The Jewish question has changed, again.

The threat didn’t disappear; it evolved. So must our response.

photo: David Holifield/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1956, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik stood before a room of religious Zionists and told them that God had knocked at the door of the Jewish People.

He counted six knocks.

The establishment of Israel, eight years earlier, had sounded them all. He asked: When the Beloved knocks in the night, will the lover rise from bed?

The speech, later a famous essay, was called Kol Dodi Dofek, inspired by Song of Songs 5:2: “My Beloved is knocking, open for me.”

Soloveitchik knew the verse’s ending. By the time she opens, he is gone. She has missed him.

The question for the Jewish People in 1956 was whether we would hear the knocks while there was still time to answer the door.

I have been thinking about this and working on this essay for several years. The cascade of events from October 7th necessitated a massive rewrite. This week we celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut, the State of Israel’s 78 years of independence, and the 70th anniversary of the rabbi’s speech.

Here is what Soloveitchik heard in 1956.

The first knock was political. At the United Nations in November 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union voted together for partition. This shouldn’t have happened, couldn’t happen again, but happened. A nation was allowed to be born with the full weight and blessing (believe it or not) of the UN.

The second was military. In 1948, a tiny army, under-equipped and half-trained, held off five invading Arab states (and then some). Soloveitchik read it as the Biblical pattern of the few defeating the many.

The third was theological. Christian supersessionism (the idea of Christianity replacing Judaism) had long claimed that Jewish exile was divine proof of Jewish rejection. The existence of a re-dedicated Jewish state now pulled the theological ground out from under that claim.

The fourth was the knock to Jewish youth. Assimilated young Jews who had drifted from their people were rediscovering themselves through the nascent state. Jewish identity, which had seemed a dying embarrassment, was suddenly a source of pride and strength.

The fifth was the knock of Jewish honour. For two millennia, Jewish blood had been hefker, ownerless — a free commodity anyone could spill without consequence. For the first time in a very long time, a sovereign power would answer for Jewish lives.

The sixth was the knock of open gates. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews fleeing murder had nowhere to go. The gates of every country closed. Now, a homeland’s gates stood open. Any Jew had somewhere to run.

Six knocks. Six demands on the Jew who claimed to be serious about his God.

What I want to try this year is to hear the knocks again — not because Soloveitchik got them wrong, but because he was writing 70 years ago this year. The house is 70 years older, the door is heavier, and the knocks are coming from different corners. Some of his original six have grown louder. Some have been tested. Some have been inverted. A few have gone places he could never have anticipated.

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In 1947, much of the world voted yes. In 2026, much of the world is voting no.

The same institution that birthed Israel has become the global platform for its delegitimization — the UN and its organs like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice and the Human Rights Council that treats Israel as a standing agenda item, and the editorial boards, the NGOs, and campus governance bodies. The verdict of the nations has turned.

Soloveitchik heard a miraculous yes from the world and said God was knocking. What do we hear in the miraculous no?

I think we hear the same knock, sounded from the other side. The political knock says: You can’t build Jewish life on the permission of the nations. When the permission was granted in 1947, it was a gift, not a guarantee. When it is withdrawn in 2026, it’s a test, not a verdict. The knock demands that we Jews know who we are without others’ validation. It demands that we stop outsourcing our legitimacy to bodies that can’t confer it, and that we don’t collapse when they refuse to.

This is harder than it sounds. Much of the postwar Jewish world was built, psychologically, on the assumption that the nations had finally accepted us. October 7th and its aftermath made clear how thin and conditional that acceptance was. The knock is the demand to rebuild our self-understanding on something sturdier than outside approval.

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Soloveitchik’s second knock was the surprise of Jewish military capacity — the few defeating the many just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the few weren’t there. For the first time in the state’s history, the IDF wasn’t adequately on the border when it mattered. Civilians tried to hold the line and were gunned down or taken — a farmer in Kibbutz Be’eri with a rifle, a retiree at a music festival with nowhere to run, a father in Kfar Aza sending his last text message to his wife. The second knock went silent, briefly, and the silence was catastrophic.

Then came the recovery. Whatever else one wants to say about the war that followed, it included feats of operational brilliance without parallel in modern military history. I’m talking about fighting this defensive war against the Iranian octopus on seven fronts; the pager operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah; the ability to distinguish between civilians and combatants hiding behind and among civilians; the decapitation of the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran; the 12-Day War against Iran last June that ended with Iranian strategic infrastructure in ruins and the regime’s deterrent posture exposed as bluff; and the recent war against Iran with unquestionable Israeli military supremacy.

The military knock today is double. It says: You were wrong to think strength meant invulnerability. It also says: Jewish power is real, and it saves Jewish lives. The demand is to hold both sentences at once. We are powerful but not necessarily safe. The knock is the refusal to let us collapse either truth into the other.

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Soloveitchik’s theological knock was the refutation of supersessionism — that Christianity replaced Judaism. After 1948, the claim that Jewish exile long ago proved Jewish rejection became harder to hold with a straight face. The exile was over.

What Soloveitchik could not have anticipated was that supersessionism would not die. It would change denominations. A new supersessionism has arisen from the Left that doesn’t speak the language of the Church but rather the language of “decolonization,” “liberation,” and “justice.” It says: Jewish peoplehood is a form of whiteness! Jewish particularism is a mask for supremacy! The Jewish state is settler-colonialism with a yarmulke! The Jewish story is not an exception to history’s arc of justice, it’s an embarrassment to it!

This is theologically the same move as the old one: the denial of the ongoing validity of Jewish covenant, Jewish peoplehood, and Jewish land. What is “new” is the vocabulary (which actually mimics, verbatim, Soviet propaganda from the 1970s), and the fact that it now speaks in the voice of a faculty lounge or NGO boardroom instead of the pulpit.

