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 the Gaza border kibbutzim.
We met in Sha’ar Hanegev, at the regional seniors’ club of the area worst hit by Hamas. Most of my listeners were elderly kibbutzniks, members of my parent’s generation. They had been shut in their safe rooms during the massacre. They were, every one of them, bereaved—losing 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 co-authored over 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. Here was the world’s first culture ever to achieve universal male literacy, and moreover those literate men did not shut themselves in a monastery but remained at home, bringing their learning to the family table. Thus, our literacy and peoplehood were welded together from early childhood. “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. Rather than passively reading the holy scripts, they interpreted, debated, posed challenges and solved intellectual puzzles, kushiyot. Here, my father and I suggested, is a specific Jewish cure against 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. How will the current wave of antisemitism affect Jewish communities? Will younger Jews abroad, someone asked, either frightened by the hate or increasingly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, decamp in multitudes?
I answered that Jewish demography has shrunk and regrown several times in history, but that Jewish survival was never about numbers. It was about ideas, customs, a deep moral attraction, toughness, sometimes even a sense of humor, what our book calls “reverent irreverence.” Hard as times are, I said, the house will hold.
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? Gaza, Netanyahu, Trump: is the grand Jewish in-family debate still doable? And then the demography: Jews have always been a tiny speck of humankind, but how is this working out in the age of social media, where sheer numbers seem to count more than ever before?
Soon, the conversation turned to the deep end of Israel’s political woes. Growing up in a kibbutz you were intimately linked to biblical geography, to ancient ruins of Jewish civilization literally at your 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. For rich and poor, for widows, orphans, slaves and the stranger among us. Ancient Hebrews probably invented the very idea of equality before the law. This does not exclude opposing traditions of separatism and supremacism. But, significantly, the old kibbutz values—indeed, Israel’s Declaration of Independence values—are the Jewish legacies 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 is a netzach yisrael of a different sort. It allows the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of a mystical collective, and innocents, Jews and Palestinians, for territorial expansion and the dream of a fundamentalist mega-state, eternally waging war.
The chasm is deeply felt. Imagine how hurtful it was for people like my audience to hear Likud MK Simcha Rotman, ringleader of the current wave of antiliberal legislation, recently quip that “there aren’t, and there have never been, secular [Jews] in Israel.”
To put it simply, many survivors of the October 7 massacre are watching in horror as meaningful public debate is eroding, and that Israeli society itself is in the danger of unraveling. The ultra-Orthodox community’s refusal to serve in the army is one case in point, but the hostage crisis is cutting even more deeply. 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 hostages’ relatives are now regularly shunned and abused, leave little room for doubt: the time-honored legacy of Jewish solidarity is crumbling before our eyes.
The Prime Minister, for his part, has nothing to say about his supporters’ vile media attacks against the hostages’ families, the kibbutzniks and the center-left. And, as my listeners reminded me, Netanyahu has yet to pay a single visit to any of the attacked kibbutzim or speak with their grieving communities.
Significantly enough, the conversation 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 little 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 their old work-clothes’ sleeves 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 back home from the Negev to Mount Carmel, more hopeful than I had been in a long while, I recalled a phrase that became viral in the Israeli social media shortly after 7 October: “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.