A Speech by Zohar Raviv:
The Educational Mission of Birthright Israel

May 2022

Zohar's talk ranks among the best I have witnessed in my entire life.

We were told only that he is an important man, that he doesn't speak to many Birthright groups, and when he does he is provacative in a scholarly way. He is Vice President of Education at Birthright. He will prod us to think.

In his speech, Zohar introduces a multitude of ideas to address the problems of our times, those facing Jews and more generally. He speaks with intensity, unmatched rhetorical eloquence, frequent word play, and no notes. Every fourth sentence he uses a phrase that was surely cultivated over years. Like a cryptographical proof of work, his words bespeak the time he has spent steeped in the discussion.

Below I aim to record the messages Zohar wished to convey.

Zohar begins with his background. He is a native Israeli, served in the army two years, then studied at Brandeis for a masters and later the Harvard Divinity School. He became a professor. Two weeks before receiving tenure, Birthright called him up to offer him a job: "Come home." He says accepting is the best decision of his life.

Zohar brings up in his first main theme the general problems surrounding discourse in today's society. He is blunt: "it is easier to be stupid! Seriously." We are fed black and white stories, squashing nuance. The key word for Zohar is context, not content. We get plenty of content from our cell phone, he says, waving his hands in the air. But information is nothing, nothing without context. Take this sentence: "All Jews should return to the land of Israel." Is the sentence antisemitic? The answer is we don't yet know enough. Ben Gurion uttered these words as an invitation. Hitler would have screamed them as an attack on our existence. Context, context, context. That is the goal of education. An analogy also that Zohar gave is that recent generations are surfers, not deep divers. The word surfing comes from the internet term: we browse a ton of content, all in a shallow way. But the analogy goes further. What do surfers look for? Waves. In the same way, internet surfers are attracted to every wave in society. Ukraine, or abortion, or George Floyd. But two months later, we forget. The next wave has come. Our society systematically creates waves for surfers to consume. More than just the surfer and diver dynamic, the ecosystem of echo chambers limits context. Combined with shallow, binary rhetoric, we have what Zohar calls junk food for thought. For example, Zohar calls himself left leaning, Zionist, and pro-Palestinian all together. He sees no contradiction. To find one would be to make monochrome a rainbow. The mandate of education should never be to tell the student what to think, but how to think. Educators should massage exclamation points back into question marks. If we board the plane at Ben Gurion airport back to America feeling that now we "get Israel," Birthright has failed miserably: "There are two options: either your trip guides were manipulators, or you are morons. Since I don't believe either, I hope you come away instead a bit broadened. Different. Not waving the Israeli flag or thinking in any particular way, but with a better feeling for the complexity of the issues." And he confirms that Birthright has deliberate systems to prevent a meddling hand from the Israeli government. In fact, Zohar has a heuristic to know when new ideas for Birthright education are ready to go. Exactly when the left and right both attack the idea with equal fervor, Zohar gives his CEO the thumbs up: "We nailed it." Zohar also related that Sheldon Adelson, a founding investor in Birthright and vocal extreme conservative in America, to his credit never once approached Birthright to further his political agenda. And so we must distinguish between goals and outcomes, says Zohar. The goal or agenda of Birthright's education program is to broaden the questions students ask, to help students feel and ultimately embrace the ambiguity of hard problems. The outcome may well be a student deciding to support Israel. Then Zohar cheers, but he never would impose such a belief on anyone. To do so would violate the mandate of education. It is not his place to say "should."

