The following is a transcript of Episode 169 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on December 19th, 2023. 

If you’ve ever spent time at summer camp, you know about that strange phenomenon where each day seems to last a week, but each week seems to fly by like a day. 2023 felt that way as we combed back through the year to draw out some themes for this week’s year in review episode, we couldn’t really believe that so much of what we were talking about earlier this year really took place this year. I guess we felt a combination of whiplash about how fast things moved, together with a little overwhelm about how much materialized over the past 12 months. 

But the metaphor of being confused by time took on new meaning over the past 10 weeks. I can’t really remember much of what I was thinking about right before October 7th, what plans I was making for a Jewish year that was just starting, or for our academic year that was also about to begin. 

For the past 10 weeks, we have been in a mix of an actual fog of war, as well as a fog of traumatic consciousness. And personally, I’ve toggled between moments of profound moral confusion, the likes of which I’ve never felt, and moments of moral clarity that I also have never experienced. 

For these 10 weeks, I’ve marked time in themes. First, shock and mourning, then to recognizing what it means for the State of Israel to be fighting a war again, questions of solidarity as global Jewry rallied in support of Israelis, and then experiences of deep ambivalence about the state of allyship here in North America went to fear and concern about the hostages, mounting fears about the rise of a new antisemitism, and throughout this time, a drumbeat of death and loss, of violence and vengeance and victimhood, with a deep foreboding that I’m carrying with me into 2024 about all of the uncertainty we face now as the Jewish people.

At the end of today’s episodes, we’ll look a little forward to next year, but I want to try to zoom us back now to the beginning of this year, and maybe even a little bit before. You see, for over a decade, we here at Hartman have been concerned with the growing divide between North American and Israeli Jews, and especially focused on the dominant population here in North America that we called the troubled committed: those committed enough to Israel and Jewish people had to stay in the conversation, but increasingly at risk of exiting. Whether because they hold fear about the future of Israeli democracy, or fatigue after 50 years of occupation with no end in sight, or just because of the usual stuff of distance and passage of time.

Back in January at the beginning of this year, I spoke to several major Israeli activists about the challenges that they faced. Honestly, they were more concerned about Israel itself than about the consequences of their society’s choices on the involvement of American Jews or about their relationship to them, but they were candid and clear-eyed about what they faced. 

This, for instance, was Tehila Friedman, an Israeli activist and former politician, setting an agenda.

Tehila: I think the most urgent thing is to rebuild the center, the Zionist center, means that people who believe in Jewish democratic state, what’s happening today in Israel, that’s the right side, the winner, believes in Jewish state with the majority decide, okay? It’s not liberal democracy is not, you know, human rights. It’s the majority is making the decisions while the left side of Israel, very small, but believes in, in democratic state with Jewish majority. 

But again, there is some declining, what it means Jewish state. On the other hand, they are making democracy into something technical and the other side making Judaism into something more technical. I think there’s urgent need to recreate the majorities that believes in Jewish democratic together and Jewish state and democratic state b’dibur echad.

And I understand that both the ultra-orthodox, and the Arabs are not part of this center. They can be the important part of Israeli society. They need to be maybe in the government, but they’re not part of this center. And because we lost the center, that’s why we’re in, in this situation we are. Because something, we lost what’s supposed to hold society, to hold it together. The center is like the stable place that’s supposed to hold the society together. 

I always think that’s the most important thing for Israel to do is to observe Aliyah from Rahat and from Bnei Brak. But the question becomes, who’s observing? Like who’s into what? 

And I can’t say there is no Israeli society, but the Israeli society is so ripped up and going so much to opposite directions, that there is a hole in the center and what’s used to be the mainstream just disappeared, and we need to rebuild it. 

Yehuda: And then there was Rana Fahoum, one of my then-newer colleagues at Hartman in Israel, who had come to the Institute to build a new center for shared society. Rana spoke unflinchingly and unforgivingly about what needed to change for Israel to live up to its promise to be a state for all of its citizens.

Rana: One of the issues that we’re facing with is that we have to claim back the public sphere in the sense that the public discourse is becoming more and more violent, more and more racist. And the big question is, and if we want to build the alternative and to think, how do we win the next round of the elections? 

