There’s an interesting phenomenon unfolding on the American Jewish progressive left, or at least in parts of it. Here and there you read and hear people like Peter Beinart, Jill Jacobs of Tru’ah and other trying to deftly walk back some of the language that they’ve been using about Israel, or at least trying to distance themselves from how others are using the language that they themselves formulated—because the dumpster fires that they started have turned into forest fires.
Now, they want to be part of the fire brigade, and it’s well, way too late.
To follow some of this, take a look at
* Peter Beinart’s comments on the Scott Wiener anti-Semitic event in San Francisco.
* Or Rabbi Steven Abraham’s Substack piece, You Lit the Fire. Now You Want to Study the Flames
Or, for a very different vibe, watch Coleman Hughes go after Beinart for his duplicitousness on Israel issues.
Coleman Hughes’ video conversation with Peter can be found here.
Today, we’re tackling some of these issues, and in a way continuing our discussion of American Jewish anti-Zionism, by hearing from Rabbi David Ingber.
Rabbi Ingber, long a fascinating combination of a deeply learned rabbi (many years in Orthodox yeshivot) also closely aligned with the progressive world, has been more vocal about how the progressive world abandoned the Jews on October 7 than have been most of his colleagues. He’s also had the courage to say what many of them still will not about an array of issues connected to this phenomenon.
If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.
Rabbi David Ingber is an American teacher and leading figure in the Jewish Renewal movement. He is the founding rabbi of Romemu, a spiritually focused Jewish community in New York City known for integrating traditional Jewish practice with meditation, mysticism, music, and contemporary spiritual teachings. Ordained by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Ingber has become a prominent voice in modern Jewish spirituality and education. He also serves as Senior Director of Jewish Life at 92NY and teaches at several leading Jewish institutions. His work emphasizes Jewish mysticism, prayer, mindfulness, and the renewal of Jewish communal life.
The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.
For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.
My guest today is a dear friend and a person for whom I have a tremendous amount of regard. Some of you may recall within the last couple couple of months, we linked to two YouTubes, which were conversations. They were really podcasts in a sense, but one was a conversation, one was a podcast, but three people: Jonah Platt, who is a very, very talented interviewer, Rabbi David Ingber, and Rabbi Sharon Brous. Rabbi Ingber is based in New York, Rabbi Brous is based in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they for a very long time had in common was that they were really leading figures in the progressive Jewish world. And I'm going to put words in Rabbi Ingber's mouth, and I won't put words in Rabbi Sharon Brous' mouth. I haven't spoken to her about this at all, but I have spoken to David about it at great length over the course of the last months.I think that I saw David as really one of the great Jewish voices in the progressive world, and one of the profoundly important bridges between the values of progressive life in general and progressive Judaism and the world of Torah. David, as we're going on, and I'll give you a bit of background about him in a minute, David is one of those people who has a deep, rich yeshiva background. So when he talks Jewish text, he knows deeply what he's talking about. And the number of people who have the wealth of knowledge that David has and felt comfortable bridging that with the progressive world is really very small. A number of weeks ago, I had the occasion to interview Melanie Phillips about her new book called Fighting the Hate. We did a conversation at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center here in Jerusalem. Melanie Phillips has never been, or certainly in the last several decades, has not been accused in any way of being part of the progressive world. But one of the things that I said to Melanie that night that I have tremendous admiration for is that she's one of these people who had carved out a place of importance and influence and was then able to say to herself at a certain point, "This world and I don't fit."This world has come to represent values that I am not— that they're just, they're at odds with my soul. And I'm gonna have to actually be honest and shift my seat. I'm gonna have to move to a different place." I'm not saying that David Ingber, he'll speak for himself, has necessarily shifted his seat. But David Ingber is one of the very, very few Jewish progressive voices in America, but I would say in the world, who has had the courage to say since October 7th, we were betrayed. We saw ourselves as part and parcel of a set of values that we shared with the progressive world. We went to their defense, whether it was the LGBT community, whether it was Black Lives Matter, whether it was immigration, whatever it was. But on October 7th, 8th, and 9th, and thereafter, they were not at our side. And David is one of the very few profound Jewish voices who's part of that progressive world, who has been willing to speak openly and passionately about his own disappointment, his pain, his struggle, And I believe it's really an unbelievably critical and important voice. I'm going to come