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- [00:00]
David Harris
Rabbi.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I'm Rabbi Ami Hirsch of the Stephen.
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Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
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And you're listening to in these Times.
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Last week, I sat down with David Harris for an interview on Jewish Broadcasting Service. David is a lifelong Jewish activist who led the American Jewish Committee for more than 20 years. Very brilliantly, he asked me about the state of Reform Judaism in America, especially in the wake of October 7th. And with permission from David and JBS, I've decided to do something a little different this episode. Today, I'll be the guest on Defending Israel with David Harris, broadcasting on in these Times.
- [00:52]
David Harris
Hello, JBS viewers. I'm David Harris, and this is Defending Israel. This week, I'm honored to have a very special guest, Rabbi Amiel Hirsch or Ami Hirsch. Many of you JBS viewers will know Ami from his sermons, which are frequently broadcast on this channel. Ami is a passionate Zionist, a brilliant orator, one of the leaders of moral clarity, of moral leadership in our country, in our community, and all the More so since October 7th. And simply for purposes of full disclosure, my wife and I were married at Stephen Wise Synagogue, where Ami is the senior rabbi. But we were married probably when he was still in grade school. Anyway, Ami, welcome to the show.
- [01:43]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Thank you. Good to be here. And you are looking great. I've always admired you during your very elaborate and profound career and your post. Very profound career. So you're really doing a great service to the Jewish community. You've done that for decades. It's an honor for me to be here with you.
- [02:02]
David Harris
Well, it's not what I anticipated, but another good reason why I invited you on this show. Ami. Ami, first of all, for those viewers who may not know you or may not know about your background from an early age, you were connected to Israel. Explain.
- [02:18]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, my father, who was a Reform rabbi and was the founder of the Religious Action center in Washington, D.C. in the early 60s and spent 11 years as the executive director of the Religious Action center, right when the civil rights movement began to take off. And the partnership between the Reform Movement, led by my father at the Religious Action center and Martin Luther King and the civil rights leaders was very tight, very profound. My father, I should say, never saw a contradiction between universalism and particularism, between social justice, what might be termed today in shorthand, Tikkun olam, and Zionism. And he was always a Zionist from the very beginning, even when the Reform movement itself was cool on Zionism. And he decided to move the international headquarters of the Reform Movement to Jerusalem in 1973, he moved his entire family of the four of us, the four kids. And that's how I ended up in Israel. I was 14 years old in 1973, and we got to Israel three months before the Yom Kippur War. I spent four years in high school. They dropped me into an Israeli high school, not really knowing Hebrew, but within a very short time I was completely fluent in Hebrew. And if you kind of know what I mean, I became more Israeli than even the Israelis because I had, you know, you were 14 years old. And I wanted to fit in and I loved Israel. So I spent four years in high school and then I was drafted. I spent three years as a tank commander in the idf. And then one thing led to another. But those seven years in Israel were very formative years. They were, you know, in biblical terminology, the seven years aplenty. And they filled me up for my entire life.
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David Harris
Did you know from an early age, as the son of a rabbi, that you yourself wanted to be a rabbi, or did you have other career ideas along the way?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Never gave it a passing thought. It's really a funny story until my wedding night when my father was a very close friend with the then dean of the Hebrew Union College in New York, Paul Steinberg of blessed memory. And we got married in 1984. We first got married in Jerusalem in the campus of the Hebrew Union College. And because my mother in law always dreamt of how her daughter's wedding would look, we did in effect, another wedding on the way back in London, where I met my wife. And so at that ceremony, it was everything, including the wedding gown, and there was no chuppah, but it was everything else. The custom in England was that the groom give a charge in honor of the bride. So I worked hard on it and it was pretty good. And somebody comes up to me afterwards, sticks his hand out. I was an attorney at that time in New York, and. And he says to me, hi, my name is Paul Steinberg. You don't know me. I'm the dean of the rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College. You're wasting your time as a lawyer. You should be a rabbi. And it had never entered my mind up until then. But by the end of the evening, you know, we had a room upstairs in the hotel where the reception was. By the end of the evening when, you know, most couples are consummating their marriage or at least opening their wedding gift, I told my wife, you know what? I think I'm going to be a rabbi. Now she had married what she thought was going to be a New York Attorney with high earning power. But I think it all worked out well in the end.
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David Harris
So you went from high earning power.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
To high earning power, at least the higher spiritual level, I hope.
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David Harris
And once you made that decision, there was no question that you'd follow the Reform Jewish trajectory.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, yeah. And I'm of course very happy with that. I would do that again.
