[I'm reposting an excellent piece by Dan Kaganovich and Jeremy England. Unfortunately, it is as timely today as it was when it was written.]
Less than a year ago, the people of Israel withstood one of the most traumatic assaults in the young country’s history. Notwithstanding the physical harm wrought by a barrage of bolt-laden Katyusha rockets, last summer’s Lebanon War took a heavy psychological toll as well. A nation that, for nearly a generation, had been taught to believe that peace with its enemies was inevitable and imminent found itself attacked simultaneously from territories it had ceded to various terrorist armies on the theory that doing so would make the country more secure. Far from the expected outpouring of goodwill from their previously belligerent neighbors – who, they had been reassured, were all but in love with Jews, but for a few soon-to-be-marginalized extremists – Israelis instead were met with cruelty as venomous and inhuman as had ever been manifest in the previous genocidal campaigns against them. With Islamic revolution incubating across nearly every border, and hostile states exploring a final technological solution to the problem of Zionism, the events of the past year may have awakened Israelis just in time to how vulnerable their country still is.
Among American Jews, however, the Lebanon War demonstrated something altogether different. Even for those who habitually shroud the Israeli-Arab conflict in a fog of moral equivalence, the Hizbullah attacks were so bold and demonic that anyone who still acknowledged the existence of good and evil felt compelled to finally take sides. For quite a few American Jewish Leftists, as it turned out, this meant siding with Hizbullah. Since then, articles pointing out the eagerness of so many Jewish intellectuals in America to condemn Israel for making the most modest attempts to defend itself have sparked vigorous public debate about what obligations American Jews have to the Jewish State.
Nowhere is this debate more relevant, and less talked about, than at universities across the United States. Among Jewish students on prominent American campuses, the recent controversy, and the war that stirred it up, both barely register on the radar. At Stanford University, one of the campuses with which we are most familiar, Hillel house has done literally nothing in six months since the war ended to acknowledge that anything untoward occurred in Israel last summer. Aside from facilitating much pro-Israel hookah smoking and featuring a puzzling “anti-divestment” motto prominently on their website, the staff of Stanford Hillel seem to be largely confused about why anything happening in Israel should be of particular interest to Stanford Jewish students. Sadly, this confusion is a symptom of what we see as a more general aimlessness that American Jewry is currently struggling with. At Stanford, and across America, flagship Jewish institutions are peddling a Judaism that is completely devoid of content, and in such an atmosphere of ambivalence about what Judaism actually consists of, strong conviction about anything Jewish – especially Israel – is hard to come by.
In understanding this phenomenon, few cases are more instructive than that of the Hillel house at Stanford. More so than exhibiting overt hostility towards Judaism or Israel, the people at Stanford Hillel simply do not know what they are doing. Or, perhaps more precisely, no one in their organization seems to be motivated by the idea that there are things one ought to do because one is Jewish. To be sure, they may see it as their job to plan programming that might appeal to Jews, but a quick perusal of their calendar of events reveals that much of this programming is concocted by adding a little bit of Jewish spice to factory-installed agenda items taken from the mainstream of American liberalism. While Hillel shows great innovation in organizing prayer services to combat global warming, it provides students with few opportunities to learn what it is that some Jews pray for three times a day. Similarly, however innocent a symbolic gay marriage rite conducted by Hillel staff in honor of Valentine’s Day might be, it is difficult to find inspiration for ceremonies involving symbolic marriage, homosexuality, or Valentine’s Day inside the confines of the Jewish tradition. And every year, new Stanford students express shock at the transparently partisan political themes of speeches that are inserted into campus High Holidays services. Absent is any atmosphere of duty and responsibility that might cause Stanford Hillel to take the rich structure of genuinely Jewish observances seriously. Instead, into the vacuum created by its own ignorance, an organization that must keep up the appearance of busyness in order to secure donations pours the priorities of Left coast politics that come most readily to mind.
The above anecdotes largely serve to illustrate that a Jewish student eager to explore Judaism with any kind of depth would be well-advised to do so somewhere other than Stanford. Yet, the flimsiness of the programming at Stanford Hillel is not merely disappointing, but can in some cases do serious harm. Not long ago, a speaker from the radically anti-Jewish propaganda group Breaking the Silence was invited to Stanford Hillel to accuse Israelis of sadism and child-murder. Apparently, the scheduling of this event was not the result of any particular desire on the part of Hillel staff to bring Breaking the Silence to campus; as soon as enough people complained, word went out that the silence would remain unbroken. Instead, the incident was simply a consequence of the general rule that prevails at Stanford Hillel: that nothing is out of bounds, except perhaps things that are too overtly Jewish, or too pro-Israel.
