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Reform Judaism in America · In These Times with Rabbi Ammi Hirsch

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I am Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and
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you're listening to in These Times.
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Last week I sat down with David Harris for an interview on
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Jewish broadcasting service.
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David is a lifelong Jewish activist who led the American Jewish
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Committee for more than 20 years.
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Very brilliantly.
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He asked me about the state of reformed Judaism in America,
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especially in the wake of October 7th.
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And with permission from David and JBS, I've decided to do
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something a little different.
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This episode today, I'll be the guest on Defending Israel with David Harris
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broadcasting on In These Times.
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Hello, JBS viewers.
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I'm David Harris and this is Defending Israel.
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This week I'm honored to have a very special guest, Rabbi
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Ammiel Hirsch or Ammi Hirsch.
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Many of you JBS viewers will know Ammi from his sermons, which are
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frequently broadcast on this channel.
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Ammi is a passionate Zionist, a brilliant orator, one of the leaders
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of moral clarity of moral leadership.
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In our country, in our community, and all the more so since October the seventh, and
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simply for purposes of full disclosure, my wife and I were married at Stephen
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Wise Synagogue where Ammi is the senior rabbi, but we were married probably
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when he was still in grade school.
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Anyway, Ammi, welcome to the
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show.
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Thank you.
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It's good to be here and you are looking great.
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I've always admired, uh, you.
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During your very elaborate and profound career and your post very profound career.
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So you're really doing a great service to the Jewish community.
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You've done that for decades.
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It's an honor for me to be here with you.
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Well, it's not what I anticipated, but another good reason why I
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invited you on this show, Ammi.
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Ammi.
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First of all, for those viewers who may not know you or may not know about
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your background from an early age, you were connected to Israel, explain,
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I. My father, who was a reform rabbi and was the founder of the Religious
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Action Center in Washington, DC in the early sixties, and spent 11 years as
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the executive director of the Religious Action Center, right when the Civil
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Rights Movement began to take off.
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Uh, and the partnership between, uh, the reform movement led by my father at
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the Religious Action Center and Martin Luther King and the civil rights leaders.
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Very tight, very profound.
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My father, I should say, never saw a contradiction between universalism
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in Particularism between social justice, what might be termed today
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in shorthand Tikun, Olam and Zionism.
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And he was always a Zionist from the very beginning, even when the reform
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movement itself was cool on Zionism.
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And, uh, he decided to move the international headquarters of the, uh,
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reform movement to Jerusalem in 1973.
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He moved his entire family, uh, of the four of us, the four kids, and
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that's how I ended up in Israel.
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I was 14 years old in 1973, and we got to Israel three months
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before the Yom Kippur war.
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Uh, I spent four years in high school, just they dropped me into an Israeli
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high school, not really knowing Hebrew, but within a very short time, I was
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completely fluent in Hebrew and.
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If you kind of know what I mean.
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I became more Israeli than even the Israelis because I had, you know,
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you were 14 years old and I wanted to fit in and, and I loved Israel.
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Uh, so I spent four years in high school and then I was drafted.
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I spent three years as a tank commander in the IDF, and
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then one thing led to another.
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But those seven years in Israel were very formative years.
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They were, you know, in biblical terminology, the seven years of plenty.
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And they filled me up for my entire life.
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Did you know from an early age as the son of a rabbi that you yourself
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wanted to be a rabbi or did you have other career ideas along the way?
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Never
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gave
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it a passing
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thought.
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It's really a funny story.
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Until, until my wedding night when my father was a very close friend with a then
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dean of the Hebrew Union College in in New York, Paul Steinberg of Blessed Memory.
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And we got married in 1984.
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We first got married in Jerusalem, in the campus of the Hebrew England college.
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And because my mother-in-law always dreamt of how her daughter's wedding would look,
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we did in effect another wedding on the way back in London where I met my wife.
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And so at that ceremony, it was everything including the wedding gown, and there
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was no hupa, but it was everything else.
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The custom in England was that the groom give a charge in honor of the bride.
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So I worked hard on it and it was pretty good.