- [06:21]
David Harris
Okay, so let's fast forward because you have been one of the most prominent voices certainly in the Reform movement, if not more broadly, since October 7th. How would you characterize today the Reform movement's attitude towards Israel and more broadly, if you will, ideologically towards Zionism?
- [06:40]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, I think there's a lot to be concerned about in terms of the.
- [06:44]
David Harris
Future, which is why I'm asking.
- [06:47]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
As of now, my intuitive impression, which is supported by various empirical surveys, indicate that most American Jews, most liberal American Jews and most Reform American Jews are strongly pro Israel. Something like 80 to 85%, maybe a little less when you zero in on the Reform movement, but very high numbers. And so the values that I articulate are in effect representative of the mainstream of Reform Jews in the pews and Reform rabbis. The challenge is the younger you go, the less true. That is the last survey that I saw of 18 to 24 year olds, I don't know if you saw this, David, that roughly half of them, I think the number was 48% of them, define themselves either as anti Zionist or their criticism of Israel is so substantial that in effect it's the same thing.
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David Harris
So what went wrong?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Look, you can, and I've heard these arguments that young people have grown up knowing only center right and right wing governments. And you know, Netanyahu has been the only prime minister they've known. It's a government that's hard to identify with for largely liberal Jews who are the bulk of American Jewry. And I think that plays a role on a certain level. But fundamentally the problem in my view is connection to Judaism. That's where we're losing the struggle and we have a lot to worry about in terms of the future. And Israel is a manifestation of the larger challenge of what we call Jewish continuity. And I think, and I've always felt that there's a direct correlation between the intensity of your support of Israel, which itself is part of the larger issue of the belief in the centrality of Jewish peoplehood. There's a direct correlation between that and Jewish identity. And the less Jewish identity you have, chances are the less everything, including attachment to Israel. That's why you see that the Orthodox at least The Zionist Orthodox, the modern Orthodox in the United States, have by all accounts the strongest connection to Judaism. And, you know, the more liberal you get, the numbers show decreasing numbers in terms of the attachment to Israel. And so fundamentally, in my view, it's a question of Jewish identity, Jewish knowledge, Jewish literacy, Jewish education. That's where we have been falling behind now for decades.
- [09:35]
David Harris
Do you see a growing awareness of this within the Reform movement and focus much more on Jewish literacy, Jewish knowledge, Jewish learning, Jewish education, or is it still lagging behind?
- [09:49]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think there's an awareness of it, but I think there's a sense also that there's a limit to what we can do. You know, there's. That is the result, the product of our times. We're all the products of our times. And the fact of the matter is, Western civilization is in many ways post religious. And at this point in time, on any given day today, fewer than half of American Jews are affiliated at all with any institution, let alone synagogues. So these social factors are driving identification with Judaism and support and affiliation with Jewish institutions. So the problem is much bigger than any specific ideology. The reason that it's a problem for all of us, including those who presumably don't have such a large, large problem of Jewish continuity, again, go to the Orthodox world, is that most American Jews have not, are not, and will not be Orthodox. And I'm not even describing some kind of moral judgment. I'm simply stating a fact, and it's likely to continue to be that way. So if we lose the bulk of American Jewry, we're going to lose the future of the American Jewish community. So everyone, all of us, whether we consider ourselves liberal or not, or whether we consider ourselves Reform, all of us, including the Orthodox, have a direct vested interest, a fundamental stake in slowing this trend down, stopping it, and reversing it over time. And if we do that, and if we raise future generations of literate Jews, the issue of Israel and Zionism will take care of itself.
- [11:41]
David Harris
There are a lot of ifs in what you said. And my question is, and you're on the inside, is there, in effect, a war council within the Jewish world, the Jewish religious world, across denominations within denominations that says there's a crisis ahead? You've just described the crisis. We have to be ready to face the crisis with our own solutions. Is that the case today?
- [12:09]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I don't think there's enough awareness, and I don't think there's enough awareness in the philanthropic community either. Because if I'm right, or at least partially right, okay, and that there is the biggest challenge or a central challenge for the American Jewish community's future is Jewish literacy attachment to Judaism itself. Then you have to say, okay, well, how do we reverse that? And they're basically three institutions outside the Orthodox community, which is the small minority of American Jews. No more than 6 to at most 10% of American Jews describe themselves as Orthodox. All the rest describe themselves as something else. Then you have to look at the institutions that are responsible for Jewish literacy, for Jewish education, and what are they in the non Orthodox world, aside from the family, which of course is the key structure. But for the first time in recorded Jewish history, we are living in unprecedented times because for the first time the parents don't know enough to teach the kids. If you remember the Passover Agada, you know, one of the children is the one who doesn't know how to ask. And so what's the solution to the one who doesn't know how to ask the parents? Teach them some Judaism. But it never dawned on our predecessors that you would reach a generation where the parents didn't know enough to teach the children. So you have that. But the three institutions of American Jewish life that are responsible for Jewish education and the instillation of Jewish identity are Jewish day schools, summer camps and synagogues. And of the three synagogues are by far the most important. One, because they reach the most number of people by far. And two, the other institutions are limited in time.
