Compared with its large presence in the United States, the Reform movement plays a minor role in Israel. How minor, exactly, has been a matter of some debate, as Shmuel Rosner, who has looked into the matter, writes. Estimates of Israelis self-identifying as Reform have varied wildly, from three percent to eight percent to thirteen percent to one percent. What accounts for this, and what does it say about Israeli Judaism? Could it be that Reform in Israel functions as a political identifier and not a religious one?

Which is it? This question cannot be answered by mathematics but depends on definitions and expectations. When Israelis are asked about being Reform (or Conservative), their response is inconsistent; the way they decide whether to identify themselves as Reform Jews seems to depend even more than usual on the framework in which the question is posed.

In the course of one year, we asked the same people four times if they were Reform. My colleague Noah Slepkov found that not even one respondent answered this question affirmatively all four times. This suggests that “Reform” is an occasional identity. It may be that sometimes, when they feel like it, Israelis will say they are Reform, but at other times they will say they are “secular” and belong to “no stream.” Why would they even say they are Reform? With the benefit of anecdotal evidence, we are inclined to take a leap and speculate that the reason is mostly political: by saying they are Reform, they establish their antipathy to Orthodox Judaism, and even more so to the Orthodox Israeli establishment.

So is Reform Judaism a religious identity in Israel, or largely a political sentiment that carries no consistent commitment to an ongoing religious practice? The numbers suggest it’s the latter. And that suggestion carries two contradictory lessons. The first is that the Orthodox establishment being rigid and annoying is the main driver of Reform growth in Israel. The second is that the advantage of Orthodoxy will be hard to overcome with Reform troops of such low commitment.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.