Amid so many serious disagreements in today’s partisan environment, we’re programmed to see cracks and overlook bonds. Even on June 25, 2017, when Netanyahu scotched the Kotel deal and the newspapers shouted “rupture” and “divorce,” the commonalities that have kept us together persisted, along with many welcome new ones. That sobering night, when the board of governors seethed about Bibi’s betrayal, Gil Troy’s son Yoni went out across town to the Shuk, Jerusalem’s open-air Machane Yehuda market. He reported in frustration that he could not find a seat, or buy a drink, or eat a snack anywhere.
Why? Because a record number of young American Jews were visiting Israel that summer and building ties, thanks mostly to Taglit-Birthright. Most of them described Israel in two words: “AWE-SOME!” Moreover, despite the justified fury of rabbis and intellectuals about Bibi’s Western Wall betrayal, when amcha, the people—meaning most Birthright participants, most American Jewish tourists—visit the Kotel, they consider it the spiritual highlight of their trip, and often their lives.
We love to focus on the loudest, angriest extremists who denounce Israel. Nevertheless, poll after poll shows that three-quarters of American Jews agree that a thriving Israel is vital for the Jewish future. The Israeli results and global results are even higher. Jews all over the world visit Israel regularly, while many more exude pride in the traditions, values, and ideas that have kept the Jewish people alive and have contributed to the betterment of humanity in so many ways. The state of Israel was founded to rally every Jewish community together, inviting every Jew to participate in this shared adventure.
It’s trite but true: we are family. We don’t want to see the Jewish people splinter into disconnected fragments, and it’s not just because we don’t want Jewish history ending on our watch.
So, are we converging or diverging? In truth, pollsters can tweak questions to uncover more empathy or distrust, more tension or warmth, more estrangement or connection. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. Between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, anger and alienation coexist with cooperation and communication. It’s a mistake to underestimate the daily frustrations or the deep bonds.
The bad news (signs of divergence) is countered by good news (interdependence). But the danger is that the good news might contain elements of the bad: this intimacy generates new, often disruptive, demands. As with a spouse—or a cellmate—the more you come to rely on one another, the more intensely you scrutinize each other.
As we’ve seen, when American Jews started turning to Israel to solve their identity problems, Israel’s slighting of the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism suddenly stung more deeply and caused great resentment. In parallel, as Israelis continued relying on American Jews to help them fight boycott threats and UN sanctions, American Jewish criticism of Israel’s policies became more pointed and more resented by those criticized. Thus, the new interdependence raises the emotional stakes and escalates minor irritations, especially when mismanaged, into major breaches. If divergence has propelled the two communities further apart in a spiral of distrust—even, some fear, to the point of no return—convergence, wholly welcome in itself but operating at a higher speed and a faster rate than in the past, raises its own risks of collision and damage.
Whether you are optimistic about the Jewish communal future or pessimistic, one thing should be clear: we need a better, more sustained, more substantive dialogue. At the height of the Kotel crisis, amid the usual confusion and anger and frustration that week, amid all the harsh, hurtful words we’re so good at piling up, Gil asked me who my enemy was. That week, he was thinking of many suspects. I blurted out instinctively, “Arrogance.” This sense, from so many battle stations, that we know better than you, that we chose a better path than you for Jewish survival and therefore don’t need you anymore, is poisonous yet spreading throughout the Jewish world.
More and more, I hear a question I’ve rarely heard before. Concerned Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are asking: Do we today share a common commitment to be one people, to continue our historic journey together?
Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on bendable statistics or fancy theories to sense our peoplehood power. My confidence in our shared future comes from the fact that at this point in my life, I’ve had an opportunity to view the relations among the Jewish people from three perspectives: the Soviet Gulag, the Israeli government, and the Jewish Agency. My old technical drafting teacher was right—looking from three dimensions captures depth.
When you are in the Israeli government, you’re working with politicians who think around the clock about serving their electorate. That, after all, is in the job description, and it is the way for every politician in a democracy to get reelected. Yet, in Israel, these same politicians also invest a lot of time dealing with people who are not citizens of their country and have no voting rights: namely, Diaspora Jews.
Over the last twenty years, despite complaints that Israelis don’t care, and amid great pressure to cut unnecessary budget items, Israeli governments have invested more and more money in strengthening Diaspora Jews’ identity and communities. In addition to subsidizing Israel experience programs and educational projects abroad, the Israeli government hit a remarkable milestone during my eighth year at the Jewish Agency. The government’s subvention dwarfed the North American Federations’ contributions to such programs for the first time ever. Israel is now the most generous funder of Diaspora-related Jewish Agency projects, further defying the pessimists.
