There are three concentric circles to the identity of the secular Zionist Jew.  There is no way to reach the inner circle without going through the outer circles, and there is no way to get out of the inner circle without going through the outer circles.

For the past 180 years, the Jewish people has been struggling with a protracted and profound identity crisis, that now threatens our very existence.  As a matter of fact, every day there are fewer Jews in the world.  Not because they are being killed, God forbid, and not because of persecution either; simply, their belonging to the Jewish people has no longer any meaning for them.  They do not deny their origin, they are not ashamed of it, they do not hide it but that origin has no longer any concrete significance in their life. 
 Living in a free and open society, which does not scrutinize every jot and tittle of a man’s conduct every hour of the day, and given conditions that alienate individuals from religious feeling, in which ‘the Death of God’ is an obvious truth (to be deplored, perhaps, but not to be doubted), a Jew’s connection to the religious community (or the pseudo-religious community) must get weaker and weaker.  To this we must add that he (or she) will know very little of Hebrew culture, if anything at all, but will know a great deal about Western culture in general, and about the specific culture in which he lives in particular.  It is only natural, then, for him to turn his face to the wider society, to the very part of it which has also lost its God, and to find his life experience within his local segment of the pervading Western culture.  Into that society he assimilates.  This is the situation of a significant portion of Jewish youth today in the Western world; and since the majority of the Jewish people not living in Zion-Israel  is to be found in the West, the future direction of the Jewish people is obvious unless something radical is done to fundamentally change it.

A Yemeni on the Streets of Vilna
Having laid down that the Jewish people has been experiencing an identity crisis for the past 180 years, we have to explain what the situation was before that, and what factor or factors brought the crisis on us.  But just how far before that must we reach back?  This is something which has to be defined.
 As Orthodox Jewry sees the world ---- all trends of Orthodox Jewry ---- Jewish identity is continuous, harmonious, consistent, and unbroken from Abraham to the End of Days.  (Perhaps not really from Abraham, since he lived before the Torah was given on Sinai, but certainly from Moses).
 We, the free-thinking Jews, see things differently.  We know very well that Jewish identity has passed through, and is still passing through, changes and upheavals: in other words, it has evolved historically.  So its phases and eras have to be delimited in historical terms.  From Yavneh and its Sages (that is, the first century of the Common Era) to the beginning of the Emancipation (early 19th century), there was, in truth, a solid, continuous, harmonious, and consistent identity by which Jews identified themselves amongst themselves and by which they were identified by outsiders.  To illustrate: take Yannai the Poet, who lived in Palestine in the fifth-sixth century C.E. (well known to part of Jewry for his, ‘And it came to pass at midnight’ in the Passover Haggadah) and transplant him to the streets of Worms, city of Rashi [Rashi’s Torah commentary is a fundament of rabbinic Judaism]  when this Sage was active, that is, the eleventh century. There is not the least possible doubt that the  Jews of Worms ---- and Rashi first and foremost --- would have recognized him as a Jew, as he would have known them as Jews. And what is no less important for our purpose, the gentiles of Worms would also have known him for a Jew. 
 Take another example. Take a Jew from San’a, from the Yemen of two hundred years ago, and put him down in the streets of Vilna at that time. Without a shadow of doubt he would have identified the Jews of Vilna as Jews and they would have identified him as a Jew; and the gentiles of Vilna would have known him for a Jew.  So what was it that these Jews had in common, and to such a degree that we may say with absolute certainty that both Jews and gentiles would have known them for Jews? (Do I need to say that if we had taken the majority of contemporary Jews for our illustration, neither Rashi nor the Jews of Vilna, nor the gentiles of Worms or Vilna, would have identified them as Jews?).  And yet, the Jews I chose to make my point did not belong to the same territory or the same history (the history of the Jews of San’a was dictated by regional developments, as was that of the Jews of Vilna; neither community had much influence on events in their wider society), they did not speak the same language (most Jews for most of the period from Yavneh to the Emancipation neither knew, spoke nor wrote Hebrew, if they indeed knew how to read and write at all [the Emancipation: the granting of civil rights to Jews, giving them equal or partially-equal status with other citizens and emancipating them from their medieval, quasi-feudal civil status].  Those who did know Hebrew had a written language in common, but pronounced it so differently they would have had the greatest difficulty understanding each other.
 Nor did they have a common faith, since there are no binding articles of faith in Judaism, and no topic which is not a  matter of controversy.  It is enough to take universally revered Jews, such as Rabbi Yehuda Halevi [poet and philosopher in 11th-12th century Spain] and Maimonides (Rambam), and examine how the first conceives God and how Rambam conceives Him, how Rabbi Halevi conceives the commandments and how Rambam conceives them; and how these two luminaries each conceive the Land of Israel. In Rambam's scheme of thought, the concepts and beliefs of Rabbi Halevi border on idolatry ---- yet it would never have occurred to him to reject him from the body of Israel.

