good

I was also taught, largely by the example both of my parents and the American  Orthodox community in which I grew, that I should practice a religion of personal and communal piety, dominated by the authority of a rabbinic interpretive religion, in which serving God was best expressed through observing mitzvot and endless Jewish learning. By doing this I was assured I would also reach a higher moral status.

While I have remained strict in my observance of mitzvot and increased my study of Torah, I became disheartened over time when I saw that others—who claimed to be even stricter in their observances and engaged in more Torah-learning—often displayed diminished moral behavior. I couldn’t ignore people with enormous kippot and long earlocks, and the women connected to them, who approved violence and racist behavior, even claiming that these were necessary for doing God’s work. In Israel, some tormented their Arab neighbors in order to chase them off the land that they claimed God had promised them.

I also stopped being surprised when supposedly-pious-rabbis were revealed to have abused their students in yeshivas, and so-called-religious-Jews turn out to have committed fraud to fund their schools and communities, even as they claimed as their motive enabling the performance of mitzvot and Torah study.  And I watched with dismay as many of these same people refused to do their share to defend the Jewish state in which they were content to live securely while others manned the battlefronts and served the state instead of them.  Clearly, their moral behavior was not enhanced by their observances and learning.

Diaspora Life vs Life in Israel

Like the Hellenizing Jews of Judea, I, like my community, considered the adjacent host non-Jewish culture and wisdom attractive, pervasive and open to Jews who wanted to share in it.  It was even easier after the melting-pot ideal gave way to multi-culturalism, which allowed one to be visibly Jewish and yet share in American culture. Even though my parents’ Holocaust experience demonstrated that Diaspora Jewry was never completely secure, they too believed America was a מלכות של חסד “a kingdom of kindness,” and exclaimed: “God bless America!”

In my American life, I could keep my personal religion within parochial boundaries and communal space while sharing in sports, theatre, literature, music, and of course a university education. I could live in multiple worlds at once. In the Orthodoxy in which I grew, practices mattered more than motives and interpretations; as long as you remained within the lines, no one asked the reasons for what you did, which meant you could remain attached to your religion in whatever way made sense to you.

Different Jewish communities might create other norms and might disparage my version of Judaism. But in America, their ability to enforce their opinions on me remained limited to social pressures and my willingness to be bound by them. The state pretty much stayed out of the way. 

Like ancient diaspora Jews, my parents, the people I prayed with in shul and I regularly repeated the liturgical formula מִפְּנֵי חֲטָאֵינוּ גָּלִינוּ מֵאַרְצֵנוּ “because of our sins, we were exiled from our land,” yet we no longer actually believed that living outside of the Land of Israel was a punishment from God for bad behavior. No less than during the Second Temple period, when the majority of the Jews stayed in the Diaspora rather than returning to Judaea, most of Jews in my America, including religiously observant ones like us, also stayed put, even after the small sovereign Jewish state was re-established.^[1]

In time my belief that Judaism in America was just fine became undone in 1967 when Israel seemed on the verge of annihilation. I discovered Israel was more precious to me than I realized. After spending several sabbaticals in Israel and increasing the time I spent there with my family, all of us grew attracted by the dream of Zionism and felt less at home in America. One-by-one all our children fulfilled that dream, moving to the Jewish state. Finally, after deferring our dream – mostly by career and family ties – my wife and I joined them. I hoped thereby to bring the compartments of my world together living a single integrated identity in a Jewish democratic state and culture.

Moving to a Changed Israel

When we finally immigrated in 2020, Israel seemed changed. No longer guests, we saw the reality in which we were included as Israelis and understood there was room for improvement.  The honeymoon ended quickly. The people with whom I prayed had moved increasingly toward extremes.

Some were caught up in messianic tendencies that focused on expanding settlements on holy lands and diminishing the democratic elements of Zionism. Others championed a religious parochialism that claimed Judaism  denied and denigrated western civilization and culture. I discovered in Israel that my belief that Judaism and Western cultural values could co-exist was out of step with many of those with whom I worshipped and studied Torah. My world and Judaism began to shrink.

Paradoxically, as an Israeli, my ability to define what Judaism means or demands was no longer private and voluntary, as it was in America. Instead, the state and those who voted for and controlled its government defined what Judaism requires. Many espouse a fundamentalist return to neo-biblical Judaism, tribalism, and conquest of land, while seeking to restore ancient norms and revive cultic Judaism – including rebuilding the Temple.  Driven by religious nationalism and ethnocentrism, and often not supportive of democratic norms, the emerging Jewish identity of Israel has made me feel hostage to others’ version of Jewishness. The Israel of my dreams has faded away and I sought to bring it back

I do not despair. With all its faults, Israel is also my country now, and I would not live anywhere else. But I want to make it closer to what it once hoped to be. Judaism is richer and more multifaceted than some of my fellow Jews make it.  I will not let it be hijacked by those who have transformed it into something narrow but with God’s help, I will work to make my expansive view part of the Jewish and Israeli reality.