There’s a broad Israeli consensus here. Despite our differences, the members of every Zionist party in Israel agree that every Jew in the world should consider Israel home. That makes dealing with Diaspora Jewry not just part of every politician’s mandate, but preserving and protecting the Jewish people remain broadly recognized as central to the state’s mission.
While chairing the Jewish Agency, when I looked through the Diaspora’s lens, I noted an internal Jewish glue that keeps us together. Even though many Jews criticize Israel harshly, the vast majority know they need Israel if they want to continue the Jewish journey. Some walk away. But most, especially in the last twenty years, have recognized that, unless they are ultra-Orthodox, Israel is the best medium for connecting to their Jewish roots, building their Jewish identity, and giving their grandchildren a shot at remaining Jewish. As I often explain, Jewish tradition and Israel serve as the only functional brakes against assimilation, and it’s most effective to use both together.
Finally, examining Israel-Diaspora relations from a more bird’s-eye perspective is reassuring. Crises clarify it all. Just as we all fought for Soviet Jewish freedom, when Israel is at war, the Jewish people come together, instinctively. Jews from all over the world put their differences aside, ignore their personal agendas, and mobilize. Suddenly, we are all from Odessa, we are all from Jerusalem, and we were all together at Mount Sinai.
From my experience, putting all three perspectives together—Israel’s ongoing concern and growing investment, the Diaspora’s new commitment to identity building through Israel, and our shared commitment to the Jewish journey—shows something profound. True, we sometimes seem to be one people divided by one religion. And sometimes we seem to be one people divided by one state. But we remain one people.
Despite the internal bickering, most Jews continue to see themselves as Jews—as a part of a people, worried about growing apart. All these fights, all these Israel-Diaspora flash points, therefore, are warning signs.
Clearly, not everyone is going to have the kinds of experiences I and others have had that provide all three perspectives. But if becoming too imprisoned in one perspective produces arrogance, how can people broaden their worldviews? Here’s where I believe that yelling and screaming helps. Ironically, by jumping into heated, no-holds-barred debate, I have frequently ended up appreciating how deeply committed my sparring partners were to our common goals too. Often, trying to convince others you are right exposes your commitment to maintaining this dialogue and keeping this people going.
These days we rely too much on media that emphasizes our differences and squelches real exchanges: news headlines, Twitter wars, snarky Facebook postings. Today’s cancel culture suggests that if you disagree with me, it’s over, you’re out—even if we’re fellow citizens in the same democracy.
By contrast, Jewish tradition teaches that disagreement can be a way of staying in, even if we are spread among the four corners of the universe. It’s a “can sell” culture, pressing others as an act of faith in them. We agree to disagree on some matters, only because we agree to agree on some fundamentals, starting with our shared sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Like all voluntary memberships, the Jewish community survives as a dialogue of one, meaning that it persists because we consider ourselves part of the same people. It’s also a dialogue of us, because when we disagree, we don’t just screech “Traitor! Now you’re one of them.” Instead, we start to fight.
While specializing in belonging through battling, Jews are also pretty good at getting to the very big ideas by going very small. That’s the Talmud’s bait and switch—so many debates look so trivial, but they ricochet between the picayune and the profound. Similarly, in a functional, substantive, expansive Jewish people’s forum, what might start as a dialogue regarding practical, concrete issues can help clarify the big underlying challenges we face in continuing our mutual journey.
When I began my journey with the Jewish people in the Soviet Union, I faced the specific questions I described in this book’s opening chapters. Should I join the kulturniki or politiki? Should the struggle to free Soviet Jewry be the struggle to come to Israel or to leave the Soviet Union? Should I only fight for Soviet Jewry or for human rights more broadly? These questions seemed all-consuming in the moment and deeply rooted in that time and that place. But in fact, these questions were the tip of the iceberg. They brought me into the defining challenges of Jewish life today that continue to spark our ongoing debates.
The split between the kulturniki and the politiki, which first struck me as a petty argument fueled by fragile egos, was much bigger than that. It was yet another version of the profound and still ongoing debate about Zionism and Jewish culture. Today, the central question is “To what extent does the newly emerging Israeli identity depend on traditional Jewish identity?”
Our intense arguments about dropouts—about whether Israel and the Jewish people should support only those Soviet Jews who went to Israel or Jewish emigration in general—seemed to revolve around the value we placed on free will. But with time, and as I assumed different roles within the Jewish journey, I saw that, too, as part of a bigger question: “To what extent does Jewish identity depend on a connection with Israel?”