back to something that David wrote recently, but let me just go for a second to David's basic bio.There's much more to say, and we'll put all of it in the written notes for today. Rabbi David Ingber is the founding rabbi of Romamu, the largest renewal synagogue in the United States, and he's the rabbi of the 92nd Street Y. So two venerable institutions in New York, of which he is the rabbi. He founded Romamu in New York in 2006 following his ordination by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement. Over the past decade plus, Romamu, which I've gone to on many occasions, has grown into a weekly home for thousands of people, growing into a membership of over 1,000 in its locations in New York. And I won't go on. There's a lot to say, and we'll put it in the notes for today. Why are we having this conversation today? Because not that long ago, within the last couple of weeks, David wrote, I think, a really critical piece in Tablet magazine called "Progressive Rabbis' Blind Spot." And it's similar to some of the points that he made in his conversation with Jonah Platt and Rabbi Brous. It's similar to some of his critiques. But I wanted to bring David on to really talk about this very important piece in Tablet magazine that deservedly got a lot of attention.But there's so much more to say, and to hear it from David's voice is so much more powerful even than reading it in David's words. And then we want to talk to David a little bit about some of the ways in which people who have progressive values can make space for the Israel that's the real Israel, parts of which we love and parts of which break our hearts. And then I want to talk to David a little bit as one of the leading thinkers about American Jewish life, about American Jewish life. And for my grandchildren and his children, what's American Jewish life possibly going to be like? There's very few people that speak about these issues as honestly as David does. So, my friend, my teacher, my colleague. David, it's really a thrill and an honor to have you on. Thank you for making the time. Take us through the argument that you made for those people who have— and of course, we're linking to it in today's notes, but take us through the argument of your piece in Tablet Magazine called "Progressive Rabbis' Blind Spot." Tell us what the blind spot is. Tell us whether you think the blind spot can be overcome. Are there progressive rabbis who have said to you, "Yeah, actually, you know what, you're helping me see the blind spot"? Are there more progressive rabbis who are saying, "You just don't get it"? So what's the argument and how's it being received?Well, as I said, it's good to be with you, Danny, and thank you for that very warm welcome, and I really appreciate being in chavrutah with you, being like, learning together. I think that, you know, I didn't start in the progressive world. I started outside of the progressive world in my Jewish journey. I grew up in a modern Orthodox home, went to modern Orthodoxy yeshivot and then had a very strong period of ultra-Orthodoxy before I left Judaism completely for almost a decade. And I came back after that decade, and I made my way through Orthodoxy again, and then eventually found my way to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's movement called Jewish Renewal. But now I've been in that world for over 20 years now, and, you know, and my experience in that world was that like any world you're in, you can feel like you're in an echo chamber and you kind of become very, you know, comfortable, maybe even complacent, maybe, you know, naturally things become overly familiar to you. And in a way, you lose a sense of being able to observe yourself and to see yourself. And there is no 360, there is no kind of no way to look at a full spectrum of your perspectives and what you're missing and what's kind of outside of your purview.And I think my experience in the progressive world was that the assumptions about liberalism and progressivism and inclusivity and the centering of all things that were marginal and kind of like fighting for the marginalized and fighting for those who are unseen, all those things that I think that I and many of us feel intuitively is part of our— like, that's our landscape. We want that. We want that. We believe Torah speaks into that space. I think at a certain point, it became clear to me that we began to see those things as a kind of catechism and an orthodoxy of their own. And anyone who questioned or dared to question certain assumptions about where Judaism should be centering itself and whether or not Jews themselves are under that construct, whether or not we in the progressive world saw ourselves as part of those marginalized or whether we were part of the power structures, I think that I started to become very, very aware of what is now being criticized as kind of the excesses of wokeism or the excesses of certain catechisms, the kind of the new like 13 articles of faith that one has to believe with absolute faith.And I started to feel in those spaces that Jews that I was gathered around were frequently invited to the table only if they were willing to park their own, their own marginality or their own center, their own issues, or even be overly, quote unquote, particularistic. Like I would say at certain moments in the last couple of years, I would say that the ur-sin of a liberal progressive person is to be tribal, and that every tribal instinct is suspicious and suspected. And one of the ways that Jews