The Jewish State Is Not the Jewish Dream
On Israel's 78th Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut), a Question Every Praying Jew Must Answer
A Necessary Clarification — Before a Single Word Is Misread
Let this be stated plainly, at the outset, without ambiguity, so that no enemy of the Jewish people can clip these words out of context and use them as ammunition against us:
We love every Jew in Israel. Every man, woman, and child living in Eretz Yisrael, and around the world, is our brother and our sister. We do not call for the weakening of Israel's defenses, in fact we daven for their success and safety. We do not call for the dismantling of any protection that stands between our people and those who wish to destroy us. We do not lend one syllable of comfort or encouragement to Hamas, to Iran, to Hezbollah, or to any force that has ever raised a hand against a Jew. Any reading of this article that suggests otherwise is a deliberate distortion.
This is not an attack on any individual. It is not a political manifesto. It is not written in anger or contempt.
It is written in love. In longing. In the voice of a Jew who prays three times a day and knows exactly what he is praying for.
Because that is the point. If you pray — really pray, not as performance but as conversation with the Ribbono Shel Olam — then you already know what this article is going to say. You have been saying it yourself, in Hebrew, every single day.
What We Actually Say When We Pray
Open a siddur. Not to the pages you rush through. Open it and read.
In Shemoneh Esrei — the Amidah, the standing prayer, the spine of Jewish davening recited three times daily — we make request after request that has nothing to do with the current State of Israel. In fact, we make requests that the current State of Israel, in its present form, cannot fulfill and in some cases actively contradicts.
Let us go through them.
The Fourteenth Brachah — Boneh Yerushalayim: "Return in mercy to Yerushalayim Your city, and dwell within it as You have promised. Rebuild it soon, in our days, as an eternal structure, and speedily establish within it the throne of David."
The throne of David. Not a Knesset. Not a coalition government. Not a Supreme Court of secular jurists. The throne of David. We are asking Hashem — explicitly, three times a day — to establish a monarchy. A kingdom. The Davidic dynasty restored to its rightful place as the governing authority of the Jewish people in the Jewish land.
This is not metaphor. This is not poetry. This is halachic prayer — words formulated by the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly, who knew precisely what they were asking for.
The Fifteenth Brachah — Et Tzemach David: "The sprout of David Your servant speedily cause to flourish, and raise his power through Your salvation, for we hope for Your salvation all day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who causes the power of salvation to flourish."
We are praying for Mashiach. By name. By lineage. The son of David. Not a prime minister elected by a fractured coalition. The anointed king of Israel, the one whose reign will be characterized not by polls and party platforms but by Torah law, by the will of Hashem expressed through His anointed.
The Seventeenth Brachah — Avodah: "Restore the service to the Holy of Holies of Your Temple, and the fire-offerings of Israel and their prayer accept with love and favor, and may the service of Your people Israel always be desirable to You. And may our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy."
The Temple service. The Beis HaMikdash. We are asking for the restoration of the korbanot, the sacrifices, the priestly service — the entire structure of Divine worship that defines what Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael is supposed to look like. A Yerushalayim with a Beis HaMikdash at its center. Not a gay pride parade at the Dead Sea. Not a secular army that drafts yeshiva students against their will. The Avodah. The service of Hashem.
The Eighteenth Brachah — Hoda'ah / Modim: "We thankfully acknowledge that You are Hashem our God and the God of our forefathers forever and ever... and for Your miracles that are with us every day."
We thank Hashem for miracles. Every day. We will return to this.
Next Year in Jerusalem — Even If You Are Already There
Every year at the Pesach Seder, Jews around the world conclude with the same words that we just uttered less than a month ago:
LeShanah HaBa'ah BiYerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem.
For most of Jewish history, this was the cry of exile. A dispersed people, scattered across Europe and North Africa and the Arab world, lifting their eyes toward a city they could not reach and a homeland they had not seen in centuries.
But what about today? What about the Jew sitting at his Seder table in Yerushalayim? In the Geula neighborhood, in Meah Shearim, in Har Nof, in the Old City itself — a five-minute walk from the Kotel?
He says it too. Next year in Jerusalem.
Why?
Because the Yerushalayim of today — the city of traffic and politics and protests and construction and secular government offices and a Supreme Court building that stands in deliberate architectural defiance of the traditions it has spent decades overturning — is not the Yerushalayim of our prayers. It shares a name and a geography with the city we long for. It does not share its essence.