And that’s just a symptom because the elections are just a symptom of things that are happening in the community, in the society. And one of the ways is to come and say, Hello, people, you know, we’re going to places that we shouldn’t be going to, and we want to claim back the public sphere and the public discourse is actually to engage in people talking about each other, working together in order to find some kind of common ground that they can work on.

And many times you start with basic understandings. It doesn’t have to be that we fully agree on everything we can. Partially agree on some issues which are basic and important to our everyday and issues that actually are endangering the democracy in Israel. And that’s, that’s the messima, that’s what we have to do now, that’s the job that we have to do now, because jeopardizing the democracy in Israel, obviously we as Palestinians will pay the highest price, but everybody will pay that price, not only the Palestinians. 

So first, we have to look for places where we can find people that have these basic understandings and common ground to build something. And it’s like building a building. So you build the first floor, and you build the second, and you build the third. And that’s building the alternative. That’s the grassroots building the alternative. 

Of course, another way of doing that is building political capital, but they don’t go one against the other. On the contrary, they both go into the same point of actually finding an alternative and an alternative, even a social alternative between the people who are sharing the land. 

Yehuda: If we started the year wondering and worrying about the future of Israel and the future of the Israel Diaspora relationship, by a few months into the year, we were starting to feel a little different. The Israeli protest movement, which launched in response to the new right-wing Netanyahu government and its proposed massive overhaul of the judiciary and the judicial system, had picked up huge momentum in the early spring, especially following the firing of the defense minister, Yoav Galant, who had encouraged a pause in the judicial overhaul.

The protesters, who now represented at least a plurality of Israeli society, succeeded in getting Gallant reinstated, and it was becoming clear that they had awakened something very significant, something dormant in the conversation about Israeli identity and Israeli democracy. 

By the time we hit Passover, it was all many of us were talking about. There was a lot of excitement about the democratic protests for Israelis and for North American Jews as well, who saw this as a window of opportunity to build a new relationship between Jewish communities that finally were talking about democracy for the first time in a generation. 

But the protests also symbolized intragroup conflict. And in preparation for Pesach, it felt like a key moment for us to talk about what it meant for communities to manage difference. For Israelis, looking at their society as a whole. For us, as North American Jews, inside our local communities, where difference more than unity seems to characterize North American Jewry. For all of us in our homes, how we might prepare for a conflict-ridden Passover Seder.

Mishael: My heart goes out to my friends who say, I hear Deri talk, and I feel like I’m on the left, and I hear Lapid talk, and I want to be on the right, and they keep ping-ponging between the different sides of the debate. And I think we all have that within us. We can empathize with that. 

That’s on one element. I’ll also say on two other levels. One is that the shiur I’ve been teaching for the last week is that Seder night is a night of unity, and it’s a night of unity around the bitterest debates. I mean, I think that’s something we’ve been saying at the Hartman Institute for years, but you feel it very much this year.

And I think that when we look at Seder night as a night that has always had huge debates at its center, that gives us consolation and inspiration. It gives us consolation to know that the Jewish people have had serious debates, the bitter debates in the past. Sometimes they’ve forced the Jewish people to split up into groups. I’ll mention two examples like that in a second. And sometimes we’ve been able to retain everyone around the table. 

But this isn’t the first time, and there’s something I think comforting about that, because if it’s not the first time, it means there’s also the next chapter, wherever that brings, but also brings me inspiration, not just consolation, the inspiration to fight for the interpretation of Judaism that I feel is correct for me, that Israel as a Jewish and liberal democratic state, and that’s the interpretation that I’m going to fight for.

Yehuda: Meanwhile, so much of Israeliness in North American Jewish life has become so dynamic, so much changing so quickly. Matti Friedman talked about this as a plastic moment.

Matti: This is a plastic moment. It’s a moment of crisis, and it’s a moment that we might use to create a better and more interesting relationship between the two major Jewish communities of our time, the one in Israel and the one in North America. 

