February 2026

Friday, February 20, 2026 – ג׳ אֲדָר תשפ”ו

Last week, in Part I, I argued that Zionism is not a relic of 19th-century nationalism but a living movement and the ongoing project of Jewish self-determination. But self-determination is not merely about the right to exist. It is about responsibility to govern. Of course, as Israel prepares for (another) war with Iran, some of these questions feel less urgent, but I am committed to addressing them now nonetheless.

As the adage goes, for revolutionaries, winning is sometimes harder than losing. Winning means morphing from being a revolutionary with a single cause to a state builder and bureaucrat. It’s one thing to fight the British, and it’s another to figure out how the education system is going to run, build infrastructure, and incorporate multiple visions of what it means to be a Jewish State into a functioning system.
If Zionism is the movement of Jewish self-determination, then sovereignty is its proving ground. It is one thing to long for a state; it is another to govern one. For guidance on what Jewish sovereignty was meant to become, we need look no further than the text Israel’s founders placed at the heart of the national enterprise: the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948).

The Declaration does more than assert the Jewish people’s historic right to self-determination. It binds that right to a moral and aspirational vision:

“The State of Israel … will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex; … promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; … be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets.”

These words are covenantally enshrined in Israel’s foundational document and represent a promise to the Jewish people, to all of Israel’s citizens, and to the world that Jewish sovereignty would be tethered to a set of ethics laid out in the Torah and by the Prophets of Israel. The Declaration is aspirational and normative and establishes the standards by which our sovereignty must be judged.

To take that promise seriously requires that we distinguish between equality and equity — two concepts often conflated but are ethically distinct.

Equality refers to formal legal status: equal voting rights, equal protection under the law, equal civic standing. It is the baseline of democratic citizenship.

Equity goes further and recognizes that historical disparities, structural inequalities, and communal differences can prevent formal equality from translating into lived reality. Equity demands that the state take affirmative steps to ensure that equal rights can be meaningfully exercised by citizens whose circumstances differ dramatically.

The Declaration commits to “full social and political equality.” Fulfilling that commitment — in law and lived experience — requires more than constitutional language (Israel has no constitution). It requires political courage, moral imagination, and a deep commitment to shared destiny.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Israel’s internal social fabric.

Within the Jewish majority, the Haredi (the ultra-Orthodox population today represents 13.5-14 percent of all Israelis, and is predicted to reach 16 percent by 2030 and 25 percent by 2050) community presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Israel’s democratic ethos. Many Haredim view communal autonomy — in education, family law, and public life — as an essential expression of religious freedom. Of course, a democratic state must protect religious liberty.

But when autonomy becomes insulation — particularly in educational systems that omit core civic and economic subjects — difficult questions arise. Can a democratic society sustain itself if significant segments of its population are structurally disconnected from shared civic obligations and economic participation? How does a state balance respect for religious tradition with its responsibility to ensure that all citizens are equipped to contribute to and sustain the common good? How does mainstream Israel not lose any sense of tolerance for Haredi behavior after the near lynching of two female soldiers in Bnei Brak who were rescued and escorted out of the city, fleeing a chasing, raging mob?

This is not merely an administrative dilemma; it is an ethical one. Equity in this context means ensuring access to foundational education, vocational opportunity (which more and more people actually want), and a fair share of civic responsibility — including some form of national service — without erasing religious identity. Shared sovereignty demands shared investment. A democratic Israel cannot thrive if participation in its civic life is unevenly distributed or economically unsustainable. This point is, of course, aimed more at the Haredi leadership who resist integration than at the Israeli Government. Even if at the end of the day, Haredim don’t serve in the military, the Israeli public needs to feel that they are active participants in the shared future of the State, which currently they do not.

The question of equality and equity becomes more pronounced when considering Israel’s Arab citizenry, who comprise roughly 20 percent of the population. Legally, Arab citizens of Israel enjoy full political rights. They vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and participate in public life.