The Common Denominator: Rabbinical Law (Halakhah)
The yardstick they all used ---- Halevi and Maimonides, the Jews of San’a and of Vilna ---- was acknowledgment of rabbinical halakhah as their legal system.  Both our luminaries lived and died by its nuances and niceties.  By ‘legal system’ I mean a complete system of laws, regulations, and rulings encompassing all aspects of man’s being.  Had our imaginary Jew from San’a of two hundred years ago, the one we lifted by his forelock  to the streets of Vilna, had he quarreled with another Jew in his good city of San’a and broken the man’s arm, what would have been the legal system used to judge him? They would have opened the  Mishneh Torah, Rambam’s monumental legal codex, known familiarly as The Firm Hand, would have been opened it at the section Torts, the halakhot [laws, rulings] on bodily injury; the proper paragraph would have been found and sentence passed accordingly.  And had a Jew from the Vilna of two hundred years ago broken a fellow-Jew’s arm, what would have been the legal system used to judge him? The very same.
 In other words, the Jewish people from Yavneh to the Emancipation had no common territory and no common history; they had ---- partially and in  very small measure ---- a common language; but they did have  a common body of law.

Halakhah as a Dividing Factor
Every legal system is based, necessarily, on implicit premises. One premise, logically indispensable and common to any imaginable system, is that the authority of that legal system be recognized and accepted by the people under its jurisdiction.  It is the unspoken premise of the American constitution that the American nation accepts it as law.  When, in the 1860s, that principle was questioned by a number of member states it led to a civil war which took more lives than any war before it.
 Halakhah makes the same presupposition ---- that the whole of the Jewish people accepts it as its law.  This was true and valid from Yavneh to the Eman, but not before Yavneh. It is well-known that the sects of Jewry were many and diverse ---- Pharisees and Sadducees, Boethusians and Essenes, Christian. (Says Rabbi Jonathan in the Jerusalem Talmud: “Israel was not exiled until there appeared twenty-four sects of heretics.”)  Each of these groups saw themselves as being the best Jews on earth, though as a rule they did not repudiate the others as ‘beyond the pale’.  They quarreled, there was even bloodshed at times, but they had regular dealings with each other and even intermarried. From Yavneh on, however anyone not accepting halakhah as law, individual or group, was set beyond the pale, expelled the camp, and so it remained up to the Emancipation. Since the Emancipation, however, the number of Jews who no longer see halakhah as their law has multiplied without cease.  That is a fact. Some may rejoice, others weep, but dispute it, no one can. No one, today,  can say that halakhah is what all those who see themselves as belonging to the section of humanity called the Jewish people have in common.  On the contrary, it is precisely halakhah which is not common to the Jewish people. The majority does not accept it as binding law.  The Jewish people is split from top to bottom, even over whether to accept halakhah as a source of inspiration and spiritual biography.
 It all began with a handful of Jews who somehow were able to breach the ghetto walls.  No sooner done, the foundations of Jewish identity, which had stood firm for eighty generations, crumbled. All the movements to have sprung up among the Jews in the last 150 years have addressed this critical issue.  For most of them, it has been the central problem.  But before reviewing the spectrum of opinion on the problem, it is appropriate to mention briefly the movement ---- though process might be a better word ---- which gave birth to the new polis, the western, humanist, democratic, civil and national state ---- the Emancipation.

