Over the years, I have sat in dozens of rooms with young American Jews: college students and young professionals. The rooms differ. The questions about Israel do not. Hard questions. Questions that cannot always be answered in a few minutes. I can choose to see them as hostile questions or as questions that come from the heart. I discover, many times, that I want them to be silent and stop asking. As an Israeli, facing reality is hard enough. As an Israeli-American, it is harder still.
I now understand the diaspora experience—where the connection to Israel is not somatic, bodily, and daily, but formed from a distant echo.
Their questions matter. Through them, these young people are slowly forming their relationship with Israel, a modern state stuck in the Middle East Quagmire, fighting on multiple fronts; with the idea of a Jewish state whose expression of Jewishness is different from the way they love Judaism; with the Land of Israel as an ancient and longed-for Jewish dream that, a little like the Messiah, for hundreds of years remained an ideal alone.
Facing the modern State of Israel, I believe that American Jews try to understand what it means to be in relationship with a place they can’t influence how it shapes itself, while at the same time, it asks them to support and trust its conduct. It is the one place in the world where their liberal Judaism is seen as contrary to the ‘true’ Orthodox monopoly. They feel that the range of emotions the Jewish community allows them to feel toward that state is limited and fixed: love, loyalty, trust and secure, among others.
Facing them, we elders — educators, rabbis, communal leaders — move, almost without noticing, to close the conversation before it opens.
I know that move. I grew up inside it.
I was raised in a Vizhnitz Hasidic community in Israel. The world I inherited was built from stories. Thousands of them. Each Hasidic master — each tzadik — had his own. Not biographical sketches. Living presences. The stories created categories of Hasidic concepts; they shaped around each tzadik a clear and unique figure centered on a particular Jewish-Hasidic value. Rabbi Chaim of Tzanz, who emphasized the value of charity. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who always argued in defense of the Jewish people. The Rebbe of Kotzk, who always challenged the Hasidic system itself. I did not need to meet my spiritual ancestors in person. I knew them. I moved through the world seeing it through their eyes.
That is what community stories do. They give children a structure for understanding reality. Categories for good and evil, courage and failure. The Hasidic world understood this. It built its entire culture of love for Hasidism on story.
There was one problem for me. Every single story was about a man.
I noticed this early. Around age six. Not as a political observation — I had no language for that yet. As a confusion. I knew my ancestors going back generations — I could recite, even before my bar mitzvah, thousands of stories, from the founding of Hasidism to the present. But I could not name one Hasidic woman. I didn’t know one story of a woman’s leadership, a woman’s struggle, a woman’s relationship with God.
This came through perhaps most clearly when my younger sister Faygili was born. In my family, when a son is born, he is given two names — one for a family member lost in the Holocaust, and one for a tzadik. And if the figure lost in the Holocaust was himself a tzadik, even better. Already in our names, we carry one of the tzadikim who accompanies us through life. Daughters receive only one name.
When Faygili was born, I remember my father brought my mother and us a book with the names of all the tzadikim — the men — and beside each name was written the name of his wife. When we reached the name Faygili we chose it. My father added that she had been a great righteous woman, and with that, he finished what he knew about her. But to this day, none of us — including my father — remembers which tzadik‘s wife she was named for.
My sisters did not have a parallel tradition of stories about righteous women to look up to. They knew fragments of the men’s tales. No one thought to dedicate time to telling them stories.
So I began to ask. I was told: first, learn the stories of the men. I learned them. When I had learned enough that no one could accuse me of ignorance, I asked again. I was told the question was immodest: Why would a boy who wants to be a tzadik be interested in women? Another time I was told that generations of tzadikim had not asked this question and, if I was asking it now, the problem was mine.
The answers grew more dismissive as the question grew more precise, which told me something: I had found something the system could not hold.
Years later, I was given an intimate dialogue with one of the great Hasidic leaders. We sat in silence for several minutes, looking at each other. He asked me to share with him what was causing me pain. I asked him about the place of women in the Hasidic world. He was quiet for long moments. Then he said:
“I regret that neither I nor my fathers knew how to confront this question. We were consumed by the hardships of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, by the pogroms. But that is not an excuse.”
