A Fork in the Road

This past March, the world mourned the death of the great Jewish actor Chaim Topol, who is best known for his iconic portrayal of Tevye in the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof.

Fiddler was a favorite in my house growing up. Every Friday night, my parents would put the soundtrack to the movie on the record player, and we would sing “Tradition! Tradition!” as we cleared the table after Shabbat dinner. So after Topol died, I found myself wanting to revisit that classic film of my childhood.

Rewatching the movie was wonderfully nostalgic. But even more than that, I was surprised to find how stirred I was by the film, despite having seen it countless times.

In particular, I was struck by the movie’s final moments. The very last image that we see as the villagers are leaving Anatevka, never to return again, is not a shot of the empty synagogue, as we might expect – not a shot of Tevye’s dilapidated home, not a shot of the town square. Rather, the final image of Anatevka is an overhead shot. From above, we see a group of ten villagers – a minyan – standing at a fork in the road, praying. Their prayers conclude. And one by one, they slowly disperse – each of them heading down one path or the other, following either the left fork or the right fork: some of them, like Yenta the Matchmaker, on their way to the Land of Israel, and others of them, like Tevye, on their way to the United States.

This final image of Anatevka is a fitting metaphor for our era in Jewish history. For hundreds of years prior to the 20th century, Jews were spread out across many different countries, with thriving, culturally distinctive Jewish communities in France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, and many others. But in the 20th century, all that changed. The Holocaust, economic opportunity in the United States, and the flight of Jews from Arab lands after the founding of the State of Israel, created a world in which, today, the vast majority of Jews – 80% – live in just two countries: the United States, and Israel.

Today, perhaps even more so than when Fiddler was first made, the image of a fork in the road is all the more striking. Over the past several decades, it has often felt as if the Jewish community in the United States and the Jewish community in Israel are each on their own path – that, although we share a common heritage, we are steadily moving in different directions, slowly growing further and further apart, to the extent that we are to each other sometimes unrecognizable.

Before I continue, I should acknowledge that some of us may be starting to feel nervous. For many of us, conversations about Israel or about American politics make us feel uneasy – wondering what is going to be said, worrying whether we will agree. These feelings are entirely natural. Difficult conversations often make us feel this way, because we intuitively sense that the stakes are high. But even though these conversations are hard, they are critically important.

To be sure, describing American Jewry and Israeli Jewry as being on two separate paths is to paint with a fairly broad brush. There are, no doubt, many things that are shared in common between our two communities – and also, within each one, there is a great range of ideological diversity. And still, there is often a value in distillation, in looking for broader trends – in hopes that, by doing so, we might be able to make sense of the patterns.

Here, then, are a few of the differences between our two communities. Jews in the US are a cultural minority; in Israel, Jews are the majority. Jews in the US live in an enormous global superpower; and while Israel is strong economically and militarily, it is tiny both in population and in landmass. In the US, more than half of Jews identify as Reform or Conservative; in Israel, those groups comprise a mere 5%. In the US, two-thirds of Jews identify as Democrats; and although the American left-right spectrum does not map neatly onto Israeli politics, in Israel, it is the Center and the Right that hold the bulk of political sway.

How are we to account for these differences? The writer and Jewish public intellectual Danny Gordis helps us to do so by looking at each country’s founding. [1] The United States, Gordis notes, was founded with a universalistic vision – imagining, at least on paper, that our experiment in democracy was for the benefit of all humankind. Israel, by contrast, was founded not with a universalistic vision, but rather, with a particular one: to establish a national homeland for the Jews. Hence, the US Declaration of Independence begins with the phrase: “When in the Course of human events” – while Israel’s Declaration begins: “The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel.”

Perhaps this, then, is the ideological fork in the road that helps to explain our differences: Jews in the US tend to prioritize the universally human, while Jews in Israel, by contrast, tend to prioritize the particularly Jewish.

If we try to make sense of this core ideological divide, then maybe, we might be able to understand why it sometimes seems that these two Jewish communities are drifting further and further apart – and perhaps, even discover what we can do about it. 

***

In all of Jewish history, our people’s experience in the United States has been truly unique. In our popular imagination, we attribute our success to this country’s promise of economic opportunity. Our great-grandparents dreamed of a country where the streets were paved with gold, where, with hard work and determination, anyone could succeed and achieve the American Dream – referring, in Yiddish, to their new Promised Land as the goldene medina, “the golden land” of opportunity.

And while the United States has indeed been quite good to the Jewish people, the primary driver of our success here has not been economics. Rather, what makes this country unique in all of Jewish history is not that it has been the goldene medina, but rather, that it has been, in Hebrew, a malchut shel chesed [2] – a “benevolent government,” founded not around a specific religion, but rather, at least on paper, founded on a universalistic vision in which “all [people] are created equal.”

