A Wandering Jew’s Case for a Wider Israel

I have been a wandering Jew within Judaism.

Not in the romantic sense—backpack, prayerbook, and vague longing—but in the practical, lived sense of a person who has tried, with seriousness, to inhabit multiple Jewish worlds from the inside. I was raised Modern Orthodox. I spent my elementary school years in yeshiva. I know the grammar of halachic life, the beauty of discipline, the ache of obligation, and the comfort of a calendar that holds you even when you can’t hold yourself.

And later, I wandered.

I have aligned at different moments with everything from Humanistic Judaism to Hasidism—sometimes out of rebellion, sometimes out of hunger, often out of curiosity that wouldn’t shut up. I have studied and practiced. I have sat in rooms where God was a metaphor and rooms where God was a fire. I have loved Jews who would not recognize each other as Jews. I have been moved by the poetry of tradition and exhausted by the gatekeeping of it.

What I have never been able to do—what I still cannot do—is submit myself to rigid orthodoxy or conformance in any organized sect, including secularism.

I reject the demand, implicit or explicit, to pick a camp and then perform loyalty as a substitute for truth.

Because the Judaism that has always felt most authentic to me isn’t a uniform. It’s a calling.

It’s the prophetic calling: questioning, critiquing, demanding—of ourselves first. The Judaism that doesn’t exist to protect Jewish comfort or Jewish power, but to pressure Jewish conscience. The Judaism that refuses to confuse being right with being righteous, or being strong with being good.

Which is precisely why aliyah, for me, has become complicated.

Not because I don’t believe in Israel. I do.

I have spent a lot of time in Israel. I have felt its potential in my bones. I understand why a Jewish homeland is not a luxury, not a “nice-to-have,” but a civilizational necessity—especially after a history that repeatedly taught Jews what happens when we depend on the goodwill of others. I am not immune to that lesson; I carry it.

And yet: the more I have been........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)