That’s, you know, among many other things that are up in the air, is also up in the air. And just as I think Zionism needs to be rebooted and kind of rethought, and just as we clearly need a second Israeli Republic, I don’t think we can just stagger on after this crisis. I think this is an opportunity to think about how this is going to work. If Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, we have a connection with Jews who live outside Israel, we would be impoverished by the disappearance of that relationship, no matter what this government thinks, and no matter how much it thinks, that the support of evangelical Christians is more important than the support of Jews abroad. 

And we have clearly a major crisis that threatens the future of the country. And we also have an opportunity internally in Israel and externally toward our brothers and sisters who live outside Israel.

Yehuda: Rabbi Rachel Isaacs also had some fascinating ideas, born of her experience leading a small town Jewish community in Maine, about what it might look like to rethink the nature of Jewish community. 

Rachel: Necessity forces us to compromise and be with people who are different than us. And that’s the most important Torah. When we think about the ways in which Jews self-segregate or self-sort, denomination is one of those ways.

The other ways in which we see Jews self-sort or self-segregate is according to political beliefs and according to generation. And I think that is profoundly insidious and very dangerous. One of the greatest challenges of my work, that is also one of the greatest opportunities, and I think I’ve come to navigate this better over time, but it’s never perfect, is that at one of my services, you can find a Black military veteran who voted for Trump with a white Ashkenazi professor who loves Bernie Sanders, both of whom own guns, along with a Colby student from Westchester who’s questioning their relationship with Zionism, along with somebody on the football team who thinks that Birthright is the be all and end all of what it means to be Jewish. 

You will find all of those people at my minyan, and they all need to get along and say amen. And they all need to find something to talk about over the Stouffer’s mac and cheese at the potluck.

Yehuda: So here’s now one of the trickiest dimensions of the relationship between North American and Israeli Jews. Many of us want to repair this relationship by binding our communities together across difference.

But at the same time, it’s well and good to also appreciate the unique features, the special gifts and contributions that each of our communities has to offer. We don’t want to erase those differences in order to be in relationship with each other. And I’m particularly eager for us to see the ways that we have intentionally evolved the meaning of Judaism differently in homeland and diaspora. That we’ve curated our values to strive to build different model societies here and there, as majorities and as minorities. 

I would never want our appreciation of one another across difference to erase what we’ve been able to do here. Stories such as Rachel’s about opening her home to Ukrainian refugees and thus telling a deeply Jewish and deeply American story about what it means as a diaspora Jew to pay Jewish history forward.

Rachel: It didn’t feel like, for me, that act of welcoming the Kovalenkos into our house was primarily one of generosity. Generosity, to me, it implies something that goes above and over, something beyond what people would normally be asked to do in the day-to-day. And this didn’t feel like that to me. This felt like we’ve been blessed to live at a time when there hasn’t been war showing up at our doorstep, at our threshold. And this showed up on my threshold. 

And so that’s not generous. That’s just, you know, refugees show up on your threshold, you open your door and you let them in. That’s what you do. That’s what my great-grandparents experienced when they came to this country. That is God willing, if we were in such a situation, we would want other people to do. 

Every year at Pesach, we all, like anyone who celebrates Pesach says, let all who are hungry come and eat. Right? We say that. And I think we, you know, we try to model that. I think a lot of us invite guests into our home and, you know, you have guests for Shabbos and we like, we do this, we see this as part of who we are. 

So apart from my own family continuity story and apart from any sense of, you know, personal obligation, this felt like something that had been taught to me as part of my Jewish education, as part of my Jewish practice.

Yehuda: We also explored other ways for North American Jews to foreground our ethical obligations as citizens in our societies and communities. What it means for us to be great citizens and good people. As Hannah Lebovits talked about in our fall episode on housing insecurity.

Hannah: I do think that housing and homelessness from a collectivist perspective does fall into these kind of four categories that we typically use when we talk about ethical obligations. And like you said, the first is a utilitarian, right? We have an ethical obligation towards utilitarianism. We have an ethical obligation towards justice. That’s the second one. We have an ethical obligation towards caring and taking care of individuals who are not otherwise serviced by the market. 

And we also have an ethical obligation to cultural competency. We have an ethical obligation to understand that different groups have to see different issues differently and that it is our job to tap into what those groups see in order to advocate better for them and service their needs.