Yet persistent disparities in municipal funding, infrastructure, affordable housing access, employment opportunities, and public safety reveal a gap between formal equality and substantive equity. When entire communities experience underinvestment or limited opportunity, the promise of equal citizenship feels fragile.

This is not simply a matter of distributive justice. It strikes at the heart of Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic, and to “promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants.” A democratic state governs on behalf of all its citizens. When a substantial minority perceives systemic disadvantage, trust erodes, and the moral force of sovereignty weakens.

Equity here requires more than rhetorical inclusion. It calls for sustained investment in Arab municipalities, demonstratively curbing violent crime and murders in the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli community, protection against discrimination, recognition of language and cultural rights, and genuine political partnership. It requires moving from tolerance to co-ownership — from paternalism to partnership. (listen to more on this in this week’s episode of The Pluralist Podcast)

Reclaiming Zionism in its ethical fullness means insisting that Jewish self-determination need not come at the expense of minority dignity. It must instead become a shared project of nation-building in which majority and minority alike have a stake in the state’s flourishing.[1]

Perhaps the most acute test of Israel’s founding promise lies beyond the Green Line, in the West Bank. There, questions of sovereignty and self-determination intersect with contested land, security imperatives, and deeply competing national claims.

Israeli Settlers and Palestinians in the same geographic space live under different legal systems[2]. Reports of Settler violence, property destruction, and uneven accountability raise profound moral concerns. Even as Israel faces very real security threats, the uneven application of law undermines the credibility of a state that grounds itself in “liberty and justice.”

The central ethical question is unavoidable: can a state claim democratic legitimacy while exercising control over a population that does not share equal civil and political rights within that system? Can Zionism’s commitment to justice accommodate a prolonged condition in which legal disparity tracks identity and territory?

At the core of this tension lies overlapping self-determination — the Jewish claim to national sovereignty and the Palestinian claim to their own political future in their own sovereign state. One need not minimize Israeli security concerns to recognize that sovereignty without justice erodes the moral foundations upon which Zionism rests. Jewish self-determination cannot be secured by permanently denying another people’s political dignity, and Palestinian agency must not be overlooked, as the current Palestinian Authority is in need of considerable reform, and focus should be on state-building, not “resistance”.

The Declaration’s language — “for the benefit of all its inhabitants … based on liberty, justice and peace” should remain as a compass. It reminds us that sovereignty is not an end in and of itself. It is a means toward building a society in which human dignity is safeguarded, minority rights are protected, and national aspirations coexist with moral responsibility.

For the Haredi community, equity means inclusion without forced assimilation. For Arab citizens, it means parity of opportunity and political voice. For Palestinians living under Israeli control, it means pursuing political arrangements that secure both Israeli safety and Palestinian self-determination. None of these challenges is simple. But avoiding them does not make them disappear.

At its best, Zionism is not static. It is a living conversation between the particular and the universal — between Jewish nationhood and universal human dignity. Self-determination gave the Jewish people a state. The ongoing work of sovereignty will determine whether that state fulfills the prophetic vision embedded in its founding words.

The question is not whether Israel has achieved perfection. No democracy has. The question is whether we measure ourselves by the standards we set at our birth and whether we possess the courage to close the gap between promise and practice.

That is the unfinished work of Zionism.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1]The notion of a shred project is threatened by Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law, which affirms Jewish national self-determination but omits any parallel constitutional guarantee of equality, creating a symbolic and legal imbalance between the state’s Jewish and democratic commitments. By elevating Jewish identity without explicitly reinforcing minority inclusion, it risks signaling to Arab citizens and other minorities that they are peripheral to the national story rather than full stakeholders in it. A shared project of nation-building depends not only on majority sovereignty, but on minority dignity and equal belonging.

[2] In the West Bank/Judea and Samaria, Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli civil law and enjoy the rights and protections of Israeli citizens, including access to Israeli courts and civilian legal procedures. Palestinians living in the same territory are generally subject to Israeli military law, tried in military courts, and governed through a different administrative system. As a result, two populations residing in the same geographic space operate under separate legal frameworks with differing rights, procedures, and protections.

