Amitai Fraiman: Islands of Sovereignty

It’s time to rethink how Jewish communities are built, and what they are for.

Editor’s Note: We are delighted to re-launch the Jewish Priorities substack with our first monthly essay, by Rabbi Amitai Fraiman, founding director of the Z3 Project. In it he discusses the unbearable commodification of organized Jewish life, especially for younger people, in which major organizations are encouraged to focus only on experiences they can “offer” to unengaged Jews, rather than investing in those already engaged and instilling a sense of responsibility and ownership among participants and donors. Instead he proposes building “islands of sovereignty,” physical spaces (such as JCCs) in which Jews may see themselves as contributing to the collective project of community, education, and family life.

Since October 7 we have been reeling in the face of antizionism, antisemitism, and our collective failure to prepare ourselves for the battles we now face. But the problem is much deeper than narrative wars. We have given up our collective commitments in an atomized, consumerized world. Fraiman argues that it’s time to rebuild those commitments—in our institutions and in our homes—and lays out a path that will take us there.

—David Hazony

Islands of Sovereignty

Amitai Fraiman

This past Passover, when I ended the Seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem,” I realized that the phrase could no longer mean to me what it once had.

Growing up in Jerusalem, I found it slightly anachronistic. “Next year in Jerusalem” sounded less like national longing than a calendar note. Only after moving to America did its emotional logic, as an expression of distance and return, begin to resonate.

But after thirteen years of Jewish life in the United States, the phrase has come to trouble me for a different reason. I have watched it become routine in some settings, recited because it is what Jews say at the end of the Seder, with little awareness of what it demands. In other settings, I have seen people soften it, skip it, or explain it away, embarrassed by its particularism or unwilling to say aloud what Jewish memory still insists upon.

To say “Next year in Jerusalem” after the return has already begun cannot mean only the preservation of the memory of exile. The return remains incomplete, and the prophetic vision of redemption has not reached its final form. But Jewish sovereignty is no longer only a dream, a prayer, or a deferred hope. It is a fact of Jewish history.

The early Zionists understood that exile was not only a geographic condition. It had created a diasporic consciousness. As early as 1882, Leo Pinsker explained the nature of this consciousness: European Jews, he argued in his book Auto-Emancipation, had preserved themselves as individuals while weakening their national bond as a people. “In the diaspora,” he wrote, “we maintained our individual life, and proved our power of resistance, but we broke the common tie of national consciousness.”

Writing after the First Zionist Congress, Ahad Ha’am sharpened Pinsker’s critique. Political refuge alone, he warned, could not repair the inner habits of exile. True liberation required “the strengthening of our national unity by joint action in every sphere of our national life.”

Pinsker believed that the broken tie of national consciousness could be repaired through political sovereignty. He was right, but only in part. Jews can now shape history in ways his generation could only imagine. Yet, as Ahad Ha’am foresaw, the achievement of statehood has exposed a deeper problem: political sovereignty restores power, but it cannot by itself teach Jews how to live as a sovereign people.

Jewish life is still speaking in categories shaped by exile: distance, dependence, vulnerability, and return. Sovereignty has changed the basic conditions of Jewish existence, but Jewish self-understanding has not caught up. The problem is no longer the absence of Jewish sovereignty. It is that Jews have not yet fully internalized what sovereignty requires.

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That failure manifests itself differently in Israel and North America. In Israel, it is expressed by the struggle to use power without needing to prove strength again and again, to accept the obligations of sovereignty rather than evade them, and to embrace Jewish power and particularity without embarrassment. In North America, it appears in the habits of a Jewish life too often received, supported, visited, or consumed rather than built.

In North America, this failure is intensified by a surrounding culture that reinforces and rewards diasporic consciousness. Consumer culture teaches us to treat nearly every part of life as something to be chosen, purchased, improved, or abandoned. That habit is especially corrosive to Judaism, which depends on obligation, shared responsibility, and communal authorship.

Jewish institutions did not set out to commodify Judaism. They adapted, understandably, to a world in which belonging became voluntary rather than assumed. Institutions professionalized, programs multiplied, fundraising became central, and the work of sustaining the Jewish community increasingly became the work of specialists serving the masses through transactional and one-directional structures.