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And somebody comes up to me afterwards, sticks his hand out.
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I was an attorney at that time in New York, and he says to me,
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hi, my name is Paul Steinberg.
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You don't know me.
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I'm the dean of the rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College.
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You're wasting your time as a lawyer.
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You should be a rabbi.
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And and it had never entered my mind.
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Up until then, but by the end of the evening, you know, we had a room up
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upstairs in the hotel where the reception was by the end of the evening when,
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you know, most couples are consummating their marriage or at least opening their
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wedding gift, I told my wife, you know what, I think I'm gonna be a rabbi now.
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She had married, uh, what she thought was gonna be a New York attorney
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with high earning power, but I think it all worked out well in the end.
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So you went from high earning power to high or
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earning power,
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at
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least a higher spiritual level, I hope.
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And once you made that decision, there was no question that you'd
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follow the reform Jewish trajectory.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, and I'm, I'm of course very happy with that.
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I would do that again.
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Okay.
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So let's fast forward, because you have been one of the most prominent
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voices, certainly in the reform movement, if not more broadly.
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Since October the seventh, how would you characterize today the
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reform movement's attitude towards Israel and more broadly, if you
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will, ideologically towards Zionism?
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Well, I think there's a lot to be concerned about in terms of the
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future, which is why I'm asking as of now my intuitive impression.
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Which is supported by various empirical surveys indicate that
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most American Jews, most liberal American Jews, and most reform
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American Jews are strongly pro-Israel.
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Okay?
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Something like 80 to 85%, maybe a little less when you zero in on the
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reform movement, but very high numbers.
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And so the values that I articulate are in effect.
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Representative of the mainstream of, uh, reformed Jews in
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the pews and reform rabbis.
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The challenge is the younger you go, uh, the less true that is.
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The last survey that I saw of 18 to 24 year olds, I don't know if you saw this,
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David, that roughly half of them, I think the number was 48% of them define
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themselves either as anti Zionist or their criticism of Israel is so substantial
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that in effect it's the same thing.
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So what went wrong?
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Look, you can, and I've heard these arguments that young people
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have grown up knowing only center right and right wing governments.
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And uh, you know, Netanyahu has been the only Prime Minister they've known,
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and it's a government that's hard to identify with for largely liberal Jews
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who are the bulk of American Jewry.
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And I think that plays a role on a certain level, but fundamentally.
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The problem in my view is connection to Judaism.
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That's where we're losing the struggle and we have a lot to
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worry about in terms of the future.
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And Israel is a manifestation of the larger challenge of
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what we call Jewish continuity.
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And I think, and I've always felt that there's a direct correlation between the
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intensity of your support of Israel, which itself is part of the larger issue of the.
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Belief in the centrality of Jewish peoplehood.
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There's a direct correlation between that and Jewish identity and the
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less Jewish identity you have, chances are the less everything,
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including attachment to Israel.
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That's why you see that the Orthodox, at least the Zionist Orthodox, the modern
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Orthodox in the United States have by all accounts the strongest connection.
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To Judaism and you know, the more liberal you get, the numbers
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show decreasing numbers in terms of the attachment to Israel.
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And so fundamentally in my view, it's a question of Jewish
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identity, Jewish knowledge, Jewish literacy, Jewish education.
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That's where we have been falling behind now for decades.
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Do you see a, a growing awareness of this within the reform movement and.
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Focus much more on Jewish literacy, Jewish knowledge, Jewish learning, Jewish
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education, or is it still lagging behind?
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I think there's an awareness of it, but I think there's a sense also that
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there's a limit to what we can do.
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You know, that is the result.
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The product of our times we're all the products of our times, and the fact of
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the matter is Western civilization is.
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In many ways post religious, and at this point in time, on any given day
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today, fewer than half of American Jews are affiliated at all with any
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institution, let alone synagogues.
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So these social factors are driving identification with Judaism and support
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and affiliation with Jewish institutions.
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So it, the, the problem is much bigger.
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Than, you know, any specific ideology.
