For Rabba Mor Shimonie, Zionism isn’t about self-definition. It’s a form of action.
“I am a Zionist, not as an identity for myself but as an active part of my life. If I’m doing something of love and care toward Zion, I am a Zionist,” said Shimonie, the family education director at The Kitchen, an independent congregation in San Francisco.
Shimonie spoke at Sunday’s Z3 Conference in Palo Alto on a panel titled “What is Zionism after 10/7?”
Shimonie was ordained this year through the Shalom Hartman Institute in her native Israel and moved to San Francisco this summer to work at The Kitchen. She sees the fact that she was born and raised in Israel as her Zionism.
“It’s my habitus,” she said at the Oshman Family JCC, using a sociological term referring to the way group culture and personal history shape a person. “It’s not even that I know what it is, or I need to define it. It’s my norms, my language, my culture, my people, like everything around me, is the outcome of Zionism. It’s my life.”
Panelist Josh Ladon, vice president and senior faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute on the West Coast, said he sees Zionism as an integral part of Judaism. But as someone who is both a Zionist and a supporter of a future Palestinian state, he rejects “maximalist Zionists who suggest that if you’re a Jew, the only expression is a Zionism that is really full-throated.”
The one thing we learned in Israel is that we have to talk to each other. Israelis love arguing. We have to have these hard conversations. Rabba Mor Shimonie
“Any time there’s a separation or attempt to uncouple Judaism from Zionism,” he added, “I get frustrated. And that’s both an outside frustration, meaning with those who see themselves as non-Zionist, and a frustration with the institutional, internal Jewish world, which oftentimes can turn Zionism into exclusively a political identity and not the sort of cultural, religious, literary revolution” that he understands it to be.
Tablet editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz, another panelist, said he understands Zionism in religious terms, as the yearning for the messianic age and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. So for him, “Zionism is not really a thing that could be defined. It’s a conversation about what kind of path we wish to take toward this divinely ordained end.”
Leibovitz pointed out that the decades-old argument over whether Israel is a Jewish state or a state of the Jews — i.e., a liberal democracy — became very heated in Israel in 2023 during the anti-government protests that stopped only because of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. The protests recently started up again.
“It is not an easy question to answer, and however it is answered, it is going to leave a whole host of Israelis feeling absolutely disenchanted and alienated from their own project,” Leibovitz said. “And yet, this is the conversation that we must have. It’s the only one going on.”
For more than a decade, American Jews have been obsessed with the concept of “peoplehood” as the core of diaspora-Israel relations, the speakers said. At least one of them noted that Israelis have a conflicted relationship with the idea of peoplehood, stemming from the early Zionist notion that the diaspora was “lesser than” Israel.
“Is Israel at the center? Is it a place we have to have?” said Shimonie, who uses the honorific “rabba” that emerged more than a decade ago among the small number of Orthodox rabbinic programs that began to ordain women. “Post 10/7, we feel this [question] really strongly. Now it’s like, wait, this project — it hasn’t ended yet.”
Before Oct. 7, Shimonie said, Israelis felt as if they had inherited a building “and my project is to decorate it and manage the neighbors who don’t like me. Now I’m like, oh no, I’m still building the foundation of this imaginary building.”
The speakers generally resisted repeated questions from moderator Jennifer Mamlet, acting CEO of the JCC Association of North America, regarding what has changed in the diaspora-Israel relationship since Oct. 7.
Leibovitz saw a “surge” of Jewish interest in coming back to synagogue and engaging in Jewish text study,
Leibovitz saw a “surge” of Jewish interest in coming back to synagogue and engaging in Jewish text study, while Shimonie said she was hoping more people would talk to her about Israel when she arrived at The Kitchen.
“I was very surprised, because I feel like the one thing that we learned in Israel is that we have to talk to each other,” she said. “Israelis love arguing. We have to have these hard conversations.” The fact that the congregation’s leaders hired her, an Israeli, indicated they wanted to talk more about it, she added.
So is there a different conversation about Zionism because of Oct. 7?
The three panelists suggested there is not. More Jews might be having the conversation, but the basics remain as they were. Understanding what diaspora itself means and the position of Israel in that conception is the central, burning question, they suggested.
“I’m deeply committed to Israel and the Jewish people being sovereign in Israel, and I believe in a version of Israel that I’m committed to make happen,” Ladon said. “It’s a Zionism of yearning, and it continues to be that way.”