Jewish Peoplehood:
Many truths and a lie [1]
Kol Nidre 5786
Oct 1, 2025
Watch
I dedicate this Dvar Torah to the young people at Kol Tzedek, and in particular the teens who shared this experience with me. Your immense compassion and curiosity give me hope for the Jewish future.
--
It was a warm spring night in early May 2024. The siege in Gaza already felt endless, 9 months in. Students and faculty were organizing on campuses across the country as part of a nation-wide university divestment effort, including right here in West Philly at the University of Pennsylvania. I had been teaching a monthly teen class on politics and ethics. We had been discussing the war in Gaza and studying the Torah of ceasefire all year. With the semester coming to an end, I decided to take them on a field trip to the encampment at Penn. It seemed like a timely opportunity for experiential education.
I imagined it would be a quiet night on campus. I had been invited to participate in an interfaith prayer service and thought that might be a nice experience to share with my students. I reached out to Molly Sand, who was finishing her freshman year at Penn, and one of the student organizers at the encampment (not to mention one of my first Bat Mitzvah students), and asked if she could make some time to debrief with my class after the prayer service.
As we walked up and over The Class of 1949 Bridge, we could hear and see a large crowd. At the last minute the students had planned a rally, and in response police arrived in equal numbers. I eyed the line of faith leaders – pastors, rabbis, imams, chaplains – wearing assorted rainbow shawls and keffiyehs. They were standing between the speakers and a block of police in full riot gear, batons and shields at the ready. I waved to my colleagues but for fear of placing my students in harm's way, we hung back on the periphery of the crowd. I kept the young people close as we took in the sea of flags, posters, and t-shirts, surrounded by many familiar Kol Tzedek faces, including Dr. Raz Segal, who was wrapping up his remarks as he passed the microphone to Dr. Noura Erakat, who began to speak.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a young Jewish student wearing a kippa and standing immediately to our right put on tefillin and began shouting the Shema over the din of the protest. At which point the crowd of many hundreds, including students, faculty, and faith leaders, began chanting “Free Palestine” over the sound of his Shema. Our heads scanned back and forth as we found ourselves suspended in the political theater. The air was combustible. I was on guard.
One of the teens leaned over and asked if he was just praying or if it was meant to be disruptive? While I could understand why it was hard to tell, I felt clear in my heart it was intentionally disruptive.
I had personally taught every one of these young Jewish adults to say the shema, to internalize the words as an expression of our profound interconnection to all life. I stood with each of them as they held the Torah and led the entire congregation in these very words at their respective B’nei Mitzvah. And now we were hearing those very words being used to silence the speakers we had come to hear.
When a quiet moment emerged, I gathered the students and we walked to a grassy knoll to debrief our experience with Molly . The teens asked thoughtful questions about the goals of the encampment and the organizing process. As we began to recount the experience of hearing the Shema, some of the teens shared how disorienting it was to hear the shema, unsure if they should join in. Unsure if they should join the chants to drown it out. Unsure who their people were.
It was not lost on me that for all of us this was a very formative experience. At the time, I was not yet ready to share with my students that we are living through a moment of rupture in the Jewish world and I too was unsure who my people were.
But now, nearly 18 months later, 2 full years into this siege on Gaza, with the people of Gaza facing famine and extermination, with the encampments dismantled, the student organizers suspended and academic freedom suppressed. Now I am ready to share that the experience caused me to question my relationship to the wider Jewish community in a profound way.
--
Shema yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
These six powerful words are inseparable from the Jewish soul.
They come directly out of the Book of Deuteronomy, intended to both unify Jews and point us to the Oneness of all life.
The shema and her blessings are a moment of collective resonance in Shabbat services, invoked twice daily in morning and the evening, a lullaby sung before bed, last words recited on our deathbed, and they will be our final call at the very end of Neilah. Each week I watch as toddlers know to stop their toddling and cover their eyes, taking in the feeling before they can even speak the words.
For the poets and mystics among us, I will note that it is in fact a haiku.
One that is exceedingly, perhaps intentionally, hard to translate into English. Every word has many meanings and there is no grammar to lean on.
--
That night on campus was one of the only times in my life that I have heard the Shema and not instinctively joined in. [2]
--
As we talked with one of the campus organizers, we learned that interrupting the activities at the encampment by loudly chanting the Shema had become a regular tactic for counter-protestors on campus. It quickly became clear that we were not the only ones disturbed by the experience. Apparently the student organizers have spent long hours trying to decide how best to respond. Sometimes the crowd quiets until they finish. Sometimes they chant “ceasefire now or free Palestine” over the Hebrew din. The Shema was successfully being used as a political tactic to position the encampment as anti-Jewish, instead of just critical of Israel.
–
Sitting with my students I too felt the pain of not knowing who my people are. And it has stayed with me all these months.
Whether or not we feel ourselves individually to be in an existential spiritual crisis, collectively I feel we are. We are indeed living through what my teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe describes as “a crash.”
To borrow a question from the title of Peter Beinart’s most recent book:
What does it mean to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza?
And what remains of our relationship to other Jews?
