The Blogs: Are Secular Israelis Still Jewish? | Rachel Collins

Every Shavuot, Israel reveals one of its deepest unresolved identity crises.

Religious Jews celebrate the giving of the Torah at Sinai.

But many secular Israelis celebrate something very different: Chag HaBikkurim, the agricultural festival created largely by the kibbutz movement and early secular Zionism.

Until I had children in the secular Israeli school system, I saw these as simply two versions of the same holiday.

They are not, despite the cheesecake.

After listening to historian Elon Gilad describe the origins of the secular Israeli Chag HaBikkurim tradition, I began to understand that secular Zionism was not simply trying to reinterpret Judaism, but to replace it with something new.

The early Zionists did not merely secularize Jewish holidays. In many ways, they attempted to build a new Hebrew-Israeli civilization: rooted in land, labor, agriculture, national revival, and sovereignty.

Shavuot could have become a metaphor: a way of saying that even if God did not literally write the Torah at Sinai, the Torah still remains the foundational civilizational story of the Jewish people.

The rabbis could have remained the great carriers of Jewish continuity through exile, even if their authority was no longer accepted in sovereign Israel.

But instead, much of secular Zionism walked away from both.

The Bible itself was retained, but detached from the rabbinic tradition that carried Judaism through two thousand years of exile.

And yet even this new Hebrew-Israeli identity could never fully escape the civilization from which it emerged.

This is what makes Israeli secularism so strange.

Many Israelis who call themselves secular are not secular in the Western sense at all. Their lives are still saturated with Jewish language, Jewish memory, Jewish time, and Jewish symbols.

But increasingly, many are disconnected from the historical civilization that preserved Jewish continuity through exile: rabbinic Judaism.

And that raises an uncomfortable question.

If you reject not only halacha but the legitimacy of the entire post-biblical Jewish tradition, then in what sense are you still Jewish?

Ethnically?

Culturally?

Nationally?

Or are you something else: a Hebrew-speaking Israeli descended from Jewish civilization, but no longer fully participating in it?

I think this unresolved contradiction sits underneath much of Israel’s political crisis today.

For decades, secular Zionism dominated the state and could simply assume its version of Israeliness was the default national identity.

But over time, secular Israelis increasingly detached themselves from Jewish literacy altogether.

Meanwhile, religious Israelis continued building schools, institutions, intellectual frameworks, communities, rituals, and systems capable of reproducing themselves across generations.

And eventually, a vacuum emerged.

Because a civilization cannot survive on negation alone.

If secular Israelis define themselves primarily as: not religious, not Orthodox, not halachic, not diaspora, then eventually they surrender the ability to shape Judaism itself.

And this is where I increasingly think the secular Zionist project never fully resolved the contradiction at its center.

It rejected Judaism as a state religion, but never fully replaced it with a coherent alternative.

The result is the strange Israeli situation we now live in: a state that is obviously deeply Jewish, but unable to clearly define the relationship between Judaism and Israeli identity.

The 2018 Nation-State Law intensified this confusion.

The secular world largely rejected Judaism as the organizing framework of the state, while the religious-nationalist world increasingly stepped in to define Jewishness politically and theologically itself.

And the secular Israelis who spent decades distancing themselves from Jewish civilization now find themselves shocked that others are shaping it without them.

But why wouldn’t they?

Civilizations are shaped by those who remain engaged in them.

Perhaps the real mistake was collapsing Judaism and Israeli nationality into the same category.

Perhaps Judaism should openly function as the civilizational and religious foundation of the state, while “Israeli” becomes the shared civic nationality of all citizens: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, and others.

That would at least honestly describe the country that already exists.

Because Israel is not a neutral liberal republic. It never was.

The real question is not whether Judaism will shape Israel.

The real question is: which Jews will shape Judaism?

Raised Modern Orthodox in the small Jewish community of Glasgow, Scotland, Rachel Collins made aliyah effectively at 17 and has spent the past 30 years wrestling with questions of Judaism, Zionism, secularism, and the future of Jewish civilization in sovereign Israel. When not thinking about covenant, post-exilic Jewish identity, or Israeli society, she helps Anglos navigate the Israeli property market through RESI and builds automated business systems through Loopstack.