The knock here is the demand to defend Jewish particularism — not by arguing that we are the same as everyone else, but by insisting that we are a people, that we have a land, that we have a story, and that none of this requires apology or translation into the “moral frameworks” of people who have decided in advance that no matter anything else, we’re wrong.

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In 1956, Soloveitchik heard Jewish pride returning to assimilated youth through Israel. In 2026, the knock is louder, though the picture is stranger.

On one side: thousands of young Jews who had never seen the inside of a Hillel showed up after October 7th. They came to Shabbat tables, rallies, and synagogues many had been avoiding since their bar/bat mitzvah. They discovered that their Jewishness, which had been a neutral demographic fact, was actually a beautiful inheritance. They started asking what it required of them. These are the so-called “October 8th Jews.”

On the other side: a loud (though smaller) cohort of young Jews moved sharply in the opposite direction. They leveraged their Jewishness as credential to denounce Israel. They joined organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Independent Jewish Voices Canada or the like.

They occupied the quads and signed open letters blaming Israel for being massacred. They wrote op-eds explaining that their grandmother’s Holocaust survival had taught them to oppose the Jewish state in her name. These “as a Jew” Jews became the faces of a movement that, stripped of its Jewish faces, would be indistinguishable from older and uglier movements.

Both groups are the same generation. Both heard a knock. They heard it differently and walked in opposite directions.

The knock demands two things: first, that we build an immense and unprecedented infrastructure to support the first group, like Shabbat tables that don’t bore them and day schools with plenty of seats, and synagogues and engaging rabbis who can answer the questions they’re now asking with wit and humour and joy.

And it demands that we understand the forces that produced the second group: an education that gave them Jewish values without Jewish loyalty, a culture that taught them to hunger for justice without teaching them where justice comes from, and a peer world that offered belonging on one condition — abandoning their people — which they paid.

A new Jewish generation is being formed right now. What we build or fail to build in the next five years will determine what Jewish diaspora life looks like for the next forty. The knock will not wait.

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Soloveitchik’s fifth knock was the end of hefker — the old Hebrew word for ownerless property, a thing no one will answer for. Jewish blood, for two millennia, was exactly that. As of 1948, no longer. The full might of a sovereign state would answer.

On October 7, 2023, Jewish blood was hefker again — twelve-hundred murdered in a morning, women and girls raped that the world’s human rights institutions could not bring themselves to denounce, bodies mutilated and burned and paraded, hostages (dead and alive) dragged into tunnels. And then, within hours, the moral conversation of much of the “educated” world shifted from the dead to the question of whether the dead had it coming. Their conclusion: They did.

The fifth knock today is piercing. It says the promise of 1948 was not a fait accompli (a decision or action that has already happened or been finalized before those affected are informed, leaving them with no choice but to accept it). It was, and is, an ongoing fight. The wars that followed October 7th were, among other things, the living answer to hefker — the refusal to accept that Jewish life is negotiable, and the willingness to pay the costs, including the international costs, of that refusal.

The knock demands that diaspora Jews stop treating our safety as a given. It demands that we build closer relations with Israel and Israelis, and that they build closer relations with us.

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Soloveitchik’s sixth knock was the gates of the Jewish state standing open for Jews with nowhere to go.

In 2026, the question is running in the opposite direction. French Jewish communities have been emptying for a decade. British and Australian and South African Jewish institutions are preparing for worse. And North American Jews, who for three generations have lived inside an assumption of permanent belonging, are beginning to ask questions they never expected to ask: Where would my children go? Is my daughter safe on that campus? Is Israel an escape route or a vacation home?

The Jewish state is our insurance policy. It is the reason we can live as Jews in Toronto and New York and London and Melbourne with a confidence no previous diaspora generation enjoyed. Like any insurance policy, though, it can only be redeemed if the premiums are paid. For three generations, most of us have assumed someone else was paying them — Israelis, the IDF, Israeli and Jewish political organizations, donors, the Jews who made aliyah (immigrated to Israel). We inherited coverage we didn’t purchase and didn’t renew.

This is the most uncomfortable of the knocks because it names a bill most diaspora Jews did not know was coming due. If the answer to the Jewish question in the 20th century was a Jewish state, the 21st century is now asking: Who will keep the policy in force?

The premiums are material, political, and moral. And the premiums are, finally, ours to pay — because a policy nobody funds is a policy that does not pay out when the claim is filed.

And the claim, one day, may be ours.

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Soloveitchik’s question was whether we would rise from bed when the Beloved knocked. Rising wasn’t easy in 1956 either, but the knocks he heard were, on balance, knocks of gratitude. They were reasons to rise with joy: a state restored, an army victorious, gates opening, youth returning, and blood no longer free.

So here’s the catch: The knocks we hear today are not only knocks of gratitude. They are also knocks of mourning, of anger, of exposure. They cost more to answer. The bed is comfortable, the door is heavy, and the world outside the door has gotten colder and louder and more insistent than it was when Soloveitchik was writing.

The Beloved is still knocking at the door. They have only gotten harder to hear because they are mixed now with air-raid sirens, calls from school asking for money for increased security measures, with hostages’ names being read aloud, with the sound of our own children asking us questions we aren’t sure how to answer.

Rising from bed this Yom Ha’atzmaut means something different than it did in 1956. It doesn’t mean rising in simple celebration. It means rising into responsibility for a project we didn’t finish and can’t abandon. It means rising while we are tired. It means opening the door while knowing that what stands behind it will ask more of us than we’re prepared to give.

Kol dodi dofek. My Beloved is knocking.

The door is ours to open.

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