This is the crux of the matter: the problem is not that Stanford Hillel stands for anything particularly problematic; it is that it doesn’t stand for anything that comes from inside Judaism. In a recent public relations barrage unleashed in response to criticisms of their events, the organization explained that “the programming policy of Hillel and its affiliated student groups reflects [its] commitment to a flourishing Jewish and democratic State of Israel within internationally recognized secure borders. Hillel does not promote views outside of that framework. Hillel does support students’ exploration of wide-ranging education and debate within that broad framework.” As reasonable as this statement may seem, it nevertheless reveals how little Judaism has to do with Hillel’s politics on Israel. Nowhere in the Jewish tradition do we hold that the Jews may only hold sovereignty in the Land of Israel conditional on their receiving permission from the other nations of the world; indeed, much ink in the Torah is devoted to making precisely the opposite point. Yet to Hillel, it is far more important what the UN says than what God says, and even in an attempt to assuage concerns about their commitment to the Jewish State, they cannot help but reveal that they are willing to support Israel only if everyone else does first.
What causes Stanford Hillel to tailor their stance on Israel so carefully to the dictates of world opinion is fundamentally the same crisis of identity faced by most Jews in America today. In both cases, the ultimate standard for morality is all too frequently to be found not anywhere within Jewish thought, but rather on the editorial pages of the New York Times; Jewish values are acceptable only insofar as they happen to coincide with those of opinion-making elites. As a result, in America (unlike in Israel), support for the Jewish state may not be expressed in the simple language of self-affirmation. Instead, an American Jew, embarrassed by his partiality to one tiny Middle Eastern country, will typically point out that all reasonable people should side with Israel for any number of reasons: because it allows Arabs to vote in free elections, because it is a safe haven for a persecuted people, because it is an invaluable ally to the United States, or (most ludicrously) because it is posting record growth in the hi-tech sector. And woe betide the State of Israel should it ever be unable to justify its existence in the sanctified terminology of liberal politics.
What Jews, both in Israel and in America, must realize is that Jewish statehood is not going to be a popular cause for the foreseeable future. In fact, this should come as no surprise; it has always been unpopular and dangerous to show an uncompromising commitment to Jewish values, because the essence of Judaism is answering to an ethical standard that transcends the shifting whims of the fashionable and the powerful. It follows that a Jew who is too willing to defer to external arbiters of morality will soon find that he has lost his most important connection to Jewish identity. This is quite literally true today, when anti-Semites seek to drive a wedge between Jews and the only institution capable of sustaining their nation in the modern world, namely a modern Jewish state that is sovereign in all of the Land of Israel.
By adopting the moral standards of other gods, the Stanford Hillels of America are raising a generation of Jewish young people to be equally indifferent to both Judaism and Israel. The few people in America who still feel a sense of responsibility for the future of actual Judaism in the Diaspora are meanwhile faced with a paradox: on the one hand, in order for a Jew living in a free society in the modern world to retain a meaningful sense of Jewish identity, a connection to Jewish nationhood in the State of Israel is essential. But, on the other hand, a substantive commitment to Israel is unlikely to materialize unless motivated by a pre-existing dedication to Judaism. Compounding this predicament is yet another serious problem (beyond the scope of this article to discuss fully), namely that much of the observant Jewish educational establishment in America cannot bring itself to acknowledge that dinosaurs once walked the Earth. No teacher whose secular education never quite reached the level of a high school diploma can aspire to provide a model for a Jewish way of life to the highly-educated and successful American Jewry. This is especially the case because willful ignorance of science, history, philosophy, and other great post-medieval innovations is generally accompanied by a severe confusion about wholly Jewish values (a truth best illustrated by the fact that so many Jews who are made nervous by the theory of evolution feel equally uncomfortable uttering prayers that speak favorably about the State of Israel).
It is very likely not within the power of America’s ailing Jewish community to solve these problems by itself. Instead, those who want a future for Judaism in America should look to the current and future intellectual and cultural center of the Jewish world – that is, to Israel – for guidance. Only there does Jewish religious observance enjoy such diversity and vitality that discernible numbers of leaders and educators have emerged who are comfortable enough with their Jewish identity that taking the Torah seriously does not prevent them from being full participants in modernity. Instead of settling for anemic, directionless organizations like Hillel, or for the backwardness of the typical ultra-orthodox alternative, American Jews must build an infrastructure for importing modern orthodox rabbis from Israel. Creating such an opportunity for Americans to learn healthy Judaism from Israelis, and for Israelis to learn about functioning government from Americans, may save American Judaism from assimilation, and Israel from annihilation, and all just in the nick of time.