So I would say that that last one, when it comes to the Jewish community, I typically frame it as what I call cultural competency. Because I think that in the Jewish community, we do have a unique perspective on shelter. We have a unique perspective on wellness and what it means for the individual to be well by being a giver. I don’t give tzedakah because I’m helping someone else. I give tzedakah because I need it for myself. I am not a well person if I don’t give tzedakah.

Yehuda: And then there was the stuff of Judaism itself here in North America. Jewish religion and Jewish identity. in the summer, we heard from Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove on what it would take to rebuild a confident and serious diaspora liberal Judaism. And then, as we headed into the High Holidays, I had this magical conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe on the role of the rabbi and on his hopes and dreams of how a great sermon, or more importantly, a great synagogue, can serve the essential needs of our people.

Eliot: We’re not hiding the fact that we’re Jewish. We’re actually quite proud of the fact that we’re Jewish, but we just don’t know what Judaism means and what it means to practice that Judaism.

So I’m sort of giving the punchline at the very beginning here, but for me, I think the journey is the same journey. It’s just going in the opposite direction, that no longer is it to create some sort of progressive expression of Jewish identity by which Jews can acclimate to America. But rather, it is to provide the pathway by which this assimilated American Jewish community can find their way back into the religious tradition.

David: You want to create a place where the greatest epidemic of America, which is loneliness, finds its greatest cure, which is community. And you want to spend your life studying and learning the longest continuous tradition in the world that teaches people how to grow their souls. And you want to feel like at every moment you’re experiencing things that enrich what you do, because everything enriches your growth as a human being.

I want two things. I want one with them to understand that there’s nothing, not only is there nothing wrong, there’s something really beautiful about Jews caring about Jews. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t care about other people. That’s part of being Jewish. But, but the Jews have a responsibility to other Jews in this world, even and sometimes especially those they don’t agree with. 

And the other thing that I’d like to hear is something that touches me and makes me think about my own life in ways that will make me a more generous, more kind, and I think that the biggest quality that’s missing in public life, a more humble person. You know, we’re all so certain about everything and, and the older I get, you know, I tell people all the time. It’s like, when you get older, you think you get answers, but you don’t. What you get is you see more of the puzzle.

Yehuda: In a different world, we might have continued on this trajectory following the end of Simchat Torah. We were watching new possibilities emerge for Israeli and Diaspora Jews, separate and together, binding ourselves increasingly in a conversation about democracy for the first time in decades. We were tracking the constant dynamism of Jewish life in North America. We were wrapping up the fall holiday season and ready to buckle down for the new year. And then on the morning of October 7th, everything changed.

Todd: There was a rumor from someone in synagogue that 50 terrorists had taken over Sderot. So that was just a rumor flowing around. We didn’t want to make a big deal about it. 

Anna: It seemed pretty serious. 

Dyonna: We weren’t particularly scared. 

Anna: Nobody had any idea. Nobody had seen the news. Nobody had checked their phone. 

Leah: At first we thought it was, quote unquote, just rockets, just another, you know, skirmish with Gaza.

Elizabeth: We went to someone’s house for Shabbat lunch, thinking what we thought was horribly the worst. 

Todd: My wife turned to me and said that this is just, this is just, it’s a game changer. I can feel it. It’s totally different than before.

Anna: I normally don’t use Shabbat or any electricity, but I made the decision that there was no way I was going to get through the day without knowing what was going on.

Avidan: When we all come out, there’s somebody in army uniform giving us a briefing and telling us that the situation is awful, is a catastrophe. 

Leah: I have a friend who lost both parents. Both parents were killed by Hamas terrorists.

Todd: You’re not six people removed. You’re one person removed from a tragedy. It’s just, it’s unfathomable.

Avidan: I was involved over the last nine months in the protest movement against the judicial reform and before that against the Netanyahu government. And I was a person who received many, many insults and much criticism of people who are anarchists and who are against the government.

