An Open Letter to Jews Embarrassed by Judaism and Israel

Jewish pride is not arrogance, Zionism is not shameful, and belonging to your own people does not require an apology.

photo: Salvatore Favata/Unsplash

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I understand you better than you might think.

I used to be one of you.

I was Jewish because I had been born Jewish, not because I had chosen it. Judaism was somewhere in the background of my life: a handful of holidays, family traditions, familiar foods, perhaps a vague sense of historical persecution. It was an identity I inherited, but not one I had examined closely enough to appreciate.

Israel felt distant too. It was a country I knew I was somehow expected to care about, but I did not fully understand why. I had absorbed the idea that Judaism was mostly a religion, Israel was mostly a political controversy, and Jewish identity was something that could be acknowledged without demanding very much of me.

I did not hate Judaism. I simply did not know it. And because I did not know it, I could not love it. That distinction matters.

Many Jews who feel indifferent toward Judaism have never seriously encountered Judaism. They have encountered a diluted version of it: Hebrew words they could not understand, rituals no one explained, services that felt repetitive, rules that appeared arbitrary, and a history presented largely as a catalogue of people trying to kill us.

They were told what Jews suffered, but not what Jews built. They were taught how Jews died, but not how Jews lived. They learned about antisemitism before they learned about Jewish civilization. They were taught to remember the Holocaust before they understood what was nearly destroyed.

It is difficult to love something when no one has shown you what is lovable about it. So this is not a letter of accusation. It is an invitation.

Before you decide that Judaism has nothing meaningful to offer you, learn what it is. Before you conclude that Israel has no place in your identity, understand what Israel means in Jewish history. Before you walk away from the Jewish story, make sure you have actually read it. Because Judaism is not merely an old religion practiced by a stubborn minority. It is one of the foundational civilizations of the human story.

You do not have to be religious to recognize the revolutionary power of Judaism. The Jewish contribution to civilization did not begin with famous Jewish scientists, doctors, writers, entrepreneurs, or Nobel Prize winners. It began thousands of years earlier, with ideas so deeply embedded in modern life that we often no longer recognize where they came from.

Judaism introduced a radically different understanding of human beings and their place in the world. In an age of emperors, tribal gods, and human sacrifice, the Torah (which literally means “instruction,” “teaching,” or “guidance”) declared that every human being was created in the image of God. Not merely the king. Not merely the priest. Not merely the warrior or the wealthy man. Every person.

That idea changed the moral architecture of civilization. If human beings possess inherent dignity, then power cannot be the only source of value. The strong do not have an unlimited right to dominate the weak. The stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor are not disposable. The ruler himself is subject to a law beyond his own desires.

Judaism insisted that might does not make right. That may sound obvious today, but it was not obvious in the ancient world, and it is still not obvious in much of the modern one.

Judaism gave humanity the concept of a weekly day of rest — not merely for elites, but for workers, servants, strangers and even animals. Shabbat was a declaration that people are not machines and life is not measured only by production. For one day each week, the laborer and the master stepped away from the economic hierarchy and remembered that human beings were created to live, not merely to work. Long before anyone spoke about work-life balance, Judaism built it into the structure of time.

Judaism transformed history from an endless cycle into a journey with moral purpose. It taught that the world is unfinished and that human beings have a responsibility to improve it. It rejected the fatalistic idea that injustice is simply the natural order of things. The prophets stood before kings and told them they were wrong. Nathan confronted David. Elijah confronted Ahab. Isaiah condemned corruption. Amos denounced those who grew rich while crushing the poor.

In Judaism, the most powerful man in the country could still be judged by a higher standard. This was a civilization in which moral courage meant speaking truth not only to one’s enemies, but to one’s own people.

Judaism made argument sacred. The Jewish tradition did not demand that every question be suppressed. It preserved disagreements. Rabbis debated one another across generations, and minority opinions were recorded even when they did not become law.

The Talmud is not a book of simple answers. It is a civilization thinking out loud. Judaism taught that intellectual struggle could itself be holy—that wrestling with God, morality, law and meaning was not evidence of disloyalty, but part of the Jewish vocation. The very name Israel comes from struggle. We are the people who wrestle.

