Jewish Priorities

​What is a Jewish Priority? Who gets to say? How do we agree on what our priorities should be? What does it even mean to ask this question?

 

In the essays that follow, each contributor was asked a simple question: If you could stand before the Jewish people and advocate for a single priority for our collective future, what would it be?

 

When Adam Bellow, publisher of Wicked Son books, first raised the idea of this volume, an immediate question arose: How do we keep it from becoming a collection of boring, conventional arguments about things most Jews already agree on, like “fighting antisemitism” or “remembering the Holocaust”? In order to be worth the effort, we agreed, such a book would need to be filled with new ideas, provocative and timely, controversial and creative. Ideas that spark debate and turn our focus to hard questions while also being, on some level, intellectually entertaining. A tall order indeed!

 

We also agreed that these ideas would have to come, not from the triangulating communications departments of our hoary communal institutions, but from thinkers, activists, scholars, rabbis, influencers, and culture-makers—people who live and breathe the contemporary Jewish experience in all its many forms and who have something important to say.

 

For generations, the Jewish agenda has been set in a top-down manner. In the Diaspora, institutional leaders and major philanthropists work together to establish our communal priorities, not just on the basis of what is truly needed, but also—even primarily—on the basis of what can be funded. That might have been necessary a generation or two ago, but in today’s decentralized, sophisticated, and technologically empowered Jewish world, it is not a good way to engage our best minds in a process that challenges our assumptions and moves us forward as a people.

 

What we really need—and perhaps have needed for a long time—is a good old-fashioned intellectual food fight. A democratized Jewish free-for-all. A spirited brawl between two covers. We therefore set out with the singular goal of gathering and putting on display a collection of new ideas for a new generation of Jews. Our aim is to start not one, not two, but many Jewish arguments. And our hope is that these arguments will percolate and spread, stimulating new initiatives and sparking a sense of fresh possibility at the dawn of a new phase of Jewish life.

 

Over the course of more than a year, we reached out to potential contributors from every quadrant—from Left to Right, from secular and Reform to Haredi, from Gen Z to our most venerated writers. Our contributors are Israelis and Americans, Europeans and Russian speakers; they are literary, rabbinic, scholarly, and communal figures, journalists and online influencers, and activists. Many, it turned out, were bursting with ideas and eager to be heard.

 

The essays we received are as eclectic as their authors. Some offer new answers to old but still-important questions: the proper approach to God, Torah study, and Jewish education; the structure and role of our communal institutions; the importance of the Hebrew language in the future of Diaspora life; the need for a renewed sense of “Jewish pride” in facing the rise of antisemitism, or giving voice to marginalized Jewish communities. Others raise entirely new themes: the role of new media in teaching ancient texts or calls for the creation of Jewish fantasy literature or a new “Jewish pantheon” to honor the heroes of our people.

 

Yet despite this variety, some surprising common threads have emerged—enough to be woven together into a collective Jewish fabric that is stronger than we may have previously supposed. Three themes, in particular, stand out.

 

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First is a belief in the necessity of the conversation itself. Ours is a time of heated mutual exclusion and intensifying polarization—and few feel this as acutely as the Jews. One might even say we invented “cancel culture” centuries ago through the process of herem or excommunication, when disputes over doctrine or practice became unbridgeable. Today, everyone seems compelled not just to keep score about various affronts but to keep a running list of “people I will never retweet.”

 

Yet our contributors have set all that aside. Despite their disagreements, they have chosen to appear together in one volume, accepting the underlying premise that such a pan-Jewish conversation is not only possible but urgently needed. For many of them, this is also an act of courage.

 

Second is the recognition of the State of Israel as a central reference point for Jewish life today. Three-quarters of a century after the founding of the first Jewish state in two millennia, a new form of Jewish identity has emerged in the Land of Israel. Many of our contributors are either Israeli-born or have chosen to make Israel their home. Many others have chosen to focus on a topic related to the Jewish state—either supportively or critically.

 

For this reason, several offer contributions that call for an “improved” Israel—whether that means overhauling its overtly Jewish (or Ashkenazic) character, its fidelity to modern liberalism, or its relationship with the Diaspora or the land itself. Some see Israel as an embattled homeland that must be protected at all costs; others fear that the new centrality of Israel may have come at the expense of a robust, independent affirmation of Jewish life in the Diaspora.

 

Yet for all the controversy that the Jewish state engenders, there can be no doubt that this book appears deep into what the political scientist Yossi Shain has called the “Israeli Century”—a time when Jews everywhere have crafted a new identity that is centrally informed by the renewal of Jewish sovereign life in our ancestral homeland.

