Over the past two months, during the American elections for the World Zionist Congress in the United States, we have seen people rise up and show how much they care about Israel and the future of the Jewish world. So many people came out to voice their support for Israel by voting with nearly double the amount of votes as the previous election. The numbers of voters were historic, and the participation across the US showed that the beautiful connection the Jewish people have to Israel is alive and well.
While the massive support for Israel in American Jewry has been a true blessing since October 7, we also saw, unfortunately, a lot of infighting, negativity, and parties focusing more on tearing each other down rather than on what they want to do to build up the Jewish people. In addition to parties trying to stop the agenda of their fellow parties, many also focused on a myopic set of goals that would only help their own constituents, which isn’t the best method for serving the greater Jewish people.
Every slate running for the WZC in America has good intentions. We all want to support Israel. We all want to help build the Jewish future. We all want a stronger sense of Jewish identity in the United States, and we all want to live in peace and do away with antisemitism and hate.
We need unity
The one thing lacking from the actions taken by many who ran in the elections is unity. This all took place while Israel, the very country we are supporting, is still at war, and while we still have 58 hostages who are held captive by our enemy.
We don’t need more divisiveness. We don’t need to highlight personal, political, or religious agendas that divide us. What we need is unity. Unity doesn’t mean uniformity. It doesn’t mean that we all need to think alike or that we have to be alike.
The Jewish people were never alike. We always had our differences. Even standing at Sinai in front of God, where our sages tell us that we were like one person with one heart, we were still 12 tribes, each with their own unique perspective and place among the Jewish people.
The difference between then and now is that we knew what to do with our differences then. We knew how to highlight and elevate our own uniqueness and our own strengths so that we could be a part of the Jewish people. We still can, and we must.
After the AZM announces the election results, all the parties that were fighting each other, that were mudslinging, accusing, and even backstabbing one another, will need to find a way to work together. None of that should have happened in the first place, but we can’t change the past; we can only hope to build a better future. We will need to do it together.
A broad coalition
As the leader of one of the slates for the WZC, I hereby commit to spending my efforts, and those of my party, to working toward building a broad coalition of Jewish organizations and communities. My party will not align with any one single stream. Instead, we will strive to be a movement that brings together the full spectrum of the Jewish people.
Because that is what the WZC is and should be. Not a plenum where each group aims to solve only their sectarian issues but a place where we learn to work together to solve the issues facing the entire Jewish people – not just in America or Israel but around the world.
I publicly declare that my party, Aish Ha’am, is committed to working with all parties represented in the WZO. For us, unity is not just a value; it’s who we are, and it’s essential to the future of the Jewish people. That is why our party is made up of people from the entire Jewish people. We have secular Jews, religious Jews, Jews on the Left of the political spectrum, and Jews on the Right.
I built the slate this way on purpose, because the WZC can’t focus on solving only some problems for some people; we focus on our shared responsibility that we have to all the Jewish people. We need to work together with wisdom to bring the lessons of unity, not uniformity, from long ago and use them today to make a better tomorrow.
Most importantly, we need to do it with love. Love for ourselves and our viewpoints, surely, for our families and our communities. We need to bring that love with us in an effort to solve the problems that they have. But we also need to work with love for our fellow Jews, regardless of which slate they are on or which party they support. We need to love them enough to want to solve their problems as well as our own, because their problems are our own.
All one people
We are all one people. We are many tribes, many factions, many slates, and we come from all over the world. But at the end of the day, we are all one people who share the same God and who, history has taught us again and again, even in recent events, share the same fate. Our strength doesn’t emanate from our sectarian politics or political prowess; it emanates from our unity, from our willingness to see our fellow Jews and take responsibility for their problems.
That is what I will endeavor to do as part of the WZC; that is what my party will endeavor to do once the dust settles on the election and the congress convenes, come October. I commit to this because that is what the WZC was created to do: to be the voice of the entire Jewish people, to come together to discuss the issues that affect us, that affect our communities, that affect our families, and that affect us as a people. Some of our issues may be different, some may make us choose different priorities, but we need to come together to solve them as a people.
When we can do so with wisdom – and with enough love for one another to see that the problems of different groups of Jews is still our problem because we are one nation, one family, no matter what side of the political or religious aisle you are from – then we can finally take on the collective responsibility that we have been given by those who voted for us to lead all of the Jewish people, together, toward a better tomorrow.
The writer, a rabbi, is CEO of Aish, a global Jewish institute, and chairman of Aish Ha’am, a new party in the World Zionist Congress. He also serves on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency. Prior to Aish, he was eastern director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City and contributed to the center’s fight against antisemitism.