Without Israel, we’re not really the Jewish People.

Now more than ever, Jews need a rallying cry — and Israel offers the only call strong enough to overcome division and indifference.

photo: Cole Keister/Unsplash

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In the obscure U.S. state of Idaho, there’s one thing that unites Right-wing farmers and Left-wing environmentalists: a fierce, almost sacred love of the land.

They may disagree on everything else — politics, economics, even what counts as “freedom” — but they agree on this: The land is not just dirt and trees. It is history, heritage, and future all at once. It is something to honor, defend, and pass on.

Jews, scattered and divided, need to rediscover that same truth.

For so many Jews today, Israel is an idea more than a reality — a line in the prayer book, a headline in the news, or a place to visit “someday.” But for the generations that built it, the land was a covenant. It was sweat in the soil, hands blistered from stones and plows, and a faith that working the land was as holy as any prayer.

The early pioneers didn’t just “settle” Israel. They loved it — the way Idaho ranchers love their valleys or environmentalists love their forests. They built kibbutzim not for profit but for permanence. They drained swamps, planted orchards, and carved farms into rocky hillsides because they believed the land was theirs to tend, not just theirs to own.

That love is fading, and with it, something essential to Jewish survival.

This is not a new idea. Our ancestors knew that loving the land was inseparable from loving God. In the Torah, the Land of Israel is not just a backdrop for the covenant but an active partner in it: “The land will rest on the seventh year, just as you rest on the seventh day.” Stewardship was sacred. When the Israelites harvested their crops, they left the corners of their fields for the poor — not just an act of charity, but as a way of acknowledging that the land, like life itself, was a gift entrusted to them.

Even in exile, we never stopped loving the land. Jews in Poland or Morocco saved coins for the blue Jewish National Fund box, dreaming of planting trees in a land they had never seen. They sang “L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim,” — Next year in Jerusalem — every Passover. They taught their children the names of the hills and valleys of Judea and Samaria, even as those places existed only in imagination and prayer.

That visceral connection is what kept us together for two thousand years. And that connection is what we are in danger of losing now.

When you talk to Idahoans — from cattle ranchers to activists chaining themselves to old-growth pines — you hear the same reverence in their voices. The land is identity. It gives them meaning beyond the daily grind, a reason to stay rooted when life gets hard. Jews once had that same resilience. It’s why we prayed facing Jerusalem in every corner of the globe. It’s why, when the chance came to return, we knew which stones to uncover and which vineyards to replant.

But for too many Jews today, Israel is a concept — political, abstract, optional. And without that visceral connection, our identity risks becoming weightless, vulnerable to every cultural storm.

To rebuild that connection, we need to stop treating Israel like a cause and start treating it like a home. That means visiting, yes, but more than that: Touching the soil, walking the trails, breathing the air, planting trees whose shade we may never sit under, and even loving her from a distance like watching Israeli movies and TV shows. It means teaching our children about Israel — the physical reality of the covenant that ties us to something larger and more enduring than ourselves.

Loving the land also means protecting it. In Israel, that obligation has inspired world-leading innovations in water conservation, reforestation, and desert agriculture. To love the land of Israel is not only to claim it but to care for it, ensuring that its beauty and vitality endure for the generations to come.

Israelis take this to heart, as personified by the Israel National Trail, one of the most remarkable ways to experience the soul of the land of Israel. Stretching more than 1,100 kilometers Kibbutz Dan near the Lebanese border in the north, to Eilat on the Red Sea in the south, the trail is a ribbon that ties together the country’s diverse geography, history, and culture. It is not just a hike; it is a journey through thousands of years of Jewish and human civilization, a walking meditation on belonging, resilience, and renewal.

Along the way, hikers traverse snow-capped mountains, lush forests, desert canyons, and serene coastlines. They pass through sites where prophets once walked, where battles of the Bible and modern history were fought, and where pioneering farmers built the foundations of today’s state. Every step on the trail offers a reminder that Israel is more than a country; it is a story, and one that continues to unfold with each generation.

The trail also reflects the deep connection between people and land that has defined the Jewish story for millennia. It is a physical reminder that Israel is not just an abstract idea or a line on a map, but a living, breathing inheritance meant to be explored, touched, and loved. It is common to see hikers — secular and religious, Israelis and visitors from abroad — sharing food, swapping stories, and offering one another places to sleep along the route. These simple acts of kindness create a sense of national community that transcends politics and ideology.

For many, walking the Israel National Trail is also a spiritual pilgrimage. It demands patience, endurance, and humility — virtues that mirror the journey of the Jewish People. And it offers moments of quiet awe: the sun rising over the Negev, the cool shade of ancient olive groves, the sound of waves crashing along the Mediterranean shore. These experiences weave together the physical and the spiritual, grounding hikers in a sense of deep gratitude for the land and for the story they are part of.

Whether completed in sections over years or in one epic thru-hike, the trail has become a modern rite of passage, particularly for young Israelis after their army service. It is a way of saying: this land is ours, but it is also bigger than us — a sacred inheritance to be cared for, cherished, and passed on.

Saharonim Mountain, on the perimeter of Ramon Crater, part of the Israel National Trail (photo: Noamdahary/Wikipedia)

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For generations, many ideas have been held up as the great unifiers of the Jewish People: shared history and memory, the sense of a single family bound together by Jewish peoplehood, the instinct for crisis and defense when enemies rise against us, and, sadly, even the ever-present shadow of antisemitism.