Then he said he hoped that in his next life he would be reborn as a girl, to parents who had the courage to ask.
He said this to me in private but has not spoken about this issue publicly. He will not.
At twenty-two, I decided to enlist in the Israel Defense Force. I was told that my choice to enlist meant I would be exiled from Hasidism, from the community, from my friends and the rabbis at the yeshiva. A death in the hope of a new life. I was angry that this was the choice being placed before me. My decision to enlist was not a desire to stop being a Hasid.
I asked my father to take me to the Vizhnitzer Rebbe — our Rebbe — to ask his guidance. I wanted to hear whether the contradiction was truly so great that I would have to be exiled from what I loved most in the world: being next to the tzadik. My father said there was no reality in which we would bring such a question to the Rebbe. The answer was obvious. Why would we ask?
I persisted. A modern Orthodox rabbi I trusted went to the Rebbe on my behalf. He came back with the Rebbe’s exact words: “I do not know what to answer to Yakir. This is a question so difficult that even my holy father was never asked it.”
The Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Chaim Meir, led the Vizhnitz community through the Holocaust and the years after. The Rebbe was telling me that my choice to enlist in the Israeli army was more difficult than the questions his father faced when his community was sent from Romania to the death camps.
I knew that was not true. My enlistment was not harder than the questions of children and elders being murdered in Auschwitz. The story had cracked. The Rebbe was answering from inside a system that had not yet learned how to hold the complexities of Jews choosing to hold power.
A few years ago, I was in a conversation with my chavruta (study partner) — a man who grew up secular in Israel, then decided to become an Ultra-Orthodox Jew, and later became an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi and the head of a Torah institution. Twelve children. A fascinating teacher. In a moment of honesty about his community, he said: “Our advantage is that we are geniuses at raising children. Our failure is that we are terrible at raising adults.”
Then he explained: Children cannot hold complexity. Their inner world is itself chaotic, formless, Tohu VaVohu. They need a world of light and darkness, of yes and no. The clearer the categories, the safer the child feels, and the more capable they are of slowly listening to their inner voice. But if you continue raising them to adulthood without the capacity to live without answers, they will never develop an understanding of complexity. Maturity, he said, is created when the community allows, at a certain age, questions to be asked without answers being given. This is the role of educators of adults, he said. The questions would crack the innocence of childhood, but they allow an adult who loves their past, their community, their stories to continue. All while knowing that life is asking each generation questions that could not have been asked before. And this means, by definition, that our ancestors were also limited and couldn’t answer every question. What we can do is render their wisdom to our contemporary life. As the Talmud says, “Jerubaal in his generation (is worthy of being treated) like Moses in his generation” — every era requires its own leaders, and its own courage to ask new questions.
This is what I see in the American Jewish conversation about Israel.
Many young American Jews grew up with stories about Israel. They love those stories. The stories give them a structure, a category, a way of understanding what Israel means. Yet those stories were built for children. I say this with respect for our American Jewish educators — children need to grow up with stories of love. As children growing up in the Diaspora, they need to fall in love with a place they have never been. A place that requires knowing its language, its stories, the smell of the Mediterranean, the feeling of walking through the alleyways of Jerusalem, the range of colors of the market in Jerusalem, Haifa, or Tel Aviv. They need to understand that there is a place where Jews are the majority — where they walk into a café called Trumpeldor (himself a cultural hero) on a street named Ahad Ha’am (himself a cultural hero) in a city called Petah Tikva (Gate of Hope, Hosea 2:17). Where soldiers with weapons sit eating hummus served to them by Arabs citizens of Israel who are supposed to be equal—but definitely are not—in that same Jewish state.
But the Israel of the stories is not the Israel of life. Life is always more complex than the story. And for this reason, we must create Israel education for adults.
The only way for young adults to achieve a deeper understanding of and love for Israel is to allow them to ask the questions. Some of those questions will point to failures — in how Israel has acted, and in how we have educated them. And that is painful, and it will create fractures.
