Where did we go right?

It’s precisely because we have instilled a strong moral compass and a deep commitment to justice in our children that they are in the streets protesting the Gaza War.

“To young American Jews who turned your backs on our people,” reads the headline of the Times of Israel post publishing Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch’s Yom Kippur sermon, “if you do not feel a special bond with other Jews you are, in Jewish terms, emotionally damaged.” 

In a Yom Kippur sermon making the rounds online, Rabbi Hirsch launches a stinging rebuke of young liberal Jews who have been vocal and active in opposition to the Israeli government’s conduct of the Gaza War. Hirsch centers his sermon on his “worry about our young people” – specifically regretting that “we” – liberal Jewish parents of my generation, I presume? – did not intend that “our emphasis on tikkun olam – social repair – would lead some Jews to join anti-Israel demonstrations.”

We wanted you to be Zionists, he says, lamenting that by protesting Israel’s conduct of the war, young activist Jews are somehow demonstrating what he calls a “detached indifference and vacuous lack of compassion for the murdered, brutalized, sexually assaulted and kidnapped of our own people.”

While I am deeply concerned about increasing antisemitic rhetoric and activity – and its presence in the protest movement – I see things a little differently. 

When I look at young activist Jews protesting the war, I feel pride – not shame – that central to their Judaism is a moral compass grounded in pursuit of justice and an obligation to stand up for the oppressed. 

I happen to have been raised by a father who was about as right-wing a Zionist as they come. One of the first children born in Tel Aviv, my father was a commander in the Beitar – the right-wing youth movement of the pre-state Irgun. He was with Ze’ev Jabotinsky in New York the day in 1940 when he died. He spent time in British prisons. He ran boats smuggling Jews out of Europe and guns into Palestine.

Every Friday night, my secular, heavily nationalistic father would read Jewish teachings and ethics with me such as Pirke Avot, the “Sayings of the Fathers.” It’s from our discussions of these texts that I developed a Jewish identity rooted in the values of our forebears.

One teaching stuck with me, very much at the center of my Judaism: the story from the Talmud of Rabbi Hillel explaining – on one leg – the whole of the Torah: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go study!”

Our Shabbat sessions covered history as well including how hate, oppression and suffering shaped my family’s and my people’s history from expulsion from Spain in 1492 to fleeing pogroms in the 1880s to perishing in the Holocaust.

Both my Jewish learning and my family history informed my reaction to encountering occupation, settlements, racism and oppression when I lived in Israel in the 90s. It was my deeply ingrained Jewish values that drove me to ask how my people, having achieved freedom and then power, could turn around and treat another people the way we ourselves had not wanted to be treated?

Over the past three decades, I have found it eminently possible to balance a commitment to the values on which I was raised with my commitment to Israel as the secure, democratic national home of the Jewish people. 

So when I see young Jews questioning and opposing the behaviors of this government, and the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and the like, I feel pride that we’ve successfully passed these values on. Pride that this new generation is asking those who raised them why the values we instilled don’t seem to apply to the conduct of our own people and of this government of Israel? To the settlement movement that seeks Jewish sovereignty over the whole land and to make a future Palestinian state impossible? To the extremist ministers who now speak of resettling Gaza?

Of course, I am not comfortable with all the rhetoric in the protest movement. I recognize that in every crowd there are those who seek harm to the state of Israel and who harbor antisemitic sentiments. I will stand up to them at every turn. I have zero tolerance for those who make life on campus for Jewish students unsafe or who deny them equal access to all that college has to offer simply on the basis of their religion or their support for Israel.

But I cannot accept asking our young people to choose between the values that lead them to the protests and their engagement in organized American Jewish life. Over a decade ago, Peter Beinart framed this as the “Crisis of Zionism”. If we force young people to choose between support for the state of Israel no matter what it does and their values – they will choose their values, he predicted. In fact, that’s what he did!

That they would do so is not a failure on their part or an embarrassment. It’s actually a failure on the part of those who are making this an either/or choice. 

I believe many, if not most, young Jews protesting Israeli action and policy would gladly develop a positive relationship with an Israel that actually upholds not just the values on which they were raised, but the values on which Israel itself was founded – “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

Rabbi Hirsch and I agree at least on this: the root of the problem we have today stems from failures in the realm of Jewish and Israel education – in synagogues, schools, camps and more.

In fact, the anger many young liberal Jews feel about what’s happening today is often rooted in anger over what they weren’t taught and told – what they never knew – about Palestinians, about occupation, about the other people who have deep historical ties to the exact same land on which the state of Israel was established. 

There is anger that it was never explained why the same events we regard as redemption and cause for celebration, the Palestinian people regard as a catastrophe. We don’t adequately prepare young Jews to grapple with the complexity of history or with the fact that multiple narratives can be true.

The education we need, however, isn’t education aimed at deepening young people’s sense of tribal loyalty – directing their eyes and hearts, as Hirsch puts it, preferentially toward the suffering of our own people. 

We need thorough, thoughtful education that tells the full history of the conflict between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples over the land between the Jordan and Mediterranean – values-based education that provides a framework for applying the ethics and teachings of our people to the complex realities of the 21^st century. 

Helping young Jews to walk through the doorway of a relationship with Israel while holding true to their values – rather than requiring them to check those values at the door – is, to my mind, a far better way to foster a generation of pro-Israel American Jews than telling them we’re ashamed and embarrassed that they care too much about the suffering of another people and not enough about our own.