US midterms reshaped Washington - but they won't decide our Jewish destiny - opinion

Add Israel's inconclusive election, with neither major political bloc able to command a Knesset majority, and there is enough material for a veritable festival of pessimism.

I am not joining it.

There are real reasons for concern. Antisemitism is disturbingly visible in public life. Some newly elected American politicians are deeply hostile to Israel, and arguments once confined to the political margins have entered the mainstream.

For Jews accustomed to regarding America as an exceptionally welcoming home, this is unsettling. Israel's political impasse compounds anxieties about security and relations with its most important ally.

We should take these concerns seriously without confusing an adverse political climate with a verdict on the Jewish future.

Consider our history: the destruction of the First Temple was supposed to spell the end of Jewish national life. Yet in Babylon, Jews developed institutions of learning and a capacity to maintain identity far from home.

The Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and Judaism reinvented its religious center around Torah, prayer, and communal life. Expulsions, persecutions, and restrictions followed across the centuries. Each left terrible wounds. None extinguished the Jewish people.

We must be careful with such history. Just because we survived doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer, and it would be grotesque to use it to minimize the very real dangers faced by Jews today.

But history does tell us something about ourselves: Jewish continuity has never depended on the generosity of a particular king, government, or parliament. Exodus tells, “And there arose a new king who did not know (or want to know) Joseph.”

While political friendships matter, our identity rests on something older and more enduring: our sense of purpose.

The prophet Isaiah describes Israel's calling as being "a light unto the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). It is an extraordinary assignment, and one too easily misunderstood.

Being a light is no assertion that Jews are better than anyone else. It is a demand that we behave as though our lives have moral significance beyond ourselves: that we bring justice, compassion, integrity, learning, and an awareness of God into the world.

A people that sees itself merely as a target of hostility can easily become absorbed by its enemies. A people that remembers its mission has something more important to get out of bed for in the morning.

Insist that universities protect Jewish students, that public officials take threats seriously, and that criticism of Israeli policy never becomes a license to intimidate Jewish neighbors. Remain engaged in democratic life, across party lines. Political advocacy is indispensable.

But our response cannot be confined to better lobbying and stronger security arrangements. We need to ask a more searching question: What are we doing to make the next generation want to be Jewish? A Jewish child should encounter Jewishness as a source of joy and meaning before encountering it as a source of anxiety.

Shabbat tables, Jewish learning, Hebrew, festivals, acts of kindness, friendships, music, community, and visits to Israel do something that a thousand political statements cannot. They make belonging tangible.

A young Jew who experiences the richness of Jewish life possesses something more lasting than a position on the latest controversy. This has been the success of Birthright, which has returned thousands of young Jews to their heritage.

This challenge extends well beyond America, to Jewish communities in Britain, France, Australia, South Africa, and throughout the world. Their circumstances differ enormously, and no single form of religious practice fits them all.

Yet everywhere, the task is the same: to take our inheritance seriously enough to learn it, live it, and pass it on. The greatest danger is that we allow those who dislike us to become the principal authors of our Jewish identity.

Israel, too, has to make a choice. Its election has exposed serious divisions within Israeli society. No ballot can magically resolve them, and no coalition arrangement will make our disagreements disappear.

But the extraordinary achievement of the Jewish state remains unchanged: a sovereign Jewish society, creative, argumentative, imperfect, and astonishingly resourceful, which has absorbed immigrants from across the world and built institutions our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Yet it also reinforces the need for Israel to become increasingly self-sufficient, a challenge that our technological brilliance, ingenuity, and remarkable capacity for innovation leave us well equipped to meet.

Israel must preserve its American relationship, listen to criticism honestly, strengthen its own defense capabilities, and treat its fellow Jews abroad as partners rather than an audience expected to applaud every government decision.

American Jews, for their part, can remain deeply attached to Israel without being asked to defend each minister or policy. Love of Israel is larger than Israeli party politics.

We also need to recover confidence in Jewish ingenuity. Faced with setbacks, Jews have built schools, hospitals, charities, businesses, scientific institutions, and communities.

The instinct to organize, educate, innovate, and help one another is among our greatest collective strengths. There is every reason to put it to work again.

And there is one other dimension that secular political analysis inevitably misses: emunah, faith.

Jewish faith has never meant sitting back and expecting God to solve our problems. Our sages warn us not to rely on miracles. We are required to make an effort, protect ourselves, use our intelligence, and take responsibility for our future.

Yet we act with the conviction that history is not meaningless, and that the God who sustained our people through so many unlikely chapters has not abandoned us.

We should meet each challenge seriously, without allowing any of them to define who we are.

No election in Washington, and no coalition negotiation in Jerusalem, can decide whether we remain a people of Torah, compassion, creativity, and hope. That decision belongs to us.

Our task is to make Jewish life so confident, so meaningful, and so generous in spirit that the next generation will be proud to inherit it. The doom merchants may have the upper hand today. We have a much longer story to tell.