Israel is the largest organized idolatry in the history of Jewish faith -- Avrum Burg

[Sid Shniad]

https://avrumburg.substack.com/p/the-neo-jews

The Neo Jews

Israel is the largest organized idolatry in the history of Jewish faith

Avrum Burg
July 30, 2026

I recently heard a conversation on a podcast between two Americans who joined the church late in their lives. Both described their new religiosity as a response to human evil. The world, they said, is full of cruelty, selfishness, lies and violence. The church offers them a different kind of space, one in which they are asked to think positively and expected to do good. It speaks to them in a language of grace and gives them moral discipline. They found in it a community to which they feel they belong through shared values and actions, and together they cultivate responsibility and solidarity toward people who are not themselves.

Their conversation was Christian in its words but very Jewish in its substance. This is how the religion of my parents’ home once was. They were religious people who found in simple faith meaning and belonging. Were they alive today, they would not recognize in this Israel the landscape of their Judaism, for their faith has changed its face.

I listened to the two Americans as a curious bystander. I am a person without faith, belonging to none of the institutions of any god, and my reservations about religion and its distortions are far greater than the new discoveries they had made. And yet they stirred in me a different thought: how different was the process they went through from what is happening in growing parts of Israeli society. And what separates the motivation of these two from the motivation of the multitudes joining the new Israeli religion.

Everyone searches for meaning, yet the meaning of meaning is elusive and not always moral. It has long been clear that fanaticism too carries meaning. Arrogant supremacy grants a sense of mission, and blind hatred binds people into a community that gives them a clear identity. For this reason the important question is not why people join a religion, but what it does to them once they have joined. Does it soften the evil within them, or does it turn them against the weak and the defenseless. In the Israeli case; is religion a universal human obligation toward every person created in the divine image, or is even the image of the creator divided here by tribal nationality. This is the test that admits no substitute: how much religion demands of its believers, not how many exemptions from responsibility it grants them.

In recent years, and especially since the October 2023 war, a new religious phenomenon has grown in Israel. A folk religion, without institutional rabbis or any binding hierarchy. Rising from below, many of its believers are young people who choose on their own to perform external superficial religious acts. This is the Neo Judaism that is not a return to tradition but an entirely new Israeli religion. In which the Jewish symbol, national sentiments and moral authority are measured by loyalty to the tribe rather than obedience to commandment. It is a religion whose inner life is still unclear yet which is extremely externalized. Long tzitzit, a fashionable kippah, a faith sticker on the car, a gold chain from which something vaguely religious hangs, a rifle slung close whenever possible, tefillin laid in the middle of a city street, and a built in sense of Jewish supremacy. None of them feels any need to apologize.

They are everywhere. In secular high schools where the students themselves invite friends to lay tefillin during recess. Soldiers, men and women, who grew up far from any religious framework, go into battle after a short prayer, an anchor of security before death and its dangers. And also in the testimonies of some of the hostages who returned from captivity, who told how keeping a fast, or reciting a verse remembered from childhood, held their spirit together through the darkest hours.

It matters to me to say this clearly: there is in Israeli religiosity a sincere search as well. A genuine longing for meaning, community, belonging, prayer and comfort. There are more than a few for whom faith has made them gentler, more generous and more responsible. But this social phenomenon has also become a political mechanism, and that must not be blurred. Rabbis give it language, politicians grant it legitimacy, army commanders allow it space, and an entire media apparatus gradually turns it into the norm. In this way neo Judaism supplies a kind of religious justification for acts that in the past would have brought shame. I speak with many of them, listen to their exchanges when I can, read what they publish. And from all of it one common denominator emerges. It is not fear of God, and it is not love of God, it is a mixture of dark passions. On one side they are convinced that “God Himself loves me”, as the foolish pop song puts it, and on the other side there is in them a real hatred for everything liberal, secular or, heaven forbid, Arab. Jewish narcissists in love with themselves, defined by their hatreds.

Unlike the two Americans, who search in the church for belonging against a plague of loneliness and for meaning against evil, many of these come to Judaism in order to do evil in the name of God. This neo Judaism permits the theft of land in the name of redemption. Discrimination has been made holy, and Jewish supremacy expresses for them their own chosenness by God.

In the occupied territories one of the darkest arenas of this phenomenon is thriving. Settlers drive Palestinians from their land, destroy their homes with joy, seize their property, sow destruction and death, mistreat them and at times even harass them sexually, all in the name of a god of vengeance and a love of the land. For them joining this community is an invitation to a religious safari. The rabbis incite and encourage, members of the Knesset lend support, the army cooperates, and the police left the scene long ago. This is the Judaism of our time, at its worst.

This is the dangerous power of religious justification. It can turn a plain crime into a commandment carrying its own reward. The robbers and the murderers have become the new righteous, and the nationalists the heroes of the redemption’s army. This is a religiosity that demands no conquest of impulse whatsoever. On the contrary, savagery and the intoxication of the passions are themselves treated as proper devotion. Vengeance has become a doctrine of security, and hatred of the other has become tribal patriotism.

This was the deepest intention of the Jewish religion, a religion that once existed and has died at their crude hands. It always cast doubt on the righteousness of the strong and the violent. Today no one any longer sets a religious moral boundary before the powerful, because the Neo Jews are themselves the rulers. They do not serve the army, the army serves them. They have a government, and masses who are ignorant and incited, thus everything is permitted to them. In the old Judaism prophets stood up to speak against the power of regime and to remind it that power is not the source of justice. But who today needs prophets, when we have ministers of TikTok and fools of gematria.

The moral distinction of the Bible lies not in the fact that it ignores the enemies of Israel, but in the fact that it refuses to grant Israel automatic innocence. It records without mercy corrupt kings, priests who betrayed their office, false prophets and a public that preferred hollow ritual to full justice. It describes the sins of our own people so as to prevent them from believing that belonging grants automatic purity.

The new Israeli religion erases all of this. It turns the Jew into someone innocent by the very fact of being Jewish, and the Palestinian into someone guilty by the very fact of existing. It produces a moral world in which the identity of the one who acts matters more than the act itself. Violence by Jews becomes sanctification of God’s name, and Palestinian resistance is always terror. In this way a false sense of justice is manufactured while a reality of real wrong is created.

A worthy religion weighs on a person, it does not lighten his load. It demands more of him because of his faith, because religion is restraint, not release, of the impulses. The tragedy of contemporary Israeli Judaism is not that it has become too religious, but that it has become religious in a way that weakens conscience and empowers force. In place of a tradition that reminds us of the limits placed on the human being, a faith has risen here that tells the Jew that limits are meant for others.

And when the state becomes more sacred than the human being, and the land more precious than life, this is no longer faith in God but national idolatry. The name of God still passes through their lips, but the true object of worship is Jewish power.

I am not interested in how many people pray. I do not count how many commandments they keep or how many verses they can recite. These are external trivialities. What I look for in them, and do not find, are other answers: have they grown more sensitive to suffering, more careful with their power, more responsible for their actions. The answer, as of now, is terrible. Their Israel is the largest organized idolatry in the history of Jewish faith. Therefore the commandment placed on me as a Jew is to smash their altars.