Knock Knock Knockin’ on (10/)7’s Door |
The speech, later an infamous essay, was called Kol Dodi Dofek, inspired by Song of Songs 5:2: My Beloved is knocking, open for me. Soloveitchik knew the verse’s ending. By the time she opens, he is gone. She has missed him. The question for the Jewish people in 1956 was whether we would hear the knocks while there was still time to answer the door.
I have been thinking about this and working on this essay for several years. The cascade of events from 10/7 necessitated a massive rewrite. It’s Yom Ha’atzmaut this week. 78 years. The 70th anniversary of the Rav’s speech. I want to take Soloveitchik’s question seriously, which means I have to do something the original essay would have likely resisted. I have to listen for knocks he could not have heard.
Sorry in advance, this is a long one!
Here is what Soloveitchik heard in 1956:
The first knock was political. At the UN in November 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union voted together for partition. This shouldn’t have happened, couldn’t happen again, but happened. A nation was allowed to be born with the full weight and blessing (believe it or not) of the UN.
The second was military. In 1948, a tiny army, under-equipped and half-trained, held off five invading states (and then some). Soloveitchik read it as the Biblical pattern of the few defeating the many.
The third was theological. Christian supersessionism (the idea of Christianity replacing Judaism) had long claimed that Jewish exile was divine proof of Jewish rejection. The existence of a re-dedicated Jewish state now pulled the theological ground out from under that claim.
The fourth was the knock to Jewish youth. Assimilated young Jews who had drifted from their people were rediscovering themselves through the nascent state. Jewish identity, which had seemed a dying embarrassment, was suddenly a source of pride and strength.
The fifth was the knock of Jewish honor. For two millennia, Jewish blood had been hefker or ownerless. A free commodity anyone could spill without consequence. For the first time in a very long time, a sovereign power would answer for Jewish lives.
The sixth was the knock of open gates. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, Jews fleeing murder had nowhere to go. The gates of every country closed. Now, a homeland’s gates stood open. Any Jew had somewhere to run.
Six demands on the Jew who claimed to be serious about his God.
What I want to try this Yom Ha’atzmaut is hear the knocks again. Not because Soloveitchik got them wrong, but because he was writing 70 years ago this year. The house is 70 years older, the door is heavier, and the knocks are coming from different corners. Some of his original six have grown louder. Some have been tested. Some have been inverted. A few have gone places he could never have anticipated.
I’m not seeking to necessarily update Soloveitchik’s list. I’m just trying to listen for what’s knocking now.
So here, tentatively, are six knocks I hear at the door this Yom Ha’atzmaut.
The political knock, inverted
In 1947 the world voted yes. In 2026 the world is voting no.
The same institution that birthed Israel has become the global platform for its delegitimization. The ICC. The ICJ. The Human Rights Council that treats Israel as a standing agenda item. The editorial boards, the NGOs, the campus governance bodies. The verdict of the nations has turned.
Soloveitchik heard a miraculous yes from the world and said God was knocking. What do we hear in the miraculous no?
This is harder than it sounds. Much of the postwar Jewish world was built, psychologically, on the assumption that the nations had finally accepted us. 10/7 and its aftermath made clear how thin and conditional that acceptance was. The knock is the demand to rebuild our self-understanding on something sturdier than international approval.
The military knock, shadowed
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the few weren’t there. For the first time in the state’s history, the IDF wasn’t on the border when it mattered. Civilians tried to hold the line and were gunned down or taken. A farmer in Be’eri with a rifle. A retiree at a music festival with nowhere to run. A father in Kfar Aza sending his last text message to his wife. The second knock went silent, briefly, and the silence was catastrophic.
Then came the recovery. Whatever else one wants to say about the war that followed, it included feats of operational brilliance without parallel in modern military history. The pager operation in Lebanon. The ability to distinguish between civilian and combatant. The decapitation of the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. The twelve-day war with Iran that ended with Iranian strategic infrastructure in ruins and the regime’s deterrent posture exposed as bluff. The recent Iranian war with unquestionable Israeli (and American) military supremacy.
The military knock today is double. It says: you were wrong to think strength meant invulnerability. It also says: Jewish power is real, and it saves Jewish lives.
The demand is to hold both sentences at once. We are powerful but not necessarily safe. The knock is the refusal to let us collapse either truth into the other.
The theological knock, renewed
What Soloveitchik could not have anticipated was that supersessionism would not die. It would change denominations. A new supersessionism has arisen from the progressive left that doesn’t speak the language of the Church but rather the language of “decolonization,” “liberation,” and “justice.” It says: Jewish peoplehood is a form of whiteness! Jewish particularism is a mask for supremacy! The Jewish state is settler-colonialism with a yarmulke! The Jewish story is not an exception to history’s arc of justice, it’s an embarrassment to it!
