No rabbinic seminary has a future in the United States if it ordains anti-Zionist clergy, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation in New York City, said at the third “Re-Charging Reform Judaism” conference.
“We have an obligation to discuss what we mean by ‘Zionism,’” the rabbi, who is president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said in a keynote address opening the two-day conference on Wednesday.
“We have an interest to establish the biggest possible tent. I am a liberal pluralist, and I believe in big tents, but even liberal pluralists have boundaries,” the rabbi said at the event. “If you believe everything, you believe nothing.”
“A diaspora community that disengages from Israel, where half of the remnants of our people lives, has no future,” he said in an address, during which he often raised his voice and shook his finger. “Such a community will eventually wither away and, at best, constitute a footnote in the annals of Jewish civilization.”
The rabbi added that “any seminary that either in word or deed, in principle or impression, acquires the reputation of being hostile to Zionism—a seminary that ordains anti-Zionist clergy has no future in America.”
“If we marginalize ourselves from the mainstream of our people, the Jewish people and the Jewish state will continue without us,” he said. “It is we who will be remembered only in books and learned articles, a testament to a good idea gone awry, a haunting psalm to what might have been.”
At the event, attendees adopted four resolutions, including one that states that Zionism and “living relationship with the State of Israel are essential expressions of Reform Judaism and central to Jewish identity and covenantal responsibility.”
Hirsch told attendees that “in the lead up to the New York City mayoral elections, those of us from Orthodox to Reform, who defended Israel in the face of an onslaught of obnoxious opprobrium, found much more common ground, worked much more closely with each other, and had much greater affinity one with the other than with those in our own movements, who promoted the anti-Zionist mayor of New York City.”
“What we often forget, but ignore at our peril, is that while our movement is a religious body devoted to God and Torah, much of the Jewish world expresses their Jewish identity in secular form, through a fierce commitment to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, the Jewish people’s most eloquent expression of peoplehood in our times,” he added.
In his remarks, Hirsch suggested that defending Israel and Zionism could be part of tikkun olam, a value that many Jews articulate as repairing the world.
He also said that there are “worrying signs of a narrowing particularism in some quarters of the Jewish world and the Jewish state.”
“Those elements of the Israeli government that represent a close-minded, chauvinistic particularism are an embarrassment to Israel and world Jewry,” he said. “The hooligans who violently assault Palestinians on the West Bank are a disgrace.”
The event drew more than 300 North American leaders to the Upper West Side synagogue, organizers said.