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The reason that it's a problem for all of us, including those who presumably
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don't have such a large problem of Jewish continuity, again, go to the
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Orthodox world, is that most American Jews have not, are not, and will
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not be Orthodox, and I'm not even describing some kind of moral judgment.
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I'm simply stating mm-hmm.
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A fact.
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It's likely to continue to be that way.
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So if we lose the bulk of American Jewry, we're going to lose the future
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of the American Jewish community.
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So everyone, all of us, whether we consider ourselves liberal or not,
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or whether we consider ourselves reform, all of us, including the
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Orthodox, have a direct vested interest, a fundamental stake.
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Slowing this trend down, stopping it and reversing it over time.
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And if we do that, and if we raise future generations of literate Jews, the issue
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of Israel and Zionism will take care of
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itself.
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There are a lot of ifs in what you said, and my question is, and you're on the
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inside, is there in effect a war council within the Jewish world, the Jewish
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religious world, across denominations, within denominations that says.
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There's a crisis ahead.
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You've just described the crisis.
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We have to be ready to face the crisis with our own solutions.
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Is that the case today?
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I don't think there's enough awareness, and I don't think there's enough
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awareness in the philanthropic community either, because if I'm
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right or at least partially right.
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Okay.
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And that there is the the biggest challenge or a central challenge for
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the American Jewish community's future.
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Is Jewish literacy.
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Mm-hmm.
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Attachment to Judaism itself.
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Then you have to say, okay, well how do we reverse that?
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And they're basically three institutions outside the Orthodox community, which
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is the small minority of American Jews.
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No more than six to at most.
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10% of American Jews describe themselves as Orthodox.
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All the rest describe themselves as something else.
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Then you have to look at the institutions that are responsible.
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For Jewish literacy, for Jewish education, and what are they in the
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non-Orthodox world, aside from the family, which of course is the key structure.
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But for the first time in recorded Jewish history, we are living in
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unprecedented times because for the first time, the parents don't
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know enough to teach the kids.
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If you remember the Passover of Gada, you know one of the children is the
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one who doesn't know how to ask.
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And so what's the solution to the one who doesn't know how to ask the parents?
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Teach them some Judaism, but it never dawned on our predecessors that you would
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reach a generation where the parents didn't know enough to teach the children.
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So you have that.
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But the three institutions of American J of American, Jewish Life that are
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responsible for Jewish education and the installation of Jewish identity
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are Jewish day schools, summer camps.
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And synagogues.
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Mm-hmm.
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And of the three synagogues are by far the most important, right?
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One because they reach the most number of people by far.
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And two, the other institutions are limited in time.
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You used two terms earlier, Ammi, when you spoke about anti
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Zionist and non Zionist Jews.
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Among the young cohort in particular, you yourself have said
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publicly that the notion of an anti-Zionist Jew is an oxymoron.
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Explain what you mean.
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It's a contradiction in terms
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one, because you know the novelty of Zionism.
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What Herzl did in his successors is not that they conceived
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of new ideas in Judaism.
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They took ideas that have been developed in Judaism for 3000
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years, specifically the centrality of Jewish peoplehood as Hago Gaal.
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I will make of you a great nation.
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National territory and the covenant between God and the
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Jewish people and fellow Jews.
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That's what that essentially is what Zionism rested on in terms
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of its fundamental principles.
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And if you read Herzl, he says over and over again in the Jewish
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state, we are a people, one people, almost as a revelation, because
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Herzl himself was not a learner Jew.
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That's part of the miracle of theater Herz.
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And what makes him one of the truly consequential.
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Jews and leaders in all of Jewish history is he took these
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ideas and politicized them.
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He found a way to create a movement of Jews based on these ideas that led
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eventually to the creation of the state of Israel, the Jewish state, but they
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rest on the basic principles of Judaism.
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If you reject the centrality of Jewish peoplehood.
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You have rejected the fundamental pillar of Judaism, right?
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We're not simply a faith community.
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We're a people, and there is no instance in any Jewish
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text until modern day reform.
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Jews of the 19th century reform rabbis that rejected the
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centrality of the land of Israel.
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Of, uh, the centrality of the Peoplehood of Israel.