Judaism elevated education into a communal obligation. Learning was not reserved for a small philosophical elite. Parents were expected to teach their children. Communities were expected to sustain schools. Literacy became central to Jewish survival because Judaism could not be inherited only through blood; it had to be studied, interpreted and renewed.

Our most sacred object is not a crown, a sword, or a monument. It is a book. Judaism gave the world a moral language that later flowed through Christianity and Islam and became inseparable from Western and global civilization: creation, covenant, law, human dignity, justice, repentance, forgiveness, responsibility, liberation, the sanctity of life, and the hope of redemption.

This does not mean Judaism was the only civilization to produce wisdom, morality, or compassion. It was not. No serious person needs to erase the achievements of other cultures in order to honor the Jewish contribution. But the opposite is also true: No serious account of the modern world can erase Judaism.

The world still lives inside ideas that Jews carried through exile, persecution, and dispersion for thousands of years.

Judaism is more than what it gave others. Yet even this argument can become a trap. We should not value Judaism only because of what it gave the world. Judaism is not important merely because Christianity borrowed from it, Western civilization absorbed parts of it, or modern activists use fragments of its moral vocabulary. Judaism does not need external validation to justify its existence.

It is ours.

It gave us a way to make time sacred. It gave us rituals for birth, maturity, marriage, grief, and death. It gave us a language for gratitude and a structure for community. It taught us to bless food before consuming it, to pause before acting, to remember before celebrating, and to take responsibility after failing.

It gave us Shabbat tables, wedding canopies, mourning prayers, melodies, stories, laws, arguments, jokes, and memories. It gave us a calendar that follows us wherever we go. It gave us the audacity to remain a people when history insisted that we disappear.

Judaism survived the destruction of kingdoms, the burning of its Temple, Roman exile, forced conversions, massacres, expulsions, ghettos, pogroms, and genocide. Empires that once ruled the known world vanished. The Jews remained — not because survival was easy, but because Jewish life was meaningful enough to preserve.

Generations of Jews carried books across borders. They whispered prayers under persecution. They taught children languages that hostile governments tried to ban. They rebuilt communities after being expelled from one country after another. They did not endure all of that so we could feel guilty. They endured because they believed they possessed something beautiful.

We often tell the Jewish story as though our ancestors were motivated only by fear: fear of assimilation, fear of enemies, fear of punishment, or fear of abandoning tradition. But fear alone cannot sustain a civilization for thousands of years.

There was also love. Love of Torah. Love of family. Love of learning. Love of Shabbat. Love of Jerusalem. Love of the Jewish people. Love of a future they would never personally see.

You are the future they believed in.

photo: Sander Crombach/Unsplash

And then there is Israel. For many Jews, Judaism feels culturally acceptable until Israel enters the conversation. You can celebrate Hanukkah, quote Jewish comedians, enjoy bagels, and talk about Jewish trauma without causing much controversy. But say that you love Israel, and suddenly you are expected to defend every policy, every politician, and every action taken by a country of millions of people.

No other national identity is treated this way.

A person can love America without endorsing every American war. A person can love France without agreeing with every French president. A person can feel attached to India, Mexico, Armenia, Ireland, or Japan without first submitting a complete moral defense of its government. But Jewish love for Israel is often treated as presumptively suspicious.

Do not accept that standard. Israel is not merely a government. It is not a political party. It is not a prime minister, a coalition, or a collection of policies. Israel is the restored national home of the Jewish people in the land where Jewish civilization was born.

Jerusalem was the Jewish capital centuries before Christianity or Islam existed. Hebrew was the language of Jewish scripture, prayer, and national memory long before it became the daily language of a modern state. Jews prayed toward Jerusalem from every corner of exile. At weddings, we remembered Jerusalem. At Passover, we ended with the hope of returning to Jerusalem. During mourning, celebration, and prayer, the land of Israel remained present.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish connection to Israel. Zionism turned an ancient connection into a modern political movement. Israel is what happened when Jews decided that perpetual helplessness was not a moral obligation.

