Editor's Notes: In era of Jewish uncertainty, Israel must rework its relationship with Diaspora

I asked former prime minister Yair Lapid about the Western Wall in a Tel Aviv café in 2018. He said that passing the outline would be among the first things he did as prime minister, and I wanted it on the record.

“That’s correct,” he said and then walked the file without notes. The cabinet approved the outline (Western Wall compromise) in 2016. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) website Kikar HaShabbat was making noise in 2017, and a government that panicked over a website it does not read canceled the thing. American Jews, he told me, woke up to find they were being spat on.

That ran in Makor Rishon, in a series it called “Distant Relatives”: 23 interviews over six months about what Israel and world Jewry owe each other.

This week Lapid stood beside former prime minister Naftali Bennett and presented their alliance’s foreign policy. Six goals. World Jewry was the third, and it ran to about three paragraphs. No Western Wall, no conversion, no Chief Rabbinate, no Law of Return.

I speak with Lapid regularly, as I do with most of the people running in this election, and he is the Israeli politician most fluent in our concerns. That is why the speech is worth reading closely. It is the ceiling, not the floor.

Three politicians have now told me what they want from world Jewry. I agree with more of it than I expected, and I disagree with all three about the same thing.

Three answers

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli said on a panel I moderated in July the part the others avoid. Diaspora Jewry is dying, he said, barely holding on. Seventy percent intermarriage is a catastrophe. The one growing community is the Orthodox one: 10% of American Jews today, with a projection of 30% by 2050. He said twice that this is data, not opinions, and noted that he is not Orthodox himself.

From that he drew one mission: formal Jewish education, and named as his proudest achievement not the money but that the federations and the large foundations now call it mission number one.

He is right, and I have written so. Identity is the variable, not advocacy. A community that cannot explain itself to its own children will not be argued into caring about us.

Then he closed with a sentence I cannot put down. Until our brothers come home, he said, we will do everything to make the communities there as strong as they can be. The generosity is real, and it is provisional. It funds Jewish life abroad while treating its survival as a failure. Lapid’s speech proposes to abolish this man’s ministry.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told me this month that he wants a million olim from North America and Europe within a decade, at the intensity Israel once applied to security and settlement. He is right about the scale, and nobody else is saying it. But Western aliyah does not fail for lack of ambition. It fails on licensing, employment, housing, and schools, and it remains a policy about our bodies rather than our judgment.

Lapid was right about the thing almost nobody here will say: that the collapse in Israel’s standing is not only antisemitism, and that claiming otherwise is lazy. He is wrong that the answer is folding the Diaspora Affairs Ministry into the Foreign Ministry. The portfolio is weak because it has no jurisdiction, not because it exists: Interior applies the Law of Return, the rabbinate controls conversion, Religious Services controls the Western Wall, and the ministry touches none of them. An envoy is not an address either, and he knows it, since in the same speech he attacks this government for leaving the public diplomacy directorate empty for two years.

The sentence that explains all three

Somewhere in that July panel, Chikli said something in passing I have been thinking about since.

Holding a Jewish identity abroad, he said, is nearly impossible unless you are traditional or religious. Here, he said, you are connected to the Hebrew calendar whether you want to be. Here we take it for granted.

He meant it as a description of our weakness. It is a description of Israel’s.

Sovereignty made Israeli Jewishness involuntary. That was the point of it, and it worked. An Israeli does not decide to be Jewish on a Tuesday in Tishrei. The state decides for him, and the calendar, and the army, and the language. A people whose identity arrives by default loses the ability to see that someone else’s is a standing decision.

So all three reach for the same kind of tool. Chikli sees ignorance and prescribes education. Smotrich sees exposure and prescribes evacuation. Lapid sees hurt feelings and prescribes respect. Those are sovereign instruments, and sovereign instruments produce students, immigrants, and audiences. They cannot produce partners, because a partner is someone whose judgment you have conceded in advance.

Not one of the three offers Diaspora Jews standing in an Israeli decision that affects them. That is not stinginess. You do not consult a patient about the treatment, or a rescue subject about the helicopter.

‘Kimu vekiblu’

The tradition is less confused about this than the Knesset is.

The Talmud in Shabbat asks what happened at Sinai and gives an uncomfortable answer: God held the mountain over their heads. Rav Aha bar Yaakov draws the obvious conclusion that a covenant signed under a mountain can be voided. Rava’s reply is this column’s argument. They accepted it again willingly in the days of Ahasuerus, he said, and quotes Esther: kimu vekiblu, they fulfilled and accepted.

The reacceptance happened in Shushan. In exile, after a decree of annihilation, with nothing holding anyone in place.

Now read Chikli’s numbers again. He sees 70% and calls it a death. Read it as a sorting instead. The Jews leaving were never choosing; they were carried by inheritance, and inheritance ran out. Everyone still standing in a Jewish community after October 7, with cheap flights, an open Law of Return, and the danger visible on their own street, has chosen. Manchester on Yom Kippur. Bondi Beach at Hanukkah. Nobody is unaware of the alternative.

A smaller Jewish people that chooses is not a weaker one. What is forming out there is the first Diaspora composed almost entirely of volunteers, and Israel is addressing it as though it stayed by accident.

The reshuffle

Since October 7, we have been reshuffled. Jews are moving in every direction at once and not on the axis Israeli policy is built to see. Out of one city and into another. Out of Europe and not to Israel. Into Israel and back out. Into communities they had not entered since childhood and out of institutions their parents built.

People in motion can be reached and are briefly willing to be asked. That window is the opportunity of this moment, and the answer three Israeli politicians have reached six weeks before an election is a recruitment campaign. Educate your children. Come home. Speak well of us.

None of this is a Lapid problem. Elyakim Rubinstein, who has served as cabinet secretary, attorney-general, and deputy president of the Supreme Court told me, for that same series, that Israel bears a double obligation toward world Jewry and, in his next sentence, that Diaspora Jews do not decide anything here and should not, because they neither vote here nor fight here. It is the house position, held sincerely, across the spectrum.

Covenantal instruments

If the problem is that Israel owns only sovereign tools, the work is to build covenantal ones inside a sovereign state.

Permanent professional Diaspora desks inside every ministry that holds a lever. Bennett told me he planted one in the Education Ministry while he ran it because a civil service post is hard to kill and a ministry may not exist next term.

Consultation with the affected community before an Israeli minister embraces a foreign political party in our name. Shira Ruderman, executive director of the Ruderman Family Foundation, raised the honest objection that nobody can say who represents American Jewry now that the organizations are a century old. Former MK Einat Wilf’s answer handles it: a council seated at the President’s Residence with the scope written down. Jewish questions, yes. Whether Israel goes into Gaza, no.

Antisemitism separated into a statutory authority with professional staff and a budget that outlasts a single Knesset.

And a standing Knesset committee, which we have never had. Ministries are traded away in coalition talks. Committees are written into the Knesset’s own rules.

The ones who don’t know yet

Alana Newhouse, the founding editor of Tablet magazine, told me something in that series I have never been able to put down.

Take a group of 14-year-old American girls. They have never heard of the fight over the Western Wall, and they do not care about it. In a few years they will get off a plane, walk to the Western Wall, want to pray, and find they cannot do it the way they do it at home.

Then they will care.

Those girls will decide, sometime in the 2040s, whether there is still a Jewish world outside this country. They will decide it the way Jews in Shushan did, by choosing, with the alternative in plain view. Three Israeli politicians have told them what they are for. Not one has told them what they get a say in.