I started combining my Zionist activism with my activism as a dissident because of my enthusiasm for my newfound freedom and identity. I wanted to pursue both. With time, I came to see that the centrality of this connection went far beyond my personal experience. In joining the argument about balancing liberty and identity, I was participating in the bigger debate about the nature of Israel as a democratic Jewish state among the nations and the Western debate about liberalism and nationalism.
Though I spent my life seeking answers for specific spin-offs of these big questions, I realized something else was going on too. Ultimately, I have learned that, as important as the answers are, the act of questioning is also critical to keeping us in conversation with one another. The circumstances of this eternal conversation change all the time. Our answers must change with them, within limits. But it is the conversation itself, about our historic national and spiritual agenda, that keeps us connected, dynamic, and alive.
That’s why, decades after I first heard the anti-Semitic joke about the Jews surviving the Titanic by talking, I still appreciate its wisdom. Participating in the ongoing debate about who we are and what we can be is the best guarantee that we will continue our journey together.
There’s a general recognition that we need better frameworks for constructive dialogue. We have seen the deep thirst for better people-to-people interactions. But there’s little consensus about just what format might work. One interesting idea to improve our back-and-forth on the communal scale, which has been bandied about in different forums for years, is some kind of a Jewish people’s parliament, a Global Jewish Council.
Israel’s parliament meets three times a year. Imagine convening three-day sessions of a Global Jewish Council before each Knesset seating. Imagine delegates from Israel and around the Jewish world debating all proposed laws that the Knesset legal advisers have determined might affect Diaspora interests, with the council issuing nonbinding advisory opinions. Imagine mandating the Knesset to require a special supermajority before passing any laws the parliament agreed might harm Diaspora Jewish interests. This approach would invite those fighting the BDS boycott movement on the front lines in universities and elsewhere to weigh in before Israel passed any BDS-related legislation. It would encourage representatives of the Jewish nation throughout the world to voice their opinions on a nation-state-type bill. It might not change the outcome, but speaking up might cut down on frustrations and reduce our rivals’ constant attacks.
In parallel, these delegates would also debate any significant Diaspora Jewish organizations’ decisions that might affect Israeli interests, with any potential Knesset resistance being respected enough to require a second look.
Imagine a security committee briefing Diaspora leaders, offering an inside perspective on Israel’s security dilemmas and moral choices by interacting with Israel’s decision makers, not its PR flacks. Imagine a foreign aid committee launching cutting-edge, unifying tikkun olam projects to genuinely improve the world. An education committee could ask tough questions about education in Israel and the Diaspora: Why did American Jewish day schools abandon Hebrew? Why do Israeli schools teach so little about Diaspora Jewry? Why doesn’t anyone do a better job teaching Zionism?
Consider how much good a meaningful intercommunal dialogue could accomplish—even without much decision-making power, which would take time to develop. Jews throughout the world could focus on two shared, overlapping goals: maintaining Jewish continuity in each community while keeping Israel secure, stable, and democratic. Rather than accusing one another of violating core Jewish values, we could develop joint projects expressing common visions. The resulting honest, substantive, and meaningful conversation at the heart of the Jewish community could result in fewer Jews taking refuge from Establishment groupthink in marginal or hostile organizations or simply drifting away.
Imagine finally addressing one of the central Jewish frustrations of our time. Instead of enjoying the classic democratic privilege of granting the consent of the governed, both Israeli and American Jews feel burdened by the responsibility of the implicated, saddled with defending positions and actions they don’t understand by other Jews living far away from them. The result is too many interactions degenerating into mutual accusations and feelings of betrayal. A redrawn Jewish social contract could better explain why we are connected and what kinds of responsibilities follow. Rather than calling it consent of the governed, call it “belonging to the tribe,” emphasizing the advisory, voluntary, yet covenantal nature of the relationship. If Jews better understood why we are involved with one another and had input on at least some big decisions through the council, frustrations would diminish.
Right now, our competing survival strategies risk pulling us apart—even blinding us to common enemies, who don’t care if we are conservative or liberal when they call us “kikes” or “oven kindling.” A healthy dialogue could tap into these different survival strategies to create more resilient approaches, with Isaiahans helping us speak to the universalists and Davidians helping us speak to the particularists.