--
I have this distinct memory from when I was a rabbinical student. It was Purim morning, probably 15 years ago. One of my teachers entered the beit midrash dressed in a black cloak, with a black hood draped over her head. She looked like a mashup of the grim reaper and darth vader. On her back was a giant silver question mark, made of cardboard and spray paint.
It was not until the very end of the celebration, until we couldn’t tell the difference between good and evil, that she revealed that she was dressed up as Jewish Peoplehood.
At once mystifying and mythic, the idea had become a major theme at Hebrew College. While our political and theological opinions varied greatly on the subject of Israel/Palestine and Zionism, the faculty posited that we should be able to agree, maybe even align, on the idea of Jewish Peoplehood. If only we could define it. [3]
Which we couldn’t.
--
The origins of the term Jewish Peoplehood are surprisingly relevant to us as a Reconstructionist community. I typically would look back to classical rabbinic sources and Torah itself to understand a Jewish concept, so I did. And, it turns out, there is no biblical or rabbinic mention of the term Jewish Peoplehood or its Hebrew cognate, “Am Yisrael” or any really comparable Jewish concept! To quote Rabbi Andy Kahn: “the idea of ‘the Jewish People’ as a unified nation is a modern invention” [4] coined in the 1930’s by the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan along with the Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen Wise.
The idea of Jews as a collective with solidarities and responsibilities to each other is ancient, but this specific version of it, that imagines Jews as a people with specific state rights and privileges, in a similar way to how for example Polish nationalism imagines Poles as a people, is new, and it was articulated very specifically to make European-style nationalism make sense in an American context, and to support Zionism.
In his book “Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation,” Jewish Studies professor Noam Pianko explains, “[Jewish Peoplehood] enabled Zionism’s conception of Jewish groupness to move from the margins to the mainstream of American Jewish life and thought.” (7)
Such a notion of peoplehood made a lot of sense in a post-Holocaust era where everyone was trying to understand the borders of belonging in a hyper-nationalist world; a world where Jews were the recent targets of racialized discrimination and violence. It made sense to say that everyone who wore or would have been made to wear a yellow star is “one of us” – that we are bound together as people, and therefore why not have the unique rights of a nation-state. If we were going to be targeted for being Jews, perhaps we should understand and empower ourselves that way as well? And this led Kaplan to conceive of – effectively invent – the notion of Jewish Peoplehood. But that specific nationalist version of Peoplehood also carried with it nationalism’s worst pathologies – to at first legitimize, but ultimately homogenize and control an otherwise diverse population. Which has led us to this moment when the entire Jewish institutional world claims that standing with Israel is a necessary expression of Jewish life.
And to be honest, until this year I thought when Kaplan coined Jewish Peoplehood he was simply translating the ancient phrase Am Yisrael. But as it turns out, Am Yisrael never appears in Torah and even more surprisingly never appears in rabbinic literature. The phrase actually originates not as a concept but rather as a lyric, an anthem, one that I grew up singing full throttle in synagogue, youth group and zionist mosh pits, Am Yisrael Chai.
The refrain was likely first coined in an early Zionist songbook in 1895 with sheet music set to many different tunes. At the time, it was an expression of solidarity, sung during and especially in the moments right after World War II, by survivors in the liberated camps. It originated as an anthem of survival.
But it was not until the 1960’s that Shlomo Carlebach set it to music and it became a real bop, sung by the student movement in support of Soviet Jewry as a slogan of solidarity among Jews.
When Carlebach wrote the tune, I imagine he saw it as the rallying cry of the underdog, displaced Jewish refugees. But its meaning greatly changes when it becomes the rallying cry of the most powerful military in the region. Following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the hasidic singer Benny Friedman released a song called Am Yisrael Chai which has become a wartime anthem. No longer a powerless people, the State of Israel has deployed Am Yisrael Chai to excite nationalist fervor in this endless siege.
–
It is not that there were no relevant terms for describing Jewish collectivity in the biblical and rabbinic imagination. In Torah we have the idea of b’nei yisrael - the children of Israel, used to describe the ancient Israelites in the desert. And perhaps more aptly, an erev rav - a mixed multitude who left a narrow place together.
And we do see the word Am in Torah, but there are two important differences in its use. First it describes God’s relationship to us, God’s people, rather than our relationship to one another. And second, Am describes a spiritual relationship, not a political one. As in, “Ki Anu Amecha, For we are Your people.” We are God’s people, which is related but distinct from being bound together as a people ourselves, and quite different from being a nation-state.
–
Which is not to say the Torah doesn’t want us to have deep care, concern and connection to one another as b’nei Yisrael and as an erev rav, a mixed multitude.
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein explains, “Loving the Jewish people collectively does not exist as a classical Jewish concept, but loving individual Jews does exist as a powerful Biblical and Rabbinic concept.” [5] And it appears in the Torah reading we will read tomorrow afternoon.
