Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
I am deeply, deeply, deeply critical of this government. I don't think that disengagement is an option.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and today, I'm speaking with two returning guests, Rabbi Deborah Waxman and Rabbi Maurice Harris. Each has recently published important pieces dealing with the relationship between non-Orthodox diaspora Jews and the state of Israel. Rabbi Waxman recently published an article under the headline, Israel is in Danger of Losing American Jewry in the influential Sapir Journal, which is edited by Bret Stephens of the New York Times. The piece really articulates what are the reasons why so many non-Orthodox Jews have such a strong connection, identification with Israel and where some of the fissures, disappointments, and complications have come in, not only recently, but really throughout Israel's history. Rabbi Waxman was recently interviewed about the piece by Hanan Weissman, a former state department official who now directs the Sapir Institute. The interview goes deep into Reconstructionist thought and its approaches to Zionism, and we put a link to the article and video in our show notes.
Rabbi Harris recently published on Evolve a piece called My Israel Palestine Learning Curve is a Zigzag, and this piece is part personal history. Harris tells the story of his mother's family fleeing Morocco for their lives and finding refuge, not exactly an easy life in the Jewish state. It's also an intellectual biography of sorts when it comes to Rabbi Harris and his approaches and understanding to Jewish and Palestinian narratives and in it and throughout it, he wrestles with profound moral, historical and spiritual questions. Okay, a reminder, all of the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is Evolve.ReconstructingJudaism.org. Now, if you want different perspectives on Israel Palestine, there's a lot on this website. Much of it has been added just over the past few months, weeks even. Some of what's written there, I personally don't agree with.
But I'll say all of it is thought-provoking and it serves as a forum where people, thinkers can engage with these questions thoughtfully, productively, respectfully, sort of with the Reconstructionist approach in mind. So I urge you to check it out, read, think, and decide for yourself. It really is modeling conversation. Now, both Rabbi Harris and Rabbi Waxman recently spent extended time in Israel and Palestine, and this podcast conversation today focuses a lot on those observations and experiences. Note this recording took place in early July and since then, portions of the ruling coalition's effort to weaken overhaul the Israeli judiciary have moved closer to passage with Israel seeming closer and closer to an abyss with another side that's hard to imagine.
So back in November of 2022, Deborah, I've spent three weeks in Israel, Palestine when the results of Israel's election were just coming in and the shape of the coalition was just starting to form in the public's mind. She was there for a meeting of the Jewish Agency for Israel. She serves as its deputy chair of the Jewish Agency Ethics Governance and Standards Committee. Jewish Agency is often described as the largest Jewish nonprofit in the world, and it's historically been tasked with promoting and facilitating immigration to Israel. And more recently, it's been much more focused or focused on building of Jewish identity throughout the globe. Also, in November, Rabbi Waxman took part in a study tour of Israel and Palestine organized by the New Israel Fund and Jewish Social Justice round table, and that was for CEOs of Jewish organizations part of the round table. In April, she attended a series of gatherings that were meant to mark Israel's 75th anniversary, but in the end were largely overshadowed by the judicial overhaul push and the resulting nationwide protests.
She attended another meeting of the Jewish Agency and she attended a meeting of the World Zionist Congress as an elected delegate, and that's been described as the parliament of the Jewish people. She also was part of the General Assembly of Jewish Federations of North America, which is typically the largest gathering in organized American Jewry, North American Jewry. And this year was held in Israel. Now, Deborah is the CEO of Reconstructing Judaism. And as somebody who works for this organization, I can attest her schedule is packed, like really packed, and the number of priorities she has to juggle makes me feel dizzy almost. So I say this to know the weight of her decision to spend this much time out of the United States engaging with Israel, engaging in the conversation about Israel.
Rabbi Harris is Reconstructing Judaism's Israel affairs specialist. In May, he took part in the Convention of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, which is the international network of the reform liberal, progressive and Reconstructionist movements, representing an estimated 1.8 million members worldwide and more than 1,200 congregations in over 50 countries. He also held several meetings with folks from different sectors of Israeli society, plus he's got dozens of family members in Israel and he made time to check in with them and had some interesting conversations with them, which we'll talk about. Now, I'm somebody who spent a lot of time in Israel in my early twenties and there's a deep affinity, but like many, I've also been really profoundly alarmed at the direction the politics has gone in recent years, and often I don't know what to think.