Friday February 13, 2026 – כ״ו שְׁבָט תשפ”ו

The recently released Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) survey has sent shockwaves through Jewish communal conversations over the past week, and for good reason. According to the survey, less than four in ten American Jews today describe themselves as “Zionist,” even as nearly 90 percent affirm that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. This disconnect has prompted soul-searching among leaders and commentators across the Jewish world and should be seen as an invitation to a conversation, as the answers we choose and the ways we respond will define the future of Jewish peoplehood.

Has the term Zionism outlived its usefulness and become a term that does more harm than good?  Well, as Shakespeare famously wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II). Which is to say that even if we retire the term Zionism, we might be able to maintain affection for and adherence to the liberation Movement for the Jewish people, fulfilling our age-old dream for self-determination, sovereignty, and to live as a People free in our own land. Some responses to the JFNA data treat the decline in Zionist self-identification as inevitable, or even as evidence that there’s more to it than that. Others argue that insisting on the label (or not letting go of “Zionism”) only alienates younger Jews or potentially flattens the rich diversity of Jewish opinion about Israel and the Jewish future. I feel that these interpretations, whether well-intentioned or not, mistake the symptoms for the disease.

What the data actually reveal is a significant confusion and even a distortion regarding the meaning of Zionism, not a crisis of commitment to Jewish life/living or to the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. In other words, people don’t reject Israel or Jewish peoplehood — they are rejecting a word (i.e., “Zionism”) that is loaded with many different meanings, assumptions, and ideologies that many Jews no longer recognize as reflective of their values.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity.

The survey shows that among North American Jews, an emotional connection to Israel remains strong, and it has intensified and grown among many cohorts since 2020 — especially younger Jews who are deeply engaged with questions of justice, a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and what is to be our collective Jewish destiny. Too many of us in organized Jewish life have allowed Zionism to be defined by others who do not share our values and by their policies, politics, and nationalist expressions that are far narrower than ours and the historic promise of Jewish self-determination in our historic Homeland. This has given space for those inside and outside the Jewish community to define “Zionism” for us in ways that are reductive, exclusionary, extremist, and politically fraught.

Zionism, properly understood, should be seen as a broad platform upon which Jews worldwide can express our highest Jewish values and aspirations for our people in Israel and Diaspora communities. Amos Oz, the renowned Israeli author and intellectual, famously stated that “Zionism is not a first name, but a family name,” implying that Zionism represents a diverse, argumentative, and broad “family” of ideologies regarding Jewish national self-determination, rather than a single, monolithic ideology. Being a Zionist was never meant to be a litmus test or a club badge. It was and must remain inclusive of the idea that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination, to safety and security, to the flourishing of the Hebrew language and culture, to moral and spiritual autonomy in the Land of our ancestors, and as members of the modern world. It is the idea that the Jewish future is not just about survival. It is about the redemption of the Jewish people from a state of homelessness and victimization, and that our future must be generative, ethically based, and in partnership with other peoples with whom we interact regionally and internationally. This is the Zionism worth reclaiming.

If we simply allow “Zionism” to fade as a self-identifier, we don’t just lose a label; we lose a framework for future-rooted Jewish belonging. We lose the idea that Israel can be simultaneously Jewish and democratic, vibrant and pluralistic, reflective of Jewish memory and boldly engaged with the world. We lose a common language for intergenerational dialogue about Israel’s challenges and aspirations. And we lose the ability to anchor that debate in a shared affirmation of the State of Israel’s centrality to Jewish destiny in our ancient Homeland and throughout the world.

There’s no question that our community is wrestling with complexity. Many Reform Jews – in many different generations – rightly raise questions about justice, human rights, and a democracy in our conversation about Israel. These are not sidebar issues. They are core Jewish ethical imperatives and concerns that our Movement and the Zionist Movement must take seriously. And yet, answering these questions outside of or in opposition to Zionism misunderstands both the importance of our Jewish past and our Jewish future.