The Yerushalayim of our dreams has the Beis HaMikdash on the Har HaBayis. It has the Sanhedrin convening in the Lishkat HaGazit. It has a Davidic king presiding over a nation that lives by Torah law in every aspect of its public life. It has no Chillul Shabbos on its streets by government permission. It has no courts that rule against the Torah. It has no parades of abomination in its streets or on its shores.
We are living in the land. We are not yet living in the Yerushalayim.
And so we cry out: Next year in Jerusalem. Not as ingrates. Not as people blind to the prophecy and miracle of return. But as people who know the difference between what is and what should be. Between what we have been given and what we are still waiting for.
Seventy-Eight Years in the Context of Thirty-Three Hundred
Here is a question worth sitting with: when a Jew reflects on what it means to be a Jew — what timeline is he looking at?
The secular Zionist answers: the last hundred years. The pogroms. The Holocaust. The 1948 War of Independence. The ingathering of exiles. The building of a state. This is the frame through which Zionism sees Jewish history — a story of persecution culminating in national liberation.
The Torah Jew answers differently. He looks at Avraham Avinu leaving Ur Kasdim. He looks at Yetzias Mitzrayim 3300+ years ago. He looks at Matan Torah at Sinai. He looks at the first Beis HaMikdash and the second Beis HaMikdash and the two exiles and the generations of scholars and martyrs and communities that kept Torah alive from Bavel to Spain to Poland to Yemen to Morocco and back.
Seventy-eight years. In thirty-three hundred years of Jewish history, seventy-eight years is a single paragraph. It is less than a blink in the eye of eternity.
This does not diminish what has happened. The return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael after two thousand years of exile is an event of staggering historical significance. The ingathering of communities from over a hundred countries to a single land is extraordinary. The survival of this state against enemies who outnumbered and surrounded it is beyond the natural order.
But none of that makes Zionism — the political ideology, the secular national movement founded by Theodor Herzl, the framework that governed the establishment and self-understanding of the modern State of Israel — the fulfillment of Jewish destiny. It makes it a chapter. A moment. A stage in a story whose final chapter has not yet been written.
And we are not supposed to confuse the stage with the destination.
The Question: Why Did Hashem Allow Zionism?
This is the question that honest Torah Jews must grapple with, even if the answer is beyond us.
Why did Hashem allow — and in some sense clearly facilitate — the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael under the banner of a secular nationalist movement? Why did He allow the land to be rebuilt, the population to grow, the state to survive and even flourish, under conditions that were in many ways antithetical to His Torah?
We do not know. And we should say so plainly: we do not know.
What we do know is that living in Eretz Yisrael is a mitzvah. The Ramban counts it among the 613. The Maharal writes about the unique spiritual dimension of the land. The entire structure of agricultural mitzvos — terumah, ma'aser, shemittah, bikkurim — presupposes residence in the land. Hundreds of mitzvos that cannot be fulfilled anywhere else in the world are waiting for us in Eretz Yisrael.
The Torah is not missing anything. The Torah does not require Zionism. It never did. It never will. Everything that a Jew needs — spiritually, halachically, communally — is contained within the Torah as given at Har Sinai. To suggest that without Zionism the Jewish people could not have survived, could not have returned, could not have thrived — is to suggest that the Torah is incomplete. That Hashem's guidance was insufficient. That we needed Herzl to save us where He had somehow failed.
Chas v'shalom. G-d forbid.
Hashem runs history. He ran it before Herzl was born and He will run it after political Zionism is a footnote. He brought us back to our land in a way that confounded every expectation and in forms that no human being designed or predicted. The mechanisms He chose — including the Zionist movement — are His to choose. But the mechanisms are not the meaning. The vehicle is not the destination.
The destination remains what it has always been: a Jewish people living in Eretz Yisrael, under the reign of Mashiach ben David, serving Hashem through His Torah, with the Beis HaMikdash rebuilt and the Shechinah dwelling in its midst.
That destination has not changed. Not in seventy-eight years. Not in two thousand years. Not ever.
What the World Will Look Like When Mashiach Comes
Let us think carefully about what we are actually praying for. Not abstractly. Concretely.
When Mashiach comes — when the geulah shleimah, the complete redemption, arrives — what will the Jewish state look like?
Will there be a Knesset? No. There will be a Sanhedrin. A body of seventy-one Torah scholars, re-established in Yerushalayim, ruling on matters of halacha with the authority of the Torah as its foundation. The Knesset — a democratic legislature operating by majority vote, in which anti-Torah laws can pass and Torah values can be overridden — has no place in that world.
