In recent years, calls for Jewish renewal in Israel have become increasingly urgent. Faced with the exhaustion of the religious-secular divide as a structuring principle of Jewish life, a growing range of educators, rabbis, artists, and cultural thinkers have sought new languages through which Jewish tradition might once again function as a living horizon rather than as a sectarian boundary. These efforts often present themselves as attempts to articulate a “third way” beyond rigid denominational identities – one that treats Judaism not merely as belief or law, but as culture, ethics, practice, memory, and shared inheritance.
Yet, the language of renewal is never neutral. In Israel, Jewish renewal is inseparable from questions of authority and legitimacy: Who is allowed to speak in the name of Judaism? Which forms of renewal are recognized as authentic, and which are dismissed as marginal, foreign, or irrelevant? And which genealogies of renewal are remembered, translated, or quietly erased in the process?
These questions have become especially visible with the emergence of initiatives that explicitly claim to move beyond the religious-secular binary while grounding themselves firmly within Zionist-Religious (dati le’umi) leadership and language. One prominent example is the “Lekhathilah” movement, which presents itself as a non-sectarian framework for Jewish depth, culture, and halakhic seriousness. Its stated goal – to renew Jewish life without reproducing the old binaries – is compelling. But the way this goal is articulated, and the sources it acknowledges or ignores, reveal a broader structural tension in contemporary Israeli Jewish discourse.
Jewish Renewal and the Promise of Post-Binary Life
Efforts to loosen the grip of the religious-secular divide did not begin with the most recent wave of renewal initiatives. Over the past two decades, Israel has seen the growth of pluralistic batei midrash, joint educational frameworks, and cultural institutions that insist on Jewish study as a shared practice rather than a marker of sectarian belonging. Midreshet Ein Prat, founded in 2001 as a pluralistic beit midrash, brought together participants from religious, traditional, and secular backgrounds for sustained Jewish learning. More recently, the Jerusalem-based “Neviah” school has articulated an explicitly post-binary pedagogy, framing Judaism as a cultural and ethical horizon rather than as a denominational identity.
What unites these projects is not a single theology, but a sociological insight: lived Jewish experience in Israel no longer maps neatly onto inherited categories. Many Israelis pray without identifying as “religious,” study Jewish texts without accepting halakhic authority, or seek moral and cultural depth in Jewish sources without committing to institutional religion. Renewal, in this sense, names an already-existing reality rather than a future aspiration.
A “New Torah” and the Boundaries of Renewal
The longing for renewal has recently been condensed into the evocative language of a “New Torah.” Following the events of October 7, the Zionist-Religious poet and educator Elhanan Nir published a poem in Haaretz calling for a “new Mishnah and a new Gemara,” alongside “new literature and new cinema.” The poem was first published in English translation for The Lehrhaus under the title “Now we need a New Torah.” It was widely read as an attempt to stretch the category of Torah beyond its conventional boundaries, placing contemporary cultural production – poetry, art, film – alongside classical rabbinic texts.
At the same time, the poem’s reception exposed a persistent fault line. While many readers in liberal Jewish circles embraced Nir’s call as resonating with long-standing non-Orthodox approaches to renewal, Nir himself later expressed discomfort with this embrace, suggesting a clear boundary in the discourse he wished to establish. The discomfort was telling: renewal was welcome, but only when it could be clearly distinguished from Reform or liberal Judaism. The fear was not innovation as such, but the loss of Orthodox authority over innovation.
Lived Judaism Beyond the Binary
My own biography offers a concrete illustration of this tension. Raised within Religious Zionism and educated in its central institutions – including the Mercaz HaRav and Har Etzion yeshivas – I later received rabbinic ordination from the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. That move did not represent a passage from “religious” to “secular,” but rather a refusal of the binary itself. In my ordination sermon, though not stated explicitly, the animating claim was that Reform Jewish communities in Israel articulate, more clearly than any other framework, a lived alternative to the religious-secular divide. Although institutionally religious, these communities do not operate within the political category of “religious” as it functions in Israeli public discourse, but instead give shape to forms of Jewish life that move beyond this binary.
This refusal became tangible when my eldest son entered a joint public kindergarten. Initially registered as “secular,” he was barred from participating in the school’s prayer time. When reclassified as “religious,” prayer became mandatory. In both cases, the institution assumed that Jewish identity could only function through fixed categories. For a child raised in a Reform community – where prayer, study, obligation, and choice coexist – neither position made sense. The problem was not theology or belief, but classification.
