As the rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, one of Reform Judaism’s most prestigious institutions, Ammiel Hirsch has become an increasingly outspoken advocate of Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, and the notion that without rich Jewish religious content, Judaism will not endure. During the most recent Gaza war, he attracted attention when he condemned in no uncertain terms a letter from Reform rabbinical students expressing much handwringing over Israel’s supposed crimes, while making no mention of Israelis who had been stabbed or shot by terrorists, or were spending nights in rocket shelters with their families. Armin Rosen writes in a profile of Hirsch:

Reform rabbinic students had, in Hirsch’s mind, shown callousness toward their fellow Jews and flirted with a betrayal of their movement’s core principles. “How is it possible for current and future leaders of the Jewish people to write an open letter to the public in the middle of a war with missiles raining down on Israeli civilians—our people—without ever mentioning Hamas, the instigator of the war?” he asked. “How is it possible to write of ‘tears that flow’ without weeping for our own brothers and sisters, killed, maimed, and scrambling to underground shelters at all hours of the day and night?”

Perhaps Hebrew Union College had forgotten its purpose and grown overly tolerant of its own students. “We have a right to insist that some values and beliefs held by some American Jews are inconsistent with our values,” Hirsch said. “Our values” included Zionism, a stance the movement has codified in its various platforms and statements of purpose. “We are entitled to accept students to the rabbinic program based on values that we’ve defined for ourselves, and if somebody doesn’t accept those values we’re entitled to say, ‘go somewhere else to study rabbinics,’” Hirsch [said] in an interview.

As for the suggestion that Zionism is somehow at odds with ideas of social justice—the latter something also very near and dear to Rabbi Hirsch’s heart:

“The very Amos who said, ‘let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream,’ ended his book with, ‘I will restore my people Israel to their own soil and never more will I uproot them from the soil I will give them,’” the rabbi said. “So Judaism is this blend. It’s a mischaracterization to define prophetic values as having nothing to do with Jewish peoplehood, or not being rooted in Jewish peoplehood.”

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.