One of the most haunting questions in Jewish history was asked not by a rabbi or a philosopher, but by a random British soldier on night watch during World War II. He turned to his Jewish bunkmate and asked, simply: if you’re not religious, why do you bother being Jewish at all? His bunkmate had no good answer. And that bunkmate, it turned out, was Bernard Lewis, who went on to become one of the greatest historians of the Middle East in the 20th century. He spent the rest of his life with that question lodged in his chest.
If being Jewish is not about religion, what exactly is it about?
God answered this the moment He first spoke to Abraham. He did not say: go and found a faith, gather believers, spread a teaching. He said:
A nation. Not a denomination, not a spiritual movement, not one of the world’s great religions. A people with land, descendants, and a national destiny unlike anything else in human history.
This is the argument at the heart of Rabbi Elie Mischel’s urgent new book, Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption. The word “Judaism” does not appear anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. It is a Greek invention, coined during the Hellenistic era, imported back into Jewish life by 18th-century European Jews who wanted desperately to belong in the modern West. The moment they repackaged Jewish identity as a religion like any other, something foundational cracked.
The Bible is not subtle about this. The promises God makes to Abraham are physical and national, not spiritual and abstract. Descendants. Land. A covenant passed not through intellectual disciples but through biological children. A religion spreads through ideas. A nation perpetuates itself through generations of flesh and blood, rooted in a specific piece of earth.
The Book of Esther shows what happens when a Jewish community forgets that. The Jews of Persia were comfortable, successful, and at home in someone else’s empire. Esther had hidden her identity so completely that no one in the royal palace knew she was Jewish. Mordecai’s name derived from Marduk, the chief Babylonian god. These were not accidents. They were the portrait of a community that had quietly decided that belonging to Persia mattered more than belonging to the Jewish people.
And then Haman rose to power. The decree went out against all Jews, the devout and the secular, the connected and the hidden. Haman was not targeting a religion. He was targeting a nation.
Mordecai’s response is one of the most misunderstood moments in the entire Bible. He refused to bow to Haman, not because Jewish law prohibited bowing to a government official, but because he refused to let the most powerful antisemite in the empire believe that Jews would keep their heads down forever. It was a declaration that the Jewish people were still a people, still standing, still themselves. That clarity saved them.
For Christians who love Israel and take the Hebrew Bible seriously, this is not a conversation happening at a distance. Christian Zionism exists because believers sense, correctly, that the Jewish people occupy a central, irreplaceable role in the redemption God is orchestrating. But that redemption has an engine, and the engine is the Jewish people waking up to who they actually are. Not a denomination. Not one religion among many. A nation, returning to its land, stepping into its calling. As Rabbi Mischel writes, Jewish clarity about Jewish identity is essential to the redemptive process that both Jews and Christians are waiting for. We are in this together.
The antisemitism exploding across America today, from college campuses to congressional primaries, from the progressive left to the populist right, is not simply a political problem to be managed. In the framework Rabbi Mischel builds in Countdown, it is a biblical one. God used Haman to force the Jews of Persia to remember who they were. The question is whether American Jews will hear the same message their ancestors heard in Shushan, and whether they will answer it before the window closes.
Mordecai told Esther: “Who knows whether you have attained royalty for such a time as this?” There was urgency in that question. There was also a deadline.
Bernard Lewis never answered the soldier’s question. The Hebrew Bible does. The Jewish people are not the followers of a religion called Judaism. They are a nation, ancient, called, and irreplaceable, with a land, a covenant, and a role in the redemption of the world that no other people can fill.
Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption by Rabbi Elie Mischel is available at Israel365store.com.