And many times I disagree with myself over the course of a given day. So I've looked forward to this conversation, not because I expect all the answers handed to me on a platter, but to really help me sort through what I've been thinking and in a number of places, I really did find it not only just validating but helpful and introduce some new perspectives and avenues I hadn't thought of. So I hope you find something in there too. Anybody who cares about this place, many of us are all just trying to figure it out. So, okay, it's time for our guests. Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Rabbi Maurice Harris, welcome back to the podcast, repeat guests. It's good to see both of you again.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
It's wonderful to be with you, Bryan, and always with you as well, Maurice.

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
Likewise, very much.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So much to dive into. We're here to talk about Israel, American Jewish relationship to Israel. Not a new topic, but a very fluid one. Each of you has spent a fair amount of time there recently. We're at a time of enormous political change, and certainly some in the diaspora Jewish community have used this as a time to question not only the policies of Israel, but the level of commitment. Is this a place? Is this a society I should be engaged with when there's so much happening at home, wherever home may be? I mean, each of you really leaned into that engagement and devoted an enormous amount of professional time to engaging into getting in conversations that might not have always been so easy. So I'm wondering to each of you, what really motivated you to lean in this way?

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Well, Maurice is Reconstructing Judaism's Israel specialist. So it's one of many portfolios he holds, but he is expressly identified with working with these projects. I'm the CEO and my attention and my time and how I spend it is divided across many, many things, and Israel is absolutely one of them for incredibly affirmative reasons. Half of the world's Jews live there. There's incredible creativity. There's the thousands year old connection, and also for not reactive, but for challenging reasons. As you suggested, it is a place of conflict. And many American Jews and many diaspora Jews, I feel that conflict. And so I absolutely feel that I'm called to talk about Israel a lot in my leadership and in my Rabbinate, and I am intensely interested in doing that from knowledge and from experience and from relationship. So I'm always anxious for any opportunity to go to Israel, to be in Israel, to be in conversations with Israeli Jews, with Israeli Arabs, with Palestinians.
Not to get too deeply into it, but of everything that I just listed, the involvement with the Jewish Agency, I think really significantly for me has to do with our commitments to religious pluralism. This is the place where when people are frustrated about the Western Wall, the kotel and egalitarian prayer space, since we do not have Reconstructionist representatives on the ground in Israel, like institutions, the Jewish Agency is a place for us to exercise influence and to share our perspective and to push for things that we really care about. So that's one of the main reasons why I am involved on behalf of the Reconstruction movement in the Jewish Agency.
They address many, many other things, and there are resources and there are opportunities and there are challenges, but that is the main impetus for me to be involved there. The study tour, I deeply appreciate the perspective and the analysis and the collegiality of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and the opportunity to go to talk to activists in the NGO sector, in the non-governmental organization sector in Israel, in partnership with the Roundtable [inaudible 00:13:15] and their partnerships just felt so important to me in general, and that it felt that it really would give me more information and deepen relationships with colleagues here in the United States and all the more so with colleagues in Israel and in Palestine.
And then the World Zionist Congress as nutty and ancient as it is, it is the locus for diaspora Jews presumably who identify as Zionists, although there is an incursion of non-Zionist Haredi Jews in this most recent incarnation. It is the locus where diaspora Jews are invited to engage in opinions and in actions, however, symbolic around Israel, and also as symbolic as all of that is the election results of the World's Alliance Congress determine the political appointments to the Jewish Agency and the World's Alliance Organization and KKL, the Israeli Jewish National Fund whose collective budget exceed a billion dollars.
So there's what to weigh in. So for me, it is about engaging, being informed, having influence and a voice to understand deeply, to make the case where necessary. I'm deeply, deeply, deeply critical of this government. I don't think that disengagement is an option. I think that criticism is entirely legitimate and I've long believed that, and it's especially true with this government. But I think that just the fact of the reality is this is big in the world and this is big in the Jewish world, and I want to try to approach it with as much integrity and with as much knowledge and frankly, with as much influence as I can muster.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maurice, I'm wondering if you had one or two experiences encountered that either inspired you or really encapsulated what you think the situation is there now, or at least was in April when you were on the ground.

