Jewish Anti-Zionists: The Wayward Sons of our Generation
BY RABBI DORON PEREZ
The phenomenon of fellow Jews misunderstanding the essence of our unique Jewish mission is, unfortunately, not new.
Jews for Jesus knocked on our doors in South Africa in the 1980s, aiming to convince fellow Jews to become Christians. The argument was simple: you can remain part of the Jewish people – its race, its ethnicity – as long as you wholly abandon Jewish faith and religious practice. This was an attempt to sever the bond between two fundamental tenets of Jewish identity – faith and religious practice on the one hand, Jewish nationhood and peoplehood on the other. A Jewish anti-Judaism, in effect: yes to Jewish peoplehood, no to Judaism.
The nineteenth century saw an ideology that cut this bond from the opposite direction. Yes to Judaism; no to Jewish nationhood. German Jews at the dawn of the Reform movement, at the time of the Emancipation, claimed to be “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” Hebrew, the national language of the Jewish people, was stripped from all prayer books, replaced entirely by German. Any reference to a return to Zion and Jerusalem was likewise removed from prayers and ritual. Jewish faith – yes. Jewish nationalism – no.
To fit in with the dominant religious or cultural order, some Jews have been willing to sever parts of their complex identity – cutting the indelible bond between Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, and the Torah of Israel.
Neturei Karta and ‘Not in My Name’ Jews
Today’s Jewish anti-Zionists pursue the same goal – but now that we have collectively returned to Zion and Jerusalem, they do so through the acerbic prism of anti-Zionism.
Zionism, from its inception, was the commitment to the collective return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland. The miraculous State of Israel gave expression to this historic promise. Today, roughly half of world Jewry lives in Israel, and over ninety percent of Jews worldwide support Israel as a Jewish state. It is indispensable to Jewish identity and destiny.
There is no authentic way to separate Zionism – the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty and self-determination in their ancestral homeland – from Judaism or Jewish peoplehood.
Yet this is precisely what today’s Jewish anti-Zionists wish to do, an unholy alliance drawn from both ends of the religious and political spectrum. Neturei Karta on the ultra-Orthodox right and the “Not in My Name” crowd on the progressive left claim to be proudly Jewish and anti-Zionist simultaneously – standing shoulder to shoulder with those who call for destroying the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” They support the cause of terrorists who murdered, maimed, and brutalized innocent Jewish men, women, and children in an unprovoked attempt to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.
I have personally witnessed, in both New York and Toronto, members of Neturei Karta – thankfully numbering no more than a few hundred misguided Jews worldwide – marching side by side with Hamas supporters calling for the annihilation of Israel.
On the progressive left, the numbers are unfortunately larger, though still marginal to mainstream Jewish communities. Incredibly, some Jews feel nothing for the suffering of their own people as they face barbaric terrorist states and organizations bent on their annihilation. In the aftermath of October 7th, they published “not in my name” statements and letters distancing themselves from the fate of their fellow Jews while siding with their murderous enemies. They form a minyan at campus gatherings calling for the destruction of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.”
The wayward son – who are you?
These Jews are the wayward sons of our generation – the very figure we read about in the Haggadah.
Here is why.
The Haggadah identifies exactly who the wayward son is: “The wayward son asks – ‘What is this service to you?’ (Shemot 12:26). By saying ‘you’ he excludes himself. And since he excludes himself from the people of Israel (Klal Yisrael), he has denied a fundamental principle of our faith (kafar be-ikar).”
The Haggadah depicts the wayward son as one who sets himself apart from the Jewish people and places himself outside Jewish communal life. His question, “What is this service to you?”, implies that the service does not obligate him in any way. Issues of Jewish identity – our collective fate, destiny, and responsibilities – have no bearing on him. The Haggadah does not mince words: to exclude oneself from the Jewish people is to deny a fundamental tenet of Jewish faith.
What emerges powerfully from the Haggadah is the supreme importance of Jewish peoplehood. The community ethic is a core component of our identity and crucial to the meaning of Jewish life.
Pesach is the story of our people. It is where we explain to ourselves and our children what it means to be part of the collective Jewish experience – the history of a people whose birth was forged in the houses of bondage, in mutual pain and suffering in Egypt. The Covenant of Fate, as Rav Soloveitchik termed it, is the crux of the Pesach story: sharing a common fate and being part of a historic community. Failure to embrace this reality excludes one from the Jewish community and therefore from being part of that destiny.
Faith is not independent of fate, and Judaism is not independent of the Jewish people. One cannot claim to be either a religious Jew or a universalist Jew without being intrinsically connected to the particular fate and fortune of our people. According to the Haggadah, any religious or universalistic interpretation of Judaism that undermines the crucible of Jewish nationhood – the community ethic and our distinct collective historical experience as a people – is antithetical to authentic Judaism.
Those who hold these views commit a tragic mistake, excluding themselves from the Jewish community. They are the wayward sons of our generation – Jews who want Judaism without Jewish peoplehood, faith without fate, universalism without the bonds of brotherhood with their own people.
Our response to the wayward son
What are we to do with the wayward child?
The Haggadah continues by telling us how to respond. There is truth – and necessary harshness – in the response to such misguided views: “You in turn should blunt his teeth and say to him – ‘because of what Hashem did for me when I left Egypt, I do this’ (Shemot 13:8) – implying for me but not for him. Had he been there in Egypt, he would not have been redeemed.”
