65 Proposals for the Jewish Future and the Conversation We Are Still Having

65 Proposals for the Jewish Future and the Conversation We Are Still Having

What happens when a Neshamah adult class picks up David Hazony’s Jewish Priorities and refuses to agree about anything. (That’s a compliment.)

By Rabbi Amy Rader | The Neshamah Institute | niboca.org

There is a question I have been sitting with since October 7, 2023, and I suspect I am not alone.

What does it mean to be Jewish right now? Not theologically, not historically, though those matter too. But practically, urgently, in the present tense. What do we owe each other as a people? What do we owe the next generation? What, exactly, are we trying to pass on?

When I found David Hazony’s anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son, 2023), I knew immediately it was the right book for an adult class at Neshamah. Not because it answers these questions. Because it refuses to.

Sixty-five essays. Sixty-five different thinkers. Sixty-five different answers to the same essential question: what should Jewish life prioritize right now? We brought this book into a room of Neshamah adults, people from different backgrounds, different levels of observance, different relationships with Israel and with God, and we started arguing. We haven’t stopped.

What the Book Is

Jewish Priorities is edited by David Hazony, a Jerusalem-based writer and scholar with a PhD in Jewish philosophy from Hebrew University. Hazony assembled an extraordinary range of voices: Israelis and Diaspora Jews; secular and Orthodox; activists, rabbis, novelists, scholars, and cultural critics. Contributors include Natan Sharansky, Dara Horn, Yossi Klein Halevi, David Wolpe, Ruth Wisse, and many others.

The premise is simple and almost radical: rather than building consensus, the book deliberately collects views that contradict each other. On education, on Zionism, on God, on antisemitism, on Jewish identity. This book does not resolve the arguments. It reveals them. And it trusts the reader to wrestle.

Hazony describes it as imagining the entire Jewish people at one dinner table, having a raucous, creative, honest argument about their collective future. That is almost exactly what our class felt like.

What We Argued About

We did not read the whole book in order. We selected essays, read them before class, and came in ready to respond. Here are some of the conversations that stayed with us.

Dara Horn on Dead Jews and Living Ones

Dara Horn’s essay, drawing from her book People Love Dead Jews, argues that Jewish education has spent decades teaching the Holocaust at the expense of teaching Jewish life. We know how to mourn. We are less practiced at celebrating what is actually alive, brilliant, and strange about Jewish civilization.

This one hit close. Several people in the room had grown up in Jewish schools where the Holocaust was the center of Jewish identity. One person said: I knew more about the Holocaust than I knew about Shabbat. That stayed in the room for a long time.

The Talmud Question: Gatekeeping or Opening the Gates?

The book includes two essays that directly contradict each other on Talmud study. One contributor describes building a social media presence around accessible, irreverent Talmud learning, the idea being that the text should be personally meaningful and open to everyone. Another argues that without a teacher steeped in the tradition, you simply cannot grasp what the Talmud is actually doing.

We fought about this one, warmly, but genuinely. Is accessibility the same as dilution? Is rigor the same as gatekeeping? Can both be true at once?

As a rabbi who cares deeply about both, about making Judaism real and accessible, and about the irreplaceable depth of the tradition, I found this the most personally alive argument in the book. I did not resolve it. Neither did the class.

What Do We Owe Israel?

Several essays take up the relationship between Diaspora Jews and Israel, not as a theoretical question but as a live, urgent one, especially in the shadow of October 7. Yossi Klein Halevi’s contribution pushes Diaspora Jews to reckon more honestly with what Israel’s existence means for them. Other voices complicate that, asking about the limits of solidarity and the space for critique.

This was perhaps the most emotionally charged conversation we had. People in the room held very different views. What was striking was that nearly everyone felt the weight of both loyalty and complexity at the same time. No one in our group wanted a simple answer. They wanted a framework for holding the difficulty. That, I think, is what Jewish adulthood actually looks like.

The Failure of Jewish Institutions

Several essays are unflinching about what has gone wrong in organized Jewish life: institutions that prioritize their own survival over their mission, communities that have confused membership with belonging, synagogues that lost the people who needed them most because they were too formal, too expensive, or too unwelcoming to ask hard questions.

I will be honest: these essays made me think hard about what we are building at Neshamah, and why. We are a dues-free community precisely because we believe that belonging should not be a financial transaction. These conversations affirmed that instinct and pushed me to keep asking whether we are living up to it.

Why This Class Matters

I want to say something directly: this kind of class is rare. Not because the content is obscure, but because most of us have never been given permission to disagree about Judaism out loud, with other Jews, in a room where nobody has to pretend.

The Jewish tradition has a name for argument conducted with integrity: machloket l’shem shamayim – disagreement for the sake of heaven. The Talmud preserves minority opinions alongside majority ones because even a view that loses the vote might contain truth. The point was never to silence the argument. The point was to have it honestly.

That is what this class is. Come because you have opinions. Come because you have questions. Come because you care about the future of Jewish life and you want to think about it alongside people who care just as much and disagree just as passionately.

Join Us

We will be continuing our adult education series at Neshamah. If Jewish Priorities sparked something for you, curiosity, argument, recognition, frustration, those are exactly the right reasons to come.

Reach out to Rabbi Amy at niboca.org to find out what we are reading next and when we meet.