Rabbi Tuly Weisz grew up in Columbus, Ohio, inside the kind of tight-knit Jewish community where almost everyone you knew was Jewish. The schools were Jewish, the grocery stores were Jewish, the social circles were Jewish. He knew the ten synagogues in Columbus and pretty much everyone who prayed in them.
What he did not know, what he had never thought to ask, was what was happening in the more than one thousand churches across the same city.
The answer, when he finally discovered it, stopped him in his tracks.
It was 2008, at a meeting of the Columbus Jewish Federation, where a Christian Zionist pastor came to speak. He wore jeans and a cowboy hat. Weisz was skeptical. He stayed anyway, and when the meeting ended, the two of them ended up talking in the parking lot for hours. What the pastor told him, that there were tens of thousands of Christians in Columbus alone who prayed for the peace of Jerusalem every single day, who loved Israel with a passion that many Jews couldn’t match, upended everything Weisz thought he knew about the world outside his community.
That parking lot conversation launched a fourteen-year journey that has now produced one of the most important books written about Israel in our generation.
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Universal Zionism: The Movement Powering Today’s Jewish-Christian Alliance is Rabbi Weisz’s argument that what is happening between Jews and Christians right now is not a political trend, a demographic curiosity, or a feel-good interfaith project. It is the next stage of a story that has been unfolding for three thousand years — and the most urgent civilizational alliance of our time.
His framework is elegant. Every Jewish child learns about the three great kings of Israel: Saul, David, and Solomon. Weisz maps the entire arc of modern Zionism onto these three figures. Political Zionism — Herzl, Ben-Gurion, the founding of the State — corresponds to King Saul: the urgent, necessary work of establishing a nation, achieving security, and becoming normal among the nations. Religious Zionism corresponds to King David: the recognition that political independence without spiritual purpose is a body without a soul. And Universal Zionism corresponds to King Solomon, the king who built the Temple as a house of prayer for all nations, who turned Israel’s light outward to illuminate the world.
We have had the body. We have found the soul. Now comes the greatest mission of all.
That mission, as Weisz sees it, is the building of a movement, of a genuine army of Jews and Christians, united not by political calculation but by deep friendship, shared biblical values, and a common conviction that Israel’s restoration is not only good for Jews but essential for the entire world. This is not a coalition of convenience but rather an alliance that goes all the way down, to the level of trust and love that can only be built one relationship at a time, one Shabbat table at a time, one honest conversation at a time.
This is what Israel365 has been building since Weisz sent his first newsletter on January 1, 2012. It is what the Shabbat Table Project is building in Dallas, Nashville, and Cleveland. It is what Universal Zionism now gives a name, a framework, and a manifesto.
The holy army being built is not made of soldiers. It is made of friendships, of Jews and Christians who have chosen to know each other, trust each other, and fight for each other in every arena that matters: in the halls of Congress, on college campuses, in the court of global opinion, and in the quiet of a Friday night Shabbat table.
Weisz believes, and fourteen years of building Israel365 has given him every reason to believe, that this alliance will prove more durable than any political coalition, more powerful than any lobbying effort, and more transformative than anything Jews or Christians could accomplish alone.
The golden age of Solomon, when Israel’s wisdom drew the nations to Jerusalem and the Temple stood as a house of prayer for all peoples, was never meant to be a relic of ancient history. It was meant to be a promise.
We are in the business of keeping it.
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Universal Zionism: The Movement Powering Today’s Jewish-Christian Alliance by Rabbi Tuly Weisz is available at the Israel365 store. The Rise Up with Israel campaign runs through the month of May.
