Please share widely with Jewish students heading off to campus whether in 1st or 4th year, and make sure to refer to the resources included at the end.

Where to begin?

I began at York University in September 2003 and thought I was prepared. I came out of CHAT with a strong Jewish education and a clear sense of who I was. What I didn’t have, and didn’t know I lacked, was any sense of who campus had already decided I was.

I didn’t know the anti-Israel talking points. Worse, I didn’t know there were talking points. An actual script, portable and rehearsed, replete with reprehensible lies, recited to me in tutorials and hallways by classmates who had never met a Jew and were confident they understood me anyway. I had no answers ready because nobody had told me there would be questions. Israeli Apartheid Week did not exist when I arrived. It was invented at the University of Toronto during my second year, and it reached York almost immediately. By 2005 I was president of Hillel @ York, a role I held for two years, and that job is where I finally got my education in all of this. Slowly. Publicly. Mostly after the fact. Everything I am today, I credit to my role on campus with Hillel.

That was 23 years ago. Before Hamas took Gaza, before five rounds of fighting there, before October 7, before the encampments. The scenery has changed beyond recognition, but the experience of arriving hasn’t. Every September, thousands of Jewish kids show up at Canadian universities exactly as unprepared as I was, holding a lanyard, a meal plan, maybe intent on hitting up their first Chabad Shabbat dinner, and nobody hands them the one document that actually describes the terrain.

So below, and in the coming few days, I will try to provide some of those resources.

The number

In August, the federal government released the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences report, the first national study of its kind in Canada. Commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage, it surveyed roughly 900 Jewish students and recent graduates across the country in late 2025.

The headline finding: 95.7% had experienced or witnessed at least one antisemitic incident in the previous twelve months.

That’s not a statistic about campus in general. It’s a statistic about the odds that this happens to you, specifically, this year.

The terrain

The useful part of the report isn’t just the big number. It’s the map underneath it, because the incidents are not evenly distributed and knowing where they cluster changes how you walk.

Where it happens: online and social media (34%), student organizations and events (33%), classrooms (25%), the neighbourhoods around campus (23%), residence (9%). What does this list tell us? The danger zone isn’t some shadowy corner of campus. It’s the club fair, the group chat, and the seminar room. The ordinary places. The ones you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to avoid.

Who does it: fellow students in about half of incidents. But faculty were involved in 18%, teaching assistants in another 7, administrators and staff in 7 more. Isn’t that insane? Roughly one incident in five involves someone with power over your grade. That single fact should reorganize how you think about the whole subject, and it’s why a later piece in this series is about reading a syllabus.

When it happens is not in the report, but I can tell you from experience that the year has a rhythm. The club fair comes first. Then the first student union meeting, the first walkout, the first time a poster goes up in your residence hallway. None of it will be about you personally. All of it will be pointed at you anyway. Just wait for people to feel more comfortable on campus. It took two months on campus for me to be called a “Fucking Zionist” for the first time, and I don’t wear a kippa or have an overtly Jewish-sounding surname. And that was 2003.

Before your first class

You can’t memorize your way to readiness. I know, because I spent two years trying to help students do exactly that, and the script always changes faster than the counter-script. What you can do is know the terrain and know the machinery. So before you begin, try to make yourself familiar with the following (the specifics are provided at the bottom):

First, your school’s anti-racism and anti-hate policy. If you’re at a publicly assisted college or university in Ontario, this document is not optional and it should be easy to find. A provincial directive that took effect in September 2024 required every institution to publish one by January 2025, along with a complaints process that must acknowledge you within 30 days and must report its numbers publicly every year. Your university owes you deadlines, in writing.

Second, the name of the actual office that receives complaints. Not “the university.” A specific office, with an email address (I’ve tried to find some, below). Find it now, while you are calm and nothing has happened, because you will not want to go searching for it on a bad night after someone has torn down your mezuzah or shouted at you clad in a keffiyeh and face-mask. By the way, if your mezuzah gets taken down, put it up again. Be proud and unafraid.

Third, where Hillel is. Not because you owe anyone your involvement. Because in that same federal survey, Jewish students said they trusted Jewish organizations far more than they trusted campus security or their own administration, and there is a reason for that. Go once. Meet the staff. Eat the free food. Know the faces. It changed my life forever, for the better.

Here’s the Catch

Nothing in this series is meant to be read as a warning to keep your head down. The point of a map is that you stop being surprised, and surprise is the thing that freezes people. I arrived at York in 2003 with no map at all, and I spent my first year mistaking a coordinated campaign for a series of personal encounters. You do not have to do that. The territory is rougher than it was 23 years ago. But you can see it now, all of it, before you take a single step. That is more than any Jewish student in this country has ever been able to say.

The resources: find your people and policy

Hillel Ontario serves most of the province’s campuses (416-913-2424, info@hillelontario.org). The fastest way to reach any campus Hillel is a DM.

York: Hillel York, Instagram @hillelyork. Your school’s policy: the Human Rights Policy and Procedures, amended January 31, 2025; complaints through the Centre for Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion, rights@yorku.ca.

University of Toronto: Hillel UofT at the Wolfond Centre, 36 Harbord Street, Instagram @hillel_uoft. Policy: the Statement on Prohibited Discrimination and Discriminatory Harassment; routing via the complaints page.

TMU: Hillel TMU, Instagram @hillel.tmu. Policy: the Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Policy, reapproved June 2025; complaints to Human Rights Services, and note the 12-month filing window.

Western: Hillel Western, Instagram @hillelwestern. Policy: MAPP 1.35, Non-Discrimination, Harassment and Sexual Misconduct, via the Human Rights Office.

Queen’s: Hillel Queen’s, Instagram @queens_hillel, queens_hillel@hillelontario.org. Policy: the Harassment and Discrimination Prevention and Response Policy, revised May 2025 and in force since last September; complaints go to the Vice-Principal (Culture, Equity and Inclusion), with an anonymous reporting tool called In-Sight.

Guelph: Hillel Guelph, Instagram @HillelGuelph. Policy: the Anti-Hate, Anti-Racism and Human Rights hub; anonymous complaints to dhrinfo@uoguelph.ca.

McMaster: Hillel McMaster, Instagram @hillelmcmaster. Policy: the Discrimination and Harassment Policy, and McMaster’s own Bill 166 statement commits, in writing, to the 30-day acknowledgment and 12-month resolution clocks.

Windsor: there is no Hillel at the University of Windsor, but there should be a Jewish Student Association (JSA - I was the president of that one too!). Complaints go through the Office of Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Mediation.

Next in this series: The Cheque You Didn’t Know You Were Writing.

On August 24, 1929, an Arab mob attacked the Jewish community of Hebron. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered in a day. There was no State of Israel. No Israeli army. No Israeli ‘occupation’ of the West Bank. No post-1967 settlement movement.

There were Jews: members of an old Sephardi community, long-established Ashkenazi families, and newer arrivals, including students at the Slobodka yeshiva established there several years earlier. In Hebron, Jews and Arabs largely lived as neighbors and traded with one another. Four days before the massacre, Haganah representatives came to Hebron and offered the Jewish community armed protection or evacuation to Jerusalem. Eliezer Dan Slonim, one of the community’s leaders, declined. He trusted Hebron’s Arab notables and feared that armed Jewish defenders would provoke the very violence they hoped to prevent.

Then, amid escalating tensions across Mandatory Palestine, Jews were attacked in their homes and in the yeshiva. Afterward, British authorities evacuated the surviving Jewish community.

Hebron matters because it interrupts a story we have become accustomed to telling. Much of the contemporary conversation about Israelis and Palestinians implicitly begins much later. Begin in 1967 and the organizing fact is occupation: Israel controls territory populated by Palestinians, settlements expand, Palestinians resist. Move the starting point back to 1948 and the story changes. Now the organizing facts are the creation of Israel, war, Palestinian displacement, and the absence of the Arab state the partition plan had envisioned.

Both starting points illuminate something real.

But neither can explain Hebron in 1929.

Where You Begin

Where a history begins shapes what it appears to explain. If your story foregrounds centuries of Jewish persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, Zionism appears as refuge and liberation. If it starts with the ‘Nakba,’ hostility to Israel is seen as a response to dispossession. If your story starts with ‘occupation,’ Palestinian violence becomes intelligible primarily as resistance to occupation.

Hebron forces one particularly important correction. Anti-Jewish violence in Mandatory Palestine did not begin as a response to Israeli sovereignty or military occupation. The Jews murdered there had no Jewish state exercising power over Palestinians and no Jewish army protecting them. Indeed, 1929 did not merely predate Jewish power: the failure of British protection strengthened the case for Jewish self-defense and pushed some previously indifferent or anti-Zionist Jews toward Zionism.

Any account in which Jewish power explains the conflict in its entirety therefore has a chronological problem.

So add more history. The violence did not emerge from nowhere. Palestinian Arabs feared growing Jewish immigration, land purchases, loss of livelihood, and eventual Jewish political domination. Those fears were real political forces, and the British Shaw Commission later identified them as fundamental causes of the wider unrest. That context makes the explanation fuller without making the massacre any more defensible.

Then complicate it again. This is not the whole story either. On Tisha B’Av, some 300 Jewish demonstrators, many of them Betar members, marched to the Western Wall, raised the flag, and sang Hatikvah. The demonstration was peaceful, but false reports soon circulated that Jews had attacked Muslims and threatened Muslim holy places. Religion raised the stakes: territorial claims became sacred claims, political defeat became desecration, and violence acquired the force of religious duty. Hamas’s name for its October 7 assault, “Al-Aqsa Flood,” drew on a similar religious frame and again invoked a threatened Muslim sanctuary to justify mass violence. Any serious history of this conflict has to treat religion as a central force, not a footnote.

And even inside Hebron, the categories refuse to behave. Arab rioters murdered Jews. Other Arab families hid Jews in their homes and saved their lives. Neighbors became murderers. Other neighbors refused and saved lives.

The Morality Play

The appeal of binaries like oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, aggressor and victim is not historical. It is moral. They sort the protagonists before the history has been told and offer the satisfaction of knowing who belongs on which side. They also compress a century of changing circumstances into a few moral labels, obscuring more than they explain.

The problem is compounded when those labels harden into permanent identities. Jews and Palestinians become characters in a morality tale, rather than people whose circumstances, vulnerabilities, aspirations, and actions change across time.

Hebron makes that difficult. Jews were living there for centuries before Israel, before so-called occupation, and before the contemporary conditions these categories are meant to describe. They included families rooted there for generations. They were attacked while defenseless and then evacuated by the British who had failed to protect them. None of that erases Palestinian rootedness or suffering. It simply makes fixed, simplistic moral roles impossible to sustain.

That is what historical thinking is supposed to do: test the framework against the facts, not trim the facts to fit the framework. Once inconvenient evidence has to be removed to preserve the casting, we are no longer studying history. We are sorting it.

What History Is For

Historical complexity does not mean suspending judgment. It means making judgment answer to the full record. Understanding the grievances that preceded a massacre does not excuse the massacre. Recognizing Jewish historical belonging does not settle Palestinian political rights. Recognizing disparities of power does not turn every act against Israelis or Jews into legitimate “resistance.” Complexity is not a demand for symmetry. Responsibility can be unequal and the history still complicated.

That should be the point of teaching this history. Education should make students’ thinking harder to manipulate and their judgments easier to defend, not prescribe a political position or make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fit neatly inside the political vocabulary they already possess.

That discipline is difficult because simple frameworks offer something history rarely does: immediate moral clarity. Students should instead learn to ask:

• What does my starting point make invisible?

• What facts would complicate my explanation?

• What does a different chronology contain that mine leaves out?

The answers may still lead them to different political conclusions. That is not a failure of historical education. History should discipline political judgment, not dictate it.

History Is Not a Blueprint

Discovering that Jews lived in Hebron long before 1967 does not tell us what Israeli policy in Hebron should be today. Historical presence establishes belonging, but it does not automatically settle sovereignty, borders, military rule, settlements, or Palestinian political rights.

History matters enormously to this conflict, but the future cannot simply be derived from the past. There is no historical ledger that, once properly balanced, will tell us where a border should run or how two peoples should live alongside one another now. Competing claims of historical justice can explain what each side believes it is owed, but they cannot by themselves produce a workable future.

Any serious political solution must therefore be pragmatic and forward-looking, asking what can actually work, what guarantees security, and what allows both peoples to build a future. The point is not to forget history, but to refuse to become captive to it.

August 24, 1929 does not tell us how the conflict should end. It shows how much our explanations depend on where we begin. A conflict with this much history becomes simple only when enough of it is removed. Hebron puts some of it back.

There’s a moment coming up on Shabbat morning when the ba’al koreh (the Torah reader) will traditionally drop his voice.

Deuteronomy 28. The tochacha. Ninety-eight verses of escalating catastrophe, boils and blindness and siege and exile, and the custom in most shuls is to read it fast and low, almost under the breath, the way you’d hurry past something you didn’t want to wake. It describes in detail the calamities that will befall Israel is we do not observe the Torah properly. Usually, people don’t want that aliyah. It gets given to the gabbai, or to the reader himself, and everyone stares at the floor while it’s being read.

The whispering is the small part of this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo.

Declare today!

But before that, the parsha opens with one of the loudest things anybody does in the Torah. You are to take the first figs off the tree, the first pomegranates, you put them in a basket, you walk to Jerusalem, you hand the basket to a Kohen (priest), and then you have to say something out loud. Higadeti hayom, I declare today! And what you declare is a story about having been nobody. My father was a wandering Aramean. We went down to Egypt, few in number. They treated us badly, we cried out, we were heard. Now we are here. Here’s some fruit:

And you shall come to the kohen who will be [serving] in those days, and say to him, “I declare this day to the Lord, your God, that I have come to the land which the Lord swore to our forefathers to give us.” And the kohen will take the basket from your hand, laying it before the altar of the Lord, your God.

And you shall call out and say before the Lord, your God, “An Aramean [sought to] destroy my forefather, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a small number of people, and there, he became a great, mighty, and numerous nation. And the Egyptians treated us cruelly and afflicted us, and they imposed hard labor upon us. So we cried out to the Lord, God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out from Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, with great awe, and with signs and wonders. And He brought us to this place, and He gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now, I have brought the first of the fruit of the ground which you, O Lord, have given to me.”

This is how the Mishnah describes how this usually happened: People gathered in the town square and slept outside so nobody would pick up impurity in a stranger’s house. In the morning someone shouted, “Get up! Let’s go up to Zion!” An ox went at the front with its horns coated in gold and an olive branch on its head, a flute playing ahead of the whole crowd, and they walked slowly holding their first fruit, only two-thirds of a day’s travel, so latecomers could catch up. When they reached the gates the craftsmen of Jerusalem put down their tools and stood, which they didn’t do for anyone, and said: “Our brothers from such-and-such a town, you have come in peace!”

Ki Tavo contains both: a parade with a flute and a gold-horned ox, and a paragraph nobody wants to say above a whisper.

And between them, an underrated line in Deuteronomy. The Torah says that all of this comes, because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, out of the abundance of everything. Not because you disbelieved. Not because you rebelled. Because you had plenty and went through the motions anyway. The curses in this parsha are the consequence of joylessness in a time of abundance. I can’t help, as you can by now imagine, thinking about how this applies to our lives in Canada, sometimes worried to express joy when there is so much around to be joyful for, living at arguably one of the best times in our history, despite what is sometimes the depths of our fear.

Idan Raichel

Which brings me to Idan Raichel. I often put him on when I’m in need of joy.

In 2005 he released the song Mima’amakim. Out of the depths. It’s the opening of Psalm 130, the psalm you say when somebody is in surgery, at funerals, in the weeks when the news from Israel is bad and there’s nothing else you can do. Raichel took those two words and wrote a love song. Then it became a hit. Triple platinum. A place with no shortage of actual depths turned from the depths I called out to you into something people dance to at weddings, and nobody found that weird.

Raichel had been a counsellor at a boarding school for immigrant kids, and the Ethiopian teenagers there handed him a whole musical world he had little understanding of. The Project that came out of it sings in Amharic, Arabic, Yemenite Hebrew, Hindi. The voice most people associate with his hits belongs to Cabra Casay, who was born in a refugee camp in Sudan in 1982 and carried to Israel as a baby. She sang from the depths. It came out sounding like a celebration.

Connection

That is, I think, the architecture of the psalm and it’s the architecture of the parsha. The verse doesn’t say in the depths. It says from the depths I called you. The calling happens down there, in the bad place, before anything improves. The bikkurim (bringing of the fruits) declaration works the same way. You stand in the Temple courtyard holding the best fruit of your year and the script requires you to start with the wandering and the affliction, because leaving that part out would make the fruit mean nothing. Before we know where we are or where we’re going, we need to know where we come from. Good and bad.

We’re just - gulp - two Shabbatot away from Rosh Hashanah. Elul, is the month for taking stock, and the taking of stock this year is not going to be cheerful for most of us. Times are, of course, rough.

A few verses from the end of the parsha, Moshe says something that ought to be devastating. God has not given you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day. Forty years of manna and miracles and protection, and you’re only now in a position to understand what you were looking at the whole time. Rashi takes that as a statement about how learning actually works, that a student doesn’t fully grasp his teacher’s mind for decades. Read it one way and it’s the bleakest line in the book. Read it the other way and it’s the most encouraging thing in the parsha, because the sentence doesn’t end with the forty wasted years. It ends with until this day. The understanding arrives, even if late.

Here’s the Catch

The tochacha gets whispered and the first fruits get shouted, and we have arranged our attention backwards. Ki Tavo’s own diagnosis of what goes wrong is not persecution or exile. It’s serving without joy while surrounded by abundance, which is a fair description of comfortable Diaspora Jewish life. The correction is in the same parsha, and it’s a performance: carry the basket, walk with the flute, say the hard part of your story out loud and then rejoice in all the good.

Idan Raichel figured out what the psalmist knew. You don’t wait until you’re out of the depths to sing. Singing is what coming out sounds like.

The ban

In the coming school year, at the private Jewish day school my kids attend, cell phones will be banned.

The new policy wasn’t put to a vote. A decision was made. I know how rare it is for an institution to do a hard thing without first diluting it into a committee. Our school, however, did it.

I completely agree with this decision (I am, what you would call, a Jonathan Haidt-er), but as soon as I heard about it, I braced for what the backlash would be. Taking away a child’s phone is the sort of thing that lights up a class WhatsApp group late at night. But the backlash, to my understanding, mostly didn’t come. Yes, there was some grumbling, and no doubt some parents tried to figure out ways around the new rule. What surprised me, at least among those I spoke with, was the relief underneath it, the sense that a lot of adults had been hoping someone else would go first.

The ban wasn’t dropped out of the sky. The school had spent several years building toward it, cultivating a culture where being unplugged was ordinary rather than punitive, having parents sign commitments to limit their kids’ phone usage, so that by the time the phones were banned, the ground had been prepared. Hold onto that detail, I’ll come back to it.

Jonathan Haidt has made the empirical case at book length, and you’ve probably absorbed the headline even without reading him. The phone-based childhood has crowded out the older kind, the one with boredom and long unstructured afternoons and the low-grade friction of having to entertain yourself. Anxiety climbs while attention falls apart. Many argue about the size of the effect, but the direction of it isn’t really in dispute if you just look around or, even, in a mirror. Comfort, in the precise form of a device built to abolish every single dull moment, is making our children worse at being people. Heck, it’s making adults worse at being people too!

But I want to take that idea somewhere less comfortable, because the phone in a nine-year-old’s pocket is a small version of a much larger problem, and it’s one our own community doesn’t like to look at head on.

Our anxious generation

The Diaspora Jewish community is, by almost any measure you could pick, the most fortunate community of Diaspora Jews who’ve ever lived. Hear me out: I walk through my neighbourhood in Thornhill or when Downtown Toronto wearing whatever I like, including my silver Star of David necklace. My children learn Hebrew in a bright building with a security guard the government helps to fund. The police answer when we call, and the courts protect us when we need them. Jews in this country are prosperous and influential and, in the daily texture of their lives, mostly unafraid. Show a Jew from almost any earlier century an ordinary Tuesday in Thornhill and they would assume you were showing them the world to come.