show up at those universal tables, those progressive tables, was by being willing to showcase that they're not tribal. Like, we're not tribal. And the best way to do that is to punch your own. And so I came to see this as almost part of what it is to be a liberal progressive leader is to, you know, instantly qualify any support for the state of Israel, any support for Israel-centered dialog or Israel-centered posturing or proud Zionism as a kind of potential flaw. And I think that, you know, so the article was basically saying that if you walk into your average progressive synagogue, that there's more likely to be a rabbi giving a sermon about Jewish settler violence than they are to talk about the larger existential threat, which is Islamic fundamentalism or Islamist societies.Are we talking before October 7th or are we talking only after October 7th? How much of this did you do before?Even before October 7th. Even before October 7th, you know, my great awakening happened around the time of the— I had already seen the writing on the wall in certain spaces where Jewish, centering Jewish vulnerability-centering Jewish particularism or tribal instincts or interests was already something that I'd seen for a while, but it came to its head in 2020 at something I've spoken about very publicly, which was around the time of the Women's March. There was something called the Women's March, and it was gonna happen in Washington, D.C., and there was a leader of the Women's March, one of the leaders had taken a picture with Louis Farrakhan, who was a noted antisemite and the leader of the Nation of Islam, And she had called him the greatest of all time, the GOAT. And that had created quite a stir. And many of the women's groups that were Jewish women's groups that were going to participate had threatened to leave and to split off. And there was already— that was happening. They were going to have a separate march. And there was an effort made by some, a group of liberal progressive rabbis here in New York to bring this woman, her name was Tamika Mallory, and to bring her into a private closed-door conversation.And I, along with many other rabbis, were invited to this closed-door meeting. This is at the end of 2019, so around December, November, December of 2019. And I thought I'll just be a fly on the wall, I'll just watch what's going on. And I walked into a room where there was like, there was, you know, this woman Tamika Mallory was there and Linda Sarsour was there. And a lot of the, I mean, all of the who's who of the progressive Jewish rabbinical, you know, elites were there in the room. And then there was also the head of the NAACP was there. There were a lot of like very like important people that were in the room. And essentially the The meeting was essentially hijacked by one of the leaders who basically accused the Jewish leaders in the Jewish community of sitting back while this woman Tamika was being vilified and attacked and all of it because she was in— she refused to apologize essentially for having made this tweet.She just refused to back down and she was beginning to work in some some tropes having to do with color and racism and make, you know, white people asking a Black person to apologize, all these things to cover up this ridiculous tweet that she had made and not just saying, okay, it was a mistake. And in that meeting, I was in the hot seat and I basically was asking her to apologize. And subsequently, long story, that meeting, we walked out and some of the things that were said by the leadership there was just so shocking to the rabbis, but not one rabbi said anything. Fast forward, the Women's March happens, and then there's a second meeting planned, and I come to the second meeting. I walk in a little bit late, and I essentially ask this woman again, Tamika Mallory, to apologize. And I'll never forget this till, you know, this is straight out of the Talmudic story in Gittin about the destruction of the Second Temple, where in that story, there's a certain you know, shaming, a public shaming, the rabbis were in the room while this public shaming happens and they don't do anything.I'm standing there and a colleague stood up and yelled at me and said, "I'm ashamed of you, David Ingber, for shaming our friend and our ally, you know, into apologizing." And it was the most shocking moment of my life, of my career, perhaps. I mean, it was just like, I could not believe my eyes. And Not one of the rabbis that were sitting there said a word. And so, fast forward from that, I gave a sermon about, that led me to give a sermon at Romamu about flags. And we put an Israeli flag into our sanctuary for the first time in over a decade. We'd never done that. And I could see the writing was on the wall. It was almost like on October 7th, there were these, scouts that were telling of what was about to occur, but nobody was listening to them. And I think that there were also scouts here in the North American landscape that were telling us of something that was coming down the pike and we were ignoring it or calling it alarmist. And so when October 7th happens, I've just come back to the Ur-sin, like if you are used to showing up in these progressive spaces and one of the ways you do that is by constantly downplaying your own vulnerability, you know, you see yourself as part of the power structure that has to change.Right, then you are, you are also committed to not raising Islamophobic issues, right? You're like worried to talk about the real existential