There is an entire generation of people born Jewish who also lack that understanding of Jewish people hood. It’s quite sad. It’s a terrible failure of the parents and perhaps parents of parents. Many of these people are antizionists, and it would not surprise me if they are the last in their family to call themselves Jewish.
Joel, the point you make about an entire generation, or two generations (on the basis a generation is 25 years), there must be many Jews that don’t grasp ‘Jewish people hood’ & not supportive of Israel. By pure numbers, this disappointing group is mainly in the USA, although also present in Europe and elsewhere. With 16 million Jews in the world, 7 million in Israel, 7 million in the USA, and the remaining 2 million elsewhere, the USA contains the bulk of this group. In that smaller non USA diaspora, the majority if not most, are all closer to the perils of the Holocaust.
The path to Jewish citizenship in 18th-century Europe was defined by a single, sharp condition, captured in Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre's 1789 declaration to the French National Assembly: "To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything." Citizenship was on offer, but only at a price — the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood.
The idea of Judaism as "merely a religion" was itself a European invention of this period. Jews had long understood themselves as a nation: a people with their own laws, communal institutions, and collective identity, not simply a group of individuals who shared certain beliefs. But the emerging nation-states of the Enlightenment had no place for a people within a people. To become a citizen, a Jew had to relinquish that national identity and re-emerge as something the state could recognize: an individual who happened to practice a private religion called Judaism.
In other words, emancipation was conditional on self-erasure. One could not enter the ruler's world as a Jew belonging to the Jewish people — only as an individual adherent of a faith, stripped of the communal and national character that had defined Jewish life for centuries.
The American Echo
Some observers argue that a version of this bargain persists in the United States today — but with a distinctive twist: it is often internalized and voiced by Jews themselves, not just imposed from outside. In a civic culture shaped by the separation of church and state and a general discomfort with ethnic or national loyalties that might complicate national belonging, many American Jews have found it safer, and more comfortable, to describe their Jewishness as a religion — something practiced privately, on weekends, at synagogue — rather than as membership in a people with a shared history, land, and collective fate tied to Jews elsewhere in the world.
On this view, when American Jews say "I'm Jewish, but that's just my religion, I'm not part of some nation," they are echoing Clermont-Tonnerre's formula from the inside. It becomes a kind of pre-emptive reassurance, offered to a surrounding society that has made clear the terms of full acceptance: individuals, yes; a people, more warily. The framing lets Jewish identity fit neatly into the American model of religious pluralism — one faith among many — while sidestepping the more difficult, and more historically accurate, claim to peoplehood.
I'm among those who say that I'm Jewish but not because of my religion. Since that particular religion didn't speak to me, I converted decades ago. But then I found out I'm Jewish because of my heartfelt connection to Israel and the Jewish people.
I am Jewish by birth and I went to Hebrew School for four years. My mother was an observant conservative Jew, but she was ritualistic rather than spiritual. She took my sister and I to shul each week. After a series of religious (mystical) experiences in my late twenties, I converted to Catholicism. I've been a practicing Catholic for decades, but I 've never given up identifying with Israel or the Jewish people.
This is precisely what is lacking in many Conservative and Reform communities. Judaism is reduced to a non-spiritual, sterile kind of religion where children are merely taught a few holiday basics and Hebrew songs.
Judaism, as practiced by what I dislike calling "Orthodox" Jews—though I must for lack of a better word—is a deeply spiritual experience. It starts with Ahavat Hashem, the love of God, and expands in so many beautiful directions. However meaningful other religions may be for non-Jews, for Jews they are only a faint reflection of what God offered us. Meditation, mysticism, philosophy, and so much more are daily components of Jewish life. Great rabbis have taught, and continue to teach, ways of reaching spiritual experiences that blow our minds and touch our souls.
I was raised in a Catholic village in the Netherlands. All my friends were Catholic, and the chaplain lived across the street—he even came to synagogue with us once or twice. He and my father enjoyed discussing religion over a good glass of Schnapps, yet this chaplain couldn't answer my father's questions about the New Testament. Much of Christian theology stems from Paul, and many of the parables attributed to Jesus originated directly from generations of Jews who came before him. The New Testament took texts from the Tanakh and altered the original wording, skipping or adding words that were never there.
