This article is spot on! The only thing missing is something I just read from Rabbi Stephen Abraham:
We handed a generation tikkun olam without Torah, identity without obligation, social justice without covenant. We taught them to march for every vulnerable people on earth and to feel faintly embarrassed centering their own. Then the world demanded that they explain why Jews have a right to live, why a people returning to the one land it never stopped facing in prayer is not a colonizer, why abduction and rape are not resistance, and too many had no language with which to answer.
Part of the issue is a profound lack of Jewish literacy. That’s the only piece missing. The rest is real, true, golden. So we have the why, now the question is how.
Hey Amitai, really loved the piece. Got me thinking and I have few questions for you.
Historically kehillot could actually bind people because leaving was costly: taxes, courts, real social consequences. But the modern islands you describe are totally voluntary. If you can walk away anytime, is that obligation really obligation, or just a preference dressed up in covenantal language? Can a community with no real consequence actually bind anyone?
And if it can't, doesn't your own logic kind of point to Israel as the only place this fully works, where peoplehood has real stakes, making diaspora life a bridge rather than the destination?
Last one: if the binding really comes from spiritual ascent and tikkun rather than the community structure itself, then isn't the kehillah just scaffolding? What's actually doing the work here, the island or the soul inside it?
There is an idea that I believe originates in the teachings of Rabbi David Hartman that, while Jews in Israel might be the chosen people, Jews in America, and elsewhere for that matter, are the choosing people. That is to say, you are right: anyone can choose to walk away.
Another reader sent me a similar set of questions, and I think it is true that the piece does not fully address the precondition for a covenantal relationship. Indeed, without that precondition, the argument does not really have legs to stand on. A voluntary community can ask a great deal of people, but only if they already understand themselves as bound to something larger than their own preference.
This relates to your last question. In my mind, the community is not simply scaffolding for individual spiritual growth. It is the arena in which we can even begin to imagine what that growth might mean. We are not a collection of aesthetic monks looking for self-improvement by practicing “good behavior” toward others. We are a family of people trying to build a better world together, fulfilling a debt to our ancestors and making a promise to our children. We do this in a covenantal relationship with one another and with our Creator.
Does that mean Israel is the only place where this can fully work? Perhaps. Israel is certainly the place where Jewish peoplehood carries consequences that cannot simply be walked away from. But I am not sure that makes Diaspora life merely a bridge rather than a destination. The fact that Diaspora Jews can leave is precisely what makes choosing Jewish obligation so significant.
Whether one can or should live that covenant most fully in Israel is a question each person must answer for themselves. But I do not think the freedom to walk away makes the choice to stay meaningless. It makes the question of why we stay, and what we are staying for, even more urgent.
Thank you for this piece. It gave me so much to think about.
The idea of Jews becoming consumers of someone else’s expression of Jewishness, rather than active participants in shaping their own covenant, meaning, and experience, was especially illuminating.
And, of course, I share your belief that JCCs are uniquely positioned as communal spaces where the richness and complexity of Jewish life can be lived, explored, and created together.
Hi Amitai, thank you for sharing this. I have two thoughts:
1. Great line: "The danger to Israel is power without conscience. The danger to the diaspora is conscience without consequence."
2. With regards to the last paragraph and specifically the last sentence -- it’s like the successful completion of a long cycle of therapy for a formerly dysfunctional relationship. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, the relationship can be symbiotic. Yes, it can even be -- dare I say? -- therapeutic. Yes, we need all the things you name... and...we need big, detailed, specific examples of how and what those might look like. That is the way to get people on board with the healing and with the conscience and consequence that flows from it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, yet I have minor misgivings about wrapping the experience of Jewish programs with the language of 'markets' and consumerism'. I don't think that language fully captures the root of the tension (at least from the perspective of an American Jew).
I agree with most of the problem as you identify it, "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."
As someone who has taken a focused effort on teshuvah in their 30s to expand my Judaism from a Reform upbringing that was, in hindsight, rich in culture but light on Torah and Hashem, I think a more adequate framing of the problem is 'secular culture' as oppose to consumerism writ large.
By my own interpretation, it was a heavily secularized upbringing that informed my lack of participation in the Jewish community in my 20s, not the consumer culture I was raised in. I would argue that greater education around the obligations, shared responsibilities and communal authorship of Judaism within the 'Islands of Sovereignty' you identify (both explicit and assumed) would be an effective start to a remedy.
One of the elements I envy most about Israel is the availability of all types of Jewish experience (both religious and everyday) that have their roots firmly in a Jewish way of life. This is a loss to the diasporic Jew, who may incorrectly view Judaism as a monolith that they don't have their own place in.
Thank you, Robert, for this thoughtful comment and for sharing your own experience.
