Am Yisrael (Or When a Movement Breaks Your Heart)

One of the problems with American discourse around Judaism is really right in the word itself: Judaism. What this word does is frames Jewish traditions as a religion “like all others.” The practices of Jews are given a spiritual designation, necessarily supernatural, and because of such is separated from the proper, secular order of politics and public life. In the effort for Jews to be, as the 1885 Reform Movement’s Pittsburgh Platform suggests, “no longer a nation, but a religious community,” the tradition of “Judaism” makes Jews Americans of a different religion.  Unlike, say, Presbyterianism, it is really just a widening bucket of traditions, practices, and a range of cosmic ideas held by Jews as a people, not simply a belief that one holds. What bound Jews together was instead the traditions, rituals, and words they daven to become connected with whatever dimension they found meaningful. If the Jewish tradition is not united in exactly what they believe about the spiritual world, it is bound together by a centerpiece of what it means to be Jews: you are Jewish by virtue of holding communion with other Jews. The structures we call Judaism are the various systems by which they are bound together as Am Yisrael, the people of Israel.

This is the innovation, or, perhaps more appropriately, the astute observation of Mordechai Kaplan, who saw Judaism as an expression of evolving “Jewish civilization” (a term that may seem out of step with today’s parlance). There are certainly boundaries on what counts, but suffice it to say that Judaism is the spiritual practices of the Jewish people more than it is a set of established beliefs and norms: it emerges from us. There are certainly boundaries, but those are still established in the doing, we perform Jewishness and thus Judaism exists. The etymology of the term "theocracy" provides some key insight into the contradictions of discussing Jews. It was first used by Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus in the first real historical study of Jews that exists. He referred to the Jewish establishment of government as "theocracy," which is now literally translated as "rule of God." Yet this is, itself, a continued misunderstanding of the Jewish relationship to Jewish traditions (halacha in particular) as the establishment of the private religious sphere onto the public life of the citizenry. Jewish life can only be explained to the world in non-Jewish terms.  

This is precisely because Judaism does the opposite of what Christianity does. With the doctrine of salvation through grace, the claimant is asked to make a choice: you either accept Jesus as your Lord and personal savior, or you don’t, and thus forgo the Kingdom of Heaven and Eternal Life. In classical Judaism, one's belief or non-belief in Divine salvation and one's fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the commandments do not sever your inclusion in the Jewish people or relationship with it (Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 44a). You are a part of the Jewish people.

Emerging as Avraham aninu, Abraham the patriarch, is what bound the Jewish people as a distinct entity allegedly for all time. This Is the heart of Kol Yisrael ‘areivin zeh bazeh, the responsibility that Jews have to one another, as discussed in Talmud (Shevuot 39a). Responsibility is a two-way street: you are supposedly accountable to the community of Jews, but they are likewise accountable to you. 

“What each Jew does has an effect on all the others; individual behavior influences the plight or destiny of the whole,” writes Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits in 1986, discussing the schismatic nature of different traditions of Judaism and Jewishness. “One may live and act against the unity of the Jewish people and thus weaken the foundations of our existence, or one may cooperate with it and enrich the sources of our strength and enhance the life of all Israel.”

The conscription of all Jews into a supposedly transhistorical phenomenon of a unified “Jewish people” has become crystallized in the concept of Am Yisrael, the mystical shared body of Jewishness. “The Hebrew word עם Am, nation, is identical to the Hebrew word עם Im, with. Our fate of unity manifests itself through a historical indispensable union,” wrote Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the American scion of Modern Orthodoxy, in his commentary on Exodus. “No Jew can renounce his part of the unity.”

The concept of Am Yisrael is related to ideas like ahavath Yisrael, the love of Jews towards one another, part of the reinvention of Jewish peoplehood to conform to the standards of modern ethnic nationalism (a reason why it so often takes on a jingoistic flavor). 

