Has Zionism Broken Judaism?

In recent years, I’ve increasingly found myself talking to Jewish folks who find it difficult – in some cases impossible – to engage in Jewish observance anymore. Without exception, these are about people who identify deeply as Jews and have actively participated in Jewish community for their entire lives. The essential issue for them is invariably the same: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza has not only turned them against Israel – it has soured them on Judaism itself.

Not long ago, my friend Sarah (not her real name) told me, with brutal honesty: “Being Jewish feels dirty to me. I feel shame.” Mind you, Sarah is not someone who has considered Judaism peripheral to her life. Quite the contrary: she’s an Israeli American who worked for years as the Executive Director of a synagogue, who routinely hosted Shabbat dinners and celebrated the Jewish holidays with friends and family. Since October 7, however, Jewish observance has become too painful for her. Part of it, she explained to me, is due to the divisions in her own family. But on a deeper level, she just can’t separate Judaism from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. “I just don’t think it’s possible to disentangle them anymore,” she said.

Anyone who knows me know I’ve been diligently engaged in this disentanglement project for years. I've regularly taken pains to point out that Judaism ≠ Zionism; that being Jewish meant something very different for thousands of years before Zionism came on this scene; that we must not allow Israel to dictate the terms of what is Jewish. Even so, I think I understand where Sarah is coming from. If we define Judaism not as a static tradition but by the metric of “what Jews actually believe and what Jews actually do,” then in a very real way, Zionism does indeed = Judaism. At present, half of the world’s Jews live in Israel. And even though support for Israel is steadily slipping among diaspora Jewry, an overwhelming majority still reports that “caring about Israel is essential or important to what being Jewish means to them”

Beyond Jewish demographic attitudes, Zionism has come to occupy (pun intended) a central role in Judaism itself. Examples of this phenomenon are legion: Jewish religious schools routinely prioritize cultivating a relationship to the state of Israel in their curricula; Israeli national holidays such as Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) have become staples on the Jewish sacred holiday calendar; and prayers for the state of Israel and for the Israeli military are included in the prayerbooks of every major Jewish denomination. The veneration of Jewish nation-statism has not only become central to Jewish civic life – it is an indelible part of Jewish religious life as well.

As the rabbi of an anti-Zionist congregation, I’ve long been part of a movement that seeks to detach Zionism from Judaism. In no small way, we’re motivated by our refusal to surrender our spiritual tradition to a toxic colonial settler ideology - because to give up on this effort would essentially mean conceding victory to Zionism. When I said as much to my friend Sarah, she responded sadly, “That’s noble, but the cynic in me says ‘dude, they’ve already won.’”

Although my experience is anecdotal, I’m increasingly hearing from Jews like her, who believe that Zionism has broken Judaism for them. They tell me that they can’t bear to celebrate Passover – a festival that commemorates Pharoah’s attempted genocide against the Israelites - while a Jewish state is actively committing an actual genocide in real time. They report that Hanukkah became tainted for them when they saw the videos of Israeli soldiers erecting Hanukkah menorahs amidst the devastation of Gaza. They couldn’t stomach making merry on Purim – a holiday that has long occasioned violence against Palestinians – when Netanyahu invoked the festival as he announced the Israel/US military onslaught on Iran.

As I ponder this issue, I’m reminded of the late Jewish writer and theologian Marc Ellis, who wrote decades ago that the “Constantinian” merging of Judaism with state power represented the “end of ethical Jewish history.” He wrote powerfully (and bitterly) about an epiphany he had while sitting in a Jewish service, when the ark was being opened and he imagined that the sacred Torah scrolls had been replaced by Israeli helicopter gunships:

I visualized the helicopter gunships transformed into ritual objects, dressed for worship, their menacing black transformed into finely rendered silver casing. I anticipated the Ark opening, the congregation bowing before the helicopter gunships as we bow before the Torah. After the prayers were chanted, the helicopter gunships would be taken around the synagogue by the Rabbi where, and with our tallit, we would kiss them, again as we kiss the Torah. The helicopter gunships would then be brought back to the Ark and with our prayers chanted, the Ark’s curtain would be closed.

Marc’s metaphor wasn’t as outrageous as it might have sounded at the time. In truth, Israeli militarism has been hopelessly enmeshed in synagogue life for decades. Many American Jewish congregations routinely stand Israeli flags on the bimah, next to the ark where the Torah scrolls are kept. Synagogues regularly host presentations by Israeli soldiers and raise funds for Friends of the IDF in their sanctuaries. Congregational gift shops openly sell yarmulkes emblazoned with Uzis and the IDF logo. In too many ways, this celebration of Jewish state power and military might is de rigueur for too many American Jewish synagogues across the denominational spectrum.

Has Zionism broken Judaism? Maybe so. But given what Judaism has become in the age of Zionism, perhaps it needs to break. Maybe it needs to break wide open. After all, isn’t that what Judaism has done at critical turning points throughout its history? Judaism as we know it was born out of the destruction of the 2nd Temple. Modernity and the Holocaust represented a massive moment of breaking open, giving rise to a plethora of Jewish movements - one of which has led us to this very moment. 

Yes, this current process of shattering has been well underway for some time. The broken pieces have long been laying scattered before us, whether we’ve chosen to see them or not. The critical question now is how we will move forward. Will we keep on davening our prayers, celebrating our holidays, observing our rituals while we willfully ignore this devastating reality? Or will we accept that our spiritual tradition has become fundamentally broken - and will have to be put back together differently if we are committed to preserving its ethical core?

Rather than mourn over (or flee from) what has been broken, maybe we should welcome this brokenness as a necessary and inevitable product of Constantinian Judaism – and from these shattered pieces rebuild Judaism into a new spiritual structure founded on justice, solidarity and liberation. What it will ultimately look like - or whether it will even succeed - is impossible to say. When one is in the midst of an emergent new paradigm, the future unfolds slowly and in ways we cannot fully predict or expect. But we know it is worth fighting for nonetheless. 

In the current moment, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Marc Ellis, who died in June 2024, while Israel’s genocide in Gaza was in full swing. I had many conversations with Marc about the future of Judaism – and while we didn’t always agree, I always looked to him as a kind of North Star on this issue. He was unsparing in his criticism of what Judaism had become, but he wasn’t ready to give up so easily on its future. 

Though Marc wasn’t an observant Jew in the conventional sense, Judaism was deeply precious to him. The essence of being Jewish, he so often wrote, was “the prophetic” – an idea he referred to as “the Jewish indigenous.” The only authentic way to act Jewishly today, Marc believed, was to act prophetically; to take a moral stand against empire, against oppressive state power, even if it invariably comes at great personal sacrifice - even if there were no guarantees.

This is how Marc concluded his 2014 book, “Future of the Prophetic: Israel’s Ancient Wisdom Re-presented” - and it is here that I will conclude as well: 

This is where we end – now. The prophetic is always before us. When Jews – with others – embody the prophetic, the worldly powers are put on notice. What happens then we know from history. The struggle intensifies. The casualties mount. The empire, always on a war footing, intensifies the war against the prophetic. Yet history remains open. Perhaps this is the ultimate message the prophets communicate to us throughout the ages. When we come to the end, against all odds, the prophet glimpses a new beginning on the horizon. When that hope will be embraced, when it will broaden so that the global community becomes prophetic, cannot be foretold in advance. The prophet is not a soothsayer. The prophet is a gatherer of light in dark times. Gathering light, hope on the horizon, justice around the corners of our lives. Eyes wide open, Israel’s ancient wisdom, re-presented, reborn.