The results became clear only in retrospect. Jewish life, once held together by obligation and shared responsibility, began to resemble a marketplace. The question shifted from what Jews owe one another to whether Jewish life feels meaningful, accessible, and worth the cost. When the market becomes our rabbi, Judaism becomes a product, judged less by whether it forms a people than by whether it satisfies a consumer.

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This can be seen in two of the most successful models of modern Jewish engagement: Birthright and Chabad. Neither is a failure. The opposite is true. Each begins with something Jewish life genuinely needs. Birthright offers immersion, encounter, and the experience of Jewish public life. Chabad offers warmth, access, religious seriousness, and recognizable Jewish depth. The problem is that under the market conditions of consumerism, even powerful forms of Jewish experience can become substitutes for the harder work of building and sustaining Jewish life.

Birthright Israel offers a revealing example because it seems, at first, to point in the opposite direction. Birthright is one of the great successes of the past two decades. For many participants, it has helped create a lasting attachment to the Jewish state and the Jewish people. It also offers something many North American Jews rarely experience at home: a glimpse of Jewish life as integrated, immersive, and public. In Israel, Jewishness is not only a program or an identity choice. It is language, land, calendar, politics, memory, grief, celebration, and argument. It is public life.

But in today’s consumer culture, even that encounter can become a curated intervention, aimed at the individual, staged elsewhere, and detached from the ordinary communities where Jewish responsibility must be learned and expressed. Birthright gives participants a trip, memories, and often a network of friends, but not a community that holds them accountable. It can make Israel feel immersive, social, and fully alive, while the communities to which the participants return often feel optional, fragmented, and self-directed.

It is not just that Birthright has a follow-up problem. It reveals a deeper issue with the North American Jewish ecosystem. Its success forced us to ask how we might create more powerful Jewish experiences in other settings. But creating experiences is not the same as forming communities. An experience can move a person, awaken memory, and create attachment, while still leaving that person outside the habits and obligations that sustain Jewish life. Birthright’s power lies in showing participants a more integrated Jewish world. Its limitation is that even in its best version, it cannot create that world for participants once they return home.

Chabad represents a more complicated version of the same problem because, at first glance, it does not appear to fit the pattern. In many ways, it seems to solve it. Chabad is warm, accessible, nonjudgmental, and serious in its Jewish presence. I am personally grateful for what Chabad has given me. It has built one of the most effective Jewish outreach movements in modern history by meeting Jews exactly where they are while offering an experience of Judaism that feels serious, recognizable, and alive.

This is also why Chabad works so well in America. It offers what consumer culture most wants but rarely produces: an experience that feels authentic. An encounter with Chabad can provide warmth, access, meaning, and a sense of recognizable Judaism. It is immediate and available, without requiring an individual to help build the world that makes the experience possible.

For Chabad, however, the encounter is understood differently. Chabad is not about service delivery. It is animated by a theological mission. As Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson put it in Likkutei Sichos: “When a Jew arouses… his quintessential Jewish spark, so that it governs his thought, speech and action, this is an act of individual redemption. Through this he… hastens the advent of the all-embracing Redemption, with the coming of Mashiach.”

Chabad pursues this mission through a structure in which the shaliach, or emissary, does not simply host programs or provide Jewish experiences. He seeks to draw the Jew closer to God, the mitzvot, and redemption. For the Jew, the encounter may offer comfort, connection, and Jewish depth. For Chabad, it is part of an eschatological mission: one more mitzvah, one more Jewish spark awakened, one more step toward redemption. The sincerity of both sides does not change the structure of the relationship.

That structure is a limitation. Chabad offers Jews a moving religious experience without asking them to take responsibility for a community they govern or shape. The experience can be meaningful and even transformative, but the Jew enters Chabad’s world rather than a shared community he or she is asked to help build. A Jew may become deeply attached to Chabad, but the relationship remains largely one-directional. Chabad provides a fully formed Jewish world, and the Jew is invited into it.

