With the cornerstone set in May of 1926 and the opening dedication in March of 1927, this year marks one hundred years of Park Avenue Synagogue’s sanctuary – an anniversary significant not only for what was said and celebrated at the dedication, but also, in hindsight, for what was not.
Built in the Moorish tradition, with Gothic touches evocative of the great synagogues of Europe, hailed in the press as “artistic and brilliantly ornate,” our sanctuary was constructed for the then astronomical sum of one million dollars. The 1920s were boom years for synagogue building in New York. B’nai Jeshurun and Rodeph Sholom built on the west side; on the same day as the press covered Park Avenue Synagogue’s dedication, Temple Emanu-El announced plans for its monumental new sanctuary on the site of the former Astor residence at Fifth and Sixty-fifth. One might call it an “edifice complex,” competitive declarations by New York Jewry that we are proud, we are here, and we are here to stay.
The dedication itself, presided over by my predecessor four times removed, Rabbi Gabriel Schulman, was staged with all the civic and religious grandeur one would expect. There was the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the presentation of an American flag by the children of the congregational school; a procession of Torah scrolls; and the kindling of the eternal light. Mayor Jimmy Walker and New York Supreme Court Justice Thomas Crain among others joinied Jewish and Christian religious leaders in offering words of tribute. Arthur Ochs, the chairman of the Building Committee, formally presented the key to synagogue president Jacob Friedman, who publicly vowed to hold onto it until the day when “all debts are paid.” Mayor Walker declared that “New York City is not a place for bigotry of any sort,” adding that the city was made better “by the erection of the Park Avenue Synagogue and every other house of God within its limits.” Friedman concluded his speech by describing the aim of our synagogue in the most soaring terms: “a place where men would be inspired to a better life, their hearts and souls lifted to higher things, and their eyes directed toward the everlasting glory of Almighty God.”
Pretty amazing! All the more so one hundred years later. So what, you may be wondering, was missing? Well, for all the pomp, civic pride, and religious confidence, one small but significant building block of modern Jewish identity went entirely unmentioned. Where’s Zionism?! No “Hatikvah.” No Zionist flag. No mention of our brothers and sisters in Mandate Palestine. The 1920s were a time of fervent Zionist activity for American Jewry, the era of Balfour, Brandeis, and the birth of the Hebrew University. I recognize that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A dedication program and a few speeches cannot tell us everything a community believed. And yet, having spent hours this summer in the Park Avenue Synagogue archives housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and having spent eighteen-plus years as a student of this congregation’s history, my conclusion – historically grounded, well-substantiated, and from the vantage point of who we are today, a little awkward to say – is this: In its origins, Park Avenue Synagogue was a non-Zionist synagogue.
As we breathe in this vertiginous 23andMe moment of institutional pedigree, before anyone starts to leave – or heave – a little context is in order. Park Avenue Synagogue, together with Emanu-El, Central, Rodeph Sholom, and others, traces its roots to the world of German-Jewish Reform – the Harmonie Club elites, if you will – of New York’s yesteryear. Though a flagship Conservative synagogue today, Park Avenue Synagogue was founded in 1882 by German Jews as the Reform congregation Temple Gates of Hope. The organ, the choir, the direction of prayer, the clergy, the earliest names on the stained glass – all bear the imprint of that era.
And yes, Classical Reform of that period was, generally speaking, anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, ranging from vigorous opposition to indifference toward the prospect of a Jewish state in Palestine. Judaism was a religion, not a nationality; American Jews had a single allegiance – to the country in which they lived. They rejected the political Zionism of Theodore Herzl – Israel as a sovereign state – not only because it raised the specter of dual loyalties, but also because of Herzl’s darker diagnosis of the Jewish condition, namely, that antisemitism was ineradicable and therefore necessitated a Jewish national home. The Jewish future was to be built here, not there.
But the non-Zionists were far from monolithic. Just as there were varieties of Zionism (religious, cultural, political, and otherwise), so too non-Zionism. Banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff was a territorialist who invested substantially in Jewish life in Palestine. Dr. Cyrus Adler, president of JTS, was a messianist deeply suspicious of secular nationalism. Louis Marshall, the eminent constitutional lawyer and communal statesman, opposed Zionism for American Jews while becoming one of the central advocates of practical investment and refuge in Palestine. Judah Magnes, of Hebrew University fame, rejected Herzl’s vision in favor of bi-nationalism, envisioning a Jewish-Arab political framework in Palestine. All of these views were not the same. Far from it. And in retrospect, we can understand – and respect – the principled questions they were asking. For instance, in the aftermath of World War I, Marshall continued to insist that the desperate needs of Jewish communities in Europe and Russia be prioritized over the project of Jewish immigration to Palestine. As builders of American Jewry and principled diasporists, these leaders could readily imagine Palestine as a home for Jews; what they resisted was the claim that it must be the political home for Jews everywhere.