Yes - let me get out ahead of those of you fuming right now - I know we have an imperfect country, and I know that our government is currently hostile to both Israel and, what sure feels like, Jews. I know it feels like there’s antisemitism at every turn, and I know that not everyone feels the same level of comfort and that the idyllic portrait I’ve painted in the paragraph above is not everyone’s perception here. But consider the difference between here and places like London, Paris, New York, I could go on.

That comfort, however, is dissolving us faster than any enemy ever managed to. Certainly, more than any antisemitism, real or perceived, that we are facing today.

Pharaoh didn’t end the Jews. Rome didn’t. The Inquisition and the pogroms and the camps didn’t finish the job either, and each one, horrifically, seemed to bind the survivors tighter to each other and to the thing being hunted.

I would argue that what none of that could accomplish, a good mortgage in a welcoming country is quietly accomplishing now. And here I don’t have to rely on a vague sense of decline, because the numbers exist and they are worse than the vague sense. The Pew Research Center’s landmark 2020 survey of American Jews found that among the non-Orthodox who married after 2010, 72% married someone who isn’t Jewish. Among the Orthodox, 98% married a Jew. Where both parents are Jewish, 94% of the adult children identify as Jewish. Where one parent is, that figure falls below half, and those children go on to marry out of the faith at a rate of 82%. Read that sequence again. This isn’t a leak in the boat. It’s compounding interest running in reverse.

One pair of findings in that survey is, in my opinion, the most damning of all. Barely a third of American Jews say it is very important to them that their grandchildren be Jewish. Among Reform Jews, the largest denomination in America, it’s 29%. And fewer still say it matters much whether those grandchildren marry Jews. So here is a community that will tell any pollster how proud it is, how much its Jewishness means to it, while declining, in overwhelming numbers, to will the one thing that reliably produces Jewish grandchildren. That gap, between the outcome we want and the difficulty we’ll accept to reach it, is the problem in a single line. Comfort is what lets us hold both wishes at once. Nothing forces the choice, so the choice never gets made.

What comfort took

Consider what comfort took from us. For most of Jewish history the difficulty was involuntary. Nobody chose to be Jewish in a demanding way; the world chose it for them, with the ghetto wall and the expulsion notice and the quota at the university gate. Identity got maintained by pressure from the outside, and that pressure never once relented long enough for anyone to drift too far. Take the pressure away and the structure it was holding upright doesn’t just keep standing on its own. Something must do the work the pressure used to do or the shape comes apart. The problem is, we are quickly becoming a people adept at seeking the path of least resistance.

There is, it turns out, an entire social science literature on exactly this, though it rarely gets read at synagogue board meetings. In 1994 the economist Laurence Iannaccone published a paper with a title that gives away the ending: “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” His finding was that demanding religious communities outgrow lenient ones, not despite the demands but because of them. Strictness screens out the free riders, the people who want the warmth of community without contributing to it, and concentrates the committed, which makes belonging worth more for everyone who stays. The anthropologist Richard Sosis pushed the question further back, studying the utopian communes of nineteenth-century America. The religious ones dramatically outlasted the secular ones, and among the religious communes, the strongest predictor of survival was how much they demanded of their members. The costly requirements didn’t drive people from the project. The costly requirements were the project.

The Jewish data say the same thing, and this should come as really no surprise to anyone. In Britain, strictly Orthodox births now account for close to half of all Jewish births, from a community that is still a minority of British Jewry. Their birthrate runs around seven children per woman; the rest of the community sits just below two, and has been shrinking for years while the Haredi world grows about 5% annually. Worldwide, roughly one Jew in seven is now Haredi. By 2040 it will be at least one in five. I have real differences with that way of life, and this essay isn’t a brief for it. But this is what the numbers show. The one corner of the Jewish world betting its whole existence on difficulty, on separateness, inconvenience, obligation, cost, is the corner that’s winning the future, while the comfortable corners write cheques to continuity task forces and wonder where the grandchildren went.

The change

October 7 handed us a jolt of the old pressure, and you could watch it operate almost overnight. People who had wandered off came back. Synagogues filled. Stars of David reappeared on necks that had gone bare for a decade. I felt it too, although I’ll admit it changed what I write far more than what I do, since I was already doing most of the Jewish things anyway. The awakening, however, was genuine. It was also, if the past tells us anything, temporary. The surge after the Yom Kippur War faded. The fierce energy of the Soviet Jewry campaign dispersed once the gates opened. Adrenaline drains away, and comfort seeps back to fill the room it left.

Someone recently analogized this to weight-loss. Losing weight is hard, gaining weight is easy. Losing weight is like commiting to Judaism, and perhaps our Ozempic was October 7. It was a quick jolt to the system that pushed us in the right direction.

But we can’t build our continuity on the monster in the closet. Some of us have started to treat antisemitism as a sort of involuntary Hebrew school, a force that keeps the kids Jewish so the parents are spared the trouble. That’s a grotesque arrangement on its own terms, and it gets worse when you notice it depends on the monster staying exactly where it is, frightening enough to concentrate the mind and far enough away to leave everyone unharmed. Nobody who lived through the seasons when the monster left the closet would ever wish it back to fix our attendance numbers.

What’s left

What’s left is the harder answer, and it’s the one my kids’ school’s decision on cell phone usage taught me without setting out to. If the world will no longer impose the difficulty on us, we must impose it on ourselves, deliberately, as a practice.

Manufactured obligation.

A day school that costs too much and eats too many hours. A Shabbat that genuinely costs you the Saturday, the game you would have watched, the invitation you must decline. Ahad Ha’am, the great Zionist thinker, understood this more than a century ago: more than the Jews have kept Shabbat, he wrote, Shabbat has kept the Jews. He wasn’t making a spiritual claim but a structural one. The obligation is the technology. The willingness to say a demanding yes in the exact spot where an easy maybe was sitting right there. The box by the classroom door in which to lock your phone is one small enactment of the principle, an institution wagering that a little chosen hardship now purchases something that ease never can.

We consider ourselves the chosen people, and for the whole long stretch of our history the choosing ran in one direction, toward us, with or without our consent. The weird gift of this comfortable moment, and in a certain sense its danger, is that the choosing has been handed back. We now get to set the level of difficulty ourselves. I believe our ancestors would have wept at the freedom of it all. It’s also the most perilous thing that has ever happened to us, because a people shaped for three thousand years by pressure from without has little muscle for pressure from within.

The phones are put away. My eldest daughter will no doubt complain about it, and she and her friends will hopefully grow up a little more able to sit inside their own heads, and one day they’ll see that the point was never the phones.

Here’s the Catch

My kids’ school banned phones, and the parents mostly exhaled. That small act of chosen hardship turns out to be the answer to a much bigger question. For three thousand years, the world kept us Jewish by force. Now nothing does. And the numbers show what comfort is quietly accomplishing: the thing Pharaoh, Rome and the camps never could. Meanwhile, the only corners of the Jewish world that are growing are the ones that demand the most. If nobody will impose the difficulty on us anymore, we have to choose it ourselves.

In July, the UN’s Nutrition Cluster presented the results of a major nutrition survey conducted across Gaza. It was run by UNICEF and Action Against Hunger.

Not the IDF.

Not some ‘hasbara’ outfit.

UNICEF, and one of the most prominent anti-hunger NGOs on earth, using the standard methodology (it’s called SMART) that the humanitarian world uses everywhere from Yemen to South Sudan.

You probably didn’t hear about it, which is sort of the point of this piece.

The number

When nutritionists want to know whether a population is starving, they measure something called wasting. Wasting is the starvation number. It’s what happens to a child’s body right now, this month, when there isn’t enough food: weight drops against height, the body consumes itself. Famines produce wasting rates of 15, 20, 30 percent. That’s what the word means clinically.

The survey measured 1,335 children across Gaza, from Gaza City to Rafah. The wasting rate came back at 0.5 percent. Add in a second screening method that catches a few more kids and it rises to 1.3 percent.

So, for nearly two years you have been told, by protest chants and ICJ filings and Javier Bardem and Jon Stewart and a thousand infographics, that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s population. Engineered famine. Extermination by hunger. A UN survey, however, just went door to door and found acute malnutrition in about one child in a hundred.

Compared to what?

Numbers mean nothing without comparison, so here’s the geopolitical neighbourhood.

Egypt, at peace, with open borders and a functioning state, has a child wasting rate somewhere between 3 and 7.5 percent depending on which survey you use. I’ll take the low end, because I want every number in this piece to survive a hostile fact-check. Jordan runs around 2 percent. Sudan and Yemen, the actual starvation catastrophes of the Arab world (that no one marches for), sit at roughly 14 to 16 percent. The Arab regional average is just under 8 percent, worse than the global average.

Gaza, mid-war, blockaded, half-destroyed: 0.5 percent.

And here’s the comparison that matters even more: Gaza’s own pre-war wasting rate was 0.8 percent, as data analyst Mark Zlochin pointed out in the Jewish Chronicle. Again: on the starvation-right-now measure, Gaza’s children today are at or below where they stood before October 7. Not “recovering toward” pre-war levels. At them.

Now, it’s not that “Gaza is doing better than Egypt.” Gaza’s children are being fed by one of the densest humanitarian nutrition operations ever assembled anywhere. There are 331 partner nutrition sites operating in the Strip. Feeding centres grew from 21 sites to 174 in a single year. Two hundred thousand children a month receive nutrient supplements. Screening of pregnant women doubled. Cure rates for treated kids exceed international standards. Confirmed nutrition-related deaths during treatment over the first six months of this year: four. Four, out of a surveyed population of 1.7 million, during a war.

So then now I’ll ask the obvious question: Every one of those feeding sites runs on supplies that entered Gaza through crossings Israel controls. Every truck was inspected and let through. Every aid worker moved through a checkpoint. You can’t operate the region’s most intensive child-feeding program inside territory whose gatekeeper - Israel - is trying to exterminate the population by hunger. Those two things can’t both be true because, guess what? One of them is demonstrably false.

The word “genocide”

Genocide is not a synonym for “war I don’t like.” It has a legal definition, and the definition includes intent: acts committed with intent to destroy a people. The starvation claim became the load-bearing wall of the genocide argument as applied to Gaza, because it was the accusation that implied deliberateness. Bombs can be explained by war. Withheld food can only be explained by policy. Right?

So here is what the evidence says: the population accused of being deliberately exterminated by hunger has a lower acute malnutrition rate than almost every Arab country. Its children’s recovery rates in treatment beat international benchmarks. The system feeding them operates, at scale, with the permission and facilitation of the accused.

If that’s a genocide (it’s not), it’s the first one in history conducted by feeding the victims well.

What I’m not saying

To be intellectually honest, it’s important to include some other details from this survey and the reporting.

First: this survey is from mid-2026. It can’t tell you what conditions were in early 2024, or during the worst of the aid disruptions at the height of the Gaza War. Someone will say things were terrible and then improved after the ceasefire and after international pressure.

However, there is a giant crack running through any famine declarations that were made during the height of the conflict. Bear with me for one wonky paragraph, because I think this is important. Declaring a famine formally requires showing that at least 30 percent of young children are acutely malnourished by the WHZ measure, the weight-for-height one. In August 2025 nobody had WHZ data for Gaza, so as Zlochin explains, the famine committee used the arm-circumference measure instead and applied a conversion: WHZ usually catches about twice as many kids as arm circumference, they reasoned, mostly from African data, so 15 percent on the arm measure could stand in for the 30 percent threshold. This survey finally measured both in Gaza, side by side. The ratio runs backwards. Arm circumference found more children than WHZ, not half as many, in every single zone. The mathematical bridge the famine declaration walked across doesn’t hold in Gaza. That doesn’t mean summer 2025 was perfect. It means the formal “famine” label rested on an assumption that Gaza’s own data has now contradicted.

Second: the survey couldn’t reach everyone. About 17 percent of the population (about 330,000 people) lives in areas that were inaccessible for security reasons, and those areas are excluded from the results. The findings represent the accessible areas, which is most of Gaza but not all of it.

How to use this

All of the above can be summarized as follows: A UN survey by UNICEF just measured acute child malnutrition in Gaza at half a percent. That’s lower than Egypt, lower than Jordan, and the same as Gaza before the war. If Israel is deliberately starving Gaza, why are Gaza’s kids at their pre-war nutrition levels?

That’s it. The numbers do the work that slogans disguise. The declarations used during the war about an alleged famine relied on a statistical conversion this survey has now shown doesn’t apply in Gaza. If a concern is raised that the current survey missed areas, remember that it covered 83 percent of the population and was run by Action Against Hunger, whose entire institutional incentive runs the other way.

Here’s the Catch

A UNICEF survey found acute child malnutrition in Gaza at 0.5 to 1.3 percent, lower than any of its neighbours, at peace or at war, and at or below Gaza’s own pre-war level of 0.8 percent. That number is incompatible with “deliberate extermination by hunger,” the vast feeding operation behind it, running entirely through Israeli-controlled access, is incompatible with genocidal intent, and the same data has knocked out the statistical assumption underneath the 2025 famine declaration. None of this makes the war painless or Israel spotless, but the maximal charge, the one on the signs and in the legal filings, now has a measured answer. The children the world says Israel is starving are, by the UN’s own count, among the best-protected from starvation in the region.

Jewish Tulsa

Joe Roberts left Ontario for Tulsa two years ago. He runs Jewish Tulsa now, and between 800 and 900 Canadian Jewish families have written to his group asking about the move, roughly two thousand people. Fine. People move. Emmanuel Moss, a cardiac surgeon, is leaving Montreal for Atlanta, and Atlanta is lucky to have him.

What Roberts - whom I actually greatly admire and respect - wants next is, in my opinion, the problem. An asylum pathway. The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in the US, has picked it up and says Washington should offer asylum to Canadian Jews who, in its words, have a credible fear of persecution on account of their faith or ethnicity.

I’m an immigration and refugee lawyer, so let me explain what that sentence actually means.

The legal test

Firstly, asylum in American law requires you to be physically standing on American soil. I believe what they mean is refugee resettlement. That requires, among other things, a well-founded fear of persecution on a protected ground (yes, religion or race are protected grounds), and it requires that the persecution come from the state or from people the state cannot or will not control, and it requires you to show there is nowhere inside your own country you could safely go instead. Canada is four thousand kilometres wide and the second largest country in the world (please don’t go to Russia).

State protection is at least for now a big part of where I think this legal argument goes to die. The Combatting Hate Act received royal assent on June 18 and came into force a month later, creating an offence for obstructing access to a synagogue or a Jewish school. Is the legislation perfect? No. Is our government currently problematic? Yes. Was Ottawa slow? Yes. But slow is not unable, and it is nowhere near unwilling. Our own jurisprudence, from Canada v. Ward through to Canada v. Kadenko and everything since, says the presumption of state protection gets heavier the more functional the democracy, and that the burden on the claimant rises accordingly. I have unfortunately lost claims for clients whose national police were the ones swinging the batons. Those clients would, frankly, read this file and laugh at us.

There is also the treaty. Since 2004 the Americans have designated Canada a safe country for refugees, and since the 2023 expansion they turn claimants back along the entire land border on exactly that reasoning. You cannot send a Somali home to Canada because Canada protects Jews and Somalis and everyone else, and then resettle a Jew from Vaughan because it doesn’t.

But to me, honestly, the law is the least of it.

Israel: No refugee status necessary

If you don’t feel safe in Canada, fine, I get and respect that. You can leave and try to rebuild your home and life anywhere you like. You don’t need a refugee claim to do so.

But also, we have a country: Israel. That was the entire point of Zionism! The Law of Return exists so that no Jew ever again has to stand at a counter and audition his fear for a foreign judge who will decide whether s/he qualifies for protection. There is a word for a Jew who goes to Israel: Oleh. One who ascends. There is no word for a Jew who applies to become a refugee from Canada, because our grandparents could never have conceived of the request.

They knew what the real thing looked like. The SS St. Louis came within sight of Halifax in June 1939 with 907 people aboard and Ottawa sent it back, and the phrase that survived from that period, ‘none is too many,’ was said about people who were actually being hunted and redirected to concentration and then death camps. To take the category built for them and hand it to a family being given a guided tour of Tulsa is not advocacy. It’s theft.

Move to Oklahoma if you want. Move to Ra’anana. But do it standing up. The posture I just can’t stomach, and the feeling that so viscerally upsets me about even uttering the words “Jewish” and “refugee” in the same sentence is the one that goes abroad and asks to be classified as a victim, because we have spent seventy-eight years and an enormous amount of blood building the alternative to needing anyone’s mercy, and here we are volunteering to hand it back for a resettlement grant and a soft landing in the United States, where we are already welcome.

So hold your head up! Fight the good fight!

I’m not asking for bravado, and I know that the last three years in this country have been ugly. I also know and have written at length about how we do not have a friendly Prime Minister and that what is written on paper is different than what happens in reality. I get it. I also don’t think that we’ve given enough of a fight in Canada to throw in the towel.

But refugees? Really?

What I want is for us to quit performing our own helplessness in front of an audience taking notes. A community that says it is being targeted and intends to do something about that will find allies fast. Present yourself at a border begging to be taken in and what comes back is pity, which has never once protected a Jew from anything at all. The world reads our desperation long before it gets around to reading our arguments. We stopped being the people on the run in 1948, deliberately, at a cost I don’t need to itemize for anyone who has been to see the graves on Har Herzl.

Enough of this.

Here’s the Catch

We don’t meet the legal test for refugee status and we know it. Canada has a functioning police force, a Parliament that just criminalized blocking the doors of our shuls, and courts that work, and every element of the refugee definition assumes the absence of all three.

But the State of Israel was built precisely so this question would never have to be asked again, and the fact that we’re asking it anyway says more about our own nerve than about Canada’s failures, which are real and which I have written about at length.

And the deepest cost isn’t legal. It’s that a community which asks to be reclassified as helpless will eventually be believed.

Last week I posted something about an upcoming TIFF screening of an October 7 film. Underneath an announcement about the new film, I wrote, “Paging Cameron Bailey [TIFF’s CEO]: We are closely watching your response to this. We remember how quickly you folded to the haters last year.” Recall, last year Bailey halted, and then reinstated, the screening of the Oct 7 film, The Road Between Us. Not sure why that guy still has his job, but I digress.

Within hours the replies were a wall of anti-Israel hate, but the same two words kept popping up: Hannibal Directive. Over and over, deployed like some kind of trump card. The implication was clear: You think October 7 was a massacre? Look up the Hannibal Directive and you’ll learn who really killed those people.

This was clearly a talking point with circulation, and I suspect many readers have either (a) never heard of it, (b) have heard of it briefly as a directive to run into harm’s way to bring home kidnapped Israelis no matter what, or (c) as some kind of an accusation.

So let me explain what it actually is.

The original directive

The Hannibal Directive was an Israeli military order from 1986, written after Hezbollah captured soldiers in Lebanon. It instructed forces to do everything possible to stop a kidnapping in progress, including firing on the escaping vehicle, even at risk to the captured soldier’s life. The logic behind it: a captured soldier becomes a strategic hostage. After all, Israel traded 1,027 Palestinians prisoners (including Yahya Sinwar) for Gilad Shalit in 2011. The directive existed to prevent the next Shalit.

It was controversial from the start. The wording was classified, commanders interpreted it differently, and some soldiers understood it as “better a dead soldier than a captured one,” a reading the army always denied. Its most scrutinized use came in Rafah in August 2014, when Lt. Hadar Goldin was captured and the IDF responded with massive fire that killed dozens of Gazans. In 2016, Gadi Eisenkot - then the IDF’s Chief of the General Staff - revoked it entirely, replacing it with a protocol that rescue efforts must not deliberately endanger the captive.

October 7

Then came October 7. In the chaos of that morning, with command structures collapsing and terrorists streaming back toward Gaza with many hostages, Hannibal-style orders appear to have been given. Israeli journalists, Haaretz foremost among them, reported directives to stop vehicles crossing into Gaza at all costs. The IDF’s own inquiry into Kibbutz Be’eri found that a tank fired on a house where hostages were being held. Israeli fire killed some Israelis that day. Those investigations came from Israeli institutions examining themselves, which is worth a whole lot. After all, states running cover-ups don’t typically publish their own damning findings. When the IDF killed three escaped hostages in Gaza City in December 2023, it disclosed the error within hours.