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
So I was actually on the ground in May, and I can think of a couple of moments that really jumped out. One was at the very end of the World Union for progressive Judaisms convention. One of the liberal movements that is a part of the World Union along with our movement is the reform movement in Israel and the reform movement in Israel made a collective decision to officially support the pro-democracy protests that have been going on in Israel for 25 plus weeks. So at the very end of the conference after Havdalah on Saturday night, they invited as many people who were at the convention who wanted to go to the weekly demonstration in Jerusalem. And my experience there was mind-blowing, I was stunned by the huge numbers of people that were there. I was also deeply impressed by how well-organized the protest was and how much organizing for future activity was embedded within the way in which this event was staged.
And it was extremely loud and in some ways had the feel of being in a space that was going to be very disruptive. And at the same time, it was extremely orderly. It was all ages, I would say about one out of every 10 people that I assumed were men had a kippah on, which can mean many different things in Israel. But I was nevertheless impressed and surprised that the breadth of the backgrounds of this coalition of people coming together around these concerns really seems to be wider than past groups that have masked together to demonstrate. And in the case of the demo that I was at, I saw that they had several ingredients including really excellent music, including three speakers who were all national intellectuals who treated this as kind of a teach-in to some extent. The amount of education that's going on about how democracies work, what it means to design a democracy so that it doesn't become tyranny of the majority, why checks and balances matter.
There's this massive informal education that's playing out about the ins and outs of what makes democracy function that are a part of this particular protest movement. And then they closed, the Israeli flags were everywhere, and they closed the demonstration by singing hatikva and thanking the police police. And there was no violence, there was no vandalism and all kinds of people who clearly live in those Jerusalem neighborhoods and know that the gatherings are happening there, they all had their cars parked along the streets just like normal. People weren't taking steps they might take if they thought their property was going to get damaged.
So I was really, really, really impressed and I have a lot of confidence that the decentralized network of leaders across the country who are involved in this are putting a lot of effort into designing ongoing resistance so that it can be sustainable and so that it can attempt to keep up with the pivots and strategy that will inevitably come from the government as it, even this week, seeks to ram through some of its judicial overhaul. So I know I spoke at length about that. That was certainly a really powerful experience I had. There was another powerful experience I had speaking with the CEO of a green startup, but maybe I'll save that story for later.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah, that's exciting. I mean, first off, I haven't been to Israel since 2008, so everything I'm on the ground, I'm getting through reading about it or seeing videos. And I am curious, Deborah, you were actually, if I remember correctly, had a chance to take part in a protest as well, and I was wondering what your experience was like.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, I was in multiple protests. I mean, I would echo what Maurice said, that I've been to a lot of marches and experiences here in the States, and this is really different especially since it is an ongoing thing. I was on at the major protest in Tel Aviv twice. One, the regular Saturday night gathering on Kaplan Street and then the other, I was there for [inaudible 00:22:00]. So that's how I chose to spend [inaudible 00:22:06]. Maurice did a really wonderful job of capturing the playfulness in the organization and the educational focus and the respect.
I do remember one of the things that I'm finding very, very interesting is that the protests are Jewish Israelis, and it would be a different experience if there were Arab Israelis or Palestinians who were either joining in the protests or organizing the protests. And there was a group that was handing out, and everybody has an assigned spot in Tel Aviv. I think that's probably true in Jerusalem as well. And there was a group that is an anti occupation group and that they were handing out flyers that said in Hebrew, there is no democracy while there's still occupation. And they were not small, but they were also not large. My understanding is that that contingent is larger in Jerusalem where the conflict is a little bit more in the face of residents there and in the surrounding neighborhoods.
But [inaudible 00:23:16], I heard, I don't recall who it was, but a university professor, a political scientist, a national intellectual, and he made the point. He made the point expressly that we have to be extending this battle beyond the Jewish constituency. And it was very striking to me that the crowd did not erupt in cheers, and neither did they erupt in boo's. And that observation was made to the tens of thousands of people who were gathered and it was received. I don't know if it was embraced, but it was received. So that's one thing I would add to what Maurice beautifully described. I also was a part of a demonstration that was organized by members of the Progressive Israel network, which we are a member at the World Zionist Congress. And we marched from [inaudible 00:24:14] International Conference Center to the Israeli Supreme Court right nearby.