If the choice is between disaffection and Chabad, Chabad is the more serious answer by far. It gives consumer-age Jewish life theological depth and institutional coherence. But it cannot serve as an aspiration for Jewish life as a whole. The danger is not that Chabad lacks depth. It does not. The danger is that its depth can obscure the passivity built into the relationship. Judaism is not meant to leave Jews as recipients of someone else’s Jewish world. It is meant to form adults: people who understand that their choices carry consequence, that Jewish life makes claims on them, and that they are responsible for building and sustaining the communities that shape them.

This is why the rest of Jewish life cannot simply become Chabad. It is also why reducing Judaism to a purely religious framework is too narrow an approach. Judaism is larger than any one movement’s theological imagination. It is the civic, cultural, textual, political, spiritual, and communal life of a people. No single movement can carry the whole Jewish people, nor should it.

Synagogues, JCCs, federations, schools, camps, and cultural institutions cannot compete with Chabad by becoming better vendors of Jewish experience. They must do something different: formulate a serious account of what they are for and raise Jews who understand themselves to be responsible for the communities that shape them. When Jewish life is reduced to discrete religious moments, excellent programs, meaningful services, or powerful experiences, participation becomes possible without ownership. The institution may remain busy even as the community it was meant to form grows weaker.

If Birthright reveals the limits of experience without accountable community, and Chabad reveals the limits of depth without shared civic ownership, then the answer cannot be better programming or more effective outreach alone. It has to be civic institutions where Jews create Jewish life rather than consume it, make decisions about shared public life, and take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

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The institutions American Jews inherited were not failures. They sustained Jewish life for generations and brought us to this moment. But they were built for a Jewish world in which Jews did not exercise sovereignty anywhere. They must now meet the demands of a world in which Jewish sovereignty is a fact, not by reducing Jewish identity to the State of Israel or denying the legitimacy of diaspora life, but by forming Jews who see themselves as agents and builders where they are.

The answer is neither to reduce North American Jewish life to Israel advocacy nor to sever it from Israel and what Jewish sovereignty now makes possible. North American Jewish life needs what we might call islands of sovereignty: the closest approximation, outside Israel, of a Jewish civic life in which Jews experience themselves not as consumers of identity but as participants in a shared Jewish world. These are concrete Jewish places where Jews learn to take responsibility for one another, inherit obligations they did not invent, and become builders of Jewish life rather than clients of those paid to sustain it.

These islands should not be retreats from the world or substitutes for Israel. They should be places where Jews learn, argue, organize, celebrate, grieve, and make decisions together in person; where Israel, memory, and peoplehood are not special programs, but part of how the community understands itself; and where belonging comes with obligation. Sovereign Jewish life requires a public square because Jews cannot learn shared responsibility from those who already agree with them. Jews must be close enough to disagree, bound together enough to compromise, and committed enough not to retreat into separate corners when Jewish life becomes difficult.

An island of sovereignty is not defined first by institutional form, but by what it asks of those inside it. It is a place where Jewish life makes claims on people: to show up regularly, sustain ritual, care for others, teach children, help clean up after the gathering, and make Israel part of the community’s moral and cultural life. It cannot mean only more committees or more opportunities to express Jewish opinions. Jews do not become sovereign by being consulted. They become sovereign by being responsible.

The strongest candidates for creating such a space are not necessarily the places with the strongest ideology or the most intense programming, but the places broad enough to bring different kinds of Jews into shared responsibility.

The months after October 7 showed that Jews still want to be with other Jews, and they revealed which institutions many Jews trusted with that need. According to JFNA research on Jews newly engaging at a high level, informal and interpersonal connections remained dominant. But when Jews turned to institutions, they turned most strongly to Jewish Community Centers (JCCs). Seventy-seven percent reported engagement through a JCC, compared with 56 percent through Jewish Federations, 24 percent through national Jewish organizations, and only 10 percent through local synagogues or temples.

The data does not mean that JCCs automatically become islands of sovereignty. It means they are one of the few institutions that can effectively do so.

This is why JCCs deserve special attention. After October 7, Jews were looking for something broader than denominational belonging and more concrete than online connection: a Jewish public square. In many communities, JCCs came closest to meeting that need.

