A Wandering Jew’s Case for a Wider Israel

I have been a wandering Jew within Judaism.

Not in the romantic sense—backpack, prayerbook, and vague longing—but in the practical, lived sense of a person who has tried, with seriousness, to inhabit multiple Jewish worlds from the inside. I was raised Modern Orthodox. I spent my elementary school years in yeshiva. I know the grammar of halachic life, the beauty of discipline, the ache of obligation, and the comfort of a calendar that holds you even when you can’t hold yourself.

And later, I wandered.

I have aligned at different moments with everything from Humanistic Judaism to Hasidism—sometimes out of rebellion, sometimes out of hunger, often out of curiosity that wouldn’t shut up. I have studied and practiced. I have sat in rooms where God was a metaphor and rooms where God was a fire. I have loved Jews who would not recognize each other as Jews. I have been moved by the poetry of tradition and exhausted by the gatekeeping of it.

What I have never been able to do—what I still cannot do—is submit myself to rigid orthodoxy or conformance in any organized sect, including secularism.

I reject the demand, implicit or explicit, to pick a camp and then perform loyalty as a substitute for truth.

Because the Judaism that has always felt most authentic to me isn’t a uniform. It’s a calling.

It’s the prophetic calling: questioning, critiquing, demanding—of ourselves first. The Judaism that doesn’t exist to protect Jewish comfort or Jewish power, but to pressure Jewish conscience. The Judaism that refuses to confuse being right with being righteous, or being strong with being good.

Which is precisely why aliyah, for me, has become complicated.

Not because I don’t believe in Israel. I do.

I have spent a lot of time in Israel. I have felt its potential in my bones. I understand why a Jewish homeland is not a luxury, not a “nice-to-have,” but a civilizational necessity—especially after a history that repeatedly taught Jews what happens when we depend on the goodwill of others. I am not immune to that lesson; I carry it.

And yet: the more I have been in Israel, the more I’ve been repelled by something I did not expect to be the major obstacle.

Israel’s internal conflict.

Israel can feel like the only place Jews are permitted to turn on Jews.

In the diaspora, Jews learn to recognize antisemitism the way you learn to recognize smoke: the small signals, the coded language, the casual scapegoating, the moment the room shifts and you realize you’re not being spoken to—you’re being spoken about.

So here is the disorienting part: in Israel, I sometimes see Jews talk about other Jews in ways that, if spoken by non-Jews in any other country, we would immediately name as antisemitic.

Not criticism. Criticism is Jewish. Critique is sacred.

I mean contempt that dehumanizes. Stereotyping that reduces. Hatred that feels righteous. A willingness to speak of other Jews as if they are a demographic problem, a moral disease, an enemy tribe.

And then, because it is internal, we normalize it. We justify it. We call it politics.

Maybe this is what happens when a people who spent two thousand years learning to survive powerlessness suddenly has to learn how to survive power. Maybe a society forged under external threat cannot easily tolerate internal disagreement. Maybe trauma makes us reach for control.

But understanding the causes doesn’t make the phenomenon less frightening.

If Israel is meant to be a homeland, why does it sometimes feel like a home where siblings are permitted to despise each other in public, with no shame, because no outsider is watching?

I can live as a minority among non-Jews. I fear being a minority among Jews.

I am aware of the threats and inconveniences of being a Jewish minority in a non-Jewish country. I live with them. I don’t romanticize diaspora life, especially now. I know that comfort can be temporary. I know how quickly norms erode.

But in America, my Jewish identity is still largely mine to define. No ministry, no court, no political coalition needs to certify my Judaism in order for it to be real. My Jewish life is negotiated in community, in learning, in practice—not in battles over who gets to control the national definition of a Jew.

In Israel, Judaism is not only a living tradition. It is also governance. It is law. It is bureaucracy. It is power.

And when Judaism becomes a tool of power, it tends to narrow.

My own life has been a refusal of narrowing. I have lived Judaism as a spectrum—sometimes fiercely traditional, sometimes radically humanist, often somewhere in between. I want a Judaism robust enough to include the disciplined and the doubting, the ecstatic and the skeptical, the halachic and the searching.

Israel, in too many of its public battles, feels like it is moving in the opposite direction: toward coercion, toward purity tests, toward a politics that turns Jewish identity into a weapon.

To make aliyah under those conditions feels like voluntarily entering a permanent identity tribunal.

The argument isn’t just about policy. It’s about the soul of Jewish peoplehood.

When Israel debates religion and state, conversion, marriage, Shabbat, education, the role of the rabbinate, the legitimacy of streams of Judaism—these are not ordinary political debates. They are debates about whether Jews like me count as full participants in the Jewish future.

And that is a uniquely destabilizing experience for someone who already knows what it feels like to be in motion within Judaism, to refuse the safety of a single label.

In America, my wandering makes me unusual.

In Israel, I worry it would make me suspect.

The tragedy: I believe in Israel’s purpose, and I fear its narrowing of purpose.

The Israel I want to bet my life on is an Israel that can hold Jewish difference without treating it as treason.

A society that can sustain argument without converting it into hatred.

A homeland that doesn’t demand ideological uniformity as the price of belonging.

A state secure enough in Jewish peoplehood that it doesn’t have to police which Jews are “real,” which Jews are “useful,” which Jews are “good.”

And this is where my prophetic instinct kicks in, the one I can’t turn off: I don’t think Israel exists merely to concentrate Jewish bodies in one place. I think it exists to make possible a certain kind of Jewish responsibility—moral, cultural, spiritual, historical.

To be a light is not to be flawless. It is to be accountable.

Which is why I cannot stop asking: what are we becoming to each other?

A hard truth for Israelis and diaspora Jews alike

Diaspora Jews should not treat Israel like a symbol rather than a society. Israelis live with consequences. We often live with commentary.

But Israelis—and the Jewish state—should also understand something diaspora Jews feel viscerally:

When Jewishness becomes tribal warfare, something breaks.

When Jews speak about other Jews with disdain that would be intolerable from non-Jews, something breaks.

When “unity” becomes code for conformity, something breaks.

And when a homeland begins to feel like it has room only for certain kinds of Jews, something breaks so deeply that even Jews who love Israel—who visit, who support, who feel its potential—hesitate to make their lives there.

Not because they reject the Jewish homeland.

Because they fear being rejected by it.

The question I wish Israel would ask

The question I hear most is: “So why don’t you come?”

But the better question—the one a confident homeland asks—is: “Who are we making room for?”

If Israel wants aliyah to be compelling not only as an act of survival but as an act of spiritual homecoming, it must widen, not narrow, the definition of Jewish belonging. It must treat Jewish plurality not as a threat to manage but as a strength to cultivate. It must find a way to argue like a people of covenant rather than a people of factions.

I can live as a Jewish minority in America and still feel, in my own community, that my Jewishness is mine—messy, searching, demanding, alive.

What makes aliyah unappealing to me is the fear that in Israel I would become a Jewish minority among Jews: not outnumbered, but outcast—pressured to conform, to choose a camp, to silence my prophetic critique in exchange for acceptance.

Not because I don’t love Israel.

But because the Israel I love is still only a potential—one I hope the Jewish people will choose to become.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)