And just two stories out of it, one is we were really, the World Zionist Congress really is people from around the world. This group was mostly North American but there were some folks, especially from the arts slate and from the merit slate who joined in. And so I know there were some folks from Central Europe, especially someone from Hungary, who was talking very, very powerfully about how traumatized the Hungarian community is by [inaudible 00:24:48] rise and how hard we have to fight and how disciplined we have to be. And folks from Paris and some Australians who came, but we were conscious that we were diaspora Jews, that the Congress permits us to take the stance, but we didn't want it to be too grandstanding. And the organizers had been in touch with [inaudible 00:25:08], which is a group of Israeli military veterans who are very, very, very involved in the protest movements.
And they came, they marched along with us, they brought us Israeli flags and they spoke about how meaningful it was to have the solidarity and the support. And the last story I'll tell is, that was very, very interesting is that with this a little bit ad hoc, we didn't seek the permit. We said we were going on a walk. We spoke very, very briefly outside of the Supreme Court and there was one policeman who was accompanying us, and we were wondering, and we were watchful and we were concerned that he was going to disrupt or chastise or disperse. And the couple things that he said was like, "Keep your group together so you don't get hit by cars." As we were crossing the street, he's concerned for our safety and in a very respectful way, he said, "You got to wrap this up or otherwise I'm going to have to take ..." He partnered with us. And so that was just so interesting and felt like it was a meeting of diaspora concerns and indigenous Israeli concerns.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maurice, you've written in the Evolve pages about your own family history, about your mother's family having to flee Morocco in the dead of night and being resettled in Israel and your large Moroccan family. I mean, my understanding is some of your very close relatives are on the other side of this issue, the judicial overhaul. I mean, to the extent you're comfortable, I imagine you saw some folks on this recent trip. What were those conversations like or did they happen at all?

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
So I did see quite a few of my relatives on this trip, and only a few of them brought up the subject of the demonstrations and the judicial overhaul. Let's put it this way. No one that I spoke to among my relatives said that they were marching or that they were supportive. I heard several of my relatives express skepticism about the demonstrators. And I had one uncle in particular who was really the only person who went on a rant. And I feel like there's something to be learned about the rant that he went on and he's in his seventies and he's worked really hard his whole life and he is struggling economically.
So he had two things to say that don't really go together typically if you were to try to make a right left center map of Israel. So the first thing that he said was that he used to vote for Netanyahu, but he hasn't the last two times because he's concluded that Netanyahu's only interests are himself and his rich friends and that the whole country is rigged and that the rich keep getting richer and that people who've worked hard their whole lives are getting less and less and less during their retirement. And so he kind of sounded a little like Bernie Sanders playbook. And then abruptly he pivoted to how the demonstrators are all people who don't want the judicial package to pass because they're the beneficiaries of the current economic system.
They're professors and upper middle class people, and they're all the beneficiaries of this crooked system. They're not really patriotic. They just hand out flags to them when they get there, otherwise, they wouldn't waive them. And if the judicial package doesn't pass, then nothing will change and it all needs to change. And I had no idea what to do with that whole package of beliefs. And I mean, he's a guy who was also ... He married my blood relative, but he's, I think, an Iraqi Jew and I think was a refugee as a kid and didn't get to finish high school. And he's intelligent and demoralized, frustrated, not very optimistic about the future of the country as a whole, but kind of described ...
