A Better Way to Teach Israel to Our Children

Constructive doubt is the most Jewish way to teach Israel to the next generations of Jews.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/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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There is a well-intentioned instinct in Jewish education to present Israel as a simple story.

The logic is, of course, understandable: Young people face a hostile world, so we need to give them armor. Certainty is armor. Doubt is vulnerability.

Respectfully, this instinct is wrong. Not because certainty is bad, but because false certainty is brittle. And brittle things shatter at the worst-possible moments.

This is where we need constructive doubt: the deliberate cultivation of questioning, complexity, and intellectual honesty in how we teach young Jews about Israel. It’s not the doubt of the cynic or the skeptic. It’s not the ridiculous “both sides” equivocation or the paralysis of endless analysis. It’s something harder and more valuable: teaching young people how to love something they are also permitted to question.

For decades, much of Jewish education operated on what we might call the certainty model: Israel is right, its enemies are wrong. The story is simple. The moral calculus is clear. Here are the talking points. Now go out into the world and defend.

This approach produced a generation of Jews who were either true believers or — let’s call them — quiet defectors. The true believers held the line until the questions got too hard, then some of them broke. The quiet defectors never said anything in Jewish day school or Hebrew school, then drifted away as they got older, armed with the suspicion that they had been sold a bill of goods. They’re the ones at the encampments shouting, “Why did we never learn this in school?!”

October 7th revealed the consequences. Young Jews arrived at that terrible morning with one of two orientations. Some had a foundation. They knew the history, understood the context, and grasped why this was different. Others had only slogans, and slogans dissolve under pressure. Worse, some had been so oversold on a simplified narrative that the first encounter with Israeli imperfection felt like betrayal.

The certainty model failed because it mistook information for formation. It gave young people facts to recite rather than a way to actually think.

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Constructive doubt begins with a confession: Israel is complicated, and that’s okay.

This doesn’t mean Israel is uniquely complicated. Every nation is complicated. The difference is that we tend to teach American or Canadian history with built-in acknowledgment of failure and growth. We teach the Civil Rights Movement or the history of residential schools as proof that nations can wrestle with their sins. Though we sometimes talk about hugging and wrestling with Israel, we rarely actually extend that same generosity to Israel.

Constructive doubt says: Israel is a real country with real flaws, real achievements, impossible dilemmas, and genuine moral weight. It says: You are allowed to ask hard questions, and asking them doesn’t make you disloyal. It says: The goal is not to win arguments, but to understand something true.

In practice, this means teaching the 1948 Arab-Israel War as both a miracle of survival and a tragedy of displacement. It means acknowledging that settlements are disputed territories, that Palestinian suffering is real and not invented by propagandists, even if it is largely the fault of their leaders. It also means insisting that context matters, that Jewish history did not begin in 1967, that the conflict did not emerge from Israeli cruelty but from the collision of two peoples with claims to the same land, wherein one people was prepared to share, and the other people said no.

Constructive doubt holds complexity without collapsing into relativism. It maintains that some things are still true: Jews have a right to self-determination, terrorism is wrong, and criticism of Israel can absolutely be antisemitic even when it is not always so.

I can already hear the objection: Why do Jews always have to be the ones acknowledging complexity? Why are we expected to teach our children nuance while the other side teaches theirs to chant for our destruction? Why must we be the grown-ups in a world that refuses to extend us the same courtesy?

This objection isn’t wrong. It comes from exhaustion and genuine injustice. The double standard applied to Israel is real. The demand that Jews perform moral sophistication while their enemies perform eliminationist rage, and then be judged as morally equivalent, is indeed obscene.

But here’s what matters: I’m not proposing constructive doubt as a concession to our critics, nor am I suggesting we teach complexity because the world demands it, or because it will make us more palatable to people who will hate us regardless. I’m suggesting we teach complexity because it is true, and because our children deserve truth. This is not about what we owe the world. It is about what we owe ourselves.

The question is not whether our enemies teach their children nuance. They don’t, and that is their problem, not ours. The question is what kind of Jews we want to raise. Do we want Jews whose attachment to Israel depends on never encountering a difficult fact? Or do we want Jews whose attachment can survive and deepen through encounter with reality?

Constructive doubt isn’t a gift to our critics, but a gift to our children. And it’s ancient and authentically Jewish.

The Mishnah distinguishes between two kinds of argument: machloket l’shem shamayim (argument for the sake of heaven) and argument that is not. The first seeks truth. The second seeks victory. The first is holy. The second is destructive.

The Talmud tells us that the School of Hillel prevailed over the School of Shammai not because they were smarter, but because they were humble. They studied their opponents’ views. They taught Shammai’s positions before their own. They understood that being defeated by the truth is the only kind of defeat that is also a victory.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observed that Judaism’s foundational texts are anthologies of arguments. We preserved minority opinions and canonized disagreement. We made questioning a form of devotion, not than a betrayal.

This is our inheritance, and shutting down hard questions about Israel is not to protect our children from doubt. It is to cut them off from the deepest currents of Jewish thought.

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Constructive doubt requires courage from educators and institutions. It requires trusting that young people can handle complexity. It requires resisting the pressure to produce defenders rather than thinkers. It requires accepting that some students, given permission to question, will arrive at conclusions we may not be comfortable with.

That last point is crucial, since constructive doubt is not a guaranteed outcome. Some young Jews will engage seriously with Israel and decide it’s not for them. But the alternative, producing Jews whose attachment is shallow and brittle, could be worse. Those Jews tend to leave anyway. They just leave later and angrier.

The young Jews who stay after genuine encounter, who have seen the shadows and chosen commitment anyway, are the ones who will sustain the community. They are the ones who can defend Israel not with talking points, but with depth and passion. They are the ones who can love a flawed thing without needing it to be flawless. It’s also an important life lesson that reaches far outside the Israel context too.

We owe young Jews the tools they need to think clearly about something that matters. We owe them the honesty of admitting that the adults don’t have all the answers either. Constructive doubt isn’t the absence of conviction. It’s the path to conviction that holds. It is the only kind of armour that doesn’t shatter on contact with reality.

And we do this not because the world asks it of us, but because it is who we have always been.

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