Moishe Steigmann, The Mindful Rabbi, our Executive Director and Rabbi, recently shared a personal reflection on his evolving relationship with Israel, Jewish identity, and spiritual belonging. We are sharing it here in the spirit of thoughtful, compassionate, and honest engagement with complex questions facing Jewish life today.
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There are certain topics that live so close to the soul that speaking about them publicly feels almost like a betrayal of community and intimacy.
For a long time, I have struggled to articulate my relationship with Israel because my feelings toward it refuse to flatten into slogans. I do not fit neatly into the categories that increasingly dominate Jewish and political discourse. I cannot speak about Israel as though it is merely an abstract geopolitical entity. Nor can I ignore the profound moral, spiritual, and emotional dissonance I increasingly feel.
And so, I write this not as an expert, not as a historian, not as someone claiming definitive truth, but as a Jew, a rabbi, and a human being trying to honestly describe an internal rupture.
These reflections are personal. They are emotional. They are incomplete. They may contain factual misunderstandings or imperfect framing, and I welcome correction where appropriate. My goal here is not to persuade anyone, but to speak openly about my experience, one I suspect many others quietly carry as well.
THE ISRAEL I LOVED
Before Israel was an argument, it was a feeling.
It was memory.
Longing.
Family.
Story.
Language.
Peoplehood.
My first trip to Israel was the summer before I turned 10. I still recall my deep despondence on the final night of my trip. More than anything else that night, after saying goodbye to my family, I simply wanted to see the Kotel one more time. My mom explained that the sheirut (shared taxi) we were taking to the airport had a defined route picking up people at various locations. It could not detour, even for one final fleeting glance at the Kotel.
I remember crying. I could not explain then—and I certainly cannot explain now—why I felt such longing and attachment to the Wall that night. Yet the emotion was real.
And somehow, impossibly, my final wish came true. One of the passengers in the sheirut had a pick-up right near the Kotel. And my emotional connection with Israel was completed at that moment.
That moment mattered deeply to me. Not politically. Spiritually.
Israel was never simply “a country” to me. It was woven into my understanding of Jewish existence itself. My family lives there. My memories live there. My community lives there. Parts of my identity were shaped there.
Even writing these reflections now is, in its own strange way, an expression of love. We do not grieve disconnection from things that mean nothing to us.
WHEN BELONGING BECOME CONDITIONAL
Over time, however, the relationship became more complicated. There emerged a growing accumulation of moments where something inside me no longer aligned.
One of the deepest examples of this for me is the Kotel itself. The place that once symbolized spiritual belonging increasingly came to symbolize exclusion. As an egalitarian Jew, I was not allowed to pray with my community at the Wall itself; we were relegated to a separate section at Robinson’s Arch.
The Kotel thus became, for me, not a holy site, but rather a symbol of a deeper rupture within Jewish life: the growing sense that Jewish belonging itself was becoming conditional. I wrote a reflection on that nearly ten years ago (https://ownyourjudaism.org/no-longer-my-spiritual-home/).
What once felt like a shared inheritance began to feel conditional: You belong… but only if you belong correctly.
And that pain is difficult to explain to people who experience Judaism differently. Because for many Diaspora Jews—especially non-Orthodox Jews—Israel is spoken about as our homeland while many of our forms of Jewish practice remain institutionally marginalized, delegitimized, or rejected there.
Now, as I write this, there is legislation before the Knesset seeking to criminalize non-Orthodox prayer at the Kotel itself (https://www.timesofisrael.com/divisive-bill-barring-non…/). Whether or not such proposals ultimately become law, the symbolism is impossible for me to ignore. The place that once represented my deepest feelings of Jewish connection increasingly feels like a place where my Judaism itself is suspect.
Over time, I began realizing that this feeling extended beyond the Kotel.
Part of what I increasingly struggle with is what happens when Jewish belonging becomes narrowed by ideological and religious gatekeeping, when there emerges an increasingly rigid definition not only of “authentic Judaism” but of legitimate Jewish moral and political identity itself.
I began noticing this narrowing in religious spaces. Then in political discourse. Then in conversations around nationalism, dissent, Palestinians, democracy, and power.
The dissonance became harder to ignore.
MORAL DISSONANCE
The rupture, however, is not only religious. It is also moral.
There are realities connected to Gaza, the West Bank, settler violence, unequal treatment under law, and nationalist rhetoric that increasingly trouble me deeply.
Part of what makes this so painful is that my concerns do not emerge from distance from Jewish history, but from closeness to it.
I understand the fears Israelis carry.
I understand Jewish vulnerability.
I understand trauma.
I understand why security matters.
And yet I also find myself struggling with what happens when fear hardens into moral numbness or when nationalism begins overriding ethical consistency.
One of the things I find hardest to reconcile is the difference in communal reaction to violence depending on who commits it, where Israelis and Palestinians who throw rocks, for instance, often face profoundly different consequences and public narratives (https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-idf-officer-admits…/).
I struggle as well with rhetoric from public figures that I experience as deeply dehumanizing toward Palestinians and that call forward a conquest of all land that was ever in Jewish control alongside what often feels to me like insufficient communal outrage in response. Perhaps what troubles me most is not simply the existence of extremist rhetoric (every society has extremists) but how easily such rhetoric can become normalized when wrapped in the language of nationalism, security, or Jewish survival.
I say this cautiously because I know how emotionally charged these conversations are. I know there are contexts I may not fully understand. I know Israelis live with realities I do not experience daily.
But moral discomfort does not disappear simply because complexity exists.
NATIONALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY
Part of the deeper tension may be philosophical.
At my core, I am profoundly wary of nationalism whenever it begins eclipsing universal ethical obligation, human dignity, or moral self-critique.
And increasingly, I experience Israel not as a homeland and haven for Jews, but as a deeply nationalist society.
That realization creates a painful tension within me because I do not experience my Judaism primarily through nationalism. I experience it through ethics, spirituality, memory, learning, wrestling, compassion, questioning, and covenantal responsibility.
SPIRITUAL HOMELESSNESS
What I struggle with most is not political disagreement.
It is spiritual homelessness.
How do you remain emotionally connected to a place that increasingly makes parts of your Jewish identity feel unwelcome?
How do you maintain attachment while experiencing alienation?
How do you criticize without severing connection?
How do you stay morally honest without collapsing into cynicism?
How do you love something that hurts you?
I do not yet have answers to these questions.
What I do know is that pretending the tension does not exist no longer feels spiritually sustainable for me.
WHAT I AM NOT SAYING
I am not saying Israel should not exist.
I am not denying Jewish history or vulnerability.
I am not claiming moral purity.
I am not pretending these issues are simple.
I am not ignoring antisemitism, terrorism, or the impossible realities Israelis face, especially in the aftermath of the atrocities of October 7th.
And I am certainly not placing myself outside the Jewish story.
If anything, this reflection emerges because I feel too inside it.
WHY SPEAK NOW
For a long time, I hesitated to say any of this publicly.
Partly out of fear:
fear of being misunderstood,
fear of hurting people I love,
fear of being weaponized by those acting in bad faith,
fear of alienating community,
fear of becoming reducible to a “position”.
But silence also carries a cost.
And perhaps part of mature Jewish identity is learning how to remain in a relationship even amid profound discomfort and disagreement.
I do not know where my relationship with Israel goes from here.
What I know is this:
I still love Israel.
I still ache for it.
I still feel bound to it.
And I still deeply love my family who live there, and I long to visit them in Jerusalem again.
And increasingly, I no longer know what to do with that love.
