The young are not abandoning a living world. They are watching adults turn sacred fragments into excuses for avoiding shared responsibility.

There is sadness in the growing distance between many young Jews and Israel. But it would be too easy, and too convenient, to blame the young.

Something deeper is happening. Christianity, progressive universalism, and anti-Zionism may become attractive to some Jews, but they are symptoms, not the cause. They become attractive when Jewish life no longer appears as a living communal form, but as memory without place, law without shared burden, and identity without a world.

For many young Jews in the diaspora, Jewish memory is no longer rooted in the original density of diaspora life. It is not carried by language, neighborhood, ritual, danger, mutual dependence, family discipline, local history, and embodied continuity. It is often mediated through schools, museums, ceremonies, inherited trauma, moral instruction, and institutional slogans. It tells them to remember, but it does not always show them where that memory is supposed to live.

A memory without place becomes strangely mobile. It can attach itself to any figure of suffering. It can be transferred from Jewish history to a general ethics of victimhood. It can even be turned against Jewish sovereignty itself. In that moment, Jewish memory no longer protects Jewish continuity. It becomes a floating moral energy, available for other causes, other liturgies, other forms of belonging.

This is not the fault of the young.

Young people do not abandon living worlds easily. They abandon structures that demand loyalty before offering participation. They abandon institutions that speak of continuity but do not give them a future they can respect.

We keep speaking about Jewish values because we are afraid to ask whether we still transmit a Jewish world.

Values are portable. A world is not.

Values can be placed on a poster, in a sermon, in a donor brochure, in a school curriculum, or in a public statement after every crisis. A world must be inhabited, paid for, defended, corrected, and shared. A world has a table, a street, a language, a law, a wound, and a burden.

This is where part of rabbinic Judaism has failed in its fixation. Not rabbinic Judaism as such, but its defensive form: the form that preserves boundaries more efficiently than it generates communal life. When Torah, halacha, authority, and education cease to produce a world in which people can dwell, they begin to function as instruments of maintenance. They preserve continuity, but they do not necessarily create presence.

When Jewish presence disappears, other forms become powerful. Christianity offers drama: incarnation, sin, forgiveness, liturgy, suffering, redemption. Progressive politics offers its own secular liturgy: guilt, confession, purification, victims, oppressors, public rituals of denunciation. Anti-Zionism offers something even more dangerous: the possibility of remaining ethically Jewish while cutting oneself off from........

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