(RNS) — I was talking recently with a young man who described a date that did not sound like the stuff of romantic legend.

The dinner seemed to be going well. The wine flowed, as did the conversation — with just enough spark to suggest possibility. He leaned into the moment, sensing chemistry, feeling that quiet optimism that accompanies a promising first date.

Then, she leaned forward, lowered her voice and asked a question that changed everything.

“I really like you,” she said. “I feel attracted to you. But I need to know something. Are you a Zionist?”

He had expected something more intimate, something more personal. Instead, he found himself fumbling through an answer about loving, supporting and caring about Israel.

The young woman was also Jewish. Let’s just say there would be no second date.

Israel is the elephant in the Jewish living room. It’s the subject of my podcast conversation with Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, the research and educational center focused on Israel and Jews around the world and headquartered in New York. He’s one of the most compelling interpreters of contemporary Jewish life.

Yehuda writes and teaches with intellectual rigor and moral urgency. He spends his days helping Jews think more honestly about power, responsibility and identity. He embodies the name Yisrael itself — the one who wrestles — because he refuses easy answers and insists on staying in the struggle.

He is my teacher, and my friend. Nevertheless, there is about a 20-year age difference between us.

When it comes to loving Israel, those 20 years make a difference.

The year of my bar mitzvah was also the year of the Six-Day War. Nine years later, at the moment that I landed in Israel to begin my rabbinical training, people at the airport were dancing because of the Entebbe hostage rescue. Those moments framed my adolescence, and they gave me a vocabulary of pride, resilience, even a sense of destiny.

Fast-forward to Yehuda — and, to a large extent, my sons. Yes, they inherited that vocabulary of pride, but found a more complicated relationship. They came of age with an Israel shaped by intifadas, by hard power, by moral ambiguity and by the assassination of a prime minister at the hands of a fellow Jew. 

We are talking about brokenness — of old certainties, of what was once the undeniable emotional bargain between Israel and American Jewry. Even the broader cultural winds feel different; a growing number of Americans now view Israel unfavorably.

How do we navigate these turbulent waters?

Our podcast grapples with that question. Most of all, we talk about how American Jews and Israeli Jews are products of two very different cultures.

As Yehuda puts it, Diaspora Jews are raised largely on a cocktail of a liberal Judaism that believes in the paramount importance of justice and righteousness. That, after all, is the mission of the Jewish people, as God tells Abraham.

My Israeli friends grow up with a very different notion of what constitutes the core of Jewishness. Yes, it includes a commitment to justice and righteousness, but it also requires Jews to survive in a very dangerous world.

Each side looks at the other and sees danger. American Jews fear that Israeli policies place Jews at risk globally. Israelis fear that American Jews underestimate existential threats. Both fears grow from real experience. Both contain truth.

And both parts of the conversation are vital. Those conversations pulsate within communities, and families.

Back to brokenness. The Hebrew word mashber means “crisis,” which contains the word shavar, which means brokenness. But mashber also means birth stool.

A crisis entails both brokenness and labor, and birth is about something new struggling to be born.

What’s being born? Perhaps it’s a more honest relationship between Israeli and American Jews. A relationship stripped of illusion, able to withstand disappointment, able to sustain civil discussion. An American Jewish community asking harder questions about what it means to love Israel, even when Israel does things that we don’t all find likable. A possible embrace of younger Jews who don’t hate Israel, but who love the values with which their Jewish parents and teachers raised them.

Most of all, we see an invitation to turn shared brokenness into deeper connection, into deep conversations that keep us in community and relationship.

Loving Israel, especially now, demands courage. It demands that we hold complexity without retreating into slogans. It demands that we choose connection over purity, relationship over righteousness alone.

And perhaps, if we do that work with honesty and humility, we will discover something unexpected. That question — “Are you a Zionist?” — does not have to end the conversation. It might just begin a deeper one.