But despite being popularized as a vessel to build up the nationalist project, Am Yisrael may also simply be one manifestation of the way that Israel “wrestles” with the concept of peoplehood, an order bestowed by Avraham onto his children. A more established concept within this may be Kol Yisrael 'areivin zeh bazeh, the responsibility that Jews have to one another. The operative idea here is not so much how that Jewish peoplehood is composed, but that it exists in perpetuity largely without choice. Even converts, “Jews by Choice,” are not really, as many kabbalistic sources suggest, a matter of choice. Chabad’s introductory texts on conversions explain the situation as the emergence of a Jewish soul to a person not born in the traditional lineage of Jewish families, and thus it needs to be “rectified” to bring yourself in alignment with who you truly are. “Pull towards the Jewish faith and a desire to belong to Jewish people, it may be a latent Jewish soul wanting to return to its community of origin, a long lost child of Abraham and Sarah reuniting with its family,” Aron Mos from Chabad writes, indicating that their Jewishness precedes their conversion. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi declared that “all Jews are now Jews by choice,” meaning we have a choice about whether or not we want to live a Jewish life, but many converts discuss something much more ephemeral and driving in their choice to commit a folkway they were not (technically) born to.  

"Not with you alone do I seal this covenant and oath. I am making it both with those here today before the Lord our God, and also with those not here today,” reads Deuteronomy 29:13, which, as a recent article at Aish.com discusses, relates back to the same Talmud passage that establishes Jewish responsibility to one another (Kol Yisrael 'areivin zeh bazeh), where we learn that all Jewish souls, including those of converts, were standing below Sinai when Hashem delivered their cosmic decree. R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and author of the Tanya, looks specifically at the Talmudic passage "A convert who converted (ger sh’nitgayer) is considered to be like a newborn baby" (Talmud Bavli Yevamot 22a et. al.), which he understands to mean that this person has already been housing a Jewish soul that only arrived in a seemingly non-Jewish form by way of cosmic accident. As scholar Hanan Balk summarizes, "the only reason a non-Jew can convert to the Jewish faith is because he was essentially never a non-Jew in the first place." R. Isaac ben Shmuel of Acre, the 13th-century Spanish kabbalist, concurred, saying that there was no transformation of gentile into Jew, but a Jew simply confirming their presence in the unlikeliest of venues. This could be the result of the original cosmic explosion, the shattering of vessels that began in the divine contraction, where those shards of Israel were cast among the nations. You began as Am Yisrael, and you will finish that way as well.

"I am an oasis of peace and serenity, a home to so many, a place of refuge for a nation that flees; I am the source of controversy and conflict, of fighting and bloodshed, a land that weeps in fear and pain while suffering constant beatings from the world," says Blume Amend, who writes from within the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. "For I am Israel, and G‑d gave me to the Jewish people. Forever."

Am Yisrael means that you are bound to all Jews as a collectivity regardless of location, style of worship, culture or politics. If you feel disaffected by the behavior of many Jews, even most Jews in your community, that does little to sever you from the tribe. "And all [the souls] have one Father, and therefore, all Jews are literally called brothers by virtue of the root of their souls in Hashem [who is] one (Havayah echod),” reads the Tanya (Chapter 32, Section 1), citing a brotherhood that moves past choice, merit, or even discretion: you don’t choose your family, that’s what makes them your family.

The term Am Yisrael is most commonly used as part of the frequent phrase Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Lives. Scholar Daniel Boyarin goes further to make this point, that the word for the “Jewish nation” is Am Yisrael, but a diaspora nation including people of varying geographies, backgrounds, and identities, not to be bound to a nation of borders and coercive state authority. (The term “Jewish peoplehood” was then put into usage to avoid the negative connotations of nationalism.) While this use of Yisrael is literally about the people and not a nation state, this was the phrase adorning placards, memes, and nicely printed signs that dotted the country in the weeks following Hamas’s October 7th, 2023, attack on Southern Israel. In this usage, the distinction between Yisrael and Israel was intentionally severed: the people of Israel lives, and so does the State of Israel. The eternal nation of the Jewish people, its continuity across three thousand years, is invoked by pairing it with the state, who claims the survival of the two (in terms it defines) are inextricably bound up in one another. In doing so they invoke the frequent traumas of Jewish history, place the violence and kidnappings of Israeli civilians into that lachrymose narrative, and thus reframe this as a battle for the survival and sanctity of Am Yisrael.

I care deeply about Am Yisrael. In my house we talk frequently about what it means to be a part of the “Jewish people.” We relate to ourselves as members of a community whose contours are unique, a peoplehood that defies ethnic, national, and political boundaries. And at no other time have I felt more estranged. As I sat in synagogue, I listened to rabbis I adored talk about how demands for a ceasefire are emerging from the voices of those who “drank the kool-aid” and who are engaged in “collective suicide.” I was told that some violence is simply not as unethical as others, particularly the violence to rid innocent Israelis of a nihilistic Islamist death cult. So much was at stake. Am Yisrael Chai. 