And it’s been amazing to see how the entire organizational infrastructure of the protest movement that was dedicated to mobilizing. Hundreds of thousands of people over the course of nine months, instantly, instantly switched over to doing everything it can to provide support, to organize donations, to bring things to families, to, to literally organize convoys of people to save families that were still under siege.

Dyonna: People are stepping up in thousands of different ways, often at the same time when they’re juggling crazy things at home, kids underfoot, spouses, children, loved ones in the army, perhaps personal losses. 

Anna: All of these grassroots pop-up initiatives to get supplies and food to soldiers in the South. You know, socks, underwear, flashlights, batteries, all sorts of, drones I saw they need. And just people banding together, tons of WhatsApps of, these people need this, here’s a drop off point, who can bring, who can drive, who’s going down South, etc. And also collections of clothes and food. For people who are displaced from the south.

Dina: This is a two truths type of situation where we’re just grieving so deeply and we’re so devastated and the whole horror show of what’s happening and at the same time we’re seeing everybody is just digging deep and bringing their best, best selves out to do everything that needs to happen.

Yehuda: Something snapped for us diaspora Jews here as well. Early on, following October 7th, I felt that the seismic event had taken place in Israel and that we, in turn, were feeling the aftershocks here. 

Increasingly, I’ve started to believe that the transformations of Jewish life that we’re feeling here in North America in response to October 7th are no less dramatic than the ones in Israel, that maybe it’d be more accurate to describe these as separate, if linked, seismic events. 

One big theme of North American Jewish life since October 7th has been the surprising re emergence of the solidarity instinct, like muscle memory, that many of us worried had only been a thing of the past. The demise of solidarity was one of those data points that fueled our fear about the troubled committed, until that span of a few weeks in October and November when diaspora Jews raised a billion dollars and showed up en masse in Washington D. C.

Shira: I found myself thinking about how not being there and not standing together at Israel’s time of need, it would leave a sort of footprint on my soul. And I began to wonder if I could offset what I came to think of as my absence footprint in much the way one would a carbon footprint. A friend connected me with someone who wasn’t attending the rally because the transportation costs were too high and so I was able to partner with that person and help get them there and it felt like their headcount maybe could be instead of my headcount.

Yehuda: In addition to the trauma and grief of October 7th for his victims, it was clear right away that it was also going to be a test of the resilience and leadership qualities of the Jewish organizational ecosystem here in North America. Earlier in the year, we had done two episodes about changes and threats to that ecosystem, to that system often known derisively by its critics as “the establishment.”

One episode had been with Eric Fingerhut about the necessity of Jewish communal organizations, and another with Gali Cooks on what Jewish leaders were going to need to do differently to lead through this era of Jewish history.

Eric: I used to say this at Hillel and I say this at Federation execs all the time and professionals is, no one is born with a gene in their body that tells them how the Jewish community functions day to day, right? We have to teach it. And every year there’s new people we have to teach it to over and over again. So we, we view that as part of our responsibility. 

And I will say though, that as you certainly have noticed, there are some moments where it’s easier to talk about the need for communal action and collective action than others. And the last couple of years have actually leaned into that, right? 

Between COVID and Ukraine and security and even the response to the George Floyd murder and the social unrest that followed that. And so I think it’s been a little bit easier. under, you know, these last few years than perhaps when times are just, you know, you’re in a living in a time when there’s no sense of communal crisis to remind people why collective action is powerful and why they should in addition to whatever else they support, that one of the things they should support is the communal priorities. 

Gali: If you don’t see yourself in your role models, or in your co-workers, or in your leaders, or in your volunteer leaders, or in your constituents, you’re just not going to want to take that path. I mean, I saw that in tech. I was the only woman in a tech company with a bunch of younger dudes who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, by the way, and it was a grind. There would have been a lot better experience, and again, this is kind of a focus group of one, but we know what you described as the feminization of a sector is real. It’s real when it comes to the pocketbook. It’s real when it comes to prestige. 

So going back to that, are we able to have the kind of value proposition where if your kid coming out of school was to say, hey, dad, I got a job at JCC, would you be proud? Or, as a non-Orthodox rabbi, would you be proud? And that, to me, seems like we need to build a sandbox where we can see everyone, and that includes, you know, the difference in gender, the difference in race, the difference in socioeconomic classes, certainly, different backgrounds. And I worry about this a lot, Yehuda, to tell you the truth.

