For There To Be Peace, Jews Must Reject Zionism and Embrace Torah

A Call to Justice, Equality, and Peace

A Covenant of Service, Not Supremacy

Shalom, my friends. Today, we gather to reflect on what it means to be a people chosen—not for privilege, but for obligation. The Torah and our prophets call us to serve humanity, to repair the world, and to walk humbly with our God. Yet, we live in a time when these sacred teachings are too often twisted to justify domination, exclusion, and violence. As a Hillelite Reformist, shaped by the wisdom of Rabbi Louis Binstock and the principled stance of the American Council for Judaism, I stand before you to proclaim that peace requires justice, and justice requires equality—values at the heart of our faith, yet absent from the Zionist project that claims to speak for us all.

The Spiritual Foundation: Human Flaws and the Path to Growth

Only the Creator is perfect. Humans, intentionally born flawed, are imbued with a spark of the Creator’s spirit, destined to grow during its transit through the material plane. As the Zohar teaches, “souls descend to ascend,” a journey where missteps lead to reincarnation, and grave failures result in the destruction of that spark. There is no Hell; this earthly existence is as bad as it gets. This premise, rooted in Kabbalistic thought, aligns with the biblical narrative where humanity’s imperfections are both a challenge and an opportunity for spiritual elevation. John Trudell’s reflection, “I’m just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human,” underscores this struggle, where becoming human requires resisting the demons that seek to eat our souls. These demons, manifesting as evil inclinations, words, and behaviors contrary to instinctive altruism, compassion, and empathy, thrive in the underclasses, manipulated by elite deceptions. Intergenerational trauma locks all of humanity in a “Sisyphus Loop,” visiting the sins of the fathers on their children generation after generation, a cycle that must be broken for tikkun olam to prevail.

Let us begin with the Torah, with the covenant that defines our purpose. In Genesis 12:7, God appears to Abraham and says, “To your offspring I will give this land.” These words are often cited as a divine deed to one people alone, but let us read them closely. The promise is to Abraham’s offspring—a term that encompasses not only the children of Israel but all who descend from Abraham, including the children of Ishmael. The land is a gift, not an exclusive possession, and it comes with a calling: to be a blessing to all nations (Genesis 12:3). Abraham, a nomadic herder, not an empire-builder, modeled this humility. He built altars, not fortresses; he sought peace with his neighbors, not conquest. The covenant was never about domination, but about service—about living in harmony with others in a land meant for all of Abraham’s seed.

Biblical Imperatives: The Call for Equality and the Peril of Exclusivity

The biblical text, from Genesis to Ecclesiastes, underscores the moral imperative of equality and warns against the vanity of exclusivity. In Genesis 1:27, we read, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” This foundational verse demands equal dignity for all, a principle echoed in Leviticus 19:18, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” Leviticus 19:16 further commands, “Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the LORD.” This injunction against repeating libel and standing idly by while your neighbor’s blood is spilled is a call to action, not just a prohibition. It demands we confront the exclusivity of terms like “blood libel,” “genocide,” and “Holocaust,” which silence others’ suffering. Deuteronomy 10:19 further commands, “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” These injunctions form the bedrock of the social contract, obliging us to demand equal rights, not special privileges.

Isaiah 56:1 proclaims, “Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed.” Yet, the pursuit of exclusive rights, as seen in Zionist claims to blood libel and genocide, contradicts this. Jeremiah 7:23–24 laments, “But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts.” The term “stiff-necked,” as GotQuestions.org elucidates, denotes pride and refusal to heed God’s law, a critique that foreshadows the troubles Jews brought upon themselves through internal corruption. Zechariah 4 insists that it is not by might, but by right that Israel was selected to be a light to the gentiles, yet throughout history, elite Jews have opted for warmongering, slave trade, sexual predation, and occult practices, today worse than ever, with massive Islamophobia on one side and religious zealotry on the other fueling the perpetual warfare of the top 4% over who will rule the world’s resources. Humans, migratory by nature and given natural resources by the Creator for all to share equally, are instead divided by these elite machinations. Genesis 1:26 states, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air.” This dominion, often misinterpreted as domination, is stewardship, not subjugation. Instead of tending the garden, humans chose to exploit mineral life, dominating nature and each other in perpetual resource wars, a betrayal of our sacred duty.

Zechariah 7:9–10 warns, “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.” The Second Temple’s fall, due to upper-class corruption, was exacerbated by such failures, with Jesus’ crucifixion a direct result of calling out this hypocrisy (Matthew 23:23). Psalm 24:1 declares, “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it,” challenging the invalid first principle of land ownership that underpins such abuses, built on, not into, the biosystem, now hurtling toward climate collapse. Ecclesiastes 1:14 observes, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” This vain pursuit, dovetailing into George Orwell’s 1946 assertion that “political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” reveals the assholishness of demanding special privileges. The Zionist claim to exclusive victimhood, enabling Palestinian genocide, is a prime example, a shanda demanding tikkun olam. The profound assholishness that now has the world on the brink of WW III against Islamic theocracy must be confronted. World War IV, as Einstein predicted, will be fought with sticks and stones if we do not stand vigilant against it today. Theocracy must be relegated to history’s dust bin, or there is no future for this vaunted Western Civilization that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu claim to be defending, demanding that we sacrifice our children to defeat its enemies.