We could, for example, build a coalition against the delegitimization of Israel by intertwining the liberal and nationalist arguments, as we did during the should-there-be-a-Jewish-state UN debate in 1947, rather than helping our enemies pit the Jewish Left against the Jewish Right. We could reexamine conversion courses, trying to make them more appealing to non-Jewish spouses while making sure that all rabbis teach about Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood, not just Jewish religion, ritual, and spirituality. We could try developing a combined curriculum, teaching Jews all over the world about the history of the Jewish people. And we could encourage moderates, rather than allowing the polarizing media to pit the loudest, shrillest Israeli politicians and Diaspora activists against each other.
Imagine, if our alienated campus radicals at least had somewhere they could feel heard, and if their embarrassed pro-Israel peers had a place committed to helping them debate these issues. Consider how much better the anguished debate about the Western Wall might have been if it had been conducted with the transparency and inclusiveness of a well-established global body. Similarly, rather than just whining about the intermarriage epidemic, Israelis and Diaspora Jews could brainstorm together about effective educational and spiritual strategies for building a robust Jewish future. We could try solving problems together rather than judging each other as failures.
We won’t fix everything, but we could start addressing some issues in healthier ways. And, yes, we could afford to let it get ugly. In fact, it would have to degenerate. Our long, loud history as a people is bound to continue.
In a Jewish education committee, American Jews might cry “Hypocrite!” and accuse Israel’s nationalist government of endorsing a global Jewish education for all without subsidizing it. Israelis might say it right back, quoting studies that show that even free Jewish education would only attract 20 percent of the community, adding that American Jews are more into padding their kids’ CVs than deepening their Jewish identities.
Fighting on a different dimension, making alliances that transcend countries of origin, conservatives would no doubt cry “Traitor!” They would be furious that liberals are blind to left-wing anti-Zionists who claim to love Jews while demonizing the Jewish state. Liberals would shout it back, outraged that conservatives, including Israel’s government, hobnob with right-wing ultranationalists who claim to love the Jewish state while demonizing the Jews. Perhaps, once the shouting ended, we could focus on explaining the criteria we have developed for clear red lines, uniting us all in a zero-tolerance policy toward anti-Semites, no matter how personally charming or politically useful they might appear to be.
Some might ask, “What’s the use? What’s the point in having us gather and yell at one another? We live in a world with too much noise already. Can such debates ever yield solutions?”
Our rich history of great Jewish congresses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers encouragement. By arguing over our positions more formally and systematically, we sometimes reach compromises, as we did at the early Zionist congresses and the Brussels Conference on Soviet Jewry. One of these gold-standard conversations created the Jewish state, despite sometimes murderous rivalries; the other kept our squabbling movement focused on “let my people go.”
Failing something on that scale, we can at least try building community consensus regarding which directions are worth exploring and which ones are dead ends. That was my great takeaway from the Ne’eman Committee’s framework. It helped us keep living with our disagreements while establishing the parameters of debate.
Similarly, for all the frustrations around the Kotel battle, the years-long dialogue established useful groundwork for an eventual solution. We narrowed the field of expectations from all sides. When the political situation changes, we will be all set with blueprints detailing a prayer space, which is already functioning but just needs improved access and authorization.
Looking back over my life since joining the Jewish people, I imagine that an ongoing, constructive dialogue like this could have helped during many key moments. Sometimes the dialogue didn’t occur because people said, “We have nothing to talk about.” Sometimes there was no forum to address the issue. With regular, obligatory, formal discussions, the outcomes wouldn’t have been perfect, but they would have been much improved.
There are barrels full of practical questions about this forum as well: who would vote, how would they vote, who could run, just how would decisions be made, and, most important, who would represent the different voices of Diaspora Jewry in this forum? I am often asked, as the outgoing chair, “What about the Jewish Agency?” In fact, an informal dialogue exists between the board of governors and Knesset members. Moreover, the Jewish Agency created what is now the largest caucus in the Knesset, the Friends of Diaspora Jewry.
We could indeed use the Jewish Agency and the Knesset to get this forum started. But in the Jewish organizational world, the best way to kill a new initiative is to start arguing about who gets to sit at the table. As a first step, let’s accept the principle, then flesh out the concept. We can yell about the details and personnel soon enough.
As I completed eight years at the Jewish Agency, the board of governors, as well as the prime minister, asked me to serve another four-year term. I thanked them for their faith in me, but I believe that democracy requires renewal and replacement. Twelve years would be too much. I agreed to serve another year as we sought a successor. That addition pleased the mathematician in me, as my nine years in the Gulag and nine years in Israeli politics ended with nine years at the Jewish Agency. Such symmetry allowed me to make my crowd-pleasing one-liner: that having served for nine years in each, I didn’t know where I suffered most.
