The Grammar of ‘and’: Loving Israel Without Choosing Between Exile and Home |
We are living in an age that demands false choices from Jews.
Choose Israel or the Diaspora.
Choose power or conscience.
Choose belonging or responsibility to the world.
Judaism has never spoken this language. Ours is the grammar of and.
We are a people formed by both exile and return, by longing and building, by vulnerability and power. To flatten that complexity is not clarity; it is amnesia.
For two thousand years, Jews lived without sovereignty. Exile trained us in moral vigilance. We learned how easily power dehumanizes, how quickly majorities forget the vulnerable, how fragile dignity can be when it depends on the goodwill of others. That memory is not an embarrassment of Jewish history. It is one of its greatest teachers.
And then something astonishing happened.
The Jewish people returned home.
The rebirth of Israel is not only a political event; it is a moral rupture in Jewish history. For the first time in two millennia, Jews are no longer only shaped by what others do to us. We........