When Argentinian President Javier Milei lit a torch on Mount Herzl this week, I was more interested in the subtext than the actual event (exciting and enthusiastic as he may have been). Yes, it was dramatic. Yes, it was warm. But let’s discuss this for a moment.
For a few minutes, Israel’s most intimate civic ritual put a larger question on stage: How should the Jewish state speak to people who stand close to the Jewish story, sometimes very close, but do not fit neatly into one box? Reports about the ceremony described Milei as the first foreign leader to receive that honor. That helped explain the electricity around it. Still, the real point was bigger than Milei.
Milei himself is one kind of case. He has made his admiration for Judaism and his bond with Israel part of his public identity. But he is not the same story as a grandson of Jews in Buenos Aires (although he has said his grandfather discovered late in life that his own mother was Jewish, placing Milei within a family story of Jewish ancestry), a family in Eastern Europe with one Jewish grandparent, or descendants of anusim (forced converts) in Latin America trying to recover a broken history.
Those are different categories. Israel often speaks about them as if they were one blur, or it avoids the subject entirely. That has always struck me as lazy. It is also self-defeating.
Some of these people are eligible under the Law of Return. Some are descendants of Jews who are not halachically Jewish. Some want a closer bond without conversion. Some may want to study, visit, build, volunteer, advocate, or eventually join the Jewish people in full.
If we don’t learn to speak to them more clearly, others will – and they will not always do it in a way that strengthens Israel or the Jewish world.
The demographic side alone should have ended the Israeli shrug years ago. Sergio DellaPergola, one of the more cautious major Jewish demographers, estimated the world’s core Jewish population in 2024 at 15,736,800. His estimate for the wider Law of Return population was 24,735,988. That is a gap of almost nine million people.
DellaPergola is very clear that these are demographic categories, not halachic rulings. He says so directly. He is measuring concentric circles of Jewish connection and eligibility, not deciding who is Jewish according to rabbinic law. That caution is part of why the number deserves attention. It is not activist inflation. It is a sober estimate of how large the outer ring really is.
Half a decade ago, in 2021, I wrote about a Diaspora Affairs Ministry committee report on communities with affinity to the Jewish people. Reading it again now, I was struck by how straightforward it was.
The committee argued that Israel was facing a new reality: Millions of people around the world who are neither Jewish nor eligible under the Law of Return still seek some form of connection to the Jewish people and the Jewish state. It called that reality a strategic opportunity. It warned that in the absence of policy, Israel sends exactly the wrong message: that these people are not wanted, or worse, not even seen.
The committee’s logic still holds. It said Israel should build two things at once: a clear track for the minority that may eventually decide to join the Jewish people fully; and stable, long-range paths for the much larger majority who want attachment without full entry, including people who wish to learn, support, cooperate, and remain close to the Jewish people and its country.
This is a clever framework. It is also a very Jewish one. Jewish life has always included different circles of belonging, loyalty, and proximity. Our modern institutions are the ones lagging behind.
The recommendations were practical, not dreamy. The committee called for serious research and mapping; public awareness; digital platforms, including genealogical resources; stronger ties with relevant communities; educational content; and pilot programs focused on descendants of conversos.
It urged the state to create a system inside the Diaspora Affairs Ministry that would actually own the issue instead of leaving it to improvisation, activists, and the occasional sympathetic rabbi. That still sounds like common sense. It also sounds, unfortunately, like unfinished business.
I am not a halachic authority, and I am not trying to play one on the page. But it is worth saying that the Jewish vocabulary here is richer than many Israelis assume. The phrase zera Yisrael, seed of Israel, exists for a reason. It reflects the idea that descendants of Jews are not simply another outside group with no tie to Jewish history.
In the writings of Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, especially through Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, one finds a clear instinct: Draw such people closer where possible. One line quoted there is hard to miss: that it is “permitted and a mitzvah” to receive them “to save the children of zera Yisrael from loss.”
I do not cite that to settle a religious argument. I cite it because it captures a moral intuition Israel has been losing: Family rupture does not erase family.
That same wider language should include Bnei Noah (Noahides). Rabbi Oury Cherki and the Noahide World Center have spent years building a framework for people who do not seek to become Jews but do seek a serious covenantal connection to the God of Israel and to the ethical world Judaism offers.
That path will not fit everyone. It should not. But it answers a question Israel and the Jewish world have often refused to ask: What do we offer people who want to come closer without crossing every boundary? The answer cannot always be silence.
There is also a selfish case for waking up. Jews are a tiny people. The core number remains under 16 million. The political climate is rough. Assimilation keeps thinning communities. Israel needs future citizens, loyal friends, serious allies, informed advocates, students, and fellow travelers who understand Jewish civilization as something deeper than social-media slogans and campus costumes.
It needs people who feel there is a place for them somewhere in the orbit of this story. You do not need sentimentality to understand that. You just need a little strategic sense.
So yes, Israel should open the door wider. Carefully, intelligently, and without flattening Halacha. It should build better routes for those already eligible under the Law of Return. It should create serious educational, cultural, and genealogical frameworks for descendants of Jews who are trying to find their way back to a broken family story. And it should help build dignified forms of attachment for those who seek connection short of conversion, including through the Noahide world where that is the right fit.
Milei’s torch lit up more than one man’s friendship with Israel. It lit up a larger circle of people with ancestry, memory, admiration, curiosity, or longing who are already somewhere near the Jewish people.
A country that was built to gather exiles should be better at recognizing the people standing near the edge of the camp, waiting to see whether anyone inside is ready to speak to them.