For the liberal American Jewish community near the beginning of a new year. An essay in five sections:
Introduction
We are living through a dark moment in Jewish history. The Jewish state is embarked on a wicked campaign of violence, terror, and forced starvation in Gaza. Our other major population center here in the United States contends with rising antisemitism amidst a broader, government-led assault on the principles and institutions that make this country one where Jews have been able to thrive like few other places and periods in our history.
As I age and witness the days of my youth transform into history, so much of the current state of the world takes on a sheen of inevitability: Netanyahu’s domestic political project in Israel; Israel’s campaign of military terror in the land that would be Palestine; American discourse about Israel; American politics more broadly. I was six in 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. This has all been moving in the same direction, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, for most of my life. Perhaps that is oversimple, or somehow out of bounds and unhelpful, to believe and say. But it is a thought that has overwhelmed me this year, and I am done trying not to write about it.
Rabbi Sharon Brous alluded to the same in her Rosh Hashanah sermon. If you swapped “Israel” and “Jewish” for “America” and “American”, the second paragraph would remain accurate:
“If this is hard for you to hear, then let me remind you of the way Prime Minister Rabin spoke after a Jewish terrorist murdered 29 Muslims in prayer in Hebron in 1994: “I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer,” he said. You are not part of the community of Israel… You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You have placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism.”
But that was thirty years ago. Israel’s government today is led by and beholden to that errant weed, extremists driving it to behave ever more like a rogue state, bound neither by foundational Jewish principles nor international law, not to mention basic democratic norms.”
We cannot fight our way out, or build something new without admitting where we are and at least noticing, if not understanding, how we got here. Because we are here.
There is much at stake, too much to waste our time trying to preserve rather than transform. Like much of the world, the American Jewish community is shifting paradigms in real time. Whether we like it or not, liberal Jews must embrace an old cliche and turn crisis into opportunity, or we will not be the ones who decide our place in whatever comes next. How we meet this moment will reverberate far into the future.
Institutions
The past two years have scrambled the American Jewish community. The war in Gaza, rising antisemitism, and America’s recently re-empowered authoritarian consolidation have forced us to confront deep and complicated questions. Our attempts to answer them, personally and communally, provoke a range of moral-emotional reactions – and a secondary wave of moral-emotional analysis about what the first wave means for our core beliefs and commitments as humans and as Jews. We are in crisis, and all things are open to reappraisal.
Eric Alterman wrote last May in the New Republic about the deepening ideological fault lines beneath the landscape of organizations that represent American Jews in the public square:
First, there are the “legacy” groups, which are the best known and best funded, and inarguably the most influential. It’s fair to say that they see themselves as the contemporary manifestation of the historic shtadlanim (intercessors), those Jews appointed to represent the entire community to whatever ruling powers happened to control the region in which they found themselves. [These groups] without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with [Trump].
…A second set of organizations seeks instead to speak for the Jewish majority that consistently votes Democratic and remains committed to defending democracy in both Israel and the United States. Working with far fewer resources than the legacy groups, they walk a political tightrope, balancing their simultaneous commitments to both Zionism and the traditional Jewish liberal agenda.
…In the space beyond both groups are those on the far right and left. The far right’s influence has rocketed skyward of late, owing to what former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller calls “the Vulcan mind meld between Trump and Netanyahu on undermining the independence of the courts and fighting the ‘woke left.’”…On the opposite side of the spectrum are the youth-dominated, protest-oriented groups [who] insist that it is their commitment to Jewish values and religious teachings that underlies their anti-Israel politics.
The political groups that (nominally) represent us are engaged in ideological combat, competing for influence in the Jewish community and the larger discourse. Alterman notes that, while October 7 pushed these organizations into greater conflict, the return of Donald Trump is what really sparked a major escalation:
“We are in the early stages of a Jewish civil war unmatched since the early battles over Zionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In essence, Trump and the forces arrayed behind him—the legacy organizations, a new and well-financed right-wing Jewish media, and the Christian evangelical world that blindly supports Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu—have offered American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value and that have provided the foundation for all they have been able to accomplish as Americans.”
You or I might favor one of these factions or another, but let’s set that aside for a moment. Alterman is describing a set of institutions in overdrive, pressured by current events, striving to be more than reactive in a time of deep uncertainty. This will not endure forever. We are arriving at a moment for decisions, and it’s not only political groups. The unceasing cadence and growing conspiracism of American politics, the horror of October 7 and abject barbarity of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the bargain Alterman describes above; all of it exerts pressure across the landscape of Jewish life. Everywhere, faultlines and tremors.
