by Jeannie Connerney
The heart of Torah is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” says Rabbi Greg Hersh, describing why he founded V’ahavtah. Named after the Hebrew word meaning “and you shall love,” the mission of the recently opened Jewish community in Cambridge is “practicing Judaism beyond Zionism.”
“The Torah is beautiful,” says Hersh, “But it has been misinterpreted by rabbis over the centuries. What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? It comes to mean ‘only Jewish people,’ which I don’t think was the intent…V’ahavtah is about reclaiming our Jewish history, which sometimes goes back to the rabbis, but often goes back further than that to the original heart of Torah: love.”
He adds that V’ahavtah was founded both “to let Jews know that you can be a good Jew and a non-Zionist, but also to let non-Jews know that we exist, that not every Jew is a blind supporter of Israel.”
The four commitments of the V’ahavtah community are: “Judaism without borders, spiritual depth and ethical clarity, radical welcome, and Palestinian solidarity,” and the website describes the synagogue as “a loving return to the heart of our tradition – a Judaism rooted in justice, compassion, and the deep belief that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of the Divine.”
The community has held three holiday gatherings so far, including for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and they also hold learning circles and community meals. Besides those within the Jewish faith, the congregation welcomes “seekers, partners, interfaith families, and allies.”
Currently, approximately 30 non-Zionist synagogues exist in the United States, although only five or six have rabbis. “There’s a real void in the Jewish community right now,” says Hersh, “and there’s nothing else quite like V’ahavatah in Massachusetts.”
Hersh’s journey toward non-Zionism and his reasons for founding V’ahavtah are deeply personal. Growing up in Connecticut as a Reform Jew, Rabbi Hersh recalls the Israeli flag in his synagogue. “That’s very prominent in every synagogue; we put it right next to the Torah. You’re praying to a flag.”
“We were all indoctrinated from a young age that Israel is the greatest country on earth,” he continues and describes reframing this belief as “a process of cleaning our eyes.” Like many Jewish-American boys, Hersh was given a classic two-week tour of Israel for his Bar Mitzvah at age 13. He toured the sites, didn’t see any Palestinians, and came home thinking, “What an amazing country!”
Then, starting in high school, he identified as a socialist and lived on a kibbutz in northern Israel for two summers during college. “I loved socialism, not necessarily Israel, that’s what drew me to the kibbutz. I would have gone to a kibbutz anywhere on earth.”
It was during those two summers that Hersh began to view Israeli society differently. “I saw Israel from the perspective of one who lives there, and the open racism was obvious. Society was segregated, you never had to see a Palestinian, and they were certainly looked down on and seen as bad, scary people to avoid.”
Despite the segregation, as a member of the kibbutz gardening team, Hersh became friends with the only Palestinian who worked there and who operated all the heavy machinery. When he asked his supervisor “Can I learn how to use the crane too?” he was told firmly “No,” that only the Palestinian could use it because “that’s the only job on the kibbutz where somebody could die, so only he’s allowed, not you.”
That conversation has stayed with him ever since. “Now I understand what it was like to be black in America before civil rights,” he told his parents that Sunday during his weekly phone call home. He adds that in 2018 the nation-state bill enshrined a two-tiered, racist system into Israeli law, codifying that “Israel is for us; not them.”
Hersh eventually began to see Judaism through a different lens and embraced Reconstructionism, a denomination which preaches “radical inclusion” and rejects the idea of both a supernatural God and Jews as the “chosen people.” He attended Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, and for the past nine years, he had been working as a rabbi at Temple Emmanuel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Wakefield, where he doubled the size of the community and built a school, which now enrolls 25 students. It’s there that Hersh had hoped to spend his career. He has served on the national board of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association since 2020, where he was also secretary and treasurer. In Wakefield he taught a six-month dual-narrative course about Israel and Palestine, which he believed had been eye-opening for his students. Everyone seemed to regress after October 7, 2023, however, and he noticed a return to a single, Israeli narrative.
“All the teachings I felt I’d imparted regarding Israel hadn’t moved the students at all. Whatever history I’d imparted fell flat. I felt worthless as a rabbi,” he says.
At about the same time, he began leading Shabbat services for Jewish Voice for Peace. “It became clear these were very different communities: Jewish Voice for Peace — a bunch of activists, most of whom never go to synagogue, versus mostly baby-boomers, who love synagogue, and that’s their Jewish life. I found myself gravitating much more towards the activists, who I could speak in front of and not hold anything back.”
A short time later, Hersh decided to move on from Temple Emmanuel. After applying for two other positions in the Reconstructionist community, he withdrew his applications upon realizing he would be expected to appease everyone. “You never get to speak your mind because you’ll offend somebody, and I’m no longer interested in that rabbinate. I’d rather do something else for a living than trying to make everyone happy all the time during a genocide.”
“So, I followed my bliss,” he says, and started V’ahavtah. “It’s a real risk. I can never go back to working in the mainstream Jewish world; now no synagogue will hire me.”
So far, that risk has paid off, and V’ahavtah has been a success story. Open since August, the new congregation is developing “quickly and beautifully,” says Hersh, “much quicker than anyone anticipated.” There are now about 280 people on the listserv, and the numbers are growing. The idea of the launch in September was to decentralize responsibility beyond the initial six-person team. “I no longer have to carry this by myself,” Hersh says. He hopes to institutionalize the community and “dream into our future together” — a future in which he predicts similar communities will also flourish.
“Interest will continue to grow in non-Zionist synagogues. So many people have been turned off to Jewish life over the last two years, and for so many of us, just seeing an Israeli flag is something we don’t want to be a part of.”
“I think there will be more and more of these synagogues that pop up because there’s a real need for it. Why I did it now was so that I could be among the first. My belief is that as more people graduate rabbinical school, they’re not going to be interested in serving right-wing communities that support a genocide, so more options will continue to arise.”
Hersh is in contact with members of other non-Zionist synagogues around the country and hopes that eventually they can work together to form a larger community with a national presence. “I do believe that this is the next evolution — an American Judaism that is not connected to Israel is our future. ’Diasporic’ has been one of the names floated for this new movement which means ‘embracing our lives outside of Israel.’”
His vision for V’ahavtah is more immediate: “My hope,” Hersh concludes, “is that during the next two or three years we can have a voice in the Boston Jewish community and people will listen to us.”
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Jeannie Connerney is a member of MAPA, Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment, Pax Christi, and Irish-Americans for Palestine, Boston.