If I could draw a thread out of what I heard from him and maybe read between the lines of some of the reticence to even get into the subject among some of my relatives, I think there may be a lot of, let's say, center right leaning Israelis or even Mizrahi Israelis who tend to not be ideologues, but do tend to be, they sort of want to be street smart about politics, who maybe feeling a little bit like they don't have an obvious camp. That there's ways in which, I think, the embrace of the Haredim and maybe the very far right ultranationalist zealots, those aren't folks that people in my family feel all that comfortable with, even have some pretty deep resentments towards. Those aren't the folks that attracted them to Likud in the past, but they also don't really feel welcome or know whether or not they actually belong in the conscious world of what they perceive as the activist left. And so I just got this sense that there's a kind of standing back and worrying and waiting maybe for things to shake out a little more clearly and they're not quite sure where to land. That's a lot of speculation on my part, but that was my takeaway.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Can I jump in with an observation? One of the things that's always attracted me to Israel is just how small and local it is that we live in this sprawling continental country, and it's very hard to have an influence on national politics. And it's very hard to put your finger on a national zeitgeist. And obviously, there are different camps and there are different groups, but it's so much more accessible and it's so much more, I think, alive and it's so much more changeable. So you referenced it, Bryan, when you said Maurice, well, you were just there last month and who knows if the reality ... So the reality, Maurice and I literally passed in the air, I was trying to download to him what I had experienced, and there were a couple of things he wanted to share with me. And literally, we joked that our flights, our planes were probably crossing in the airspace and he already arrived in a different country that I left.
I mean, it just changes so much. And Bryan, you say you haven't been there since 2008, and I think about how much the great recession and the economic downturn that followed affected Israel as much as it affected everything that we're here in America. And that's when I think the huge financial remaking happened and the income inequality that we see that is, and the gap between the 1% and everybody else, that's when it really, really, really started to accelerate. So Bryan, it's a radically different country. And the economics really, the economics are such a huge part of it and the affordability issue. And then you've got things like the deep ideological overlays that also fuel it, right? It's hard to get ahold of Israel. I say often that when American Jews are talking about Israel, very often we're talking about America. And some of that is because we have been fed such an idealized, and in a certain way, utilitarian like Israel exists for our education and for our existential needs.
And some of it has to do with a distance, and some of it has to do with how easy it is to project both aspirations and anxiety onto something that is not us. And so it's useful in that way. And some of it has to do with the fact that Israel is such a changeable nation, and I think the American press, for sure, and even the Jewish press doesn't do a particularly good job of capturing or communicating that. And in the age of the internet, there are many, many more ways to tap into or make it accessible. But I do think that it's important for me to be in Israel, especially in this role at least once a year, so that I just can just tap in and plug in, in a way that is different. It's just fundamentally different than it is when I'm sitting anyplace else.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah. In 2008, Benjamin Netanyahu had been prime minister once for a total of three years. So it was a very, very different country just done then alone. And the half year I spent there was in 1999 when the country resoundingly voted for Ehud Barak and his vision for really restarting the Oslo process and aggressively pursuing peace with Syria. And clearly, it is a country that has moved very much since then for all kinds of reasons.
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Okay. Back to our conversation. I am wondering, I know there were demonstrations in American cities on the East Coast. There was certainly a few in New York, maybe in Philadelphia also. I guess generally, I mean, most or a lot of American Jews that care about Israeli democracy don't have the opportunities to spend the amount of time that each of you did in Israel to get there at all. I'm wondering if either of you have suggestions what folks can do to make their voices heard on this or what a diaspora Jews role could be in terms of active engaged citizen, or not a citizen of Israel, but citizen of global Jewry, I guess.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Will be important to note that Israelis are asking us to jump in and Israelis are asking us to share our voices and to share our values. There's an ongoing debate about, well, American Jews, anyone who doesn't live in Israel, you don't have an opinion. And that is one of the spaces that the World Zionist Congress occupies is that it is the place where diaspora Jews are invited in to have an opinion. But I've logged in of the belief that that forum exists anywhere and everywhere. But this is an unprecedented moment where Israelis are saying ... Obviously, these are people who are really deeply concerned about the judicial reform, but they're saying, if you care about democracy, if you care about a vision of Israel that is committed to democratic values, it's really essential for you to weigh in here. So Maurice, do you want to take on?

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
Yeah, absolutely. A few thoughts to share about that. And the first is how frequently I heard from Israelis involved in fighting to preserve the balance of powers and democratic institutions in Israel that they want very much to hear the voices of diaspora Jews raised loud and in ways that are tactically effective. So to be contacting one's own elected officials in diaspora countries to urge them to take steps that make clear a strong commitment for maintaining democratic institutions in Israel. And a deep displeasure over the thought of those aspects of Israel's nature being degraded. Most of the demonstrations happening in the United States are being organized by Israeli citizens who live in the United States. They've formed a network called Unacceptable with a funny spelling, and they have taken several pages out of strong civil disobedience activism in terms of maybe civil obedience is pushing it a bit too far. But they've made a point to not just demonstrate, but to also try to be nonviolently disruptive when members of the most extreme parts of the current coalition government come to the United States and speak.