Will there be a secular Supreme Court? No. The institution that has spent decades cutting yeshiva funding, overriding Jewish law in matters of conversion and marriage, and whose representative was caught on microphone vowing to "dismantle the Torah world" — will not exist. Law will flow from Torah. It will be interpreted by those who have spent their lives studying it. It will not be invented by judges who view Jewish tradition as an obstacle to progressive values.
Will there be forced conscription into a secular army? No. The Jewish army of the Messianic era will not draft Torah scholars against their will and drag them into environments that threaten their spiritual integrity. The defense of Klal Yisrael will be conducted in a manner consistent with the Torah's values — as it was in the time of the Jewish kings, when kohanim went before the army and the nation understood that its protection came ultimately from Hashem.
Will there be Chillul Shabbos sanctioned by the government? No. Shabbos will be Shabbos. Not a private preference. Not a religious lifestyle choice that the secular majority tolerates with diminishing patience. Shabbos will be the law of the land. The streets of Yerushalayim will be still. The stores will be closed. The nation will rest and pray and learn and be present to the reality that the world was created by a God Who commanded us to remember its creation every seven days.
Will there be a "Pride Land" festival at the Dead Sea? No. The Torah is clear on this matter. What the Torah calls an abomination will not be celebrated as a national achievement. It will not be promoted by the official social media accounts of the Jewish state. It will not be advertised as the largest event of its kind in the Middle East, as if this were a source of pride rather than a source of grief.
Every Jew who prays — regardless of where they sit on the religious spectrum — is praying for that world. Not for the world we have now, but for the world that is possible, the world that is promised, the world that our entire three-thousand-three-hundred- and thirty-one year history has been building toward.
Torah vs. Hellenism — The Eternal Choice
This is not a new struggle. It is the oldest struggle in Jewish history.
When the Greeks entered Eretz Yisrael, they did not come primarily to kill Jews. They came to Hellenize them. To replace Torah with Greek philosophy. To replace the Beis HaMikdash with the gymnasium. To replace the Jewish calendar with the Greek calendar. To replace the Covenant with culture.
Many Jews went along with it. The Mityavnim — the Hellenizers — were not foreigners. They were Jews. They were educated, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. They understood the world. They were embarrassed by the particular, the tribal, the ancient, the stubborn insistence of Torah Judaism on being different. They wanted to be like the nations.
The Chashmonaim refused. And Hashem gave them a miracle.
What we face today is a version of the same choice. On one side: Torah. The eternal wisdom of Sinai. The halacha that governs every dimension of life. The understanding that a Jew's purpose is not to build a state like all the nations, but to be mamlechet kohanim v'goy kadosh — a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. On the other side: the Hellenism of the twenty-first century. Secular democracy. Progressive values. The ideology of self-determination that measures success by GDP and military power and cultural influence rather than by fidelity to Hashem and His Torah.
Theodor Herzl was a brilliant man. He was also a man who had almost no connection to Torah Judaism. He famously suggested that the Jewish state might be built in Uganda. He envisioned a state modeled on the liberal European democracies of his era. He wrote in his diary that in his state, the rabbis would be confined to their synagogues. Religion would be private. The public square would be secular.
That vision has been largely implemented. And we are living with its consequences.
A Letter to Our Religious Zionist Brothers and Sisters
There is a conversation that needs to happen — honestly, lovingly, and without condescension — within the world of believing Jews.
To our brothers and sisters in the Dati Leumi world, the Religious Zionist community: this is written for you, with respect and with love. Not to attack you. Not to dismiss what you have built or what you have sacrificed. The devotion of Dati Leumi families to Eretz Yisrael, the blood their sons have spilled defending it, the mesiras nefesh of communities who have built homes and raised families and buried their children in the land of their fathers — none of this is invisible to us. None of it is taken for granted.
But we need to have an honest conversation about where your love of the land actually comes from.
It does not come from Zionism.
It comes from the Torah.
The love of Eretz Yisrael is a Torah value. It is in the Chumash. It is in the Ramban. It is in the prayers we have recited three times a day for two thousand years. The longing for the land — the visceral, bone-deep attachment that makes a Jew weep when he sees the hills of the Galil or walks through the alleyways of the Old City — that is not a gift of the Zionist movement. That is a gift of the Torah. Zionism did not create it. Zionism borrowed it.