And one of the main tools to make progress on effective discourse is dialogue. Too often people will politely nod, devise their own response, remember it, nod, say it, and repeat. This is no dialogue. This is a parallel monologue. Dialogue means resilient listening, then considering that the other person's viewpoint might just -- gasp -- be true. Dialogue is to honestly grapple with the ideas of the other side. Not debate, where the sides never budge. Antithetical to dialogue is Cancel Culture, which advocates cutting ties as soon as someone says something that too far threatens one's views. The whole point of honest dialogue is to entertain ideas far enough that they might dent one's innermost worldview. And speaking of which, Americans have come to badly misunderstand the meaning of free speech. As Zohar puts it, free speech is not free expression. The right protected under the Constitution is the right to speak on the respectful plane of ideas, but not the right to spit in someone's face, apply any sort of pressure, or belittle based on race, gender, orientation, or creed. How one expresses oneself is subject to rules. No restrictions on what one says, strictly speaking, is the inalienable right to Zohar. His view is in fact one of the closest resolutions I have heard to the issue of what should count as free speech: honest dialogue. And Zohar makes one final claim. He frames there being a loud minority and a silent majority. Zohar urges us to take a stand on issues. He asks us to go out and make dialogue with those willing to engage. He is careful to qualify that some are lost causes, too deep in a dogma; simply ignore them, suggests Zohar. You will be attacked, but you must form an alternative to the loud voices. Form an alternative. An alternative to black and white, to the conquest of context, to the shallow surfers, and to the denial of dialogue. Form an alternative.

Zohar moves on to his second main theme: the paradigmatic Jewish narrative. As it stands, the way the world sees Jews and the way Jews see themselves is most often "they tried to kill us but we survived." What is the history of Israel? 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2021. These are the wars that have punctuated the short country's existence. And they are all we talk about and learn about. When asked in a 2008 poll, almost 70% of American Jews said they felt most defined by the Holocaust. But to Zohar, this way of thinking is a mistake. Zohar says he once asked the head of Israel's Ministry of Education what happened in Israel in 1966. He didn't know. Well, the answer is nothing! Not a single catastrophe. If you look into it, Israeli scientists that year developed a chemical formula crucial for cancer research for decades to come. What happened in 1492? Columbus, and the Spanish Inquisition. But what happened for Jews in Spain the prior 300 years? That period was referred to as the golden age of Jews in Spain! Jews produced great works, living together with the Spanish.

Zohar wants to make a paradigm shift in how we conceive of the Jewish narrative. The traditional narrative is persecution. Such death, Zohar says, but where is the life? Our narrative must not be catastrophes interrupted by peace, but peace interrupted by catastrophes. Most Jews throughout history, he claims, have not been persecuted. Many, many have of course. Zohar stresses we should not stop teaching these tragedies, and remembering the Holocaust for example. But almost every Jewish museum outside of Israel is a Holocaust remembrance museum. How is the world to learn the good of Judaism if this is all they see? Judaism does not need to be a religion. It is a mindset, a value system, and a community with a shared history whose numbers have often been inversely proportional to impact. Jews have striven to make a better world. Jews have contributed to nearly every field of human thought. Jews seeded many of the values of Western civilization. Why be proud to be Jewish? If your sales pitch of Judaism to your child is, "And then you will be persecuted," who will join in? Zohar calls for a paradigm shift in the narrative of the Jewish people. Our story is great; not perfect, but none is. Zohar sees a future museum in which the life of Judaism is celebrated on center stage. One room is dedicated to the Holocaust, but it is seen as a heinous interruption, not a definition for Judaism. Certainly crisis mode has its benefits: it mobilizes Jews and especially donors. But also it is unsustainable in the long run. Zohar's excellent phrase for this idea to turn oy to joy: cover catastrophes as interruptions to life, not life as interruptions to catastrophes. Maybe then more young Jews would be proud to connect to their history. Maybe then non-Jews could better understand what being Jewish is all about. One book with a similar message is "People Love Dead Jews." Zohar has conveyed his message to many champions of Jewish education. He believes the seeds for change are planted. But he also sees a long time horizon. His phrase is that we should be revolutionary, but also evolutionary. We should embrace that change takes time. Unlike a bomb exploding, positive change is not instant. So Zohar says, we must engage in open dialogue, learn the life of Judaism and not just its death, and pass on this new narrative of the Jewish people.