This is theologically the same move as the old one. The denial of the ongoing validity of Jewish covenant, Jewish people, Jewish land. What is ‘new’ is the vocabulary (which actually mimics, verbatim, Soviet propaganda from the 1970s), and the fact that it now speaks in the voice of the faculty lounge instead of the pulpit.
The knock here is the demand to defend Jewish particularism. Not by arguing that we are the same as everyone else, but by insisting that we are a people, that we have a land, that we have a story, and that none of this requires apology or translation into the moral frameworks of people who have decided in advance that no matter anything else, we’re wrong.
The knock to Jewish youth, doubled
On the other side: a loud (though smaller) cohort of young Jews moved sharply in the opposite direction. They leveraged their Jewishness as credential to denounce Israel. They joined JVP or IJV. They occupied the quads and signed open letters blaming Israel for being massacred. They wrote op-eds explaining that their grandmother’s Holocaust survival had taught them to oppose the Jewish state in her name. These “As-A-Jews” became the faces of a movement that, stripped of its Jewish faces, would be indistinguishable from older and uglier movements. Indeed, the Anglophone world’s anti-Israel left is now run by three Jews: Avi Lewis, Bernie Sanders, and Zack Polanski.
Both groups are the same generation. Both heard a knock. They heard it differently and walked in opposite directions.
The knock demands two things. It demands that we build an immense and unprecedented infrastructure to support the first group. Shabbat tables that don’t bore them and day schools with plenty of seats. Synagogues and engaging Rabbis who can answer the questions they’re now asking with wit and humor and joy. And it demands that we understand the forces that produced the second group: An education that gave them Jewish values without Jewish loyalty; a culture that taught them to hunger for justice without teaching them where justice comes from; and a peer world that offered belonging on one condition – abandoning their people – which they paid.
A new Jewish generation is being formed right now. What we build or fail to build in the next five years will determine what Diaspora Jewish life looks like for the next forty. The knock will not wait.
The knock of Jewish honor, tested
The fifth knock today is piercing. It says the promise of 1948 was not a fait accompli. It was, and is, an ongoing fight. The war(s) that followed 10/7 were, among other things, the living answer to hefker. The refusal to accept that Jewish life is negotiable. The willingness to pay the costs, including the international costs, of that refusal.
The knock demands that Diaspora Jews stop treating our safety as a given. It demands that we understand the cost of the answer Israel gave in our name. It demands that we neither romanticize it nor abandon it.
The knock of open gates, reversed
The Jewish State is our insurance policy. It is the reason we can live as Jews in Toronto and New York and London with a confidence no previous Diaspora generation enjoyed. Like any insurance policy, though, it can only be redeemed if the premiums are paid. For three generations, most of us have assumed someone else was paying them – Israelis, the IDF, AIPAC/CJPAC, the donors, the people who made aliyah. We inherited coverage we didn’t purchase and didn’t renew.
This is the most uncomfortable of the knocks because it names a bill most Diaspora Jews did not know was coming due. If the answer to the Jewish question in the 20th century was a Jewish State, the 21st century is now asking: who will keep the policy in force? The premiums are material, political, and moral. And the premiums are, finally, ours to pay – because a policy nobody funds is a policy that does not pay out when the claim is filed, and the claim, one day, may be ours.
What does paying the premium actually look like? It looks like making a donation to a Jewish community organization, a bit more than last year. It looks like showing up to the rally when you would rather be watching TV. It looks like defending Israel at the dinner party when the easier move is to stay quiet or hedge. It looks like sending your kids to the Jewish day school even when the public one is closer and cheaper. It looks like learning enough – about the history, conflict, texts – that you can answer your nephew’s questions without Google. It looks like visiting Israel. It looks like voting, where voting matters, with Jewish interests in mind without apology. The premium isn’t paid in a single grand gesture. It’s paid in a thousand small refusals to be a free rider on someone else’s Jewish courage.
So here’s the Catch: the knocks we hear today are not only knocks of gratitude. They are also knocks of mourning, of anger, of exposure. They cost more to answer. The bed is comfortable, the door is heavy, and the world outside the door has gotten colder and louder and more insistent than it was when Soloveitchik was writing.
The Beloved is still knocking at the door. They have only gotten harder to hear because they are mixed now with air-raid sirens, calls from school asking for money for increased security measures, with hostages’ names being read aloud, with the sound of our own children asking us questions we aren’t sure how to answer.
Rising from bed this Yom Ha’atzmaut means something different than it did in 1956. It doesn’t mean rising in simple celebration. It means rising into responsibility for a project we didn’t finish and can’t abandon. It means rising while we are tired. It means opening the door while knowing that what stands behind it will ask more of us than we’re prepared to give.
Kol dodi dofek. My Beloved is knocking.
The door is ours to open.