And here is the problem: when you fuse Torah values with a secular political ideology, the ideology eventually begins to reshape the values. It always does. You can see it happening in real time. Positions that would have been unthinkable in Religious Zionist circles a generation ago are becoming normalized because the ideology pulls in that direction. The need to support the state, to stand with the secular establishment, to be seen as partners in the Zionist project — that need creates pressures that Torah alone would never create.
The state that you love — the state you have defended with your bodies and your prayers — is the same state that announced this week, on its official platform, that it is hosting the largest LGBT festival in the history of the Middle East. At the Dead Sea. In the shadow of Sodom. The same state whose Supreme Court has declared war on Torah learning, on yeshiva funding, on the right of Chareidi Jews to live according to their convictions. The same state whose secular establishment looks at the wave of teshuva sweeping through Israeli society — Hashem's own hand at work — and responds by trying to dismantle the institutions that make Torah life possible.
You cannot serve two masters. No one can. And the Torah has always been clear about what happens when we try.
We are not asking you to love the land less. We are asking you to love it better — to love it as the Torah commands us to love it, not as a secular nationalist ideology commands us to love it. The land is holy because Hashem gave it to us, not because Herzl decided it would be our national home. The right of the Jewish people to live in Eretz Yisrael rests on the word of Hashem in Bereishis, not on the Balfour Declaration.
And if that is true — and it is true — then our relationship to the land and to the state must be governed by the Torah, not by the ideology of a man who had little connection to it.
We need you.
This is the moment — with miracles happening that defy explanation, with secular Jews returning to Torah in unprecedented numbers, with the entire world watching to see what the Jewish people will do with this extraordinary chapter of history — this is the moment when the Torah world needs to stand together.
Not Chareidim on one side and Dati Leumi on the other. Not Litvish against Chassidish. Not those who served in the army against those who learned in yeshiva. Together. Beyachad. As one.
Because the only force in the world capable of bringing the rest of the Jewish people back to Torah is Jews who already live by it — Jews who can show, by the way they speak and love and treat each other and stand up for what they believe, that Torah is not a restriction but a liberation. That it is not a burden but a treasure. That it is not an obstacle to living a full human life but the very definition of one.
We cannot do that when we are divided. And we cannot do that when part of our community is entangled with an ideology that — despite the sincere faith of many of its adherents — is pulling in the opposite direction.
Come. Join us not in abandoning the land — never in abandoning the land — but in claiming it for what it truly is: the inheritance of a Torah nation, not the territory of a secular state. Let us build, together, the Jewish future that the Torah has always described. Let us be, together, the mamlechet kohanim v'goy kadosh that we were always meant to be.
The land needs us. All of us. Together. Governed not by the ideology of Basel but by the word of Har Sinai.
The Dead Sea Abomination
Which brings us to this week's news — announced, with pride, by the official State of Israel social media account:
"Pride Land" — the largest LGBT festival ever held in the Middle East — is scheduled for July 1–4, 2026, in Ein Bokek on the Dead Sea.
Four days. Fifteen hotels. A "Pride City" built from scratch in the middle of the Judean Desert. Twenty-four-hour parties. And promoted — officially, by the government of the Jewish state — as a source of national pride.
The location is not accidental. The Dead Sea. The lowest point on earth. The body of water that sits at the edge of what was once Sodom and Amorah — the cities whose destruction is recorded in Bereishis precisely because of the sins that this festival intends to celebrate.
This is not the opinion of one group within Judaism. The Torah's position on this matter is unambiguous. It is stated plainly in Vayikra: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman — it is an abomination." This is not a rabbinical ordinance that can be reinterpreted. It is a Torah prohibition. It applies in every generation. It does not bend to cultural change, political pressure, or the desire to be welcomed at the international table.
And here is what makes this a Chillul Hashem of the highest order — a desecration of God's name that reaches beyond the act itself:
We are living through a period of open miracles. As documented in the surveys, in the testimonies, in the intelligence reports — Hashem has been showing His hand in Israel in ways that cannot be explained by natural means. Missiles landing in empty fields. Operations that should have failed, succeeding. Iran's entire military architecture collapsing. Hostages emerging from tunnels more Jewish than when they went in. A wave of teshuva sweeping through a secular population.
And in the midst of all of this — with the ink barely dry on two years of open miracles — the State of Israel uses its official platform to announce the largest LGBT festival in the history of the Middle East.
Simultaneously.
