Parashat Balak contains one of the most unusual narratives in the Torah. For almost the entire portion, the Jewish people disappear from the story.
Throughout the Torah, we experience events through Moses, the Israelites, or God speaking directly to His people. This week is different. The Israelites continue their journey completely unaware of the drama unfolding around them. Instead, the Torah lifts us to the mountaintops of Moab, where King Balak and the prophet Balaam stand overlooking the Israelite camp below.
For the only time in the Torah, we see the Jewish people entirely through the eyes of outsiders.
That perspective is striking. The story told reminds us that long before anyone attempts to destroy a people, they first seek to define them.
Balak does not look upon Israel and see the descendants of Abraham returning to the land God promised their forefathers. He does not see a nation recently liberated from slavery or a people carrying a covenant that would shape the moral foundations of civilization. Looking down from the mountain, he sees only a threat. Once he reaches that conclusion, everything else follows naturally. A dangerous people deserve to be weakened. A dangerous people deserve to be cursed.
Before there is violence, there is narrative.
Balak understands that words have power. If Israel can be portrayed as an illegitimate menace, hostility becomes easier to justify. He therefore summons Balaam, believing that the right words can reshape reality itself.
But the Torah teaches exactly the opposite lesson.
Each time Balaam opens his mouth to curse Israel, God compels him to describe what he actually sees rather than what Balak wishes were true. The curses become blessings. The accusations become admiration. Instead of condemning Israel, Balaam proclaims, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.”
The battle in Parashat Balak is ultimately not over land or military strength. It is over definition. Who has the authority to describe the Jewish people? A fearful king looking down from a distant mountain, or the God who entered into covenant with them?
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s “Balaam’s Ass”, 1626
That ancient struggle continues today.
Many of the loudest voices speaking about the Jewish people insist on defining them for themselves. Jewish history is recast as though the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel were a modern political invention rather than the foundation of Jewish civilization. Jerusalem is detached from the people who have been praying toward it for thousands of years. The descendants of ancient Israel become foreign colonizers in the very land where their national story began.
“European Jewish Zionists claimed to be descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews and to be merely “returning” to their ancient land.” – Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, July 2022
The same impulse appears in discussions of antisemitism. Increasingly, others claim the authority to determine what Jews should consider antisemitic while dismissing the experience of Jewish communities themselves. The people who are the object of hatred are told they cannot define the hatred directed against them.
The pattern is remarkably familiar.
Balak first decided the Israelites were a threat and concluded they deserved condemnation. The false identity justified the action.
The Torah overturns that process.
The only outsider whose words are remembered for eternity is the one whom God compels to abandon prejudice and speak truth. Balaam climbed the mountain intending to curse Israel, but he remained a prophet. He still recognized that there was a Judge above him. When God commanded him to bless, his own desires gave way to a higher truth.
Today’s loudest critics acknowledge no such authority beyond themselves. They do not seek God’s judgment but the approval of crowds, political movements, or academic fashions. Their words may echo through universities, international institutions, social media, and the halls of government, but they carry no weight in Heaven. They resonate only among fellow travelers who have already chosen contempt over truth.
Three thousand years ago, God refused to allow those who hated Israel to define Israel. That remains the enduring lesson of Parashat Balak. The Jewish people are not who their enemies say they are. They are who God says they are.
“Now the days were the days of the first ripe grapes” (Numbers 13:20).
At first glance, the verse appears to be little more than a calendar note. The spies entered Canaan during harvest season. Naturally they found grapes.
But the Torah rarely includes details without purpose.
The Israelites had spent generations hearing about a land flowing with milk and honey. They stood at the threshold of that promise. The spies were being sent to verify it. They entered the land at the very moment when its abundance would be on full display. The nation was waiting for proof.
And the spies returned carrying exactly that proof: an enormous cluster of grapes from the Valley of Eshkol.
Panel showing two Israelite spies carrying enormous grapes from map by Jan Jansson, 1631
Yet the sages make a curious observation. According to Sotah 34a, the ten spies who delivered the negative report carried the produce. Joshua and Caleb carried nothing.