As closely as these non-Zionists held their convictions, they held something closer still: they cared deeply about the Jewish people. Odd as it may sound, a non-Zionist could oppose Herzl’s political Zionism while enthusiastically supporting Palestine as a refuge for Jews in need. Whatever their differences with the Zionists – and the fights were plentiful – non-Zionists dug deep to help their struggling brothers and sisters. The vulnerability of the pre-state Jewish population in Palestine, the rampant antisemitic conspiracies being propagated by Henry Ford, the plight of world Jewry after the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 slammed shut America’s gates of immigration – none of this was lost on them. Jewish concern came first. Jacob Schiff, banker, philanthropist, and outspoken critic of political Zionism, gave the extraordinary sum of $100,000 toward the establishment of the Technion in Haifa and responded generously to appeals for the Jews of Palestine. By 1929, in the wake of the Arab-Jewish riots, Park Avenue Synagogue had established a Palestine Relief Fund. One could raise funds for kinsmen in Palestine, support them, defend them, advocate for them, and invest in their future. One simply need not – and, in certain circles, emphatically should not – call oneself a Zionist.
And the most important part is this. Whatever their differences – principled or personal – these Jews – Zionists, non-Zionists, anti-Zionists – in all their varieties, figured out a way to work together. Between 1924 and 1928 – precisely the years in which our sanctuary was conceived, built, and dedicated – roundtable discussions and conferences were held in New York bringing Zionists and non-Zionists into sustained conversation over the future of Palestine. Beginning with the Non-Partisan Conference on Palestine in 1924, the aim was to enlarge the Jewish Agency so that responsibility for building Jewish life in Palestine would no longer belong to Zionists alone. Strange as it may sound, the arrangement sought parity: the governing bodies of the enlarged Jewish Agency for Palestine would be composed equally of Zionist and non-Zionist representatives. They disagreed about Jewish nationhood. They disagreed about Zionism. They disagreed about what Palestine meant, what America meant, and what being an American Jew meant. Some of the disagreements were ideological, some were undoubtedly personal. But they came to understand that responsibility for the Jewish people came first, that differences could not become an excuse for abandoning one another. Everyone had to learn to become comfortable being uncomfortable.
The agreement between Chaim Weizmann’s Zionists and Louis Marshall’s non-Zionists was hailed as “The Pact of Glory.” Tragically, Marshall died in Zurich barely a month after the enlarged Jewish Agency was formally constituted. As the lights of Europe dimmed in the 1930s, through World War II and the Holocaust and ultimately the establishment of the State of Israel, the center of gravity of American Jewish life shifted dramatically toward Zionism. Our synagogue, Park Avenue Synagogue, would travel the same path. In 1933 it called Milton Steinberg – a leading voice of American Zionism – to its pulpit, beginning a transformation that would continue through the rabbinates of Judah Nadich and David Lincoln of blessed memory, and into our own day.
The enduring significance of it all? Not that the rapprochement converted American non-Zionists into Zionists or the other way around. It did something far more consequential. It changed the question. No longer simply, “What label do you wear?” But rather, “What are you doing, as an American Jew, to strengthen the Jewish future in Palestine, in America, and around the globe?” A fascinating and instructive chapter not only of American Jewish history, but of Jewish peoplehood itself.
It is Rosh Hashanah one hundred years later: 1926 to 2026. History may not repeat but it does rhyme. Once again, our congregation is in the midst of a generational building project – an ambitious effort to refurbish our sanctuary, broaden our reach, and secure our future for those who will come after us. HVAC systems do not last a hundred years, and neither will any of us. It is time to invest in the future. Once again, the promise of Jewish self-determination unfolds in the shadow of Arab-Jewish violence. Once again, the pincers of American Jewish identity tighten from both the right and the left: the recrudescence of an isolationist, “America First” right, and a socialist left inhospitable to ethnonational particularism of the Jewish kind. Once again, American Jews are being asked whether our commitments to the Jewish people can sit comfortably alongside our commitments as Americans. In genteel and brutish ways, Jews are once again experiencing the sharp edge of antisemitism.
And yes, once again, within the Jewish family itself we are witnessing the reemergence of an old argument. Zionists and Jewish critics of Zionism disagree over Jewish nationhood, over the role of the Jewish homeland in Jewish identity, over whether American Jews should call themselves Zionists, and over how, if at all, we nevertheless remain responsible for one another.
