There is Babylon in the Diaspora.
My father was born in Argentina to Romanian parents; my mother in Shanghai to Russian parents. They met in Israel, where I was born in Beersheba, and we moved to America when I was three.
I grew up in Auburn, Alabama, where there were three Jews in the entire school system. Not my grade. Not my school. The system. My brother and I were two of them. Whatever Jewish life my family had, my parents assembled out of nothing that the town supplied.
Zvika Klein recently argued that Israel does not know how to treat Diaspora Jews as partners. I agree that Diaspora Jews should have a voice on questions that affect the Jewish people. A voice, not a veto. And no vote in Israel’s sovereign decisions. Israelis vote there, serve there, bury their children there, and bear the consequences.
Jewish questions, yes. Whether Israel goes into Gaza, no.
I want to add something. Israel is not only reaching for the wrong tools. It is running on the wrong story.
Klein found his precedent in the Book of Esther, where the rabbis say the Jews of Persia freely accepted a covenant that had once been forced on them. It is the right text, and it proves more than he claimed.
The rabbi who made that argument was living in Babylon, centuries after Persia opened the road back to Jerusalem and most Jews chose not to take it. The classic proof that Jews accept their Judaism freely was itself written by Jews who chose to stay in the Diaspora and built there.
Babylon did not disappear. It became a center. It produced the Talmud, which is to say it produced the operating system of Jewish civilization for the next 1,500 years, and it did so without a state, without sovereignty, and without any expectation of return.
Now go back further. Egypt gives us two stories. The first is the story of those who stayed behind. They disappeared. And it is this lesson that runs deeply through Israeli consciousness: Jews who remain in exile are Jews who eventually will not make it. When Israel looks at a shrinking Diaspora, it instinctively sees the Jews who stayed in Egypt.
But Egypt also gives us the story of the committed minority. Tradition holds that only one in five Israelites left Egypt. The claim is remarkable: from that minority came Sinai and a civilization that changed the world.
The Jewish people did not survive because everyone stayed committed. It survived because enough did. For most of our history, it has been the few leading the few.
For the Diaspora, all three lessons matter. The Jews who stayed in Egypt warn what can happen when commitment disappears. The Jews who left Egypt teach that numbers were never the point: a committed minority can carry the Jewish future. Babylon teaches that a committed minority can build something enduring outside the land.
The Jews who stayed in Egypt warn that Diaspora communities can disappear. Babylon teaches that they do not have to. As Klein put it to me: in Egypt they perish, and in Babylon they write the Talmud. An Israeli hears “fewer” and reaches for Egypt. I hear “fewer, and choosing,” and reach for Babylon.
As Klein wrote, “a smaller Jewish people that chooses is not a weaker one.” In the Diaspora, the Jews who remain actively Jewish when assimilation is easy, particularly after the October 7 Hamas-led massacre, have chosen.
In Israel, Jewish identity is reinforced by language, calendar, geography, culture, and the state itself. In America, nothing requires a Jew to light Shabbat candles, educate a child Jewishly, learn Jewish history, defend Israel publicly, or remain attached to the Jewish people at all. Those who do are making an affirmative choice.
The Diaspora is therefore a test that Israel cannot replicate: whether Jewish civilization contains something compelling enough that people will choose it when they are entirely free not to.
The idea of Jewish peoplehood is coming together
A few weeks ago I had dinner in Tel Aviv with five young Israelis, two of whom had grown up in the Diaspora. One asked me, genuinely and without malice, what Israel actually needs from Diaspora Jews if we are assimilating and evaporating anyway.
Parts of the community are assimilating, and the numbers are real. But something else is growing alongside them: a serious and expanding collective of Jews committed to God, Torah, and Israel, and I mean Israel not only as a place but as the whole idea of Jewish peoplehood.
Many of them are not Orthodox and have no intention of becoming Orthodox. Some are studying with Orthodox teachers, with both sides comfortable that full observance is not the goal. They are learning in their 40s and 50s because nobody handed it to them at 18. Some have moved between communities, looking for depth rather than for a label.
They are not converting to anything. They are refusing to be sorted. Israel produces less of this than it needs.
They are also not sitting quietly. There are Jews here fighting for America, for Israel, and for the Jewish people everywhere. They are fighting on campuses, in city councils, and in their own professional associations.
We are one people, and that carries obligations in both directions. It also means there is something to learn in both directions.
After nearly 2,000 years without Jewish sovereignty, Israel restored self-government, self-defense, sovereignty in the land of Israel, and the capacity to act collectively in history, while building a modern Hebrew civilization.
American Jews built the habit of choosing Jewish life when nothing requires it, and the fluency to engage universal values, translate Jewish particularism into the language of the wider world, and carry the Jewish story into institutions and societies far beyond Israel’s borders.
Neither of those is a favor to the other, and what serious Diaspora Jewish life has developed is not something we offer Israel as supplicants. Both are contributions to the same people.
Neither is sufficient by itself. A Jewish civilization that can explain itself but cannot defend itself will not survive. One that can defend itself but cannot explain itself will not hold. For the first time in 2,000 years, the Jewish people possess both capacities at once. The opportunity of this generation is to use them together.
The best version of this argument I have heard came from an Israeli – a shinshin – who deferred his mandatory military service for a year and spent a year of service in an American community.
He told me what he found there: families lighting candles on Friday night not because the city stopped but because that family decided to stop; mezuzahs on doorposts where the houses on either side had none. He said, I came as an Israeli. I return as a Jew.
He had been sent to teach. He went home having learned something, and what he learned is the thing Israel misses when it looks at us and sees Egypt. We choose. We are building. We are Babylon.
The writer is co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in Jewish education, thriving Jewish communities, Israel, and families in need.