Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured a story about a letter critical of the State of Israel written by a group of 93 rabbinical and cantorial students at most of America’s non-Orthodox seminaries. The letter set off a firestorm. The story told of the anger and support the letter generated. The title of the hard copy story delivered to my house was “Generation Exodus,” symbolizing a generational shift in American Judaism.

This post is not about the policies of the State of Israel or the merits of the criticisms in the letter. Instead, I am interested in the assumption that support for the State of Israel is crucial to the future of Judaism in America. Here is the quote from Shaul Kelner in the story: “’American Jews are not that worried about how American Jews feel about God, because God’s not such an important religious symbol in American Jewish life,’ Shaul Kelner, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University, told me. ‘Israel and the Holocaust are.’”

I did not leave Judaism because of the policies of Israel. Or a dearth of memories of the Holocaust. I left because I no longer believed in God. I do not understand the assumption that there could be any form of Judaism without a relationship to the God of Abraham. Jews could continue without God, but what would be the point? The reason the Jewish people exist is to show the world the working of God. That is why the Jewish way of life is described as mitzvot–commandments.

I often say that a lot of the people in churches do not believe in God, but rather are a part of the phenomenon of the Death of God. With this story, we see that the same is true of people in synagogues.