- [14:05]
David Harris
You used two terms earlier, ami, when you spoke about anti Zionist and non Zionist Jews among the young cohort. In particular, you yourself have said publicly that the notion of an anti Zionist Jew is an oxymoron. Explain what you mean.
- [14:21]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
A contradiction in terms. One, because the novelty of Zionism, what Herzl did and his successors is not that they conceived of new ideas in Judaism. They took ideas that had been developed in Judaism for 3,000 years. Specifically the centrality of Jewish peoplehood. Es chalagoi gadol. I will make of you a great nation, national territory, and the covenant between God and the Jewish people and fellow Jews. That essentially is what Zionism rested on in terms of its fundamental principles. And if you read Herzl, he says over and over again, in the Jewish state, we are a people, one people. Almost as a revelation, because Herzl himself was not a learned Jew. That's part of the miracle of Theodor Herzl. And what makes him one of the truly consequential Jews and leaders in all of Jewish history is he took these ideas and politicized them. He found A way to create a movement of Jews based on these ideas that led eventually to the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish state. But they rest on the basic principles of Judaism. If you reject the centrality of Jewish peoplehood, you have rejected the fundamental pillar of Judaism. We're not simply a faith community, we're a people. And there is no instance in any Jewish text until modern day Reform jews of the 19th century Reform rabbis that rejected the centrality of the land of Israel or of the centrality of the peoplehood of Israel. And by the way, that was our position pre existing to the Zionist movement, but within a historical blink of an eye, literally within three to four decades, we had already reversed that in the Reform movement because the people rejected it and our analysis of history was wrong. And the Zionists were more right than the anti Zionists because. Because what they saw, or at least intuited, nobody could have foreseen the Holocaust. But they intuited that there was something about the condition of Europe that was catastrophic for the Jewish body and the Jewish soul. So they took these fundamental principles and converted them into a political movement. Now half of the world's Jews live in Israel. So I don't even know what anti Zionism means. Honestly, when people say, and they could be older as well, but they tend to be younger American Jews say that they're anti Zionists, I don't know what it means. It's one thing to have been an anti Zionist in the debate about whether this was a good idea pre1948. Pre1948, it's a whole other matter to say there are seven and a half million Jews living in Israel now out of the 10 million Israeli citizens. When you say you're an anti Zionist, what does that mean? Does it mean what Hamas says it means? Does it mean what BDS says it means? What do you mean if you're Jewish and you say you're an anti Zionist, if it means the destruction of the Jewish state along with all of the consequent destruction of Jewish lives, that for sure is a contradiction in terms. It violates every principle of Judaism. And I say that especially when it comes to rabbis. And this is a particular issue for us. But all of the non orthodox rabbinical seminaries essentially have the same challenge nowadays. If you're a Zionist institution for rabbinic leadership, you should be ordaining Zionist rabbis. You cannot be.
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David Harris
And the Reform institutions, to be clear, are self declared Zionist institutions for decades.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And we for example, have a campus in Israel on Jerusalem Street.
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David Harris
Absolutely.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
So that's a real problem. Okay. And that's a real challenge. It's not that I, you know, if there's a group of Jews who define themselves as anti Zionists, of course they're entitled to their views, and if they can find spiritual leaders to lead them who also believe the same thing, bless them. And if a young person comes and says, I want to be a rabbi and I want to be an anti Zionist rabbi, they're entitled to their beliefs, and if they can find a community that wants to be led by them, great. They don't have to come to us. We're not the institution that should be ordaining them. And this is a fundamental issue in particular after October 7th.
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David Harris
Okay? And that's what I want to come to. Because you, again, ami, have been fiery, passionate, outspoken since October 7th in what we American Jews need to understand what's changed in the landscape. What do we need to understand about the difference between October 6th and October 8th from the perspective of Ami Hirsch?
- [19:35]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Everything changed.
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David Harris
Okay.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
In fact, I would say if you're a Jew, let alone a Jewish leader, communal leader, and your agenda hasn't changed radically, chances are you're not living up to the historical demands of the times. You're not living up to your. So talk to us about Jewish responsibility.