For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers who could tolerate them one year and expel them the next. Jewish security depended on the goodwill of governments, churches, monarchs, and neighbors. Sometimes that goodwill lasted for generations. Sometimes it disappeared overnight. The Holocaust did not create the Jewish need for sovereignty. It demonstrated the catastrophic cost of statelessness.

Israel gave Jews somewhere to go. It absorbed Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim countries, Ethiopian Jews, Soviet Jews, and communities facing persecution around the world. It revived Hebrew, built universities, created cities, developed agriculture, advanced medicine, and technology, and formed a democratic society in one of the most hostile regions on earth.

It is imperfect because it is real. Imaginary countries never make mistakes. Real countries do.

Loving Israel does not require shutting down your conscience. Israel itself is filled with disagreement. Israelis argue about war, peace, religion, courts, settlements, borders, budgets, and leadership with extraordinary intensity. Disagreement is not betrayal, but there is a difference between criticizing Israel because you care about what it becomes and treating Israel’s very existence as a moral stain.

There is a difference between disagreeing a government and opposing Jewish sovereignty. There is a difference between demanding that Israel improve and demanding that it disappear. A Jewish state should not be required to achieve perfection in order to deserve survival. No other state meets that standard.

You may not hate Israel. You may fear loving it. Some Jews distance themselves from Israel not because they have studied it carefully and reached a reasoned conclusion, but because loving Israel has become socially expensive.

Perhaps your friends disapprove. Perhaps your political community treats Zionism as a form of racism. Perhaps you worry that defending Israel will make you appear insensitive, tribal or reactionary.

So you qualify every sentence. You begin every statement about Jewish suffering with an apology. You condemn Israel before anyone has even asked what you believe. You present your Jewish identity in the least threatening form possible. You want to prove that you are one of the “good Jews.” I understand the temptation.

But a Jewish identity built around seeking permission from non-Jews will eventually become an identity defined by what other people are willing to tolerate. That is not liberation. Compassion that demands Jewish self-erasure is not compassion. Universalism that asks every group to preserve its identity except the Jews is not universalism. Justice that recognizes every people’s historical trauma except ours is not justice.

You are allowed to care about Jews without apologizing for it. You are allowed to love Israel without presenting a legal brief. You are allowed to belong to your own people.

Perhaps you still feel little connection to Judaism or Israel. That feeling is real, but it does not have to be final. Do not begin with obligation. Begin with curiosity.

Read Jewish history — not merely the history of antisemitism, but the history of Jewish ideas, kingdoms, communities, creativity and renewal.

Study the Torah as literature, law, philosophy, and national memory. Read the arguments of the rabbis. Learn why Jews pray toward Jerusalem. Understand what Shabbat was designed to do. Explore the diversity of Jewish communities from Morocco to Poland, Iraq to Ethiopia, Yemen to Spain.

Visit Israel — not as a political tour, but as an encounter with Jewish civilization alive in its own language and land.

Walk through Jerusalem and realize that the street signs are written in the language of the Bible. Sit in a café surrounded by Jews from families scattered across continents. Hear ancient prayers spoken in a modern country. Watch Jews argue with one another loudly, passionately, and freely.

You may discover that Israel is not the simplistic symbol you were taught to either worship or condemn. It is a living society. You may also discover that Judaism is not a burden from the past. It is a framework for the future.

I used to think Jewish identity was something I had received accidentally. Now I understand it as an inheritance of almost unimaginable depth. An inheritance does not become meaningful merely because it is old. It becomes meaningful when we open it, study it, use it and add something of our own.

You do not have to believe exactly what your grandparents believed. You do not have to practice Judaism exactly as they did. You do not have to agree with every rabbi, every Israeli, or every Jew — but you should know what you are rejecting before you reject it. You should know what your ancestors protected before you decide it has no value. You should know what Israel restored before you treat it as disposable.

I once stood outside that story. Then I learned enough to step inside. The door is still open.

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