It is one thing to write a book about the marvel of Jewish continuity across three millennia. It’s a very different thing to speak on the topic, as I recently did, to a group of October 7 survivors from Gaza border kibbutzim. We met in Sha’ar Hanegev, an umbrella community for about a dozen kibbutzim, at the regional seniors’ club of the area worst hit by Hamas. Most of my listeners were elderly kibbutzniks, members of my parents’ generation. They had been shut in their safe rooms during the massacre. They had lost family, friends or neighbors in the cruelest ways imaginable. And here I was, trying to reconfigure Jewish destiny with these strong and heartbroken people, who had spent their lives building communities that must now literally rise from the ashes.
They had asked me to speak about Jews and Words, a book I coauthored more than a decade ago with my late father, Amos Oz, offering our answer to the riddle of Jewish cultural longevity. As secular Jews, we consider Jewish history to be a miracle, but human rather than divine, bound up with the commitment to literacy. “Ours is not a bloodline but a text line,” we wrote.
There was no need to assert the staying power of secular Judaism to this particular audience. Like my own family, they have witnessed five or six thriving generations of secular Jews. Their generation took active part in Israeli state-building and the flourishing of Hebrew culture. They connected deeply with the ancient Jewish values still at work even among us atheists: communal solidarity, social justice, textual parenting and collective remembrance.
I discussed another perennial legacy we all inherited, the chutzpah-tinged argumentativeness. Jews have never been submissive and obedient, not even to their own traditions. Throughout history, they interpreted, debated, posed challenges and solved intellectual puzzles. Here, my father and I suggested, is a specific Jewish cure for fanaticism and violence: putting our disagreements into words.
My listeners enjoyed the idea, which was kind of them. They could have easily accused me of being naïve. After all, they had recently experienced physical violence that words cannot begin to describe. I was therefore touched when the first question referred to the current plight of diaspora Jews. Will younger Jews abroad, someone asked, either frightened by the hate or increasingly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, decamp from the community in multitudes? I didn’t have the heart to share my own doubts. How many Jewish families can no longer put disagreement into words as they evade politics at their holiday tables?
Soon, the conversation turned to the deep end of Israel’s political woes. Growing up in a kibbutz we were intimately linked to biblical geography, to ancient ruins of Jewish civilization literally at our doorstep. But equally strong was the humanist Jewish creed we were raised upon. One of the Jews’ oldest ethical imperatives is justice, both individual and universal. Ancient Hebrews probably invented the very idea of equality before the law. This does not exclude opposing traditions of separatism and supremacism. But the old kibbutz values—indeed, Israel’s Declaration of Independence values—are a Jewish legacy tightly woven into the Western humanist tradition. This is why, for the founders of Zionism, the modern state of the Jews could be nothing but a peace-seeking democracy.
As my listeners rightly pointed out, some Israeli leaders and rabbis, currently very powerful, are now aiming to divorce Judaism from democracy. Their notion of Jewish continuity is far from humanist. It allows the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of a mystical collective, and of innocents—Jews and Palestinians—for territorial expansion. The chasm is deeply felt. Imagine how hurtful it was for people like my audience to hear MK Simcha Rothman, ringleader of the current wave of antiliberal legislation, recently quip that “there aren’t, and there have never been, secular [Jews] in Israel.”
Many survivors of the October 7 massacre are watching in horror as meaningful public debate erodes. Many hostages’ families now openly assert that the government has abandoned them, and most of my audience seemed to agree. Opinions on a deal with Hamas may legitimately differ, but the ugly scenes in the Knesset, where relatives of those still held in Gaza are now regularly shunned and abused, show the time-honored legacy of Jewish solidarity crumbling before our eyes.
Significantly enough, my conversation with the kibbutzniks did not end on a note of anger, helplessness or despair. The sheer human strength of the dozens of people I met that day was palpable.
One participant gave me her new book, a simple and stark account of her own survival on October 7 alongside memories of her childhood in post-Holocaust Europe. Others told me that they demonstrate for democracy every Saturday evening. So do their grandchildren. Like a great many Israelis, they staunchly reject the role of hapless victims. Instead, they are pulling up the sleeves of their old work clothes to rebuild and to mend, not only their own lives and communities, but Israeli society. As in the United States, such healing will have to include public debate itself, the capacity to put political disagreements into reasoned words.
As I traveled home, more hopeful than I had been in a long while, I recalled a phrase that went viral after October 7: “No substance in the universe is as tough as a kibbutznik grandmother.” Quite an addition, I thought, to the future annals of Jewish continuity.
Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli essayist and history professor emerita at the University of Haifa.