Yehuda: I can’t help wondering whether the events of October and November are going to reset a lot of what we think we know about the future of our community here, and its institutions, and what we can expect from its leaders.

Anyway, all of that inside baseball stuff pales in comparison and importance to the truly existential questions that Israel has been navigating in fighting this impossible war against Hamas in Gaza. I fielded more requests than I’ve ever received for a topic to cover on this show, to do something about the ethics of war, to help our listeners process what they were seeing in the news, and to deal with our collective cognitive dissonance in striving to be supporters of Israel in the face of the terrible choices that militaries have to make.

Tal: You know, you were talking about the importance of power in the Jewish tradition, even though we need to be careful about not deifying that power. Power is, of course, a force for good in the world, but it is also a recognition that there is evil in the world. That needs to be confronted. We saw that evil on October 7th. 

There isn’t a path towards a peaceful Middle East that doesn’t involve defeating the enemies of peace. That doesn’t involve taking away the capabilities of those who are trying to prevent coexistence from ever being possible. And at that very basic sense, this is the most legitimate of actions.

Yehuda: What else did we cover this year? Well, we learned Torah with Rabbi Benay Lappe and Rabbi Joshua Kulp and with my teacher, Rabbi David Ellenson, who recently passed away, and whose episode on American Jewish thinkers is an amazing tribute to David’s breadth and depth of knowledge about what it means for us to inherit our recent past.

We had powerful emotional episodes with Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin about their son, Hersh, who is still being held hostage in Gaza. And with Yael Kornfeld about the mental health crisis on campus, and with Adam Reinherz on commemorating five years since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. 

We looked to the future for a conversation with teens and another with Gap Year students and in a special episode where I got to celebrate my title change in becoming president of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

And there were several episodes this year that dealt with themes that are going to be increasingly more important. We did one on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at CUNY, and on liberal values on campus with Mijal Bitton, and on the future of the Israeli left in and after the war. 

I’ve learned enough in this line of work that it’s hard enough to be a historian whose job is to say something coherent about the past, that it’s even harder to be something of a pundit whose job in a podcast like this is to try to say something wise and coherent about the present, and that it’s therefore total folly to try to be a prophet, to try to say something wise and coherent about the future.

To be honest, I’ve never been more nervous about the future than I am right now. I’ve tended to subscribe to the Steven Pinker worldview, that on virtually every front, the conditions of our lives are better than those of our predecessors. But it’s hard not to feel as a Jew right now, marking time, not in eras, but in the increment of a year, that we are slipping.

I don’t think most Israelis would have anticipated a return to conventional war after decades of smaller-scale terror attacks and brief cross-border incursions. Nor do I think that Israelis would have anticipated the reawakening of the feeling of existential threats from their neighbors, which was the stuff of the collective memory of the 40s through the 70s.

I’m quite sure we North American Jews did not fully anticipate the strange precariousness of our current anti-Semitism moment, where we still benefit from a strong social position, but are watching the prized liberal institutions through which we receive that position erode under the forces of illiberalism.

But if I’m optimistic about anything, it’s that the troubled, committed story that we started with at the beginning of the year looks a lot different now. North American Jews should feel buoyed by the democracy protests to know that we have partners in Israel. And all of us should take note of the solidarity moments that we can remember when we will inevitably forget all the ways that we, the Jewish people, are ultimately in this together. Maybe that’s enough for now. We’ll see you on the other side.

Thanks so much for listening to our show. Thanks for listening to all of these episodes over the course of this year. And special thanks to all of our guests from 2023, who helped us make sense of this eventful and tumultuous year. Identity Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet, edited by Ben Azevedo at Bear Cave Audio and Tessa Zitter with music provided by Socalled. 

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. You can sponsor an episode of the show, follow the link in the show notes or visit us at shalomhartman.org/identitycrisis. We’ll acknowledge your gift on a future episode. 

We’re always looking for ideas what we should cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. For more from the Shalom Hartman Institute about everything unfolding right now, you can sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next year and thanks for listening.