Who Is In, Who Is Out, and Who Decides?
The Place of Non-Zionists and Anti-Zionist in Jewish Communal Life
Shabbat Parashat Terumah 5785
The video is sixteen seconds long and has been playing on loop in my brain for the last four months. It’s October 7, 2024 – a tragic anniversary for the Jewish community, a day of mourning for all people of good conscience. It is also the day that many haters of Israel chose to march in protest against the Jewish state.
The video captures one such march, down the streets of New York. Amidst the “Israel Must Be Stopped” signs and fluttering Palestinians flags, there is a man, shoulders draped with keffiyeh and head covered with a kippah. Around him are three chabadnikim helping him put on tfillin.
I know, for many of us, there is something disjointed about this video. These two acts – protesting Israel and putting on tfillin – are, we feel, mutually incompatible.
Yet, of late, more and more such seeming juxtapositions have become visible. These past sixteen months have brought non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews into the rest of the Jewish community’s line of sight at a magnitude not seen since before the founding of the state.
How are we, who are supportive of Israel, to relate to such Jews? What is their place in the community? It may feel like a new concern, but it is really a variation on a very old question.
Since our beginning, we have asked who is in, who is out, and importantly who gets to decide. The sheer variety of words for Jews on the periphery speak to their historic plenitude: meshumad, mumar, moser, apikores, kofer, min. We are very good at labeling those who don’t fit in, even as what one must do to warrant such a label isn’t always clear.
Most recently, politely, we might refer to such a Jew as being ‘off the derekh’ – understanding them as having departed from the correct pathway of Jewish life. Much less charitably, we call them self-hating Jews.
But these are problematic terms. Does the man putting on tfillin during an anti-protest hate Judaism? Clearly not. What of the person who leads Kabbalat Shabbat in the middle of an anti-Israel encampment?
It is incontestable that our tradition teaches that such people retain their status as Jews. A Jew, the Talmud says, אף על פי שחטא ישראל הוא. A Jew even though he has sinned remains a Jew.
But how do we, the mainstream Jewish community, orient ourselves toward them? What is their place within our community’s institutions?
These aren’t hypotheticals. They are live questions in Toronto today. Can a publicly anti-Zionist Jew work for a Jewish community organization, in particular at an organization that isn’t especially Israel-oriented and in a role that isn’t program design and delivery? This is a true-to-life question that Jewish communal professionals and online Jewish groups have been grappling with all week.
Needless to say, the conversation about the place of anti-Israel Jews within the broader community isn’t limited to Toronto. My colleagues south of the border tell me of congregants who walk-out for the Prayer for the State of Israel, which, understandably, seriously upsets other congregants. Should such a person be allowed to pray in that community? What about join the shul? What about lead services? What about become shul president, which is the case in at least one colleague’s shul?
I want to provide a framework from this morning’s parashah that I hope will help us begin to move from gut reactions to more thought-out responses.
Our parashah begins with God speaking to Moses:
דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְיִקְחוּ־לִי תְּרוּמָה מֵאֵת כׇּל־אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ תִּקְחוּ אֶת־תְּרוּמָתִי׃
“Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.”
The tabernacle will soon be under construction and materials are needed. Unlike the collection described in the special reading this morning for Shabbat Shekalim in which a universal flat tax is imposed, Parashat Terumah’s call for materials is voluntary.
“Whoever’s heart so moves them shall bring Me gifts.”
The bringing of such gifts does not require a loyalty test. There is no check to see if the giver is a good enough Jew. If a person feels spiritually connected with the Almighty, then come, bring your gifts.
Importantly, the verse concludes with what could be understood as superfluous wording. תִּקְחוּ אֶת־תְּרוּמָתִי. You, Moses, must accept their gifts.
The Israelites are told they may bring gifts. Moses is told that he must accept them.
Perhaps God feared that Moses would look the person up and down and say, ‘your wares aren’t wanted here’. But whether the person giving is a scoundrel or a saint, he must accept. What matters in that moment is the gift itself, not whatever else the person has or has not done, whatever that person does or doesn’t believe.
The following verses though narrow this open-handed reception.
וְזֹאת הַתְּרוּמָה אֲשֶׁר תִּקְחוּ מֵאִתָּם.
These are the gifts that you shall accept from them. Gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson yarn, and so on and so forth. There’s literally a list and only what is on it must be accepted. As ibn Ezra points out, iron, a common building material, but one not to be included in the mishkan, is notably not mentioned, strengthening the idea that whoever might have brought something unlisted would be sent back home, gift still in hand.