Why not?
The question becomes even more intriguing when we remember that this is not the first time representatives of the tribes returned carrying evidence.
Centuries earlier, Joseph’s brothers returned to Jacob with Joseph’s coat dipped in blood. They never explicitly claimed Joseph was dead. They simply presented the evidence and allowed Jacob to reach the conclusion they intended.
Perhaps the spies were doing something similar.
We often read the giant cluster of grapes as proof of the goodness of the land. But what if that was not how the spies intended it to be understood?
The Torah’s report moves almost seamlessly from the fruit to the inhabitants:
“Indeed it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Nevertheless, the people who dwell in the land are strong…” (Numbers 13:27-28)
Look at these grapes, the spies may have been saying. Ordinary men do not live in a place that produces fruit like this. The same land that yields giant grapes yields giant warriors.
Seen this way, the grapes were not simply a sample of the harvest. They were evidence enlisted in support of a conclusion they sought to impart: fear.
This possibility sheds new light on the teaching in Sotah. If the fruit was being used to support the spies’ narrative, Joshua and Caleb’s refusal to carry it becomes understandable. They were not rejecting the grapes. They were rejecting the interpretation attached to them.
The parallel to Joseph’s coat becomes even deeper when we consider who these men were.
Joshua descended from Joseph through Ephraim. Caleb descended from Judah. The descendants of Joseph and Judah became the two spies who stood apart from the majority.
Joseph’s brothers brought a coat. The spies brought grapes. Neither group needed to invent evidence. The objects were real. What mattered was the narrative attached to them.
The brothers used a coat to tell a story about Joseph. The spies used grapes to tell a story about the Land. In both cases, the evidence itself did not contain the conclusion. The conclusion came from those presenting it.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson connecting these two stories. Facts matter, but facts rarely arrive without interpretation. The same coat could become evidence of tragedy or merely separation. The same cluster of grapes could become evidence of giants or evidence of God’s promise.
The challenge is not simply to examine the evidence before us. It is to recognize the narrative that accompanies it and to ask whether the story being told is the only one the evidence supports.
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attacked Israel this week, most English-language reports focused on his accusations of genocide, his attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his warnings about regional instability.
But Arabic and Turkish media focused on a different line.
According to Turkey’s own state-run Anadolu Agency, Erdoğan declared:
“We know very well what the ultimate objective of the delusions of the Promised Land is, and God willing, we will never allow it.”
It is a line he has used for years. It’s a headline phrase across the Arab world. Al Jazeera highlighted it. Egypt’s Al-Ahram highlighted it. Al-Quds Al-Arabi highlighted it. He uses it as a charge that Israel is coming for Turkey itself.
Yet the English-language media ignored it.
That omission matters because Erdoğan was no longer criticizing Israeli policy. He was ridiculing a foundational Jewish belief.
The Promised Land is not a policy of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not a platform of the Israeli government. It is a central element of Jewish faith, history, and identity dating back more than three thousand years. It appears throughout the Hebrew Bible and has been part of Jewish religious life through centuries of exile.
Calling that belief a “delusion” is no different than mocking Christian belief in the Resurrection or Muslim belief in the divine revelation of the Quran.
There is a word for dismissing the core religious beliefs of Jews as uniquely illegitimate: antisemitism.
Yet English-language audiences were shielded from that reality. Readers were told Erdoğan was criticizing Israel. They were not told he was deriding one of Judaism’s foundational beliefs. That this is a Muslim war against the Jews.
For years, Western audiences have been told that criticism of Israel must be distinguished from hostility toward Jews. But when a foreign leader publicly mocks a core tenet of Judaism and the press translates it into a story solely about Israeli policy, the distinction is being used in reverse. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is sanitized and repackaged as ordinary criticism of Israel.
Arabic readers saw what Erdoğan actually chose to emphasize. English readers did not, guided on a narrow path to direct the public.
Parshat Beha’alotcha opens with the lighting of the Menorah.
The Haftorah from Zechariah returns to the same image but adds a remarkable detail. The prophet sees a golden Menorah fed by two olive trees, one on each side, supplying a continuous flow of oil.