I can see your point. At the same time, as you write toward the end, one of the things that makes Israel compelling from this perspective is the ability to experience Jewishness and Jewish life in all sorts of ways, both “religious and everyday.” In other words, secular.
If that is true in Israel, and if that is one of the great advantages of living in a shared Jewish civic setting, then I am not sure secularism itself is the heart of the problem. Part of what I mean by “islands of sovereignty” is the creation of places where Jews live in proximity to Jewish life and to other Jews, sometimes by choice and sometimes simply because they share a communal space. That proximity gives us the opportunity to take ownership of a shared future, rather than experiencing Judaism only as a religious or cultural offering that we may choose to accept or reject.
That is not to say I disagree with you about the need for a shared ethos and the critical role of a deeper sense of obligation and of Torah (this part needs much more expansion). I agree with you that without those things, there is little substance for the community to transmit. But I still think it is davka, specifically, consumerism that sits at the heart of the challenge, because this is not a problem confined to liberal or secular parts of the Jewish community. We can already see it in Orthodox communities as well, when Orthodoxy begins to function less as a covenantal orientation and more as a social, cultural, or socioeconomic category.
Secularization may explain why many Jews were never given access to the depth of Jewish life. Consumerism explains something else: why Jewish life, once encountered, is still treated as a product to be evaluated according to whether it meets our needs. The two are connected, but I do not think they are the same.
I think the secular v. consumer subtlety is real. Arguably in the US, the secular culture pulls or 'magnetizes' towards a broader society that is not based on a Jewish identity in the way Israeli secular society might 'pull' towards a secular society more grounded in a Jewish way of life.
Yet, it is totally reasonable to argue that consumer culture is more uniformly present across both American and Israeli society and Jewish communities in both geographies (regardless of religiosity). If I'm correctly understanding your point in that way, it makes good sense to me.
I agree that the 'solution' (or vision, or direction to move in), is in the creation of these islands of sovereignty. There is no substitute for proximity (in whatever form that may take, but most ideally a physical closeness to a Jewish community). I've thought of it as a kind of call to 'get in the eruv' (not necessarily a literal eruv, it could be a digital space, a club, a community, just some sustaining way to engage with community).
In a sense you can argue that islands of sovereignty are the tool to subvert the threat of consumerized Judaism by collapsing transactive Judaism (annual camps, classes, 'big transaction' Judaism), into a million little moments, lived day by day, that one would never dream of turning into a transaction (helping a neighbor clean their lawn, bringing soup to someone sick on the street).
Amitai, I don't understand. Why is there no mention of the one group in Judaism who are dong this extraordinarily well - the Yeshivos! Rather than being lauded for their success, they are subject daily to public pilloring and vilification.
Interesting piece. Regarding JCCs, it is true that they can be their own Jewish ecosystem, and include Jews of all backgrounds and levels of observance. But large portions of JCC membership are non-Jewish, and the professional staff, even the CEO, are often non-Jewish. How does this affect our thinking about the role JCCs play in Jewish life?
Your theoretical lens determines who gets counted as normative and who becomes invisible.
The intellectual genealogy running through this essay - Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rawidowicz, Heschel - is entirely Ashkenazi Eastern European. The exile consciousness you describe, the broken national bond, sovereignty as repair: these emerged from a specific encounter with emancipation, nationalism, and Christian Europe’s rejection. That is a Jewish experience. It is not the Jewish experience.
What is striking is not simply what the framework explains, but what it excludes. Entire Sephardi and Mizrahi histories disappear from view. Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, Bombay, Rangoon, and Singapore are not peripheral cases; they are part of the Jewish story.
Yet their experience is largely unintelligible within a model built around the crises of Eastern Europe.
The analysis would be stronger, and its claims more defensible, if the full range of Jewish historical experience served as evidence rather than the Ashkenazi European case functioning as the implicit universal.
"places where Jews learn to take responsibility for one another, inherit obligations they did not invent, and become builders of Jewish life"
The one real place where Diaspora Jews learn about mutual responsibility, obligation and become builders of Jewish life is by supporting our brothers and sisters in Israel.
Take that out and everything else in this essay could easily be done by committed members of T'ruah or JVP.
The frivolity I've seen in some JCC programs may build a sense of community but hardly matches the seriousness of our time, when the only vibrant and flourishing Jewish community in the world is the one in Israel. Jews without the personal courage to support it cannot build a Jewish life elsewhere.
This is what mutual responsibility and obligation looked like in the 16th century; it still looks exactly the same today:
This article is spot on! The only thing missing is something I just read from Rabbi Stephen Abraham:
We handed a generation tikkun olam without Torah, identity without obligation, social justice without covenant. We taught them to march for every vulnerable people on earth and to feel faintly embarrassed centering their own. Then the world demanded that they explain why Jews have a right to live, why a people returning to the one land it never stopped facing in prayer is not a colonizer, why abduction and rape are not resistance, and too many had no language with which to answer.