As a European Jew, I am shocked whenever a Jew converts to Catholicism—even acknowledging that many righteous Catholics saved Jews during the Holocaust. So many of our ancestors paid with their lives when forced by the Inquisition to convert and refusing to do so. Others had to flee their homes, while those forced to convert maintained their Jewish faith in secret.
The Spanish and Portuguese Jews have a beautiful grace after meals born out of this history: Bendigamos al Altísimo. While often believed to have been sung in secret to hide from neighbors, it actually emerged when former forced converts escaped the Iberian Peninsula to freedom. Cut off from Hebrew for generations, they composed this Spanish hymn to reconnect with their faith in the language they knew best. As a resilient people, we managed to transform a painful history of exile into something deeply beautiful.
It is never too late to return to your Jewish roots.
As a Thomist, the Christian theology that I follow comes from Aquinas, on whom I wrote my dissertation. I won't go into the nature of my religious experiences. My philosophical needs are satisfied, having taught philosophy for 35 years. I don't choose a religion simply because I have roots in it. The religion I chose, after investigating every major world religion except Islam, satisfies my spiritual longings. Thank you for the invitation.
Jews have always been a people small in number, which has made them vulnerable. At the same time this is an enormous strength because it enables the sense of peoplehood, of being a family. And I wonder if this is not something that irks some people, including those Jews who feel somewhat alienated from their Jewishness, possibly even leading to jealousy.
In general I think non-Jews find it hard to understand who the Jews are, Judaism being unique as both a religion and a people, yet encompassing those who have no religious belief and/or observance. Perhaps this is one reason why conspiracy theories about Jews proliferate.
You remind me of watching the NBC news in the nineties with a man in the radio/music industry....someone whose name you might even recognize, a close friend, a Gentile, who always felt close to his many Jewish friends. The scene was the Temple Mount...the video was of the IDF shooting rubber bullets at the Muslims....NO CONTEXT....which we hear so much about....they'd been pelting worshippers at the Western Wall.....My friend turns to me....re the Israelis, "I don't like them very much," I told him the CONTEXT...."oh, I didn't know." Well that sums it up......I didn't know.
The Jewish people were exiled from their land nearly 2,000 years ago, while the Jewish prophetic tradition repeatedly speaks of the eventual return of Israel to its land. Whatever one's religious interpretation of modern Zionism may be, that return is happening before our eyes.
The people of Israel did not suddenly come into existence in 1948. Our origins go back more than 3,000 years. According to the biblical tradition, the twelve tribes of Israel descended from Jacob — whose name was changed to Israel — and his family. From there developed the people known throughout Jewish history as Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel, and Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.
I myself am a Kohen, part of the Jewish priestly tradition that traces its paternal ancestry to Aaron of the tribe of Levi. My DNA also shows a paternal lineage consistent with lineages found among some Jewish priestly families. But that is actually beside the point: DNA is not what makes someone Jewish.
Judaism has never been simply a race. A person can become fully Jewish through conversion and thereafter belongs to the Jewish people. Ruth is perhaps the most famous biblical example: she was born a Moabite, joined the people of Israel, and became the great-grandmother of King David.
In modern terminology, you could compare conversion — imperfectly, of course — to naturalization. Someone who becomes an American citizen does not need ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower in order to be an American. In the same way, a convert does not become a "second-class Jew." He or she joins the Jewish people.
This is why Jews have called themselves Am Yisrael — the People of Israel — for thousands of years, long before the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
There is, however, a fascinating internal Jewish debate about whether Jews were permitted to re-establish political sovereignty before the coming of the Messiah.
Some very Orthodox communities, most famously Satmar, oppose Zionism on theological grounds. Their position is based largely on a passage in the Talmud, Ketubot 111a, traditionally known as the Three Oaths.
The passage describes three oaths:
Israel should not "ascend as a wall." The Satmar Rebbe understood this as prohibiting a mass, forceful return to the Land of Israel for the purpose of establishing Jewish sovereignty.
Israel should not rebel against the nations among whom the Jewish people live.
The nations should not oppress Israel excessively.
That third oath is important and is sometimes conveniently forgotten. The Three Oaths are not simply three prohibitions imposed upon the Jews. One of them is an oath concerning the nations and their treatment of the Jewish people.
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, developed his interpretation at length in Vayoel Moshe. He argued that establishing a Jewish state through political and military action before the coming of the Messiah violated these principles.
It would be too simplistic, however, to dismiss the Satmar position merely by saying, "This is Aggadah, not Halacha."
