A.B. Yehoshua is still fighting the good old Zionist fight of the 20th century to convince world Jewry that they really ought to be living in Israel in order to have an authentically Jewish life. However, the challenge posed to world Jewry in the 21st century is a dramatically different one, and it is one which neither Yehoshua nor many of his critics are ready for.

Whether you approach an understanding of life from an economic, political, technological or ecological point of view, the central truth of the 21st century is that we live in an increasingly interconnected world. And whether it is looking at the possibility of nuclear proliferation and war, or an impending environmental catastrophe, more people are coming to understand the central moral insight of our time: that our well-being, as individuals, families, religious communities and nations depends on the well-being of the entire world, and on the well-being of the planet itself.

So there is no “individual solution” for you or me as people, and there is no “national solution” for Israel or the Jewish people that doesn’t depend on providing for the economic, cultural, political and spiritual fulfillment of everyone else.

This is the central survival issue facing humanity today, and it makes the old 19th century nationalism and the 20th century struggles about Jewish identity seem like relics of an ancient past.

The central question for the Jewish people is this: Do we have anything of value to contribute to the human race either from the standpoint of our nationhood such as it is constituted in the State of Israel or from the perspective of our religious and spiritual heritage?

And of course the answer is an old Jewish one: “yes and no.”

Yehoshua is undoubtedly correct when he points to the fuller-bodied experience of having to put one’s ethical values into immediate use in the day-to-day experience of building a state and a society that living in Israel presents as a challenge to contemporary Judaism. Unfortunately, whether drawing upon secular nationalist or religious foundations, Israel’s Jews have done a remarkably bad job of this task, creating a society that has become a pariah among nations that never had any history of anti-Semitism, but which nevertheless have watched Israel treat the Palestinians with such ruthless disregard for their human rights as to make it unique among the economically advanced societies (though, in my view, far less a shonda [shame] than many other economically underdeveloped societies, and Russia and China). Nor has Israel been a light unto the nations when it comes to the treatment of its own poor, with such wealth disparities as to render it among the worst in the developed world. The scientific and technological advances in Israel are worthy of admiration. However, it is important to remember that Jews have been at the forefront of such achievements in whatever country they have lived for almost 200 years.

The fact remains that Jewish nationalism has reached a pinnacle of extremism in Israel, and has come to epitomize the political paradigm that humanity needs most to transcend. It is a disgrace for Jews everywhere that Israel is the best example of a society with utopian ideals that degenerated into the opposite of those ideals, and which conservatives use to demonstrate that humanity will always be involved in irresolvable ethnic conflict. When the prophet Isaiah heard God proclaiming “my House will be a House of prayer for all peoples,” he was conveying a universal spiritual vision that has been lost by much of the Jewish religious world as it transformed Judaism into a cheerleader for the politics of a particular state.

Jews in the Diaspora have not been particularly successful in providing an alternative. The sad truth is that those most affiliated with the organized Jewish community are those who have been least creative in defining a Judaism that can meet the challenges of the 21st century. Much of America’s organized Jewish community is mired in a religion of Holocaust and Israel-worship that sends it into a fury if anyone dares compare our Holocaust to theirs, or uses universally accepted criteria of human rights to criticize Israel. Many members of America’s Jewish community have largely abandoned the consciousness that would have led it to be concerned with the rights of others, as it was during the time in which it stood for civil rights. (The only recent exception being the admirable opposition to the genocide in Darfur, though it merely received Jewish establishment support because it allowed Jews and Evangelical Christians the opportunity to use human rights criteria to attack Arabs and Muslims in Darfur, while remaining silent about American and Israeli human rights violations.)

The rebellion against all of this by Jews who are unaffiliated with the organized Jewish community in the U.S. (the majority of American Jews) is largely unknown in Israel. Even decent media sources like Haaretz think they are covering American Jewry’s response to every issue when they contact the few (usually unelected) bureaucrats who run organizations whose members rarely even know what their “leadership” is supposedly saying in their name.

It’s a rare day when an Israeli knows about the majority of American Jews under the age of 60 who have developed a spiritual rebirth far outside the confines of traditional denominations, a political rebirth that finds expression in organizations like the Tikkun Community’s Network of Spiritual Progressives, Jewish Voice for Peace, Brit Tzedek v’ Shalom, the Jewish Fund for Justice or the Shalom Center.

It is in these “unofficial” areas of Diaspora life where Jews are most willing to think in universal terms, to transcend the limitations of narrow nationalism or a chauvinist religion to ask the most important Jewish question facing us: How do we transform our Jewish state, our Jewish culture, our Jewish religion, our Jewish literature and the assumptions with which we read our holy texts, to nurture rather than restrict our capacities to empathize with and give priority to universal human needs?

Jewry the world over must develop those aspects of our heritage and our wisdom that could make a serious contribution to the human race in the 21st century. Unfortunately, A.B. Yehoshua hasn’t come to understand that yet.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine. His most recent book is “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right.”

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