Yavne or Masada

“Choose life that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

According to Israeli historian Yuval Harari, Jews are facing a crisis as transformative as the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, where, to quote Rabbi Shaul Magid, “what is at stake is nothing less than the moral fiber of the Jewish people” (The Will to (Not) Believe, shaulmagid.substack.com).

Back then, facing the overwhelming might of Imperial Rome, the Jews of Jerusalem, trusting that their God would protect the holy city, refused to surrender and unintentionally chose death.

Today, trusting in the overwhelming might of the Israeli military and believing they are fulfilling the promise of their God, the Jews of Israel are abandoning the life-affirming values of Judaism and once again choosing death: death of Palestinians, death of Jews, and death of the Jewish soul.

Back then, as Jerusalem burned, Eliezer Ben-Yair and 960 zealots escaped to Masada, a mountain fortress in the Negev Desert built by Herod the Great. There, according to the latest archaeological evidence, they continued to fight the Roman army for a few more weeks. The night before the Romans took Masada, the defenders also chose death and committed suicide.

Eliezer Ben-Yair’s contemporary, Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakai, chose life. Recognizing the imminent fall of Jerusalem and unable to persuade the city's leaders to seek peace, Ben Zakai faked his death, smuggled himself out of Jerusalem in a coffin, and convinced Vespasian, the commander of the Roman army and future Emperor, to grant him and his students refuge to study Torah and Judaism in Yavne, a coastal city south of present-day Tel Aviv.

Choosing death at Masada gave modern Jewish zealots a rallying cry, “Masada shall not fall again.” Choosing life in Yavne provided the Jewish people and the world with a vibrant Jewish civilization filled with scholars, mystics, philosophers, writers, artists, doctors, lawyers, judges, and revolutionaries.

Back then, the Jews at Masada chose physical death. Today, as a recent survey by Professor Tamir Sorek from Penn State (“Yes to Transfer,” Haaretz, May 28, 2025) shows, the Jews of Israel are choosing spiritual death.

• Eighty-two percent of Jewish Israelis support expelling Gazans from Gaza, with fifty-two percent saying they are “very” supportive.

• Fifty-six percent of Jewish Israelis support the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.”

• When asked if the Israeli army, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?” forty-seven percent responded affirmatively.

Looking more closely at the numbers, it becomes clear that the more religious an Israeli Jew is, the more spiritually disconnected they tend to be. While it’s true that seventy percent of secular Israelis supported the expulsions of Gazans from Gaza, this number rose to ninety percent among the religious. Thirty-eight percent of secular Israeli Jews supported expelling their fellow Arab citizens, and thirty-one percent would endorse genocide. Among the religious, these figures were at least double.

So much for the idea that Judaism—at least Orthodox Judaism in Israel—is a source of justice, compassion, and peace, rather than a breeding ground for hate, violence, and inhumanity.

I’m a liberal Diaspora Jew who left Orthodoxy sixty years ago. DNA testing reveals that I am 99% German Jew and 1% European. The former explains my affinity for Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Erich Fromm, and Hannah Arendt, while the latter explains why I like U2.

As a Diaspora Jew, I could ignore this survey or dismiss it as the not-so-surprising attitude of a traumatized population that has lived under the threat of genocide their entire lives. However, the worship of Israel has become the de facto religion for most Jews, and the genocidal madness infecting Israeli Jews is consuming the souls of Diaspora Jews as well.

The Jewish people must choose between Eliezer Ben-Yair and Yochanan ben Zakai, between Masada and Yavne. I fear we will pick the former now just as we did then.

No, Israel will not fall, but Jews face spiritual destruction. Where Yochanan ben Zakai established a Judaism based on peace, justice, compassion, and humility, along with a politics of equal law for citizens and noncitizens alike (Psalm 34:14; Deuteronomy 16:20; Micah 6:8; Leviticus 19:18, 34; Exodus 12:49; Numbers 15:16; Leviticus 24:22), modern Israel and the religion of Zionism are promoting a Judaism that worships the State and reveres power and Jewish supremacy.

As the shadow of the Shoah (Holocaust), the brutal pogrom of October 7^th, and rising Jew-hatred in the United States and around the world push Jews out of Yavne and into Masada, a few brave Jews must abandon the spiritually empty cult of Israelism and create a new, life-affirming Judaism based on the One Foot Judaism of Yochanan Ben Zakai’s teacher, Rabbi Hillel.

When challenged by a Roman soldier to teach him the entire Torah while the soldier stood on one foot, Rabbi Hillel replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else. That is the entire Torah. Everything else is commentary. Go and study it!” (Talmud, Shabbat 31a).

My teaching partner Frank Levy and I embrace Hillel's Torah of the Golden Rule. Like Hillel, we view “all the rest”—Jewish texts, teachings, and traditions—as commentary on the Rule to be studied and adapted. This deepens our understanding of and engagement with the Golden Rule. This represents the Judaism of the new Yavne, a Judaism beyond tribalism and denominations.

I expect to hear from many Jews who will label me as self-hating, anti-Zionist, and anti-Israel. All I’m saying is that I oppose both expulsion and genocide. If you equate being against expulsion and genocide with being against Zionism and Israel, I believe you have a very dark and dangerous view of Zionism and Israel.

I’ve written about the Judaism I love in many books, especially Open Secrets, Zen Mind, Jewish Mind, and Judaism without Tribalism. Frank is working on our “One Foot Judaism” manifesto and would be happy to share it with you if you ask. What we are doing for Judaism, we encourage others to do for their religions as well. Please email Frank at prepare.respond@gmail.com.