The Talmud is indeed not simply a codex of Jewish law. It is an enormous record of legal reasoning, interpretation, narrative and rabbinical debate, containing many competing opinions. Nevertheless, Satmar developed a serious halachic argument for why the Three Oaths should be regarded as binding.
The stronger response is not that Satmar has no argument. The stronger response is that major Torah authorities profoundly disagree with Satmar about the legal force, interpretation and modern applicability of the Three Oaths.
Some authorities understood the Three Oaths primarily as an aggadic teaching rather than as a straightforward halachic prohibition. Others argued that "ascending as a wall" prohibited taking the Land by force against the will of the nations, rather than prohibiting Jewish national restoration under all circumstances.
That distinction became enormously important in modern history.
Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, one of the great Orthodox authorities of his generation, argued that once the nations had recognized the right of Jews to establish a national home in their ancestral land — particularly following the Balfour Declaration and the international decisions at San Remo — the situation had fundamentally changed. The Jewish return could no longer simply be described as rebellion against the nations.
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook went considerably further. He regarded the return to Zion, the rebuilding of the Land and the restoration of Jewish national life as part of the unfolding process of redemption — even though many of the Zionists physically doing that work were secular Jews.
There is another powerful argument surrounding the Three Oaths.
If the Jewish people were bound by oaths concerning their conduct toward the nations, what happens when the nations violate the oath concerning their conduct toward the Jews?
After centuries of expulsions, massacres, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust, some Jewish thinkers argued that the nations had catastrophically violated their side of the arrangement and therefore could hardly invoke the Three Oaths to prevent Jews from seeking sovereignty and physical security in their ancestral homeland.
Satmar did not accept the simple argument that the nations' violation of their oath automatically released the Jewish people from theirs. That distinction matters if we want to describe Satmar honestly rather than create a straw man.
But other Orthodox authorities reached very different conclusions about both the meaning and continuing applicability of the oaths.
So there is a genuine Jewish theological dispute here.
Satmar says that Jews must await divine redemption and the coming of the Messiah rather than create Jewish sovereignty through human political and military action.
Religious Zionist authorities argue that human action, the return to Zion and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty may themselves be instruments through which divine redemption unfolds.
And others have argued that whatever the original meaning of the Three Oaths, international recognition of Jewish national rights and the historical conduct of the nations fundamentally changed the circumstances to which that Talmudic passage could be applied.
And perhaps the most Jewish thing about the whole discussion is that disagreement itself is nothing unusual.
The Talmud is filled with arguments. Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai famously disagreed on an extraordinary number of questions. Yet both remained part of the same rabbinic tradition.
You almost have to be Jewish to appreciate the idea that two rabbis can argue passionately for hours, completely disagree with one another — and still regard the argument itself as part of serving the same Torah.
So when someone points to Satmar opposition to Zionism and says:
"Judaism teaches that Jews are forbidden to have a State of Israel before the Messiah comes,"
that is simply not an accurate description of Judaism.
The accurate statement is:
There is a major Jewish religious debate about how and when Jewish sovereignty may be restored. Satmar represents one important interpretation of the Three Oaths. Religious Zionist rabbis and other major Orthodox authorities have reached very different conclusions about their meaning, their halachic status and their applicability to the modern return to Zion.
But there is something much more fundamental that this theological disagreement does not change:
Jews did not become the People of Israel in 1948. Jews have called themselves Am Yisrael — the People of Israel — for thousands of years. The modern State of Israel took the ancient name of the people; the people did not take their name from the modern state.
To this I would add that Israel is both the past and the future of the Jewish people. It is where we came from but, given current demographic trends, it is also where we are heading. Unlike the Jewish communities outside of Israel, the birth rate in Israel is solidly positive. In a generation or two the Jewish population of places like the US and Europe will have contracted significantly. The opposite will be true in Israel.
Who today would ask any anyone to renounce their connection to the country from which they derive their national identity?
Would the ultra-right wing Proud Boys, the KKK, renounce their connection to America?
Would the AltLeft neo-Marxists ask Russians to renounce their connection to Russia, the Chinese to China?
Yet, these same altL types demand we accept without question that "Palestine" is a nation despite verifiable, documented evidence revealing it to actually be a political identity that goes all the waaaay back to 1968 when Arafat manufactured it. The Judean Samarian Arab elites then retrofitted the identity to Canaanite civilization to legitimize that claim.
