“Whether one looks in the political, social, or cultural and religious domains,” writes Neil Rogachevsky, “there has been a continuing and rather rapid shift” of the Jewish world’s center of gravity from the Diaspora to the Jewish state. The Israeli political scientist-turned-parliamentarian Yossi Shain, in his new book, The Israeli Century, documents this shift, and argues that it is an unambiguously good thing, the “culmination” of Jewish history. Without disputing his premise, Rogachevsky notes a parallel trend that Shain seems to underappreciate:

The limitation in the argument that Judaism is being Israelized is the fact that Israel itself is becoming more and more Jewish. And the Judaism of Israel is not simply a Bible- and Hebraic-culture-centric Judaism sought, at various moments, by David Ben-Gurion and other founders of Israel. Diaspora Judaism has struck back.

The Judaization of Israel is, however, somewhat hard to see because very much of it is in flux. Traditions and observance are growing across the Israeli public sphere. But what forms will Jewish belief and practice take in the years ahead? Will mysticism grow still stronger? Will a more rationalistic Orthodoxy, compatible with both patriotism and liberalism, continue to grow? Will the older and newer Diaspora religious movements (Conservative, Reconstructionist, etc.) finally take off in Israel even as they fade in North America? Judaism may be transformed in Israel but it will not escape the forms and practices developed in the Diaspora. It may well be that the greatest role Diaspora Jews can play in an Israeli century to come is to help Israelis think through the politics of religion.

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.