threats because you're committed to not being a part of the problem that will lead to more Islamophobia and other, other things. And so in progressive circles, you're more likely to have a rabbi rail against Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, but rarely even decide, like, for all kinds of really interesting reasons, never say anything about Hezbollah or about Hamas or about rising Islamic, you know, jihadism. And so you have this strange, you know, odd way that progressive rabbis occupy this space. And so that was their blind spot. The blind spot is that they're more likely to lean into universal values at a moment of deep existential crisis and downplay real concerns and vulnerabilities that are facing the Jewish community.What was the reaction In your shul, when you brought the flag in, this is before October 7th, way before October 7th, what was the reaction?This is an MLK weekend in 2020. And I wrote a sermon called Raising Our Flawed Flags. And I basically, my argument was, is that you know nothing about me just because I have a Torah. You don't know what kind of Jew I am just because I have a Torah in the ark. And same thing, similarly with a flag, like, you don't know what kind of Zionist I am or what kind of government I support, but I was making a point about the centrality of Israel for Jewish peoplehood and its indivisible nature, which I think, of course, is now up for grabs, or not for me, but for many. That's the role of Mamdani and the role of, and kind of what's happened in the aftermath of October 7th is like this effort for all kinds of reasons to divide us into, you know, is Zionism or quote unquote Israel's centrality or not? Is it Israel central or not? And I think that understandably, Israel became a kind of, has become a kind of religious space, but it's really about peoplehood. Like the shift from religion as core to who we are, what unites us, in the diaspora to the State of Israel, the state, the land of Israel, right? We can argue about whether it's the land, you know, land versus state, it is a political entity, but like, for all intents and purposes, having our own, you know, being the joinable tribe that we are, as Dara Horne calls us, the joinable tribe that we are in our own indigenous land is an existential requirement, actually, I think, in the next 100 years. I think it's forever, but like, let's just assume the next 100 years. And so to me, the reason why I am so adamant about my stance vis-à-vis Zionism or anti-Zionism is because I think that it's a misreading of the essential nature of what it is to have land again and what it means to have an army again, what it is to have power, to have rejoined history. So to me, those things are almost like meaning it's not like quite in that category of you'll be willing to die for it. It's kind of like martyrs for the sake of that of that principle. But to me, that principle is ironclad. I see that every attack on the state of Israel, to some extent, coming from the place of wanting to invalidate or delegitimize, is an existential— it's like an existential threat to our own survival in the most profound way. And the idea that we're going to separate out ourselves into a diasporic community and an Israel community, I think, is completely misguided. And anyway, we could talk about that in a minute, but what I saw when I gave that sermon about Israel, and about the flag rather, in 2020 on MLK weekend, 10 people got up and heckled me and they left. There were like 300 people there. And I'd never been, never had that experience in my life. These, they were anarchists, or they only came to Ramamu because it was a place where they could have their anti-Zionism, and I realized that without publicly expressing my love for the State of Israel, I had unwittingly opened up, been so inclusive that I had attracted people who felt it unsafe to be in a room where there was an Israeli flag. So that was a real watershed moment for me. I really saw—They felt it was unsafe. I really want to get to the bottom of that. They felt it was unsafe to be in a room where there was a flag, or they found it offensive? Which one is it?Both. Both. They felt like it was—I get the offensive. I mean, I don't agree with it, obviously, but I get the offensive part. What's unsafe?Yeah, it's a good question. What's unsafe? I didn't understand. They made others feel unsafe, by the way. When they got up and they yelled at me, they scared half the room. And so half the room was terrified. But then ironically, they said, you made us feel unsafe, right? And I said, how were you unsafe? Because you— Rabbi, you're the pulpit and you're the authority. And you didn't, you know, you're talking about Zionism, which is involved in occupation and it's a colonial state. I mean, they went through the whole list of things and that you were forced to, they were trapped. They said, we're trapped here listening to your propaganda. And it said more about also that generation, I think, in some profound way. About what it means to, you know, to be able to hear something that makes you uncomfortable, which I think is very difficult for this generation. And I think that it was a, it was a real sign of what was to come. And I think that in the aftermath of October 7th, it got much worse. Obviously, it got worse throughout the Jewish world and certainly our community, which is, you know, in the Columbia area, we're on 105th and Amsterdam.And so we were at the epicenter here in New York of some of the worst of it, you know, the