The AltL blithely ignores the irony of denying to Jews what it claims are the innate rights of all other national peoples. It endows them these rights on "Palestinians" because, as Arab members of the ummah (Arab collectivity), they are entitled to them. However, despite waves of conquest by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and the British, Jews, who have a 3,000+ proven record of an unbroken presence on their unceded, ancestral territory, are not for the good reason that they are Jews.
After reading this article, I’m having trouble figuring out why I still remember where I was and what I was wearing when US president JFK was shot. I’m Canadian, was a teenager and an apolitical Roman Catholic. I didn’t have the feeling that he was family.
Thank you for this piece. This is exactly what I have been saying for 2 years and you have eloquently penned it. When our non Jewish neighbours and work colleagues failed to contact us after October 7th to express sympathy, it became very clear to us that they have no concept of what it means to be part of a Community, a People who are our brothers & sisters. I’m not angry anymore; rather, I feel sorry for them. Klal Yisrael gives the Jews a sense of community that makes us Givers, contributors to world at large. Being Jewish spurs us to help others and that’s why I’m so proud to be Jewish.
Israel is not who I am. I do not identify with an ethno-state that can deny you citizenship on the basis of ethnicity or religion, because it has a quota system for non-jews, and that favors certain religious groups even among jews. The Israeli democratic system is also badly flawed. Then there are Israel's attempts to annex land.
I do not deny that Israel has a right to exist, and I do not accuse it of "genocide." I believe some sort of alliance between the US and Israel is warranted, though not on the basis of the alliance to date. And I understand that many jews needed somewhere to go after WWII, when they were denied entery so many other places. But I don't care for what jews have done with Israel. Yes, Israel might be better in many ways than a lot of other countries in the Middle East, but I don't think that is saying a lot compared with liberal democracies elsewhere.
There is an entire generation of people born Jewish who also lack that understanding of Jewish people hood. It’s quite sad. It’s a terrible failure of the parents and perhaps parents of parents. Many of these people are antizionists, and it would not surprise me if they are the last in their family to call themselves Jewish.
Joel, the point you make about an entire generation, or two generations (on the basis a generation is 25 years), there must be many Jews that don’t grasp ‘Jewish people hood’ & not supportive of Israel. By pure numbers, this disappointing group is mainly in the USA, although also present in Europe and elsewhere. With 16 million Jews in the world, 7 million in Israel, 7 million in the USA, and the remaining 2 million elsewhere, the USA contains the bulk of this group. In that smaller non USA diaspora, the majority if not most, are all closer to the perils of the Holocaust.
Citizenship on Condition of Self-Erasure
The path to Jewish citizenship in 18th-century Europe was defined by a single, sharp condition, captured in Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre's 1789 declaration to the French National Assembly: "To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything." Citizenship was on offer, but only at a price — the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood.
The idea of Judaism as "merely a religion" was itself a European invention of this period. Jews had long understood themselves as a nation: a people with their own laws, communal institutions, and collective identity, not simply a group of individuals who shared certain beliefs. But the emerging nation-states of the Enlightenment had no place for a people within a people. To become a citizen, a Jew had to relinquish that national identity and re-emerge as something the state could recognize: an individual who happened to practice a private religion called Judaism.
In other words, emancipation was conditional on self-erasure. One could not enter the ruler's world as a Jew belonging to the Jewish people — only as an individual adherent of a faith, stripped of the communal and national character that had defined Jewish life for centuries.
The American Echo
Some observers argue that a version of this bargain persists in the United States today — but with a distinctive twist: it is often internalized and voiced by Jews themselves, not just imposed from outside. In a civic culture shaped by the separation of church and state and a general discomfort with ethnic or national loyalties that might complicate national belonging, many American Jews have found it safer, and more comfortable, to describe their Jewishness as a religion — something practiced privately, on weekends, at synagogue — rather than as membership in a people with a shared history, land, and collective fate tied to Jews elsewhere in the world.
On this view, when American Jews say "I'm Jewish, but that's just my religion, I'm not part of some nation," they are echoing Clermont-Tonnerre's formula from the inside. It becomes a kind of pre-emptive reassurance, offered to a surrounding society that has made clear the terms of full acceptance: individuals, yes; a people, more warily. The framing lets Jewish identity fit neatly into the American model of religious pluralism — one faith among many — while sidestepping the more difficult, and more historically accurate, claim to peoplehood.