The trolls

Now look at what my repliers were actually claiming. Not that friendly fire occurred in specific, documented incidents. They were claiming, or heavily-implying-with-no-room-for-question, that Israel killed most of the those murdered on October 7 and pinned it on Hamas. That the massacre was, in some meaningful sense, self-inflicted. This is where a minor event gets inflated into denialism, and the inflation is, as always, the whole point. The documented cases of Israel potentially killing Israelis number maybe the tens. Roughly 1,200 people were killed that day. No serious investigation, Israeli or otherwise, supports anything close to the inflated claim that Israel murdered it’s own people to that extent. It’s ridiculous to even be typing or have to rebut.

The anti-Israel talking point however works by borrowing credibility from the real reporting and spending it on a conclusion the reporting doesn’t at all support.

The category error matters too. A directive that applied to soldiers, that was revoked seven years earlier, improvised back into use during a nine-hour collapse of command while kibbutzim burned, is a subject for inquiry and accountability. I want those inquiries, and I demand that accountability. Every family deserves to know exactly how their loved ones died. But improvized orders in unprecedented chaos are not a standing doctrine to murder civilians, and they can’t carry the weight the repliers need them to carry, which is the erasure of the massacre itself. Watch where the argument is always headed. It never ends at “Israel should investigate friendly fire.” It ends at “so the atrocity wasn’t really Hamas’s doing.”

Why does this catch on?

Why does this particular talking point travel so well? Because unlike most claims in this conflict, its core is sourced to Israelis. An activist citing Hannibal isn’t quoting Hamas’s health ministry. They’re quoting Haaretz, and that feels like an indictment. It also attacks the moral centre of Israel’s case rather than its conduct. Israel’s deepest claim after October 7 is that it values life, that the war is framed around bringing hostages home, and that they’ve prioritized limiting civilian casualties. If you can suggest the army kills its own to deny the enemy bargaining chips, you’ve poisoned the premise. “If that’s what they do to Jews, imagine what they do to Palestinians!” That’s a far more efficient move than arguing about any particular airstrike.

So if you see those two words in a reply thread, here’s what the author is trying to do: take a real chapter of Israeli military doctrine, a complicated one, layered over several conflicts and unprecedented situations, and stretching it over October 7 like a tarp, hoping it covers the whole thing. It doesn’t. It covers specific incidents that Israel itself uncovered, is investigating, and committed to change. The rest is the massacre, exactly as it happened, filmed by the Palestinian terrorists who committed it and then called home, gleefully telling their dad that they killed 10 Jews today.

Here’s the Catch

The Hannibal Directive was real: a 1986 order to stop soldier abductions at any cost, including risk to the captive, revoked in 2016. On October 7, versions of it were improvised amid total chaos, and Israeli fire killed some Israelis in documented incidents, uncovered largely by Israeli journalists and the IDF’s own probes. The online talking point inflates those dozens of cases into the claim that Israel massacred its own people, a leap no investigation supports. Concede the documented core without flinching, demand specificity, and name where the argument is headed. The people flooding your replies aren’t asking for accountability. They’re asking you to un-see a pogrom that the perpetrators themselves proudly filmed.

On a side note, kol hakavod to Jack Berkovits of Omni Jewelcrafters, who is giving away 18,000 Star of David necklaces to anyone, Jew or gentile, who will give their word that they’ll wear it openly and publicly. He’s had enough of the hate, and wants people to live their Jewish lives proudly. Without a doubt, the mensch of the week.

Schools across Ontario are consistently engaging in equity, anti-racism and anti-hate work and, as a school principal, I am consistently engaging with the research and policies regarding these issues. I have noticed a shift in conversations and an uptick in acts of bias, hate, and prejudice against Jewish students, families, and educators within our communities. I’ve watched students and families actively hide their Jewish identity out of fear for retaliation, packing their bags and ready to relocate to protect their children. Parents have reached out to ask me whether it was safe for their young sons to wear their kippahs at school. As a non-Jew, I sat in discomfort and concern as I watched this rise in antisemitism and became increasingly aware that I needed to better educate myself in order to actively call out antisemitism. With this deep desire to learn more, I joined the UJA on an educators trip to Israel to understand the complex situation faced by Jews and all Israelis today.

My journey began as I landed in Tel Aviv and took a taxi to Jerusalem. The Arab Israeli cab driver was the first to introduce me to the city of Jerusalem. He responded to my attempts to make conversation and the pride and joy was evident as he spoke of his homeland and about the many different people groups who co-exist peacefully in this beautiful place. There was a note of sadness in his voice as he said that people around the world don’t understand Israel.

As I began to absorb all that I was seeing and hearing, so much seemed to be a paradox and then I heard the words “Gam v’gam”. This is a Hebrew expression that means “both” or “this and also that” and is used to express how the Jews hold both grief and joy, trauma and life at the same time. This paradoxical phrase was remarkably apt and so succinctly captured the complexities of the Israeli context that it became the framework I used to comprehend the reality of Israel, the Jewish experience, and the role that I play as an educational leader.

We spent time in Sderot, a town adjacent to Gaza and taken by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Here we met Eddy Azran, a man who fought alongside his civilian neighbours to protect the city. He shared his experience of the attacks and the horrors and loss they endured. He also shared about the work they are doing in schools to empower Jewish youth. As he spoke, you could see just a little crack in the emotion at a time he was least expecting it, as his voice catches. We met some of the residents who are returning to their homes and who are giving a whole new definition to the term “revitalization” as they rebuild spaces, memorialize the brave who were murdered, and bring new business ventures. It is here that I see the lived trauma, strength and courage alongside active determination and action to ensure a future of safety, autonomy, acceptance, and belonging for the Jews, their families and others.

On a personal level, I found our visit to the Nova Festival Site the most difficult. This is a large scale, collective memorial for the many lives lost on October 7th. The slaughter at the ill-timed rave that attracted 4,000 young people was likely an unplanned biproduct of the carefully coordinated Hamas attack. As a mother of two teens, who may also have been drawn to such an event, I felt the sorrow and anguish deep in my heart.

Many families have chosen to create a large tribute board on the site to commemorate the young lives that were lost. The commemorative boards resemble an Instagram post, with beautiful young men and women in various poses celebrating the joy, vitality, naivety, and inherent beauty of youth. But alongside these photos are screen captures of the last messages they sent their parents with words such as “Mom, mom- what do I do? I am so scared.” Standing there, I realized that memorials in Israel are not simply intended to remember the dead but are also there as a testament to a life lived and a statement that life will continue.

We visited Kibbutz Kfar Azza and, led by resident Shahar Schnurman, witnessed the chaos and evidence of murder everywhere. Families of those who were murdered were present, honouring their loved ones. The time spent here was emotional and difficult and it is the final moments of our time with Shachar that are forever emblazoned upon my mind. Shahar standing tall, the ruined fields of Gaza directly behind him, spoke about the Palestinians that worked alongside him in the Kibbutz and who he considered his friends. Gesturing to the fields behind him, he shakes his head and talks about the war, expressing heartache for both Palestinian and Jewish lives lost and a hope for change. He finishes by saying “We just want peace.” In this moment he exhibited deep compassion and sorrow and yet so much resilience and desire for change. This challenged my assumptions and showed me that within this man who is grieving his murdered friends, are depths of forgiveness and hope for a future of peace with both his Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours.

Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of our trip, was the opportunity to meet with former hostages Keith and Aviva Siegel. Our time together was informal and heart-breaking. Aviva talked about her time in captivity, her release and the subsequent months when she advocated for the release of the remaining hostages, including her husband. Keith then shares his story and the two begin to converge their dialogue in a way that only two people who have shared a long-standing union and partnership can. As they spoke, I reflected on the normalcy of their interaction juxtaposed with the nightmare that they were sharing. This normalcy is something that I can grasp, but it still leaves me very short of understanding the trauma they endured and carry with them today. Recently, this couple has shared that they are expecting another grandchild and while they continue to work through the impact of their time in captivity, they also experience overwhelming joy as they welcome a new life to their family.

During a day at the beach at Tel Aviv, I made friends with three teen girls, and as one often does at the beach, we took turns watching each other’s personal belongings as we swam in the warm Mediterranean Sea. During some moments of rest in the sand, the girls shared a story of their 13-year-old friend who saw her parents murdered, was taken hostage with her brother, and experienced unimaginable horrors. They shared that she is now home and attending school. When I ask if she was “okay,” they shook their head sorrowfully and responded with a subdued “no.” Here I am reminded that even the young people of Israel have been impacted by the attacks and embody the ability or necessity to carry deep trauma and still engage in ordinary, everyday routines and pass-times.

While visiting Yad Vashem I was struck by how the museum brings you on a chronological journey showing the rise of antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. We finished the tour of the museum in the Garden of the Righteous, an area honouring non-Jewish people who recognized that a wrong was taking place and helped the Jews, rescuing many with no personal gain and often at great cost to themselves. I wonder if I would have had what it takes to be among the Righteous Among the Nations. Would I have helped another human at risk to my safety, community standing, and, most importantly, the safety of my own children and family?

These experiences have all taught me that as a collective, Israel and Jews are not defined simply by trauma and grief. They live with joy, embracing life and working to protect their identity, future, homeland, and rights, unwilling to repeat the horrors of the past. They intentionally invest in family, community, and the future. It is truly remarkable and commendable.

As I return home to Canada, I think about how, at the end of every day, I sat amongst Jewish and Arab Israelis, gazing upon the beauty of Israel and toasting L’chaim (life) and I feel a call to action. As leaders in education and global citizens, we need to recognize that we have a duty to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging and can celebrate their identity. Specifically, we need to provide that space and create these conditions for our Jewish students. Educators hold positions of influence and have a responsibility to learn about and empower the various identities within our learning communities. We are responsible for engaging in the curriculum, educating students about complex systems and problems, celebrating diversity, and building allyship with families. For me this begins with leaving my assumptions behind and listening to the experiences and perspectives of others.

As I end this writing, I embrace the memory of sitting on the Tel Aviv beach overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, feet buried in the white sand, indulging in watermelon and feta. The layered taste of the sweet, juicy watermelon and the salty, smooth feta, reminds me of Israel and that, in order to fully appreciate Israel, the Jewish experience and its complexities, I also need to hold both, the sweet and the salty, the grief and the joy, the trauma and life. Gam v’gam.

I’m here to indict the patient.

That’s us.

Why books?

A quick word about the obvious objection, which is that nobody reads full books anymore. Partly true, but entirely beside the point. The book carries a strange, almost sacred authority in our culture whether or not it gets read. Nobody puts a viral thread on a course syllabus, and the weekend papers don't review Instagram posts. A book announces that a serious person sat with a subject for years and that a serious institution agreed it mattered, and people who haven't opened a book since university still believe this. Books are how a civilization signals what it takes seriously, and the shelf Matti Friedman found in Washington is what it looks like when that signal gets jammed. Look how many people put books on shelves and coffee tables in their houses even if they don’t read them, to signal a sign of higher intellect, class, or simple curiosity. It’s real.

Publishers

So let’s start with the big publishers. The big houses have spent two years telling Jewish writers that a pro-Israel manuscript is “not the right fit for our list” or that an October 7 memoir is “commercially challenging.” Many rejections are disguised as a market judgment.

Just last week, JTA reported on novelist Meg Keene, who shopped a romance with Israeli characters through an enthusiastic agent with a strong sales record and heard, over and over, that the book was too Jewish to publish while Gaza made anything pro-Israel radioactive. That isn’t a market judgment but a confession: you make us uncomfortable, and, we just don’t like you.

Yesterday’s Commentary Magazine podcast dismantled that fiction in about five minutes, and the discussion is worth listening to. Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, is republishing two Susan Abulhawa novels this September, in a press release gushing about her “lyrical” voice. This is a writer whose social media record, as the Washington Free Beacon has documented, includes calling Jews cockroaches, demons, and ghouls, and calling October 7 “a spectacular moment.”

The Commentary podcast noted that Abulhawa’s breakout novel, Mornings in Jenin, began life under a different title - The Scar of David - and only found its audience after publishers renamed it and edited it into readability. So the industry isn’t merely tolerating this despicable person, but carrying her. Meanwhile, Jewish writers are hearing outright that Jewish content invites controversies that publishing houses would rather not touch. So the bar was never quality, and it obviously isn’t decency.

The bar is fear, running in just one direction.

It goes all the way down to the shop too. Days ago, a Nashville bookstore cancelled the launch event for Alyssa Rosenheck’s White. Blonde. Jew. after an online pressure campaign, citing security concerns (though Rosenheck had, you know, already hired private security at her own expense and says the store told her it had no worries at all). Then it obviously cancelled anyway.

Rosenheck isn’t an outlier, but just the newest example in a recent pattern. In August 2024, Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena cancelled Joshua Leifer’s launch for Tablets Shattered less than an hour before it was supposed to start because the moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, is a Zionist, and a staffer told Leifer to his face that they wouldn’t have one (a Zionist) on their stage. Brett Gelman had a Los Angeles signing scrapped after antisemitic threats. And in March 2025, Chuck Schumer, then the most powerful (and arguably most useless) Jewish elected official in America, had his entire tour postponed for a book called Antisemitism in America after activists promised protests at every stop. Yep, the tour for a book about antisemitism was chased off the road by antisemitism (again, no love lost for Schumer I must say).

And here’s the greatest insult that Commentary’s John Podhoretz pointed out in his podcast: for most of the 20th century, Jews were American publishing’s best customers! 4% of the American population buying 20% or more of the books. Simon & Schuster itself was (obviously) founded by two Jews: Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster. The publishing industry we helped build has now decided that we’re the liability.

These institutions are terrified of a hashtag campaign and a letter signed by two hundred writers nobody has heard of. They aren’t scared of us. Because unlike our books, we haven’t shown our spine.

So what’s our excuse?

We have money.

We have family foundations that can build a hospital wing in a fiscal quarter.

We have presses of our own, imprints, institutes, a Diaspora full of writers and editors and agents and publicists who know exactly how this industry works because plenty of them built it.

And what have we produced against the flood? A very polite trickle. Carefully vetted. Only seeking the highest of intellectual standards. Waiting, always, for the perfect book, the unimpeachable author, the volume so airtight nobody can dismiss it, something only from anm already well-known individual, while the other side ships garbage by the pallet and sells them in our stores.

Grow a spine

The pro-Israel and Jewish publishing houses that have the ability should be running their presses at capacity, not curating a boutique.

There are some positive moves in the US and Keene (mentioned above) is one of them: she now runs her own fiction imprint at Wicked Son, a Jewish press, part of a small new wave of Jewish publishing houses and grants built by people who got tired of asking permission. We need ten times more of this, and in Canada, where the infrastructure barely exists, and where we continue to lament in tweet after tweet the issues we have with this country, we need it most of all.

Foundations should be blasting grants into the world for good books about Jews and Jewish life and Israel and the Jewish connection to it: the soldier’s memoir, the kibbutznik’s diary, the historian’s monograph, the Diaspora experience, the grandmother’s cookbook blended with the story of Aleppo or Rabat or Kiev or Montreal folded in between the recipes. In this respect, the Azrieli Foundation gets 10 points. Be like them.

There should be an easily accessible bench of Jewish editors on call for any writer with a story, publishers whose doors a first-time author can actually find, a manuscript-to-shelf pipeline so simple that a local teacher with an idea knows exactly whom to phone. None of this is exotic. It’s infrastructure, and we are historically pretty pretty pretty good at infrastructure.

Some of what we publish will be flawed. Sentimental, angry, mediocre even. Some people may even use AI to edit their stuff. So what? The other shelf certainly isn’t built on excellence. It’s built on volume, and volume manufactures consensus in the mind of a browsing reader before s/he has read a single page.

Let me be clear: I am not advocating to lower standards for the sake of it. I’m simply arguing that we need to change our focus and priorities. We need plenty of accessible, readable, and thoughtful material.

The other side has taken our industry and is now using it against us. Just like they’ve inverted the genocide label from something Jews experienced to what they’re now falsely alleging the Palestinians are experiencing, they’re inverting publishing too. It’s insane that we are not yet effectively fighting back.

Too complicated? Here are some more ideas:

• Did a Jewish author get blacklisted or have his/her book launch cancelled? All the North American UJA Federations should buy thousands of copies of the book, and give it away for free to people in the local communities. Support Jewish authors!

• Why wait for someone to be cancelled? We should be organizing more book launches, more book clubs, sending Indigo gift cards throughout the community to encourage people to buy and read more books, incentivize reading, and dig into our whole “People of the Book” schtick.

• Is there someone in the community who you would love to read more of? Commission them. Give them a grant to write a book, and help them get it published. If it can’t get published, help them self-publish it and then give them publicity grants to get the word out there. We have enough sub-par TikTok influencers. Let’s elevate writers and thinkers and intellectuals and make them thought-influencers too.

• Are you a Jewish publishing house or a Canadian/American publishing house with a spine? Get off your high horses about what you’re looking for. The self-publishing industry is leaving you in the dust, so rather than sitting around waiting for the perfect, intellectually-balanced-and-nuanced manuscript to land in your lap, pick up some of the stuff you think could be marketable, interesting, useful in this generational battle for hearts and minds, and give it 10 more seconds of time than you’d usually give.

• Are you a Jewish and/or Zionist writer? WRITE, WRITE, WRITE, and then WRITE SOME MORE.

We have the resources, we have the brains, we have the need, and there’s no time to waste. Our philanthropy is unmatched, but whereas a hospital needs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to be built, this initiative needs far less to be impactful. We can have better representation in book stores, at book fairs, at community events, in a way that is proportionate to our voice and our ability. I sadly just don’t see it here, at a time when it’s needed most.

Here’s the Catch:

We call ourselves the people of the book and behave like the people of the strongly worded tweet. Matti Friedman discovered Gazology, but we need an inverse movement that is actually substantive, and true, and robust. A shelf is an argument, and empty space on it concedes. Stand in any bookstore and look at what the argument is made of: spines. Row upon row of them, turned outward, every one facing us down. The publishers showed us their spine. It bends. So grow one, dear Jews. Grow a thousand, cloth-bound, stamped in gold, packed in so tight the lies have to fight for shelf space. On a book, the spine is the part that holds everything together. It’s also the part that faces the world.

Something in us loves a ruin.

Not the ruin itself per se, but what it does to a story. Destruction has a shape, a date, a cause, a villain, a before, and an after. You can build a commemoration around it or teach it to a ten-year-old in one lesson. Our calendars are organized around catastrophe and rescue. Our news cycles turn on the moment a thing breaks, and our politics on the warning that it is about to.

Maintenance has none of this. Maintenance resists narrative. It’s the work of converting moments of mobilization into durability. It’s an engineer replacing a part that hasn’t yet failed, on a road no one thinks about, with money that could have gone to something with a ribbon to cut. It’s the third year of a policy that won’t show results for some time, or the governance review that no one cares to read about.

There’s nothing dramatic about maintenance. Its success is strangely self-erasing. When maintenance works, the bridge doesn’t collapse, the institution doesn’t fail, and the emergency never arrives. Nothing happened, which makes the work that prevented it look unnecessary.

I’ve been thinking about this asymmetry because it describes one of the central Jewish temptations of the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic: mistaking survival of the emergency for resolution of the problem. Emergency produces clarity, mobilization, and sometimes heroism. But survival becomes durable only through the slower work of converting emergency achievements into institutions, habits, and capacity.

Israel after the emergency

By any historical measure, Israel has just come through an extraordinary run of military achievement. Hezbollah, the “crown jewel” of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” which spent two decades accumulating an arsenal designed to make northern Israel unlivable, has been degraded to a fraction of what it was. The Iranian regime itself absorbed strikes that would have been unthinkable in 2021, and lost its Supreme Leader (and most of its other leaders) in the process. Hostages came home. Israel survived other attacks, and still, its people party on the beach.

Every one of these is a precondition. None of them is a policy.

Military success isn’t self-executing. It creates an opening. Politics decides whether that opening becomes an arrangement or closes again.

