Shalom from Israel, where I am learning for the month with other rabbis at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.   

Sara and I spent this past Shabbat in Ranana with several close friends of ours. Just after Shabbat, we turned on our phones to read that a 20-year-old boy from Ranana, Yair Avitan, was killed fighting in Gaza. I attended his funeral in the Ranana cemetery at 12:30a.m. Motzei Shabbat, along with not only his family and friends but hundreds of neighbors and fellow citizens.

Many people spoke at the funeral—friends, military officers and his parents, but his mother was especially powerful, composed and articulate.  She said Yair was born on the second day of the month of Av (a birthday I share with him), and his brit was on Tisha B’av. This day, Tisha B’av was fitting, she said, because he believed in and worked toward ahavat chinam, baseless love, the fix for the baseless hatred upon which the Tisha B’av destruction is blamed.   

She spoke of the Israeli army as a holy army, not just because it defends a holy land and a holy people, but primarily because it facilitates that ahavat chinam. She described the Israeli army as a unifier. No matter one’s background, the army renders all as brothers and sisters, deeply reliant on each other. She then called upon the government of Israel and its prime minister to work toward unity instead of political division. Her passionate words, spoken with deep love, interwove the centrality of the army, the nation and the Torah. 

Standing in that sea of individuals and their tears, I felt a different sense of Jewish peoplehood. In Washington, in the diaspora, we often say that we Jewish people are a nation, but in truth we feel more like a religion. In contrast, standing at that soldier’s funeral, I felt a deep, visceral sense of the integration of Torah, with Jewish nationhood and the Land of Israel.   

In the United States, I am an American and a Jew. It is a very different feeling than being an Israeli and an Israelite. To have one’s sense of nationhood, peoplehood and religious identity all bound together is foreign to the diaspora Jew, but to the Israeli Jew, it is profoundly integrative, unifying our people’s past, present and future.    

Growing up in Haredi yeshivot in my youth, I did not identify as a Zionist. My first interview to be a congregational rabbi 30 years ago was for the position of assistant rabbi at a very Zionist synagogue in a large American city. When asked what I thought about Israel, I replied that I did not think Israel was important.   Torah, I said, is what kept the Jewish people who we are for two millennia and for most of that time, we had no land, so obviously, the Torah is what defines us. I honestly had no idea that this was the “wrong” answer.   

A few days later the senior rabbi called me and said, “Hyim, if you want to be a Modern Orthodox rabbi in America, you have to come to terms with Zionism.” That moment launched my personal exploration of the significance of Medinat Yisrael and our relationship to it. Part of that journey included two half-year sabbaticals in Israel, one learning in Lod with Israelis who carried guns and knew only Hebrew. It also involved learning Rav Kook and some modern Jewish history, as well as understanding the experience and perspectives of my many friends and relatives who live in Israel and lay their lives on the line for her.   

This question of the extent to which the modern State of Israel plays a role in our collective national identity or whether only the Torah does, is the crux of the current debate in Israel between the Zionists and the Haredim over the nature of the country and the Haredi draft: Is the Torah the essence of who we are, and Israel a holy land upon which devolves an array of Torah laws, but we would be happy if the British or the Americans ruled the land, as long as they let us study Torah, eat kosher and live in peace? Or is the idea of being a Jewish landed nation on the world stage, integrated with values and history of Torah, the center of what it means to be who we are?  This question is no small matter, but one which is poised to potentially cleave the Jewish people in Israel. I believe that in this era, after 76 years of statehood, even the diaspora Jew is compelled to reckon with this fundamental question of Jewish identity.