But of, course, it doesn't work. Didn't work in Germany, and not working anymore in America.
I'm among those who say that I'm Jewish but not because of my religion. Since that particular religion didn't speak to me, I converted decades ago. But then I found out I'm Jewish because of my heartfelt connection to Israel and the Jewish people.
I understand you converted to another religion but being Jewish by birth? May i ask which religion?
I am Jewish by birth and I went to Hebrew School for four years. My mother was an observant conservative Jew, but she was ritualistic rather than spiritual. She took my sister and I to shul each week. After a series of religious (mystical) experiences in my late twenties, I converted to Catholicism. I've been a practicing Catholic for decades, but I 've never given up identifying with Israel or the Jewish people.
This is precisely what is lacking in many Conservative and Reform communities. Judaism is reduced to a non-spiritual, sterile kind of religion where children are merely taught a few holiday basics and Hebrew songs.
Judaism, as practiced by what I dislike calling "Orthodox" Jews—though I must for lack of a better word—is a deeply spiritual experience. It starts with Ahavat Hashem, the love of God, and expands in so many beautiful directions. However meaningful other religions may be for non-Jews, for Jews they are only a faint reflection of what God offered us. Meditation, mysticism, philosophy, and so much more are daily components of Jewish life. Great rabbis have taught, and continue to teach, ways of reaching spiritual experiences that blow our minds and touch our souls.
I was raised in a Catholic village in the Netherlands. All my friends were Catholic, and the chaplain lived across the street—he even came to synagogue with us once or twice. He and my father enjoyed discussing religion over a good glass of Schnapps, yet this chaplain couldn't answer my father's questions about the New Testament. Much of Christian theology stems from Paul, and many of the parables attributed to Jesus originated directly from generations of Jews who came before him. The New Testament took texts from the Tanakh and altered the original wording, skipping or adding words that were never there.
As a European Jew, I am shocked whenever a Jew converts to Catholicism—even acknowledging that many righteous Catholics saved Jews during the Holocaust. So many of our ancestors paid with their lives when forced by the Inquisition to convert and refusing to do so. Others had to flee their homes, while those forced to convert maintained their Jewish faith in secret.
The Spanish and Portuguese Jews have a beautiful grace after meals born out of this history: Bendigamos al Altísimo. While often believed to have been sung in secret to hide from neighbors, it actually emerged when former forced converts escaped the Iberian Peninsula to freedom. Cut off from Hebrew for generations, they composed this Spanish hymn to reconnect with their faith in the language they knew best. As a resilient people, we managed to transform a painful history of exile into something deeply beautiful.
It is never too late to return to your Jewish roots.
As a Thomist, the Christian theology that I follow comes from Aquinas, on whom I wrote my dissertation. I won't go into the nature of my religious experiences. My philosophical needs are satisfied, having taught philosophy for 35 years. I don't choose a religion simply because I have roots in it. The religion I chose, after investigating every major world religion except Islam, satisfies my spiritual longings. Thank you for the invitation.
Jews have always been a people small in number, which has made them vulnerable. At the same time this is an enormous strength because it enables the sense of peoplehood, of being a family. And I wonder if this is not something that irks some people, including those Jews who feel somewhat alienated from their Jewishness, possibly even leading to jealousy.
In general I think non-Jews find it hard to understand who the Jews are, Judaism being unique as both a religion and a people, yet encompassing those who have no religious belief and/or observance. Perhaps this is one reason why conspiracy theories about Jews proliferate.
well said!
This explains our peoplehood so perfectly. Thank you!
You remind me of watching the NBC news in the nineties with a man in the radio/music industry....someone whose name you might even recognize, a close friend, a Gentile, who always felt close to his many Jewish friends. The scene was the Temple Mount...the video was of the IDF shooting rubber bullets at the Muslims....NO CONTEXT....which we hear so much about....they'd been pelting worshippers at the Western Wall.....My friend turns to me....re the Israelis, "I don't like them very much," I told him the CONTEXT...."oh, I didn't know." Well that sums it up......I didn't know.
It's actually quite simple.
The Jewish people were exiled from their land nearly 2,000 years ago, while the Jewish prophetic tradition repeatedly speaks of the eventual return of Israel to its land. Whatever one's religious interpretation of modern Zionism may be, that return is happening before our eyes.
