The Secret to Loving Israel

The Jewish state was never meant to make people feel comfortable, and the humility to recognize that is precisely the point.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

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

---

More than two years after October 7, 2023 — after Israel was thrust into a multi-front war that showed no sign of resolving neatly — many Jews, Zionists, and our friends abroad are tired.

Tired of waking up to heart-wrenching stories that never seem to end. Tired of watching Israel flattened into a caricature in media, academia, and cultural institutions that claim moral seriousness while practicing intellectual laziness. Tired of antisemitism that no longer bothers to disguise itself, and antisemitism that insists, with a straight face, that it is merely “anti-Zionism.” Tired of explaining ourselves, of defending basic facts, of being asked to prove — over and over again — why Jewish self-determination deserves the same legitimacy as everyone else’s.

This exhaustion is not a failure of commitment; it is the predictable cost of sustained moral pressure applied unevenly and relentlessly. Many people are not losing their connection to Israel because they care too little, but because they have been asked to care in a way that is emotionally unsustainable: to love Israel sentimentally, to justify it endlessly, and to carry its contradictions alone.

And that is precisely why we need a better way of thinking about what it means to “love” Israel. I’m not talking about a version of love that demands constant emotional performance, political agreement, or moral perfection, but one that can survive dissonance, disagreement, and fatigue. A form of attachment rooted not in feeling, but in seriousness; not in approval, but in responsibility.

Because, if loving Israel requires constant certainty and endless stamina, it will eventually break even the most committed. And Israel, like the people bound to it, was never meant to be sustained by exhaustion alone.

That recognition forces a shift — not away from Israel, but toward a more durable relationship with it. One that does not depend on emotional intensity or ideological purity, but on something steadier and more honest.

The first part of something steadier and more honest is this: No one needs to “love” Israel. Appreciation, admiration, and respect are far more reasonable expectations. Love is intimate and demanding; it implies emotional alignment, patience, and forgiveness. Not every nation invites that kind of relationship, and not every observer owes it. A country can be legitimate, necessary, and worthy without being emotionally convenient.

The second part is far more complicated: It’s learning to deal with dissonance, the tension that arises when two or more things are true at the same time but do not sit comfortably together. Dissonance is the mental and emotional discomfort of holding conflicting ideas, values, or realities without being able to collapse them into a single, clean conclusion. Dissonance resists resolution. It cannot be solved by choosing one side and discarding the other; it can only be endured, managed, and integrated.

In everyday life, dissonance shows up when our ideals collide with reality, when our loyalties clash with our critiques, or when moral clarity gives way to moral complexity. People naturally try to escape it — by simplifying, moralizing, outsourcing judgment, or retreating into slogans. Dissonance is uncomfortable because it demands maturity. It asks us to think slower, judge more carefully, and live without certainty.

In the Jewish tradition, dissonance is built-in. The Talmud preserves unresolved arguments side by side. Multiple truths coexist without one annihilating the other. Meaning emerges not from final answers, but from sustained engagement. Living with dissonance is a form of intellectual and moral discipline.

In short, dissonance is difficult, but it is also where seriousness begins.

As it relates to Israel, the Jewish state is a place and a people defined by contradictions that refuse to resolve neatly. For many, that is precisely the problem. We prefer moral clarity, clean narratives, and comforting binaries. Israel offers none of that. It asks something more demanding: the ability to hold opposing truths at the same time without rushing to simplify them away.

Israel is mighty, yet it almost never uses its full strength. It possesses overwhelming military and intelligence power and faces enemies who openly call for its destruction — by name, in public, and without ambiguity. Few nations have ever lived under such explicit, sustained threat. Fewer still have had the capacity to end that threat decisively.

And yet, Israel does not. It operates with a level of restraint that would be unthinkable for most nations under similar conditions. It warns civilians before strikes. It aborts operations mid-flight when the risk of collateral harm is deemed too high. It exposes its soldiers to greater danger in order to reduce harm to noncombatants on the other side. These are not the actions of a state indifferent to power; they are the actions of a state burdened by it.

This restraint is not the absence of force. It is force deliberately held back. It is power constantly questioned by law, by ethics, and by a society that argues fiercely about the cost of every decision. Israel’s wars are fought not only on borders and battlefields, but within courtrooms, cabinet rooms, and living rooms. Every operation is contested in real time by citizens whose children are serving on the front lines.

The moral tension is permanent and unresolved, including the necessity of survival versus the refusal to surrender conscience, and the obligation to protect one’s people without abandoning the values that define them. Many nations resolve this tension by choosing one side. Israel lives inside it. That choice, to endure the burden of restraint rather than escape it through overwhelming force, is not weakness. It is one of the hardest moral postures a nation can take.

What’s more, Israel is ancient and modern at once — not as a slogan, but as a lived reality. It is a startup nation powered by cutting-edge technology, cybersecurity firms, medical breakthroughs, and global innovation, while also shaped by texts, rituals, and collective memories thousands of years old. Emails are written in a language revived from scripture. Venture capital meetings take place in cities whose names appear in the Bible. Satellites are launched from a land once navigated by shepherds and prophets.