The irony is almost too painful to articulate. Hashem reaches out His hand and says: Return to Me. And the response of the secular establishment is to announce a four-day celebration of the precise sins for which Sodom was destroyed — in the shadow of its ruins.
There is a word for this. It is not merely tone-deafness. It is not merely a difference of values. It is kefira. A turning away. A conscious and deliberate rejection of the message being sent.
And there is a reason that no other country in the Middle East would host such an event. Our enemies — whatever else we say about them — would not publicly celebrate a direct violation of Divine law on this scale. Not because they are better people. Not because their societies are just or their treatment of human beings is kind. But because even they recognize that there are lines that should not be crossed in the name of defying the Creator.
The State of Israel — the self-proclaimed Jewish state, the state that invokes the Tanach to justify its right to exist in this land — crosses that line and calls it progress.
The Love That Prays for the End
And so we return to the prayer.
It is the prayer of love, not of hatred. The prayer of a parent who wants better for a child than the child is currently choosing. The prayer of someone who looks at a magnificent building on fire and says — I want this to be the last year of this fire. Not because he wants the building to fall, but because he wants it to be saved.
When we say LeShanah HaBa'ah BiYerushalayim — Next Year in Jerusalem — we are praying for an end to this chapter and the beginning of the next one.
We are praying for the end of a state that flies the Israeli flag at a pride festival near the ruins of Sodom.
We are praying for the end of courts that cut yeshiva funding in the middle of a war and call it justice.
We are praying for the end of an army that drafts Torah scholars and strips them of the spiritual environment they need to survive.
We are praying for the end of a political system that measures success by whether its gay rights record impresses European newspapers.
And we are praying for the beginning of something else entirely.
A Yerushalayim with the Beis HaMikdash rebuilt.
A Sanhedrin rendering halachic decisions from the Lishkat HaGazit.
A king from the house of David — not elected, not polling, not coalition-building — governing a people whose national identity is not Zionist or secular or progressive, but Jewish. Simply, entirely, unapologetically Jewish.
A country where Shabbos is Shabbos. Where kashrut is the law of the land. Where the streets of Yerushalayim are filled not with protest marches but with Torah learning and prayer and the service of Hashem that was always meant to define this people in this land.
A country where Jews from every corner of the world — from Brooklyn and London and Melbourne and Mumbai — come home. Not to visit. Not on birthright trips. But to stay. To build. To raise their families under the Shechinah.
That is what we pray for.
Not because we hate what exists. But because we love what is possible.
A Choice Every Jew Must Make
The Rambam writes in Hilchos Melachim that one of the signs of the Messianic era will be that all Jews return to Torah and the truth will become manifest to everyone. He is not describing a forced return. He is describing an awakened one. A recognition, arising from within, of what was always true.
We are watching the early edges of that awakening. The teshuva wave is real. The surveys are real. The hostage testimonies are real. Hashem is calling.
And every Jew — every single Jew, wherever he stands today — faces the same essential question:
On which side of history do you want to be standing when the story reaches its destination?
Not "are you religious" or "are you secular" — these are categories of the current moment, not of eternity. The question is whether you recognize that this moment in history — seventy-eight years of a secular state built on a secular ideology in the most sacred land on earth — is a waypoint, not a destination.
The Torah is not missing anything. It never needed Zionism to survive. It will outlast Zionism. It has outlasted every other ideology that has ever competed with it for the soul of the Jewish people — the Greeks, the Romans, the Enlightenment, Communism, and every variation of assimilation that promised Jews they could be fully human without being fully Jewish.
It will outlast this too.
Not because we will force it. Because it is true. Because Hashem promised. Because three-thousand-three-hundred years of Jewish history, seen from the proper vantage point, points in one direction and one direction only.
LeShanah HaBa'ah BiYerushalayim HaBenuyah.
Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem.
May this be the last year we have to say it.
This article was written with love for every Jew — in Israel and around the world — and with the fervent prayer that we will all merit to see the geulah shleimah, the complete redemption, speedily in our days.
Sources: Siddur — Shemoneh Esrei, Brachos 14, 15, 17 (Boneh Yerushalayim, Et Tzemach David, Avodah); Rambam, Hilchos Melachim 11–12; Ramban, Sefer HaMitzvos, Positive Commandment 4; Vayikra 18:22; Bereishis 19; Jerusalem Post, April 2026 — Pride Land festival announcement; Official State of Israel X account, April 20, 2026.