Elie Wiesel’s 1979 The Trial of God keeps playing in the back of my mind as I sit in Israel, listening to my American Jewish colleagues in week four of the war. In the play, a small group of Jews, reeling from a pogrom that destroyed their community, decide to put God on trial for His silence in the face of their suffering. The case is compelling and the prosecution, righteous. The only problem: no one wants the role of defense attorney.

In our contemporary trial, Israel has replaced God. Following the launch of Operation Roaring Lion, antisemitic incidents spiked 34% worldwide in the first week alone, with nearly half directly motivated by the conflict — culminating in the March 12 attack in West Bloomfield, Michigan, when a man drove a truck through the doors of Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue and preschool with 140 children inside. Israel was meant to be a source of American Jewish security and pride. Now, as support for the war fractures across the American political spectrum, Israel has become the source of American Jewry’s social and physical vulnerability.

According to a March 9 JPPI survey, 68% of connected American Jews initially backed the war. But a more complicated truth quickly surfaced — it’s showing up in internal email chains of American Jewish professionals I’m accidentally cc’d in and the pained Zoom faces of mainstream institutional voices “checking in.” Thought leaders are publishing the new Iran War version of the same piece from last year and the year before about Bibi and Trump, the divergence between Israelis and American Jews, and what to do about the spoiled Zionist story — as if called up, once again, for reserve duty. In short, American Jewry seems more tired of Israel making their lives harder than Israelis are of running in and out of shelters all night.

And perhaps most offensive of all is that Israel seems to neither notice nor care; in fact, an Israeli Knesset committee decided that now is the right time to advance a bill giving total Orthodox control over the Western Wall, the Jewish people’s most important collective symbol.

I am not here to audition as Israel’s defense attorney. I’m here to offer a complete rewrite of the script. This moment is not about Israel, Iran, or our heads of state; it is not even about Zionism — after all, a conversation about the Jewish people’s nation-state would only make sense after figuring out who we are as a people. It’s about what is happening to all of us, collectively, at this moment. And while the only way out might seem like placing Israel on trial or moving it entirely from the conversation, it won’t leave the American Jewish community any better off; Israel’s direction will continue to impact you. The only way through it is for Israelis and American Jews to choose, together, to understand our reality as a global Jewish moment — and co-write a better shared Jewish future.

As such, we have to start here, with the people. To rewrite the script, we first need to understand the original storyline — and where it went wrong.

Based on the state’s failure to live up to the role it was assigned, Israel might well deserve to be on trial. ‘National sovereignty’ was the definitive answer to the basic Jewish question: ‘What will keep us safe?’ Israeli Zionism grounded its narrative response in shlilat hagolah — the negation of diaspora, past, present, and future — placing the State as the sun and global Jewry in its orbit. In its process of becoming, the State replaced both God and the Jewish People as the anchor of the Jewish story. After the Six-Day War, American Jews fully bought into the narrative, placing Israel at the center of Jewish identity, pride, cohesion, and security.

It was a good story. And it mostly held until Hamas broke the fence on October 7. “Where is the army? Where is the army?” — was the question Dr. Ruth Calderon, a Talmudic scholar and descendant of Holocaust survivors, recalled hearing in her Tel Aviv bomb shelter that morning. “This became the ‘Where is God’ of the generation of my mother, my grandmother,” she told Israeli journalist Roni Kuban. The contract between citizen and state broke that day as well. 72% of Israelis now express low trust in the State, and more Israelis have been leaving Israel than Jews are coming over the last three years.

While Israelis’ break was sharp, for American Jewry it’s been a slower spoiling — compounded disappointments and misalignment with Israel’s religious-political direction curdling over decades. Under Israel’s hot sun, the milk and honey of American Jewry’s Israel story began to turn. Now, in the Iran war, for growing numbers it seems to have soured entirely — raising the question of whether discarding Israel is the only way to preserve what remains of American-Jewish honey.

With the old narrative broken, both communities are left holding a vulnerability they can’t seem to explain. In a cultural moment that treats power and vulnerability as mutually exclusive, the claim that Jews are vulnerable reads, to many — including Jews themselves — as dishonest. Israel commands one of the most sophisticated militaries on earth. American Jews hold extraordinary institutional influence. It follows, then, that our strength — and in particular, Israel’s use of it — must ironically be the cause of American Jewish insecurity.

But not even the State, with all its might, can account for what is, in fact, an interconnected global Jewish moment. October 7 and its aftermath exposed our simultaneous power and vulnerability, hitting each of us at the core pain point holding our particular answer to the oldest Jewish question: ‘what keeps us safe?’ Where one stands determines which threat feels most existential, which space feels most dangerous, and who is to blame. And right now, Israelis and American Jews are reaching for very different answers. Which is why it feels like a breaking point.

And yet, beneath the external threats and exposed fractures, a through-line is emerging — a collective turn toward Jewish belonging.

Since October 7, Israelis and American Jews have been “surging”. In America, it’s the phenomenon of the ‘October 8 Jew’. In Israel, we refer to it as our post-October 7 “Judaization.”  27% of Israeli respondents to a November 2025 Jewish People Policy Institute report noted an increase in observing religious customs — not necessarily in a halachic way, but in ways more salient in their daily lives. In this shift, Israelis are feeling closer to the Jewish people; 72% of Israeli respondents to a 2025 ‘Shabbat Project’ survey identify Shabbat as “a unifying force between Israeli and Diaspora Jews.” A 2024 survey found that 60% of Israelis believe that the war will strengthen Israel-Diaspora relations.

In an interview in Yedioth Achronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, American-Jewish author Dara Horn translated this emerging consciousness into clear terms for Israeli readers: “If you think Judaism is just a religion, then really there’s no reason for a religion to have a state. But Jews are a people who have a homeland, history, and culture.”  Only in the context of a ‘People’ does the ‘State’ make sense.

Rabanit Dr. Yafa Giser, writing in the Religious Zionist paper Makor Rishon, issued a call for her community’s leadership to respond to this moment: “American Jewry is not a ‘problem’ to be managed; it is a full partner in the fate of the Jewish people.” Even the State itself is evolving. Yom Tov Raanan, deputy director general of Israel’s Diaspora Ministry, put it plainly: “What happens here reverberates there, and what unfolds there inevitably affects us here. We can no longer afford to ignore this reality.”

In Wiesel’s play, a stranger named Sam volunteers as defense attorney. He turns out to be Satan. There’s never a clean verdict. The only response, in the end, is to keep moving forward as a people.

To put the State on trial is, inescapably, to put Israelis on trial — the Israelis living under missile fire, who also lost trust on October 7, who keep showing up for the reserves round after round, who are also asking what keeps them safe and where they belong. A verdict against the State lands on its people, a people who, with Israel on track to hold the majority of world Jewry by 2050, will play a leading role in our next act.

The Zionist vision always imagined a state positioned in service of a united Jewish nation. For decades, we got the order wrong — centering the State by marginalizing the People. Now, in this global Jewish moment, Israelis are ripe to make a tikkun. We will not show up if American Jewry casts us in the role of defense. But we will show up as co-writers. Our next act can place the Jewish people — Israelis and global Jewry alike — as the main character, placing Israel as our shared stage.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)