The Self-Righteous Idolatry of the Anti-Zionist Rabbi

On Yom Kippur these enlightened Chicagoans and their pied piper were basking in their own moral superiority

Rabbi Brant Rosen is arrested during a protest against President Donald Trump's proposed policies on combating crime on February 21, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

On March 30, Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago, a synagogue on the heimish North Side of the city, made the unusual announcement that his congregation had “just voted to adopt anti-Zionism as a core value.” The proclamation arrived within days of 11 murders in a wave of terrorist attacks across Israel. On April 7, three more Israelis were killed on Dizengoff Street in the heart of Tel Aviv in this new wave of violence. It’s not often that an established synagogue declares its antipathy against the Jewish state as a core part of its identity—but then again, this wasn’t out of step for Rabbi Rosen, who’d been working himself up to this very moment for the better part of the past decade.

As it happens, I’ve known Rabbi Rosen since before “I was a man.” I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, and attended the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in neighboring Evanston, where Rabbi Brant held the rabbinate. Back then, he was, I suppose, a kind of liberal Zionist. I didn’t have much of an impression of him, other than that he seemed kind and Jewish. In 2002, when I became a bar mitzvah, Rabbi Brant led the service. In his notes on my d’var (which I recently read again), he seems reasonably sympathetic to Israel. 

By the time Rabbi Brant left JRC in 2014, my father and I had heard through the grapevine that he’d become a radical pro-Palestinian activist, and in our family, “Rabbi Brant” became a catchall for a certain kind of Jew we simply could not understand. When I moved back to Chicago this past year, I couldn’t help but go back to the source. I wanted to know: Who are these people? What even is a “non-Zionist” synagogue during the most spiritually elevated time of the year? 

To try to find the answer, I attended Tzedek’s 2021 High Holidays services over Zoom.

The High Holidays are my favorite time of year. They feel meaningful and personal in a way that no other holidays, religious or secular, do. Wherever I am in relation to my Judaism, I know that sometime in September or October, I will be called to assess my soul, no matter how brutal the accounting. In his opening remarks on Rosh Hashanah, it seemed Rabbi Rosen was on a similar path. “The High Holidays at its core allows us to step out of time, to reboot in a sense to affirm that we would start anew, to look back and look forward,” he said. “It’s this liminal in-between time that is inherently sacred time, and it’s also a time to think seriously about how we are accountable to one another and what we owe to each other and what we owe to the world.” 

I thought, Who cares if we fundamentally disagree about Jewish destiny? We’ll endure the accounting together, as Jews. These days are about the spirit, not national identity. Things quickly took a turn, however, during the rabbi’s introduction of the portion on Hagar and Ishmael. Using the most obvious inference available—that Abraham and Sarah casting out Hagar and Ishmael is the biblical version of the contemporary conflict—he said, “It is our sacred obligation to see and respond to the children of Gaza, to their parents, and to all who cry out to us from the wilderness.” Of course, the rabbi was referring to the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Gaza, and he read from an LA Times piece about the terror endured by Gazan families. He said nothing of the deaths Israel suffered in the conflict.

Before the mishebeirach, commenters wrote suggestions for who was in greatest need of healing: the children of Gaza, the Afghan people, and trees lost in forest fires—none were for the people of Israel. Soon after, the rabbi invited one congregant to offer a prayer for the courage to “dismantle systems of oppression”, and another to read a poem about Jubilee that contained the line “Rights to private property are no defense for profiteering off of death and poverty.” Finally, it was time for the rabbi’s sermon, which made the point that vaccine advocacy was comparable to pikuach nefesh, the injunction to, above all, save a life. “That means fighting misinformation is pikuach nefesh. Advocating for vaccine mandates is pikuach nefesh. Making vaccines available to underserved populations that lack access to health care is pikuach nefesh.”

By the time we reached the shofar service, the cognitive dissonance was pulsing through me. “We sound the shofar for liberation,” Rabbi Brant said. Where, I wondered, do my fellow service attendees believe the tradition of the ram’s horn comes from? Yonkers? Encino? Why continue to sound the shofar at all if they were going to sever all ties to the land of Israel, from which it came?

Kol Nidre services, also on Zoom, began with a stirring Enya-like riff on “Shema Koleinu,” and I was drawn in by the liturgical, musical magic. Listening to his opening Yom Kippur remarks, I felt an urge of empathy for the rabbi and his seemingly noble and utopian quest. Indeed, I admire people who are willing to stand up for unpopular beliefs. And the Kol Nidre itself was deeply moving, unavoidably, as the Aramaic belongs to everyone.

“Repair is always possible,” Rabbi Rosen encouraged. “We know that we are not perfect. We cannot fix what is broken completely, both in our own lives and in these systems that have been so corrupting life, in our communities and around the world. … Brokenness is not our destiny. Repair and return is always possible.”  