The people of Israel did not suddenly come into existence in 1948. Our origins go back more than 3,000 years. According to the biblical tradition, the twelve tribes of Israel descended from Jacob — whose name was changed to Israel — and his family. From there developed the people known throughout Jewish history as Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel, and Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.
I myself am a Kohen, part of the Jewish priestly tradition that traces its paternal ancestry to Aaron of the tribe of Levi. My DNA also shows a paternal lineage consistent with lineages found among some Jewish priestly families. But that is actually beside the point: DNA is not what makes someone Jewish.
Judaism has never been simply a race. A person can become fully Jewish through conversion and thereafter belongs to the Jewish people. Ruth is perhaps the most famous biblical example: she was born a Moabite, joined the people of Israel, and became the great-grandmother of King David.
In modern terminology, you could compare conversion — imperfectly, of course — to naturalization. Someone who becomes an American citizen does not need ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower in order to be an American. In the same way, a convert does not become a "second-class Jew." He or she joins the Jewish people.
This is why Jews have called themselves Am Yisrael — the People of Israel — for thousands of years, long before the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
There is, however, a fascinating internal Jewish debate about whether Jews were permitted to re-establish political sovereignty before the coming of the Messiah.
Some very Orthodox communities, most famously Satmar, oppose Zionism on theological grounds. Their position is based largely on a passage in the Talmud, Ketubot 111a, traditionally known as the Three Oaths.
The passage describes three oaths:
Israel should not "ascend as a wall." The Satmar Rebbe understood this as prohibiting a mass, forceful return to the Land of Israel for the purpose of establishing Jewish sovereignty.
Israel should not rebel against the nations among whom the Jewish people live.
The nations should not oppress Israel excessively.
That third oath is important and is sometimes conveniently forgotten. The Three Oaths are not simply three prohibitions imposed upon the Jews. One of them is an oath concerning the nations and their treatment of the Jewish people.
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, developed his interpretation at length in Vayoel Moshe. He argued that establishing a Jewish state through political and military action before the coming of the Messiah violated these principles.
It would be too simplistic, however, to dismiss the Satmar position merely by saying, "This is Aggadah, not Halacha."
The Talmud is indeed not simply a codex of Jewish law. It is an enormous record of legal reasoning, interpretation, narrative and rabbinical debate, containing many competing opinions. Nevertheless, Satmar developed a serious halachic argument for why the Three Oaths should be regarded as binding.
The stronger response is not that Satmar has no argument. The stronger response is that major Torah authorities profoundly disagree with Satmar about the legal force, interpretation and modern applicability of the Three Oaths.
Some authorities understood the Three Oaths primarily as an aggadic teaching rather than as a straightforward halachic prohibition. Others argued that "ascending as a wall" prohibited taking the Land by force against the will of the nations, rather than prohibiting Jewish national restoration under all circumstances.
That distinction became enormously important in modern history.
Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, one of the great Orthodox authorities of his generation, argued that once the nations had recognized the right of Jews to establish a national home in their ancestral land — particularly following the Balfour Declaration and the international decisions at San Remo — the situation had fundamentally changed. The Jewish return could no longer simply be described as rebellion against the nations.
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook went considerably further. He regarded the return to Zion, the rebuilding of the Land and the restoration of Jewish national life as part of the unfolding process of redemption — even though many of the Zionists physically doing that work were secular Jews.
There is another powerful argument surrounding the Three Oaths.
If the Jewish people were bound by oaths concerning their conduct toward the nations, what happens when the nations violate the oath concerning their conduct toward the Jews?
After centuries of expulsions, massacres, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust, some Jewish thinkers argued that the nations had catastrophically violated their side of the arrangement and therefore could hardly invoke the Three Oaths to prevent Jews from seeking sovereignty and physical security in their ancestral homeland.
Satmar did not accept the simple argument that the nations' violation of their oath automatically released the Jewish people from theirs. That distinction matters if we want to describe Satmar honestly rather than create a straw man.
But other Orthodox authorities reached very different conclusions about both the meaning and continuing applicability of the oaths.
So there is a genuine Jewish theological dispute here.
Satmar says that Jews must await divine redemption and the coming of the Messiah rather than create Jewish sovereignty through human political and military action.
Religious Zionist authorities argue that human action, the return to Zion and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty may themselves be instruments through which divine redemption unfolds.
And others have argued that whatever the original meaning of the Three Oaths, international recognition of Jewish national rights and the historical conduct of the nations fundamentally changed the circumstances to which that Talmudic passage could be applied.
