Chicago rabbi questions need for Jewish state
CHICAGO — As the sun vanished below the horizon one recent Friday night, Rabbi Brant Rosen looked out over the standing-room-only crowd packed into the muggy basement of a Lutheran church in the city’s Lincoln Square neighborhood.
On the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, they had come from miles around to learn more about a new congregation, focused on supporting human rights, named Tzedek — Hebrew for justice. But members of the Tzedek Chicago congregation also are defined by what they question: steadfast loyalty to an ethnic Jewish state.
Members of the non-Zionist congregation — believed to be the only one of its kind in the United States — seek to separate their Judaism from Jewish political nationalism. Instead, they hope to focus their energy and efforts on relieving poverty, engendering equality and fostering peace and justice — locally and worldwide.
“Our raison d’etre is not opposing Zionism,” said Rosen, 52, who left his longtime north suburban Evanston synagogue last year amid growing concern about his pro-Palestinian activism. “It’s a core value that fits into a larger core value of anti-racism and anti-oppression. We point that out because Israel is doing it in our name as Jews.”
The emergence of Tzedek Chicago underscores the growing rift in the American Jewish community over the Middle East conflict, the nuclear accord with Iran and, more broadly, the concept of inclusion.
“There are many congregations that you can go to where the blind support of Israel is so endemic to the whole institution,” said Lynn Pollack, one of the founding members of Tzedek Chicago. “You can’t find one that honestly discusses what’s going on in Israel and our obligation to speak out about it.”
Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said there may be a growing number of Jews who disagree with Israeli policies. But it would be a mistake to assume a large percentage want to distance themselves from the need for a Jewish state, he said.
“I hope that this new congregation really wrestles with those complexities,” he said. “The folks who think it’s a morality tale of good and bad and right and wrong and easy solutions — they’re simply ill-informed and not liable to be helpful or persuasive.”
A synagogue that does not
champion Israel as a Jewish homeland might seem incongruous, but Rosen and his congregants insist Zionism and Judaism don’t go hand in hand.
The original pillars of the Reform Jewish movement drafted in the 19th century explicitly defined Judaism as a religion, not a nation, and said there was no expectation of a Jewish state.
After millions of European Jews had perished in the Holocaust in the 1940s, leaders of the American Reform movement first adopted a pro-Zionist stance.
“A lot of American Jews came to the conclusion if we’d had a Jewish state we’d have a place for all of these refugees,” Sarna said.
But not all American Jews felt that way. Chicago philanthropist Lessing Rosenwald, a former chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co., led an anti-Zionist association, the American Council for Judaism, that still exists today. Sarna said those Jews believed that “nationalism has been a cause of a lot of wars” and advocated for Jews as a religious community, not a nation.
Zionism became more mainstream after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War against Syria, Jordan and Egypt in 1967, he said.
For Rosen, who grew up in the Reform movement in Los Angeles, Israel was a central part of his Jewish identity. He was 8 years old when he made his first trip to visit family and friends in the Holy Land.
Becoming a rabbi was the last thing he thought he’d do when he was young. But when he studied with first-year rabbinical students in Israel, he was sold. He chose to pursue ordination in the Reconstructionist movement, where he found his spiritual home.
Reconstructionists teach that God is a life force that inspires everyone to make the world a better place. In 1992, he was ordained and in 1998 he became the spiritual leader of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston.
As an adult he fought hard for a peaceful two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. But he also harbored doubts about his Zionist identity.
“As a peace activist in this country, I would habitually let Israel off the hook,” he said. In meetings Rosen and his fellow Zionists often referred to the Palestinian birthrate as a demographic threat, a mantra he realized over time was unconscionable.
“If I talked about people here in the U.S. being a demographic threat, that would be considered downright racist,” he said. “To treat a group of people as a threat for no other reason than their identity, that’s ethically problematic.”
In December 2008, shortly after Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza, Rosen decided he could no longer stay silent. Israel was reacting to rockets fired into southern Israel by Hamas, which governs the Gaza territory, but Rosen said the response was excessive.
“We good liberal Jews are
ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass,” Rosen wrote on his blog, Shalom Rav. “It’s a fascinating double-standard, and one I understand all too well. I understand it because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it.”
In 2009, he and another rabbi organized a communal fast to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza. And on Yom Kippur of that year, Rosen called on the faithful to do more than fast, but also to reflect on Israel’s military actions.
Taking members of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation to the West Bank in 2010, he said, was one of the proudest moments of his rabbinical career.
When Israel and Hamas clashed anew in 2014, Rosen again responded, helping organize an effort to disrupt a fundraiser for the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago featuring Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and American-born Israeli politician Michael Oren. Rosen live-tweeted and shot video of protesters shouting, “I’m a Jew. Shame on you.”
“It was upsetting to a lot of people, which was part of the point,” he said. “We were making a moral statement at a desperate time.”
But by then, members of JRC began to question Rosen’s commitment to the congregation. Rosen realized he could not stay. After 17 years, he resigned. Later last fall, he became midwest regional director of the American Friends Service Committee, the social
justice arm of the Quakers, a Christian denomination.
“This work allows me to be my authentic self,” he said. “I can be a part of the social justice community in ways I wasn’t before. It’s a meaningful professional home. But at heart I’m a congregational rabbi.”
Tzedek Chicago fills a void for Rosen and others, including Ashley Bohrer, 27.
A doctoral candidate in philosophy at DePaul University, Bohrer grew up so immersed in Zionism that she thought she could no longer be Jewish if she questioned Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories. It was her activism with like-minded Jews that brought her back to the faith.
“A lot of Jews across the country and across the world feel unwelcome in Jewish institutional spaces if they’re anti-occupation,” she said. Rosen hopes to show Jews who have felt disenfranchised that religion can still be a “sustaining shelter in the storm.”
“I really believe in my heart there’s a place for a congregation like this,” he said. “I don’t want to just create another orthodoxy.”