Let me be clear:
Zionism doesn’t demand unquestioning loyalty to any government, nor does it erase moral critique of specific policies and actions taken by the State of Israel. It is not about assuming blind support for the Jewish State because one is Jewish, nor is it about some supremacist views concerning the Jewish people and our identity. Rather, Zionism as we should reclaim it calls for courageous engagement, the kind that loves our people, our Land, and is sufficiently committed to the future of the Jewish and democratic State of Israel enough to question, to struggle, and to build. Our Movement should not shrink from that work. We should lead it.

Reclaiming Zionism is not about insisting upon a single, static definition of what Zionism is. It is about reclaiming a generative, values-aligned understanding of Jewish self-determination that resonates with Jewish hearts and minds today—especially with a younger generation that is asking the big ethical questions about the world that they want to inherit and the news they are watching coming out of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is about giving that younger generation something worth inheriting and of which they and we older Jews can be proud, rather than trying to spin whatever is happening, apportion “a better PR or Hasbara campaign,” or deflect criticism of Israeli government policies as disloyalty or lacking in commitment to the Jewish people and Jewish State.  And reclaiming Zionism is certainly not abandoning young Jews to the self-destructive siren song of dismissal or defeatism.

The alternative to the aggressive PR campaign that justifies whatever Israel does is allowing the Zionist movement to drift without defense or definition. Both cede our historic inheritance to forces that misunderstand and misrepresent it. That’s not a future our Reform Zionist Movement can accept. The JFNA survey didn’t show that American Jews are turning away from Israel. It showed that they’re searching for meaning, clarity, and integrity in the language we use to define Zionism for us today. Let us give them that. Let us redeem Zionism (in accordance with our Reform Zionist values and tradition) and create a future that is hopeful, just, secure, compassionate, and unmistakably Jewish.

Shabbat Shalom.

By Rabbi Lindsey Danziger

“וְאֵלֶּה הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר תָּשִׂים לִפְנֵיהֶם”
שמות כא:א

  “And these are the laws that you shall place before them.”  (Exodus 21:1) 

Kehillat haPardes began on October 7th, 2023, in the Northern Israeli village of Pardes Hannah, when Rabbi Naomi Efrat awoke to a nightmare. In the confusion and pain of that morning, her first instinct was to open her home. Neighbors, friends, and friends-to-be kept showing up. They brought food and musical instruments. They cried and prayed, and they didn’t leave. What emerged is a Reform congregation, hundreds-strong, in one of Israel’s fastest-growing communities. They gather wherever people need them most: living rooms, yoga studios, the woods. Kehillat haPardes is our new IMPJ sister congregation at The Temple Nashville, and on a recent community trip to Israel, we were blessed to spend time together. We welcomed Shabbat with melodies and fresh fruit, and got a taste of the creative Jewish expression emerging across Israel. Rabbinic pioneers in Reform and Progressive congregations are responding to Israelis’ hunger for Jewish connection and re-imagined Jewish practice following trauma.   

This week, Parashat Mishpatim presents a guide on how to live: economics, agriculture, property, and social responsibility. These laws make little sense for a people wandering in the wilderness; they are meant for a society settling into their land and learning how to live together. From biblical times to now, our task has been to define and redefine, in every generation, how our sacred texts shape our lives. Nowhere is this more alive than in the Land of Israel, where a modern state and a modern people bring ancient wisdom into daily practice—wrestling with Torah in the public sphere, sometimes beautifully and sometimes painfully. How does a Jewish army defend itself while preserving life? How does a Jewish farmer maintain profitability while letting fields lie fallow every seven years? How does a rabbi gather her congregation for prayer and connection during national trauma?  