Confused by the vision, Zechariah asks what it means. The answer contains one of the most famous lines in the Bible:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” – Zechariah 4:6
The vision came during the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. A small Jewish community had returned from Babylonian exile and faced the daunting task of restoring both a city and a nation.
Many readers focus on the famous verse. The prophet, however, devotes considerable attention to the two olive trees.
Rashi, following the Talmud, identifies the two olive trees with Joshua the High Priest and Zerubbabel the governor. One represented the spiritual leadership of the nation. The other represented its political and civic restoration.
The symbolism is powerful.
The Menorah stands between spiritual leadership and political leadership. Between the Temple and the city. Between faith and statecraft.
The vision’s message was not that politics would save the Jewish people. Nor was it that spiritual life alone would rebuild Jerusalem.
The Temple could not stand without a city. A city could not fulfill its purpose without the values embodied by the Temple.
That lesson echoed throughout Jewish history.
Kings and prophets, priests and governors, rabbis and communal leaders each played different roles in sustaining Jewish life. Sometimes they cooperated. Sometimes they clashed. Yet Jewish continuity depended on both the preservation of spiritual purpose and the institutions capable of carrying that purpose into the world.
Today, Israel’s state emblem places a Menorah at its center, flanked by olive branches. The design was inspired by the Menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. Yet the image also echoes Zechariah’s vision of a Menorah being reestablished in Jerusalem, standing between olive trees.
A people of faith needs security, institutions, and leadership. A nation needs purpose, values, and a mission greater than itself.
Zechariah’s vision does not place the Menorah beneath a single olive tree.
It stands between two.
The light of Israel emerges from the meeting point of spiritual purpose and national life.
In 1979, archaeologists excavating a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, on a hillside overlooking the Old City walls of Jerusalem, discovered two tiny silver scrolls. When carefully unrolled, they revealed words that Jews still recite today.
Ketef Hinnom scrolls
The scrolls, engraved more than 2,600 years ago, contain the priestly blessing from Parshat Naso:
“May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face upon you and grant you peace.”
They are the oldest known biblical texts ever discovered.
Every year, Jews encounter these verses when Parshat Naso is read in synagogue. Parents recite them over their children on Friday nights. In Israel, kohanim still stand before congregations every day and deliver the same blessing first commanded to Aaron and his descendants in the wilderness.
What makes the Ketef Hinnom discovery extraordinary is not only its age, but its location.
The silver scrolls were found only a short distance from the Temple Mount, where priests once pronounced these words over the people of Israel. Few archaeological discoveries draw such a direct line across three millennia. The oldest surviving biblical text was found almost within sight of the place where it was commanded to be spoken.
The content of the blessing is equally remarkable. The oldest biblical inscription yet discovered is neither a king’s decree nor a military victory. It is a passage from the Bible that culminates in a single aspiration:
Shalom. Peace.
The prayer asks for blessing, protection, grace, and ultimately peace itself. Those hopes remain as familiar today as they were to the Jerusalem resident who carried the silver amulet twenty-six centuries ago.
The scrolls from Ketef Hinnom remind us that Jerusalem, the Bible, and the pursuit of peace have stood at the center of Jewish life for thousands of years.
“May the Lord bless you and keep you.”
The empires of the ancient world survive in ruins. This blessing survives in a people.
Parshat Bamidbar appears to focus on logistics: censuses, military formations, camp arrangements. Yet beneath the counting sits a striking idea. The Jewish people are becoming a nation, while still preserving tribes.
That is extraordinary.
The descendants of Jacob had spent centuries in Egypt. They suffered together, left Egypt together, received one Torah together, and followed one prophet toward one land. Most nations formed through such an experience would emerge flattened into a single identity.
Yet Bamidbar carefully restores the tribes as though the years in Egypt had barely interrupted the original family structure.
Judah remains Judah. Ephraim remains Ephraim. Dan remains Dan.
The land itself will eventually be divided according to those ancient tribal lines, rooted in the original sons of Jacob. Time passed. Generations died. Slavery reshaped the people. Yet the inheritance map waiting in Canaan hundreds of years earlier remained intact.