The Enlightenment Breaks Down the Ghetto Walls
The Jewish people ---- or perhaps it would be better to say its great men, its sages, its leaders ---- were not part of the process called the Enlightenment, (Hebrew: haskalah). [The Enlightenment was the philosophical movement in 18th century Europe, especially in France, in which reason and individualism were set up in place of tradition.] Certainly, they were not among its pioneers, its mentors, and its champions.  On the contrary, a great many of them fought desperately against it.  In the long and impressive list of creators, philosophers, artists and leaders who, by their very personality, actions and creations, constituted the Enlightenment, there is not a single Jew.  (To be fair, one Jew did make a very significant contribution, and his name is celebrated for it, but not in his own community, which denounced him, Baruch  Spinoza, precisely because of this contribution, as unfit to remain part of it; he was ostracized, excommunicated and driven out.) It may be fairly said that, on the whole, the Jewish people met the Enlightenment and its ideas totally unprepared for it, unprepared socially, economically, and, worst of all, spiritually. And this is why that small number of Jews who breached the ghetto walls exploded the very underpinnings of the Jewish people. To this day, Jewry has not recovered from the blow. Its very character has prevented recovery.
 From time immemorial, Ashkenazi Jews have confined their education ‘within the four close walls of Torah’. A Jewish child was suckled on Torah and an old Jew died in Torah, having all his life studied his Talmud by a method devised and perfected in Rashi’s time.
 A Jew in Spain [i.e. a Sephardi Jew] by contrast, would also study from cradle to grave but he would study all the subjects known to his time as well as Torah. [Sephardi Jews are, in the main, descended from Jewish communities that lived under Arab regimes in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, while Ashkenazi Jews are, in the main, of European descent and culture]. True, it was only Torah study that mattered and the rest was marginal; nevertheless, his eyes were open to other worlds.  It is not necessary to elaborate here how Jewish culture won enormous riches by this openness (and perhaps somehow, by the most indirect of indirect paths, Western culture as well).  Unfortunately, with the expulsion of Jews from Spain [1492], it was the Ashkenazi system that prevailed. Throughout the Jewish Diaspora (with the exception of a number of communities no longer playing a dominant role in the life of the Jewish people, the Italian, for instance) the core and substance of a Jew’s study and thinking was what was contained within the four close walls of Torah.  This introversion exacted its inevitable price, as it does in all closed-off societies from Hottentots to Eskimos ---- atrophy.  In the three hundred years separating the expulsion from Spain and the beginning of the Enlightenment, several highly disquieting signs of the atrophy of Jewry appeared. I shall give only a few examples here to illustrate the trend.

The Handicap of Segregation
In 1666, the Year of the Plague after the Great Fire of London, the young Isaac Newton, aged 24, fled Cambridge to his mother's farm at Woolsthorpe, where he purchased triangular prisms, experimented with them, and reasoned his way to his wonderful discovery ---- “White light is ever compounded and to its composition are requisite all the primary colors mixed in due proportion” he wrote in his treatise on optics (which he published only in 1704).  In that same year (1666) he came to the conclusion that “the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve’’ and thus laid the foundation of mechanics.  (He would only publish this treatise, Principia Mathematica, 21 years later). In the very same year, the year Leibnitz and the young Newton (independently and unaware of each other) invented the method of infinitesimal calculus, all the great men of Israel, but for a pitiful handful, were devoting all their energy to the intense study of a question that without doubt had its own fascination: Is Shabtai Tzvi a Messiah of the House of Joseph or the House of David? [Shabtai Tzvi proclaimed himself Messiah in 1665 and, in so doing, stirred up a mass furore among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.]  The Vilna Gaon, who lived a hundred years after Newton, knew as much about gravity as about the Emperor of China.  The Gaon lived at the time of the French Revolution, but like most other Sages of Israel, did not appreciate the importance of what was happening ---- if he heard about it at all, that is.  This closure to the world became a source of terrible weakness since, as we have seen, it meant that the Jewish people met the Enlightenment totally unprepared. Had Europe of the early nineteenth century rapidly implemented the principles of the Enlightenment the Jewish people would very likely have disintegrated within fifty years.  However, Europe did not digest its own ideas so easily, and the past two hundred years have seen an ongoing struggle between those wanting to advance the process of enlightenment and those trying to put the clock back.  Caught between the two, European Jewry, having endured the history of a thousand years, met its end.