When I first visited Israel as a Jewishly disconnected college student, this dynamic process caught my attention, hooked me, and changed my Jewish journey. After that first trip, I became an expert at finding every fellowship, gig, and program that included Israel. I felt most alive and connected to Judaism there. Then I became a mother and a full-time professional, and other obligations took precedence. I spent a decade away. That changed on October 7th. Like many who experienced “the surge,” I longed to be in Israel. When our family is hurting, we show up. We bring food, we run errands, we help. World Jewry understood this instinctively. Flight prices surged, donations poured in, and visitors who had never experienced dangerous conflict learned to recognize the sound of rocket sirens. I am now planning my seventh trip to Israel since October 7th—not because my responsibilities subsided, but because my priorities shifted. Showing up requires sacrifice. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and often uncomfortable. But it’s worth it. 

For those who can’t travel, “showing up” looks like learning, donating, lighting Shabbat candles, connecting to community, attending synagogue, voting in the World Zionist Congress elections(!), or simply paying attention. Over the past two and a half years, every Jew has been asked—sometimes painfully, sometimes affirmingly—to make choices about their relationship with Israel. But what now? What happens as the war is (perhaps, tenuously, God willing) ending, headlines move on, and following the ultimate example of what it means to live out Jewish values in a Jewish state, every hostage is home from Gaza? 

Last week, I traveled to Israel for the first time since the return of the body of Ron Gvili z”l for burial in Israeli soil, and the end of Israel’s painful hostage ordeal. I went with my home community through the Nashville Jewish Federation to visit our partners, such as Kehilat haPardes. As Jews living in the “belt buckle of the Bible Belt,” we know what it means to show up for our people and to prioritize Jewish identity. When the volunteer mission was announced, the bus filled quickly. Then Nashville was hit by a historic ice storm, bringing power outages, displacement, and uncertainty. Those who made the trip moved mountains to do so and brought their full selves. 

We hit the highlights, from the Dead Sea and the Kotel to a sunset Havdalah on the Mediterranean. We explored religious pluralism and met with the Ethiopian community. We bore witness to the atrocities of October 7th alongside a bereaved mother at the Nova site and at Netiv HaAsara, a village on the Gaza border where residents are rebuilding and recommitting. We packed food boxes for the food insecure, picked cucumbers and strawberries in fields bereft of foreign workers since October 7th. We celebrated Tu Bishvat, our holiday of nature’s renewal, surrounded by blooming greenery—an experience that finally made sense compared to North America’s frozen landscape. 

What set this trip apart was seeing Israel through my companions’ eyes. For many, it was their first visit; for most, their first in many years. I watched them fall in love with Israel’s beauty and its scars—not the idealized version from afar, and not the geopolitical abstraction, but a living, breathing, complicated Jewish state, just as Mishpatim anticipates. One participant returned to Kibbutz Holit, where she had lived as a teenager, and found her host family’s home burned on October 7th. Standing in the ashes, surrounded by people rebuilding, she felt both devastation and resilience. In our closing circle, we shared what we were “leaving behind.” A Jew by choice spoke of letting go of feeling “not Jewish enough.” A mother, whose child is facing antisemitism at school, said she was leaving behind fear—and would take up more space as a proud Jew. 

Now is the time to show up for Israel. A country that has been holding its breath is beginning to exhale, assess the devastation, and decide who it wants to be next. If the last few years were about survival, the next can be about intention. If we’ve been embracing Israel in a bear hug, it’s time to walk beside her through healing. Recent days have seen Jewish and Arab Israelis taking to the streets together, demanding an end to the government’s inaction towards deadly violence in Palestinian towns. There is a demand for public accountability through an independent inquiry into the events of October 7th. Israelis will soon head to the polls for the first time since that deadly day – voicing their democratic vision for the future. If you visited Israel in the aftermath of October 7th and witnessed history taking place, now you have the chance to join our siblings in writing it.  

Parashat Mishpatim ends with the Israelites’ accension to the commandments: naaseh v’nishma—“we will do, and we will listen.” Our sages teach that this order of words means taking a leap of faith rather than waiting to understand every detail. This is your invitation to do and to listen. Engage more deeply. Visit Israel and send your children for a summer or semester. Build a congregational partnership through the IMPJ Domim Program. Join an ARZA Action Team to fight for Jewish and democratic values. Our presence, our choices, and our willingness to stay engaged are how Torah becomes lived reality again and again. 

