I was in the office on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the second floor on Jaffa Road, when the siren started. I have watched the siren stop Israel since I was a child. For years now, I take out my phone. That is what journalists do. We observe.
From the window, I could see down to the light-rail platform across the street. Two people were standing there. An elderly Orthodox man in a black hat and long coat. A Muslim woman next to him, hair covered, traditional dress. Strangers. They had nothing to do with each other until the siren went off, and then they both stopped. They stood side by side for the full two minutes, facing nowhere in particular.
I filmed it. I posted it. It went viral.
My kids asked me later why I was filming. Weren’t you supposed to be in the moment, they said. Look down. Remember. That’s what the siren is for.
I didn’t have a good answer. I still don’t.
The video traveled because of what the world thinks Israel is. The world sees a flat picture. Jews here, Arabs there, a state built on walls. Those two people on the platform weren’t performing anything. There were two Israelis who happened to be standing in the same place when their country stopped moving, and they stopped with it. By accident, which is what made it real.
I have been thinking about that platform for days because of something Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, wrote 20 years ago. Herzl, Sacks pointed out, called his book Der Judenstaat, which translates literally as “The State of the Jews.”
Zionism, Sacks argued, was reaching for more than that: A Jewish state, in the deeper sense. A society whose civic life, treatment of the stranger, and balance between the religious and the secular would carry the covenantal weight the Jewish people had been carrying for 4,000 years.
Sacks died in 2020. He never saw the October 7 massacre. He never saw the war in the North, the hostages, the rupture with parts of the Diaspora, the collapse of Jewish life on American campuses. He never saw the 78th Independence Day.
His question is hanging over all of it.
Which 'Zionism' is Israel today?
At 78, we are past aspiring. We are choosing. Every decision now – on the hostages, on governance, on religious pluralism, on how Jerusalem relates to Jewish communities abroad – is an answer to the question Sacks was asking. Which Zionism are we?
I have been hearing the question this past year in voices that do not usually agree.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan and one of the leading Zionist voices in the American Reform movement, has been sounding an alarm that would have been unthinkable in a Reform pulpit two generations ago.
“Everything Jewish begins with Jewish peoplehood,” he told his congregation on Yom Kippur 2024. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All Jews are responsible one for the other. “If you do not feel this special bond with other Jews, you are emotionally damaged, Jewishly.”
That is a jarring sentence from a Reform rabbi. Reform Judaism built its American identity on the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which declared that American Jews were a religious community rather than a nation, and it rejected the idea of a return to Zion.
Hirsch is pulling his movement away from that platform and back toward Genesis. He worries most about Reform young people, who he argues have been taught tikkun olam, the repair of the world, as a replacement for Jewish peoplehood rather than as one of its expressions.
On this, I am completely with him. People ask me, as an Israeli Jew, why we should care about Diaspora Jews, pray for them, and help them when their politics or values differ from ours. My answer is always the same. Because. Because that is what Jewish peoplehood is. It does not depend on whether they agree with us or we agree with them. It is the brit, the covenant, plain and simple. Hirsch is saying the same thing from inside the movement that once forgot it.
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and one of the most prominent voices in American Conservative Judaism, came at it from the other side of the room.
Last December, he stood at the American Zionist Movement’s biennial in Manhattan, facing 300 Zionist leaders, and said something most of them did not want to hear. The roughly one-third of Jewish New Yorkers who had just voted for Zohran Mamdani, he said, should not have surprised anyone.
“For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government,” Cosgrove told the room, “Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind.” Some people stood and clapped. Others walked out.
His sharpest line: “By making unconditional support for the Israeli government a litmus test for Jewish identity, we ourselves have inflicted harm on the Jewish future.”
I respect Cosgrove. I think he is asking the right question. I just don’t buy his answer. Most of that one-third have never been to Israel, or were once on a Birthright trip a decade ago. They don’t know the country. They don’t know its neighborhoods, its accents, its tensions, its humor. Their frustration with the Israeli government is real, but it is only part of the explanation.
Their own rabbis and communal leaders, many of whom are openly angry at Jerusalem, may be turning their congregants off more than Jerusalem is. Or those young voters may simply have assimilated past the point of caring. Blaming the Israeli government for the Mamdani vote lets too many other people off the hook.
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Bracha and one of the leading halachic authorities of the religious-Zionist community in Israel, left the Land of Israel for the first time in his life last spring. He went to Paris to speak at a conference of religious emissaries.
I reread the interview he later gave three times, because I had never heard him sound this way. He had always hesitated to travel abroad, he said, because he did not know what to say to Jews who had not made aliyah.
He cited Yevamot 65b, where it says just as there is a commandment to say what will be heard, there is a commandment to refrain from saying what will not. And then he said he himself might not have had the strength to leave the country of his birth had he been born in Paris or Toronto.
Melamed ended the interview with a line that felt almost like a summary of what the other rabbis had been groping toward: The destiny of the Jewish people is “to bring blessing to all the families of the earth through the establishment of an exemplary society in the Land.”
This is the paragraph I loved most, because Melamed gave something away that most Israeli rabbis will not. My parents decided to make aliyah when I was three. I grew up here. Would I have made the same choice had I been born in Chicago and stayed? Honestly, I don’t know.
That uncertainty is the quiet truth underneath a lot of our conversations with Diaspora Jews, and Israelis rarely admit it. Melamed did. That admission is what makes his call to build an exemplary society credible. He is not demanding a sacrifice from abroad that he is sure he himself would have made.
Rabbi Doron Perez, the newly elected president of the World Zionist Organization and executive chairman of the World Mizrachi movement, reached in his Pessah essay for Rav Soloveitchik’s Covenant of Fate. “Faith is not independent of fate,” Perez wrote, “and Judaism is not independent of the Jewish people.”
Soloveitchik’s idea is that Jewish peoplehood is forged in shared suffering and shared destiny before it is anything else. After the October 7 massacre, after Daniel Perez, and the hostages, and the sirens in communities that have barely stopped running to shelters for three years, that sentence hits differently. The covenant is not a theological abstraction. It is what binds an Israeli family in Yad Binyamin to a Jewish family in Melbourne to a soldier still in the North.
A Zionism worth defending
Four rabbis. Three countries. Four denominations. They do not agree on everything, and I do not agree with all of them. What ties them together is that they keep arriving, from different directions, at the same source. Genesis 12. Abraham. The covenant that Zionism did not invent and cannot inherit alone.
That is the Zionism worth defending. It speaks about what kind of society the Jewish state is building. It remembers the stranger, the widow, the soldier. It remembers two people on a light-rail platform who didn’t know each other and who stopped anyway when their country asked them to.
At 78, the easy version of Independence Day is the arrival story. We made it. The state is here. The flag flies. Everything after 1948 is gravy.
The rabbis are telling us the opposite. Independence Day is not the arrival. It is the annual exam. The question on the exam is the one Sacks did not live to answer. What kind of Jewish state are we becoming?
My kids were right about the video. I should have been in the moment. I should have looked down. The most I can do now is make the observing worth something. Point, the way the rabbis are pointing, at what those two strangers revealed without meaning to. A country that still, after everything, knows how to stop and remember, together.
The covenant is something we hold between us. Seventy-eight years in, that is the Zionism worth celebrating.