But I guess I'll share two other thoughts about this whole issue. One is that it's very important to treat the old chestnut that people will sometimes throw out that if you don't live in Israel, you don't have a right to express an opinion about it. To recognize that almost always the only people who ever say that are people who are defending far right-wing policies in Israel. Because the truth of the matter is some of the most far right-wing policies that have been advanced in Israel have been initiated by wealthy diaspora Jewish influencers who are not Israeli citizens. And most-

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Including the judicial reform.

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
That's right. The entire judicial reform is the product of an American think tank funded by two Jewish American billionaires. So fair play goes both ways. And as a Reconstructionist, I am also someone who, per my reading of Kaplan, sees Israeli and diaspora Jewish societies as ideally in a relationship that's flowing ideas back and forth and including moral corrective. And I would love to see that open flow. I think Israeli society, at its best, offers tremendous countercultural, correctives to things that are spiritually disastrous about American culture. So it's not that I have a desire to preach to Israelis. I want that back and forth relationship that I think Kaplan really hoped could happen to come to fruition.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Israel has become, I mean, this is not a new development, but really a third rail in many, many American, Jewish, North American diaspora Jewish communities, we tend not to talk about it even with the prominence it has. How does that manifest in Reconstructionist Judaism? How does the movement itself deal with this rich diversity of opinions?

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
I feel like I've really gotten a good opportunity over the past, I want to say, eight months to talk to a lot of lay leaders, adult ed programmers and Rabbis across our movement, who much more so than at any time in the past seven years I've been in this job have been emailing, calling, saying, "We're trying to figure out how to do some kind of programming around what's going on in Israel and we're not quite sure how to do it." And so I've noticed that I think we do have some congregations that struggle so much with the ways in which doing Israel programming becomes quickly divisive that they do avoid it. But I actually think a large majority of our congregations do not treat Israel as a third rail. I think that they treat Israel programming as something that is challenging and that they feel a growing sense of duty or pressure to try to find a way to handle.
And then if they want help, they're more and more aware that they can contact us. So that's resulted in a few different outcomes. In some cases, I've been asked to come do webinar and Q and A in other cases, a people have simply wanted advice about a title for a program or I had a call not long ago from a Rabbi who has another retired Rabbi who's a member of their congregation, who the first Rabbi generally feels a great deal of confidence in. But the retired Rabbi is feeling extremely activated about wanting to push more of that congregation's members to be more outraged by these right-wing moves in Israel. And so that Rabbi just wanted to talk about how can I skillfully encourage this other Rabbi to go ahead and offer a course that they want to offer, but how can I do it in a way that also make sure I don't just seed all control over what could turn out to be a dicey thing if it goes sideways?
So I do see a lot of our congregations making calculated and thoughtful decisions. And by the way, a lot of the congregations that do make decisions to engage don't contact us for help. They just go ahead and do stuff. And then the way I learn about it is I see something in their newsletter. So there's a lot of our congregations that if they're in a university town, they have one or two professors come and give a talk. And the common denominators I tend to see is that they tend to want people who aren't reading from an oversimplified script who can handle differences of opinion and who bring a certain kind of intellectual rigor to the conversations. In other words, kind of what you would hope for and expect that Reconstructionist communities would want. And so I want to just offer all of that out as an alternative portrait of how our communities are wrestling with all of this. And it is definitely wrestling. There is anxiety and fear. That's part of it.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
I think that's such a great answer, and I'm so grateful that we are a resource and a place where our congregations can turn. And really, Maurice, that's very much a testament to your work, and I'm very grateful for all that you do. I just want to zoom out a little bit, and this is with my historian's hat on as much as Jewish communal leader's hat on, definitely for a couple of decades following the establishment of Israel, and most especially after the six-day war, Israel loomed large in American Jewish education and identity without necessarily relationship and without necessarily a lot of content. So a lot of Israel independent state programming used to be like, "Let's have a fair and let's eat falafel," and not the kind of content that Maurice was just talking about. And the word on the street used to be the collective communal understanding used to be up until through the '90s was that Israel was the great consensus topic among American Jews, especially those who were kind of oriented toward affiliation.