Shabbat shalom. 

Friday February 6, 2026 – י״ט שְׁבָט תשפ”ו

This week, we stand once again at Sinai. We receive the Torah as a sacred text, a moral and ethical guide, our collective narrative and master story, and as the central defining moment of our people – arguably even more formative than our redemption from slavery in Egypt. Matan Torah is the moment of revelation, when a newly freed people accepts a covenant that will define not only what we believe, but how we behave. The drama of thunder and fire gives way to something quieter and far more demanding: a way of living in the world, bound by law, responsibility, and mutual obligation.

The Torah given at Sinai is more than a statement of faith; it is a blueprint for society. “You shall not murder,” “you shall not steal,” “love the stranger, for you were strangers…” and “remember and keep Shabbat”—these are not abstract ideals but organizing principles for communal life. Revelation begins with God speaking, but it continues in the ways human beings interpret, apply, and live Torah across time and circumstance. Sometimes the Torah’s demands are strikingly clear. It is a minor miracle of the Jewish state that everyone who boards a public bus encounters the verse “מִפְּנֵי שֵׂיבָה֙ תָּק֔וּם” — “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old” (Leviticus 19:32), a quiet but persistent biblical reminder of basic human decency woven into daily life – just one of a myriad of such examples.

And yet, from the very moment we received the Torah, we began to interpret it. Out of love, reverence, fear, and devotion, we undertook an intense—sometimes anxious and meticulous—process of guarding the law by building what the rabbis famously called fences around the Torah. The Torah itself invites this process. “Lo bashamayim hi”—it is not in heaven (Deuteronomy 30). The tradition that flows from Sinai assumes argument, debate, and a multiplicity of readings, all undertaken in the name of covenantal responsibility. To receive Torah is not only to revere it, but to wrestle with it.

That tension—between shared commitment and divergent interpretation—has animated Jewish life for three millennia. It is now playing out, as it must, in the State of Israel: the arena where Judaism meets sovereignty, public culture, civic responsibility, and democracy.

Rather than understanding Israel as divided between those who care about Torah and those who do not, we would do better to see it as divided between fundamentally different understandings of what Torah demands of a society: who bears responsibility, how power is exercised, and how obligations are shared among citizens. These differences are not theoretical. They shape policy, budgets, legal frameworks, and ultimately, lives.

Torah is embedded everywhere in Israeli society—in architecture, art, music, slogans, protests, speeches, and headlines. It forms the subconscious grammar of public life. And yet, at times, our interpretations drift far from their original ethical intention. For instance, the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (a command repeated three times in the Torah: Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21) has, over centuries, produced the requirement to separate dishes, divide food courts, and has created elaborate systems designed to prevent even the most remote infringement. There are countless such examples. The fences grow higher and the distance from the original legal intent only widens.

Against this backdrop, Orly Erez-Likhovsky and I devoted a recent episode of The Pluralist Podcast to one of the most sensitive and consequential questions facing Israeli society today: the place of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in a Jewish and democratic state. We sought to examine Haredi life through a lens that resists caricature, focusing on a community deeply committed to Torah—but committed to a particular interpretation of Torah.

The conversation was prompted by a tragic case that made headlines: the deaths of two infants in an unregulated childcare setting. But it quickly became about something much larger—not identity or belief, but power, responsibility, and what it means to live together in a shared society.

Too often, discussions of Haredi society collapse into buzzwords or culture-war tropes. Instead, we tried to slow the conversation down, add context, and insist on criticism without demonization—while refusing to ignore the very real consequences of policies that affect children, women, and the long-term viability of the state. The tragedy was not framed as a moral failure of individuals, but as the predictable outcome of structural decisions: underfunded services, lack of oversight, and a political system that has allowed entire sectors[1] to opt out of shared civic responsibility while remaining deeply dependent on the state.