The heart of the “Holiness Code” found in Leviticus 19 elucidates a list of spiritual instructions meant to create a more just society and included among them, is one of the most famous of biblical teachings, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” [6]
The passage used a variety of words to describe our obligations to other people: רֵעֶ֑ךָ, אָחִ֖יךָ, עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ , בְּנֵ֣י עַמֶּ֔ךָ . The variety of words inspires us to ask, Who counts as your people? Your kin? Your neighbor? And in what ways are our obligations the same or different based on how we understand our relationship?
Questions I have been asking myself these days.
Setting aside the nuance of these different terms, it is clear that we have an obligation to carefully relate to other human beings in general and especially to other Jews. The context in Torah suggests the care includes both righteous behavior and proactively holding them accountable, summarized best in the Jewish concept, Kol Yisrael ‘areivim zeh bazeh. Most often translated as “We are each responsible for one another.” Kol Yisrael may yet be the closest expression of Jewish collectivity, if not for the fact that it is immediately deconstructed into zeh bazeh, one by one. [7] Making clear our responsibility lies in our individual relationships, not our loyalty to the collective.
One of the consequences of living through this spiritual catastrophe is that I feel cut off from other Jews. From my own family members, my teachers, colleagues and study partners. I know I am not alone in this. And I expect it to get worse not better.
--
In a recent meeting with the new vice president of community relationships at the Jewish Federation, I confronted him about the fact that because of Kol Tzedek’s participation, the Federation pulled their name from the center city Shavuot Tikkun that we are part of creating every year. In response he asked directly if Kol Tzedek was an anti-zionist community.
I shared that while I personally identify as an anti-zionist, Kol Tzedek as a congregation does not identify that way and includes members with a range of views. What unites us is our shared values of democracy and self-determination for all people in Israel/Palestine, and our desperate calls for a Ceasefire. [8]
In response, he confirmed that indeed Kol Tzedek has and will continue to be disenfranchised from all Jewish Federation programming because of our views on Israel. The candor of the conversation was stark and clarifying.
It is not that we feel isolated, it is that we are isolated.
--
I have sat with so many congregants who are reaching out rather desperately, hanging on to Jewish community by a thread. From Philadelphia to Appalachia, Miami and New Zealand. And the common theme among their concerns is a deep shame in being part of the Jewish people given two years of genocide in Gaza. The shared sentiment is that Jewish institutional life has failed them. There is no place for them in Jewish life, at dayschools, summer camps, shabbat services, if they cannot tolerate the regular invocation of Jewish nationalism.
And quite honestly, the feeling is mutual.
Just last week the rabbi at the synagogue I grew up in announced that the congregation was going to be bringing speakers on a range of opinions on Israel, and he wondered, “should that include antizionists?”
Spoiler, the verdict was no.
Not even those of us, whom he publicly acknowledges, are “well mannered Jewish adults who went to Jewish summer camp and believe the values they learned compel them to be anti-zionist.” And this is the kicker, not even the ones who “were raised and educated here at [our Temple].” At which point he may as well have called me by name.
All these years later, it is not just that I am questioning my relationship to the wider Jewish community. They too are unsure if there is a place for me in their Jewish community.
And here we see that the ongoing nakba of Palestinians orchestrated by the state of Israel in the name of Jewish safety has exposed the fallacy of Jewish peoplehood on all sides, fracturing the very Jews it claims to protect and unite. Literally disconnecting me, and many of us, from the Jewish communities that raised us.
Jewish peoplehood has been enormously sticky.
Sticky but also sour.
Which is why that Purim costume has haunted me all these years.
--
Here is the brutal truth. There is no religion that has not been used to justify nationalism or genocide. Not Buddhism or Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. I can understand why one could look at this truth and say, see, religion is the problem. And I wouldn’t judge them for it. But I look it at and realize, this is the way of human nature.
The realization that Jews are as diverse and flawed as any other religious or ethnic group is humbling and healthy. It is a fulfillment of Kaplan’s conviction that we are not exceptional or chosen people. We are just people, like everyone else on earth. We are not a particular threat, as Christian Nationalism suggests. We do not control the government or the media. We are not plotting to take over the world. Sadly, we don’t even have space lasers. But we are also not a light unto the nations or the keepers of the most moral army on earth. We are not any one thing. And we are just as susceptible to the dangers of racism and nationalism as anyone else on earth.
I must admit, it feels strange and counter-intuitive to be so intentionally deconstructing our understanding of Jewish collectivity on this holiest day of the year when our prayers instruct us to gather as one collective spiritual entity, an agudat achat. Especially because part of what I love about being Jewish and being a congregational rabbi is the invitation to be part of and care for something larger than ourselves, to extend our circle of concern, to augment our self-interest, to widen our web of relationships. I am not interested in being Jewish alone. That is why I have devoted my life to building Jewish community. Needless to say, we are swimming upstream.
--
The truth is that the longing to understand what binds Jews together is itself ancient, at least as old as the Talmud.
A story is told in masechet Brachot (6a), in which the ancient rabbis, who of course invented tefillin, imagined that God, too, prays as we pray, and wraps tefillin as we do.
And so logically, the rabbis asked, if the Shema which contains the aspiration of God's oneness is in our tefillin, what is in God's tefillin?