Weakening Hezbollah isn’t the same as building a stable northern border. A stable northern border requires a Lebanese army able and willing to actually hold ground it’s been handed, a political settlement that survives the next Lebanese government, and Israeli communities willing to move their children back into their homes. The pilot zones in the south are a test of institutions, not of firepower, and institutions are slower and less satisfying than airstrikes.

A ceasefire in Gaza is not the same as determining Gaza’s future. The hostages are home and large-scale fighting has subsided, but nearly every structural question remains open. A new roadmap now envisages phased Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, technocratic administration, and international security supervision. But a roadmap isn’t implementation. Hamas disputes what it has agreed to surrender. The sequencing remains contested. The technocratic committee exists, but it has not yet established effective authority inside Gaza. Reconstruction and legitimate governance can’t just be announced into existence.

Surviving an Iranian attack also isn’t the same as a regional strategy. The memorandum of understanding signed in June was supposed to end the confrontation within sixty days. In July it frayed over shipping lanes. A country can’t organize its national life around the expectation of a decisive blow that finally settles things, because the blow never settles things. It buys an interval, and what you do during that interval is the hard work.

Which brings us to October 2026. Israel will hold an election on the 27th, the first since October 7, 2023, and the first in almost forty years to follow a Knesset that completed its four-year term. The temptation will be to fight it entirely on the question of blame, because blame is the most narratively satisfying material available. Blame asks whom to punish, whereas accountability asks what must be repaired. A serious commission of inquiry wouldn’t be a distraction from maintenance; it would be maintenance. The questions that will determine whether the next decade is survivable are all maintenance questions:

• who serves in the army and who doesn’t,

• whether courts, governments, and parliaments can constrain one another without making effective government impossible,

• whether an honest accounting of October 7 is ever produced,

• whether the North and the Gaza Envelope are genuinely rebuilt rather than announced.

None of these deliver a single triumphant headline, but all of them compound.

The Diaspora’s version of the same mistake

We make the identical error in the rest of the Jewish world, in a different key.

Emergency is something Diaspora Jewish institutions know how to do. It concentrates attention, loosens wallets, clarifies loyalties, and makes participation feel urgent. The harder question is what remains when urgency recedes.

Since October 7, enormous Jewish energy has gone into condemning antisemitism, documenting it, litigating it, and demanding that institutions name it. This is necessary and I frankly don’t have patience for people who suggest otherwise. But it’s such a defensive posture which is just not a way to live our lives. We can’t raise our children on a threat. If the only reason we give them to stay is that someone out there hates them, Jewishness becomes a liability to manage rather than an inheritance to deepen, and we can’t be surprised when they conclude that the easiest solution is to become less visible or to leave

Durable Jewish life in North America requires institutions capable of reproducing commitment after the rally ends. It needs day schools that families can afford and qualified teachers who are paid and valued enough to build careers rather than pass briefly through Jewish work. It requires synagogues and camps and campus organizations with functioning boards, credible leadership pipelines, real succession plans, vibrant social service agencies, and budgets that survive the departure of one philanthropic family. It requires coalitions with people who won’t agree with us about everything, built patiently in years when we don’t need them, because coalitions assembled during an emergency are just not coalitions, but appeals. And it requires an affirmative account of why any of this is worth continuing, one that would still be compelling if antisemitism vanished tomorrow. As Bari Weiss often says, our role is to be Jewish, not just fight antisemitism.

A Jewish community is a system of mutual obligation. It teaches, feeds, houses, employs, visits, buries, welcomes, and cares. A community that can issue a perfect statement on antisemitism but can’t care for its members has defended its name while neglecting its substance. It’s doing something wrong.

I’ve sat in enough board meetings to know that the future of Jewish life gets decided in rooms where nothing memorable is said.

A Durable Zionism

Zionism has always been better at this than its critics or its loudest defenders admit. Its revolutionary achievement was not only that it inspired Jews to declare sovereignty. It converted aspiration into administration.

The Declaration of Independence was read, briefly, on a Friday afternoon. What made it stick was schools and clinics, municipalities and courts, Hebrew classrooms and tax systems, housing and immigration agencies, public institutions capable of receiving over a million Jews from the Arab world and then another million from the former Soviet Union decades later, absorbed badly and unevenly and at enormous cost, but absorbed nonetheless. That’s the version that worked, and we don’t need to blanket it with epic language. The results speak for themselves. Zionism worked because it eventually became boring.

A durable Zionism is one that survives its own success. Governments made serious errors. But the state didn’t endure because its institutions were flawless. It endured because failures could be absorbed, contested, and, if need be, corrected. Durable Zionism treats the state as an ongoing administrative project rather than a slogan to be defended in comment sections, and it accepts that a project you actually own is one you’re obliged to repair. Ownership without repair is just fandom. Criticism without the willingness to do the hard work of repair is moral performance.

The un-sexy thing about maintenance is that it offers no ending and little recognition. You’ll never know if you succeeded, only that nothing collapsed on your watch, and then you do it again. The bridge did not fall. The teacher did not leave. The institution survived the donor’s departure. The border community returned and stayed. The next crisis arrived and found functioning systems waiting for it.

Nobody writes songs about this because, when it succeeds, there’s no single night on which the people were saved. There are only people who kept showing up after the emergency stopped making showing up feel heroic. We’re always looking for some great headline, but civilizations are rarely saved by grand gestures, despite what The Odyssey may show, in theaters now.

Whether we can be those people isn’t something we get to decide in the next crisis. It’s being decided in the years between them, which is to say: right now.

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Elie Wiesel published two endings to the story that became Night.

In the one most people have read, a boy whose just been liberated from Buchenwald drags himself to a mirror. He hasn’t seen his own face since the ghetto, and a corpse looks back at him. The look in its eyes has never left him. That’s the last line.

In the other, the boy looks into the same mirror and sees the same corpse. Then he raises his fist and puts it through the glass. He faints. He wakes up, and from that moment his health begins to improve. He starts writing immediately. And then the book keeps going, out of the camp and into the world, where he reports that, ten years on, Germany is sovereign and has an army again, the sadist of Buchenwald – Ilsa Koch - is raising her children in peace, war criminals stroll through Hamburg and Munich unbothered, and the world is already forgetting. He doesn’t believe his book will change any of this. He ends by asking whether breaking the mirror was worth it at all.

Told about these two versions, most readers assume the second is the later one: the angry one, the bitter one, written by an older man who had watched the decades go by and lost patience.

But it’s not.

It came first.

I.

The angry version is Un di velt hot geshvign - And the World Remained Silent - published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires in 1956, in a series of memoirs of Polish Jewry. The first, famous, version is La Nuit – Night - published in French in 1958.

Two years apart. The same author. The same events. A totally different moral grammar.

Wiesel recast the book in French with the encouragement of François Mauriac, the Catholic Nobel laureate who read the manuscript and helped him find a publisher. Jérôme Lindon, the publisher who finally accepted it, made further cuts. Wiesel accepted those cuts because he understood that the fuller book would not otherwise be published.

We tend to imagine that Holocaust memory softened as it grew more distant: that the first generation told the truth and the third generation turned it into a lesson plan to be used in a curriculum. That’s not exactly what happened, or at least not what happened here. This softening took just two years. It happened at the point of first contact with a general readership, and it happened with the survivor’s participation.

Naomi Seidman laid out the particulars in an essay first published in 1996 and reprinted in Tablet in 2023. She notes that Wiesel’s Yiddish version dedicates the book to his mother, father, and little sister, adding that they were killed by German murderers. The latter French version dedicates it to his parents and little sister. Period.

In Yiddish, Sighet - Wiesel’s hometown – is given as a real place with borders and history: the largest Jewish population in Marmarosh, Austro-Hungarian and then Romanian and then Hungarian again. In French, it’s described as a little town in Transylvania where Wiesel spent his childhood.

Then there’s a passage around which Seidman built much of her argument. In both versions, the narrator is disgusted that the newly liberated Jewish prisoners think only about bread and not about revenge. In the Yiddish, he says that Jewish boys went to Weimar to steal potatoes and clothes and to rape German girls, and laments that the “historical commandment of revenge went unfulfilled.” In the French, some young men go to Weimar for potatoes, clothes and girls, and “of revenge there is no sign.”

Jews and Germans in the first. Young men and girls in the second.

The nouns that carry responsibility disappear.

Even the titles do heavy lifting. And the World Remained Silent accuses somebody. Night names no one, human or divine. Night is an inevitable part of the daily cycle. It comes and goes no matter what.

Seidman’s conclusion was that there were two survivors in Wiesel: a Yiddish one and a French one. The difference between them was not how much they suffered. It was whether they were permitted to be angry, and at whom.

This wasn’t censorship imposed on Wiesel against his will. He participated in the transformation and accepted the cuts that were made. He approved the editions that followed, including the English translation his wife published in 2006. In his preface to that edition, he finally acknowledged the Yiddish book and explained that some of what he had omitted was simply too private to publish.

That’s not a scandal as writers always edit. Publishers make demands. Authors decide what they wish to disclose and what their readers can be persuaded to receive. Anyone who wants to be widely read makes accommodations.

The question however is not whether Wiesel edited his book.

The question is what kind of truth became unpublishable.

II.

The horror of the Holocaust survived. The accusation did not.

Mauriac’s foreword, which has been printed in nearly every edition of Night since, is entirely at ease with horror. It arranges the murder of six million people into a hierarchy and places at the top the death of God in the soul of a child. That’s horror rendered into something of a theology, and theology was something the European reader of 1958 understood.

Rage is far more difficult because rage has an address – it must be directed at someone. The moment you write down who you’re angry at, you make a claim on your reader. You suggest that his society failed, that his neighbours watched, that his government is letting the guilty walk around Munich. Grief can flatter a reader by inviting his sympathy. Fury risks implicating him.

The inimitable Dara Horn puts it more bluntly. Writing about this episode in People Love Dead Jews, she says the French version “repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst,” and asks: what reader wants to hear about how his own society had failed? Better to blame God!

Her account explains much of what changed between the two books. But Horn’s larger case is that this just wasn’t an unfortunate exception. It became a standard operating procedure of later Holocaust literature.

She points to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The latter three place non-Jewish rescuers near the moral centre: people who risk or sacrifice themselves to save Jews and thereby give the reader something redemptive to carry away. Such people existed, and yes, their actions matter enormously. They were also extraordinarily rare. The question is why this exceptional experience has become one of the Holocaust stories most likely to travel.

The most quoted sentence in the literature is a fifteen-year-old Anne Frank’s declaration, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” It was written, as Horn points out, three weeks before she encountered people who were not at all good at heart. We love the sentence because it flatters us, and because it came from a murdered girl, we can treat the pardon as though it were issued with authority.

But Horn also offers a counterexample: Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life, a Yiddish trilogy published in 1971 about the Łódź Ghetto. Rosenfarb introduces a large cast of characters before the war closes around them and allows them to remain real people rather than symbols of victimhood or instruments of somebody else’s redemption. The book’s honesty doesn’t consist in being gorier. It consists in refusing to make catastrophe useful, to turn it into something uplifting, a reassuring judgment about humanity. It doesn’t ask Jewish deaths to prove that people are good. It asks the reader to know that real Jews lived and died.

That distinction is important. The alternative to an uplifting account of catastrophe isn’t necessarily a more graphic one. It’s an account that refuses to reduce the people inside it to the lesson an outside reader wants to receive.

None of these stories is necessarily false, but it’s the selection that’s the issue. One true part of a catastrophe is elevated until it supplies the meaning of the whole.

Accounts of Jewish catastrophe tend to travel furthest once accusation has been made safe. Sometimes the accusation is cut. Sometimes it is turned into theology. Sometimes the story is made to end in an uplifting way. The reader is allowed to mourn without feeling addressed or shamed or guilty.

It was the price of the ticket: how the words got printed, and how they became available to everyone beyond the Yiddish world.

III.

It wasn’t reading Elie Wiesel that first made me think about this. It was something I recently experienced over two days in Israel.

The first day was Yad Vashem.

The museum ends as Israel’s Holocaust Museum was designed to end. You emerge onto a bright balcony with the Jerusalem Forest in front and below you. The architecture makes an argument which is: you’ve just descended into the catastrophe of European Jewry and as the war and Holocaust play out and eventually end, you emerge into the middle of our eternal capital. Israel, the Jewish state, was established three years after the Holocaust ended, and the shape of the museum is survival.

The second day was Kibbutz Kfar Azza.

The kibbutz is rebuilding and wants its families back home. New construction is going up beside buildings deliberately left as they were after October 7, 2023. The neighbourhood where young couples lived is still standing and still shot through, its walls carrying the record – bullet by bullet - of what came through them.

One of those houses belonged to Sivan Elkabetz. She and her boyfriend, Naor Hasidim, were killed there. Her parents have preserved the house and opened it so that people can walk through its rooms and see what happened inside. The bullet holes remain in the walls and ceiling. Their CD player sits destroyed. Their shoes and clothing are in disarray on the ground, and their mattress is shoved into a corner of their room, a failed shield from that fateful day. Their WhatsApp messages from the day have been printed off and stuck to the wall. We get a minute-by-minute understanding of how a beautiful couple was murdered.

In Kfar Azza, there’s no balcony emerging onto a serene forest. Nothing at the end resolves what happened. You literally leave the destroyed neighbourhood and get back onto the bus waiting for you on a dusty road. Look past the bus, there’s a field. Look past the field, there’s Gaza. The kibbutz is rebuilding, which is itself a form of return and survival, but the ruins haven’t yet been made to deliver any sort of coherent lesson.

I certainly don’t mean that Yad Vashem does any disservice to the Holocaust. The balcony and what’s below isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a thesis from those who built it: destruction, then sovereignty. But every thesis selects. It gives the catastrophe a destination and makes everything before it lean towards that destination. Once survival becomes the ending, anger, failure, contingency, and unresolved loss can begin to look like things the visitor must pass through on the way there. The danger isn’t that the meaning is false. It’s that one meaning becomes the whole meaning.

Every museum makes an argument. But every argument has a shape, and a shape is a decision about where to stop. Walking out of Kfar Azza, where the event has not yet acquired a settled ending, I understood what a memorial necessarily costs: the unresolvedness of the catastrophe, and the possibility that it might still mean several things at once.

A people must rebuild. Survivors don’t owe anyone permanent brokenness, and Kfar Azza is one of the only kibbutzim left that hasn’t removed their October 7 destruction, yet. The danger isn’t the balcony itself. The danger is the speed with which every ruin is required to lead there.

I found myself wondering how long Kfar Azza had before somebody built it a balcony.

That question sent me back to the books.

IV.

I don’t believe that the October 7 books themselves are being cleaned up. Maybe it’s still OK to be raw, and maybe that’s because of the availability of self-publishing. But it appears the softening often happens around them: in subtitles, jacket copy, reviews, and screen adaptations that tell the public, before it has read a word, what the suffering is supposed to mean.

Since the first books began appearing, I’ve read as much as I could. I just felt compelled, as a Jew in the Diaspora, to know as much as possible about what happened that day: who was killed, who acted courageously, how the state failed, and what’s followed.

Many of the books are remarkably direct. Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s When We See You Again holds loss without turning it into a lesson. Lee Yaron’s 10/7: 100 Human Stories refuses to reduce the attack to a handful of representative stories; it records many lives at once. In Surviving October 7, Shahar Horovitz writes about what the Nova massacre did to the innocence of the young.

Then there is Eli Sharabi’s Hostage, which recounts his 491 days in Hamas captivity. The book’s final devastation lies outside the tunnel. When Sharabi emerged, he learned that his wife and both of his daughters had been murdered on October 7.

Now look at how the book is presented to English readers.

The Jewish Chronicle says it is ultimately about “finding the light in the darkest of circumstances.” Commentary calls Sharabi “unbroken and unbowed” and presents him as an example of resilience. The Washington Free Beacon calls the book “captivating and inspiring.” Its American subtitle promises a memoir of survival and the human spirit.

Presumably, little has been removed from Sharabi’s testimony. But one part of it – resilience - has been chosen to explain everything else.

This isn’t an isolated example. HBO presented One Day in October through the language of love, courage, sacrifice, hope, and resilience. A Nova survivor’s memoir carries the subtitle Terror, Escape, and Resilience. The wording tells the reader in advance where the story is meant to end. Terror and escape are what happened. Resilience is what they’re supposed to mean.

That doesn’t make the resilience false. Sharabi himself has said that he wants readers to understand what captivity was like while also choosing light and humanity. That intention must be taken seriously. He’s entitled to decide what his survival means to him.

But a survivor can mean several things at once. Sharabi’s story can be about courage and about cruelty, bereavement, abandonment, and irreparable loss. The problem begins when one true part of the story is promoted into its official conclusion.

Resilience is true, but it’s not the whole truth.

That’s why the cover and the publicity matter. Most people don’t encounter a book without preparation. Heck, most people don’t even read full books anymore. Before they read it - if they read it at all - they see the title, subtitle, jacket copy, advertisements, and reviews. Those things tell them what kind of story they are receiving and what they should carry away from it. Over time, the frame can become the public memory of the book.

Mauriac’s foreword did something similar for Night. It taught generations of readers to understand Wiesel’s suffering principally as a crisis of faith. The words of the book remained, but the interpretation waiting outside the book told readers which words mattered most.

There is, however, an important difference. Wiesel was entering a Christian European literary world that was more comfortable with Jewish suffering than with Jewish accusation. The framing of the October 7 books is often being done by Jewish and strongly pro-Israel institutions: Commentary, The Jewish Chronicle, the Washington Free Beacon, publishers bravely risking boycott to seek Jewish readership and organizations trying to defend Israel before a hostile public.

No outside editor is then forcing this meaning upon us.

But that does not mean the choice is inexplicable or contemptible. A wounded community needs stories of endurance. It needs to know that people resisted, rescued others, fought, survived, and returned. Resilience helps a society continue. It also gives Israel’s defenders something useful to say in a public argument: we were attacked, and we remain standing.

“Unbroken” is a powerful word in a fight, but it may also be a poor description of what survival costs.

A person can survive and still be permanently changed. A community can rebuild without turning its destruction into an inspiring story. To call someone resilient may honour his strength. To insist that he is unbroken can deny the reality of what was actually done to him.

So the parallel with Wiesel isn’t exact. His text was altered as it crossed into a wider language and readership. The October 7 texts may remain intact while the material around them supplies a safer conclusion.

But the result can be similar. A wide audience receives the grief, the courage and the survival more easily than it receives the anger, the blame and the demand for judgment. The accusation hasn’t vanished from the book, but in some ways it’s been pushed away from the centre of what the book is said to mean.

That’s what I mean when I say that October 7 is being translated on Wiesel’s schedule. The language isn’t literally being changed. The meaning is being narrowed before it enters public memory.

We don’t have to wait forty years and learn another language to notice. The translation is already there, printed on the back cover in yellow letters.

V.

There’s an obvious objection to what I’m writing.

The rawest document of October 7 is a 47-minute compilation assembled by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit from Hamas body-camera footage, dash cameras, security cameras, and the phones of people who were being murdered. It hasn’t been publicly released. Instead, it’s shown at invitation-only screenings to legislators, diplomats, journalists, and community leaders.

The editors, Yuval Horowitz and Matan Harel-Fisch, have explained their reasons. One is the dignity of the dead and their families. Another is strategic: publicly releasing the film might attract intense attention for a day or two and then become just another piece of material circulating online. Its restricted existence may preserve more of its force.

They may be right, and they’ve of course thought about the question harder than I have.

The choice before us is therefore not courage against cowardice, or unfiltered truth against squeamish concealment. The rawest artifact we possess is already being curated, deliberately and for serious reasons.

That objection clarifies what I am asking for.

I’m not asking for footage, nor am I asking for maximum horror.

Go back to what was removed from Wiesel’s Yiddish book. It wasn’t gore.

What disappeared was the dedication naming German murderers; the identification of Jews as Jews and Germans as Germans; Ilse Koch named as walking around freely; the accusation that an obligation to respond had gone unmet; and Sighet presented as a real place with a real history rather than a picturesque little town somewhere east.

Names. Attribution. Anger. Specificity.