At their best, JCCs are not merely program providers. They are civic institutions, places where Jews come together despite the differences that elsewhere divide them. JCCs’ strength is not only that they serve many kinds of Jews, but that they bring those Jews into proximity with one another. Children, parents, grandparents, Israelis, Americans, religious Jews, secular Jews, newcomers, staff, volunteers, donors, and community leaders all move through the same shared Jewish space. That breadth is not incidental. It is what makes the JCC capable of becoming a shared public square rather than another niche institution.

JCCs should not replace synagogues, schools, camps, or federations. They should give the broader community a shared center. Synagogues remain essential for religious life, schools and camps shape the next generation, and federations help organize communal resources. But no single denominational, educational, or philanthropic institution can serve as the civic home of the whole community by itself. Without a shared center, aspects of Jewish life may flourish, but Jews do not become responsible for one another as a community.

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman. Photo: Shir Shelef

However, even the strongest civic institutions cannot bear sovereign responsibility on their own. Jews who do not build Jewish life at home cannot sustain the institutions that islands of sovereignty require, and institutions that make no claims on people cannot generate the Jews who carry those claims into their own lives. The relationship between community and home is mutually reinforcing. Jewish life must be built at both ends.

One of the places where this responsibility is practiced is the Shabbat table. Abraham Joshua Heschel called Shabbat a palace in time, a form of sanctity that, properly inhabited, can hold many dimensions of Jewish life at once: ritual, family, language, learning, hospitality, argument, song, and the welcoming of strangers. A Shabbat table is not one piece of Jewish life among others. It is Jewish life compressed into one location and brought into being by the people sitting at it. The same is true of a holiday meal, a study chavruta, or a parent teaching a child. Jewish life cannot be reduced to transactional or episodic experience. It runs through every scale of Jewish presence, from global peoplehood to the individual, and at every scale it asks to be created rather than consumed.

Islands of sovereignty require more than institutional structure or household practice. The deeper question is covenantal: what does Jewish responsibility now require of us? After October 7, many Jews rediscovered peoplehood through advocacy: rallies, letters, donations, public statements, and political pressure. Those acts are necessary, but reaction to crisis cannot become the substance of Jewish life. A sovereign Jewish consciousness must rebuild the forms of Jewish life that make responsibility habitual before crisis makes it urgent.

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The work of building islands of sovereignty in North America is one expression of a larger Jewish task. The failure to internalize sovereignty is not only a diaspora problem. It is a generational Jewish problem, appearing differently in each center of Jewish life. North American Jewry’s challenge is to create the conditions in which Jews stop outsourcing Jewish life and become agents and builders of a Jewish world they are called upon to sustain. Israel’s challenge is different: to ensure that political sovereignty becomes a disciplined form of Jewish power rather than power alone.

Former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein once recalled a joke his father used to tell: “For two thousand years, Jews prayed for a sovereign state. Did it have to happen in our generation?” The joke lands because it points out the gap between longing for sovereignty and knowing how to live with it. Political sovereignty can be reclaimed in a generation. Sovereign consciousness takes longer.

In Israel, the failure to internalize sovereignty is expressed by the struggle to use power without being ruled by it. Israel lives under threat, and realpolitik remains an essential tool of survival. But survival alone cannot constitute the whole of Jewish life. A people that does not survive cannot exercise its moral voice at all. Yet when Jewish power loses moral discipline, it begins to consume the people it was meant to protect.

The failure to internalize sovereignty appears in different forms across Israeli society. Among some religious Zionists and nationalists, Jewish power can become a way to prove, again and again, that Jews are no longer weak, even though sovereignty should already have made that clear. In some Haredi communities, sovereignty can be refused as though Jews were still living under conditions of exile, perpetuating exilic reflexes inside a sovereign Jewish society. Among some secular and progressive Israelis, Jewish particularity and Jewish power can become sources of discomfort, as though Israel would be better off becoming a normal Western liberal society rather than wrestling with what it means to be both Jewish and democratic.