To which Rav Hiyya bar Avin replied, God's tefillin contains the aspiration that the people of Yisrael will be echad, will be one. The rabbis, themselves living through a time of rupture, were struggling with the same thing so many of us are struggling with. What is our relationship to other Jews? In Babylonia, in Jerusalem and beyond? Are we really still connected?
The rabbis tell this story because they understand that Jewish peoplehood, and the clarity of what it is that connects us, is elusive. As it should be. It’s aspirational. Even the Holy One aspires to know what it is.
Over the past 18 months I have developed a lot of compassion for the student who chanted the Shema. I imagine that for the student chanting the shema, Judaism and Zionism are one in the same, inextricably linked. I believe his protest was for him an authentic expression of his Jewish identity. I certainly was taught that Jewish survival depends on the existence of a Jewish state. Those of us raised in mainstream institutional Jewish life were all taught that. But I also believe that the early Zionist thinkers never imagined this moment, when Jewish nationalism would prove itself to be morally incompatible with Jewish values. And what’s clear to me now is that unless we untease our spiritual tradition from this political ideology, Judaism itself will crumble.
Judaism has survived a cascade of spiritual catastrophes. And this one is ours to shape. Judaism needs us as much as we need it.
--
What connected us in the time of the rabbis, and still connects us now, is Torah and avodah and gemilut chesed, abundant acts of kindness. It's the celebration of holidays and the taste of your Bubbies’s favorite recipes. It's teaching our children the deeply embedded values of b’tzelem elohim and tikkun olam, honoring the dignity of every person and pursuing justice, and encouraging their questions and insights. It’s our understanding that love includes holding each other accountable. It's the celebration of new life at a bris, coming of age at a bat mitzvah, breaking the glass at a wedding. It's shoveling dirt together to bury our dead and somehow finding the strength to say kaddish again and again and again. What binds us is so much older and so much more enduring than nationalism.
I believe one of the unique opportunities and responsibilities of our generation, and of our community in particular, is to reclaim and recover a Judaism beyond nationalism, which is how it was for thousands of years.
I don’t yet know if it’s possible to infuse the phrase “Jewish Peoplehood” with new meaning. Or if we need to release those words and return to something older like B’nei Yisrael, or allow something altogether new to emerge.
In trying to untangle the idea of Jewish peoplehood, I’ve come to believe that it is many truths and a lie.
Truth: Peoplehood is and has always been elusive.
Truth: What binds us together as a people are shared languages, traditions and spiritual practices.
And the lie: That the ideal and ultimate manifestation of Jewish peoplehood is a political entity rather than a spiritual one.
The thing that is everlasting, that is worth preserving, is not the nationalist version of Jewish peoplehood that Kaplan and Wise conceived of, but rather the vastness of Jewish people and our spiritual traditions; our ability to question everything, our emphasis on teshuvah, our dozens of languages, our desire to make the world more whole.
If in every recitation of the shema it's our task to realize the Oneness of the Holy One, as elusive as it may be, then it's comforting to imagine that it’s God’s task to pray for our wholeness, our Oneness. As elusive as it may be.
May we reclaim the joy and wisdom at the heart of Jewish tradition.
May we come to realize that the boundaries of our people are wider than we ever imagined.
And may we merit to raise a generation of Jews empowered with the Torah of truth and justice.
In the words of Marcia Falk,
Hear, O Israel--
The divine abounds everywhere
and swells in everything;
the many are One.
May it be so.
Footnotes
[1] With gratitude to Rabbi Benay Lappe, Jon Argaman, Michael David Lukas, Abby McCartney and Shosh Ruskin for the hours spent editing. And to Huda Fakhreddine and Rabbi Mónica Gomery for encouraging me to share this Torah.
[2] The mishnah begins: מֵאֵימָתַי קוֹרִין אֶת שְׁמַע בְּעַרְבִית. From what time does one recite the Shema in the evening? Some 2000 years ago, in the earliest days of rabbinic Judaism, in the very first law code, this is the very first question the rabbis record. A question that affirms the shema at the center of Jewish prayer and spiritual practice.[3] https://religionnews.com/2025/09/23/rosh-hashana-helps-us-envision-a-judaism-beyond-nationalism/
[3] In an email exchange after Yom Kippur, my teacher explained that her intention was “to inhabit peoplehood by making a costume with a “peephole” and a “hood,” which is quite different from my experience and interpretation.
[4]
[5] I learned this idea from Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein in a teaching he did for Rabbis for Ceasefire this past Shavuot, June 2025.
[6] Leviticus 19:16-18: (16) Do not go around slandering your people. Do not stand over the blood of your fellow: I am יהוה. (17) Rebuke – really rebuke – your comrade; so you don’t transgress on their account. (18) You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your fellows. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am יהוה.
[7] I am not sure if this was my insight or if I learned it from someone. I regret that if it is not my original idea I can’t remember from whom I learned it. If it was you, please let me know!
[8] In our most recent community survey from the spring of 2025, 50% have been active in the Ceasefire movement, 47% are interested in learning more, 42% identify as anti-Zionist, and 25% as non-Zionist. Some number of people checked multiple of those boxes. I feel keenly aware that these terms are at once limiting, empowering and not mutually exclusive.