I have watched Jewish friends pull away from mainstream Jewish life, some have been doing so for decades as these dominant institutions fail to represent their own vision of Jewish spiritual and ethical life. I am one of them, always looking for a manifestation of Jewish community where I can grow and spread roots. But this is a partial journey at best: I am part of Am Yisrael, no changing of synagogues or canceling of dues payments or denunciations from Zionists will change that. They’re stuck with me. Or, perhaps more appropriately, I’m stuck with them. 

It’s easy to say that we choose social movements to be a part of because they match something inexorable about ourselves. When I was in my twenties I started working with the Take Back the Land movement because their dual mission of anti-eviction campaigns and housing liberation matched my own sense of what kind of direct action strategies were most evocative. I grew into labor, housing justice, environmental, and other movements based on where I best saw myself, where I had something to offer, or where they had something to offer me. 

But the reality is that I hardly had a choice. Few of us determine the conditions we arrived in as adults, the forces that helped to mold us. Convictions and principles may have causes, but they are rarely chosen, and feeling drawn to movement spaces can feel like a nearly mystical process. We share something unbroken with those around us, a bond forms in at least this one way and that can be enough to grow into the root and branch of lifelong, patient relationships, new families that produce generations of offspring touched by passion of petitioning the powerful.

And, just as often, they let me down. What they don’t tell you about organizing is that you lose, most of the time. How many houses did I actually stop from being evicted? A handful, and the same tepid count of victories adorns most people’s campaign checklists. The world is hard and capital is positioned against us, so any success is a cause worth championing. But it is a difficult road and you can expect failure and failure and failure before final victory.

Even moreso, prepare for a battle, not against the forces allied against you, but against each other. If a friendship is hard and a marriage nearly impossible, then organizing with other humans may be cursed by Hashem. Living human beings are not “stakeholders,” “advocates,” or “truth tellers,” they are fallible, insufferable, and unbearably annoying. Any movement bent on challenging the seats of power requires numbers, and the more people you cram into a space, virtual or physical, the pressure of disagreement only becomes more severe. 

Across organizations and movements I have been a part of, the most challenging moments I have been through were not being arrested from a blockade or losing a strike, it is arguing with my dear friends in a battle over mundane differences. Organizations rarely make choices in the way that a single person would want them to, and most people with on-the-ground experience come in with strong opinions about what would work and why. And that direction is not, by chance, the direction your organization is likely to go in, and it is even less likely to be chosen by massive coalitions or multiplying masses of participants.

Worse still, missteps may not be the biggest problem: internal bigotries, abuse, and domineering voices can be. I’ve been in enough union meetings or tenant occupations to hear just about every allegation that could turn heads: “The landlord is just a loud-mouthed gay dude, acting like a queen anytime someone talks back.” “Of course the boss is acting like that, probably just closet Rothschild and trying to run his business like a bank or Hollywood.” “Did you see their lawyer? Just slathered in make-up, probably spent her whole career winning cases by flirting with judges.” Casual comments give way to oppressive strategies, which can embed the very systems we are fighting back into the movement tasked to challenge them. This can easily transform a social movement into one that punches Peter to pay Paul: it tries to win gains in one venue by throwing other communities under the bus. The same unions that fought for workers rights helped pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Women’s Movement that launched modern feminism also held the seeds of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism. Not only can movements fail, they can push the clock back in spectacular ways.

These are the results not of the movements themselves, but the world we created them in. It is par for the course to have oppressive behavior and excruciating interpersonal behaviors brought into organizing projects because we are embedded in a society that manufactures the same. We do not live in the world we want and we are molded by its existing failures. To engage in a revolutionary struggle you begin by accepting that we cannot simply redirect our lives to solve problems, we have to come together in a union to solve the problems we can’t alone. Imperfection is the starting point; we have to accept people, in some fashion or another, as they are. That doesn’t mean you must stand down when abusive behavior reigns, but you can’t walk away when people inevitably fail to live up to the standards their political aspirations have set for them. 