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And by the way, that was our position preexisting to the Zionist movement,
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but within a historical blink of an eye, literally within three to four decades,
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we had already reversed that in the reform movement because the people rejected it,
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and our analysis of history was wrong.
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And the Zionists were more right than the anti-Zionists because what
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they saw, or at least intuited.
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Nobody could have foreseen the Holocaust, but they intuited that
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there was something about the condition of Europe that was catastrophic for
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the Jewish body and the Jewish soul.
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So they took these fundamental principles and converted them
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into a political movement.
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Now.
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Half of the world's Jews live in Israel, so I don't even
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know what anti-Zionism means.
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Honestly, when people say, and they can be older as well, but they
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tend to be Younger American Jews say that they're anti-Zionists.
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I don't know what it means.
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It's one thing to have been an anti-Zionist in the debate about
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whether this was a good idea.
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Pre 1948, pre 1948, it's a whole other matter to say there's seven and a half
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million Jews living in Israel now.
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Out of the 10 million Israeli uh, citizens.
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When you say you're an anti-Zionist, what does that mean?
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Does it mean what Hamas says it means?
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Does it mean what BDS says it means?
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What do you mean?
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If you're Jewish and you say you're an anti-Zionist, if it means the
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destruction of the Jewish state along with all of the consequent
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destruction of Jewish lives that.
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For sure is a contradiction.
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In terms, it violates every principle of Judaism, and I say that especially when it
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comes to rabbis, and this is a particular issue for us, but all of the non-Orthodox
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rabbinical seminaries essentially have the same challenge nowadays.
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If you're a Zionist institution.
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For rabbinic leadership, you should be ordaining Zionist rabbis.
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You cannot
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be.
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And the reform institutions, to be clear, are self-declared Zionist institutions for
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decades.
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And we, for example, have a campus in, uh, Israel on King David Street in Jerusalem.
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Absolutely.
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So that's a real problem.
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Okay.
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And that's a real challenge.
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It's not that I, you know, if there's a group of Jews who define
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themselves as anti-Zionists, of course.
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They're entitled to their views.
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And if they can find spiritual leaders to lead them who also
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believe the same thing, bless them.
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And if a young person comes and says, I wanna be a rabbi and I
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wanna be an anti-Zionist rabbi, they're entitled to their beliefs.
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And if they can find a community that wants to be led by them.
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They don't have to come to us.
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We're not the institution that should be ordaining them.
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And this is a fundamental issue in particular after October 7th.
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Okay.
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And
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that's what I want to come to because you, again, Ammi, have been fiery, passionate,
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outspoken since October the seventh in what we American Jews need to understand.
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What's changed in the landscape?
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What do we need to understand about the difference between
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October 6th and October the eighth?
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From the perspective of Ammi Hirsch,
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everything changed.
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Okay.
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In fact, I would say if you're a Jew, let alone a Jewish leader,
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communal leader, and you're agenda hasn't changed radically.
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Chances are you're not living up to the historical demands of the times.
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You're not living up to your, so talk to, talk to us about Jewish
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responsibility, about at the top of your list, what's changed and what
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needs to be changed as a result?
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First of all, we discovered that actually we are not post existential threats
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against Israel and the Jewish people.
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We're not post antisemitism in the west either, especially in the United
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States where we kind of assumed that we were, I think there were three
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revelations of October 7th that, you know, kind of like the Covid pandemic
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that created certain challenges, but also uncovered a lot that was hidden before.
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So October 7th did the same for the American Jewish community.
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One it revealed, and it revealed this to Israelis two.
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That despite our fervent desire and our assumptions, Israel was not beyond
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existential threat and it couldn't kind of pull back, ignore the Middle East.
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Say we're part of Europe and the West and America.
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We've got all this high technology and we don't have to worry about
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what's going on on the other side.
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That turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
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And so catastrophic that it'll be living with us for decades to come.
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We won't recover for decades, and it'll lead to all kinds of different
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approaches on the security level, on the economic level, and on
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the political level in every way.
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By the way, I don't think we're even on October 8th anymore.