Oct 1, 2025
Watch
I dedicate this Dvar Torah to the young people at Kol Tzedek, and in particular the teens who shared this experience with me. Your immense compassion and curiosity give me hope for the Jewish future.
--
It was a warm spring night in early May 2024. The siege in Gaza already felt endless, 9 months in. Students and faculty were organizing on campuses across the country as part of a nation-wide university divestment effort, including right here in West Philly at the University of Pennsylvania. I had been teaching a monthly teen class on politics and ethics. We had been discussing the war in Gaza and studying the Torah of ceasefire all year. With the semester coming to an end, I decided to take them on a field trip to the encampment at Penn. It seemed like a timely opportunity for experiential education.
I imagined it would be a quiet night on campus. I had been invited to participate in an interfaith prayer service and thought that might be a nice experience to share with my students. I reached out to Molly Sand, who was finishing her freshman year at Penn, and one of the student organizers at the encampment (not to mention one of my first Bat Mitzvah students), and asked if she could make some time to debrief with my class after the prayer service.
As we walked up and over The Class of 1949 Bridge, we could hear and see a large crowd. At the last minute the students had planned a rally, and in response police arrived in equal numbers. I eyed the line of faith leaders – pastors, rabbis, imams, chaplains – wearing assorted rainbow shawls and keffiyehs. They were standing between the speakers and a block of police in full riot gear, batons and shields at the ready. I waved to my colleagues but for fear of placing my students in harm's way, we hung back on the periphery of the crowd. I kept the young people close as we took in the sea of flags, posters, and t-shirts, surrounded by many familiar Kol Tzedek faces, including Dr. Raz Segal, who was wrapping up his remarks as he passed the microphone to Dr. Noura Erakat, who began to speak.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a young Jewish student wearing a kippa and standing immediately to our right put on tefillin and began shouting the Shema over the din of the protest. At which point the crowd of many hundreds, including students, faculty, and faith leaders, began chanting “Free Palestine” over the sound of his Shema. Our heads scanned back and forth as we found ourselves suspended in the political theater. The air was combustible. I was on guard.
One of the teens leaned over and asked if he was just praying or if it was meant to be disruptive? While I could understand why it was hard to tell, I felt clear in my heart it was intentionally disruptive.
I had personally taught every one of these young Jewish adults to say the shema, to internalize the words as an expression of our profound interconnection to all life. I stood with each of them as they held the Torah and led the entire congregation in these very words at their respective B’nei Mitzvah. And now we were hearing those very words being used to silence the speakers we had come to hear.
When a quiet moment emerged, I gathered the students and we walked to a grassy knoll to debrief our experience with Molly . The teens asked thoughtful questions about the goals of the encampment and the organizing process. As we began to recount the experience of hearing the Shema, some of the teens shared how disorienting it was to hear the shema, unsure if they should join in. Unsure if they should join the chants to drown it out. Unsure who their people were.
It was not lost on me that for all of us this was a very formative experience. At the time, I was not yet ready to share with my students that we are living through a moment of rupture in the Jewish world and I too was unsure who my people were.
But now, nearly 18 months later, 2 full years into this siege on Gaza, with the people of Gaza facing famine and extermination, with the encampments dismantled, the student organizers suspended and academic freedom suppressed. Now I am ready to share that the experience caused me to question my relationship to the wider Jewish community in a profound way.
--
Shema yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
These six powerful words are inseparable from the Jewish soul.
They come directly out of the Book of Deuteronomy, intended to both unify Jews and point us to the Oneness of all life.
The shema and her blessings are a moment of collective resonance in Shabbat services, invoked twice daily in morning and the evening, a lullaby sung before bed, last words recited on our deathbed, and they will be our final call at the very end of Neilah. Each week I watch as toddlers know to stop their toddling and cover their eyes, taking in the feeling before they can even speak the words.
For the poets and mystics among us, I will note that it is in fact a haiku.
One that is exceedingly, perhaps intentionally, hard to translate into English. Every word has many meanings and there is no grammar to lean on.
--
That night on campus was one of the only times in my life that I have heard the Shema and not instinctively joined in. [2]
--
As we talked with one of the campus organizers, we learned that interrupting the activities at the encampment by loudly chanting the Shema had become a regular tactic for counter-protestors on campus. It quickly became clear that we were not the only ones disturbed by the experience. Apparently the student organizers have spent long hours trying to decide how best to respond. Sometimes the crowd quiets until they finish. Sometimes they chant “ceasefire now or free Palestine” over the Hebrew din. The Shema was successfully being used as a political tactic to position the encampment as anti-Jewish, instead of just critical of Israel.
–
Sitting with my students I too felt the pain of not knowing who my people are. And it has stayed with me all these months.
Whether or not we feel ourselves individually to be in an existential spiritual crisis, collectively I feel we are. We are indeed living through what my teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe describes as “a crash.”
To borrow a question from the title of Peter Beinart’s most recent book:
What does it mean to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza?
And what remains of our relationship to other Jews?