That’s the list.

Anger is the emotional register. Attribution is the historical claim. Anger may cool with time. Attribution must remain. We can lose the heat without losing who did what to whom, who watched, who failed to arrive and who was left exposed.

The lesson is not to preserve the worst detail. It is to preserve the naming and the assignment of responsibility.

Keep the accusation pointed at people rather than dissolving it into metaphysics, “cycles of violence,” the tragedy of the region, or the human spirit. Night is inevitable. Murder just isn’t.

This is also the form of memory most likely to survive hostile scrutiny. Specific claims involving named actors, places, and events can be tested and defended. They’re evidence. Atrocity detail on its own can’t bear the same weight. Where sensational claims have run ahead of verification, they have handed deniers exactly the lever they wanted.

The answer to abstraction is precision.

VI.

But naming the dead is not enough.

Horn’s central complaint in her recent writing is that the world knows Jews as a people who were murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945, and that this is dehumanizing even when every fact is true. She doesn’t ask for a more graphic Holocaust curriculum. She asks why people care so much about how Jews died and so little about how Jews lived.

By her own logic, an essay demanding that October 7 remain raw forever risks doing to Israelis exactly what has so often been done to Jews: fixing an entire people at the moment of their deaths and calling it remembrance.

That objection is persuasive. Horn’s admiration for Rosenfarb points to one answer: don’t make one person or one lesson stand for everyone. Show many lives, with their names, flaws, habits, and ordinary details. The more particular the people remain, the harder it is to turn their suffering into a tidy story of redemption.

The beginning of an answer to this can also be found in Seidman’s essay.

The Yiddish Holocaust memoirs of the 1950s modelled themselves on the pinkes, the communal register where community events are recorded, and the yizker-bukh, the memorial book. Their governing instinct was to catalogue. Seidman notes a reviewer in Wiesel’s own series praising one memoir for its index of eight hundred actors, writers and poets, not all of them famous. (There’s an interesting new book about this, Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World, by Jane Ziegelman)

Narrative elegance was not the only standard. Comprehensiveness mattered.

Get everybody down.

That’s what the French edition traded away, and I think it’s what must be defended now.

Not the footage, but the register.

The names. The kibbutz. The moshav. The dog. The ordinary Saturday morning. The woman who ran the dining hall. The family argument. The music somebody listened to. Who these people were before any of us had a reason to know their names.

Specificity is what resists being turned into a metaphor.

You can’t make a bumper sticker out of a list.

Lee Yaron understood this, which is why 10/7 is, in my opinion, one of the most important book on my shelf. It’s in many respects a yizker-bukh. It’s doing in English what Yiddish writers were doing immediately after the war. It catalogues rather than distils. It does not ask one life to stand in for everybody else.

So, for that matter, does the Elkabetz house. Nobody appointed Sivan’s parents. No ministry commissioned the project. No committee approved the wording, and no architect calculated where the visitor should be standing to maximize the impact of the place. They preserved one house and allowed people to enter.

That is the pinkes instinct in its purest available form, practiced by a family on a kibbutz otherwise busy rebuilding.

But this is still only half an answer.

A memorial book is, after all, a book about the dead. Cataloguing our murders more carefully, however well we do it, may still leave us known principally for having been murdered. That is the condition Horn objects to.

The register must therefore record not merely how people died, but the worlds in which they lived. A book can begin that work; it can’t complete it. The rest happens in classrooms and around tables, in the stories we tell our children and in the continued life of the places that were attacked.

Get the record right and nothing else, and all we will have built is a very good index of our own dead.

VII.

There is one final pattern.

By my count, I have read about fifteen books about October 7, and they divide, more or less, into two groups. The testimony carries the suffering. The commentary carries the anger. Few carry both.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Lee Yaron, Eli Sharabi and Shahar Horowitz hold grief with enormous dignity. Howard Jacobson, Dave Rich, Brendan O’Neill, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Adam Kirsch hold the fury. But those books are likely to be read mostly by people who already share the anger.

The anger didn’t disappear from October 7 writing.

It was relocated.

With Wiesel, accusation was cut from the book. With October 7, it is often distributed across separate forms: grief in testimony, fury in commentary, resilience on the cover. Each element remains somewhere. What disappears is their coexistence.

The suffering reaches one audience. The anger reaches another. The frame that travels furthest – the blurb or the cover - tells us that endurance is the final meaning of both.

This is the same operation performed by different means. Wiesel had nowhere acceptable to put his rage, so it remained in Yiddish and disappeared from general view for decades. We have somewhere to put ours: a separate shelf, in a separate genre, for a separate audience.

Maybe that’s not an improvement. Maybe it’s only a more sophisticated way of achieving the same result.

What I am advocating for, however, is simple. As the public memory of October 7 is built, grief, anger, responsibility, and survival should be kept in the same account. The record should name the people who were murdered and abducted, the communities that were attacked, Hamas and the other perpetrators (including their gleeful allies abroad) who carried it out and excused their actions, the warnings that were ignored, and the Israeli failures that left people exposed. It should also record who those people were before the attack - their work, their families, their jokes, their habits, their disputes, their ambitions, and their ordinary days. It should leave room for the survivor who feels resilient and the survivor who doesn’t; for courage without pretending that courage cancels devastation; for rebuilding without making rebuilding the answer to every question. The goal isn’t to keep October 7 forever raw or to preserve the maximum amount of horror. It’s to preserve a complete, specific, and morally legible account of what happened, to whom, by whom, what failed, and what was lost.

This can be done through ordinary publishing decisions being made now. A memoir like Sharabi’s need not be sold as a universal parable. Its subtitle could simply describe the record: Hostage: 491 Days in Hamas Captivity. The jacket copy could name Hamas, Kibbutz Be’eri, the murder of his wife and daughters, and his own stated commitment to humanity, without turning the last of those into the meaning of all the others.

A multi-voice book could place each testimony beside a verified timeline, a map, a short biography and, where relevant, an account of the documented military and political failures that shaped the day. An editor could allow anger and judgment to remain inside a survivor’s account rather than moving them to an outside essay, and could commission an afterword on responsibility rather than a foreword that universalizes the event. A book about a kibbutz could include the dead and the abducted, but also the work roster, the children’s drawings, the music, the dogs, the recipes, the private jokes and the arguments. Detail the fact that before October 7, many Gazans worked on those kibbutzim. Some of them passed on intelligence to Hamas, of where the schools were located, how many family members lived in each building, where the ammunition was kept, and turned on their employers on that dark day. Among other reasons, that’s why there are no longer Gazans working in Israel. Publishers can still speak of courage and endurance. They should stop promising redemption though before the reader has opened the book. None of this requires propaganda or a single approved interpretation. It requires refusing to make the record neat before it’s complete.

Wiesel’s Yiddish book ends by asking whether breaking the mirror was worth it. He doesn’t answer. He asked the question in a language almost nobody outside the Yiddish world was going to read, which is - I think - the only reason the accusation survived to be asked at all.

We don’t have that excuse. We’re still close enough to decide what enters the common record and what is sent to a separate shelf. Whatever we permit to be edited out, universalized or separated from the testimony, we’re letting go with our eyes open.

The mirror may break.

The register must remain.

Bibliography

Testimony: Rachel Goldberg-Polin, When We See You Again, on true and irreducible loss. Lee Yaron, 10/7, in my view the most important of these books: raw, blunt and extensive, cataloguing rather than distilling. Eli Sharabi, Hostage, devastating in a particular way because the reader knows what news is waiting for him after his captivity. Shahar Horowitz, Surviving October 7, on what the attack at the Nova festival did to the innocence of the young. October 7: Voices of Survivors and Witnesses, compiled testimony presented with relatively little shaping. Liz Naftali, Saving Abigail, on the extraordinary effort required to bring one child home. Amir Tibon, The Gates of Gaza, an account of Israel’s failures told from inside a safe room.

Failure and war: Yaakov Katz, While Israel Slept, on the disappointment of a country that allowed the attack to happen. Seth Frantzman, The October 7 War, an early account of the attack and the war that followed.

Reception and argument: Howard Jacobson, Howl, satirical and furious about the response to Jewish suffering. Dave Rich, Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism Is Built Into Our World And How You Can Change It, on the reach and adaptability of antisemitism. Brendan O’Neill, After the Pogrom, on the hypocrisies exposed after October 7. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Israel Alone, on Israel’s isolation and the Jewish future. Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism, and Gil Troy, To Resist the Academic Intifada, on the ideas and institutions through which the attack and its aftermath have been interpreted.

On Wiesel, I used Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1, Autumn 1996, reprinted as “Jews of Rage” in Tablet on January 10, 2023. Also essential are Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, her essay “Is Holocaust Education Making Antisemitism Worse?” in the May 2023 issue of The Atlantic, and Wiesel’s preface to the 2006 English translation of Night.

Canada 1993

In the 1993 Canadian Federal election that would see Jean Chrétien trounce incumbent Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Kim Campbell on his way to his first of three majority governments, the PC campaign ran a now famous ad against him:

The ad showed unflattering pictures of Chrétien, who suffers from Bell’s Palsy, with a narrator asking “Is this a Prime Minister?”

The ad backfired spectacularly, and Chrétien, whose personal approval ratings were very low, even while his party was approaching a far-from-certain majority in the polls, capitalized on the outpouring of outrage and sympathy to clinch an unambiguous victory. The ads were quickly pulled, but the damage was done. Nobody likes a bully.

Israel 2026

Fast forward nearly 33 years, and one wonders if Israel last week had a similar political moment.

It would not be unfair to say that Gadi Eisenkot - who has been polling well, and has seemingly been successful in wrestling the opposition crown away from the two-headed Hydra of former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid - was having his first bad week.

His future coalition partners, the democrats, held their primaries, and Eisenkot will have to defend running in a bloc with candidates who encouraged reservist soldiers to refuse to report to reserve duty in protest.

Similarly, he put his foot in his mouth when asked about forming a government with United Arab List chairman Mansour Abbas, and compared Abbas to Christian Arab-Israeli war hero Yoseph Haddad who was wounded fighting Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War.

To win over right-leaning voters with an antipathy to Bibi personally - exactly the voters that the non-Bibi bloc needs in order to form a majority in the Knesset this fall - Eisenkot must convince them that electing him, the former IDF Chief of Staff, means they can have the tough-on-Iran, tough-on-terror, and strong foreign policy that have been hallmarks of the Bibi era, without Bibi himself, and without the Haredim and/or Ben Gvir.

The Bibi bloc, on the other hand, will try to convince voters that Mansour Abbas (not to be confused with Palestinian Authority President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas) cannot form government without handing the keys to the kingdom to an assortment of Islamists and radical leftists that the average centrist voter would consider completely unpalatable.

The Ad

Enter this week’s AI-generated attack ad from Bibi Netanyahu:

It shows Gadi Eisenkot running through a pastoral field, towards a young man in a tshirt with “Unity of Israel” written on it. The two are seemingly on their way to embrace one another, when Eisenkot runs past the dejected-looking young man and embraces Mansour Abbas instead.

The voiceover then reads “Eizenkot has no government without Yair Golan and the Arab parties.”

To the casual observer, it’s a pretty parve and on-message attack ad, but some Israeli viewers saw something far more sinister. To many observers, the AI-generated voter running through the field bore a striking resemblance to Gadi Eisenkot’s son Gal z”l, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023.

While Netanyahu aides were quick to dismiss the claims of any resemblance, one even reposting the ad with a female voter:

This was done to - in his words - “remove any doubt” as to the intention of the ad. Nevertheless, detractors were successful in seizing the narrative and making the ad a national story.

Viewers can decide for themselves if the resemblance is there, and whether or not it was intentional, but the ad clearly backfired in that it refocused attention away from Gadi’s coalition dilemmas and towards the fact that he is the bereaved father of a war hero who fell protecting Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7th (notably, the day after Eisenkot’s son died, his nephew, Sgt. Maor Cohen Eisenkot, also fell fighting in Gaza).

Just as the Chrétien ad - intended to call into question whether or not the candidate was Prime Minister material - instead created a wellspring of sympathy for its theretofore unpopular target, so has Bibi’s ad resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for Eisenkot.

The Likud campaign is determined to disqualify the opposition based on its most radical elements. Every misstep that instead focuses attention on Eisenkot’s record as an accomplished military figure, or as a bereaved father, is an own-goal that the incumbent Prime Minister cannot afford.

Let the games begin.

I had spent a week with educators, travelling through a country that has recently been at war, that has more reason than almost anywhere on earth to feel under siege. And what I kept noticing was how little the people I met seemed to be bracing. They were tired, and of course many were grieving. Many seemed to have family in active service, in Lebanon, Gaza, or elsewhere. Nobody was pretending things were fine. But there was a steadiness to them, a kind of forward lean, that I don’t always feel at home.

Then I landed back in Toronto, opened my phone, read a single op-ed in a single newspaper, and felt my stomach drop.

That gap has been bothering me. An Israeli in Ashkelon hears a siren and goes to the stairwell. A Jew in Toronto reads a column and starts thinking about renewing her passport. By any honest measure the person in the stairwell is in more danger. So why does the column land harder?

I think I found part of the answer in the work of a running coach.

Steve Magness

Steve Magness is an American coach and writer, the author of Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game. He spends most of his time on athletes and performance, but the idea at the centre of his work isn’t really about sports at all.

It comes out of a body of research in psychology going back to the 1990s, associated with a researcher named Jim Blascovich, sometimes called the biopsychosocial model of stress. Let’s see if I can explain this clearly:

When you encounter something difficult, your brain runs a quick calculation, mostly below the level of conscious thought. It asks two questions: How hard is this? And what do I have to meet it with?

If the answers come back that your resources are roughly equal to the demand, your body enters what researchers call a challenge state. If the answer comes back that the demand is bigger than anything you have, you enter a threat state.

Both states feel like stress. In both, your heart rate climbs, your palms go damp, your attention sharpens. You can’t tell them apart from the inside just by how activated you feel. The difference is in what your body then does with that activation.

In a challenge state, your blood vessels open, your heart pumps more blood with each beat, and you get more fuel delivered to the places that need it. Your attention stays wide, you notice things, you keep thinking flexibly, and you move toward the problem.

In a threat state, your blood vessels constrict. Stress hormones like cortisol take over. Your attention narrows and turns inward, toward yourself and how badly this is going. You stop taking in new information, and you protect rather than engage.

Same stress. Opposite response. The difference? A quick calculation about available resources.

Magness is clear about what he thinks does not work here: You can’t usually talk yourself across the line. Standing in front of a mirror telling yourself that fear is really just excitement might get you through a mildly awkward meeting. It falls apart under real pressure, because the calculation your brain is running isn’t fooled by shouting slogans at yourself in the mirror. It wants to know what you actually have available to use.

So the way to move the ratio is to change one of the two numbers. Lower the demand, or raise the resources. Magness identifies a handful of things that genuinely count as resources: preparation/practice, previous experience with hard things, social support, and above all a sense of agency, the belief that what you do affects how this turns out.

And in Win the Inside Game he adds one more, which is what led me to want to write this essay: when your identity narrows down to one thing, everything becomes a threat. If you are only a runner, then every race is a referendum on whether you deserve to exist. Losing the race means losing yourself, and the calculation can never come out any other way. The athletes who hold up best are the ones who are also something else. Not because they care less but because they have more to stand on.

What this explains about us

Now, let’s apply that framework to the puzzle I came home from Israel with.

Israel

The obvious explanation for the gap between Israel and here is that Israelis are simply braver, or tougher, or more used to it. They live in a rough neighbourhood, geopolitically, after all. But I don’t believe that, and I don’t think it’s a useful thing to tell anyone.

The Magness framework offers a better answer. It’s not that Israelis face a smaller demand. Their demand is enormous and it’s physical and real. However, it’s that they have an overwhelming pile of resources on the other side of the ledger.

Think about what an Israeli has when something happens. A country. An army. A vote in a system that governs the outcome. A language. A flag that belongs to them and not to a debate. A job to do, whether that is reserve duty or driving supplies south or hosting an evacuated family. When the news breaks, there is something to do and someone to do it, and that someone is you.

That is a challenge state. Not because the threat is small, but because the resources are large.

Canada

Now think about what a Jew in Canada has when something happens. A motion passes at a union local. A professor assigns a reading. A city councillor says something at a rally. A swastika spraypainted on one’s business. The demand is, in physical terms, much lower. But ask the second question: what do I have to meet this with?

We are 1% of the population. Most of us can’t name the process by which that motion passed, let alone reverse it. Our institutions frequently ask us to stay calm and let the professionals handle it, which is sometimes wise and always, at the level of the nervous system, a message that says you have nothing to contribute here. Agency, the single biggest lever in the entire model, is the resource we’re shortest on.

So the calculation comes back the way it comes back. Demand exceeds resources. Threat. Vessels constrict, attention narrows, we turn inward, we scan for exits. We start checking whether our grandmother’s birth certificate is enough for an EU passport.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying the threat here is imaginary. Some of it is entirely real, and people have been hurt, and some institutions have failed us, and a person who tells you it’s all in your head isn’t being helpful or honest. The claim isn’t that the demand is small. The claim is that maybe we’ve been trying to solve this problem entirely on the demand side, by cataloguing how bad it is, when the side that actually moves is the other one.

The identity trap

There is a second thing going on too.

Since October 7, a great deal of Diaspora Jewish identity has narrowed to a single strand: defending Israel and tracking antisemitism. For many people that is now what being Jewish primarily consists of, in terms of hours spent and emotional weight carried. Is there anything else you discuss at your shabbat dinners with such frequency?

Go back to Magness on the runner who is only a runner. When identity collapses to one thing, every event involving that thing becomes existential, because there’s nothing else holding you up. I think that’s unfortunately, exactly where we are. Every news cycle becomes a referendum on whether we get to keep existing here. Not because any single news cycle is that important, but because we’ve arranged our inner lives so that it has to be.

This is why a bad column can wreck a week. It’s not the column. It’s that the column is landing on the only strand we feel we have left.

The way out, then, is not to care less, but to be more. Text, practice, community, food, argument, music, obligation, joy. Not as a distraction from the fight, and not as a nicer alternative to it. As the thing that makes the fight survivable, and that turns it from a threat you can only endure into a challenge you can truly meet.

A Jew who has a Shabbat table, a chevruta (study collective), a choir, a reason to be Jewish that exists whether or not anyone is attacking, walks into the fight with resources. A Jew whose entire Jewish life is the fight walks in with nothing but the fight.

And ya there’s an obvious irony to this: the narrowing happened because we were under attack, and it felt like the responsible thing to do. Drop everything else, all hands on deck! But the narrowing is what turned an attack we could have met into a threat that unmoors us. We defended ourselves into a weaker position.

Why this matters most for young people

Here’s where I think the stakes are highest.

Threat framing has one useful property: It mobilizes people who are already committed, quickly. That’s why we reach for it. Tell someone who already cares that the house is on fire and they will run.

But threat framing doesn’t offer a role, it only offers an alarm. And when you give a 19 year old alarm with no role, you get one of two responses, and we have all seen both in the last few years. Some of them freeze and disengage, because a demand with no available action is unbearable and the only escape is to stop caring. The others roll their eyes, because they have heard the house is on fire every. year. of. their. conscious. life. and the house is still standing, and after a while the alarm just sounds like background noise.

Challenge framing offers something else. It offers a task. Here is a hard thing, here is what you would need to meet it, here is how you get that, here is your part. And kids love rising to a challenge.

Magness makes a related argument about how we train toughness, and I think it lands squarely on our communal messaging. The old model of toughness manufactured threat on purpose. Fear, humiliation, unpredictability, the belief that if you scared people enough they would come out harder. What it actually produces is compliance in the room and collapse under real pressure, because nobody built any resources, they just learned to perform.

I unfortunately think that we’ve done a version of this. We’ve built a great deal of communal communication on fear and catastrophe, and suddenly wonder why young people either burn out or drift off. They can smell it. They can tell when they’re being handled rather than equipped.

What to actually do

The obvious prescription falls out of the model. Four resources, four moves.