Psalm 24: A Demand for Clean Hands
Turn now to the Psalms, to Psalm 24, which asks, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place?” The answer is clear: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false” (Psalm 24:3–4). This is a profound challenge to any who claim Zion as their destiny. The psalmist declares that the Earth and everything in it belongs to God (Psalm 24:1)—not to one nation, not to one people, but to all who walk in righteousness. No one driven by yetzer hara—the evil inclination of greed, pride, or power—can ascend God’s hill with blood on their hands. No one who sows division or injustice can stand in the holy place.

Yet, what do we see today? A movement called Zionism, born in the 19th century, claims the mantle of our faith while trampling its ethical core. From Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall essays, the Zionist vision has been one of Jewish domination, not coexistence. Herzl dreamed of a state that would exclude others to secure Jewish supremacy. Jabotinsky wrote of an “iron wall” of force to subdue the native people of the land. And from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, led by the European Ashkenazi Labor and Likud blocs, we have seen this vision unfold: ethnic cleansing, displacement, and a relentless drive to control the entire region, over the objections of rabbis and lay Jews who warned that such a path defies our Torah.

The Prophetic Call: Justice and Equality
Our prophets have always spoken truth to power. Isaiah demanded, “Seek justice, rescue the oppressed” (Isaiah 1:17). Amos thundered, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Zechariah, in the Haftarah we read at Hanukkah, proclaimed, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). These voices echo through the ages, reminding us that our chosenness is an obligation to repair the world, not to rule it by force of arms.

Consider Deuteronomy 20:19, a verse too often overlooked. In the midst of laws about warfare, God commands, “You shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them… Are the trees of the field human, to be besieged by you?” This is not just about trees; it’s about the sanctity of creation, the dignity of the land, and the moral restraint we must show even in conflict. Yet, for decades, we have witnessed what some call “olive harvest terrorism”—settler violence that uproots Palestinian olive groves, destroying livelihoods and heritage, millions of trees destroyed, some from ancient groves. These acts spit in the face of Torah law. They violate Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and Leviticus 19:34, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born, and you shall love him as yourself.” How can we claim to be a light unto the nations when we allow such darkness to flourish?

Zionism’s Failure of Equality
Peace requires justice, and justice requires equality. But equality has never been in the Zionist playbook. From its inception, the movement sought not coexistence but exclusion. The leaders of Israel, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, have pursued policies that prioritize Jewish supremacy over the rights of others. The Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, was not an accident but a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing, documented by historians like Ilan Pappé. Today, the occupation, the checkpoints, the settlements—all continue this legacy of inequality, defying the prophetic vision of a world where all are equal before God.

Our Torah lays out the stakes clearly. In Deuteronomy 6–11, we hear the Shema’s call to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, and to teach justice to our children. We are warned against pride, against forgetting God’s role in our blessings: “If you forget the Lord… you shall surely perish” (Deuteronomy 8:19–20). Deuteronomy 30 summarizes the choice: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Life comes through righteousness, through loving our neighbor, through choosing equality over domination. The curses—exile, desolation—await those who betray this covenant.

A Path Forward: Repair, Not Rule
My friends, we stand at a crossroads. The Zionist project, driven by the yetzer hara of nationalism and power, has led us astray. It has bloodied our hands and hardened our hearts, distancing us from the holy hill of the Lord. But there is another way—the way of Abraham, who sought peace; the way of Amram’s family—Moses, Aaron, and Miriam—who built, healed, and taught; the way of Hillel, who taught us to do no harm to our neighbor.

We, as Jews, are called to repair the world, not to rule it. We must demand justice for the Palestinian people, whose olives are stolen, whose homes are demolished, whose dignity is denied. We must reject the false idols of nationalism and militarism, and instead embrace the spirit of God, as Zechariah taught. We must advocate for a land where all of Abraham’s offspring—Jew, Muslim, Christian—live as equals, sharing the Earth that belongs to God alone.

Closing: Choose Life
Let us close with a prayer from our hearts, inspired by Psalm 24. May we ascend God’s hill with clean hands and pure hearts, free from the stain of injustice. May we choose life, as Deuteronomy 30 urges, by pursuing justice, equality, and peace. And may we, as a people chosen for service, be a blessing to all nations, repairing the world with love, not ruling it with force.

Shalom aleichem—peace be upon you, and upon all who dwell in the land of Abraham’s promise.