Daniel Gordis has no qualms about Jew­ish sov­er­eign­ty in an inde­pen­dent state. His new book is a man­i­festo pred­i­cat­ed on the Jew­ish state’s hav­ing recre­at­ed Jew­ish peo­ple­hood, revived the Hebrew lan­guage, and restored a place in his­to­ry for Jews as a nation. Draw­ing on Zionism’s exam­ple of the pow­er of such ideas, he con­cludes that Israel needs a new sense of pur­pose, one that tran­scends the cur­rent stale­mate with the Pales­tini­ans and that starts with the recog­ni­tion that Israel was nev­er meant to be a state like all oth­er states.

Rab­bi Gordis sug­gests that Israel’s rea­son for being is ​“the heal­ing of the Jew­ish peo­ple, the cre­ation of a space in which Jews can thrive as they could nowhere else.” This chal­lenges the Enlight­en­ment val­ues of uni­ver­sal­ism and democ­ra­cy, and he does not shrink from those impli­ca­tions. He treats democ­ra­cy as a val­ue sec­ond to pre­serv­ing a Jew­ish major­i­ty, and rejects the vision of Israel as mere­ly ​“a Hebrew-speak­ing, minia­ture America.”

Equal­ly chal­leng­ing to many Amer­i­can Jews is his view that the use of force in self-defense is a tra­di­tion­al Jew­ish val­ue. Hav­ing a state is not a mat­ter of Jews glo­ri­fy­ing vio­lence or con­quest, he writes, only ​“the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for their own sur­vival.” More broad­ly, through a state ​“Jews can give expres­sion to the ideas they have long cul­ti­vat­ed but have nev­er been able to express in action.” Rab­bi Gordis firm­ly rejects the indis­crim­i­nate bias of many Jews against war in gen­er­al, and the con­comi­tant embrace of pas­siv­i­ty and vic­tim­hood as a basis for Jew­ish identity.

By chang­ing the sub­ject from Israel’s short-term behav­ior to its guid­ing prin­ci­ples and its long-term pur­pose, Daniel Gordis has restart­ed the whole con­ver­sa­tion about the country’s direc­tion. His urgent call to action, artic­u­lat­ed with eru­di­tion, reflec­tion, and fear­less­ness, could not be more time­ly or more essential.