Columbia campus protests and so on. And so I've been watching this and I've been watching my progressive allies and friends who were shocked by what happened on October 8th and in that immediately aftermath of that, of October 7th and how the foreshadowing had been back in that closed-door meeting. Like, everything we needed to know about the ways that we would be excluded, even though we thought we had, you know, we had attained, like, we are part of the liberal progressive worldview. And the liberal progressive worldview, of course, is, it will, you know, does not, it won't have the anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism pieces to it. And in the immediate aftermath, not only were we disappointed, but we saw progressive rabbis double down often on their relationships with allies outside of the Jewish community, preserving those relationships at the cost of calling them out. The same voices who in years before that were holding hands with people who were anti-Zionists or who didn't have the Jewish community's interests at heart, but were holding hands with them because they believed that all marginalized communities have to get together, we're in this together, they're trying to divide us, it's white supremacy or some other sub-large system and structure.Those same rabbis couldn't find their way in the week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks after that to call out these leaders who were sitting on their hands and not protesting what took place, not coming out with condemnations about what had just taken place. You know, so basically, the price of belonging to these larger groups is that we can't rebuke them, we can't call them on a kind of equity and symmetry in these relationships. And so, You know, I think that was extremely disappointing. Israelis are watching it. It's interesting how much attention Israeli press is giving to American Jewish life. I mean, I've been living here for 30 years-ish, and there's always been some interest, obviously. And, you know, there's good days and bad days and this and that. But it started with the three presidents in Congress, the three university presidents and contextual, and, you know, every Israeli newspaper is having to explain what contextual meant and so on and so forth. But there's been a tremendous amount of interest in the press, in journals. I have a piece coming out in Hashiloach, which is kind of an upper crust, not quite academic, but serious long-form essay thing, where I was asked to write about American Judaism and Israel. Israelis are interested in this. Haaretz, as you well know, ran a front cover story in its Musaf Haaretz with Ariel Angel who's the outgoing editor of Jewish Currents, an avowed anti-Zionist, not a non-Zionist, but an avowed anti-Zionist. Nice person, by the way. I just want to say for the record, a very nice person. We've had chats, we've had very friendly chats, but obviously disagree about basically everything under the sun, certainly when it comes to Judaism. And I want to ask you what you would say to Israelis. Israelis are looking at this and a lot of them are scratching their heads and they're saying, what's happening to American Jewish life?I mean, and I wanna separate the question into two parts. Are you guys gonna have a home there? One. And number two, in order to protect your home there, are we gonna become ballast that is gonna have to get jettisoned? Israelis are therefore, I think, looking at American Jews both with concern for American Jews and worry at being abandoned by American Jews. What would you say to rank-and-file Israelis about where you think this is all heading in terms of the relationship between the two communities that comprise obviously 90% of the Jewish world?So I think that those of us in the anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism camp acknowledge, clearly acknowledge, that there once was, and there continues to be in theory, in the abstract, the idea that someone could be quote-unquote against Zionism and/or against the Zionist, or, you know, an ethno-national state for the Jewish people, and not necessarily, but definitionally be in the category of an anti-Semite in the way that we usually categorized anti-Semites. There's no doubt that we'd have to throw a lot of really good Jews into that boat, but that was usually, usually, not always, but usually pre-mandate. And no matter what anyone says in the abstract about whether anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism in the most— definitionally, it really doesn't matter at this moment. Because at this moment, anti-Zionism has been, is being used in the most egregious way as you said, to put a Scarlet Z on the back of everyone who supports Israel, whether you're a Jew on the Upper West Side, in LA, in Buenos Aires, or wherever you are around the world. If you in any way, shape, or form see Israel as your homeland or as the homeland of the Jewish people, you have a Scarlet Z, right? Of course, everything happens without any context whatsoever. There's never a framing of why that is and how we got here. It's just kind of, So I think it's just kind of thrown out there. So I think that many of us have been seeing the writing on the wall and watching this. And for many of us, that's why we aren't critical of the state of Israel publicly, is because we know that everything will be weaponized in some way, shape, or form by this tsunami of this tidal wave of Jew hatred. And so as a Jew living in the United States, right, it's