A parable of recent cultural politics:

The mainline Jewish establishment in the US has been in a panicked frenzy for at least a decade now.  “The kids don’t care!,” cry the greying elders.  “They abandon the interests of their own people, they align themselves with foreign and hostile ideologies!  We will die, we will die, we will die!  What have we done to deserve this?”

And, yes, of course, to some extent this is a thing that greying elders are always crying, in every generation and every culture.

In this case, though, there’s something more to it.

I am one of those kids who doesn’t care.  In part, this is something that happened for idiosyncratic reasons, because I care way more about theology than most people (and especially most Jews) do, and I could be driven to cultural apostasy directly through doctrinal apostasy; I am like Tzelafchad, my sin is my own.  But it’s also true that, before I dropped out, I received the same cultural indoctrination as all my peers, and I saw what happened to them as a result.

We were taught, in briefest terms, that it Wasn’t About Us and never would be.  In our day and age, the project of the Jewish people was the State of Israel; that was the shining beacon of goodness, the collective value to which we were all to be devoted.  If you don’t live in Israel, well, you really should move there, y’know, if you’re really a good and devoted Jew.  And if you’re not going to do that – well, your job is to support Israel and to ensure that the Israelis get whatever they need in order to thrive.  This is a political endeavor, an economic endeavor, a spiritual endeavor.  Your job as an agent in the world is to put muscle behind Israel-supporting movements.  Your job as a worshiper in your synagogue is to preach the glories of Israel, or to attend such preaching.  Your job as a parent is to ensure that your children receive sufficient exposure to Israel.  It goes without saying that you’re not supposed to question this state of affairs, and you’re not supposed to question the Israelis’ determination of what they need.  Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die. 

Amazingly, it turned out that in the long term – once the cultural conditions that had generated this ideology went away – it was totally unsustainable.  American Jews didn’t want to make Israel the center of their lives and their devotions.  They didn’t want to practice a religion that definitely Wasn’t About Them.  And no one could make them.  So…they didn’t.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.