People
Institutional crises unfold in a world of programs and strategic plans, balance sheets and performance metrics; a person in crisis just unfolds. How are we as people? According to recent polling from the Institute for Experiential Jewish Education, as reported by Grace Gilson for JTA:
“Less than a quarter of Jewish community workers report often feeling hopeful about the future, according to the poll…The respondents — nearly 950 employees of Jewish organizations in the United States — said their hopelessness was not primarily driven by antisemitism or Israel’s multifront war. Instead, the most frequent answer was ‘internal communal division,’ comprising nearly twice as many answers as other concerns.”
In providing context for when the poll was conducted, the article also indicates something of why it yielded such results: “The survey was fielded between July and August, following Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran, but before the focus of media coverage on Israel’s offensive in Gaza shifted to reports of widespread starvation in the enclave.”
The survey data confirms what many understand anecdotally. Anyone whose work overlaps with the Jewish world probably has stories that illustrate the way October 7 and the second Trump administration has forced organizations to adjust strategic plans, face impossible decisions, balance the diverging perspectives of various stakeholders, etc:
After that, respondents listed “leadership failures,” followed by “external hostility/antisemitism” and “navigating Israel discourse.” They also described feeling “caught between competing factions,” “unable to navigate constituency expectations,” and “watching our community tear itself apart,” according to the report.
The survey reminds me of my least favorite part of my own job in the Jewish communal world: the three-sentence statement. I don’t think anyone else calls them that, but each time some tragic or violent event throws the Jewish world, or the whole world, into panic or mourning or deep unrest, I write a short statement. It will be placed at the top or bottom of a previously scheduled email, to acknowledge the pain in the community and so that the ongoing operations of our organization do not appear callous or insensitive or tone-deaf. Sometimes a three sentence statement only needs two sentences, on occasion it might call for four. In every case, these sentences must reference the tragic event, but never in a graphic or overly descriptive way. They must acknowledge the presence of horror and emotional pain, but they must avoid all politics. They must be light on details which might seed disagreement, and heavy on the unobjectionable language of our values. They must be broad without being generic, pointed without pointing fingers. When choppy waters already heave us to and fro, there is no need to risk further rocking the boat.
Pushed and squeezed and boggled by current events, American Jewish life is shifting paradigms in real time. Returning to Eric Alterman in the New Republic near the end of his piece (emphases mine):
“During the course of writing and researching this article, I had occasion to speak to dozens of liberal Jewish leaders and noted scholars of American Jewish history. Among them, the only difference I could discern in their views was their degree of concern—a better word in many cases would be “panic”—over what constitutes the greater threat to American Jews: Trump’s attack on universities and his apparently unconstitutional treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the name of combating “antisemitism,” or the threats to the survival of U.S. democracy inherent in these actions.
Both of these, however, are tied up with the problem of the transformation of Israel into a country to which millions of liberal American Jews remain profoundly emotionally committed, but whose government consistently violates their most deeply held values.
I deeply relate to the liberal Jews Alterman interviewed. I too, am concerned about how the Trump administration’s weaponization of antisemitism (exclusively, from what I can tell, on the left) will variously impact American democracy and American Jews. I too, struggle in anguish with my relationship to Israel after all these years under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, this ever-intensifying defilement of the state’s moral and ideological commitments as enunciated in its founding document. The crisis facing America’s Liberal Jews is not only of conscience, but of spirit. Alterman continues:
Taken together, these challenges combine to present American Jews with what J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami described as the fundamental question: “What does it mean to be Jewish in the U.S. in the middle of the twenty-first century?”
Jeremy Ben-Ami’s question is real, but also gestures at something I worry about: much of American Jewish discourse today amounts to “picking a side” on Israel, and then figuring out whether to devote more concern to antisemitism “from the left” or “from the right” (as if hatred and suspicion of Jews were not the solvent that allows the two extremes to blend into each other somewhere along the unlit portion of America’s political spectrum).
Maybe it is not so bad to be focused on these things considering the state of the world. Still, I worry about the opportunity cost liberal American Jews pay by flattening the Jewish experience to fit these two axes, antisemitism and the questions of Jewish statehood and power. The crisis in our community is not more effectively addressed, nor is the material state of the world improved in Israel or anywhere else, and still we are diminished.
Universalism, Particularism, the Torah
In order to meet this moment with the honesty, conviction, and effectiveness it demands, we must identify the crisis we face at its most fundamental level. In this, I find Ben-Ami’s further clarification instructive in defining the terms of his question about the next paradigm of Jewish life in America:
On the one side is ‘fealty to domination,’ a particularist Jewish vision that is ‘tribal, nationalist, and territorialist.’ On the other are the ‘liberal universalist values’ that have historically defined the politics and culture of (non-Orthodox) American Jewish life.
This crisis is forcing liberal Jews into a thicket of painful questions about Jewish meaning and identity raised by Zionism and antisemitism, which sharpens the tension between particularism and universalism that has become an ongoing crisis for liberalism itself. This tension is best encapsulated by Hillel’s famous pair of questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?”