We should not demand of them the choice I was forced to make — either / or. In most of the spaces I have been in over the last decade, even the ones that claim to allow questions, there are “correct” answers waiting, sometimes indicated only in a look from a leader. Or we say, with half a smile: it’s complicated. Which is only half true: The answer “it’s complicated” can sound like forget it, it’s complicated, just drop the subject but keep supporting Israel as it is through your actions. Or it can mean: It is complex, and therefore you are invited to remain inside the question and, until you form your own position, we will be proud of whatever decision you make, even if we don’t love it, but please don’t stop asking.
I left the Hasidic community I grew up in. I could not live inside a world that systematically refused to see women except, in my view, as objects. My brothers and sisters did not make my choice, yet they are no less sensitive than I am. I made mine when I was told that my enlistment in the Israeli army was more challenging than the questions of children in Auschwitz; it was, in my view, not an educational answer. As the Midrash said: “Is that the way one answers the distressed?”
I paid the price. I was excommunicated for years.
In my time, to leave the Hasidic world was considered as a declaration: I am leaving God, tradition, Torah, prayer. The categories were total. You were either inside or outside. Those who left became, in most cases, atheists who wanted nothing to do with the world they came from.
That is no longer true today. For years, I volunteered with an organization now called On The Derech, supporting those who leave the Ultra-Orthodox world. With the help of sensitive volunteers and leaders, we created change — among those who left, and slowly also within the Ultra-Orthodox society itself.
Today, many of those young people who leave the Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel meet on Friday nights in bars and sing every Shabbat melody, with the same quality of intention they brought to the yeshiva. This time men and women together. They continue to study Torah. Most importantly, they refuse the category of religious or secular. They create a new soft and vulnerable understanding of being close to that which is greater than themselves. For the first time, there is a community of men and women who learn and pray Hasidism together—inside Western life, not despite it.
This also happened because the Ultra-Orthodox world stopped throwing its young people away. When parents were told by the rabbis to keep the door open, the ones who left stayed connected. And that connection changed them, and changed the community. The fear of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe is today the reality in most of Ultra-Orthodox society. American Jewry must learn the same lesson around Israel.
Last week, I listened to a podcast featuring a six-hour discussion between a group of veterans of Shayetet 13 (one of the three most selective commando units in the IDF) and the former head of the Shin Bet (General Security Service) named Yoram Cohen, an Orthodox religious man. Six hours on the West Bank alone. The questions on the table: apartheid, Jewish terror, Shin Bet torture of Palestinian prisoners, dangerous religious-nationalism, and the implications of the policy of Israeli government.
They did not agree. Not on most of it. After question upon question, in disagreement, the discussion ended. And at the same time, what the discussion made clear was that all of them — the commandos, the former intelligence chief — understood that Israel is closer to perpetrating those horrors than it has ever been. At the same time, regardless of their position, those veterans and the General Security representative all continue to act to strengthen Israeli democracy as much as they can. And they feel pain — for Israelis, but also for Palestinians simultaneously. On that, there was no disagreement. Caring for all humans between the river and the sea feels the most human and Jewish for them. For me, the most important thing is their choice to publish the dialogue among them — so that every Israeli can learn about the complexity of life in Israel, and about Israel’s movement toward spaces that many consider dangerous to the future of the Jewish-democratic state. For me, they demonstrate the importance of allowing every question to be asked, without labeling the questioner and silencing them.
These are not young protesters who have abandoned Israel. These are the people who built Israel with their whole beings.
If we decide we are not giving up on our young Jews, it won’t mean they can walk into a synagogue or a Federation and reshape it. Just like the former Hasidim, these young Jews will need to build their own spaces. Many are already doing that. If we know how to keep them within our community, they will shape its character to some degree. But like those who leave the Hasidic world today, they will continue to love the community and Israel—even as they believe it is failing in its mission.
This is the choice to live an adult life at the level of community. A life that allows community members to choose different ways of living — but the community’s questions, the stories, the dreams, the hopes and the pains — will remain shared.
That is how you raise adults.
Image: A.I. generated by ChatGPT