Of course, we know that the United States has not always lived up to this vision. We bear the disgraceful legacy of slavery, the decimation of indigenous people, the disenfranchisement of women, and so much more.

And still, this country’s founders believed in a universalistic ideal. James Madison, in Federalist Paper #10, advocated on behalf of that ideal. He observed that the new American republic – comprised as it was of thirteen individual states, each with its own unique identity – would never be completely homogenous. Rather, he believed that this diversity of opinions and worldviews would help to strengthen American democracy – that it would cause elected officials to make decisions based not solely on the interests of their own particular group, but rather, on behalf of the greater collective good. With this principle in mind, Madison advocated that the Constitution not include a religious test for elected officials – and the Jewish people’s malchut shel chesed was born.

From that moment onward, a tendency towards the universally human has been a core part of much of the American Jewish experience. For example: political scientist Kenneth Wald has noted that American Jews are unusual in our voting habits – that we tend to vote based not on our own economic self-interest, but rather, based on our perception of which policies will best advance our belief that all people are created equal. Or, for example: consider our popular use of the word mitzvah. The word literally means “commandment”: a specific set of obligations enumerated in the Torah and required uniquely of the Jewish people. However, in common parlance, the word mitzvah has taken on a second, unofficial – but nevertheless recognizable – meaning: a “good deed,” of any kind, by any one.

But our tendency towards the universally human does come with a cost. In our pursuit of the greater common good, many non-Orthodox American Jews have begun to lose a sense of our own group identity. In an earlier era, Jews in this country needed to learn how to become Americans. Today, the exact opposite is true: now, we are fluent in American culture; it is our Jewishness that does not come naturally to us, our Jewishness that we need to go out of our way to acquire.

Many Israeli Jews see these trends and scratch their heads. They wonder how American Jewry could so casually part ways with our own identity. Don’t we American Jews see, Israeli Jews might ask us, that our embrace of the universally human is imperiling our very survival?

***

Let us return now to Tevye’s fork in the road, in order to follow it down the alternative path: in order to better understand Israeli Jewry – who, in contrast to us, tend to place their emphasis not on the universally human, but rather, on the particularly Jewish.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence declares that the state shall be not only a political haven for the battered Jewish people, but also, shall seek to promote the cultural, spiritual, and civilizational flourishing of the Jewish people.

In this capacity, Israel has succeeded far beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. It is a country in which, in 2021, the most-played pop song on Israeli radio – both in the religious cities and in the secular ones – draws its lyrics from a passage in the Mishnah. It is a country in which, every Friday afternoon, the highways and trains are packed with young people – returning home from university or from their job in the big cities, in order to have Shabbat dinner with their family. It is a country in which, at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list are serious, intellectual books not on figures like Winston Churchill and Alexander Hamilton, but rather, on Maimonides and on the Book of Deuteronomy.

There are, of course, aspects of this Jewish cultural renaissance that might trouble non-Orthodox Jews: say, for example, that there is no such thing as civil marriage in Israel – that all marriages between Israel’s Jewish citizens must, by law, meet the religious standards of the Orthodox rabbinate. Or, for example: that there is no egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall Plaza – that Torah can be chanted there only by men. If they wanted to, my own daughters could not become Bat Mitzvah at the Western Wall.

But if Israel’s tendency towards the particularly Jewish is sometimes a challenge even to its Jewish population, then how much the more so to the one-out-of-every-five Israeli citizens who is not Jewish. It has been well documented that Arab Israelis are disproportionately prosecuted by the criminal justice system, and meanwhile, are disproportionately underserved in educational opportunity and in economic advancement. [3] For Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, who live under Israeli military control, the challenges are still worse.

Despite these troubling trends, Israel’s tendency towards the particularly Jewish has only continued to deepen in recent years. This past November, Israelis went to the polls and elected the most religious, most nationalistic government in the country’s history. For many Israelis, their vote was a sign of their disillusionment with the Peace Process. Although, in 1993, Yitchak Rabin and Yasser Afarat had shaken hands on the White House Lawn, their historic agreement did not bring peace, but rather, led to the Second Intifada: cafés and buses exploding all over the country. Although, in 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlers from the Gaza Strip, the disengagement led to the election of Hamas and a regular barrage of rockets. These experiences, and others like them, pushed many Israelis to embrace intensely nationalistic politicians, taking Israel’s natural tendency towards the particularly Jewish to the extreme.

Many American Jews are troubled by these trends. They wonder how Israeli Jews could embrace so parochial a worldview. Don’t Israeli Jews see, we American Jews might ask, that their embrace of the particularly Jewish is potentially leading them down the path to becoming an ethnic theocracy?