To make a beautiful and concise point more laborious and extreme: Is our obligation to secure the safety and wellbeing of our fellow group members, even when this might cause damage to people outside the group or the larger social order? Or is our obligation to promote a broader harmony guided by the group’s deeper ethical and ideological commitments, even if it causes damage to some in the group who benefit from the current arrangement of power?
(It’s worth keeping in mind that particularism does not oblige one to welcome or work for the downfall of others, only to protect and prioritize those who matter in some personal or historical or otherwise identifying communal framework. I say this to note that this way of seeing and sorting the world does not automatically entail adopting a set of rhetorical and moral principles that grant permission to persecute people. The style of nationalism that speaks a story of violence and corruption in the language of order and purity is something far more perverse than simple particularism.)
Because of a great side gig, I read and thought about the Torah more in 5785 than any other year of my adult life. I am not a rabbi, and my Hebrew is barely at the college level, so I approach the text as someone who loves to read, and who loves to write stories, and who wants to learn something. All year, I paid attention to the Torah’s commitments to the universal and particular.
If you’re searching for particularism in the Torah you don’t have to look very hard; God is pretty upfront about proclaiming the chosenness of the Jewish people, setting them apart as distinct. (For now, let’s also set apart our impulse to proclaim problematic.) What drew my attention this year was how that distinction is expressed and manifested in Leviticus. The third book of the Torah instructs the Israelites on how to maintain their covenant with God–a divine particularist signifier–through ritual sacrifice, health standards, moral and legal codes, and other practices. The ritual sacrifice happens in the Tabernacle, or Mishkan, God’s dwelling place among the Israelites in the wilderness, constructed to exacting detail following a set of instructions laid out near the end of Exodus. These same practices will apply to the Temple they will build in Jerusalem later in the Bible. This is the origin of Jewish particularity as a lived experience: in a world of many gods, a distinct worship practice linked to a distinct set of social codes and systems would bind the people to their distinct and only God.
Universalism is found in many places in the Torah, but nowhere more so than the text’s constant instruction to care for the “ger”, or traveler/stranger/foreigner, repeated thirty-six times in the text. A society with no notion of a larger obligation to humanity would not invest so much meaning in these words to repeat them over and over again. Also repeated is the commandment’s justification, a reminder that we were slaves and outsiders in the land of Egypt, freed and redeemed by the grace of God. We must strive to relate to others, to see humanity in the face of the stranger because we know what it means to be strangers. Because we are participating in a shared human project. The Passover seder is structured around this idea. Each year we gather to remind ourself that every Jew, in every generation, was present for the exodus from Egypt. This is the beating heart of Jewish civilization.
The particularism of Leviticus is similarly justified by the exodus. The third book of the Torah is light on plot, thick with detailed descriptions of ritual and sacrifice and the material-spiritual labor or separating sacred and profane. Then we arrive at Chapter 26, the second to last, and God clarifies the stakes–bountiful blessings or horrifying curses–and, more importantly, the motivation: “I am God who brought you out of the land of the Egyptians to be their slaves no more, who broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect” (26:13). Even if Jews of one generation stray from this path, God will “remember in their favor the covenant with the ancients whom I freed from Egypt” (45).
Enslaved in Egypt, freed by God. Universalism and particularism in the Torah share this justification, which suggests that rather than separate, they are vital and linked at their roots.
The First and Final Test
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? Hillel pairs these questions to get at something fundamental about being Jewish, an opportunity and obligation to simultaneously wrestle with and accept this tension in our lives and in the world; to attempt to make sense of when and how and why we set boundaries of tribe and stranger. Insistenting that one impulse permanently supersedes the other misses the point.
The things that make you you in the world and the things that make you care about the world are the same things. The tension between universalism and particularism is baked into the Jewish experience because it is baked into the human experience. This is something I believe in my bones as a Jew, and as a reader and writer of fiction. The power of narrative lives in that tension. Here’s what I mean: every one of us is living our own subjective experience; I do not know what it means to be you and you do not know what it means to be me. But a great story manages to bridge the divide between our particular subjectivities. A lot of this is about details. For a story to originate in one context and mean something in another, the writer finds the details that communicate universal meaning in a particular situation of character, setting, and plot.
An example from the Torah. Chapter 28 of Exodus describes the official garments of the priesthood, bejeweled chest plates and fine linen tunics adorned in fine colorful yarns. Even in translation, you can almost sense the ancient writers’ excitement in the descriptions, the parceling and repetition of details gathering together like so many layers and folds of material. I think they thought the outfits were cool. I also imagine those writers attempting a similar act of creative imagination, trying to relate to the garments’ original designers as they draft their text.
