'Our relationship with Israel shapes our Jewish identity'

UK’s top 2 Progressive rabbis: Israel’s direction risks it becoming ‘incompatible with Jewish values’

Israeli government’s path ‘fractures our relationship with Israel,’ and criticizing it, far from disloyalty, is ‘a Jewish obligation,’ Rabbi Charley Baginsky says

Israel’s current political direction poses an “existential threat” to Judaism, with the country at risk of becoming “incompatible with Jewish values,” two of the UK’s Progressive rabbinical leaders told The Guardian in an interview published Tuesday.

Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy, co-leads of the country’s nascent Progressive Judaism movement, said that criticism of Israel’s government is “a Jewish obligation” rather than an act of disloyalty.

“We’ve often talked about the direction of Israel being an existential threat not to Jews per se, but to Judaism,” Baginsky said in the interview, timed to promote the movement’s new book, which was published Monday. “What happens when the direction of the government within Israel takes Israel down a line that makes it incompatible with our Jewish values? That’s a huge worry.”

The Progressive Judaism movement was formed last year in a merger of the Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism movements. It claims to represent about 30% of the country’s Jews who are affiliated with synagogues.

Speaking to The Times of Israel after the Guardian article’s publication, Baginsky elaborated on why the actions of the Israeli government, including military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon following the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre, are posing a religious crisis.

“For many of us in Progressive Judaism, our relationship with Israel shapes a large part of our Jewish identity,” she said. “Most of us in Jewish leadership roles in the UK have spent extensive time in Israel, and our relationship with Israel winds itself through our identity, as well as our liturgy, our theology, and our reading of the Torah.”

“When we watch the Israeli government lead the country down a path where its behaviors are so incompatible with Judaism,” she continued, “it fractures our relationship with Israel and our sense of what it means to be Jewish. This, in turn, creates an existential threat for us of what it means to understand ourselves.”

Not all Jews subscribe to the progressive values she holds, Baginsky acknowledged, but the different sides need to spend more time listening to each other.

“Let’s say what we know: Judaism has never believed that there is one truth, beyond there being one God,” she said. “We’re a nation of people who know how to hold disagreement and model what it means to disagree.”

“I have no issue with people seeing Judaism through different lenses, or arguing with me about what Judaism says about our values,” Baginsky continued. “But when we reach a point where we are not allowing each other to speak, and not willing to hear each other, then we inherit the polarization that we see in the world and a leadership that is not taking us to good places.”

Last summer, Baginsky and Levy were booed off the stage at a London rally in support of Israel’s hostages after they called for an end to the war in Gaza and expressed support for the idea of a Palestinian state.

In her interview in The Guardian, Baginsky stressed that it is important to challenge the narrative of Jewish politics being put forth by far-right leaders such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

“We have a responsibility to show that our religious Zionism is not the religious Zionism that we see sometimes coming out of the West Bank,” Baginsky said. “My Zionism is also a recognition of Palestinian self-determination.”

Levy told the Guardian that asking tough questions of Israel is not a sign of disloyalty to Israel or to the Jewish community.

“What the government of Israel does reflects on us as Jews and reflects on our Judaism,” he said. “It is to be part of a millennial conversation about Jewish values and what God wants of us in the world and our relationship with the land.”

The movement’s first book, “Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel,” is a collection of 40 essays from Jewish clergy and community leaders debating the issues surrounding Israel today. The Progressive Judaism movement has an inaugural convention scheduled for June.

“The fact that our first publication talks about Zionism and the State of Israel tells you something about how important this relationship is to us,” Baginsky told The Times of Israel. “This is an important and values-led discussion that’s happening across the UK and the Diaspora, and people are crying out for a different kind of conversation.”

“It’s really important to me that there is not one voice here, but 40 people entering these conversations from such different places with deep intellectual rigor,” she said. “Our religious Zionism comes out of our sense of struggling with what it means to be a religious Jew.”