--
I have this distinct memory from when I was a rabbinical student. It was Purim morning, probably 15 years ago. One of my teachers entered the beit midrash dressed in a black cloak, with a black hood draped over her head. She looked like a mashup of the grim reaper and darth vader. On her back was a giant silver question mark, made of cardboard and spray paint.
It was not until the very end of the celebration, until we couldn’t tell the difference between good and evil, that she revealed that she was dressed up as Jewish Peoplehood.
At once mystifying and mythic, the idea had become a major theme at Hebrew College. While our political and theological opinions varied greatly on the subject of Israel/Palestine and Zionism, the faculty posited that we should be able to agree, maybe even align, on the idea of Jewish Peoplehood. If only we could define it. [3]
Which we couldn’t.
--
The origins of the term Jewish Peoplehood are surprisingly relevant to us as a Reconstructionist community. I typically would look back to classical rabbinic sources and Torah itself to understand a Jewish concept, so I did. And, it turns out, there is no biblical or rabbinic mention of the term Jewish Peoplehood or its Hebrew cognate, “Am Yisrael” or any really comparable Jewish concept! To quote Rabbi Andy Kahn: “the idea of ‘the Jewish People’ as a unified nation is a modern invention” [4] coined in the 1930’s by the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan along with the Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen Wise.
The idea of Jews as a collective with solidarities and responsibilities to each other is ancient, but this specific version of it, that imagines Jews as a people with specific state rights and privileges, in a similar way to how for example Polish nationalism imagines Poles as a people, is new, and it was articulated very specifically to make European-style nationalism make sense in an American context, and to support Zionism.
In his book “Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation,” Jewish Studies professor Noam Pianko explains, “[Jewish Peoplehood] enabled Zionism’s conception of Jewish groupness to move from the margins to the mainstream of American Jewish life and thought.” (7)
Such a notion of peoplehood made a lot of sense in a post-Holocaust era where everyone was trying to understand the borders of belonging in a hyper-nationalist world; a world where Jews were the recent targets of racialized discrimination and violence. It made sense to say that everyone who wore or would have been made to wear a yellow star is “one of us” – that we are bound together as people, and therefore why not have the unique rights of a nation-state. If we were going to be targeted for being Jews, perhaps we should understand and empower ourselves that way as well? And this led Kaplan to conceive of – effectively invent – the notion of Jewish Peoplehood. But that specific nationalist version of Peoplehood also carried with it nationalism’s worst pathologies – to at first legitimize, but ultimately homogenize and control an otherwise diverse population. Which has led us to this moment when the entire Jewish institutional world claims that standing with Israel is a necessary expression of Jewish life.
And to be honest, until this year I thought when Kaplan coined Jewish Peoplehood he was simply translating the ancient phrase Am Yisrael. But as it turns out, Am Yisrael never appears in Torah and even more surprisingly never appears in rabbinic literature. The phrase actually originates not as a concept but rather as a lyric, an anthem, one that I grew up singing full throttle in synagogue, youth group and zionist mosh pits, Am Yisrael Chai.
The refrain was likely first coined in an early Zionist songbook in 1895 with sheet music set to many different tunes. At the time, it was an expression of solidarity, sung during and especially in the moments right after World War II, by survivors in the liberated camps. It originated as an anthem of survival.
But it was not until the 1960’s that Shlomo Carlebach set it to music and it became a real bop, sung by the student movement in support of Soviet Jewry as a slogan of solidarity among Jews.
When Carlebach wrote the tune, I imagine he saw it as the rallying cry of the underdog, displaced Jewish refugees. But its meaning greatly changes when it becomes the rallying cry of the most powerful military in the region. Following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the hasidic singer Benny Friedman released a song called Am Yisrael Chai which has become a wartime anthem. No longer a powerless people, the State of Israel has deployed Am Yisrael Chai to excite nationalist fervor in this endless siege.
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It is not that there were no relevant terms for describing Jewish collectivity in the biblical and rabbinic imagination. In Torah we have the idea of b’nei yisrael - the children of Israel, used to describe the ancient Israelites in the desert. And perhaps more aptly, an erev rav - a mixed multitude who left a narrow place together.
And we do see the word Am in Torah, but there are two important differences in its use. First it describes God’s relationship to us, God’s people, rather than our relationship to one another. And second, Am describes a spiritual relationship, not a political one. As in, “Ki Anu Amecha, For we are Your people.” We are God’s people, which is related but distinct from being bound together as a people ourselves, and quite different from being a nation-state.
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Which is not to say the Torah doesn’t want us to have deep care, concern and connection to one another as b’nei Yisrael and as an erev rav, a mixed multitude.
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein explains, “Loving the Jewish people collectively does not exist as a classical Jewish concept, but loving individual Jews does exist as a powerful Biblical and Rabbinic concept.” [5] And it appears in the Torah reading we will read tomorrow afternoon.
The heart of the “Holiness Code” found in Leviticus 19 elucidates a list of spiritual instructions meant to create a more just society and included among them, is one of the most famous of biblical teachings, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” [6]
The passage used a variety of words to describe our obligations to other people: רֵעֶ֑ךָ, אָחִ֖יךָ, עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ , בְּנֵ֣י עַמֶּ֔ךָ . The variety of words inspires us to ask, Who counts as your people? Your kin? Your neighbor? And in what ways are our obligations the same or different based on how we understand our relationship?