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We're still living this Groundhog Day of October 7th over and over and over again.
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We're still in the trauma.
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We're not even in the post-trauma phase.
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Until the hostages are restored, until the hot war ends and until commissions
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of investigations are established.
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To investigate responsibility, assign responsibility, and to
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force acceptance of responsibility.
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On the military and political level, we're not really in even the recovery
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phase yet, but October 7th revealed three things to us fundamentally.
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One, the existential threats that still exist.
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Two.
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It revealed to the Jews of the West, and in particular American
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Jews, who really, most of us, had never before experienced any kind of
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consequential antisemitism in our lives.
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I mean, you know here and there are some things, but nothing
22:15
like what we're seeing today.
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It revealed that our assumptions about America and America's
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acceptance of Jews was wrong.
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That if we felt that we were in some kind of post historical phase, I.
22:30
That the Jews didn't need to worry about antisemitism in America.
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That turned out to be wrong.
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Right.
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American exceptionalism.
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Exactly.
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And then the third, uh, issue for us was, and this is especially acute in our
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part of the American Jewish community, the liberal part of the American Jewish
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community, is we discovered that the partners we thought who were with us
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on so many things actually weren't.
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And they.
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Harbored hostility, intense hostility.
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At best, they were silent at best on October 7th at best.
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Yeah.
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And you see the time at the worst that that the idea that great universities
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that were supported by Jews.
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Funded by Jews.
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Populated by Jews disproportionately, and were in a sense, a haven for
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the American Jewish community that.
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Valued by generations of Jews before us, uh, education and knowledge and the
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pursuit of truth and liberalism that these institutions, some of which were downright
23:36
anti-Semitic and tolerated anti-Semitism, whether in the form of anti-Zionism or
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downright anti-Semitism, it was shocking.
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We won't recover for decades, ourselves from this.
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So those three conceptions collapsed.
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As a result of October 7th and somehow or another, we have to figure out how
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to rebuild those three pillars, and it's gonna take us a long, long time.
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We don't have a lot of time left, unfortunately, but I want to add to
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your list with this question, you yourself have said you now don't expect
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to see a two-state solution in your lifetime, if even it remains conceivable.
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Is that another fundamental change post-oc October
24:22
7th?
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Yeah, it goes, it goes to the existential issue I talked about and
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the liberal perspective of not only intellect but international diplomacy.
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What characterizes liberals on the international stage I. We
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believe that people can change.
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We believe we can change, and we believe that even our enemies can change.
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And that suffered a catastrophic blow up in October
24:45
7th because the belief among many liberals was if only a liberal
24:51
government took office in Jerusalem, they would see the opportunities.
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For peace, which would lead to a two-state solution.
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I don't want to go into parts.
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Not only that by the way, but on the Palestinian side too.
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And you've spoken with people who suffered direct consequences of
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October 7th and Sylva, and they were the most liberal of Israelis, the most
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peace loving of Israelis, and they have radically changed their minds.
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Right?
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Does it also force some American Jews to face new political
25:19
realities in this country?
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Is that another change after October 7th or not?
25:24
Yes.
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All of a sudden we're looking at the Democratic Party, which was the home of
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at least two thirds of American Jews,
25:32
at least since FDR R'S time,
25:34
right?
25:35
At least since FDR, who voted overwhelmingly and supported
25:38
overwhelmingly the Democratic Party.
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And I'm not voicing a partisan opinion, nor am I asking you.
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But you know, American Jews turn around now and they look at a substantial wing
25:48
of the Democratic party that not only doesn't represent them on domestic values
25:53
of race and uh, identity politics, but that inevitably is connected to the
26:00
question of Israel, Zionism and Jews.
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And they see that a substantial part of the Democratic Party, which was their home
26:07
for close to a century, as essentially turned against them, and that is bound.
26:12
To have political ramifications for the years to come.
26:16
Thank you so
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much.
26:16
Oh, it's such an honor to
26:18
be with you, David.
26:18
Ammi No, it's, uh, it's so important to have your voice and especially
26:22
now Postoc, October the seventh and JBS viewers, um, Ammi Hirsch.