And perhaps the most Jewish thing about the whole discussion is that disagreement itself is nothing unusual.
The Talmud is filled with arguments. Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai famously disagreed on an extraordinary number of questions. Yet both remained part of the same rabbinic tradition.
You almost have to be Jewish to appreciate the idea that two rabbis can argue passionately for hours, completely disagree with one another — and still regard the argument itself as part of serving the same Torah.
So when someone points to Satmar opposition to Zionism and says:
"Judaism teaches that Jews are forbidden to have a State of Israel before the Messiah comes,"
that is simply not an accurate description of Judaism.
The accurate statement is:
There is a major Jewish religious debate about how and when Jewish sovereignty may be restored. Satmar represents one important interpretation of the Three Oaths. Religious Zionist rabbis and other major Orthodox authorities have reached very different conclusions about their meaning, their halachic status and their applicability to the modern return to Zion.
But there is something much more fundamental that this theological disagreement does not change:
Jews did not become the People of Israel in 1948. Jews have called themselves Am Yisrael — the People of Israel — for thousands of years. The modern State of Israel took the ancient name of the people; the people did not take their name from the modern state.
To this I would add that Israel is both the past and the future of the Jewish people. It is where we came from but, given current demographic trends, it is also where we are heading. Unlike the Jewish communities outside of Israel, the birth rate in Israel is solidly positive. In a generation or two the Jewish population of places like the US and Europe will have contracted significantly. The opposite will be true in Israel.
Very astute. Very insightful observations.
Who today would ask any anyone to renounce their connection to the country from which they derive their national identity?
Would the ultra-right wing Proud Boys, the KKK, renounce their connection to America?
Would the AltLeft neo-Marxists ask Russians to renounce their connection to Russia, the Chinese to China?
Yet, these same altL types demand we accept without question that "Palestine" is a nation despite verifiable, documented evidence revealing it to actually be a political identity that goes all the waaaay back to 1968 when Arafat manufactured it. The Judean Samarian Arab elites then retrofitted the identity to Canaanite civilization to legitimize that claim.
The AltL blithely ignores the irony of denying to Jews what it claims are the innate rights of all other national peoples. It endows them these rights on "Palestinians" because, as Arab members of the ummah (Arab collectivity), they are entitled to them. However, despite waves of conquest by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and the British, Jews, who have a 3,000+ proven record of an unbroken presence on their unceded, ancestral territory, are not for the good reason that they are Jews.
There are better Jews than this, they just don't live in Israel.
After reading this article, I’m having trouble figuring out why I remember where I was and what I was wearing when JFK was shot.
After reading this article, I’m having trouble figuring out why I still remember where I was and what I was wearing when US president JFK was shot. I’m Canadian, was a teenager and an apolitical Roman Catholic. I didn’t have the feeling that he was family.
Thank you for this piece. This is exactly what I have been saying for 2 years and you have eloquently penned it. When our non Jewish neighbours and work colleagues failed to contact us after October 7th to express sympathy, it became very clear to us that they have no concept of what it means to be part of a Community, a People who are our brothers & sisters. I’m not angry anymore; rather, I feel sorry for them. Klal Yisrael gives the Jews a sense of community that makes us Givers, contributors to world at large. Being Jewish spurs us to help others and that’s why I’m so proud to be Jewish.
Thanks for a very moving essay. It is one I plan to share with certain individuals who simply "don't get it".
Israel is not who I am. I do not identify with an ethno-state that can deny you citizenship on the basis of ethnicity or religion, because it has a quota system for non-jews, and that favors certain religious groups even among jews. The Israeli democratic system is also badly flawed. Then there are Israel's attempts to annex land.
I do not deny that Israel has a right to exist, and I do not accuse it of "genocide." I believe some sort of alliance between the US and Israel is warranted, though not on the basis of the alliance to date. And I understand that many jews needed somewhere to go after WWII, when they were denied entery so many other places. But I don't care for what jews have done with Israel. Yes, Israel might be better in many ways than a lot of other countries in the Middle East, but I don't think that is saying a lot compared with liberal democracies elsewhere.
MLB, you need some new compatriots. I’ve got solidarity all around me. Let me know if you need help.
agree with everything you wrote except there is no good that came out of 10/7.
it was a day of horror that has led to a world of daily terror and the unmasking yet again of the banality of evil