Noting the increased blurring of once-firm distinctions among different Jewish religious communities in Israel, Moshe Koppel sees reason to hope that Judaism is entering a new era of flourishing in the Holy Land. Members of the younger generation in particular, he writes, “aspire for Judaism to be a culture, not a counterculture.”

[These Israelis] don’t need to prove that they’re not assimilating; there aren’t enough Gentiles [in Israel] to assimilate into. . . . They are also sick of wasting energy on broadcasting their loyalty to one or another narrow subset of Judaism. Their mix-and-match of modes of dress, ideology, and practices that seem incongruous to old fogies and diaspora Jews are simply inchoate attempts at breaking down [these narrow categories] and separating the signals from the substance. . . .

[Members of this younger generation are] looking for some form of authentic Judaism rich enough, substantial enough, realistic enough to serve as a national culture and not merely as a counterculture sufficient to sustain a minority. This will happen slowly and from the bottom up. . . .

The much bigger question regards what is happening with halakhah. Halakhah can’t and shouldn’t change dramatically or quickly. . . . But there is a qualitative difference between, for example, seeing Jewish agricultural law—sabbatical years, tithes, etc.—as a series of largely ceremonial obstacles that need to be circumvented, steamrolled, or dumped in somebody else’s backyard and wanting those same laws adapted to modern circumstances in a way that honors their purpose and intent. There is a difference between Shabbat as a personal observance and Shabbat as a communal and even national day of rest, prayer, and study. There are many more mitzvot that take on new meaning when they are observed by an entire society and not just a select minority. How will these evolve? It’s too soon to say. . . .

Israel’s success is the precise opposite of what many of its founders saw as its purpose. Instead of overcoming Jewish tradition, it has facilitated a return to it; instead of replacing Jewish communities with the state, it has given those communities the space to flourish and to influence each other. To complete this process, Israel needs to give its citizens freedom not only from enemies and hostile cultures but also from their own government. . . . The [old] Zionist notion that the big state will guide its citizens to the ideal balance of Jewishness and democracy has it exactly backwards; it is the [limited] “night-watchman” state that seeks to do no more than keep us safe—or rather that serves as the framework within which we keep each other safe—that will create the opportunity for us to figure it all out for ourselves very slowly and very surely.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.