It’s the details that spark that creative imagination, which is how we sense the shared humanity that opens us up to the transformative power of a story, or any other meaningful pre-scripted experience–a one act play, a great meal, a worship ritual, a museum exhibit, a text. We discover the universal in our loving exploration of the particular.
Today the tension between particularism and universalism is a lens for understanding politics all over the world, including the United States and the conflict about what this country is meant to be. And all over the world, the various levers of power for shaping discourse, and, increasingly, decision-making, are captured by people who stake maximalist positions in one direction or the other. Too often, (even liberal) Jewish discourse follows the same course. We are steeped in a culture that insists the only way is to pick a side when we all know deep down it isn’t possible and the pretending doesn’t help.
When we yield the floor to loud extremists who insist universalism and particularism are binary opposites, we allow ourselves to be diverted into cul de sacs of paralyzing absolutism by the comforting illusion of moral and epistemological certainty. We sacrifice our ability to communicate with any nuance or grace. An irreconcilable tension that affects our emotional, spiritual, social, and political lives, and we leave no room for nuance or grace.
This is where I see the opportunity cost: Navigating the tension between universalism and particularism in any frank, honest, and meaningful way is the first and final test of humankind’s humanity. When Jewish identity becomes another battle between the extremes, we deny its potential to offer us a way out. To offer much of anything transcendent. To help us develop our capacity for deep hope, hope that takes real effort. Hope that will someday shine bright enough to guide us out of this darkness. Sitting in tensions like these are where the work of spirituality happens.
I understand if at first consideration this position might feel bloodless in comparison to the strength of our anger and despair. However we feel, we feel it fiercely. But I am speaking from the gut, not the heart, and in my gut I am a pragmatist, humble in the face of our shared human condition. To me this is a question of accepting reality, so that we might learn and communicate honestly and vulnerably, so that we might strengthen our power to act with compassion and awareness in the world.
Of course we need to confront Trump’s bargain, and the rest of America’s horrors, and Israel’s. Nothing I am proposing here contravenes our duty to speak and act with moral conviction to oppose forced starvation, plainclothes masked police squads, and all the rest. There is so much to do and account for. I believe it would only help to back away from our absolutisms and make common cause with people who share our conviction about how we want to make the world change tomorrow, and next week, and next month, even if we might not agree about how it should look in two or twenty years.
What would this look like? That is for another time, but for now I will start here: I believe it starts by acknowledging that deep human tensions are something we each get to evaluate for ourselves, even if we wrestle with them together. That is to say, without a larger agenda, we should empower people to learn together, think and talk deeply about the world, and evolve their opinions in whatever way this leads them.
And, because I cannot help myself, I will add this as well: I share in the opinion of Adam Serwer and others that much of the suffering and calamity in the world today is evidence of failure, capitulation, or unseriousness on the part of leaders and elites. Self-interest, naivete, incuriosity, overconfidence–these are the notable qualities of too many of the people we are meant to look to and rely on. Leaders who do not understand that the paradigm is shifting. They might occupy a leadership role, but they are not leading. I see this in the Jewish world too. Maintaining influence, preserving position, and aiming only to avoid controversy are simply more elaborate methods of marching toward insignificance and defeat. Let me put this another way: Are you okay living in a world whose most effective Jewish leaders are Benjamin Netanyahu and Stephen Miller?
The paradigm is shifting. I believe that what we build next should begin inside the tension between the universal and the particular, and then grow to encompass it. It will be uncomfortable, and challenging, but worth it. Whatever we build, we will know that we trust the honesty of its foundation. The hope it yields will abide, and so will we.
[Coda]
I planned to publish this essay in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but in my revising I discovered a few new ideas to explore, so I missed my self-imposed deadline. It is hard to write an essay like this when so much changes each day in Israel, Palestine, and here in the United States. At times I wondered if I should contend more directly with the possibility that whatever paradigm we are shifting into will be existential for the Jews. For that reason, I offer the following reflection, written last November, about Jewish resistance:
Jewish resistance begins with humor. Laughter frees the spirit. Laughing at the absurd is a way of telling the truth. Laughing at the powerful is a way of claiming power.
Jewish resistance can move underground. We will do it in secret if we have to. We will hide our books. We will build gathering places concealed in the walls. We will remember all the stories. We will paint them on bricks and concrete in the night. We will sing at a whisper and our song will tell the truth.
Jewish resistance does not end. If it comes to it, and we are to the ghetto, we will fight. We will fight like our ancestors. We will fight until no one can win. We will fight because it grinds the gears of their machine until someone else can pick up the fight. And they will keep at it until someone comes to save whoever is left, and our story will be told with the others when it all comes back around, and a new generation is called, once again, to resist.
Adam Zemel 