For the sake of heaven?

“Every controversy which is for the sake of heaven is destined to be of lasting significance, but any controversy which is not for the sake of heaven will not be of lasting significance.” (from Pirkey Avot, chapter 5)

It is no secret that for many years now, our diaspora Jewish community here in the United States has been engaged in an increasingly heated controversy regarding our relationship with the State of Israel and the evolving and often competing meanings of Zionism. It remains to be seen whether or not this controversy is for the sake of heaven.

As I wrote in one of my columns about a year ago (May 2, 2025), it was way back on June 10, 2010, that Peter Beinart, then a young journalism teacher at the City University of New York, published an article in “The New York Review of Books” titled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”; at that time, Beinart urged us to look at the growing rift between liberal American Jews and the kind of Zionism which underpins the Jewish State of Israel.

Both bitter critics of Beinart and his diehard supporters have pointed to the same two cogent sentences in his essay: “Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberals.” And “For several decades the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Fifteen years have passed since Beinart wrote his controversial essay. For some, he has initiated a profoundly constructive controversy for the sake of heaven; others have gone so far as to call Beinart a self-hating Jew, to be excluded from the community of self-respecting (and self-righteous) Jews.

Early this spring, the editor- in-chief and CEO of Moment magazine, Nadine Epstein, published her own essay with the explosive title “The Word ZIONISM is Dead.” As she elaborates in her second paragraph:

“It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves as Zionists and anti-Zionists and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement.”

Having taught courses on Zionism at Connecticut College in New London during the 1980s, I was not at all shocked by Epstein’s essay, nor even surprised. The primary text we used during each of the two or three semesters I had the opportunity to offer the course was “The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader” (1959) by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg (1921-2006); this thick volume is a collection of writings of leading Zionist thinkers, together with a lengthy and penetrating intellectual history of the Zionist movement. During our class discussions, it became clear that there have been almost more versions and variations of the Zionist idea than we could count.

Further on in her essay, Epstein includes a provocative quotation from David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first Prime Minister. During a Zionist conference in Jerusalem in August 1957, he said: “There seems to be a general agreement that a Jew can live in America, speak and read English and bring up his children in America and still call himself a Zionist. If that is Zionism, I want no part of it.”

Ben-Gurion saw no place for Zionism in the diaspora; all Zionists in the diaspora should make aliyah and become citizens of the State of Israel. The one and only time that I witnessed Ben-Gurion speaking to a group was during the late 1960s, when he addressed the faculty and my fellow rabbinical students at the New York School of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. His Zionism was an absolute negation of the diaspora; from his perspective, it was not possible for us to live out our lives in these United States and yet call ourselves Zionists.

With increasing urgency, I have been writing in this space that I still consider myself a liberal Zionist; yet I utterly reject all forms of Zionism which embrace the notion of shililat hagolah, the negation of the diaspora. To the contrary, I affirm my complex identity as both an American Jew and a Jewish American. I am forever adjusting the balance between my Jewish and my American selves, and I am convinced that my need as a diaspora Jew to constantly negotiate my multiple identities makes me a better American, a better Jew and, yes, a better person.

It should be clear that I am not asking any of my readers to agree with my pro-Israel/pro-diaspora form of Zionism; but let me assure you that I offer you my perspective l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven.

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.