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According to Dr. Daniel Gordis, the question posed in the title of his own lecture -- "Why Israel is Necessary" -- would have seemed absurd just a generation ago.

"A generation or two generations ago, no Jewish community would have thought that it was even a question worth discussing," Gordis told a packed audience at Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains Nov. 3. "It was a time that Jews had a historical consciousness of what the Jewish condition had been like absent Jewish sovereignty."

The situation today, however, is different, said Gordis, who is the senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author most recently of "Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End."

Gordis said that while he is not surprised about the delegitimization of Israel in countries around the world, it has also unfortunately become an issue within the Jewish community, particularly among the younger generation.

"The truth of the matter is that the question has actually become a central question in the Jewish world as well, and that's where you and I need to begin to really worry," he said.

Gordis pointed to a study conducted several years ago by Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman entitled "Beyond Distancing."

In the study, the professors interviewed American Jews about their attitudes toward Israel.

In response to the question of whether the destruction of the state of Israel would constitute a personal tragedy, half of those surveyed under the age of 35 said it would not be a personal tragedy for them.

Gordis said that this survey did not include non-married or intermarried Jews, which would have put that statistic even higher.

In order to address this challenge, Gordis argued that the discourse about Israel must be changed.

"We need to change the discourse about Israel because right now if you do a Rorschach about Israel and you say ‘Israel' and asked people, Jewish or not... what is the first thing that comes to mind, it's war, and it's occupation, and its checkpoints," Gordis said.

We are not equipped to the answer the question of why Israel matters, he said, "because the answers we give are wrong or fall on deaf ears" with regard to young Jews.

Gordis said that in order to communicate to young Diaspora Jews the importance of Israel, the discussion should not start with the Holocaust or the country as a potential refuge.

"The minute you start with Shoah, you lose the younger generation," Gordis said.

Gordis said that the solution is to speak about what Israel means for the Jewish people, without focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which will not end anytime soon.

"I don't say that with glee, and I don't say with that with any kind of light-heartedness, I say that because I understand what the issue is. Because I understand that the minute that they actually want to live more than they want to destroy us; that the minute that the creation of their own state is more important to them than the destruction of our state, then there's going to be a solution."

In his talk, Gordis focused on three reasons on why Israel matters.

The first is that the creation of Israel restored to Jews the belief in a future.

"In 1947, if you asked someone about the future of the Jews, there wasn't a lot of reasons to assume, unless you were looking for some theological answer, that the future was bright," he said.

The belief in a Jewish future that Zionism promised, Gordis said, is undermined by the potential of a nuclear Iran.

"Iran does not need to use the bomb in order to undermine the belief in the possibility of a Jewish future; it just needs to have the bomb," he said. "Because the minute they have it, the Jews are restored back to where we were before we had a state. We live and we die, when they decide that we live and we die."

The second reason is that it allows Jews to be players in the international community, and to be taken seriously.

Gordis said that with the state of Israel, the Jewish people belong in the category of the French, the Spanish, and the Germans, rather than the Tibetans, the Basques, or the Chechens.

The third reason why Israel matters is because it allows for the maintenance of the Hebrew language.

"At the end of the day, when you take your land, and you take your language, and your book, and your memory, and your sovereignty, and your kids, and you stir them all together and you let it simmer for 60 years what emerges is a new conception of the Jew," he said.

"Is Israel really necessary?" Gordis asked the audience rhetorically, "Only if you care about the Jewish future."