terrifying where we are right now. It's terrifying to see that one of the three things that Democrats seem to all agree upon is that we need to defund the state of Israel and that it's questionable if any type of—Including defensive weapons.Including defensive weapons potentially. The point is that the sea change that has happened over the last couple of years is so shocking. And so remarkable, and we continue to think and believe that it would not have happened had it been a different government. And again, the counterfactual— you can not like our current government, and I'm sure we agree on that, and there are so many missed opportunities and bad moments and stupid moments, but there's something else that was growing for quite a while, even before this, for decades, and this has become where we are right now. And so I think a lot of Jews like myself are completely homeless. We're waiting, you know, we're trying to do the best we can between now and the midterms, trying to figure out what is possible. We feel as though we're between a rock and a hard place between the Tucker Carlson nation and the JD Vance-ification and the Candace Owens on the one side, and then, you know, all of the radical lefts on the left side, and we don't know where we are.And I think it's scary to imagine whether or not we have a future. And I do think that more and more people will abandon Israel when push comes to shove, or their affiliation with Israel, depending on how strong it was to begin with. But, right, it's arguably, if the risks and the stakes are raised to such an extent, then we might see assimilation. What assimilation will look like now is not changing your name from Goldstein to Tony Curtis, right? Or from, you know, something to Kirk Douglas. It'll mean I'm not going to be a supporter of Israel publicly, right? I won't say, I won't wear my—I won't speak Hebrew, or at all, right? Or at all.Or at all. And I'll walk away. And the structures are now being put in place by movements for diasporic Judaism and for non-Zionist or anti-Zionist communities to create those havens for Jews to kind of feel like, oh, I can still be a Jew. The only thing I have to give up on is Israel. And I think that there's a lot of work for the North American Jewish community and the global diasporic community to do to maintain. That's why I'm doubling down. Like, that's why for me, you know, doubling down on Israel because I think it's an existential, it's an existential threat. And I don't personally think that we'll be safe being Marrano Jews or converso Jews vis-à-vis Israel. Like, we'll let, you know, we'll let the right appear.What about all the congregants of these progressive rabbis who have doubled down? I mean, you published this piece, which is an excellent piece in Tablet magazine. I'm sure you heard from a lot of your erstwhile progressive colleagues, and I'm sure a lot of it was not complimentary and embracing, I'm guessing. Their congregants who are hearing the rabbis who would much rather criticize Ben-Gvir than Islamic radicalism, though, their congregants who are more likely to hear about Kristof's piece about Israeli sexual violence than about Israel's piece about Muslim sexual violence, which came out the next day. And a lot of people think that it's not a coincidence that the Times published its piece when it did. In other words, these thousands and thousands and thousands of American Jews who are being exposed to this on an ongoing basis— I know you don't have a crystal ball, but where are we heading in terms of the relationship of the 8 million Jews who live here in Israel, and that no longer so insubstantial part of the American Jewish community? What's going to be with us?Yeah, you know, I think that there's no way to deny that there's a rift that is growing. There's no way to deny that it's going to take work, you know, here in the United States and in other places to do the work. The thing that saddens me the most is that the answer I can give you in terms of what will work will leave me feeling sad. It'll make me sad and actually more tellingly, it might lead to more of the same problem in the future, which is there is a way in which some of the surface critiques, if those critiques are actually, if those facts on the ground change, we could see some change happen because, you know, I think those who are who are hating on Israel now will choose proximate causes that aren't the true cause. But if those proximate causes change, if Bibi is no longer the prime minister at some point, then even though I personally don't believe that, you know, the sea change is as connected to Bibi's leadership as others would claim, I think it's just, again, it's a fig leaf for something else that's going on, then we'll see a change, right?Yeah. But maybe only for a short period of time before these things will rear their head again. You know, we're losing the narrative war completely. The jihad online, the online jihad, as someone called it, has been incredibly successful. It's almost impossible to compete with it, and not that we can even try. There is a, there is a, there is something happening afoot, and I don't know what will happen on the ground to change American attitudes. And so I don't see the rift healing anytime soon. I think it gets wider. Whether that eventually breaks, I hope to God that it doesn't, but I don't see it coming. I don't see in the immediate future it being healed. That's a little bit pessimistic.Okay, no, I mean, I'm just, yeah, I mean, I'm just, I'm