The Torah is preserving continuity.
Modern states often try to weaken regional, familial, or tribal identities in favor of a single centralized national identity. Bamidbar moves differently. The tribes each have their own banner, leader, place in the camp, and future territory. Later Jewish history associates distinct characteristics with them: Judah and kingship, Levi and spiritual service, Issachar and scholarship, Zebulun and commerce.
The camp around the Mishkan reflects this structure beautifully. At the center stands the shared spiritual core. Around it stand distinct tribes in ordered formation. Difference remains visible, yet everything faces the same center.
Closeup of tribes around mishkan from Jan Jansson (1588-1664) map of the Holy Land, 1630
That may be one of Bamidbar’s deepest teachings about nationhood. A healthy nation leaves room for distinct identities, histories, and roles while binding them to a larger shared mission.
The census itself reinforces this idea. People are counted through families and ancestral houses. The Torah is reconnecting the wilderness generation to the covenantal family that entered Egypt centuries earlier. Egypt could enslave the Israelites, but the deeper inheritance endured.
Jewish history would repeat this pattern again and again. Jews entered foreign civilizations across thousands of years while carrying older identities beneath the surface. Languages changed. Governments changed. Geography changed. The continuity remained.
Bamidbar therefore reads as far more than a census. It is a declaration that covenant survives exile, and that unity becomes strongest when rooted in enduring memory, shared purpose, and distinct communities gathered around a sacred center.
In the Hebrew Bible, Abraham, the father of monotheism, is tested ten times. The biblical commentator Rashi (1040-1105) lists them out, and it is curious to line them against the ten nations that inhabit the land that God promises to Abraham.
10 Tests according to Rashi
10 Nations in the promised land
Abraham hid underground for 13 years from King Nimrod, who wanted to kill him.
Kenites
Nimrod flung Abraham into a burning furnace.
Kenizzites
Abraham was commanded to leave his family and homeland.
Kadmonites
As soon as he arrived in Canaan, he was forced to leave to escape famine to Egypt.
Hittites
Sarah was kidnapped by Pharaoh’s officials.
Perizzites
The 4 kings captured Lot, and Abraham went out to war to rescue him.
Rephaites
God told Abraham that his offspring would suffer exile and slavery for 400 years initially four monarchies.
Amorites
At 99, Abraham was commanded to circumcise himself and his household.
Canaanites
Abraham was instructed to drive away Ishmael and Hagar.
Girgashites
He was commanded to sacrifice Isaac.
Jebusites
The Torah never tells us to match them one by one, but two of Abraham’s tests align so precisely with two of those nations that they reveal the architecture of the covenant itself: one in the flesh, one on the mountain.
The first is brit milah and Canaan, what we know of today as the bulk of the land of Israel.
When God first expands Abraham’s promise of land in Book of Genesis 13, He tells him to rise and walk it: Arise, walk through the land, its length and breadth, for I will give it to you.
Abraham walks the land before he owns it.
But in Genesis 17, when the covenant is deepened through circumcision, the order changes. God commands Abraham to mark the covenant into his own body and then immediately ties that mark to the promise of land: I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan.
The sequence is striking.
First Abraham walks the land. Then Abraham marks the flesh. The lesson is deeper than ownership. You cannot carry covenantal land unless the covenant is carried within you.
Before borders, there is obligation. Before sovereignty, there is submission.
The modern world treats land as politics—lines, armies, treaties. The Torah treats land as moral space. Canaan is not merely inherited geography. It is covenantal geography. And covenantal geography requires covenantal people.
Brit milah is the title deed, not written on parchment, but on the body itself.
The land of Canaan is not inherited simply because it was promised. It is inherited because Abraham accepted what the promise demanded.
Then comes the Akedah and the Jebusites, which takes place in Jerusalem.
If brit milah secures the land broadly, the Akedah secures its heart.
