Fighting for our Vision of Israel

[Based on a conversation with Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience podcast host, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, April 30, 2025]   

The transition in Israel from Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembering the enormous prices paid for the existence of Israel over these years, into the very next day, Yom Ha’azma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, is always fraught with a lot of fragility. This year, we are in the middle of a war that seems relentless and endless, with casualties that are hurting Israeli homes and hearts, and the devastation for Palestinians who are homeless and foodless in Gaza.

Raised in a Religious Zionist Household 

My family in Jerusalem just sent me the WhatsApp videos of their sitting around the festive table. The table is set, as it has been every year of my life, for the holiday of Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and for my birthday. I was born on the eve of Independence Day. I am named Amichai, “My people live,” because I was born only minutes after the siren that separates Memorial Day from Independence Day. There are strawberries on the birthday cake that’s on the table in Jerusalem because my father kept telling my mother: “Don’t give birth during Memorial Day. Keep pushing, keep waiting.” For some reason, he thought that her eating strawberries would extend labor. In the family myth, it did work, and therefore there are strawberries on the cake. The cake is two-tier, one tier for the State of Israel, and one for me.

I am a product of a religious Zionist household that is now in crisis because the religious Zionism I grew up with has been hijacked by fundamentalist, extremist zealots. In the video, they are all celebrating: my mother, at 95 years old, my older brother Benny, a religious Zionist rabbi, and two of his sons, who are on reserve duty and in uniform. Everyone is exhausted from over a year and a half of battle, but they are praising this moment. They sing Hallel, the prayers of praise, with a blessing, because their view of the State of Israel is not about the here and now of the political reality and the terrible situation we’re in. Their eyes are on the prize of a much bigger reality. 

You can say it’s messianic, you can say it’s spiritual. But as children of Holocaust survivors, which my siblings and I are, it is about a dream that at this point, 77 years later, is partially manifested. I don’t want to poo-poo the successes and the positivity, but on many levels, it is also a nightmare. It is especially a nightmare for Palestinians. 

Combating Despair 

And so the words of the Psalm (126:1), Hayinu kekholmim, “We were as dreamers when we returned to Zion,” is on my mind and in my heart tonight. What is the dream we want to dream that will release us from this current rupture and will enable us to co-create a reality where my dream is not somebody else’s nightmare? 

One of the biggest challenges of the moment is despair and dismissal. The dream feels so far away that it is impossible. Part of the work of this moment is to help other people remember what the dream is and redouble efforts to try — in ways we can imagine, and in ways we can’t yet imagine — to keep fighting for that vision. It is the vision of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a vision of an equality of everyone who’s living in the land. It is a vision that is democratically inspired and life-giving. I’m so grateful that the vision exists. I continually orient myself to it. 

The vision of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a vision of an equality of everyone who’s living in the land. It is a vision that is democratically inspired and life-giving.

We might lose — the progressives, the liberals, we who are queer, we who are feminist, we who are humanists, we who believe in the human agency to live out your destiny and not always defer to the collective, which is how our patriarchal legacy has led the day for most of our history. 

We are now witnessing in the United States, in Europe and in Israel, triumphant and triumphalist supremacy as the only alternative that is legitimate and authentic. My flesh-and-blood cousins and people who I know well truly believe that the only way to be Jewish is to be Orthodox. That only men are worthy of being counted in a minyan or of being leaders. That to be gay is a crime against Torah, against God and against humanity. That to be an Arab or a non-Jew is inferior to being a Jew. That the holy land belongs to Jews and Jews only, at any price. 

And that leads to violence such as the violence we saw last night in the Israeli town of Ra’anana, where a bunch of thugs and hoodlums, propelled and organized by the Likud Party, prevented or try to prevent the screening of the Israeli-Palestinian ritual of commemoration held at the synagogue of our dear friend, Rav Chai Tzioni, a Reform rabbi. The level of vitriol that we are witnessing on screens and on the streets is terrifying. After more than two years of protests in the Israeli streets against the judicial reform and the demolition of democracy, and now against this war that serves nothing other than allowing the government to hold onto power at the expense of lives. The shame of it — the disappointment when we see Chabad Hasidim host Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir at their headquarters last year. 

So much of what we hold dear as the kernel and the core of Jewish beauty has been subsumed and is being reclaimed in hateful and horrific ways. So when I say we might lose, I’m looking at history. 

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan 

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, of blessed memory, taught that halakhah, Jewish law, must have a vote but not a veto. We need to evolve. But we are not the majority: not the Reconstructionists and not the Jewish Renewals, and not the flexidoxies, of which I am a part, and not the liberals. The literals are now winning, and the liberals are on the defense.

When you look at Jewish history, this is not new. It’s new to us, but it’s not new to history. We’re holding on to a very particular Jewish voice — a human voice, a humanistic voice — that is proud and loud. Even with all these hateful supremacist, misogynistic voices, we are here. We have work to do because need to remind ourselves that all of us are created in the Divine image, whatever God is, and that every life is sacred, and whether you are queer or whether you are straight, and whether you’re Jewish, Jew-ish, or non-Jewish, you are in the image of the Divine, equally sacred.