And even those who weren't necessarily. And what we've seen over the last 15 and especially 10 years was the shattering of that consensus. And I think that that's what really led to the shutdown and to the disengagement. There's a lot behind that consensus. The Israeli government really, really actively stifled any dissent in the '70s and in the '80s. There's a lot behind what went into that consensus. And those efforts started to be more and more problematic and more and more resisted as the consensus started to fracture. So I think the silencing really spoke to a kind of paralysis and a kind of lack of skills that we had to talk in a sophisticated in a way that allowed us to celebrate and also take seriously critique and take seriously the national aspirations of another people who also live in that land. And so I do think that what we are seeing over the last couple of years, the Reconstructionis movement was at the vanguard of the fracturing.
And as Maurice just reported, the Reconstructionist movement is at the vanguard of the moving beyond it back into some kind of engagement. Ironically, I think the current government and this tremendous overreach that that retired Rabbi is so activated by has kind of helped that, that people who previously said this was a slogan a couple of years ago, wherever we stand, we stand with Israel. Now, don't really stand for these values. And so one has to be able to hold multiple things at once. Those of us, whether we're long accustomed to doing it or we're new to it, we're all trying to hold multiple realities. And so I think that this is really hard and this is really complicated. I do think it's much healthier than either the enforced consensus or the terrified paralysis.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow. I'm told where time is starting to run down and I feel like I'm just starting to get warmed up with this stuff but there's so much. You each mentioned the word wrestling, and I'll just throw this question out to either of you. The Evolve platform has website has certainly featured a number of pieces that raise the issue, the consciousness of Palestinians suffering and injustices perpetrated against Palestinians, both historically and through today. And I'm wondering how do we weigh that with where wrestling with it grappling it, understanding it should fit in Jewish communal priorities, and how you might balance that with active support for progressive Democratic Israel. Does anything in Reconstructionist thought help us parse all of that? Because it can be a lot, just following this stuff can be a lot to hold in your head and your heart at one time and try to make sense of. So that's definitely the most concise question I've ever asked, but whoever feels ready to jump in.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Maurice, why don't you go first and then I'll go.

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
Sure. There's a question underneath that question that I think is at work, and that question is how do we handle the possibility of discovering that the history of Israel's creation and then the firming up of its establishment after the war in 1948 may not have been as morally clean and unambiguous as we were raised to think? And if in fact, there's a rather serious dark side to those events, then what becomes of our connection, our relationship to and our advocacy for Israel?
And I think that it's really helpful to take a step back from a question like that and notice that if that's what's being asked underneath, and it's causing a lot of us to have this spike in anxiety, to be a little mindfulness-y about it and kind of interrogate that anxiety because I want to suggest that as Americans, our experience of discovering, let's say whole new layers to realities of atrocities or other just grave injustices committed by people who formed and then solidified the United States, even if they weren't our personal ancestors, they're people to whom we owe our existence and first world relatively free life here. So we accept the bargain of an imperfect founding whose story sometimes gets worse as more gets uncovered, sometimes gets better.
And we tend to be able to receive that information without the same degree of panic. We tend to be able to then pause and look to our deepest sources of wisdom and morality and say, "Okay, so what now?" So for me, the other part of your question was what can Reconstructionism do? I think Reconstructionism and even bigger Judaism writ large offers us a lot of wisdom around how to come to terms with the morally mixed bag that tends to be part and parcel of being human, of struggling to survive and of trying to make a way in the world. And I think that there's an awful lot that we have to learn that invites us to be careful not to treat questions in black and white terms, to be careful not to assume that if the current order that benefits us includes some injustices, as is part of its foundation, not to assume that therefore the solution is to completely overturn the table and flip over to the exact opposite order.