1. Build agency. This is the big one and it’s also the most concrete. Find the level where a person can actually affect something and put them there. School boards. Riding associations. Union locals. Student government. Campus paper. Not because any one of these is decisive, but because the difference between a person who has changed one outcome and a person who has never changed anything is the difference between a challenge state and a threat state. Agency isn’t a feeling but a track record.

2. Build competence. Nobody feels resourced arguing a case they can’t make. A lot of what reads as fear in young Jews is simply not knowing the history well enough to speak without dread. Teach the material. Teach the hard parts, including the parts where our side has something to answer for, because a person who has only heard the polished version knows deep down they’re carrying something brittle and it makes them scared to be tested. Preparation is a resource in the literal, measurable sense.

3. Build the social layer. Magness lists social support as a resource because it is one. Nobody should be doing this alone in a seminar room. The person who knows that eleven other people have their back after the meeting is running a completely different calculation than the person who doesn’t.

4. Widen the identity. Give young Jews a Jewish life that’s bigger than the conflict, and teach them that Israel isn’t just an argument to be won. This is the most important one, and it’s also the vaguest sounding, so let me be concrete about what it means in practice.

It means a kid who can lead something. Not attend something, lead it. Kiddush, a chunk of the seder, a shiur for younger kids. It means one text they have gone deep enough into that they own it and could teach it. It means a table they are expected at every week, which is a different thing from an event they are invited to. It means a Jewish skill that has nothing to do with the argument, whether that is cooking, singing, reading, or building. It means a relationship with Israel that includes food and music and cousins and landscape and not only headlines and history and grievance.

Every one of those is a leg. A person standing on six legs responds differently to a bad week than a person standing on one. Not because they care less about the one. Because the one is no longer carrying the whole weight of who they are. I wrote about this several weeks ago here.

Our current urgency makes this the hardest sell, because everything on that list feels like a luxury when the alarm is going. It isn’t a luxury though, as its a load bearing.

None of this makes the demand smaller. It just changes what we bring to it.

The Israelis I met recently aren’t calm because nothing is happening to them. They’re calm because they have somewhere to put their hands.

We can build that here. It’s slower, and it looks less like a rally and more like a decade of hard work at the level of the school board and the Shabbat table. But it’s eminently buildable, and it is the only thing I can think of now that turns dread into something a person can actually carry.

I’ve also started posting my pieces on Spotify for those who prefer to listen. You can access this one on Spotify here where I speak in my most presidential voice.

The eve of Tisha b’Av, 8 Av 5786 · 22 July 2026

My brothers and sisters. Citizens of Israel.

Eighty years ago tonight, in this city, a wing of the King David Hotel came down in fire and dust. Ninety one people were killed. They were British and Arab and Jewish. The explosives had been carried in milk churns and set beneath the offices of the Mandate. And when the smoke cleared, something more than a building had fallen.

I do not stand here to relitigate that day. Others have argued for eighty years about the warnings that were or were not given, about who bore the guilt and who bore the grief. I leave that to the historians. I want to speak about the wound underneath it, because the King David was never really a story about the British. It was a story about us. In those years we were a people learning, painfully, whether we could act as one. There had been the season we do not like to name, when Jews handed other Jews to the authorities, brother informing on brother. There would come, two years later, the guns of the Altalena, fired by Jews at Jews within sight of these shores. On the night of the King David, a resistance that had briefly stood together came apart, each faction certain it alone held the future in its hands.

We are marking this on the eve of Tisha b’Av. That was not my choosing. It was the calendar’s. And I have come to believe the calendar is trying to tell us something tonight, if we are willing to sit still long enough to hear it.

Baseless Hatred

Tomorrow we sit on the floor and read Lamentations. We mourn two houses of stone. And our sages, when they asked why the second of those houses fell, gave an answer we should read very slowly this year.

They said the second house did not fall for idolatry. The people of that generation studied Torah day and night. They kept the commandments. They gave charity to the poor. By every visible measure they were devout. And still the house fell. The reason our sages gave was one thing only. Sinat chinam. Baseless hatred, one Jew for another. And they said something that should stop the breath in our chests: that on the scale of heaven, baseless hatred weighs as much as idolatry and bloodshed and every forbidden thing, all of them together.

Hold that in your hand for a moment. A generation that kept every law, and hated the brother standing beside it, lost everything. Their piety did not save them. Their learning did not save them. Nothing saves a house that has gone to war with itself.

For two thousand years since then we have prayed for a third house. And I want to say something tonight that some of you will hear as close to heresy, and I ask you to stay with me to the end.

I do not believe the third house is waiting to be built. I believe we are standing inside it.

I do not speak of stones on the mountain. I do not speak of what some would raise on the Temple Mount, and God keep us from lighting that fire. I speak of the house we already live in. The sovereign home of the Jewish people, restored after two thousand years of exile, gathered out of the ash of Europe and the courtyards of Baghdad and the villages of the Atlas mountains and those new Olim from the Western world. The prayer we say in every synagogue on every Shabbat calls this state reishit tzmichat geulateinu, the first flowering of our redemption. Words, as it happens, that my own grandfather’s hand helped to set down, in the year the state was born.

The third house is not made of cedar and gold. It is made of us. Nine million of us. It is made of the Jew in Kiryat Shmona and the Jew in Beersheba, of the citizen who prays three times a day and the citizen who has never prayed at all, of the soldier and the scholar and the farmer and the nurse. That is the sanctuary. And here is the thing I need you to understand tonight, the reason the calendar has brought us to this eve: a house made of living people is destroyed in exactly the same way a house of stone was destroyed. Not by Rome. Not by Babylon. Not by any army that has ever massed at our borders. It is destroyed from the inside, by baseless hatred, with a book of law lying open on the table.

Still Fighting

We are approaching three years since the morning of the seventh of October. You carry it. You carry the names and the faces from the posters that hung on every wall until the wind took them down.

And now, thank God, the hostages are home. The last of them are home. That is a mercy we begged for through a thousand nights, and we should never once speak of it lightly.

But I will not stand in this hall and tell you the war is over, because it is not over, and every one of you knows it is not. Even now, even as I speak these words in the warmth and safety of this room, there are young men and women of ours standing watch in the hills of southern Lebanon. There are soldiers on the Syrian line tonight, in the cold and the dark, straining to hear what moves on the other side of the wire. There are our sons in the ruins of Gaza at this hour, and somewhere in this country a family is sitting by a phone that has not rung, and does not yet know that the knock is coming. The war did not end when the cameras went home. It never does. So before I say anything else tonight, let me say this. To every soldier out there in the black, and to every mother and father and wife and husband and child waiting for a door to open: this house has not forgotten you. This house does not go on without you. You are the reason there is a house at all.

And it is because of you, because you are still out there, that I have to speak carefully about the temptation I feel in this country tonight.

There is a phrase I have heard in the markets and from my own family, said with love and with exhaustion. The show must go on. And I honour it. It is the oldest Jewish instinct there is, this stubborn insistence on life. We bury more than any people should, and still we plant, still we marry, still we send the children to school in the morning.

But a temple is not maintained by forgetting. A house is not made holy by looking away from the cracks in its walls. And we cannot close our reckoning while the war itself is still open, while our children are still standing in the dark on our behalf. We are the majority in our own land, and that is a gift no generation of Jews before us was able to hold. It means we get to decide when the show goes on. It means we set the tone. But the temptation of a people desperate to believe the bleeding has stopped is to move on before it has reckoned. To mistake a lull for the healing. To let the show go on so loudly that we can no longer hear the questions the seventh of October asked of the third house, and that we have not yet answered.

Who did we become in the hours when the state did not come? Who held the line, and who was held? Those are not questions for a commission alone. They are questions for the sanctuary. And a sanctuary cannot be sent back to work.

On Our Streets

Now let me speak plainly about the hatred that is loose in the streets of this house, because I am too old and this hour is too serious for anything else.

When we crossed the Jordan into this land, the tribes who wished to remain behind with their flocks were given one condition. They were required to arm themselves and cross over at the head of their brothers, and only when the land was secure could they return home. Chalutzim ta’avru. You shall cross over as pioneers, before your brothers. A share in the land was a share in its defence. There is no verse that says otherwise. There is no sage who taught otherwise.

For three years, our sons have gone to the border again and again and again, and as I speak to you they are still there, in Lebanon and on the Syrian line and in Gaza, standing in the dark on this very night. They have left their studies unfinished and their children growing up in photographs from the field. Some did not come home. Some will not come home from where they are tonight. And in those same three years, and at this very hour, while other men’s children keep the watch, we have watched factions who wrap themselves in the mantle of Torah block the highways, burn the tires, and raise their hands against soldiers and against police, declaring that the covenant of shared fate does not apply to them.

Let me be careful, because careful is what this moment demands. I do not speak against the ultra-Orthodox community. I do not speak against a single hour of Torah study, which I hold sacred, which is part of the breath of this people. Among the haredim are hundreds of thousands of good and gentle citizens, many of them as troubled by the violence as you are. I speak against the disorder. I speak against the men who set this country alight and call it faith.

And I speak to them through the calendar. The generation of the second house also studied Torah. Their study did not save the sanctuary, because they had learned to despise the brother beside them. So hear me clearly. To break the highways of this country in the name of heaven, to teach that the blood of one mother’s son is owed to the nation and the blood of another’s is not, is not to defend the third house. It is to burn it. Exactly as the second was burned. From the inside. With a book of law open in your hands. That is the sin our sages warned us weighs against all the others together, and a state that permits it in the name of mercy is not being merciful. It is handing torches to the very fire we will mourn tomorrow night.

Time for Fresh Faces

And so I come to the hardest thing I have to say, and it concerns those who lead this country, myself among them.

Look at us. Look at the faces on our stages and in our cabinet, and yes, in this office. We are old. We were raised on the wars of the last century, and we have tended this house as if we alone knew how. But it was not our generation that ran toward the gunfire on the seventh of October. It was the young. It was the boys and girls of the party in the desert who carried the wounded across open ground. It was the reservists who rose before any order came. A generation we had dismissed as soft, as lost to their screens, and when the hour came they were made of iron.

They earned this house that morning, and again in every month that followed. And we have thanked them with medals and speeches and everything except the one thing they have actually earned, which is a share of the power to decide what this house will be. So I say to the young men and women of Israel, and I mean more than sentiment: your country needs you not only in the reserves. It needs you in the Knesset, in the parties, in the unglamorous rooms where the real decisions are made and where, for too long, the same grey faces have refused to leave. Power is not given. It is taken up. Take it up. And to those of my own generation who have held their seats for thirty years, who have come to believe the state cannot survive their departure, I say only that the greatest of the founders knew when to hand the scroll to the next hand. Ben-Gurion went to the desert. A man can serve this country by leaving the stage.

Decide

In the months ahead you will be asked to decide. There will be an election, and there may be more than an election. There may be a referendum on the very frame of this house, on the compact that binds the citizen to the state and the state to the citizen. I will not tell you how to vote. It is not the place of this office.

But I will tell you what is on the ballot beneath the parties and the slogans. What is on the ballot is whether the third house stands or falls. Whether we remain a collection of tribes sharing a strip of land and a grievance, or become at last a people sharing a fate. That question has been open since the night of the King David Hotel. We have never quite answered it. In the season ahead we have the chance to answer it, and we should not waste that chance on the small quarrels that fill our screens.

Our Ideal

Let me close with the thing I most need you to carry out of this hall.

For a hundred years we told ourselves a story about Israel as an ideal. The light unto the nations. The startup nation. The land of milk and honey and fibre optics. And it is all true, and I am proud of every word of it. But an ideal does not bleed, and this house bleeds. An ideal does not stand in traffic on the way to a shiva. An ideal does not fight with its own children over who will carry the weight. The third house is not a gleaming thing on a hill. It is this one. The tired one. The one that argues in the checkout line and weeps at the airport and cannot agree on anything and would die for every one of its members without pausing to ask their politics. That is the sanctuary. That is the one whose soul we are trying to find. And you do not consecrate a house by loving the blueprint. You consecrate it by loving the walls you actually have.

Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of this land, in whose seat my grandfather would later sit, left us one teaching for a night such as this. If the house was destroyed by baseless hatred, he said, then it will be rebuilt by baseless love. Ahavat chinam. Love that asks for no reason and demands no reward. Love for the brother who votes against you and prays differently than you and infuriates you in every possible way, offered not because he has earned it but because he is yours and you are his and the roof over both your heads is the same roof.

The third house is not finished. It may be that a house made of living people is never finished, that this is the most Jewish thing about it. It has no roof yet. It stands open to the sky. And it is not built of stone. It is built of ahavat chinam, slowly, by us, or it is not built at all.

Eighty years ago we let the future be written by the few, and we paid for it in fire. Tomorrow we mourn two houses that fell because we could not hold them together. The night after, we rise, as we always rise, and we light the lamps.

The third house is still open to the sky, my brothers and sisters. Let us go and build the roof together.

Kol HaKavod La’Tsahal, Am Israel Chai.

Last week I landed telling myself I’d win a colour back. Last year I wrote this country in the colours of grief, orange and yellow and a field of red, and I wanted to know whether a living place still owned the rest of the spectrum, or whether we’d quietly handed it all over to mourning. I now have my answer.

Gold

Gold was the first night, in Jerusalem, at a table where Yaron and Jacqui Vital told us about the daughter that October 7 took from them. The day before, a young Hasidic man in Hezekiah’s tunnel taught me that this land is called Eretz HaTzvi because, like a deer's hide, it stretches to make room for everyone who comes home. Hold the difficulty and the joy at once, Gil Troy had told us our first morning, and by nightfall the country had proven him right. Gold is not the absence of grief, but the precious thing grief can’t put out.

Green

Green was Har Herzl, where families press living things into the soil over their fallen sons and stake the green tree of Golani above boys who were nineteen. It was to the market that same afternoon, loud and impossibly alive, because we bury our children on a green hill in the morning and somehow argue over green olives by lunch and don’t necessarily experience it as a contradiction. We experience it as Tuesday. It’s the thing we’ve always called resilience, which I finally understood to mean holding all of it at once and refusing to let any of it fold you.

Red

Red was the hardest day, the whole country bending south toward the wound, and it’s something neither Israel nor the Diaspora has yet recovered from. But even there it refused to stay simple. Sderot isn’t a sad city, it’s 40,000 people who cook and build and grow on the very periphery of the map. A woman whose husband was killed at his Sderot police station told us the lesson she carries is that we must all, simply, be good people. And in Kfar Azza, next to the Elkabets home left exactly as that morning left it, there were cranes and scaffolding, because these people have decided the blood is not the end of the sentence. Life comes back up through the red.

Blue

Blue was the sea and the sky and the flag, and then it was Keith Siegel, who spent 484 days underground without seeing any of it, and who survived by building a community in his head and speaking to them one by one, which may be the most Jewish thing I’ve ever heard. His wife Aviva gave us this: “The terrorists spend their days deciding who to hate. We get to decide who to love.” Blue turned out to mean the sky, and the distance between the people who stand under it without a thought and the people who were buried beneath a city, waiting to be allowed to look up.

White

White was yesterday, the White City - Tel Aviv - raised out of bare dunes, a secular crowd at the port singing the Shabbat in as a bride, a museum that has finally stopped telling the Jewish story as a long funeral. And it was a table again, a white one this time, where I was privileged to give a dvar Torah to a group of brave and curious and phenomenal Canadian educators that didn’t take long to write because the week had written it for me. Today we read the parsha that lists all forty-two places the Israelites camped on the way to the land, and Rashi says the stops are the story, that you don’t get somewhere in a single leap but always in stages, and that each stage counts.

And in the same portion, two tribes ask to live on the far side of the river, and are never condemned for it, and are asked for one thing in return: that living far away never harden into checking out, that when it matters, they cross back and show up for their people and their cause. That’s what I am taking home.

Most of Jewish history has happened on the other side of the river - in fact, I’m heading there right now. You’re allowed to live there. You just aren’t allowed to forget which way the bridge runs.

And so

They’re about to call my flight. I can’t fit the gold or the green or the red or the blue into my suitcase packed with sweaty clothes, too many books, gifts for my kids, and more Tel Aviv sand than intended, and I’ve stopped trying. What I can carry is the white blank page, and a promise to keep filling it, and to keep crossing back, and to bring my family next time.

And now, for a week spent hugging my wife and kids, getting my inbox back down to zero, and taking a week off from writing.

Thanks for coming along.

ANU Museum

We spent the morning at ANU, the Museum of the Jewish People, and there is no room on this whole journey that lands closer to the centre of so much that I have focused on the last few years. I’ve spent the last few years writing about the Diaspora, about whether we’re the rough draft and Israel the fair copy, or whether it’s always been one long argument carried on across an ocean. ANU doesn’t settle the argument, but honours it.

The tour was beautiful, the history laid out clean and whole, three thousand years of it told not as a list of disasters survived but as a civilization: its books, its arguments, its music, its endless wandering, its stubborn genius for staying itself in a hundred different costumes. It puts the shtetl and the Lower East Side and the Cape Town shul in the same building as the kibbutz, and doesn’t rank them.

Our guide told us something I’ve been thinking over the last few hours. This place used to be called Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Diaspora, and at its heart, hanging down through the middle of the building, was a Holocaust memorial. The whole museum, he told me, effectively revolved around it. That was the Diaspora as Israel once understood it: the place Jews went to die, the long dark waiting room before the state, a story whose real subject was catastrophe. Then they rebuilt it as ANU, the Museum of the Jewish People, and the Holocaust is now a single modest room among many. He clarified the shift thus: Israel no longer sees the Diaspora as a graveyard. Not a prologue to disaster, not a cautionary tale, but a living, creating, arguing branch of the same people, worthy of a museum that is mostly about how we have lived rather than how we died. For a Diaspora Jew who has spent a long time insisting that we aren’t merely the sad part of the story, standing in that reimagined building felt a great deal like being seen.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh

And then Michal Cotler-Wunsh, and of course I don’t have the words for how impressive she was. She had been appointed Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism three weeks before October 7, which is something like being named chief of the FDNY a week before 9/11. She spoke for an hour without notes and without a wasted sentence, the way people speak when they have thought about a thing so long that it’s become part of how they breathe, and I sat there taking notes like a first-year student.

Her master frame is essentially this: antisemitism is a virus that survives by mutating, by latching onto whatever a society holds most sacred. When the sacred thing was religion, the Jew was the Christ-killer and the poisoner of wells. When it was race, the Jew was the contamination to be purified away. And the sacred thing of our own age is human rights and international law, so that is the costume the hatred now wears, fluent and credentialed, speaking the grammar of justice, which is exactly why antizionism has become the one respectable, even fashionable, strain of the oldest hatred alive. Once she said it, her most chilling line stopped sounding paranoid and started sounding obvious. She knew, she told us, on October 8, before Israel had fired a single shot, that a tsunami of antisemitism was coming in response to the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. We all knew it too. But that sentence shouldn’t make sense. A hatred that erupts in answer to the murder of Jews, before there is any war to protest, was never about anything Israel did. Their timing was their confession.

For the proof she reached back fifty years, to 1975, when the UN declared Zionism a form of racism and the American ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan rose to warn that a great evil had been loosed upon the world. That was the opening shot, she said: brand the Jewish national movement as racism inside the world’s highest chamber and you license the hatred everywhere, and the Jewish state stands convicted in advance of every conflict that follows. Thus, the collapse of morality is not October 7 itself; we know what genocidal terrorists are and do. The collapse is in the response to it, which is something that we all know, but that bears repeating nonetheless. The silence, a #MeToo that went mute the instant the raped women were Jewish. The denial, which began while the killers were still livestreaming their own pride at killing Jews. The justification, tenured professors calling the mass rape a form of resistance. And at the end, the open season on any Jew, or anyone who won’t disavow the Jewish state. She wasn’t describing a problem for Jews but rather a civilization whose moral language failed at the precise point where the victims were us, and in failing there, showed the exception it had been carrying the whole time.