When I passed the torch to my successor, Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, I gave him one piece of advice. I said, “To enjoy your job, not only for nine years but even for one minute, you have to answer one question: Do you love the Jewish people? I don’t like hours-long conference calls on cutting programs and managing the bureaucracy of Israel and the Jewish world. But I love our projects and meeting with their participants. You have to enjoy the feeling of being an emissary of the Jewish people and building bridges between Israel and the Diaspora.”
Do you love the Jewish people? What does the question mean? Well, for starters, while it is true that the head of the Jewish Agency is never alone, it often felt that I was never at home. I made over fifty trips overseas in my nine years at the Jewish Agency, traveling more than two million miles to dozens of communities in over twenty countries. When we had conference calls in Jerusalem with our emissaries, we could joke that the sun never sets on the Jewish people, with our Australians nine hours ahead of us and our Californians ten hours behind.
When I retired, I felt like I had earned an El Al captain’s stripes. Instead I received a model El Al airplane with 207,188 on it, the number of people who immigrated to Israel during my years at the Jewish Agency. I wondered just how many of them I had greeted at the airport. I never tired of coming to the arrivals terminal, no matter how early in the morning or late at night. Every time I saw a new immigrant walk down those stairs onto Israeli soil, I would start thinking about how many generations of prayers and hopes were standing behind that particular oleh. I would try imagining just how big a historical and personal circle each new arrival was closing.
The leader of the Jewish Agency has to get a kick out of going to conferences with young emissaries, who became more and more numerous each year and also somehow younger and younger. It’s important to enjoy talking with them deep into the night then dancing in a circle with them, around and around, and to enjoy debriefing them when they return to Israel, as they join a unique group of Israelis who can present both worlds.
The government kindly acknowledged our programs’ successes. Although the Jewish Agency criticized official Israeli policies as never before over the Western Wall and other matters, the government’s budget for our programs nevertheless increased as never before.
Sometimes, a moment catapults you from the day-to-day, so you can see some grand logic in your life, closing some circle in a way you didn’t quite anticipate but makes sense when it happens.
The town where I was born, Donetsk, did not fare well in the post-Communist years. When I was growing up, what was supposed to be the unbreakable bond between Russians and Ukrainians was symbolized by all the propaganda hailing the unity of the Soviet people. But Donetsk ended up in the middle of the prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine. By the time I started chairing the Jewish Agency, the situation in the area had turned desperate.
Trying to help Jews caught in the war zone, we ended up establishing a refugee center just outside Dnipropetrovsk, now called Dnipro, a few hours’ drive from Donetsk.
On one of my visits there, a man approached me in my hotel. “You’re Sharansky, yes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re the head of the Jewish Agency.”
“Yes.”
“And you were born in Donetsk,” he stated.
Again I nodded, not sure what was coming.
“Me too,” he said. “We in Donetsk are very critical of your work.”
Really? I was surprised. Usually, as we traveled around this broken region, to the extent people noticed us, they thanked us for helping out however we could.
He said, “I’m not Jewish. We’re all suffering too. No one’s coming to take me away from this nightmare and to give me a better life. We’re all alone here. Only Jews are getting telephone calls from your organization. Only Jews receive invitations to emigrate to another country and get help to move on top of that. So only Jews have somewhere to go. Is that fair? Why are you people singled out?”
Of course I could have told this man a lot about the many Jewish philanthropists and organizations helping the needy all over the world, including the victims of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But I didn’t feel that he wanted a lecture at that moment. He was in trouble. Alas, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite siding with Ukraine against Russia, this man did what people with problems did in the good old days of the Soviet Union: he resurrected the old anti-Semitic paradigm viewing Jews as clannish, as only looking out for ourselves.
But instead of correcting this throwback to Soviet days, I was too busy absorbing the irony of our interaction. “My God,” I thought. “That’s quite a change from my childhood.” Back then, to be outed as Jewish in Donetsk was the worst thing that could happen to you. When someone linked you with the fifth line, outing you as a Jew on your identity card, it meant only one thing: you belonged to the one outcast group. It was a disease without cure, a sentence to a life without hope, an invitation to be pitied because there was no one to help us. Now, that word “Jew” meant that not only someone had your back, but that there was a proud people and democratic state behind you.
“Thank you for telling me this,” I said. I was thanking him for reminding me how the world had changed, how Israel had empowered the Jewish people, how that empowerment involved building ourselves up so we could benefit others, and that when you belong to the Jewish people you are never alone.