These forces are real, and they have sustained us through exile, persecution, and rebirth. But compared to Israel — to the physical, tangible reality of the Jewish homeland — they are pale and abstract.

Shared history and memory bind us in profound ways. From the Exodus to the Holocaust, our story is one of survival against impossible odds. But memory alone is fragile. It lives in books and museums, in holidays and sermons, but it can fade with assimilation or apathy. Without something to make that memory tactile — without a place to stand where our ancestors stood, to walk where prophets walked, to build where pioneers built — history risks becoming just that: history, distant and detached from lived experience.

Jewish peoplehood, too, is powerful. There is something extraordinary about walking into a synagogue anywhere in the world and feeling at home, about knowing that wherever there are Jews, there is family. But peoplehood without place often becomes transactional, a network rather than a nation. Israel gives peoplehood substance. It is the common ground, literally and figuratively, where the abstract idea of one people becomes concrete reality.

Even crisis and defense, as potent as they are, are not enough. Yes, Jews rally when rockets are fired from Gaza or when a swastika is scrawled on a college campus. But fear-driven unity is shallow and unsustainable. It binds us for a moment, but rarely builds anything lasting. And if the only thing keeping us together is the hatred of others, then our identity is defined by our enemies rather than by ourselves.

Israel transcends all of this because it is not an idea or a reaction; it is a reality. It is a place you can touch, taste, and claim as your own. It makes history immediate, turning prayers into geography and memory into belonging. It transforms peoplehood from theory into practice, giving Jews everywhere not just a network but a home. And it offers a unity that is active rather than reactive — a chance to build, create, and dream together, not just to defend together.

Other forces may remind us that we are one people. Israel allows us to live it.

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Jewish tradition has always understood that our connection to the land is not just historical or political; it is spiritual and cyclical. Nearly every holiday in our calendar, in one way or another, ties us to nature and the rhythms of the earth.

Tu B’Shvat, the “New Year of the Trees,” calls us to plant, to nurture, and to eat from the fruits of the land of Israel — a quiet reminder that our roots are deeper than we realize. Sukkot turns our attention to the harvest, inviting us to leave the comfort of our homes and dwell under the stars, lulav and etrog in hand, acknowledging that shelter and sustenance are gifts, not entitlements. Shavuot, which today celebrates the giving of the Torah, was once a pilgrimage to offer the first fruits of the wheat harvest, weaving gratitude for the land into gratitude for revelation itself.

Even Passover, often remembered only as a story of freedom, is tied to the barley harvest, and the foods on our Seder plates (bitter herbs, parsley, charoset) are material reminders that redemption is bound to the earth which sustains us. Lag BaOmer, with its bonfires and outdoor celebrations, reconnects us to the elements. And every new moon — every Rosh Chodesh — invites us to mark time not by clocks or spreadsheets, but by the ancient dance of the heavens.

In the land itself, there are even deeper cycles: the Sh’mitah year, when the fields rest every seventh year, and the Yovel, the Jubilee year, when land returns to its original families and society is reset. These are not just agricultural laws; they are spiritual disciplines, designed to remind us that the land is not ours to exploit but ours to tend, that we are stewards, not masters.

Our ancestors understood this intuitively: that loving God and loving the land were intertwined. To be a Jew was to live in sync with the soil, the seasons, and the sky. Recovering that truth in our own time — through planting, harvesting, hiking, or even simply pausing to notice — is how we can transform our identity from something abstract to something rooted, real, and enduring.

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There’s also urgency here.

“Anti-Zionism” is no longer a fringe ideology; it’s a mainstream hostility that questions the very right of Jews to belong anywhere, let alone in their ancestral home. To withstand that pressure, Jews need a deeper connection than political arguments or talking points. We need belonging — the unshakable certainty that the hills of Judea, the stones of Jerusalem, and the shores of the Mediterranean are not just someone else’s headlines, but our inheritance, our story, our home.

This love of land can also unite us. Just as Idahoans who disagree on everything else come together to protect a river or fight a wildfire, so too can Jews of every stripe — religious and secular, Left and Right, in Israel and in the diaspora — find common ground in our shared soil. A mountain does not ask whether you keep kosher. A desert does not check your voting record. The land is neutral, but it is also sacred.

We should also look to other peoples for inspiration. The Māori of New Zealand, the Navajo in the American Southwest, and the Basques in Spain all draw strength, cohesion, and resilience from their connection to the land. They remind us that identity rooted in place is stronger than identity built on abstraction.

And we can act. We can visit Israel not just to see but to serve — to volunteer on farms, to plant trees, to hike the land with our children and tell them its stories. We can support organizations that preserve the environment and sustain agriculture. And even in the diaspora, we can cultivate this value by bringing the outdoors into our Jewish practice — by planting gardens for Tu B’Shvat, by hiking on Shabbat afternoons, by reconnecting our rituals to the earth that has always sustained us.

The survival of the Jewish People has always depended on more than ideas. It has depended on the tangible: on the Sabbath table in exile, on the mezuzah nailed to a doorframe, and, yes, on the soil of a small strip of land — the one place in the Middle East that Moses took us to that has no oil, to paraphrase a quote from Golda Meir¹.

If we want to secure our future, we need to return to that tangible love — to remember that our story is not just about who we are, but about where we belong.

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1. Golda Meir was the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was Israel’s first and, to date, only female head of government. Born into a Jewish family in Kiev, Russian Empire, Meir immigrated with her family to the United States in 1906, before immigrating to a kibbutz in pre-state Israel.