For decades, American Jewish leaders have sought ways to combat rising rates of intermarriage and declining rates of synagogue membership, and then lamented the apparent failures of their efforts. Daniel Gordis, an American Conservative rabbi who eventually settled in Israel to become an educator and writer, traces these problems to the hollowness of Jewish education in the U.S. since World War II:

American Jewish leaders never made the claim publicly, nor in all likelihood did they ever articulate it to themselves. Yet in retrospect, the wager they made has become clear: American Jewish leadership believed that it could fashion a variety of Judaism that would be both meaningful and sustainable with virtually no content at its core.

We, [members of the older generation]. see the result of Jewish “education” sans content most painfully when it comes to Israel. Many of us are distraught at the antipathy [many members of the] younger generation feel toward what we see as a national liberation movement, but to no small degree, it’s our fault. What have we done to show them that Zionism is not a simple and uniform ideology, but a profound and ongoing conversation? What have we done to usher them into the [vibrant exchange] that was once (and in certain circles, still is) Zionist discourse? What have we taught them about the differing worldviews of the great Zionist thinkers—the [cultural nationalism of] Ahad Ha’am; Leon Pinsker, the diagnostician of the illness of European Jewry; A.D. Gordon and his belief that redemption would come from having the earth of the Land of Israel under their fingernails; Vladimir Jabotinsky, the classical liberal who opposed mainstream Zionism’s naïveté about Arabs; or Abraham Isaac Kook and his unique theological stance that allowed his Orthodoxy to embrace the revolution?

The most basic truths about Judaism are utterly unfamiliar to the Jews we claim to have educated. By the time we send them off to freshman orientation, have we ever taken their intelligence seriously? . . .

How did this play out in American Jewish life? American non-Orthodox religious leaders, increasingly shaped by academic scholarship, found themselves unable to embrace theological principles that had long been a bedrock of Jewish life. If God’s authorship of the Torah was suddenly called into question because of various formulations of the documentary hypothesis, how could one speak of the authority of the laws that emerged from the Bible, or the Talmud, or the Shulḥan Arukh?

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.