And then she reached into the walls around us. The Holocaust itself, she argued, has been hijacked, conscripted as a weapon against the Jewish state, so that a child can tour a Holocaust museum and walk out having somehow concluded that a people who survived that must be uniquely monstrous to, in the slander she was naming, be perpetrating it now. A museum that shows only what happened, and never teaches how it happens, the machinery of demonization that makes any of it possible, doesn’t protect against the next catastrophe, but can rather feed it. And then I thought of our guide a few hours earlier, and the Holocaust memorial that once hung down through the centre of this building, and the decision to take the Jewish story back from catastrophe and tell it whole. She and the museum were making the same argument: that remembering how we died is not enough, that a people has the right to be about how it lives.

There was also a circle in her lecture that she couldn’t have planned. The definitive book on that Moynihan speech is Moynihan’s Moment, written by none other than Gil Troy, the historian who set our table on the very first morning of this trip. The man who opened the week four days ago had, years ago, written the book on the warning that explained its end. And she closed, on purpose, on hope, which she was careful to separate from optimism the way Rabbi Sacks did: optimism is the belief that things will turn out fine, and asks nothing of you, while hope is the belief that together we can make them fine, and asks everything. She reminded us that the country we were sitting in had named its anthem Hatikvah, the hope.

Florentine

The heaviness of the morning wanted somewhere to go, and the afternoon obliged. We ate in Florentine, a scruffy, bohemian corner of the city where the walls are all graffiti and the food is far better than the walls let on, at a place called Florentina. Salad and pasta and fish and pastries and coffee. Each plate better than the last.

Then we walked to the foot of Rothschild Boulevard, where our guide told us how Tel Aviv began, a little over a century ago, on nothing, on bare dunes north of Jaffa, a city conjured out of empty sand by people who decided that a modern Hebrew city should simply exist, and then made it exist. 1909 Tel Aviv was founded, named after Herzl’s Altneuland (Old New Land). I finally saw where the day’s colour had been hiding: Tel Aviv is the White City. They call it that for the pale Bauhaus buildings that went up here in the thirties, thousands of them, clean white lines raised on the sand by architects fleeing a Europe that was turning on them, so that the one white thing the refugees still owned, a blank modern surface, became an entire metropolis. We finished the afternoon in the Carmel Market, loud and jammed with the pre-Shabbat rush, the whole city buying flowers and challah against the clock and leaning, all together, toward sundown.

Tel Aviv Port

And then the hour I will remember longest. We walked to the old Tel Aviv port, where a Kabbalat Shabbat had gathered, a secular one, no synagogue and no rabbi, just a band and a crowd and the sea. They sang the Sabbath in, the old liturgical melodies threaded through Israeli folk songs, hundreds of people who may never set foot in a shul singing Lecha Dodi and meaning every word, welcoming Shabbat the way this city welcomes everything, in the open air, out loud, facing the Mediterranean Sea.

Kabbalat Shabbat is, underneath, a wedding: we rise and turn and sing to greet the Sabbath as a bride, and the tradition dresses her in white. I sat there with the Mediterranean going silver in front of me and a whole secular city singing a bride toward the shore, and I could not have told you where the religion ended and the Israeliness began, which I suspect, was the entire point. Israeli Judaism is a curious creature. It was, however, with no exaggeration, one of the most beautiful hours of my life.

Shabbat Dinner

We ended at the hotel, at Shabbat dinner with the group, around a single enormous table laid on purpose so that all of us could see one another and talk, a white cloth running the length of it. One of the non-Jewish educators spoke about how grateful she was that she finally got to “meet” Israel. Another spoke of how valuable the notion of allyship is, and why our community often craves it, because we can’t always do this alone, and we are grateful when someone says the courage to say something we’re always looking for others to say. Another reiterated a message we heard throughout the week, that history is someone else’s story, and that memory is your story, and how in Israel, culture is not about just observing, because the culture is alive and breathing everywhere around you, at all times. It was riveting and meaningful.

Some of the group spoke about the week, and sitting there I realized it had quietly closed a circle opened on Monday night. I began this trip at a table in Jerusalem, set in gold, where two grieving parents handed us their daughter’s story – that of Adi Kaploun Vital. I am ending it at a table in Tel Aviv, laid in white, where a room of near-strangers who have now seen the same unbearable and beautiful things try to say aloud what any of it meant. The whole week, it turns out, happened between two tables.

I gave a brief d’var Torah while we ate. It turned out that the week had actually written it for me. This Shabbat we read Matot-Masei, the double portion that closes the Book of Numbers, the one at whose end the whole congregation stands and says chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek, be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen

one another, the way we do at the finish of every book. Masei means journeys, and the portion does something tedious: it lists all forty-two places the Israelites camped in the desert, every stop between Egypt and the edge of the land, the good ones and the dull ones and the ones where everything went wrong. Rashi asks why bother, and answers that the stops are the story. You don’t reach the land in one leap. You get there in stages, and every stage counts, even the detours, even the hard ones. This past week, we made our own list of stops. Jerusalem. The Gaza Envelope. Caesarea. Haifa. Zichron Yaakov. Tel Aviv. Some of it beautiful, some of it almost unbearable. The Torah’s point is that all of it counts.

But it was the other half I thought was more important for a room of Diaspora educators. Before entering Canaan, two of the tribes, Reuven and Gad, come to Moshe and ask to settle on the near side of the Jordan, outside the land, where the grazing is good. Moshe is furious: your brothers will cross and fight while you sit here? And they answer with a promise: we’ll cross the river with everyone. We’ll fight at the front, beside our brothers. And only when it’s finished will we come back across to our homes. Moshe agrees, the deal holds, and here’s the key: the Torah never once condemns them for choosing to live on the far side of the river. It asks them for only one thing: that living far away never curdle into checking out, that when it matters, they show up and they cross over. That is us, I said. Most of Jewish history has happened across the river, and you are allowed to live there. But you must keep crossing back, again and again, and you have to bring your students with you. We need allies, we need those to fight with us, and then you can cross back and go your own way after the battle is over.

I said all that to the table, but I was also saying it to myself, because crossing back is the hard part. In a day I fly home to three children growing up Jewish in a city that has grown harder to be Jewish in, to a Diaspora that needs this place and is, in its quieter corners, a little tired of being told that it does. The job is to keep crossing the river, again and again, always fighting the necessary battles.

You can’t bring it back. Not the gold of the first evening, not the green hill, not the red the flowers should have been, not the blue that swallowed Herod’s harbour. None of it fits in a carry-on. The white you can bring, because white is the unwritten page, and that one is mine to fill when I land back home. That’s either faith or stubbornness. I’ll take either.

Here’s the Catch

Last year I gave this country the colours of grief. This week I came to win the spectrum back, and I did: gold, green, red, blue, and now white, which was hiding in plain sight the whole time. Tel Aviv is the White City, raised on bare dunes by refugees who had nothing white left but a clean modern surface and built a metropolis from it. At the port a secular crowd sang the Sabbath in as a bride in white, facing the sea. And the week that opened at a gold table in Jerusalem, where two grieving parents gave us their daughter, closed at a white table in Tel Aviv, where a room of us tried to say what it meant. ANU showed me a people deciding it is more than the sum of its catastrophes. Cotler-Wunsh named the collapse of morality, and ended, on purpose, on hope. This week’s Torah portion asked the two tribes who settled across the river to keep crossing back; the educator is not the destination, only the road. You can’t pack the gold or the green or the red or the blue. You can pack the white, the empty page, and on Sunday you’ll stand in front of people who weren’t there and begin to fill it. The week doesn’t end. It just gets handed to someone else.

Now, watch this video of the Kabbalat Shabbat service at the Tel Aviv Port:

We began in Tel Aviv, on the beach, with the Mediterranean running that impossible blue all the way to the edge of the world. Yesterday we were standing in the Nova field. This morning I was standing at the sea, and the distance between those two places, an hour or so up the coast, is the thing this whole country somehow holds.

Caesarea

We drove up that coast to Caesarea, where Herod built a city to flatter Rome and the blue Mediterranean has been quietly taking it back ever since. We toured the amphitheatre and the hippodrome ruins, the harbour stones, and saw the aqueducts from afar. There, perhaps more than elsewhere in the country, you feel the whole weight of what Rome was, the empire that ruled this coast when it was called Judea and later renamed it Syria Palestina, trying to erase us from the map once it found it couldn’t erase us from the earth. We’ve always been stubborn, no?

And then you consider the man who built the place. Herod was a Jewish king, Jewish enough by blood, and in almost every way that counted a traitor to his own people, a client of Rome who paved his kingdom with his masters’ vanity. Here’s what’s important about Herod: what he left, the stone, the harbour, the ambition, is still standing, and it stands now inside a Jewish sovereign state that outlasted Rome, outlasted the name Rome tried to bury us under, and came back to walk through his ruins as the owners of the ground. Herod may have served the empire, but we buried it. His stones are a day trip in our country now, complete with selfies, bathroom breaks, and wisps of the salt sea in our hair. Visit the gift shop on the way out.

Haifa

From Caesarea to Haifa, and the Baha’i Gardens spilling down the mountain in nineteen perfect terraces, the blue of the bay laid out beneath them under a cloudless blue sky. I’ve never been inside those gardens, and they are just totally immaculate and fascinating. We learned who the Baha’i are, where they come from, what they hold sacred, and this reminder: the holiest place on earth to the Baha’i faith, those persecuted of Islam, is here, in Haifa, tended and guarded inside and by the Jewish state. The guard reminded me that Israel’s declaration of independence guarded minority religious rights in the new state, and the Baha’i Gardens are exact proof. A people that knows better than almost anyone on earth what it is to have your holy places taken from you has made itself the keeper of someone else’s. Both deep confidence and deep decency, in my opinion.

Daliat el-Carmel

And then up into the Carmel, to the Druze village of Daliat al-Carmel and a restaurant called Nurah’s Kitchen, to a Druze table that honestly could have fed an army. Nurah was there, and she welcomed us warmly. She fed us plentifully. On the wall, they had written this line:

“From this kitchen, comes the atmosphere of the covenant of Yitro and Moses: Brotherhood between the Druze and the Jews, in coordination, love, and good taste.”

It traced the brotherhood between the Jews and the Druze all the way back to Moshe and Yitro, to Moses and the father-in-law who took him in and counselled him, the Midianite priest the Druze revere as their own great prophet. Not a modern alliance of convenience, then, but a bond with its roots in the Torah itself. And you feel it at the table and in the town. The Druze are loyal Israelis in a way that runs deeper than citizenship. They serve in the army, they bury their sons under the flag emblazoned with the Jewish star, and they have taken the blue and white of that flag and made it their own, not because anyone required it of them, but because this is their country and they have chosen to defend it. The blue of this day turns out to be the blue of a flag that two peoples fly.

Zichron Yaakov

On the way back we stopped in Zichron Yaakov, one of the very first Zionist villages in the land, planted on this hillside in 1882 when the hillside was mostly malaria and boulders. My favourite town in Israel, Zichron has a quaint main pedestrian street with gift shops and restaurants, and it oozes tradition and the sacredness of time past.

I got to tell the group a little of its history, and in particular the story of the Aaronsohn family, of Aaron and his sister Sarah, who ran a spy ring called NILI out of their own house to help the British prise this land loose from the Ottomans. Sarah was caught and tortured and took her own life rather than give up the others. They bet everything they had on the idea that this hillside would one day be governed by Jews, and neither of them lived to see a day of it. You can stand at the Aaronsohn house and look straight down the slope to the sea, blue again, the same blue, and doing so, it’s impossible not to feel that Sarah died looking more or less in this direction, at a country she was buying for people she’d never meet.

On our way out, we also stepped, briefly, into the Great Synagogue of Zichron, Ohel Yaakov, built in 1886, which has a real claim to being the first modern Zionist synagogue raised in this land.

It has been a stage for a century and a half of the settlement’s and the country’s history, but what stopped me was the ceiling. Someone painted it blue and scattered it with gold stars, so that you stand in the first Zionist prayer house in the country and look straight up into a painted heaven. In a way I felt the pulse of the week inside me as I looked up, as it gathered the whole week into a single ceiling. The gold I began with in Jerusalem and the blue I have been swimming in all day, the two colours I have spent this week chasing, are up there together over the pews, laid down by people who built this room 60 years before there was a state to pray for. They painted themselves a sky and filled it with gold, as if they already knew the heavens were going to be ours.

In many ways, this was the day I have spent so much time trying to teach, the one my notes and slides keep reaching for: Israel as a living society, not a museum and not a battlefield and not simply an argument, but a real place holding the ruins of the empire that ruled it, the holiest site of a faith born elsewhere, a mountain of Druze who chose it and who were accepted back, and a coastline of blue tying the whole thing together. The same state that holds Kfar Aza holds all of this blue.

Siegels

And then, back at the hotel, at the end of a day drenched in blue, we sat with Keith and Aviva Siegel. Keith was held hostage in Gaza for 484 days. Aviva was taken with him and held for 51 days before she was released, which means she came home and then waited more than a year for the rest of him to follow her out. I’ll never forget how he looked deeply at her as she spoke, how she quietly placed her hand on his leg if he ever stumbled, small gestures that say so much about a relationship that has endured the impossible. He has been free for well over a year now, and he told us, almost in passing, that he is still amazed every time he can walk to a door and open it himself. A grown man, home more than a year, still astonished by a door handle, still carrying injuries he’ll likely never fully be free of. We live our whole lives on the easy side of doors and skies and never once feel the weight of them. Because the other thing Keith said rearranged the day for me: down there, underground, for all those days, he couldn’t see the sky. No blue, not once. I had spent my last week in the blue, swimming in it, on a beach, along a coast, down a hillside, against a garden, the one free thing that had been taken from him completely. We are told to keep a thread of tekhelet in the tallit, a blue they say is the colour of heaven seen through a clear eye, and to look at it and remember the covenant and the mitzvot. Keith spent those days where there was no thread and no heaven and nothing at all to look up at, and I don’t think I’ll ever put on a tallit again without picturing a man who would have given years of his life for one blue thread.

I’m sure we all asked ourselves how a person even survives that, and Keith answered without being asked. He got through the days, he said, by building a community in his mind and speaking to them, one by one, all that time. He asked his mother how she was. He spoke to his brother, to his children, to Aviva. A community in my head, he called it. How…Jewish. Strip a Jew of everything, the sky, the door, the calendar, his dignity, the certainty of the next hour, and the thing he builds in the dark to keep himself alive is a minyan. We are the people who were never meant to do it alone, and it turns out we can’t, not even there. Especially not there.

Aviva carried her own unbearable things out of that place. She told us the terrorists threatened them by barring their emotions. They were not allowed to feel. Not allowed to cry. As if grief itself were contraband, smuggled below the surface of the earth, as if they meant to confiscate even that. She told us she lay there and wondered aloud what it was going to feel like to die. And she told us what she said to Keith on the day she was released and he was not, neither of them knowing whether they would ever see each other again: you be strong for me, and I’ll be strong for you. She walked out into the blue and left him under the city, and they carried each other’s strength across more than a year of dark, and somehow it held. She traveled across countries and continents, meeting Presidents Biden and Trump, senators and legislators and diplomats, all in an effort to bring her Keith home. Somehow, miraculously, it worked.

“The terrorists,” Aviva said, “spend their lives deciding who to hate. We get to decide who to love, and how to live. So, do everything you can.” She is doing everything she can, she told us, “for the next generation.” We all aim to be educators, but perhaps, “do everything you can for the next generation” is just Hillel’s one-legged maxim for the 21^st century. Thank you Aviva and Keith.

Here’s the Catch

After Wednesday’s red, blue, and an ocean of it. Tel Aviv’s sea in the morning, Herod’s ruined Rome reclaimed by a Jewish state that outlasted the empire and the name it tried to bury us under, the Baha’i faith’s holiest place guarded inside that state, a Druze table in the Carmel flying our blue and white as its own, and Sarah Aaronsohn’s Zichron Yaakov, where the first Zionist synagogue in the land keeps a painted heaven of gold stars overhead and a young woman died buying a country she would never see. All of it under one blue sky. And then Keith and Aviva Siegel, who taught me what the blue was actually for. Keith spent 484 days in Gaza without seeing it too often. I spent today within a blue he could not reach. That’s the whole country in a single colour: the free sky overhead, and the buried memory of everyone who was kept from it.

The discipline of the week is certainly not grief. It’s refusing, ever again, to take the blue for granted, now that I’ve met a man who spent 484 days without it and a woman who walked out of the dark declaring, out loud, for whom she would always stay strong.

I had braced for red. Last year I gave this ground red too, the blood red of the Nova field, and I wasn’t sure if I should use the same colour again. Then I remembered what name is often given to this region: Darom Adom or the Red South. In winter these fields go scarlet with anemones, kalaniot, a wild red carpet that people drive down from the whole country to stand in and photograph their kids against. The red here is supposed to be flowers but we came in July and the flowers were gone. The red had come from somewhere else.

Sderot

In Sderot we stood and looked out over Gaza. There were flags everywhere. Israeli flags, huge ones, staked along the ridge and flying over the fields that face the Strip, blue and white snapping in the wind on the very ground the worst of it came through. On a day I had come to read in red, these flags were insisting on another colour, and I read them as saying this: Not again. Not here. Not ever again from that direction. For a piece of fabric, a flag says a lot. You plant it exactly where you were made to feel you had no right to stand, and it says you are staying. I’m with a group of educators, and thought about how you can always teach a fact about a place. You can’t however teach the feeling of standing somewhere ordinary, a town of 40,000 with pizza places and schools, and knowing exactly how far away the thing that came is.

The ordinariness of Sderot is worth considering too. We know Sderot the way the news has always, for the last 20 years, handed it to us: the first place the rockets reached, under fire since 2006, a ledger of red alerts and seconds to shelter, one of the communities October 7th emptied. We know it, in other words, only as a victim. And a place known only for what has been done to it stops being a place at all. It becomes a symbol of some kind, which in a way erases the people who live there.

So we went to a school for excellent and gifted children. Sderot sits in what Israelis call the periphery (HaPeripheria), the towns far from the “centre” (i.e. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, etc.) and its money and its advantages, and here was the opposite of victimhood built in brick: the insistence that the brightest kids of a bombarded town on the edge of the map deserve every single chance a child in Tel Aviv gets, and will be handed it. Places like this are not built for places that have been given up on, but rather those places where you expect to have a future.

And then, of all things on a day like this, a food tour, and it turned out to be maybe the most honest lesson of the morning. Moroccan cous-cous and spicy fish balls, Georgian khachapuri, Tunisian fried burekas, smoothies, and cheesecake for dessert. You can taste a whole town’s immigration in an afternoon, the Moroccan and the Kurdish and the Ethiopian and everyone else who was sent out to this edge decades ago and answered by building a home and a kitchen and staying. Humanized is the word that kept coming to me, and it’s a weird word to think of for a town where my cousins live, because these people were never anything less than human. It was, I think, our seeing that had gone thin. Sderot isn’t a sad city as we are told it is abroad. Sderot is a town of 40,000 that expects to be 80,000 within fifteen years, growing and cooking and raising its clever children, getting on with the enormous ordinary business of living in a place the world only ever names as a target. To see these people only through the wound is to miss them completely, and to miss them is to look away. We flew across the world this week in order to look.

That was the food. This was the cost. We also visited what remains of the police station, which is to say to the memorial where it stood, because the station was overrun on October 7 and the fight to take it back ended with the building itself brought down by Israeli tanks. The memorial can easily be missed if driving too quickly, but it consists of several tall “pillars of eternity” surrounded by information and testimony about what happened at this place, on this day.

On the street, we met the widow of Officer Adir Shlomo, the officer who commanded the police station and who was the first killed defending it that day (his day off). She told us, plainly, about the worst day of her life. They have four children, two of whom now wear the same uniform their father died in, which is either the most broken thing I’ve heard or the most defiant. I’ve decided: it’s defiant. And then she said this: the lesson she carries from that day, she told us, is that we all simply need to be good people. A woman whose husband was killed at his post, leaving her a widowed mother of four, handing us that. How she does it, and how she says such things, I’ll never know.

There’s a child’s voice on that memorial too. As many in Israel now know, when police pulled a little girl named Romi Suisa from a car that morning, her parents already dead, she looked up at the man who reached her and asked him, in Hebrew, “Atem shel Yisrael? Are you for Israel?” Are you one of ours.