Part of the issue is a profound lack of Jewish literacy. That’s the only piece missing. The rest is real, true, golden. So we have the why, now the question is how.
100% so much to say about how we organize around the fear of losing the next generation.
Hey Amitai, really loved the piece. Got me thinking and I have few questions for you.
Historically kehillot could actually bind people because leaving was costly: taxes, courts, real social consequences. But the modern islands you describe are totally voluntary. If you can walk away anytime, is that obligation really obligation, or just a preference dressed up in covenantal language? Can a community with no real consequence actually bind anyone?
And if it can't, doesn't your own logic kind of point to Israel as the only place this fully works, where peoplehood has real stakes, making diaspora life a bridge rather than the destination?
Last one: if the binding really comes from spiritual ascent and tikkun rather than the community structure itself, then isn't the kehillah just scaffolding? What's actually doing the work here, the island or the soul inside it?
Thanks for reading and for these great questions.
There is an idea that I believe originates in the teachings of Rabbi David Hartman that, while Jews in Israel might be the chosen people, Jews in America, and elsewhere for that matter, are the choosing people. That is to say, you are right: anyone can choose to walk away.
Another reader sent me a similar set of questions, and I think it is true that the piece does not fully address the precondition for a covenantal relationship. Indeed, without that precondition, the argument does not really have legs to stand on. A voluntary community can ask a great deal of people, but only if they already understand themselves as bound to something larger than their own preference.
This relates to your last question. In my mind, the community is not simply scaffolding for individual spiritual growth. It is the arena in which we can even begin to imagine what that growth might mean. We are not a collection of aesthetic monks looking for self-improvement by practicing “good behavior” toward others. We are a family of people trying to build a better world together, fulfilling a debt to our ancestors and making a promise to our children. We do this in a covenantal relationship with one another and with our Creator.
Does that mean Israel is the only place where this can fully work? Perhaps. Israel is certainly the place where Jewish peoplehood carries consequences that cannot simply be walked away from. But I am not sure that makes Diaspora life merely a bridge rather than a destination. The fact that Diaspora Jews can leave is precisely what makes choosing Jewish obligation so significant.
Whether one can or should live that covenant most fully in Israel is a question each person must answer for themselves. But I do not think the freedom to walk away makes the choice to stay meaningless. It makes the question of why we stay, and what we are staying for, even more urgent.
Thank you for this piece. It gave me so much to think about.
The idea of Jews becoming consumers of someone else’s expression of Jewishness, rather than active participants in shaping their own covenant, meaning, and experience, was especially illuminating.
And, of course, I share your belief that JCCs are uniquely positioned as communal spaces where the richness and complexity of Jewish life can be lived, explored, and created together.
Hi Amitai, thank you for sharing this. I have two thoughts:
1. Great line: "The danger to Israel is power without conscience. The danger to the diaspora is conscience without consequence."
2. With regards to the last paragraph and specifically the last sentence -- it’s like the successful completion of a long cycle of therapy for a formerly dysfunctional relationship. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, the relationship can be symbiotic. Yes, it can even be -- dare I say? -- therapeutic. Yes, we need all the things you name... and...we need big, detailed, specific examples of how and what those might look like. That is the way to get people on board with the healing and with the conscience and consequence that flows from it.
Amitai,
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, yet I have minor misgivings about wrapping the experience of Jewish programs with the language of 'markets' and consumerism'. I don't think that language fully captures the root of the tension (at least from the perspective of an American Jew).
I agree with most of the problem as you identify it, "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."
As someone who has taken a focused effort on teshuvah in their 30s to expand my Judaism from a Reform upbringing that was, in hindsight, rich in culture but light on Torah and Hashem, I think a more adequate framing of the problem is 'secular culture' as oppose to consumerism writ large.
By my own interpretation, it was a heavily secularized upbringing that informed my lack of participation in the Jewish community in my 20s, not the consumer culture I was raised in. I would argue that greater education around the obligations, shared responsibilities and communal authorship of Judaism within the 'Islands of Sovereignty' you identify (both explicit and assumed) would be an effective start to a remedy.
One of the elements I envy most about Israel is the availability of all types of Jewish experience (both religious and everyday) that have their roots firmly in a Jewish way of life. This is a loss to the diasporic Jew, who may incorrectly view Judaism as a monolith that they don't have their own place in.
Thank you, Robert, for this thoughtful comment and for sharing your own experience.
I can see your point. At the same time, as you write toward the end, one of the things that makes Israel compelling from this perspective is the ability to experience Jewishness and Jewish life in all sorts of ways, both “religious and everyday.” In other words, secular.