Questions I have been asking myself these days.
Setting aside the nuance of these different terms, it is clear that we have an obligation to carefully relate to other human beings in general and especially to other Jews. The context in Torah suggests the care includes both righteous behavior and proactively holding them accountable, summarized best in the Jewish concept, Kol Yisrael ‘areivim zeh bazeh. Most often translated as “We are each responsible for one another.” Kol Yisrael may yet be the closest expression of Jewish collectivity, if not for the fact that it is immediately deconstructed into zeh bazeh, one by one. [7] Making clear our responsibility lies in our individual relationships, not our loyalty to the collective.
One of the consequences of living through this spiritual catastrophe is that I feel cut off from other Jews. From my own family members, my teachers, colleagues and study partners. I know I am not alone in this. And I expect it to get worse not better.
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In a recent meeting with the new vice president of community relationships at the Jewish Federation, I confronted him about the fact that because of Kol Tzedek’s participation, the Federation pulled their name from the center city Shavuot Tikkun that we are part of creating every year. In response he asked directly if Kol Tzedek was an anti-zionist community.
I shared that while I personally identify as an anti-zionist, Kol Tzedek as a congregation does not identify that way and includes members with a range of views. What unites us is our shared values of democracy and self-determination for all people in Israel/Palestine, and our desperate calls for a Ceasefire. [8]
In response, he confirmed that indeed Kol Tzedek has and will continue to be disenfranchised from all Jewish Federation programming because of our views on Israel. The candor of the conversation was stark and clarifying.
It is not that we feel isolated, it is that we are isolated.
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I have sat with so many congregants who are reaching out rather desperately, hanging on to Jewish community by a thread. From Philadelphia to Appalachia, Miami and New Zealand. And the common theme among their concerns is a deep shame in being part of the Jewish people given two years of genocide in Gaza. The shared sentiment is that Jewish institutional life has failed them. There is no place for them in Jewish life, at dayschools, summer camps, shabbat services, if they cannot tolerate the regular invocation of Jewish nationalism.
And quite honestly, the feeling is mutual.
Just last week the rabbi at the synagogue I grew up in announced that the congregation was going to be bringing speakers on a range of opinions on Israel, and he wondered, “should that include antizionists?”
Spoiler, the verdict was no.
Not even those of us, whom he publicly acknowledges, are “well mannered Jewish adults who went to Jewish summer camp and believe the values they learned compel them to be anti-zionist.” And this is the kicker, not even the ones who “were raised and educated here at [our Temple].” At which point he may as well have called me by name.
All these years later, it is not just that I am questioning my relationship to the wider Jewish community. They too are unsure if there is a place for me in their Jewish community.
And here we see that the ongoing nakba of Palestinians orchestrated by the state of Israel in the name of Jewish safety has exposed the fallacy of Jewish peoplehood on all sides, fracturing the very Jews it claims to protect and unite. Literally disconnecting me, and many of us, from the Jewish communities that raised us.
Jewish peoplehood has been enormously sticky.
Sticky but also sour.
Which is why that Purim costume has haunted me all these years.
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Here is the brutal truth. There is no religion that has not been used to justify nationalism or genocide. Not Buddhism or Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. I can understand why one could look at this truth and say, see, religion is the problem. And I wouldn’t judge them for it. But I look it at and realize, this is the way of human nature.
The realization that Jews are as diverse and flawed as any other religious or ethnic group is humbling and healthy. It is a fulfillment of Kaplan’s conviction that we are not exceptional or chosen people. We are just people, like everyone else on earth. We are not a particular threat, as Christian Nationalism suggests. We do not control the government or the media. We are not plotting to take over the world. Sadly, we don’t even have space lasers. But we are also not a light unto the nations or the keepers of the most moral army on earth. We are not any one thing. And we are just as susceptible to the dangers of racism and nationalism as anyone else on earth.
I must admit, it feels strange and counter-intuitive to be so intentionally deconstructing our understanding of Jewish collectivity on this holiest day of the year when our prayers instruct us to gather as one collective spiritual entity, an agudat achat. Especially because part of what I love about being Jewish and being a congregational rabbi is the invitation to be part of and care for something larger than ourselves, to extend our circle of concern, to augment our self-interest, to widen our web of relationships. I am not interested in being Jewish alone. That is why I have devoted my life to building Jewish community. Needless to say, we are swimming upstream.
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The truth is that the longing to understand what binds Jews together is itself ancient, at least as old as the Talmud.
A story is told in masechet Brachot (6a), in which the ancient rabbis, who of course invented tefillin, imagined that God, too, prays as we pray, and wraps tefillin as we do.
And so logically, the rabbis asked, if the Shema which contains the aspiration of God's oneness is in our tefillin, what is in God's tefillin?