Over time, large segments of Haredi society have constructed ever-higher fences around the Torah—layers of stringency that elevate particular mitzvot above all others. Shabbat observance, norms of modesty, and full-time Torah study have come to function not only as religious practices, but as the primary markers of belonging and legitimacy. In doing so, values that are sacred and meaningful in themselves are sometimes detached from the Torah’s broader ethical system, producing an insular worldview in which separation and communal survival eclipse shared civic responsibility. What emerges is not merely a different interpretation of Torah, but a self-contained religious culture with its own hierarchy of obligations.

These arrangements are often justified in the language of Torah—full-time Torah study as the highest value, insularity as religious necessity—but their impact is felt far beyond the walls of the beit midrash (house of study) or the kollel (full-time study for married men). This is where Parashat Yitro becomes urgently contemporary.

At Sinai, Torah is given to the entirety of the people of Israel. The covenant is collective. The commandments presume a society in which parents can work without endangering their children, in which courts protect the vulnerable, and in which leaders are accountable to the people they serve. Even Yitro’s advice to Moses—to establish systems of shared leadership and responsibility—is a reminder that spiritual aspiration cannot come at the expense of functional governance or basic compliance with communal norms.

From a Reform and liberal Zionist perspective, living by Torah means taking that collective responsibility seriously. It means building institutions that protect life, ensure dignity, and balance religious freedom with the obligations of citizenship. Interpretation is not merely an intellectual exercise, a theoretical “what if?” It is about consequences.

The deepest strain in Israeli society today is not simply between secular and religious, or between Haredi and non-Haredi. It is between visions of Torah as a private ideal insulated from civic responsibility, and Torah as a public ethic that demands participation, accountability, care for the whole, and continual evolution.

Nowhere is this tension more dangerous than in the growing, principled refusal of large segments of Haredi society to enlist in the IDF. In a nation where security is a shared burden and military service is both a civic obligation and a social adhesive, this refusal risks becoming not only a source of resentment but a force of internal unraveling. External enemies threaten Israel’s borders; the collapse of shared responsibility threatens its very fabric.

Receiving Torah at Sinai was a unifying moment—but it did not erase differences. It created a framework within which differences could exist without fracturing the people. The challenge of our time is to reclaim that model: passionate disagreement grounded in shared fate.

Parashat Yitro reminds us that revelation is not measured by how loudly we invoke Torah, nor by how high we build fences around it, but by how faithfully we live its values together. The question before Israeli society is not whose Torah is more authentic, but whether our interpretations lead to a society that is safer, fairer, and more humane for all who live within it.

That question is not marginal. It is the work of the covenant itself—and it may determine whether Israel can endure threats from within as well as from without.

Shabbat Shalom.

P.S. Catch the latest episode of The Pluralist Podcast – with Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg:

Separate Fate or Shared destiny? Haredi Life in the Jewish State. We take on one of the most sensitive and misunderstood questions in Israeli society today: the place of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in a shared Jewish and democratic state.

[1] These challenges must be understood within a broader structural context. Both Haredi and Arab communities in Israel continue to face high levels of poverty, underinvestment, and limited access to economic mobility—realities that demand serious, sustained policy responses rather than slogans or blame. At the same time, the scale of the challenge has changed dramatically. What began as a temporary exemption granted by David Ben-Gurion to roughly 400 Haredi men in the 1950s has grown into a system involving an estimated 100,000 individuals today (as discussed on The Pluralist Podcast). As the Haredi population grows rapidly and constitutes an ever-larger share of Israeli society, the cumulative impact of widespread exemptions from military service and workforce participation raises urgent questions about social cohesion, fairness in sharing civic burdens, and the long-term sustainability of Israel’s economy and state budget. Without meaningful integration strategies—educational, economic, and civic—the strain on Israel’s social contract risks deepening divisions at precisely the moment when shared responsibility is most needed.