The phrase, “two Jews, three opinions” is never more apt than when American Jews talk about the State of Israel.
In the past two decades, what had been uniform support and affection for Israel slowly mutated to a pervasive ambivalence and even, in some corners, outright rejection of Zionism.
The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle over the years has carried a number of news and opinion articles about this phenomenon.
In the issue of June 1, 2001, Jonathan Rosenblum of the Israel office of Am Echad noted, “In American Jewry, there is a rapidly diminishing identification with Israel and a breakdown of the old consensus about what is good for Israel.”
In 2007, sociologists Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman published a study showing that about one half of non-Orthodox U.S. Jews under 35 feel alienated from or even resentful of Israel — a finding that has caused much anguished comment then and since.
This past May 3, the New York Jewish Week printed a column by its editor and publisher Gary Rosenblatt on worrisome reports of how rabbinical students in the liberal movements’ seminaries are increasingly feeling disenchanted by Israel.
There are many opinions as to how we arrived at this lamentable state. More important are two questions:
• How do we go forward to forge a new understanding of, and appreciation for, the State of Israel?
First, we have to acknowledge that Israel of the 21st century differs from the Israel we came to know in the 1960s and 1970s.
In its earliest years, Israel endured food rationing and constant cross-border raids by Arab fedayeen — what today we would call terrorists. In the wake of the Holocaust, we embraced a “Narrative of Crisis” that focused on the real and imminent threats to Israel’s existence.
Thank goodness, times have changed. Israel today has an effective military and an extraordinary economy. Political, economic, and cultural advances have made Israel the envy of many in the Middle East and beyond.
Given these positive changes, the “Narrative of Crisis” is less compelling. Even with continuing threats to its security, Israel is no longer a weak country in need of assistance from world Jewry.
The question arises: Going forward, on what will we base the relationship between American Jews and Israel?
On Tuesday evening, Nov. 1, Rabbi Jacob Herber of Congregation Beth Israel, and I will begin co-teaching a 12-session class called “Engaging Israel: Foundations for a New Relationship.”
With multimedia materials created by the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, including video conversations with some of Israel’s world leading scholars and public intellectuals, we will employ Jewish thought, political theory and international law as we address important questions. They will include:
• What is the necessity and significance of the Jewish national enterprise?
• Why should a Jew who lives outside of Israel care about Israel?
The class is not a history lesson with a particular bias. In fact, our primary focus is not as much on what Israel is today, but how the wisdom of Judaism might inform our conversation of what Israel can be in the future.
This course arises from my and Herber’s participation in the fourth Rabbinic Leadership Initiative, a three-year course of study at the Hartman Institute that began in the summer of 2010.
Along with 25 Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Senior Rabbinic Fellows, we meet in Jerusalem for three weeks in July and one week in January, and study Jewish texts and philosophy. Online classes with teachers in Jerusalem make up the balance of the year.
The Engaging Israel curriculum grew out of our class sessions. Our program of study is predicated on the same premise as the course we will teach in Milwaukee: in the 21st century, we need to recast the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, based on a vocabulary of the shared heritage of Jewish values and traditions.
Rabbi David Cohen is spiritual leader of Congregation Sinai.
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