The wayward son needs to decide which side of Jewish and human history he stands on. If his worldview has no room for this deep sense of Jewish fate – the cry of solidarity with a suffering people, from Pharaoh to the Ayatollahs – he has missed the mark of the Jewish experience.
Our Sages tell us that many Jews tragically chose not to leave Egypt, lost during the plague of darkness. These Jews could not come to terms with Moses’ vision of redemption: to journey to the homeland of their forefathers and exercise their divine, religious, historical, and moral right to self-determination in their G-d-given land. Those who left Egypt committed to this narrative. Those who stayed behind rejected it.
Remaining in Egypt – perhaps even prioritizing the suffering of the Egyptians, the very perpetrators of generations of horrific slavery, over the suffering of their own people – sidelined them from Jewish destiny.
Of course, every good Jew must be sensitive to the suffering of all human beings. All are created in the image of G-d, and this is an unquestioned core Jewish value. But how can this possibly override the suffering of his own family, community, and people? Kindness and charity must never end in the home, but they most certainly begin there.
Instead of becoming influential protagonists of Jewish history, they became a peripheral footnote.
Judge Richard Goldstone, UN Human Rights Council, September 2009. (Photo: UN Photo/Jean Marc Ferré)
The Goldstone Report… and the repentance of a wayward son
Can such a harsh and heartfelt response actually reach a wayward Jew?
The answer is a resounding ‘yes.’
I will never forget how a meeting of South African Jewish community leadership played an important role in shifting the views of Justice Richard Goldstone – the man behind the infamous UN Goldstone Report.
Goldstone, a South African-born jurist who had moved to the United States, naively led a harsh and characteristically biased UN report condemning Israel for war crimes and potential crimes against humanity in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9. This three-week operation aimed to stop the barrage of Qassam rockets that had been raining down on Israel since Hamas’ violent seizure of Gaza in 2007.
The Goldstone Report was released in September 2009, triggering outrage in Israel and across the Jewish world. Goldstone believed that leading this libelous report did not disqualify him from being a good Jew – a Zionist, even, as he saw himself.
He did not anticipate the uproar that erupted across South African Jewry, nor the planned communal protests surrounding his scheduled participation in his grandson’s bar mitzvah in Johannesburg in April 2010. An agreement was reached: no protests, on condition that Goldstone meet with the leadership of the South African Jewish community. He agreed, and we met on May 3, 2010.
I had the privilege of serving as the rabbinic representative of a twelve-person leadership committee, led by my friend and colleague Avrom Krengel, then chairman of the South African Zionist Federation and the South African Mizrachi movement.
It was a remarkable meeting. Goldstone and his lawyer sat across from us for nearly two hours, listening to a sharp, unified South African Jewish voice of dismay and contempt for his role in the report bearing his name. Mr. Krengel, himself a leading lawyer, opened with a thorough and brilliant analysis demonstrating both the report’s inherent bias and the enormous damage it had caused Israel and the South African Jewish community. Leaders from left and right, religious and secular, from across all Jewish streams, came together with one clear message: not in our name. You cannot claim to be a faithful South African Jew and Zionist when you have caused greater damage to Israel than arguably any other Jew of our time.
I was the last to speak – rabbinic privilege. Drawing on the proximity to Pesach, I explained to Justice Goldstone – in a similar vein to what I have written above – who the wayward son of the Haggadah is (I chose the word wayward rather than wicked, out of respect) and why his actions had made him such a harmful son of our people. We left that difficult but necessary meeting with the sense that our words had been heard.
Less than a year later, in April 2011, Goldstone astonishingly retracted the key findings of his report in a Washington Post op-ed, stating that the evidence did not support the claim that Israel had intentionally targeted civilians. He expressed regret over the report’s conclusions, noting that Israeli investigations had since shown that many civilian deaths were not part of a deliberate policy. He concluded that the accusation that Israel intended to kill civilians was unsupported, and that the report had failed to give sufficient attention to Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: “There are very few incidents in which false accusations are taken back, and this is the case with the Goldstone Report.”
Goldstone understood, it seems, that as long as he wished to remain part of the Jewish community, he could not be oblivious to its pain and suffering – certainly not while actively strengthening the hand of its sworn, brutal terrorist enemy. If a wayward son wishes to be embraced by his family and people, he must return to them.
Our responsibility to the wayward son
This fills me with both pause and hope – and with a deep sense of our responsibility to reach the wayward sons of our generation. Yes, there must be an honest harshness about their misguided and damaging views. But there must also be an invitation to sit together at the table of the Jewish family – to share in our pain and our outrage. We want them to come home.
What is telling about the wayward son is that he is present at the table. Despite his distancing from the collective pain of his family, he still wants to be part of it. As long as he values his place at our table, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to engage him in a way that brings him home.
As his fellow Jews, we bear a responsibility to both embrace and educate him – to make clear the eternal and indivisible link between the Jewish people, Judaism, and the Jewish state. Universal morality, religious conviction, and Jewish nationhood are not competing loyalties but complementary strands of Jewish identity and destiny.
We are one family and ought to do all we can to preserve that family. The Haggadah reminds us that to be unable to feel the collective pain of our people is to miss something fundamental about Jewish life. It also reminds us that the wayward child is at the table and wants to be part of our family and story. We must be harshly honest about their destructive ideas and actions – without truth they cannot learn. But without love and an open heart, they may never return.
Rabbi Doron Perez is the Executive Chairman of World Mizrachi.