Modernism, the Enemy of Halakhah
Let us go back to the spectrum of Jewish opinion that, in the early part of the 18th century, had to deal with the influx of new ideas.  At one extreme we have classic Orthodox Judaism.  Its position can be summed up by the words of the Hatam Sofer, Rabbi of Pressburg in Hungary and one of Orthodoxy’s greatest proponents: “Torah forbids innovation”.  In other words, we, Jews, have one and only one function, to keep and preserve the Torah and the commandments, and this we shall do faithfully until the day of our death; all the rest is the problem of the Lord, blessed be He: He created the world and will solve all its problems.  A careful man will shun Modernism and everything to do with it.  Classic Orthodoxy refused to even acknowledge the nesituation, much less yield to it.  It said, as it were, ‘We have our position and the outer world has its; we must confine ourselves more closely than ever to the only things a Jew needs to know --- that which is found within the four close walls of Torah.’

Assimilation: the Largest Jewish Movement in the World
At the other extreme of the spectrum are the Jews who chose assimilation. Their position can be summarized in one sentence:  the historical mission of the Jewish people, whose sons and daughters we are ---- a great, important, and mighty people which has left a deep imprint on the history of human thought and perhaps even on the history of mankind ---- this mission is accomplished.  We have a splendid past but no common future. Let us therefore disperse, each to his own way; each of us will find his own solution within the new conditions set up by the Enlightenment and the Emancipation. This is what Heinrich Heine said, and he converted to Christianity; this is what Heinrich Marx, Karl Marx’s father, said before taking himself and his family into the Christian Church; Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin, and a well-known writer himself, said: “The people I come from has not produced in the last thousand years even ten wise men whose wisdom is worth listening to.” The ‘assimilationists’ took their leave of the Jewish people, never to return. They counted, perhaps, its greater part.  It is not right to call it a movement, since its guiding spirit was and is ‘every man for himself, every man to his own spot’ but, unfortunately, this is the largest ‘Jewish movement’ that the world has known.
 If we turn back again to the other end of the spectrum, we find, before we come to the traditional Orthodox at the very end, the New or Neo-Orthodox, disciples of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch [d. 1888]. His position in one phrase (my words) is: Torah with courtesy for the outside world.  Here is what Rabbi Samson Raphael told his disciples: “The gentiles let you study in their universities --- go study.  Excel in your subjects, be the best engineers, the best doctors and so forth, but the Torah and its commandments we shall keep to the minutest detail in the tradition of our fathers.  Grasp the one but do not let the other slip out of your hand.”  He set up a rabbinical seminary that taught both Torah and science (in Frankfurt-am-Main).  His ideas caught on and Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer set up a similar institution in Berlin.  These were to shape three or four generations of fascinating Jews, who, to our misfortune, have remained almost unknown to educated Jews everywhere.  And it all came to an end when European Jewry came to an end.

Separating Religion from Zionist Nationality and the Opponents of the Separation
Closer to the center of the spectrum we find the Reform Jews, and they constitute a real revolution.  Their philosophy can be summed up as follows: we have to fight for full equality of rights and obligations ---- within the framework of the new emancipating nation-states evolving in Europe.  Full rights and obligations means full citizenship. Full citizenship means full nationality. This is the new form of nationality taking shape in Europe. For the first time in the existence of Jewry, religion and nationality separate for nationality now went with citizenship. A Jew’s nationality, said Reform Jewry, will from now on be decided by the place of his citizenship. In other words, a Jew of  German citizenship will be German by nationality and  Jewish by religion.  Just as there are German nationals who are Protestants, Calvinists, Baptists and so forth, so will there be German Jews. The same for Jews who receive French citizenship.
 So much for the relations of Jews to the outside world.  The new ‘Reformed’ conception of Judaism itself was no less of an upheaval. To bring it into line with the spirit of the times, the religion of Moses was to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and given a good shaking out. A true revolution was to be carried through ---- from within and without.
 Conceptually, Reform Judaism is the polar opposite to Zionism.  Zionism, too, separated religion and nationality, but Zionism saw a Jew first and foremost and above all as a member of the Jewish nation.  How it came about that the Reform movement eventually became one of the mainstays of the Zionist movement --- that is another story.
 Further along the spectrum from Reform we find the revolutionary Jews --- Socialists, Communists, Bundists and other ‘ists’. Common to all, with respect to the issue we are discussing, was the  faith that the revolution which Europe had undergone [during the 18th century] was but a drop in the bucket compared to what was yet to come; and that in that future revolution, the Jewish problem would be solved along with all other social problems. How solved? There was no consensus on that point: Socialists had their answer, Communists had theirs, and Bundists had theirs.
 In effect, we can divide the whole length of our spectrum into three groups, all categorically opposed to Zionism.  Orthodoxy in all its forms, classical or neo-Orthodox, opposed Zionism with all its heart. It considered it as rebellion, a betrayal of the past of the Jewish people, a betrayal of the Jewish people’s age-old source of authority, namely, halakhah.  Reform Jews, including the various strands of Liberal Jews, were against Zionism in the name of the present: Europe offers us an acceptable solution, they said; more than that, Europe offers us the appropriate solution ---- equality of rights and obligations, full citizenship and nationality in societies which are themselves in the very vanguard of progress. Offered such a solution, Jews should fight to bring it to full realization.  The various revolutionary Jews denounced Zionists in the name of the future.  Their argument went like this: your search for a solution on a national-territorial basis is anachronistic because the future will be supra-national and non-national, and it is in a future like that that the solution of the Jewish problem is to be found.