kind of silent only because Wow. First of all, I agree with you, by the way, this is an aside, but I mean, I think those American Jews who are following Israeli politics closely and mostly not through the English press, but through the Hebrew press will know that the one issue that's not being contested in this upcoming election, which is likely to be in September now, it appears, the one issue that's not being contested is Israel's foreign policy. The one issue that's not being contested is Israel's conduct of the war. There's no conversation about that. I mean, you know, Yair Golan might say a little bit differently than Bibi Netanyahu is gonna say, and everybody's appalled except for the people that love him. Everybody's appalled by Ben-Gvir, But Ben-Gvir wasn't determining really the way the war was executed and prosecuted. There are— the issues here are the Haredim, the issues here are the conduct of the personal conduct of lots of the ministers. The issues here were lots of things, but whether it's Bennett or Eisenkot or David Sherez from El Hadegel or Einat Wilf from Oz, or Gantz, or I mean, we can go on and on. There's no shortage of candidates. The war's not going to change. The foreign policy is not going to change. The attitude towards Iran is going to be exactly the same thing. The attitude towards Hezbollah being embedded in southern Lebanon is going to be exactly the same thing. The attitude towards Hamas rebuilding itself in Gaza is going to be exactly the same thing. So I think, you know, even if there is a certain kind of momentary sense of healing and whatever, I actually think that it's very unlikely this is going to remain— it's going to be a healing thing. So the problem, I agree with you, is going to get greater. Now, my question to you is this about the sustainability of a kind of Jewishness in the United States without Israel, not necessarily at its core, but as one of its core pillars. So, imagine that I'm a young, you know, Columbia student, or whatever, a Harvard student, or a CCNY student, it doesn't make any difference. And I'm in your shul the day that you put up that Israeli flag. And I hear the buzz, I get it. A lot of people are really uncomfortable with it.And I'm not saying that you made me feel unsafe, I'm just saying, well, I don't really get that. So I come to your office and I say, Rabbi Ingber, explain to me why I can't have a Judaism in the United States based on— I'll give you tribal, we care about Jews and, you know, the concentric circles of caring and so forth. But it's just the nationalism part, it's the sovereignty part. I'm actually thrilled about Jews in Israel rebuilding Jewish culture and yeshivot and museums and libraries and all of that. Why can't I build a Jewish life in which this nationalist, necessarily militaristic, necessarily embedded in conflict entity just isn't part of my worldview? What would you say to that young student?I mean, there's almost impossible to do anything in Jewish life which doesn't reference the land of Israel in some way, shape, or form, whether it's through prayer, or through, you know, again, as you said, learning, right? There's almost It would be a different religion to some extent if they removed, they tried to excise every reference to the land. It might be sustainable, but it becomes a different religion. It becomes a version of Christianity or Messianic Christianity to kind of make it in that way, maybe without the Christian figure, but kind of it becomes divorced from the body politic of the Jewish people and from our historic connection to the land. You know, you have to explain all kinds of remnants to your children. I don't see it having a shelf life, but potentially could. I would say to Those people, of course, you can, you know, you're more than, you're going to do it. Like, you can, you know, the Hasidim who lived in the land of, in the Ukraine and in Poland and in the Pale of Settlement abstracted the land of Israel into a kind of an abstract idea that, you know, called the land. But many of them went eventually to the actual land. So I don't, again, Whether, like, I'm okay to some extent with their commitment to it because, you know, I personally believe that there's always the possibility of doing teshuvah and coming back. Do they have a, you know, would they do teshuvah? It's a funny idea, but like, they would come back to the land.And so again, I would speak to them from the heart and I would speak to them about what is hurting them. I would say to this person who sits in my office talking about their separation from the land of Israel is to say, here's my deep suspicion: it won't go away. Because you're compromising on a part of who you are, and you think you're keeping yourself nice and clean from all the messiness of having a land, but you'll compromise on other things soon as well. Because you're buying into the rhetoric that demonizes Israel, and if you're going to buy into that rhetoric and participate in it, pretty soon there'll be other double standards that'll be superimposed upon you as a Jew, because it's not about Israel, it's about being a Jew. Yeah. So it's almost like what Esther was, you know, what Mordechai said to Esther, if you think that you're gonna go and you're gonna hide in Beis Hamelach, in the king's palace, it's not gonna work. You think you're gonna hide away from having to have a state and having a land and an army? Good luck. Like, we tried that for a couple thousand years, didn't go that well. So that's what I would