Who you are doesn’t matter. What matters is what you bring to the table.
Put another way, if what you bring to the community table is kosher, we’re happy to partake. If not, then no thank you. To extend the metaphor, if while you’re at the table you keep your food to yourself, we’d love to have you over for dinner. But if you insist on mixing your treif with the kosher food, then kindly stay home.
It is the job of the mainstream Jewish community to ensure that this communal table remains in our control. This will not always be an easy task. Those whose views on Israel are radically different than our own though should be welcome, but, please, no need to bring dessert.
I am especially concerned with rumours of dossiers catalogueing local Jews whose public statements are deemed outside of communal norms, which are being created with the goal of excluding these Jews from employment in Jewish organizations or involvement in Jewish communal life.
I think it a mistake to blacklist Jews who think differently than us. We Jews don’t have a good history with lists. Not to mention, if you don’t approve of cancel culture generally, you also shouldn’t approve of it within our community.
Like in any organization, for profit and not, those who are involved have to be able to put the mission of their organization before their personal beliefs. If you cannot, then you’re in the wrong job and probably shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. I see no problem with a vegan working as a receptionist at the abattoir, so long as she doesn’t pick up the phone saying, “meat is murder, how may I help you”?
I also think that outside of her work hours we can make a distinction – a fine but not arbitrary one – between criticizing her company, which should reasonably be actionable, and criticizing her industry. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where job security is dependent upon ideological alignment with one’s boss.
As a consumer though I have greater latitude. I may fairly choose to not buy from a certain company because I know that the owner supports causes that I fundamentally oppose. Indeed, many are right now choosing to boycott goods from an entire country because of its leader’s threats.
We reasonably don’t want proprietors or countries with whom we vociferously disagree to benefit from our dollars.
Community charities though aren’t for profit corporation. It is the responsibility of their leadership to hire the staff best able to help the organization fulfill its mission. And it is the responsibility of its employees to act in the organization’s best interests while representing that organization. We have to be able to accept some level of misalignment between the goals of the organization and the values of its employees expressed in a personal capacity.
I wouldn’t hire the tfillin marcher in our congregational school. But if we were in the market for a new graphic designer – and especially if the tfillin wearer is Hebrew conversant (a skill hard to find amongst graphic designers) – that would be something different entirely.
It would be intolerable for us were someone to lose their job for being an active Zionist. There would be petitions and lawsuits. It must therefore, at bare minimum, give us pause to consider whether an anti-Zionist should be denied employed at an agency whose work has little to do with Israel.
We have to be able to live with some discomfort in our lives, to work in co-existence with those with whom we disagree.
On that note, and in anticipation with what is, I fear, a growing trend, I’ve been reading about Jewish anti-Zionism lately: specifically, Daniel Boyarin’s new book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto and Yakov Rabkin’s A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. I found the jargony manifesto to be far from convincing, but at the same time a very good read to understand the intellectual scaffolding upon which modern Jewish anti-Zionism is founded. If you want to fight Jewish anti-Zionism, you first must understand it. The second book speaks less to the current moment but does serve as a reminder of the breadth of Jewish religious understandings vis-à-vis Israel and especially how different those understandings are in 2025 as compared to 1925.
Adam Kirsch’s brief On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, which is a challenge to the idea of settler colonialism and specifically Zionism as a settler colonial project is next on my list.
I want to finish by asking you a related, if not more foundational, question than what I’ve been talking about until now. I hope you take the time to think it through for yourself.
Why is support of Israel (or opposition to Israel) the litmus test for involvement in Jewish communal life? What about an entity that has been in existence for fewer than 80 years makes it different than the norms – indeed what we understand to be divinely mandated laws – that have existed for thousands of years, whose modern-day failure to uphold have little communal consequence?
The Torah speaks of the case of the man who gathered wood on Shabbat. He was killed as punishment. Yet, I can’t think of a single Conservative shul, or federation, or Jewish agency outside of the Orthodox world in which breaking Shabbat would be disqualifying to hold executive office.
To frame the question differently, if you sat on a beit din for a prospective convert who davened three times a day, kept a strictly kosher home, and gave generously to charity, but who did not see herself as a Zionist, would you accept this person? Why or why not?
Let’s talk during kiddush.