Abraham’s greatest trial takes place on Mount Moriah, where he binds Isaac and prepares to surrender the son through whom every promise was meant to continue. Jewish tradition identifies that mountain with the future Temple Mount, the site held by the Jebusites until King David captures it and makes it the spiritual center of Israel, 3,000 years ago.
That means Abraham’s greatest and final test takes place at the future center of Jewish history. That is not incidental.
Long before David purchases it, long before King Solomon builds the Temple, long before priests serve and pilgrims ascend, Abraham stands there and confronts the deepest truth of covenant: even the future belongs to God.
Canaan is the inheritance of the body. Its covenant is sealed in flesh.
Jerusalem is the inheritance of the soul. Its covenant is sealed in surrender.
One is broad territory. The other is concentrated holiness.
The land of the Canaanites – the land of Israel – is the essence of the covenant between God and the Jews; the land of the Jebusites – Jerusalem – is the center of that faith. These are lessons that God imparted to Abraham in the year 2023 of the Jewish calendar that anchors Judaism to this day.
The covenant is complete: blessing and curse, prosperity and famine, exile and return. Bechukotai lays out the full drama of covenantal life and its consequences. The Torah even sounds like it is closing the book: “These are the statutes and laws and teachings that the Lord gave between Himself and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai.”
It feels finished.
And then there is chapter 27. Vows. Valuations. Tithes. Cherem.
It feels almost out of place, like an appendix attached after the ending.
Until you realize it is answering a different question.
For twenty-six chapters, Leviticus has written the script of covenantal life. It teaches what must be done: the sacrifices to bring, the boundaries to keep, the sacred times to observe, the society to build. It is the architecture of obedience.
But a script alone does not create a performance.
A script tells you what must happen. It creates the structure. What it cannot provide is the actor.
That is chapter 27.
After all the commandments have been given, after the covenant is written, the Torah turns back to the individual and asks: what will you bring that was never required?
Will you make a vow? Will you dedicate your field? Will you sanctify what still feels like yours?
That is why the book ends with possessions. Because ownership is where devotion becomes real. Your produce, your livestock, your property, your word itself.
That question feels especially modern. Ours is a culture of minimums—minimum compliance, minimum obligation, minimum sacrifice. We measure success by how much we can retain, not by what we are willing to dedicate.
Obedience is fulfilling what is required. Devotion begins when a person chooses to give beyond the minimum, to consecrate what he could have kept, to bind himself by a word he never had to speak.
That is the final lesson of Leviticus. Holiness does not end with obedience.
Obedience follows the script. Devotion begins where the script ends.
The Torah can command obedience. Only people can choose devotion.
The menorah in the Mishkan was about the height of a person at that time. According to the rabbinic tradition in Babylonian Talmud, the menorah stood eighteen tefachim high, somewhere between four and a half and five and a half feet depending on the measure.
That is a strange choice. The Torah could have commanded a towering monument, a giant golden structure rising upward into sacred space. That is what the ancient world did. Temples were built to dwarf the worshipper. Gods were elevated into inaccessible heights, their homes designed to overwhelm and diminish those who approached. Yet when the Torah returns to the menorah in Leviticus in Parshat Emor, it commands to keep its lamps burning continually – at human scale.
The God of Israel does not seek awe; He seeks encounter. The menorah stood at eye level because holiness in Judaism is not built on distance but relationship.
Its form deepens the message. The menorah is shaped like a tree. Hammered from one piece of gold and adorned with almond blossoms, buds, and flowers, it evokes organic life, growth, and rootedness. Rashi and Nachmanides understood it as a symbol of divine wisdom and life itself. The imagery reaches backward to Eden and the Tree of Life standing at the center of creation. The menorah is that tree brought into history, planted in the center of Israel’s sacred life.
And it is more than a tree. It is time in the shape of a tree. Seven branches, seven flames, seven points of light. Like the seven days of creation, the menorah gathers into one object the architecture of existence itself. In Judaism, seven is the structure of the world. Creation unfolds in seven days. The land rests in the seventh year. Freedom resets in the seventh cycle of the jubilee. Sacred time is built in sevens, and the menorah gathers that pattern into gold.