Return. What kind of return was he referring to? That became clearer during the sermon, when Rabbi Brant said that Tzedek Chicago was unequivocally opposed to “Jewish nation-statism” from its inception. Parroting Amnesty International, the rabbi also said Israel was an apartheid state. And while citing the numbers of Palestinian dead in the May conflict, he shared his grief. “As with past Israeli attacks on Gaza, I found those weeks in May to be utterly unbearable.”

In the comments, congregants wrote, “Thank God for the moral leadership of this community,” and “We were weary of Zionist congregations. We are so so nourished by this offering.” That’s good for them, I suppose, but it’s impossible not to notice that this nourishment has nothing to do with the Torah or Jewish history, which is nothing if not obsessed with return to the land of Israel. It’s the nourishment of political talking points, the same thin gruel being doled out on college campuses, in prestigious newspaper columns, and within every other elite, progressive space in the United States.  

Here we were, then, on Yom Kippur 2021, during a wave of stabbing attacks in Israel. The country was in a state of minor panic over the escape from Gilboa Prison of six “security prisoners,” two of whom were still on the loose. (One congregant asked that “the recaptured Palestinian political prisoners” be included in the thoughts and prayers of the mishebeirach.) During the morning service the next day, Rabbi Rosen delivered his most ambitious sermon yet, the one he called “There’s More of Us Than There Are of Them,” a jeremiad against white American males and their rage. 

It was best to understand aggrieved white Americans as analogous to the sea monster Leviathan, the rabbi explained, which is “never fully vanquished.” The vital question, then, on Yom Kippur, was how to respond to such evil. Channeling King Théoden in The Two Towers, the rabbi asked, “How do we resist such fierce and unrelenting rage?” To go on the offense. To embrace the moniker white radical in place of white liberal. To continue with organizing and activist work. And to remember that the shofar blast on Yom Kippur is about changing the status quo and that “setbacks and backlashes are a sign of their fear, not their strength.” 

*** 

Granted, the entire Days of Awe were being conducted on Zoom, and that is already an impersonal, distancing mechanism, but by the time we reached Neilah, I couldn’t focus on the service. I had become fixated on the sheer lack of introspection. Normally, on Yom Kippur, if you’re even half-interestedly participating in the repetition of the prayers, by the time you reach Neilah, you have been forced to meditate on your shortcomings, your assholery, the dark thoughts, the evil impulses you are called to resist. It is a profoundly personal holiday, a 25-hour struggle session against yourself. But from Rosh Hashanah right up to the closing gates, the congregants of Tzedek Chicago seemed most interested in The Struggle™ rather than any kind of reckoning within themselves. 

In the Tzedek liturgy that we used for the holiday, you’ll find the traditional vidui and these inward-looking admonitions: 

We have done wrong. We have been untrue. We have broken the law. We have defamed others. We have harmed others. We have acted unjustly. We have been zealous. We have caused hurt. We have lied. We have acted rashly. We have covered up. We have behaved with scorn. We have abused our responsibility. We have neglected those who need us. We have been unnecessarily stubborn. We have acted offensively. We have bent justice. We have caused dissension. We have been apathetic. We have aided wrongdoers. We have acted corruptly. We have disdained others. We have gone off course. We have misled. 

And there was some light chest tapping and a cursory run-through of the ancient plea for forgiveness. But much more reflective of the energy of the day was the adapted Al Chet prayer: “For the wrong we have done before you, for preferring militarized fences to open borders”; “For the wrong we have done before you, for demonizing immigrants as threats to be neutralized”; “For the wrong we have done before you, for the continued colonization of indigenous peoples.”

Of course, these are not genuine requests for forgiveness before the Lord. These statements offload guilt onto the evil conservative white supremacists that the rabbi and his congregants spent 25 hours combatting. These sins are not the sins of the evolved, liberated, liberationist attendees, but the sins of their deplorable countrymen and fascist Israeli cousins. The good people of Tzedek Chicago would never prefer militarized fences to open borders, never demonize an immigrant, never colonize anyone—and certainly would never raise a rifle to defend their people.

At the time of year commanded to be used for self-reflection and an accounting of the soul, these enlightened Chicagoans and their pied piper were instead basking in their own moral superiority. Of course, there’s nothing brave about such people declaring their anti-Zionism—it’s the ultimate demonstration of narcissism and obedience. Only, rather than obeying divine authority, they obey the dictates of a progressive ideological machinery that treats bashing Israel and defunding the police in U.S. cities as two sides of the same coin. It is, in other words, the quintessential modern form of idol worship. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Clayton Fox is a former Tablet journalism fellow and has also written for Los Angeles Magazine, Real Clear Investigations, and the Brownstone Institute. Follow him on Twitter @clayfoxwriter.