Zionism Saw What Was Coming
One section of Jewry spoke in the name of the past, another in the name of the present, and the third in that of the future.  But what did the Zionists have to say? I shall first define succinctly what Zionism is and then elaborate on each component of the definition.  Zionists said: For the time being, there is no other way and no other solution other than the in-gathering of the Jewish people in a territory of its own, where it can take responsibility for all components of its life.
 ‘For the time being’ -- that is, Zionism is not a new orthodoxy but a modern socio-political movement, rational and self-critical.  It does not see itself as an everlasting solution.  It saw with clarity that should mankind still be alive a hundred and fifty years ahead, and should people identifying themselves as Jews still be part of that mankind, the problems they would have to face would be so different and so far distant from anything imaginable at present that the only thing to do was to wish them sages with the power to find solutions appropriate for their time and leaders to show them the way to implement these solutions.  It followed from the four words ‘for the time being’ that an honest Zionist, and an honest Zionist movement, had to get up every morning and ask itself: Am I still relevant, and is the Zionist solution still the right one?
 It can be said ---- at least up to the time of writing ---- that Zionism and Zionists correctly read the politico-historical map of their time and in fact read it better than anyone else.  By any objective criterion, given the purposes and the objectives Zionism set for itself, it saw reality with less self-delusion than any other school of thought.
‘There is no other way and no other solution’: This is the very essence of the radical concept of rejecting Judaism as a way of life in exile [and rejecting the euphemism of ‘dispersal’ which is the meaning of ‘Diaspora’].  It was the Zionists’ sense, understanding, and evaluation that in the western world of civilian democratic states, Jewry stno chance of survival.  And the fact is that the Jewish people in our time is indeed diminishing at an astonishing rate.  The only community increasing consistently is the Jewish community in the Jewish state. From 50,000 Jews in Israel at the beginning of the century we are more than five million at the close of the century ---- more than a hundredfold increase. The importance of the Zionist enterprise can hardly be exaggerated.
‘Gathered in its own territory’: A territory, yes, but which? Everyone knows that a whole Zionist Congress [The 7th Zionist Congress of 1905] was devoted to the dispute on that point. Good Zionists pleaded for a territory other than Palestine, yet this point of view must not exclude them from our definition of Zionism. Especially since Herzl, the prime mover of Zionism, was one of them and we have no intention of excluding him from our definition.
‘Taking responsibility for all components of its life’:   This is the alpha and omega of the Zionist idea.  To restore Jewish society to the multi-facetedness of human commitment, from sweeping the streets to education and research, from health to defense, from ploughing and harvesting to the creation of poetry and literature, theater and music.  And paramount among them all ---- the very heart of the matter ---- a Jewish parliament legislating in autonomous sovereignty. No longer would the law be rabbinic ---- the consensus on that point went from the extremist left to the Religious Zionists.  As Pinsker [Pioneer Zionist. Leader of the Khibbat Zion movement. d. 1891] put it, what was required was our “self-emancipation, that is, all the principles of emancipation applied by ourselves to ourselves”.  The consequence was the creation of a new polis, based on new principles, born of emancipation and humanism.  Unfortunately, after a century of Zionism and fifty years of the Jewish State, we are still having difficulty making a reality of these principles, particularly with respect to freedom of conscience and religion.
 To make my point crystal clear, I shall illustrate the possibilities that have opened up to the Jews in their new polis, where they can give the fullest expression to the multi-facetedness of man.