***

We have before us two Jewish communities, separated by a long-ago fork in the road. One, here in the United States, has, in order to navigate a pluralistic society, tended to prioritize the universally human – but in so doing, has inadvertently imperiled our cultural survival. The other, there in Israel, has, in order to help our civilization flourish, tended to prioritize the particularly Jewish – but in so doing, increasingly runs the risk of veering into ethnic theocracy.

Over the past several months in particular, I have heard many American Jews – including many people in this congregation – ask whether the distance between US Jewry and Israeli Jewry may now be too wide to bridge: that perhaps it is time for American Jews to cut our ties with Israel. And similarly, I know from my conversations with many Israelis – with friends, with taxi drivers, and from reading the Israeli newspapers – that many Israeli Jews are also asking the same question: wondering whether perhaps it is time for Israeli Jewry to stop groveling for the support of an unsympathetic American Jewish community and instead look to Evangelical Christians, or to Russia, or to China as Israel’s greatest advocate.

Perhaps the fork in the road is already too far in the past for these two Jewish communities to ever again feel that we are a part of the same global family. Perhaps the wheels have already been irreversibly set in motion – that both groups will continue to drift further and further apart, until each group is absorbed by its extremes: that universalistic American Jews will slowly assimilate into nothingness, and that particularistic Israeli Jews will slowly harden into a fundamentalist enclave.

But now precisely is the time that we need to do the exact opposite. Rather than cutting ties and letting one another veer off into our separate distances, what we need now, instead, is to retether ourselves to one another, so that we do not vanish into our extremes.

Now, perhaps more than ever, these two Jewish communities need each other. We need each other not so that we can try to convince the other of the superiority of our worldview. Rather, we need each other so that we can each act as a counterbalance, a corrective – a trusted, familiar hand that, when the other begins to stray off its path, can lovingly help guide it back to the road.

When segments of Israeli Jewry begin to promulgate policies that we American Jews recognize as dangerously particularistic, it is our responsibility, as members of the same global family, to speak up: to bring to the conversation our lived experience about the need for a pluralistic society.

And also, when we American Jews begin to lose touch with the customs, the stories, the commitments that make us Jewish in the first place, it is Israeli Jewry’s responsibility to speak up: to bring to the conversation their cultural creativity, the Jewish civilizational renaissance that they have pioneered.

We need one another: to help us see our own shortcomings, and to lend our strengths to the other.

Ours, after all, is not the first era in which the Jewish people has been divided by a fork in the road. In fact, from the very beginning, it has been a trademark of our history.

In Biblical times, there was not just one Israelite republic, but rather, there were two: the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and also, the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

In the Rabbinic period, our sages produced not just one compendium of Jewish teaching, but rather, produced two: writing both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

In the Middle Ages, our greatest scholars recorded not just one opinion on matters Jewish Law, but rather, recorded two: with Ashkenazi rabbis saying that rice was forbidden on Passover, and Sephardi rabbis saying that it was permitted.

In the 1800s, our great-great grandparents had not just one definition of Jewishness; rather, they had two: with Jews in Western Europe insisting that Judaism was a religion, while Jews in Eastern Europe insisted that Judaism was a collective identity.

In each of these eras, and in many others like them, the Jewish people was not torn apart by our differences. Rather, we were strengthened by them.

***

Long before Tevye and the other villagers of Anatevka stood at that fork in the road – in an earlier scene, practically at the movie’s very beginning – in one of the film’s most quotable exchanges, Tevye and his companions are debating whether they should read the newspapers and worry about the world outside their village, or go about their daily lives without concern for current events. 

 “Why should I break my head about the outside world?” says one of the villagers. “Let the outside world break its own head!” To which Tevye responds: “He’s right!” 

“Nonsense,” pipes up young Perchik. “You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.” And again, Tevye responds: “He’s right!” 

A third villager chimes in: “He’s right, and he’s right? They can’t both be right.”

Tevye considers this. And with inimitable wit, he says: “You know, you are also right.”

Today, we would do well to learn from Tevye: to recognize that, although the global Jewish family has been divided by a fork in the road, we need one another – to help keep us on the path. After all: that has always been our Tradition.

_____

[1] Danny Gordis, Impossible Takes Longer (2023), p. xvi.

[2] Rav Moshe Feinstein, Darash Moshe, “Drush 10” (1939): https://yaacovhaber.com/rth/participating-in-the-political-process-a-torah-view/

[3] Danny Gordis (quoting the well-regarded non-profit Freedom House), Impossible Takes Longer (2023), p. 142.