To advocate for a complete overturning of everything that was, and an undoing of everything that was history has really taught us that very often, those kinds of revolutionary overturns of things then produce their own grave and gross injustices. For me, I feel like we have a tradition that, especially the Rabbinic tradition, that cautions us to keep weighing and balancing competing values. And to bear also in mind that the effort to try to be more fair, more just to all the stakeholders in a real world set of circumstances is in many ways a very high moral calling. And that for me is what I look to for guidance in this situation.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So powerful, Maurice. Thank you. I do think it is incumbent every person in every community to grapple with the reality of another people with their own narrative, with their own aspirations, with their own suffering. And that the advancement of our own aspirations and our own liberation must also take into consideration the concerns and the needs and the aspirations and the pain of others, that it's not truly liberatory. If Zionism is, as some people claim, the liberation movement of the Jewish people. I would claim that the only way for that to be true is if it's one that is full of empathy and compassion and justice. And I happen to believe along with Kaplan and along with the founding generation of Reconstructionists, that democracy is an essential tool toward those ends. So I'm not particularly interested in a Zionism, not at all interested in a Zionism stripped of democracy.
And I'm especially mistrustful of a Zionism that takes on the language and the tactics and the stance of chauvinism, of ethnonationalism, of Jewish supremacism. I can't even believe those words are tumbling out of my mouth. And so I think when I look at what ... So how every individual sorts that out and how every congregation negotiates that among its members, there's no prescribed answer, but that it's a mandate that it's a reality and a mandate is it just seems that this is the world we're living in and also this is the world we want to be living in. What I'll say about Reconstructionism, there's an ongoing debate about how bound to Kaplan's vision Reconstructionism is. And he wrote, he was writing a hundred years ago, 90 years ago, 80 years ago in circumstances that have some continuities with today and have huge, huge discontinuities.
And there are things that he couldn't possibly have imagined, but Kaplan was most ... Zionism was incredibly inspirational to Reconstructionism. He was keenly aware that this was not really ... Even the political move toward establishing the state of Israel really didn't exist until the late 19th century. And it went from this tiny fringe idea in the 1880s by the time he was writing in the Interwar period, the period between the First and the Second World War, a movement that united huge swaths of Jews around the world. And what he really wanted was for Reconstructionism to be alongside of that as inspirational, this methodology, this approach that would be as inspiring and as uniting. And he saw Zionism of both an inspiration and of a piece with that, but it was definitely not what he was trying to do. The primary expression of Zionism in his day was Eastern European political that was hostile to religious Judaism.
And the essential move that he made was to reinsert religious texts and religious practices and religious values into Zionist ideals. And I think that he was concerned with minority rights in Israel a little bit, not as much as we would like, more than many of his peers, and not as much as we would like for our purposes today. But what I take out of the longstanding Reconstructionist commitments that were first modeled by and launched into the world by Mordecai Kaplan is a fearlessness at looking, or not even a fearlessness.
You can be full of fear, but the recognition that you cannot look away from hard truths, that there are opportunities within those challenges that we must be bold, that we can be deeply grounded even as we move forward. And that justice has to be, at the end of the day, being Jewish, and I'm certain he would say being Zionist, is a means to being the best possible human being, not the best possible Jew or the best possible Zionist, but the best possible human being, the best possible citizen of the planet. And he believed, and I believed with him, that democracy is an essential way toward achieving that kind of just and equitable world. So that is something that I take a lot of.
I feel like it's a firm foundation to stand on a liberal Zionist perspective. I feel that we are, that Maurice and I, and so many others engaged in our congregations among the Reconstructionist Rabbinate, are furthering it, are furthering this vision of what a just and equitable Zionist vision can look like at this moment in time. And even setting aside the ideological statement of Zionism, just what it means to be in this world in a way that, as Maurice so powerfully said, we navigate through the partial narratives and the pain toward redemption, toward connection, toward justice, toward equity.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maurice and Deborah, thank you so much for being here. It's a difficult topic and you really gave me and our listeners a lot to think about as we wrestle with pretty profound moral, factual, practical questions. And it's always good to be with both of you, no matter the topic.

Rabbi Maurice Harris:
I want to thank you so much. This has been a really great experience, and I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Me too. So wonderful. Thank you so much, Bryan, and Maurice, it's always such a blessing to be in conversation on this topic with you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So what'd you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about meaningful conversations, and that includes you send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got, you can reach me. This is my real email address, BSchwartzman@ReconstructingJudaism.org. We'll be back soon with an all new episode. Evolve, the groundbreaking Jewish conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song [inaudible 01:05:02] is by Rabbi Miriam Margolyes. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and I will see you next time.