As a rabbi I’ve devoted my life to tending to the wellbeing of the American Jewish community. That community is now collapsing in on itself in a moment of true rupture—and that, I believe, is not only necessary but a blessing.

Usually, Jewish homes are full of extended family at this time of year. It’s the season of the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and for Jews of all backgrounds this means getting together and, often, going to synagogue. On these holidays, many Jews who otherwise forego religious services break out the prayer shawl they wore at their b’nai mitzvahs and pray. They fast, they atone.

But many people won’t be attending services at their family’s synagogue this year because it has a large “We Stand with Israel” poster out front or an Israeli flag on the podium next to the rabbi. They won’t be intoning a prayer for Israel—with no mention of Palestinians—alongside the rest of the congregation. Instead, these Jews, many of them young, will be turning to alternative services that are explicitly non-Zionist or creating their own ways to observe the High Holidays. What is typically a time of unity in Jewish communities, this year will be a time of separation. 

For many in the establishment Jewish community, this is a source of deep anxiety. In May, as a human-made famine was taking hold in Gaza, and as students were protesting across US campuses, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote in The Forward: “A panic has developed within much of the Jewish community as more and more Jews—mostly, but not entirely young people—have declared themselves to be anti-Zionists or non-Zionists.”

I share Rabbi Jacobs’s sentiment that there is indeed a moral crisis at the heart of mainstream Jewish life. (I also appreciate that she argues against formally excommunicating non- and anti-Zionist Jews, even as we have long been unwelcome in supposedly progressive spaces).

However, I believe our panic should not be over the waning support for Zionism among Jewish young people. Instead, the crisis is that the Jewish State that was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust has been found guilty of its own plausible genocide. Our Jewish community should break apart when so many of our leaders and institutions go along with or even champion Israel as it maims, tortures, starves, and kills Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children. 

Since the beginning of Zionism, 130 or so years ago, there have been Jews who have rejected it—on theological, political, and cultural grounds. The Reform movement of Judaism, today the largest denomination of Judaism in the United States, was adamantly anti-Zionist until the 1970s, eschewing the idea that Jews constitute a nation, asserting instead that we are rather a religious community. The Jewish Labor Bund, a Jewish social democratic movement founded in the same era as Zionism, preferred to link arms with the working class in their home countries to struggle for labor and social justice. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews to this day reject the idea that humans can bring Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel by force; only God can do that in messianic times.

Over the past 76 years, since Israel’s bloody birth, the Jewish organizational establishment has cultivated an illusion of a Jewish Zionist consensus. After the Six Day War in 1967, that effort only intensified as legacy Jewish institutions in North America pivoted dramatically from promoting Jewish civic and social standing for minorities and new immigrants to pro-Israel advocacy.

Yet today, American Jews are farther from each other than they’ve ever been before, with the greatest chasm falling along generational lines. A recent Pew study found that younger Jews have less favorable attitudes toward Israelis and more favorable views of the Palestinian people. Fifty-five percent of Jews under 35 have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. Jews ages 50 to 64 are the only age group in which a majority express a favorable opinion of the Israeli government (64 percent). By comparison, just 45 percent of Jews ages 18 to 34 have a favorable view of the Israeli government.

In another study, when presented with a definition of Zionism that asserts the belief in “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” a full 69 percent of Jewish American respondents said that they were probably or definitely not Zionist.