People swipe into high-tech offices in the morning and pray during their breaks. Soldiers carry smartphones and siddurim in the same backpack. Doctors perform advanced procedures in hospitals built on hills named in ancient psalms. The calendar itself refuses to modernize fully: Workweeks bend around holidays rooted in agricultural cycles and ancient covenants, not market efficiency. Entire cities shut down not for emergencies or elections, but because the sun is setting on Friday night.

Tradition in Israel is not preserved behind glass or reduced to folklore. It interrupts modern life on purpose. It demands attention, pauses productivity, and insists that progress answer to something older than itself. Highways empty. Airports slow. Families gather. Time stops being transactional and becomes sacred again.

Even the language reflects this fusion. Hebrew, once confined to prayer and study, is now used in board meetings, political debates, dating apps, and video games. Ancient words are repurposed for modern dilemmas, carrying layers of meaning into everyday speech. The past is not left behind; it is spoken aloud.

This is the dissonance Israel lives with daily: a future-obsessed society anchored to an ancient moral memory, a nation racing forward while constantly being pulled back — by texts, by rituals, by history — to ask not only what can be built, but what should be. Time in Israel does not move in a straight line; it bends toward meaning.

At the same time, Israelis are notorious for working relentlessly, and then stopping completely. The culture is intense, direct, argumentative, and exhausting. People push, build, criticize, and demand more of one another. And then, suddenly, the country exhales. Shabbat arrives. Holidays pile up. Traffic disappears. Productivity bows to something older and deeper. Life is not only about building a future; it is about remembering why that future matters.

Of course, Israelis love life fiercely, but they cannot love the lives of enemies who cherish and invite death. This is one of the deepest moral dissonances at the heart of Israeli society, and one of the least understood from the outside. Love of life does not mean a limitless obligation to preserve every life at all costs, regardless of intent. It means prioritizing life where life itself is honored, protected, built, and sustained.

Israel faces enemies who do not merely accept death as a consequence of war; they elevate it as a virtue. Death is preached, ingrained, incentivized, and broadcast. Civilians are deliberately placed in harm’s way. Children are weaponized — not only physically, but morally — as instruments of propaganda. In such a worldview, life is expendable, and survival is secondary to spectacle.

To expect Israelis to “love” the lives of those who cherish death is to demand moral self-erasure. It is to confuse compassion with suicide, and universalism with the abdication of responsibility. Loving life sometimes requires drawing hard lines, not out of cruelty, but out of clarity. A culture that chooses life cannot be asked to pretend that death-worship is morally equivalent to life-building. That refusal is not a failure of empathy; it is the boundary that makes empathy possible at all.

Perhaps most unsettling of all, Israel argues — with itself. Loudly. Constantly. About religion and state, war and peace, courts and coalitions, identity and power, socialism and capitalism. These arguments spill out of parliament and into cafés, family dinners, military units, WhatsApp groups, and street demonstrations. Nothing is too sacred to debate, and nothing too urgent to be questioned.

To outsiders, this can look like chaos or weakness, a nation perpetually at war with itself. But in reality, it is continuity. A people forged through argument did not suddenly become silent upon achieving sovereignty. Plus, Jewish civilization has never advanced through enforced consensus; it advanced through disputation, through competing interpretations preserved side by side, through dissent that remained anchored in belonging.

The Talmud does not resolve every argument; it records them. Minority opinions are not erased; they are canonized. Truth emerges not from unanimity, but from sustained engagement. That intellectual and moral architecture did not disappear when Jews gained a state. It scaled.

In Israel, disagreement is not a prelude to fracture; it is a sign of investment. People argue because they care, because the stakes are real, because the outcomes shape real lives, not theories or abstractions. Protest is not a rejection of the state, but a demand made within it. Loyalty is expressed not through silence, but through refusal to disengage.

Israel did not abandon the Jewish tradition of argument when it became sovereign. It nationalized it, turning an ancient culture of debate into a modern political reality. The result is messy, exhausting, and often uncomfortable. But it is also deeply Jewish, and one of the clearest signs that the state is not an interruption of Jewish history, just its continuation.

Yet still, Israel is not judged like other nations that fight wars, secure borders, or prioritize their citizens. It is judged by standards no one else is asked to meet. It is expected to absorb violence and terrorism quietly, to explain itself endlessly, to survive without inconveniencing anyone else’s moral comfort. Our enemies are granted excuses, our intentions are interrogated, and our existence is treated as an amateur high school debate. Israel carries not only the burden of self-defense, but the burden of reassuring a world that is deeply uneasy with Jewish power used in defense of Jewish life.

For Jews, Zionists, and our friends outside Israel, this dissonance often feels personal. Loving Israel has become socially costly, emotionally draining, and morally demanding. It requires explaining oneself at dinner tables, in classrooms, and on timelines that were never designed to accommodate complexity. Many feel pulled between loyalty and exhaustion, between solidarity and the desire to opt out altogether. But perhaps that, too, is part of the inheritance. Judaism was never meant to be easy to carry, only worthy of carrying.

To love Israel is not to deny its flaws or silence its critics; it is to reject the fantasy that a nation born of decolonization, surrounded by hostility, and committed to life would ever be simple, serene, or universally admired. It is to accept that moral seriousness rarely feels clean, and that responsibility often feels heavy.

The secret to loving Israel is not agreement; it is tolerance for tension. It is the courage to remain attached to a people and a place that refuses to make you comfortable — and the humility to recognize that this discomfort is precisely the point.

---