 

A third common thread is something we may call a proper sense of Jewish pride. More than seven decades after the Holocaust and Independence, a great many Jews still feel we are missing something, some spiritual quality that is hard to define yet deeply necessary for our survival as a people.

 

We could have gone on commissioning essays indefinitely. The resulting volume could easily have been twice as long—and we regret that the constraints of time and space required us finally to say, “Enough.”

 

But we are very pleased and proud of the result. Taken as a whole, this singular collection provides a kind of still-life of the state of the Jews in our time, along with a catalogue of the fears, dreams, and plans of a people at a particular moment in history.

 

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Indeed, my own belief is that this work constitutes an important contribution to what we may call a “New Torah” for a new generation of Jews.

 

The word “Torah” or “teaching” has always had a double meaning. There was the Torah, representing the five Books of Moses, considered by tradition to be divinely dictated. And then there was simply “Torah,” which embraced the entirety of Jewish teaching from pithy proverbs to urgent polemics, from legalistic haggling and interpretation of dreams to medical advice, philosophy, and mystical legends, from prophecy to poetry and prayer.

 

When the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, we are told, all the Israelites had crowns placed on their heads—symbolizing both the responsibility and the honor of the sovereign individual’s pursuit of consequential wisdom.

 

This has been our mission as a people for thousands of years—and it has always been a creative process, one that proceeded largely through books. Books define us like no other people on earth. The Bible—a limited collection of texts each written at a certain place and time—trained us in the arts of high-leverage narratives about our past, but also of poetry, wisdom, and law. The Talmud threw tens of thousands of memorized tales, dialogues, legal disputes, medical and business advice, and mystical imaginings into a pulsating food processor that has nurtured the imagination of Jews for millennia. Later still, we expressed ourselves through codes of law, mystical texts, theological and philosophical treatises, and, in the modern era, through novels and screenplays, magazines and newspapers, manifestoes and op-eds. And today it continues, through YouTube and Substack, podcasts and tweets.

 

All of these are in their own way holy texts. They are holy even if we deny there is such a thing as holiness. They are holy even when their subject matter is utterly secular in nature. They are holy because they are the building blocks of our collective wisdom, our Torah, which is part of our core mission on earth.

 

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, the leader of the Jews during the Great Revolt, who salvaged our Torah from the ashes of Roman destruction in the first century C.E., was said to have mastered every form of wisdom, including “constellations and calculations, the sayings of launderers and the sayings of fox-keepers, the conversation of demons and the conversation of palm trees, the conversation of the ministering angels, the great things and the little things” (Bava Batra 134a).

 

Ben Zakkai was the last political leader of a sovereign Jewish country prior to the Zionist revolution of 1948. “Torah” was, in his time, our wisdom of life, the universe, and everything—and expressed a sense that all of life is interconnected and bound by the Jewish quest for wisdom and goodness. And it necessarily included the vast multiplicity of opinions, contradictory narratives, and sharp disagreements that any authentic quest requires.

 

In our own era, when Jewish life once again embraces the entirety of the human experience, our wisdom has expanded to include politics and policy, science, literature and the arts, the sayings of cab drivers and the sayings of tank commanders. Our collective wisdom today is as broad as the disciplines we have mastered (or, in many cases, pioneered) and as deep as our most profound religious, spiritual, or humanistic thinking.

 

The essays in this collection represent, I would modestly suggest, an important part of this “New Torah”—not to replace the old by any means, but to add another layer for a people that has carried its ancient instincts into our time. For it is not simply sixty-five opinions; it is a demonstration that despite our differences, we remain one people, bound through history and into the future by our timeless quest for wisdom.

 

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Every book is necessarily finite, but my hope is that you will not experience this as a finished work. Rather, it is just the beginning of what should be an ongoing conversation, a demonstration that Jewish priorities can be advocated, explored, rebutted, and defended in the broadest possible context—that of the Jewish people as a whole.

 

Each essay can be read in one sitting. They are organized alphabetically by author’s last name, to avoid making invidious choices. They can be read in order, randomly, or even in reverse.

 

Some will inspire new thoughts, or offer just the right words to express something you have long held on the tip of your tongue. But I encourage every one of us to pay closest attention to those we disagree with. For it is only we, as readers, who can turn this collective exercise into a genuine clash of ideas—and thereby set a course for a stronger, richer, prouder, and more inspiring future for our people.