You may have read the studies published this past year; there have been a few. The Jewish Federations of North America report that just a third of American Jews positively identify as Zionists, and a similarly large number say they are unsure or simply do not identify with any of the available labels. Eight percent identify as non-Zionist; seven percent as anti-Zionist, rising to fourteen percent among Jews ages eighteen to thirty-four. The data is not abstract, it plays out in our community every day. I have had conversations with many of you this past year. “What are we going to do about the next generation?” A conversation which I know – because I know – is often code for “What am I going to do about my niece, my nephew, my daughter, my son?” You used to come to me with your heartache over who your children would marry. These days, the “boundary conversations” taking place in my office are about Zionism. And, I should add, I have had many conversations from the other direction – with Jews who wonder, having grown up at Park Avenue Synagogue, whether, given my steadfast Zionism, they still have a place in the community, or even in the Jewish family.
For me these conversations are difficult. The very fact of non-Zionism is a point of deep consternation and pain. First and foremost, the obvious: Unlike one hundred years ago, today the State of Israel actually exists. To hearken back to a time when it did not, to recklessly invoke some pre-State non-Zionist ideologue, strikes me as equivalent to anti-vaxxers longing for the days before modern medicine. I can imagine it; I just want no part of it. All the more so after the Holocaust, 1967, 1973, and October 7th. As the rejoinder goes about the anti-Zionist Bund, “They may have been right, but they are also dead.”
Second, we are living in a time when bad actors are actively employing the language of anti-Zionism not only to isolate, delegitimize, and destroy the Jewish state – the language of genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, and worse – but also as code to justify antisemitic harm against the Jewish people. It is not just that it feels like your non-Zionism turns its back on Jewish history and eight million of your brothers and sisters who live in Israel – though that would be enough. It is that your words are used as cover for something far more nefarious.
My third critique of non-Zionists and anti-Zionists is the lack of courage: the willingness to cede the language of Jewish self-determination either to those who would seek to do our people harm or to those who would use Zionism to justify the worst excesses of the Israeli government. To be a Jew has never come with the promise of being popular or accepted. Any person or politician who accepts you as a Jew only insofar as your Zionism is checked at the door is not accepting you as a Jew at all. Zionism is only the beginning. The asks will keep coming. The price of belonging will keep rising.
For the rejection of the eight million Jews in Israel, for the anachronistic longing to inhabit a world divorced from reality, for the lack of courage – for all these things, to be a Jew and to be disconnected from Israel is a position that I can neither endorse, embrace, nor defend. All this I believe and more, much more. But what I also believe, and I believe with just as much passion, is that truth does not begin and end with me. My belief in my beliefs does not preclude me from seeking to understand and engage in the beliefs of others.
No different than one hundred years ago, Jewish critics of Zionism are not monolithic. To caricature a position we find disquieting as merely the indulgence of a misguided youth – akin to a body piercing or a bad haircut – is not just dismissive but intellectually lazy. Jewish critics of Zionism are not all young, they are not all in Brooklyn, and they are not – and this is a point to which we will return – all “they.” I have been using the terms non-Zionism and anti-Zionism interchangeably. They are not, and they mean different things to different people. Sobering as the data is on the growth of Jewish critics of Zionism, the quantitative and qualitative research makes clear that nine out of ten Jews nevertheless strongly support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. How can so many Jews believe in Jewish self-determination and yet not identify as Zionists? Again, because in the horseshoe nature of identity politics, Zionism has been recast – on the left and right – as synonymous with the most extreme policies of the Israeli government. It has morphed from a label of pride to opprobrium, something to be shunned not embraced.
I know very few things for sure, but there are two truths that I will stand by: First, you can’t tell a person how they feel; and second, you can’t blame a person for when they were born. My formative images of Israel were the hope of Camp David and Oslo, the Jew vs. Jew horror of Rabin’s assassination, and the violence of the intifadas. That is not the Israel through which American Jews come to understand Israel today. A Jew today encounters Israel by way of the devastation of Gaza, out-of-control settler violence, and right-wing politics. In the lived experience of many American Jews, Israel no longer inspires the reflexive pride and sense of security of an earlier generation; at times, just the opposite. What one generation experienced as the hard-earned necessity of Jewish power, another reads as the moral dangers of Jewish power. What one generation hears as calls for solidarity, another hears as calls for silence; what one generation understands as criticism, another experiences as betrayal. Generations of American Jews were raised with Zionism as the foundation stone of their Judaism, believing that to be a proud American Jew, in Brandeis’s formulation, is to be a proud Zionist. That is an increasingly untenable proposition for Jews who object to having their Judaism linked to the policies of the Israeli government. By a certain telling, Jewish critics of Zionism today are exactly the opposite of those of the 1920s. Those of yesteryear bristled at the possibility of their Jewish identities being tied to the Jewish state. Those of today bristle at the inescapability of their Jewish identities being tied to the Jewish state. The problem is not that they don’t care, but that they do care.
