Jewish Peoplehood is a Superpower

A rabbi's photo ends up in an Israeli classroom — and it becomes a sermon about what really holds the Jewish people together. In this sermon at Temple Judea, Rabbi Josh Franklin opens with a true story: a cousin in Netanya, Israel, texts him during a teacher training seminar. On the screen up front are five images of "Israelis" — an Ethiopian elder, a Filipino-Israeli soldier, secular teenage girls, a Mizrahi bar mitzvah boy... and a photo of Rabbi Josh, halfway around the world. "I know him," his cousin says. "He's not Israeli. But he's one of us." From there, Rabbi Franklin unpacks Jewish peoplehood — one of Judaism's most essential and most misunderstood ideas. He traces it from the Reform movement's 1885 Pittsburgh Platform (which once declared Jews "no longer a nation, only a religious community") to today's college campuses, where Jewish students are pressured to disconnect from Israel and from Jews around the world as the price of admission to certain spaces. He explores the Hebrew concepts of Am (people), Bet Yisrael (the house of Israel), and mishpacha (family) — and why the Torah's own language for Jewish identity has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with peoplehood. He doesn't shy away from how hard that peoplehood can be — recounting being spit on by ultra-Orthodox protesters at the Kotel, and a tense Shabbat dinner with extremist family members in the West Bank — before landing on the Talmudic teaching that anchors it all: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, all of Israel is responsible for one another. A sermon about disagreement, family, Am Yisrael Chai, and what it means to be one people — no matter where you are or how different you look. Shana Tova. 🔔 Subscribe to Temple Judea for more sermons, teachings, and Jewish learning. #JewishPeoplehood #AmYisraelChai #RoshHashanah #Jewishpeople #RabbiJosh