Who Is In and Who Is Out in 5787?
By Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove's accounting delivered in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, only a third of American Jews positively identify as Zionists. A similarly large share say they're unsure or don't claim any label at all. Another 15% identify outright as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, rising to 14% anti-Zionist alone among Jews under 35. By these numbers, cited from a JFNA poll, most American Jews do not hold Zionism as central to their Judaism. What do these figures mean, then, for American rabbis’ responsibilities to this population?
On a recent podcast, Rabbi Sharon Brous said, of anti-Zionist Jews, "I don't think the answer is to write them off," arguing that Jewish leaders need to engage with Jews for whom Zionism and Israel aren't part of their Judaism. Her Rosh haShanah sermon asserted that staying at the table with extremists is the only way to make change. Cosgrove’s sermon continued on to suggest that the Jewish tent needs expanding, and that we all need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Reform Rabbi Josh Weinberg, president of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, has written about staying in relationship with people who see the world differently, and cited settler violence among the things he remains vigilant about.
There is no public record of Brous, Cosgrove, or Weinberg convening with individuals or any organization representing the Jews who don't hold a relationship to Israel and Zionism as core to their identity. But two months before this Rosh Hashanah, though, at the Anu Museum in Tel Aviv, these three rabbis, as part of a delegation of a dozen American non-Orthodox rabbis, met a dozen Israeli religious nationalist leaders to "build unity" ahead of Tisha b'Av. Brous closed the convening by leading everyone in Acheinu, "our brothers," a traditional prayer that since October 7th has become the anthem of hostage solidarity and wartime Zionist Jewish unity. Weinberg told the room "we are all religious Zionists." Cosgrove described the evening afterward as free of any real friction: "No one was confrontational." This meeting was featured in the publication eJewishPhilanthropy, and the managing editor who wrote the coverage had helped decide who was on the list for the event.
Two of the Israelis in the room were Rabbanit Yafa Giser and Rabbi Doron Perez. Giser lives in Ofra, the largest unauthorized outpost in the West Bank, built substantially on land registered to Palestinians. Her organization, Yesodot, is headquartered in the settlement of Alon Shevut. It has published a framework it calls the "equitable landlord," holding that Jews own the state, non-Jews are merely tenants for whom Jews should be good landlords. and that the idea of equal standing between all residents is more extreme than telling a minority to leave. This is, ultimately, the hilltop youth's ideology dressed up in a fancy metaphor.
Perez runs World Mizrachi, founded explicitly around support for the settlement enterprise, whose Canadian arm has sent millions to settlement groups, and now also runs the World Zionist Organization, whose Settlement Division has funded and expanded West Bank settlements, including illegal outposts, since 1971, using government money while dodging the oversight that would apply if the government did it directly. The event is described as bringing together two equal sides who don't see eye to eye, but one side runs the institutions maintaining and expanding the occupation. The other side was simply American rabbis who sat, listened, and asked nothing of them. Palestinians, either Israeli citizens or otherwise, were not in the room at all.
In her sermon, Brous cited a Talmudic story against extremism. If we actually read the story, she stands on the very side she denounces. The rabbis of besieged Jerusalem weren't condemned for holding too few listening circles with the zealots. The story's turning point comes when Yohanan Ben Zakkai stopped talking and acted, smuggling himself out and negotiating a new future. The moral is that talk without action is what let the crisis metastasize. These three have given the majority of American Jews plenty of talk. The action went to the settlers.
When the words and the actions point in opposite directions, the words tell you what these three leaders want to be seen believing. The actions tell you who they actually are. One of the primary purposes of the High Holidays is to help us reflect on how we have fallen short of our own values, stated and unstated. My hope is that for these rabbis, this season of teshuvah will help them see how the mismatch between their words and actions have extremely damaging impacts.
Ask who is in the tent this year, and who is out. The architects of the Israeli religious nationalist project in the West Bank were in in July. American Jews who do not identify with Israel have been discussed while being left out of the conversation. May we see, in 5787, the outcomes of teshuvah that these rabbis can still accomplish by aligning their words and their deeds.