Jewish life in the diaspora, shaped by minority conditions, can make the opposite mistake. It can confuse Judaism with moral purity, as though a tradition built around law, obligation, action, failure, repair, and teshuva could remain Jewish while avoiding the moral risks that come with acting in history. Judaism is not a religion of pure intention. It is a discipline of commanded action in an imperfect world. A Judaism that refuses to risk applying itself to the real world becomes theoretical. A Judaism that seeks innocence over responsibility ceases to be Judaism at all.

The danger to Israel is power without conscience. The danger to the diaspora is conscience without consequence. Each center reveals what the other is tempted to forget: their relationship cannot remain ornamental. Jewish life cannot be built on power without conscience or on conscience without consequence.

For much of the twentieth century, American Jews and the State of Israel operated within a framework that made sense for its time. The 1950 Blaustein-Ben-Gurion understandings codified a delicate balance: Israel would not undermine the civic security of American Jews by treating them as Israelis-in-waiting, and American Jewish leaders would support Israel without formally claiming authority over Israeli policy. That arrangement was necessary, but over time its limits became clearer. It allowed Israeli sovereignty and diaspora life to coexist without forcing either one to reshape the other. Israel could become a state without requiring American Jewish institutions to rethink the meaning of Jewish power. American Jews could support Israel without asking what sovereignty demanded of their own Jewish life.

But coexistence is no longer enough. If sovereignty is now a fact of Jewish history, then the two centers of Jewish life must become conscious partners in shaping the next era of Jewish life. Ahad Ha’am imagined a Jewish cultural center radiating renewal outward, but Simon Rawidowicz, the twentieth-century Jewish historian and philosopher, offers a better paradigm than that of center and periphery. In his essay “Two That Are One,” Rawidowicz described the Jewish people as “an ellipse with two foci”—the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. But he refused to turn that structure into a hierarchy. “There are not, nor should there be, absolute givers and takers among Jews,” he wrote. Each center of Jewish life carries its own creative responsibility, and no part of the Jewish people can fulfill the obligations of another.

This is why the usual family metaphors are no longer enough. Israel and the diaspora are not siblings, cousins, or spouses negotiating affection, loyalty, and distance. They are chavrutot, bound not by sameness but by the demand that each help the other see more fully. The rabbis put the stakes starkly: o chavruta o mituta, either chavruta or death. Chavruta is not a gentler metaphor than family, but a more demanding one, requiring mutuality, accountability, commitment, and enough trust to expose the other’s temptation without walking away.

Yossi Klein Halevi has put the distinction sharply: Israel gives Jewish life depth, while the diaspora gives it breadth. Israel gives Jewish life the depth of majority existence: land, language, power, consequence, and the density of a full Jewish public square. The diaspora gives Jewish life the breadth of minority existence: translation, encounter, creativity, moral imagination, and the capacity to carry Judaism into the wider human story.

Internalizing sovereignty does not collapse the two centers into one another. It allows each to become more fully itself without mistaking itself for the whole. Israel must learn that power remains Jewish only when it is answerable to conscience. The diaspora must learn that conscience becomes Jewish only when it accepts consequence. Each center holds a truth the other lacks, and each prevents the other from transforming its own condition into an ideology.

Jewish life has never been well served by one Zionist idea alone. Herzl was right that Jews need power. Ahad Ha’am was right that power alone is not enough. Rawidowicz was right that Jewish life cannot be organized around one center. Each saw part of the truth, and each part becomes distorted when it is asked to become the whole. A state can protect Jewish life, but it cannot by itself form a Jewish people. Culture can deepen Jewish life, but without power, it cannot secure it. Two centers can correct one another, but only if each becomes responsible for the form of sovereignty entrusted to it.

The question is no longer whether Jewish sovereignty exists. It does. Nor is the question whether we must secure it. We must. The deeper question is whether we are ready to internalize sovereignty: not by simply longing for return, since the return has already begun, but by building the Jewish life that return now makes possible. If we succeed, the next stage of Jewish life will not simply repeat the old arguments between Israel and the diaspora. It will be shaped by a people capable of letting each center challenge the other, correct the other, and take responsibility for building a Jewish future neither can create alone.

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is founding director of the Z3 Project.

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