And the reason is not because of them, but because of us. We are the people we have. We didn’t choose them out of the lot only because of our loving affinities. Instead, a certain amount of material condition and fate plays into it. This is the community we have been granted. This is the clay we have to mold. These are the resources we have. We need to make do. 

It certainly is a crisis to see a project or social movement make catastrophic missteps, particularly when it happens in such a widespread or systematic manner that reform seems impossible. But we also have to remember that these movements are what exists; we are a part of them in a way that is beyond simple choice, and no one is better equipped to fight for their future than someone on the inside. Organizations, projects, and formal associations are always, on a long enough time frame, temporary, but a movement becomes transhistorical when it surpasses the people who gave it a name. It has the effect of becoming perennial specifically when its value exceeds the limitations of those holding it up, a testament to the fact that it can survive the mistakes its participants inevitably make. 

So the catastrophe of a movement that has lost its way is something we should be preparing ourselves to digest the moment we begin. Vulnerability is the only starting point possible for organizing, learning to live with our pain in a way that can transform into cascading fuel. When your organization feels like it is leaving you behind, this is when your work has really begun, because you entered into a polyamorous love affair with those that sit in the circle with you. You have agreed to a blood oath: you aren’t getting out of this simply because you can’t bear their sight. This is what struggle means: to struggle through things, to figure out the difference you can’t live with, to make yourself heard and to hear those you hope to love. 

What is distinct about Am Yisrael is that it is both modern and historical, superficial and indicative of something more transgressive. The modern use of the term has sought to force a kind of ethnic nationalism into seemingly cosmic language, to make the kind of Jewish national discourse so common particularly in appeals to the diaspora for largely uncritical support of the State of Israel. This usage is a modern construct that repurposes a larger concept and gives it politically defined parameters. Am Yisrael Chai may itself be a phrase that attempts to simply mobilize Jewish peoplehood directly into support of the State of Israel, but despite its intention, it actually picks up on a concept much more expansive than the settlement project in historic Palestine. 

But the actual story of Jewish peoplehood, the historical entity that “Am Yisrael” claims to capture, is more multitudinous, overlapping, and contradictory. Instead, it is a family that fights, disowns one another, who often have little in common and whose supposed allegiances are often constructed out of political opportunity. And yet, the affinity remains. Am Yisrael Chai. 

What the wreckage of a movement or an organization contains, at all times, is the vision of the different world, even if the question about how to operationalize its goals is always in flux. You don’t commit to an organization, a partnership, a style of decision making, or even a strategy or tactic, you only align to something more pressing and abstract. When those around you collapse, what remains alive is the idea and need that came before, even if you have to tear apart what you’ve built to ensure the integrity of why you built it. 

And this may be why Kol Yisrael 'areivin zeh bazeh ends up as the better formulation, which could even be read as a form of what Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Darnell L. Moore called “love with accountability.” There is a desire to make the Jewish people something to take pride in, just as all movements to remake the world seek not just for victories but to satisfy their promise. If Jewishness is in the doing, let’s make the doing the test of our values. “We are called Yisra’el, which means that we have collectively taken on the identity of our ancestor who wrestled with God, who struggled to understand,” writes Rabbi Arthur Green in a 2019 “letter” to Israelis, contesting the increasingly abhorrent treatment of Palestinians. “In declaring ourselves goy kadosh, a holy nation, we insisted that our collective identity, the purpose for which we continue to exist in each generation, is that of spiritual awareness and moral living. We would make no distinction between our national identity and our spiritual values” (Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love, p. 269). A movement rests on ideals, often lofty and utopian. But people? They rarely meet the standards our political fantasies are built on. Humans try, fail, often mistaking oppressive violence and settler colonialism with liberation and healing. And while the tragedy and heartbreak is immense, while it requires us to challenge the basic ethos the connected so many of us, the world we are called to build remains pressing. No matter how much of a failure your project has become should, ultimately, dissuade us from the vision that inspired us to fight in the first place. Our allegiance was never to a building, a name, a member list, or a campaign strategy document. It was always something bigger to begin with.

I’ll be heading back to shul, if, perhaps, a different one. I study Hebrew and Chassidus, I refuse pork and treif, I pray in the direction of Jerusalem every morning. I do this because I am forever a part of Am Yisrael, and I think we are worth fighting for, not simply because of what we could be, but because of what we are right now. What I am.