Yet the number seven is only part of the symbolism. The structure itself carries the deeper lesson. The menorah has one central shaft, with three branches extending from one side and three from the other. Everything depends on the center. That center can be read as Shabbat itself, the seventh day that gives shape to the other six.
This is one of Judaism’s deepest interventions into human experience. Most people think of Shabbat as the end of the week, the point of collapse after six days of work. But the Torah’s vision runs in the opposite direction. Shabbat is not simply the conclusion of labor. It is the center of time. The six days are not meaningful because they arrive at rest; they are meaningful because they emerge from sanctity. The week is not six days of secular striving interrupted by a religious pause. It is six days of labor structured around a holy center.
Modern life has reversed that structure entirely. Modern man builds his life around work and treats rest as recovery. Judaism builds life around sanctity and treats work as extension. One organizes existence around productivity and squeezes meaning into the margins. The other organizes existence around holiness and allows labor to become part of that larger order. One produces burnout. The other produces orientation. The menorah, in that sense, is profoundly anti-modern. Its center is not productivity. Its center is sacred time.
The menorah’s design teaches the structure of the soul. Find the center first. Build outward second. The center is what gives coherence to everything else.
That is why the menorah stands at human height. Divine presence enters human dimensions. It stands face to face, and orients each of us to the life to lead.
When rabbis portray Israel as a moral problem instead of a Jewish inheritance
Two progressive rabbis – Sharon Brous and David Ingber – sat before a packed Jewish audience in San Diego for a taping of the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, to wrestle with a distinctly modern Jewish dilemma: how does a tradition forged in exile process the return of Jewish power?
The subject was the rabbinate and Israel, but the deeper argument was Judaism itself.
The language was familiar: fear, shame, democracy, moral crisis. The question underneath it was older than the state and older than Zionism itself. What exactly is Judaism when Jews are sovereign again – and what does that mean for diaspora Jews?
That question is increasingly dividing Jewish life.
For years the pattern has been visible in polling, synagogue life, philanthropy, and communal politics. The further left a Jew moves politically, the more likely that Jew is to become publicly critical of Israel. The less traditional the Jewish framework, the more likely that criticism expands beyond policy into discomfort with Jewish statehood itself. Orthodox Jews criticize Israeli governments all the time, often fiercely, but they rarely place Jewish national existence itself in the dock.
That difference is not merely political. It is theological. It is civilizational.
Because traditional Judaism has always answered the question of Jewish identity in integrated terms: God, Torah, peoplehood, and land. These are particular to the Jewish people. They embody one structure. Remove one and the architecture strains. Remove the land and Judaism survives, but in suspension.
Diaspora Judaism became one of history’s great civilizational achievements, but it was always an adaptation to rupture. The prayerbook points toward Jerusalem. The festivals move according to the agricultural rhythms of the Land of Israel. The fast days mourn national destruction. The closing line of the seder and of Yom Kippur pushes in one direction only: next year in Jerusalem.
That was never metaphor. It was memory preserved as architecture.
For traditional Jews, Jewish self-rule is not simply politics. It is Jewish history restored. Such belief does not make every Israeli government wise or righteous. Jews argue bitterly over borders, settlements, courts, wars, and coalitions. But beneath those arguments lies a premise that remains fixed: Jewish political agency is indispensable.
Progressive – and especially non-Orthodox – Judaism increasingly begins somewhere else.
Its center of gravity is ethical universalism. Its first question is increasingly not what preserves Jewish continuity, but what satisfies universal justice. That instinct has deep Jewish roots. The prophets placed moral obligation at the center of covenantal life. But prophets do not run borders.
States do.
States defend territory, absorb casualties, deter enemies, and make violent decisions under imperfect conditions. Sovereignty stains the hands. Once universal ethics become the supreme framework, the Jewish state itself becomes vulnerable to indictment.
That is what the Brous–Ingber exchange revealed with unusual clarity.
And it was revealing precisely because it did not end in one room.