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David Harris
About at the top of your list, what's changed and what needs to be changed as a result.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
First of all, we discovered that actually we are not post existential threats against Israel and the Jewish people, and we're not post antisemitism in the west either, especially in the United States, where we kind of assumed that we were. I think there were three revelations of October 7th that, you know, kind of like the COVID pandemic that created certain challenges, but also uncovered a lot that was hidden before. So October 7 did the same for the American Jewish community. One, it revealed, and it revealed this to Israelis, too, that despite our fervent desire and our assumptions, Israel was not beyond existential threat and it couldn't kind of pull back, ignore the Middle east, say we're part of Europe and the west and America. We've got all this high technology, and we don't have to worry about what's going on on the other side. That turned out to be catastrophically wrong and so catastrophic that it'll be living with us for decades to come. We won't recover for decades, and it'll lead to all kinds of different approaches on the security level, on the economic level, and on the political level. In every way, by the way, I don't think we're even on October 8th anymore. We're still living this Groundhog Day of October 7th over and over and over again. We're still in the trauma. We're not even in the post trauma phase until the hostages are restored, until the hot war ends, and until commissions of investigations are established to investigate responsibility, assign responsibility, and to force acceptance of responsibility on the military and political level. We're not really in even the recovery phase yet. But October 7th revealed three things to us fundamentally. One, the existential threats that still exist. Two, it revealed to the Jews of the west, and in particular American Jews, who really most of us had never before experienced any kind of consequential antisemitism in our lives. I mean, you know, here and there, some things, but nothing like what we're seeing today. It revealed that our assumptions about America and America's acceptance of Jews was wrong. That if we felt that we were in some kind of post historical phase, that the Jews didn't need to worry about antisemitism in America, that turned out to be wrong.
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David Harris
American exceptionalism.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Exactly. And then the third issue for us was, and this is especially acute in our part of the American Jewish community, the liberal part of the American Jewish community is we discovered that the partners we thought who were with us on so many things actually weren't. And they harbored hostility, intense hostility at.
- [23:04]
David Harris
Best, they were silent at best, on.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
October 7, at best and at worst. The idea that great universities that were supported by Jews, funded by Jews, populated by Jews disproportionately, and were in a sense a haven for the American Jewish community that valued, like generations of Jews before us, education and knowledge and the pursuit of truth and liberalism. That these institutions, some of which were downright antisemitic and tolerated anti Semitism, whether in the form of anti Zionism or downright anti Semitism, it was shocking. We won't recover for decades ourselves from this. So those three conceptions collapsed as a result of October 7th. And somehow or another we have to figure out how to rebuild those three pillars. And it's going to take us a long, long time.
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David Harris
We don't have a lot of time left, unfortunately. But I want to add to your list with this question. You yourself have said you now don't expect to see a two state solution in your lifetime if even it remains conceivable. Is that another fundamental change post October 7th?
- [24:22]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah. It goes to the existential issue I talked about and the liberal perspective of not only intellect, but international diplomacy. What characterizes liberals on the international stage is we believe that people can change, we believe we can change, and we believe that even our enemies can change. And that suffered a catastrophic blow up.
- [24:45]
David Harris
In October 7th because the belief among many liberals was if only a liberal government took office in Jerusalem, they would see the opportunities for peace which would lead to a two state solution. I don't want to go into parts.
- [25:00]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Not only that, by the way, but on the Palestinian side too. And you've spoken with people who suffered direct consequences of October 7th, and so have I. And they were the most liberal of Israelis, the most peace loving of Israelis, and they have radically changed their minds.
- [25:14]
David Harris
Right. Does it also force some American Jews to face new political realities in this country? Is that another change after October 7th or not?
- [25:25]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yes. All of a sudden we're looking at the Democratic Party, which was the home of at least two thirds of American.
- [25:32]
David Harris
Jews, at least since FDR's time.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Right. At least since FDR, who voted overwhelmingly and supported overwhelmingly the Democratic Party. And I'm not voicing a partisan opinion here, nor am I asking you, but you know, American Jews turn around now and they look at a substantial wing of the Democratic Party that not only doesn't represent them on domestic values of race and identity politics, but that inevitably is connected to the question of Israel, Zionism and Jews. And they see that a substantial part of the Democratic Party, which was their home for close to a century, has essentially turned against them. And that is bound to have political ramifications for the years to come.
- [26:16]
David Harris
Thank you so much.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
It's such an honor to be with you.
- [26:20]
David Harris
It's so important to have your voice. And especially now post October 7th and JBS viewers, Ami Hirsch.