The work for that kind of democratic, liberal, progressive Judaism is hard. We are fighting thousands of years of patriarchy, and we’re fighting trauma. What we’re seeing now in the streets of Israel is the result of post-traumatic stress. And the trauma is real, but it does not bring nuance. Trauma brings flight or fight, and a lot of fight. It’s my survival, the supremacists believe, or your survival. 

I grew up gay in an Orthodox Jewish household and realized that I had to fight for my place around the table or leave the table. I had to reject the belief that there is no place for me because God, Jewish law and the rabbis are all homophobes, and therefore, I’m an abomination and I may as well leave. I decided to fight for my place at the table and say that actually, we can expand our sense of empathy and inclusivity and use the oral Torah to talk back to the written Torah, and to redefine what is and is not an “abomination” and understand that the Torah was written by humans with a social political agenda. Nowadays, my dignity does matter.

Kaplan blew my mind in my late teens. The only reason I didn’t get ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi is geography. I attended the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for a whole semester. When I first moved to New York in the late 1990s, I spent a semester at RRC, and I loved it. But I was working in New York, and it wasn’t the right time. But in theory, we’re on the same page.

Israelis thirst for a Jewishness that feels authentic, that is visceral, that is helpful, that is in the perfect sweet spot in which familiar tradition speaks to today.

Fighting for Life, Decency and Dignity 

Many Israelis find Kaplan extremely inspiring. We are witnessing a paradigm shift, certainly for Israel, where the denominations are not helpful. We are in the midst of an evolution where the Jewishness of who we are is evolving and emerging. It’s very true for Israel, I would say, having just come back from six weeks there again, and I’ve been back and forth since Oct. 7. The thirst and the need, especially in the face of supremacist attacks on life and decency and dignity, is for a Jewishness that feels authentic, that is visceral, that is helpful, that is in the perfect sweet spot in which familiar tradition speaks to today.

The Voice for Peace Is Jewishly Authentic 

Part of what’s happening in Israel, which is why I’m so heartbroken but excited about being in this fight, is that people are “worshipping” Adonai Tzeva’ot, the god of wrath that’s in the Bible and that sanctifies this bloodshed. It’s one that some Jews hold onto and pray to. And that gives them strength. My Divine, by contrast, is the Shekhinah, the feminine Divine that is also non-gendered, whose Presence we experience as face to face, panim el panim, in hesed, love and compassion and empathy. In Jewish tradition, these are not incompatible forms of the Divine. Whether it’s the Zohar or the Mishnah, whether it’s Kabbalah or poetry, whether it’s the Torah that is written or the spoken Torah, these different ways of living in the world coexist. They always have. 

And so I think it’s our job to not give up, to know that what we’re bringing is legitimate, authentic, traditional. I am a carrier of tradition. I am the 39th generation of rabbis on my father’s side. I’m probably the first openly queer one. But there’s a relay race here. If we give up on our authentic form of Judaism that embraces humanity and reimagines our legacy, then they’ve won. And if they win, that feels like such a waste of evolutionary energy. To have come back to the land after 2000 years, to restore Hebrew, to create all these phenomenal ways of being in the world and to let the racist supremacists again win. With such a narrow vision and a lack of empathy and of generosity.

We need to be proud and to affirm that what we’re doing is not second best. We are carrying forward authentic Jewishness that goes back to our people’s origins. We are the holders of the humanistic Judaism that is both/and, and that is not either/or. And we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift of proportions we don’t understand yet. Oct. 7 was a slap in the face of Jewish hubris and a terrible trauma that we don’t quite understand yet, and it is a result of the occupation. Period. Nothing justifies the horrific attack of Hamas on innocent civilians and babies and women. Nothing justifies the hostages who are still captive and the ones who have been killed. The terrible cruelty is unjustifiable.

And yet, we understand it in the context of the occupation. I was a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, and I served in the First Intifada. I saw this firsthand, and I refused to be in the reserves after that. And I have friends who are in uniform right now, and friends who have now refused to serve after many months of being in Gaza. At this point, they are refusing because this war is not about bringing back hostages. It’s about keeping Netanyahu and his supremacist government in power.

There is an urgent need to offer a Jewish voice that promotes peace, that believes in dialogue, that sees Palestinians as humans and their children as worthy of life. We need to plant the seeds for reconciliation and truth — where there will be sulkhas, there will be these rituals of forgiveness that both Muslims and Jews and Christians have in our traditional toolkits. We will know how and when to bring out these tools for reconciliation and truth telling. And for now, it’s up to some of us to not give up on the dream.

There is a line in Psalms 92: le-hagid ba-boker hasdekha ve-emunatkha baleilot. In the morning we sing of love, and at night, when it’s dark, we have trust that though we can’t see it, we affirm God’s faithfulness.