Their first conversation exposed a tension neither side could settle. Sharon Brous spoke from the prophetic register of progressive Judaism, where Judaism is primarily moral witness, conscience, and justice. David Ingber, while sharing much of that moral vocabulary, kept returning to something older and deeper: peoplehood, continuity, solidarity, historical necessity.
The disagreement lingered.
Brous later acknowledged discomfort with how the exchange unfolded, and the conversation resumed in a second round on Jonah Platt’s podcast. That itself was revealing. One debate became two because the argument underneath it could not be resolved by clarifying policy or refining moral critique. The disagreement was structural.
And in that second conversation, the divide remained.
Brous continued pressing the prophetic burden, insisting that Jewish moral credibility depends on confronting Jewish power when it acts unjustly. Ingber continued defending something prior to critique itself: the necessity of Jewish collective power in a world that has repeatedly shown its appetite for Jewish vulnerability, especially in light of the widespread antisemitism today.
One critiques Israel primarily as a moral actor, the other defends Israel first as a historical necessity and only then wrestles with its conduct.
It is the difference between inheritance and indictment.
And this internal Jewish struggle is increasingly being exported into the wider world, where it is eagerly consumed.
This week in the United Kingdom, leading progressive rabbis warned that Israel’s political direction poses an existential threat to Judaism itself, tied to the publication of their new book. The phrase was startling.
Israel as an existential threat to Judaism.
For two thousand years, existential threats to Judaism had names: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet repression, the expulsions from Arab lands.
Statelessness itself was the existential condition.
Now, for growing sectors of progressive non-Orthodox Jewish leadership, the Jewish state itself is increasingly being cast as the danger.
That is more than criticism. That is inversion.
And notice who was eager to amplify it.
The Guardian, a British publication whose editorial posture toward Israel has long been sharply critical, gave the book and its thesis prominent space. That matters because internal Jewish dissent carries unique public utility in anti-Israel discourse. Criticism from outside can be dismissed as hostility. Criticism from inside acquires the authority of confession.
Progressive Jewish critique often assumes its audience shares its covenantal investment in Jewish survival. The wider world often hears something simpler: if even rabbis are indicting the Jewish state, the case against it must already be proven.
That is one of anti-Zionism’s most valuable currencies: Jewish testimony against Jewish power.
Not because Jewish dissent is illegitimate. Jewish argument is one of Judaism’s oldest arts. But once internal critique detaches from internal solidarity, it stops functioning as family argument and starts functioning as prosecutorial evidence.
The family dispute becomes public exhibit.
And this is where traditional Jewish memory diverges sharply from progressive Jewish moral instinct.
Traditional Jews remember something progressive Jewish politics often struggles to metabolize: the central danger of Jewish history was never Jewish power: It was Jewish powerlessness.
The Holocaust was not a lesson in the abuse of Jewish power. It was a lesson in the consequences of Jewish defenselessness.
Then came 1948 and Jewish agency returned.
And within years, the map of Jewish history changed. Ancient Jewish communities across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco collapsed into expulsion, flight, and dispossession. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Israel.
That memory disciplines judgment. It teaches realism.
Progressive Jewish consciousness inherited a different lesson from modernity: nationalism corrupts, power must be constrained, minorities must maintain moral vigilance.
There is wisdom in that inheritance – as a modifier, not as a ruling ethos. A beleaguered minority does not have the luxury of abandoning all rights and power to satisfy the mob.
That is what Zionism answered, not abstractly but operationally.
German Jews once believed they had solved history. They were cultured, integrated, patriotic, indispensable.
History did not care.
American Jews should similarly be cautious with assumptions of permanence.
Because beneath every synagogue fight, every anguished podcast, every progressive Jewish book tour, lies the same civilizational argument: is Judaism an inheritance to preserve, or a moral vocabulary to deploy?
These have become competing theories of Jewish survival.
For two thousand years Jews prayed toward Zion because history taught them exile was fragile. Progressive Judaism increasingly asks whether Israel deserves that loyalty, while traditional Judaism believes the land is central to Judaism and disagreements are best managed internally.
Whether in public or private discussions, the policies of Israel are becoming an exhibit in the philosophical rift between progressive and traditional Judaism.
First One Through 