Who Speaks for Judaism when the Majority of Jews Don’t?

Israel Elections 2026 Brief

Serious Analysis for a Decisive Election

Issue #7| June 18 2026

Previous issues of this publication have examined the leaders contending for Israel's future. This issue steps back from the contestants to ask a question none of them — and none of their voters — can avoid: can the Judaism of the Jewish State generate responses up to the level of the questions imposed by this century, or has it become captive to formulations designed for a world that no longer exists?

In October 2026, Israel holds a national election. Observers will frame it, as they always do, in the familiar vocabulary of political analysis: security, judicial reform, religion and state, the economy — and now the cascading consequences of October 7, the confrontation with Iran, and the realignment of American foreign policy under Trump. 

These are real issues. Beneath them, however, lies a question no election can answer: can the Judaism of the Jewish State generate responses up to the level of the questions imposed by this century — or has it become captive to formulations designed for a world that no longer exists?

That question did not arise in a vacuum. It arose because for decades most Jews carried-and continue to carry- their Jewish identity without examining its content. This Jewish majority assumed that Medieval and Rabbinical Judaism, in all its contemporary iterations, would eventually yield to the weight of its own anachronism. Modernity would take care of it. History would render it irrelevant. It was a comfortable assumption — and a catastrophically mistaken one.

That same dismissiveness — the refusal to take seriously what one prefers to ignore — runs through the cascading crises now defining this election: the catastrophe of October 7 and its unresolved aftermath; the failure of the confrontation with Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions or dismantle the network of proxies encircling Israel; the radical realignment of American foreign policy under Trump; the refusal of the Haredi world to share the burden of military service; the settlers and Religious Zionist push to expel Palestinians from the West Bank; the encroachment of religious authority into civil and military life — in particular, the effort to erase women’s visibility from society. In each case, a majority assumed that what it refused to engage would simply become irrelevant. In each case, it did not.

For decades, Israel filled the space that engagement would have occupied. Supporting Israel, or simply identifying with it, allowed unaffiliated Jews to feel their Jewishness without examining its content. Israel was the substance their identity pointed toward without their having to define what that substance was. This was a comfortable arrangement. Israel, for much of its history, projected an image compatible with broadly liberal Jewish self-understanding — a democracy, a refuge, a civilizational achievement under pressure.

That comfort is no longer available. 

Over the past decade, and with accelerating force since 2023, Israel's conduct — its policies, its rhetoric, its governing coalitions, its wars — has forced itself into the consciousness of Jews everywhere. What was once possible to acknowledge abstractly and then set aside can no longer be set aside. 

The Judaism of the Jewish State is now the dominant global image of what Jewish values look like when they govern, when they command an army, when they hold political power over millions of people Jewish and non- Jewish. That image is impossible to ignore — and for the unaffiliated majority that had outsourced its Jewish identity to Israel without examining what Israel was becoming, it has made one question inescapable:

That question is not primarily political. It demands something deeper than political analysis — it demands that Jews examine what they actually believe their civilization is for. 

That examination has a precedent in figures such as Ahad Ha’am, Franz Rosenzweig and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, among others. In twentieth century in America, rabbi and philosopher Mordecai Kaplan, argued that Judaism should be understood not as a fixed religious system but as a civilization — an evolving constellation of language, memory, ethics, law, culture, and collective aspiration through which Jews respond to the actual challenges of their historical moment. 

His key insight was simple and radical: civilizations do not generate answers once and for all. Their responses emerge from specific circumstances and are adequate to those circumstances — not to all circumstances for all time.

Medieval Judaism-the dominant for of Jewish religiosity, was a civilizational response of extraordinary sophistication. But it was a response to specific challenges: stateless minority existence, persecution, and the need to maintain identity under the authority of others. Those were the questions. The answers were brilliant, and they worked. They are not, however, the questions Jews face today.

Today's questions are different: what does the Jewish moral tradition contribute to the challenges of this century — democracy under pressure, the responsible use of power, human dignity in an age of technology, the obligations of a majority toward minorities within its borders? 

These questions have no direct answers in the medieval codes and are not addressed in Jewish liturgy, because the medieval codes were not written for a people in this situation. Applying those codes as if they answer contemporary questions and sensibilities is not fidelity to tradition. It is anachronism — and when anachronism acquires state power, it becomes something more consequential than an intellectual error.

The movements consolidating power in contemporary Israel are not merely conservative. They are theologically systematic. They offer coherent answers to ultimate questions — who the Jewish people are, what their destiny is, and what law should govern their collective life. Those answers are delivered with certainty and now with the force of state institutions. 

Their weakness is precisely this: most of contemporary Jews do not believe in them, because they live in the contemporary world, not the medieval one. No civilization can sustain itself on answers that most of its members cannot honestly affirm, no matter how institutionally those answers are enforced.

Jewish tradition possesses resources of genuine relevance to the actual world. It has pondered deeply on accountability, justice, the moral limits of power, and the obligations that come with freedom. It understands that societies cannot survive without memory, that power unconstrained by ethics corrupts what it touches, and that human beings are accountable for what they do with the circumstances history hands them. These are not ideological concerns. They speak directly to the defining challenges of this century.

But those resources do not deploy themselves. They require Jews — unaffiliated, secular, liberal, culturally identified, whatever the self-description — to stop outsourcing the question of Jewish purpose, and with it the face and meaning of Jewish civilization itself, to whoever happens to control the Israeli government. They require Jews to take up the actual work of asking what their civilization has to say about the world they are living in.

October 2026 will determine who governs Israel. It will not determine what Judaism means. 

That question belongs neither to politicians nor to parties. It will be answered, or left unanswered — and either way, the consequences will be felt by every Jew who lives in the real, everyday world and asks, however quietly, what their civilization has to offer to the human project.