Such moments reveal the everyday cost of maintaining rigid taxonomies in a society whose Jewish life has already outgrown them.
Renewal Already Practiced
The forms of renewal now described as daring innovations did not emerge in a vacuum. For decades, non-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel have cultivated practices that deliberately blur the religious-secular divide. One concrete example comes from my own rabbinical studies at Hebrew Union College.
In a required course on halakhah – one of several core courses structured in this way – students, believers, and skeptics alike were asked to complete a simple but demanding sentence: “If halakhah is…, then I am a halakhic Jew.” The exercise neither rejected halakhah nor sanctified it uncritically. Instead, it required each of us to articulate a personal and responsible relationship to halakhah as a source of meaning, obligation, critique, or inspiration. Authority was not abolished, but reconfigured as dialogical rather than coercive. Significantly, the same exercise continues to shape rabbinic formation: again, this year, one of the college’s newly ordained rabbis based her entire credential sermon on Nir’s poem.
This pedagogical framework matters not because it was exceptional, but precisely because it was ordinary – embedded in the routine formation of rabbis and educators rather than framed as a radical intervention. Many of the gestures now celebrated as daring innovations within Orthodox renewal discourse – flexible authority, cultural translation, ethical centrality, and the refusal of rigid identity labels – were already being practiced, quite matter-of-factly, as part of an established pedagogical culture rather than as an isolated experiment.
Selective Inheritance: A Specific Israeli Case
This pattern of renewal through selective inheritance becomes especially visible in public discourse surrounding Lekhathilah. In an interview published in Makor Rishon, R. Chayim Vidal, a senior figure in the movement’s leadership and chair of its public council, argued that Judaism should be understood not merely as a religion but as a broad culture or civilization. To illustrate this point, he turned to the thought of A. D. Gordon, presenting Gordon as a key source for this expansive understanding of Judaism and expressing concern about what he described as “cultural ignorance” in Israeli society.
What often goes unremarked in such discussions is that the most systematic articulation of Judaism as a civilization was formulated not by Zionist thinkers, but by R. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, already in the early twentieth century. The preference for citing A. D. Gordon rather than Kaplan is therefore not incidental. Gordon’s Zionist idiom registers as native and self-evidently Israeli, whereas Kaplan’s thought – identified with non-Orthodox and Diaspora Judaism – remains largely absent from Israeli public discourse. This absence is frequently justified by the assumption that liberal denominations represent diaspora imports that do not fully belong within Israeli Judaism.[1] What is ultimately embraced, then, is not the genealogy of the idea but the idea itself, once it has been severed from its non-Orthodox origins. This is not an isolated oversight but a recurring mechanism: renewal is made culturally acceptable through translation into Orthodox-Zionist idioms, while parallel or prior non-Orthodox frameworks are left unacknowledged.
Renewal, Critique, and a Concrete Shift
It would be a mistake to interpret this mechanism solely as an expression of bad faith. Structures, unlike intentions, can change – and in this case, critique has already begun to produce movement.
Following the publication of my earlier critique in Makor Rishon, Lekhathilah took a notable step. At a recent public event in Tel Aviv devoted to halakhah and its contemporary meaning – organized by Mabu’a, the network associated with Midreshet Ein Prat, and presented in cooperation with Lekhathilah – a Reform rabbi was invited to participate in the discussion. The presence of Yoav Sorek, head of Lekhathilah, underscored the significance of this moment as a concrete shift in the terms of the conversation. This was not a symbolic gesture but a substantive acknowledgment that conversations about halakhah, culture, and Jewish renewal cannot be confined to Orthodox voices alone.
This development does not negate the structural argument advanced here. On the contrary, it confirms it. The very fact that critique could open the door to such participation demonstrates both the persistence of exclusion and the possibility of its transformation.
Recognition as the Condition of Renewal
Jewish renewal in Israel today does not suffer from a lack of creativity or commitment. What it lacks is a shared language of recognition – one capable of acknowledging that many of its most compelling ideas have already been lived, tested, and refined within non-Orthodox frameworks.
To move beyond the religious-secular divide requires more than new initiatives or poetic calls for a “New Torah.” It requires the willingness to recognize renewal wherever it has taken root, even when it emerges outside the boundaries of Orthodox legitimacy. Only then can Jewish renewal become not a project of selective inheritance, but a genuinely shared endeavor.
[1] See also David Sperber, “Not Orthodox, Not Secular: Reform Jewish Israelis Are Not Welcome in Israel,” Haaretz (June 14 2025).
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