say.I want to wrap up by asking you something about your other, your progressive rabbi colleagues. Are— I know that you've taken a lot of heat. You took a lot of heat over the issue with Farrakhan, and you took a lot of heat after the 7th. You probably took some heat, I'm guessing, after the Jonah Platt videos, although I don't have any idea if that's true or not. Is anybody else rethinking the way that you've had the courage to do? Are there other rabbis that are saying, "This came out of a very good place." but we weren't met with equal openness, and it's taking us Jewishly to a place that, as you said, feels kind of like a different religion, even if you're not using that language. How many David Ingers are there, and how optimistic are you that there can remain a progressive Jewish movement that is still in a love affair with the idea of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish homeland?I think there are, actually, my experience has been since I wrote this, and even before, by the way, that there are many, many, the vast majority of colleagues reached out to me and said, "Thank you for saying this. It's something that we've felt and that we've spoken in private quarters, or maybe we said it here and there, but to put it out there", there was a sense of relief. There was a sense of, you know, all the power to you." And I just want to say also that there's a misunderstanding also in the piece, which is I didn't write the piece in order to vilify my progressive or liberal colleagues. I still consider myself to be a part of the progressive world. I still want to see a world that has a lot of the values that are alive and well within those spaces. I just think there's a great, great imbalance. And that's where the blind spot is, is that we can do both of those things and not just give lip service that we do both of those things, but actually do both of those things. We can show up when there's antisemitism against Haredi brothers and sisters.We can be mindful that if we're going to give a sermon about, you know, someone in the Israeli parliament who is outside of the pale. We also have to have somewhat of a balance because the world is watching us and we have every responsibility to protect the people of Israel, to protect the people who are under fire, right? I personally will not add one, I will try not to add one ounce of ammunition to the world where Israeli tourists can go to a hotel and get accosted and being called baby killers. I refuse. To participate in that, right, in any way, shape, or form. I want to lift up what is beautiful about the State of Israel. I acknowledge that there are all kinds of things that have to be seen. I recognize that I don't live there, and so I have to do my service in a different way. And I would call upon my liberal and progressive colleagues to be proudly pushing back on narratives that demonize us or give us undue obsession with all of the foibles and the, you know, and all of the ways in which Israel misses the mark, which of course it will. This is not a moment— that's not the moment's call, in my opinion. The moment's call right now is to be strong. To be strong and to stand firm.It's beautifully said, and I think the kind of the corollary here is we have the opposite side to worry about. We have the side that I think that the— here the need to be strong goes without saying, and there's hardly anybody here that doesn't think we need to be strong. You have to be strong without being ugly. And you have to be strong without being racist. And you have to be strong without giving the ammunition that you're talking about, but from the other side. And I think that that actually may, in fact, be a way that we could build a kind of a rapport between Israeli leaders and American Jewish leaders, which is to say, we each have an extreme to rein in. There's a universalist side that can't critique Israel's enemies that has to be reined in. And there's a highly particularist, uber-tribal side, which sees non-Jews as subhuman, as not deserving of the kinds of values that the Torah has. So, there is actually, I think, a kind of, at this moment of crisis, also a potential bridge to be built. And as I said at the very outset, you know, you were one of those people who were building bridges between the Jewish world and the progressive world for so many years. It's very possible, I really believe this, And I felt this once again when I read your piece. It's very possible that you and your counterparts here in Israel, and you have many of them, can be the beginning of a building of a bridge of both sides. One side shedding its extremism on one side, one side, the other side, shedding its extremism on the other side, and hopefully trying to repair the relationship that you very sadly said, you know, you're not sure it's not going to break. But I think it's our responsibility, all of us collectively, to try to make sure that it doesn't. You're doing really creative and courageous work. And it's very easy to be courageous and sort of, you know, not all that creative. It's very easy to be creative and not worry about so much what the implications are. I think your voice is critically important. And it's an important voice, by the way, for Israelis to hear, no less than it is for your American Jewish colleagues. Rabbi David Ingber, thank you very much for the opportunity to learn with you and learn from you once again.Thank you. You too, Danny. Thank you for having me.
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