It’s a child’s way of asking the only thing that matters: did you come to kill or save me? They set her words in the memorial because they are the whole day in three syllables. And standing there I kept hearing the same question travel outward across these almost three years, with only the preposition moved. Are you with Israel? With the murdered or the murderers? With humanity, with civilization, or with the thing that came for it? A child asked it first and cleanest, without a gram of politics in it, and most of the grown world still cannot manage her answer.

Kibbutz Kfar Azza

I was here last year, and the first thing I noticed this time was what is missing. The yellow. The ribbons and the banners and the faces of the taken that covered every fence the last time are mostly down now, because most of the people dragged from here into Gaza have come home. Most. Two came home in coffins, taken alive and killed, tragically by the IDF in a friendly-fire incident.

We walked us through the houses, and the spray paint the searchers left is still on the walls, a shorthand in a language no one should ever have to read: how many were found inside, who was accounted for, what body parts were left to account for. A family’s front door turned into a form someone filled in during the worst week of the country’s life. To me, the unbearable weight of the place isn’t in the burned walls the cameras want. It is in the kettle still on a counter, the one flower someone planted in a pot and never came back to water, still going somehow, obscene and alive.

The hardest door was Sivan Elkabetz’s. She was murdered in her own living room alongside her boyfriend Naor Hasidim, both of them young, both of them beautiful, both at the very start of a life together.

Her parents have not cleaned it. In fact, they’ve left the house exactly as that morning left it and opened it to strangers, and her father stood outside it with us. The bullet holes are everywhere, in the walls, in the furniture, in the small ordinary objects of a first shared home, and you can see without being told where the blood must have flowed. I have never been in a room like this. To keep your daughter’s death intact, as a place other people can walk through, on purpose, so that no one will ever be able to say it did not happen: there should be a different word for the sort of courage her parents’ display, I just can’t find it.

And then, in the same kibbutz, a sound I wasn’t expecting: building. Bulldozers, scaffolding, the noise of people putting a place back together. All across the Gaza envelope the kibbutzim are deciding, one by one, to return, to rebuild and replant and bring families home to the ground that was emptied. How can one come home to a house that was kept as a tomb going up beside a house in which one is expected to live? That’s precisely what these people are asking of themselves, and of us. These streets will always, somewhere in them, be where the blood ran. But the ones who live here have decided that the red blood is not the end of the sentence, that something is meant to grow up out of it. It’s the wrong season to see it, but this is anemone country, and I know what this ground does when its winter comes: it takes whatever soaked into it and it sends up red flowers by the field. They are betting their homes on the same thing the flowers do. Life comes back up through the red.

Nova

The Nova site. I’m actually standing in it as I write this, and so maybe what follows will not be clear. There is too much. Too many names, too many faces, too many small memorials staked into the ground, one for each life, until the field stops being a field and becomes a crowd of the missing. Three hundred and sixty-four of them look out at me from the signs, young, caught mid-laugh in the photographs their families chose, dressed for a party. They were dancing. They came to a field to dance at dawn, and the men who killed them made their way here on purpose, reaching this place about two and a half hours into the morning’s slaughter, not by accident, not in the fog of some battle, but as a plan carried out against a field whose only crime was joy. They may not have known about the festival the morning they invaded, but they soon saw a ripe opportunity for blood, and they took it.

The first time I came here, I felt sadness and despair. I was overwhelmed and shocked. This time I felt different, and though I’m reluctant to write what follows, I feel like I owe it to the lost eyes looking back at me to say the truth. Standing among these faces today, I’m not sad, but furious. Because there are people, many, many of them, comfortable and far from here, who have decided to call what my people did in Gaza a genocide, and I am looking, right now, at three hundred and sixty-four reasons why that is a lie. An attempted genocide was committed here, against them, in this field. To take the word for what was done to these kids and fix it instead on the ones who buried them is not an argument but rather an inversion, the oldest trick ever aimed at us, dressed for this decade. Anyone who has spent five minutes inside the Jewish community, at one table, at one funeral, at one board meeting, at one celebration, knows how obscene the charge is, how far it sits from anything these beautiful souls or the Jewish people and our allies who mourn them could ever want for another human being. I want to laugh in the face of it. Genocide? Us? Under the laugh is something less polite, and standing here, I feel no need to apologize for it.

Rahat

And then, because this country will not let the story stay simple, Rahat. We were guests in the home of a Bedouin man named Sammy, and we sat along a table with a red cloth running the length of it. After a whole day spent reading red as blood, here it was again as something else entirely, a red cloth laid for guests, the oldest sign of hospitality there is that you are welcome and that room has been made for you. Sammy talked to us about the Bedouin world, its schools and its society and the long, unfinished question of being Bedouin in Israel: a citizen and not quite a citizen, woven into the country and somehow always also standing beside it, integrated and not integrated in the same breath. He did not tie it off neatly. He let it stay as complicated as it actually is. He criticized the government. Is his criticism more off-base than that of any other Jewish Israeli levelling the same claims? I don’t know.

He told us how many of his neighbours are employed by SodaStream, and the story is worth repeating. The factory used to sit in the West Bank, until an international boycott campaign waged in the name of Palestinians (hundreds of whom were employed by SodaStream in the West Bank), against a plant standing on what the campaign called occupied land, forced it to close its doors there. It moved here, to Rahat, and it hired Bedouin employers. So the great victory of the boycott movement ended with hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank out of work, the plant humming away in the Negev, and Bedouin in Rahat clocking in each morning. I’m not trying to score a point, but I raise it because it’s the kind of thing that will not fit neatly on a poster, and this entire day has been an argument against the poster: against the single word, the clean villain, the clean victim, a story simple enough to chant.

And these Bedouin are people whose sons and daughters were murdered and rescued and bereaved on October 7 alongside everyone else. Anyone selling you a tidy account of this place just hasn’t sat at Sammy’s table. The red does not belong to one tribe. Neither does the courage.

Here’s the Catch

This ground is named for red. In a kinder season it goes scarlet with anemones and families come to stand in the flowers. We came in the wrong season and the red came from the wound instead, the way the body sends everything to the place that is hurt. Above those fields the flags fly huge and blue and white, the plainest promise the country knows how to make, that it will not happen again. Grief doesn’t photograph, and the weight is in the quiet and the kettles and the one red flower nobody came back to water. Sderot is not the sad city the news sells; it is 40,000 people cooking and growing and raising their excellent children in a town the world only ever names as a target. Rahat broke the clean version of it too, because the red and the courage here belong to more than one people. In Kfar Azza the families are already rebuilding on the ground that emptied, betting their homes on what the anemones do every winter, that life comes back up through the red. I don’t really have any lesson tonight, just a dad wondering what I’m allowed to carry home to kids who deserve the truth without being crushed by it. Some red you witness not to heal it but to refuse, on principle, to look away.

Watch this video of the inside of Sivan Elkabetz and Naor Hasidim’s home today, July 8, 1,005 days later:

Yad Vashem

We began at Yad Vashem.

I’ve been many times before, and it never loses its force: a country that gathers up the worst thing that was ever done to us and builds it, in stone, into the side of its own capital, so that the state and the memory of what came before the state are never out of each other’s sight.

It’s disorienting standing inside the memorial to one catastrophe while another is almost three years old. I see myself more in the faces of our recent victims, than in the black and white pictures of 80 years ago.

I keep trying to line up the episodes of our history, the expulsions and the pogroms and the camps and the 7th of October, as if they were beads on a single string, as if seeing the pattern would tell me how to understand it. It just…doesn’t. I can’t fully comprehend it nor can I decide what it’s meant to make of me, except that I know I want it to leave me prouder and stronger rather than smaller and afraid. Maybe that response or refusal is the answer. Maybe holding all of it at once, seeing the distant with the not-so-distant past, and not letting any of it fold you, is the thing we Jews have been calling resilience the whole time. Or as one of the trip’s non-Jewish participants told me this evening, “It’s amazing how the Jewish people have rallied around life, after all that’s been thrown at them.”

The museum is built so that you walk down into the dark and climb back into the light at the end, out onto the terrace over the Jerusalem Forest. Inside, it’s the ordinary things that break my heart utterly and completely. The shoes always make me catch my breath. A whole case of them, worn and buckled and scuffed at the toe, and I can’t stand in front of it without doing the arithmetic: every one of them was warm once, on a foot, on a person who put it on one morning without knowing it was among the last. They look just like the shoes my dad wears. You can’t hold six million as a number. You can hold a shoe. Then the path climbs and lets you out onto the terrace, and the hills are green, and the architecture forgives you in advance for needing that green.

There’s a separate place at Yad Vashem for the children. It remembers 1.5 million of them murdered in the Holocaust, and it does it with almost nothing: a single flame set between mirrors and multiplied until you are standing in the dark inside a whole sky of small lights, one for every child, more than the eye can hold. I had walked through it before, but I haven’t since I became a father. I wasn’t ready for that. Almost before I had decided to, I picked out three of the lights in the dark and fixed on them and couldn’t let them go, three among the million and a half, my own children held for a moment in a room built for everyone else’s. That is the only way I have ever been able to reach the size of it. Not through the number. Through those three, and the mirrors that kept making more.

Har Herzl

Then up Har Herzl, which is a forest. The hill where the country buries the ones it asked the most of, is planted thick with pine and cypress, green and deliberate, because this is a people that answers death by putting something living in the ground. OK it sounds cliche to write but Israelis live to remember while always remembering to live. The man who dreamed the Jewish State lies at the top of it and never saw a green day of it. He died in 1904, in a Vienna that would later kill his neighbours, and 45 years later, the Israelis carried his bones to this green hill so he could lie above the country he only imagined. It is always a tremendous honour to stand before the OG Zionist. The simple basalt tombstone with few words, a testament to the many words written by its honouree, buried beneath. Those same words that birthed our surroundings into existence. “In Basel I founded the Jewish State…”

And then, lower on the same hillside, the graves of those who fell on the 7th of October and in the long war it began. I was here before, but the second time is no less shocking when you read the ages on the tombstones. You read the years cut into the stone and do the arithmetic before you can stop yourself: nineteen, twenty, twenty-two. Children, by any measure. El’ad Michael Sasson, son of Aliza and David, born in Jerusalem, 21. Ofir Tasta, son of Bati and Tal, born in Givat Binyamin, 21. Ori Shani, son of Shlomit Rivka and Yehoshua, born in Hebron, 20.

Here the green stopped being landscaping and started to speak. Families have planted the graves, bushes and flowers and small living things pressed into the soil over their sons, and among them stand the little flags of the brigades. I kept finding the green and yellow of Golani, the tree on its badge staked into the ground above boys who will not grow the way that tree will. A people that marks its dead with a living, growing tree is arguing with the grave. The grave before which I stopped was that of Ariel Har’eli, son of Dana and Asaf, 20 years old. It was covered with small stones on which messages to Ariel were written: “Your mother loves you,” “We miss you until it hurts, love Aba and Ido,” “Please come back to me, my Ariel,” “The best brother in the world,” and “A hero of Israel.”

National Library

In the afternoon, the National Library. In the massive round reading room, I spotted a statue, that of Hugo Lowy, a Hungarian Jew who, as the plaque behind him read, was beaten to death by a Nazi when he insisted on clinging to his tfillin, tallis, and siddur rather than throwing them onto the pile of belongings growing on the train platform. He watches while those around him read.

The library is, I think, an apt monument we have raised to show what being the People of the Book actually means, not a phrase on a banner but a whole institution built to keep the words safe. And it sits, by design, directly across from the Knesset. I refuse to believe that is an accident of city planning. A people set its parliament and its library face to face and said, in effect, that the life of the mind and the life of the nation are one civic act, that we guard the first because it is the only reason the second has ever survived. Etz chaim hi, we say of the Torah, it is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it. The library is where we keep the tree green.

Market

And then Machane Yehuda, an ordinary Tuesday, no Shabbat rush, just the shuk doing what it does, and the first thing my eye went to was the green. Herbs in wet bundles, za’atar and mint and parsley, and barrels of olives shining green under the lights, crates of it all, absurd quantities of living green stacked and sold to a people that is increasingly putting its past behind them. This is the trick we have never explained to anyone, least of all ourselves. We bury the children on a green hill in the morning and we haggle over green olives and green herbs in the afternoon, and we do not experience this as a contradiction. We experience it as Tuesday.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Here’s the Catch

Yesterday’s gold, today’s green, and green was the harder colour to earn. Yad Vashem asks you to hold the Holocaust and October 7th in the same hand, and I cannot make the episodes of our history line up into sense; maybe holding them all at once, without letting any of them fold you, is the thing we have been calling resilience the whole time. In the children’s memorial I held three lights in the dark for my own three, which is maybe the only way to begin to understand the scope. Har Herzl answers death by planting, and on the graves of soldiers who were nineteen and twenty and twenty-two, families press living green into the soil and stake the green tree of Golani above them, arguing with the grave. Across from the Knesset, the National Library keeps the People of the Book, because Etz chaim hi, and the tree is kept green in the words. I came to learn how Israel grieves. I leave having watched it grieve and grow in the same green day, and call neither one a betrayal.

You don’t arrive in Jerusalem so much as you’re taken up into it. The road climbs, your ears pop, and then the city is just there, gold and stubborn, exactly where you left it the last time and exactly where your grandparents left it without, in some cases, ever having seen it at all.

In March 2025 I spent a day in the Gaza Envelope and gave each part of the day its own colour, and every one of them was a colour of grief. The orange of two small boys. The yellow of a ribbon worn until it frayed. The red of a field where the young had been dancing. This year I want the rest of the spectrum back. I want to know whether a living place still owns its colours, or whether we’ve surrendered them all to mourning.

So I’m starting again, this time with gold.

Arrival

It wasn’t hard to find. I arrived in Jerusalem in the early afternoon, the hour when the stone stops pretending to be grey and admits what it has been all along, and the whole city turned the colour of a thing worth keeping. Yerushalayim shel zahav. They didn’t call it the city of gold for its wealth. They called it gold for the light, and because gold is the word you reach for when you mean the thing you would not trade.

The group’s first session of the morning belonged to the inimitable Gil Troy, who has spent a career explaining why he is a Zionist. He didn’t spend our hour on the difficulty, though he named it plainly enough. He spent it on the other thing, the part the news never has room for: the joy. He asked us not to let the hard truths crowd out how wonderful this place is, and can still be. Hold both, he said, in more or less those words. Don’t come all this way and train your eyes only on the wound. I wrote it down, because without knowing it he had just described the whole argument I had flown in carrying. I didn’t come to surrender the gold, nor did the other participants on the group, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who have all come looking for answers and explanations.

Afternoon

We walked the Old City in the afternoon, through the press and the smell of it, the stone underfoot worn to a shine by everyone who has ever come here needing something. The shopkeepers were desperate for business, after months and years of a lull in tourism - it’s hard to haggle in such circumstances. We briefly visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a different faith keeps its own gold lamps burning over its own grief, and I thought about how this small stubborn city has never once managed to belong to only one people (or even to one denomination of one people).

Then to the Kotel. Here’s what nobody really says about the Kotel: it’s not supposed to be the wall you came to see. It’s a retaining wall for something that was once greater. Its only job, ever, was to hold up the platform on which the holy thing once stood. Nevertheless, we press our faces and our folded notes against the part that was never sacred, the engineering, the masonry whose whole purpose was to carry the weight of a gold it would never itself be. The gold we yearn to have returned to us, sitting below the gold dome that now graces our sacred spot.

Before

Yesterday, before the group had properly gathered, I spent the morning down in the City of David, on the ridge that runs south of the Old City’s walls, where they have been digging the older Jerusalem out from underneath the newest one. After reading Doron Spielman’s book, When the Stones Speak, I had been dreaming of exploring the newest excavations in Jerusalem, and they didn’t disappoint. I explored the City of David as well as the newly opened Piligrimage Road, opened in February 2026, showing off the walkway along which our Jewish ancestors purified themselves in the Siloam Pool before walking to the Temple for ritual and sacrifice.

The cold water of the Gihon Spring is still running, and history is still very much alive down there. You go down and down, below the honking and the satellite dishes and the ordinary weekday of the living city stacked on top, and at the bottom there is the stepped Pilgrimage Road that pilgrims climbed three thousand years ago on their way up to the very platform the Kotel now holds. The road still points uphill toward the mountain. It has been pointing there the whole time, under everyone’s feet, patient, waiting for someone to dig it back into the light. We are privileged to have found it in our lifetimes.

Down in the wet dark of the tunnel, a young Hasidic man fell into step beside me and, the way strangers do here, began teaching me Torah as though we had known each other for years. He wanted me to understand why the tradition calls this place - the Land of Israel - Eretz HaTzvi. Tzvi is Hebrew for deer, he said, and the sages noticed something about a deer’s hide. Once you take it off the animal, it will not go back on. It shrinks. It refuses to cover what it came from. Every skin in the world does this, except one. This land is the skin that stretches. When the people come home to it, it opens and makes room, it expands to hold all of them, however many arrive. And when they leave, it draws in tight and small and waits: "Just as the hide of a deer has the capacity to encompass its body, but shrinks when separated from its flesh, so too can the Land of Israel miraculously expand to encompass all its rightful inhabitants, but shrinks in their absence." Then he wished me a good week and was gone, up toward the light, and I was left standing in the dark holding my flashlight and country that grows to fit whoever comes back to it.

How nice it was to think about tunnels for a day without considering cold, hungry Jews held hostage within them.

Kotel

Then down again, today, into the tunnels beneath the plaza, out of the gold and into the dark, where the same wall keeps going, course after course, into the bedrock. The city you walk on is a polite lie told by the surface. Everything that actually holds the place up is underneath, in the part you can’t really photograph well, holding up the gold.

Dinner

Dinner tonight at Ima Restaurant. A room of relative strangers just beginning to knit into a group. Educators, all of us, people whose work is to set tables for other people’s children and then step back and hope someone sits.

And then Yaron and Jacqui Vital sat down with us and told us about their daughter, who was killed on the seventh of October. Adi Vital Kaploun was killed by Palestinian terrorists in her safe room at Kibbutz Holit, while she shielded her sons Negev (then 4) and Eshel (then 4 months). They shared pictures and videos and letters written about her, we learned of her inner and outer beauty, her strength and determination to save those she loved, and how she excelled at everything she did in her short life. It has admittedly been some time since I’ve learned about the life of one of those angels lost on 10/7, and it was a privilege to hear from her parents. Adi’s father spoke about his own saga as a survivor of the massacre, staying near Adi on that fateful day.

I can’t hand you their grief in an essay. It’s theirs, and they gave it to us in person, across a table, which is a different and holier thing than print. I’ll only tell you what it is to sit in that restaurant’s gold light while two people describe the day that took their daughter and do not once ask you to look away. They came. They pulled up chairs at a table set by strangers and they gave us the most precious thing they have left of her, which is her story, so that we would carry it home and set it down in front of children who will never get to meet her. That is what a table is for. That is what an educator is for.

Who’s there

I keep returning to who sits at this table and who cannot. This land and a set table are the same promise, really, one large and one small: room made in advance, a skin that stretches, a place laid for a guest who may or may not walk through the door. Tonight two people came to the table whose daughter cannot, and they spoke of her anyway, which is its own way of setting her a place. This is a country drawn tight and small around its empty chairs, and still it lays the cloth, still it lights the candles gold. You set the table anyway. You set it wide enough to stretch. That’s either faith or stubbornness, and in the last few days, I lost the ability to tell the two apart.

Here’s the Catch

Last year I wrote about the colours of grief. This year I’m taking the spectrum back, starting with gold. Gil Troy asked us in the morning to hold both at once, the difficulty and the joy, and by nightfall the day had proven him right: the city gold at dusk, and then a gold table where Yaron and Jacqui Vital gave us the story of the daughter they lost on October 7, so that it would travel. Gold isn’t the absence of grief. It’s the precious thing grief can’t put out. A stranger in a tunnel taught me this land is called Eretz HaTzvi because, like a deerskin, it stretches to hold everyone who comes home and draws small when they go, which is only the table’s promise made the size of a country. We are table-setters, and tonight two grieving parents set a place for us. The first day is not about answers. It is about sitting down, in the gold, and leaving the table wide enough to stretch.