To which Rav Hiyya bar Avin replied, God's tefillin contains the aspiration that the people of Yisrael will be echad, will be one. The rabbis, themselves living through a time of rupture, were struggling with the same thing so many of us are struggling with. What is our relationship to other Jews? In Babylonia, in Jerusalem and beyond? Are we really still connected?
The rabbis tell this story because they understand that Jewish peoplehood, and the clarity of what it is that connects us, is elusive. As it should be. It’s aspirational. Even the Holy One aspires to know what it is.
Over the past 18 months I have developed a lot of compassion for the student who chanted the Shema. I imagine that for the student chanting the shema, Judaism and Zionism are one in the same, inextricably linked. I believe his protest was for him an authentic expression of his Jewish identity. I certainly was taught that Jewish survival depends on the existence of a Jewish state. Those of us raised in mainstream institutional Jewish life were all taught that. But I also believe that the early Zionist thinkers never imagined this moment, when Jewish nationalism would prove itself to be morally incompatible with Jewish values. And what’s clear to me now is that unless we untease our spiritual tradition from this political ideology, Judaism itself will crumble.
Judaism has survived a cascade of spiritual catastrophes. And this one is ours to shape. Judaism needs us as much as we need it.
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What connected us in the time of the rabbis, and still connects us now, is Torah and avodah and gemilut chesed, abundant acts of kindness. It's the celebration of holidays and the taste of your Bubbies’s favorite recipes. It's teaching our children the deeply embedded values of b’tzelem elohim and tikkun olam, honoring the dignity of every person and pursuing justice, and encouraging their questions and insights. It’s our understanding that love includes holding each other accountable. It's the celebration of new life at a bris, coming of age at a bat mitzvah, breaking the glass at a wedding. It's shoveling dirt together to bury our dead and somehow finding the strength to say kaddish again and again and again. What binds us is so much older and so much more enduring than nationalism.
I believe one of the unique opportunities and responsibilities of our generation, and of our community in particular, is to reclaim and recover a Judaism beyond nationalism, which is how it was for thousands of years.
I don’t yet know if it’s possible to infuse the phrase “Jewish Peoplehood” with new meaning. Or if we need to release those words and return to something older like B’nei Yisrael, or allow something altogether new to emerge.
In trying to untangle the idea of Jewish peoplehood, I’ve come to believe that it is many truths and a lie.
Truth: Peoplehood is and has always been elusive.
Truth: What binds us together as a people are shared languages, traditions and spiritual practices.
And the lie: That the ideal and ultimate manifestation of Jewish peoplehood is a political entity rather than a spiritual one.
The thing that is everlasting, that is worth preserving, is not the nationalist version of Jewish peoplehood that Kaplan and Wise conceived of, but rather the vastness of Jewish people and our spiritual traditions; our ability to question everything, our emphasis on teshuvah, our dozens of languages, our desire to make the world more whole.
If in every recitation of the shema it's our task to realize the Oneness of the Holy One, as elusive as it may be, then it's comforting to imagine that it’s God’s task to pray for our wholeness, our Oneness. As elusive as it may be.
May we reclaim the joy and wisdom at the heart of Jewish tradition.
May we come to realize that the boundaries of our people are wider than we ever imagined.
And may we merit to raise a generation of Jews empowered with the Torah of truth and justice.
In the words of Marcia Falk,
Hear, O Israel--
The divine abounds everywhere
and swells in everything;
the many are One.
May it be so.
Footnotes
[1] With gratitude to Rabbi Benay Lappe, Jon Argaman, Michael David Lukas, Abby McCartney and Shosh Ruskin for the hours spent editing. And to Huda Fakhreddine and Rabbi Mónica Gomery for encouraging me to share this Torah.
[2] The mishnah begins: מֵאֵימָתַי קוֹרִין אֶת שְׁמַע בְּעַרְבִית. From what time does one recite the Shema in the evening? Some 2000 years ago, in the earliest days of rabbinic Judaism, in the very first law code, this is the very first question the rabbis record. A question that affirms the shema at the center of Jewish prayer and spiritual practice.[3] https://religionnews.com/2025/09/23/rosh-hashana-helps-us-envision-a-judaism-beyond-nationalism/
[3] In an email exchange after Yom Kippur, my teacher explained that her intention was “to inhabit peoplehood by making a costume with a “peephole” and a “hood,” which is quite different from my experience and interpretation.
[4]
[5] I learned this idea from Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein in a teaching he did for Rabbis for Ceasefire this past Shavuot, June 2025.
[6] Leviticus 19:16-18: (16) Do not go around slandering your people. Do not stand over the blood of your fellow: I am יהוה. (17) Rebuke – really rebuke – your comrade; so you don’t transgress on their account. (18) You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your fellows. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am יהוה.
[7] I am not sure if this was my insight or if I learned it from someone. I regret that if it is not my original idea I can’t remember from whom I learned it. If it was you, please let me know!
[8] In our most recent community survey from the spring of 2025, 50% have been active in the Ceasefire movement, 47% are interested in learning more, 42% identify as anti-Zionist, and 25% as non-Zionist. Some number of people checked multiple of those boxes. I feel keenly aware that these terms are at once limiting, empowering and not mutually exclusive.