The Three Circles of Jewish and Secular Identity
There are three concentric circles to the identity of the secular Zionist Jew.  There is no way to reach the inner circle without going through the outer circles, and there is no way to get out of the inner circle without going through the outer circles.  They have a shared center ---- the heart of man. The integration and harmony of the three circles is an option made possible only by the establishment of the Jewish polis.

The First Circle: Humanism
The humanist circle is the universal one. We believe in and stand for the fundamental principles of humanism.  These principles take precedence over any other commitment to a people, a race, a religion, gender or family; some of them one would die fighting for.  Let me show what I mean:
 We, the Jewish State, brought a man to justice. To a fair trial we said.  We got him there by entirely irregular means, in violation of international law.  We put him on trial. We sentenced him to death.  We hanged him.  We cremated his body.  We scattered his ashes over the sea.  By what justice was Adolf Eichmann convicted? By the laws of his country? Not only did he not violate them, he observed them to the letter and the spirit. The laws of Israel he could not have broken because Israel did not exist at the time. Adolf Eichmann transgressed the fundamental principles of mankind as such, the very principles that no power on earth can rescind or has the right to rescind, and in their name it is a man’s duty to betray, and rebel against, his country, his people, his race, his gender, and his family.
 Another example. One of the three greatest sins, according to rabbinic Judaism, is idolatry, proscribed by the Ten Commandments, and against which rabbinic Judaism will fight to the bitter end. A Jew who sees in humanism the first circle of his being, on the other hand, will fight with all his might and strength for freedom of religious belief and practice for all individuals in his society, as long as none of the practices infringes on another principle of humanism.

The Second Circle, the Jewish Circle
Of all humanists, we are the ones who try to apply its universal principles in the country where we live, in our very special circumstances and in constant interaction with our own spiritual biography, Jewish culture ancient of days. In other words, the praxis is peculiarly ours.  In Western, emancipatory, humanist society, there is general consensus on fundamental principles.  If opinions divide, it is not necessarily on national grounds, but rather between humanists with different views or approaches. The variance, the specificity, of humanism is to be found in the praxis.  People of French culture will always implement humanist principles differently from people of English culture.  Language, geography, spiritual biography, and the circumstances deriving from all these ---- not to mention mentality, temperament and the like ---- these are what dictate the divergences.
 The Zionist enterprise created the possibility of Jewish praxis on the basis of these same emancipatory humanist principles.  Such a praxis is only fully possible in an independent polis, and that is the creation of Zionism. Jewish humanist  praxis is realized in three dimensions, three coordinates upon which are woven, spun, and played out the life of humankind, public life.
 The first the calendar of a man's life. His birth (the way society reacts to it: with ceremonies, symbols, special acts, etc.); circumcision (yes or no?, what is the significance of the act to us?) Bar Mitzvah, marriage, the birth of children, divorce, death. How does society apportion the life cycle? How does it treat events along the axis of life? How does it react to them? This is the very soul of a living culture, the point where all the circles meet, horizontally and vertically, with all their  contradictions and complementariness.
 The second dimension is the calendar of the year.  All that was said of the calendar of man applies here as well.
 The third dimension economic and social life.  Socio-economic relations constitute the backbone of any culture.

The Third Circle, Zionism
Among Jews, we are those who believe that for the time being, there is no other way and no other solution than to gather the Jewish people in a territory of its own, where we can take responsibility for all the components of our life.
In conclusion: a total experience of life, in all its multitudinous facets, in all its contradictions and complementariness, in the tension between what is possible, desirable, and necessary, and between past, present and hope ---- this is what constitutes the vibrant being of a living culture, with a great future awaiting it.