Whatever military victories Israel has extracted these past years on the kinetic front, we have lost – have been clobbered, actually – in the battle for hearts and minds. And in addition, by acts of commission and omission, we commit the sin of ideological and institutional purity tests – imposed by both the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment – that equate support for Israel with assent to the policies of the Israeli government. It is a posture that has resulted in incalculable self-inflicted damage. How can we ask others to differentiate between love of Israel and support for its government if we ourselves refuse to make that distinction? How can we ask others to summon the courage to stand with Israel if we, the American Jewish establishment, lack the courage to speak out when Israel falls short of its own founding ideals as a Jewish and democratic state? How can we ask others to hold complexity if we ourselves insist on simplicity? It is too easy to dismiss Jewish critics of Zionism as the problem, to write them off as know-nothings, brainwashed by woke ideology, and uncaring about the Jewish people. My conversations indicate otherwise. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through. The spirit of the season – and intellectual honesty itself – demands that we redirect some of our indignation toward ourselves and the role we have played in bringing us to this moment.
I have said that the problem is not just generational. It is not. But if I had to appropriate a biblical image, it would be that of the first family of the Jewish people, whom we read about today on Rosh Hashanah. Abraham receives the call to Lekh l’kha, “Go forth,” with the promise of blessing, progeny and, of course, land. Whatever the setbacks, no matter the doubts, Abraham understands these things as inseparable. To be in covenant with God is to be in covenant with one’s people is to be bound to the Land.
And then there is Abraham’s son Isaac. Isaac was not present when that promise was first made. He did not hear that Lekh l’khha call. He did not choose this journey. He also wasn’t the one who displaced his brother Ishmael. His mother and father did that, yet he is the one who inherits his brother’s enmity. And it is Isaac who is asked to put himself on the line for that promise. Bound on the altar at the top of Mount Moriah, that feeling is no abstraction. It is a demand made upon his body, his future, his life, to bear the burden of the promise first given to his father. I imagine Isaac as he heads up that mountain with his dad. He is doing the math in his head. “Here is the fire and the wood,” he says with fear and trembling. “Where is the lamb?” I imagine him looking up at his public-facing, knight-of-faith father and thinking, “I didn’t sign up for this! You got us into this; how exactly do you intend to get us out of it?” I imagine him thinking, “What ever happened to ‘your son, your only son, the one you love’?” The two walk up the mountain together. Are we at all surprised that they walk down apart, never to speak again?
Friends, there is no “us” and there is no “them.” There is only us. There is only our Jewish family. We do not lack for enemies; let us not make enemies of one another. We play for the name on the front of the jersey, not the back. We defend the tent, never wavering from our ahavat yisrael, our love for the people and State of Israel. And we expand the tent – no different than Israelis themselves – modeling that there are multiple ways to give expression to that love. Those of us who lead with love need to learn to accept criticism of Israel as an expression of love. Those of us who lead with critique, need to learn how to frame that critique by way of love. We must create a language – and curriculum – capable of holding all these forces at once: one that knows our story, is proud of our story, and is honest enough to teach its tensions without surrendering the story itself. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. We dare not let the tragedy of Abraham and Isaac, the failure to remain in conversation, become our own. I can think of no greater project for the future of Park Avenue Synagogue than to model for all of American Jewry what a vital, dynamic, and cohesive Jewish conversation, curriculum, and community look like that make room for all the ways that love of Israel can be expressed.
As long as Jews have been Jews, we have disagreed. None of us here are going to change that. So let’s stop fixating on the question of what label we wear and return to the only question that actually matters: “What are you doing, as an American Jew, to strengthen the Jewish future in Israel, in America, and around the globe?” If we want our legacy institutions to have legacies, then we have to work to make sure all voices know themselves to be stakeholders in our future. No different than those who came before us, we need to create communal structures that make room for the diversity of voices that constitute our communities. We all need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We are not as far apart as the world makes us out to be – as we ourselves make ourselves out to be. It is our Judaism, not our political views, that bind us together.
We may not agree today; we may not agree in our lifetimes. It was only after Abraham died that Isaac was able to uncover the wells his father had dug. Maybe that is the most a parent can hope for. Not that our children will believe exactly what we believe, or love exactly as we love, or tell the Jewish story precisely as we do. Just that someday they will return to the wells and that beneath all the dirt, all the politics, the anger, the arguments, and the disappointments – they will discover the water to still be there. Abraham cannot dig the wells for his son. He can only signal where they are and hope that one day his son will find them.
To look ahead is the charge of the holiday season. Of every season. It is what it means to be a Jew. To look not just at today or even tomorrow, but to look long. Where we were one hundred years ago, where we hope to be one hundred years from now, and what steps we need to take to make that dream a reality. That is what I am trying to do; that is what I ask you to join me in doing. As our synagogue president declared at our sanctuary dedication a century ago, so too today, so too a century from now: Let us make our synagogue “a place where men [and women] be inspired to a better life, their hearts and souls lifted to higher things, and their eyes directed toward the everlasting glory of Almighty God.”