If that is true in Israel, and if that is one of the great advantages of living in a shared Jewish civic setting, then I am not sure secularism itself is the heart of the problem. Part of what I mean by “islands of sovereignty” is the creation of places where Jews live in proximity to Jewish life and to other Jews, sometimes by choice and sometimes simply because they share a communal space. That proximity gives us the opportunity to take ownership of a shared future, rather than experiencing Judaism only as a religious or cultural offering that we may choose to accept or reject.
That is not to say I disagree with you about the need for a shared ethos and the critical role of a deeper sense of obligation and of Torah (this part needs much more expansion). I agree with you that without those things, there is little substance for the community to transmit. But I still think it is davka, specifically, consumerism that sits at the heart of the challenge, because this is not a problem confined to liberal or secular parts of the Jewish community. We can already see it in Orthodox communities as well, when Orthodoxy begins to function less as a covenantal orientation and more as a social, cultural, or socioeconomic category.
Secularization may explain why many Jews were never given access to the depth of Jewish life. Consumerism explains something else: why Jewish life, once encountered, is still treated as a product to be evaluated according to whether it meets our needs. The two are connected, but I do not think they are the same.
Thank you for the reply and your clarification.
I think the secular v. consumer subtlety is real. Arguably in the US, the secular culture pulls or 'magnetizes' towards a broader society that is not based on a Jewish identity in the way Israeli secular society might 'pull' towards a secular society more grounded in a Jewish way of life.
Yet, it is totally reasonable to argue that consumer culture is more uniformly present across both American and Israeli society and Jewish communities in both geographies (regardless of religiosity). If I'm correctly understanding your point in that way, it makes good sense to me.
I agree that the 'solution' (or vision, or direction to move in), is in the creation of these islands of sovereignty. There is no substitute for proximity (in whatever form that may take, but most ideally a physical closeness to a Jewish community). I've thought of it as a kind of call to 'get in the eruv' (not necessarily a literal eruv, it could be a digital space, a club, a community, just some sustaining way to engage with community).
In a sense you can argue that islands of sovereignty are the tool to subvert the threat of consumerized Judaism by collapsing transactive Judaism (annual camps, classes, 'big transaction' Judaism), into a million little moments, lived day by day, that one would never dream of turning into a transaction (helping a neighbor clean their lawn, bringing soup to someone sick on the street).
Thank you again for your hard work on this piece!
Great piece Amitai!! And, spot on! “it’s time to rebuild those commitments—in our institutions and in our homes” - David Hazony.
Amitai, I don't understand. Why is there no mention of the one group in Judaism who are dong this extraordinarily well - the Yeshivos! Rather than being lauded for their success, they are subject daily to public pilloring and vilification.
Sorry Amitai, but as a friend and admirer I have to be frank. A new term has been coined pertaining to what you and HaZony are doing. Find it here: https://davidchinitz.substack.com/p/zionism-out-aliyah-in?r=2mop22&utm_medium=ios
Interesting piece. Regarding JCCs, it is true that they can be their own Jewish ecosystem, and include Jews of all backgrounds and levels of observance. But large portions of JCC membership are non-Jewish, and the professional staff, even the CEO, are often non-Jewish. How does this affect our thinking about the role JCCs play in Jewish life?
Your theoretical lens determines who gets counted as normative and who becomes invisible.
The intellectual genealogy running through this essay - Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, Rawidowicz, Heschel - is entirely Ashkenazi Eastern European. The exile consciousness you describe, the broken national bond, sovereignty as repair: these emerged from a specific encounter with emancipation, nationalism, and Christian Europe’s rejection. That is a Jewish experience. It is not the Jewish experience.
What is striking is not simply what the framework explains, but what it excludes. Entire Sephardi and Mizrahi histories disappear from view. Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, Bombay, Rangoon, and Singapore are not peripheral cases; they are part of the Jewish story.
Yet their experience is largely unintelligible within a model built around the crises of Eastern Europe.
The analysis would be stronger, and its claims more defensible, if the full range of Jewish historical experience served as evidence rather than the Ashkenazi European case functioning as the implicit universal.
"places where Jews learn to take responsibility for one another, inherit obligations they did not invent, and become builders of Jewish life"
The one real place where Diaspora Jews learn about mutual responsibility, obligation and become builders of Jewish life is by supporting our brothers and sisters in Israel.
Take that out and everything else in this essay could easily be done by committed members of T'ruah or JVP.
The frivolity I've seen in some JCC programs may build a sense of community but hardly matches the seriousness of our time, when the only vibrant and flourishing Jewish community in the world is the one in Israel. Jews without the personal courage to support it cannot build a Jewish life elsewhere.
This is what mutual responsibility and obligation looked like in the 16th century; it still looks exactly the same today:
https://melissabrodsky.substack.com/p/she-had-two-names