The Antidote to Cynicism

It occurs to me that I haven’t explained what has brought me to Israel on this adventure with the Good People Fund.

The Good People Fund was founded 19 years ago by my friend and teacher Naomi Eisenberger, seeking out and supporting extraordinary people and organizations that are doing the work of Tikkun Olam/world-repair in powerful, creative, and grassroots ways. We currently work with 35 projects across North America, 28 in Israel, and 1 in Ukraine. And they are not necessarily Jewish projects; what makes our work Jewish is the way in which we do our Tzedakah work.

(For more information about the Good People Fund—and for a real jolt of inspiration—check out the new edition of the Journal for Good, available on the GPF website.)

Naomi and I met each other 34 years ago in Jerusalem, where we both were mentored by Danny Siegel, the pioneering teacher, author, and poet who changed the ways in which the Jewish world thinks about Doing Good. For years Naomi was the Managing Director of the Ziv Tzedakah Fund which Danny created. When Ziv closed its operations in 2007, Naomi launched the Good People Fund—taking the whole idea to the next level of seeding new projects and mentoring them in best practices of how to run a truly transformative organization. (It’s been wonderful to see the love that each of our projects’ leaders have shown to Naomi throughout this trip.)

Naomi retired as the Executive Director earlier this year, and the Good People Fund is now under the leadership of the wonderful Julie Fisher, who will take this work to another level in what is effectively chapter 3 of this story.

My connections to Naomi and Danny  have absolutely shaped my outlook on the world and why I do the work I do. So when Julie invited me to join the Board in 2025, of course I said yes. And when I was invited to be the “rabbi-in-residence” for this sojourn to Israel, it felt like coming full circle.

Now, Jewish communities frequently launch “Tzedakah missions” to Israel, often via Jewish Federations or large foundations, but this trip is far from those. The Good People Fund nurtures young Tzedakah startups, providing them with a crucial foundation from which to grow. Every project inevitably is led by a visionary—someone who is creative, passionate, loving, and utterly non-arrogant or self-consumed. They tend to have a ziv – a warm radiance of integrity, honesty, kindness, and hope.

The other common denominators that Good People Fund projects share are absolute trustworthiness, transparency in their finances, and a grassroots commitment to their work.  And, of course, touching lives and transforming them.

They work in different fields and care for different populations of people. But for me, one thing cuts across all their work:

Being with Good People is an antidote cynicism.

It’s a fraught time for the State of Israel, and for Jewish people around in the world in this era of slander, hate, and surging antisemitism. I know I have days when those forces feel overwhelming.

But if you’ve felt that way before, know that we have to push back against those forces. Cynicism is a spiritual toxin, and it brings a terrible coarsening of the soul.

The best antidote I know is to spend time with these people and the countless others like them.

Here are a few examples drawn from the 20+ Good People Fund grantees we’ve encountered in the past few days (in addition to a few I described in my previous post):

Assif (Assi) at Back 2 Life Farm

Back to Life Farm in Sdot Yam: In a nation that is wracked with PTSD, especially in the wake of the massacres of October 7 and the subsequent war, it is inspiring to see how many compassionate people are addressing victims of trauma. We met Assi Nave, who started in this magnificent place in memories of his brother-in-law Ro’i Levy and his best friend Danny, each of whom died tragically in recent years. Assi and his companions created this farm, starting with rescued horses and other animals, and created an oasis of a caring community.

And we met with a current client, also named Ro’i, who spoke about how this place not only saved his life by restoring his self-worth, but how it gave him the opportunity to become a volunteer on the farm, helping others who had been similarly traumatized. “That’s one of the best things they could give me,” Ro’i told us.

Jamal telling us his story

Jamal Alkirnawi/A New Dawn in the Negev:  There are around 40 unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel’s south, and they lack many crucial services and support systems. We journeyed to the Negev, Israel’s southern desert, to meet grantees who are working with the Bedouin community here, especially the children.

Jamal Alkirnawi has a remarkable and inspirational story about how, as a shy and introverted boy in this traditional and insulated community, he discovered Israeli teenagers’ student councils—and made a journey to Tel Aviv (virtually another planet for an isolated Bedouin kid) to encounter and learn with his Israeli peers. Then he returned to his home communities here, and now works to empower young people with initiatives based in literacy, leadership development, entrepreneurship, and peace.  

Gadi and me

Gadi Gevaryahu/Tag Meir: I’ve known about and contributed to Tag Meir for years, but was delighted finally to meet its founder Gadi in person. We all know about the shameful surge in racist violence by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the past few years; they call it tag mahir/“price tag” attacks for Palestinian acts of terror. In 2011 Gadi created an Israeli-Jewish emergency response unit, Tag Meir (a “tag of light”): every time there is an act of Jewish terror, their volunteers mobilize with visits of compassion, sorrow, and empathy—and much more, including Tzedakah. It’s Israeli anti-racism at its most urgent and primal level.

Racheli Tadessa Malkai

Ma’atzimot—Empowering Ethiopian Women/Racheli Tadessa Malkai: In 1992, my life changed volunteering on an Israeli immigrant absorption center in the wake of Operation Solomon, when over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. Racheli and Ma’atzimot work to promote women’s rights in that traditional community, combatting sexual abuse and teaching leadership development, vocational training, resilience and entrepreneurship—and promoting pride in their distinct heritage in Israel’s cultural mosaic. She is awesome—as is the book of women’s voices that they’ve published (in Hebrew).

That’s the tip of big iceberg and a very intense and inspirational week. Do check out the Journal of Good on the GPF website for more of these wondrous people and projects.

Ultimately, this journey is about hope. Hope is not some glassy-eyed view of the world that “everything will work out for the best.” The open wounds of October 7 prove that. But hope is a reminder that there is still a powerful network of good that exists in this world, and if you can plug into it, you can be empowered to defeat the cynicism and fear and solipsism that poisons the spirit.

Am Yisrael Chai!

"You See Me!"

Shalom from Tel Aviv. I’m in Israel for two weeks with the Good People Fund, visiting extraordinary changemakers whom the organization supports. I’ll be blogging about some of them over the next few days.

It’s a powerful moment to be in Israel. Last week Israel held its national elections, the first since the terrorist massacres of October 7 and the subsequent Gaza war. And Tuesday of course was the U.S. midterm elections, in which Israel and Jewish communities were given outsized attention.

These are fraught times for Israel and people who love her. I’ll write a future post about the view from here about these things. But for now I’m here for other reasons.

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וַתִּקְרָ֤א שֵׁם־ה׳ הַדֹּבֵ֣ר אֵלֶ֔יהָ אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל רֳאִ֑י
כִּ֣י אָֽמְרָ֗ה הֲגַ֥ם הֲלֹ֛ם רָאִ֖יתִי אַחֲרֵ֥י רֹאִֽי׃

And Hagar called YHVH who spoke to her, “You Are El-roi,”
by which she meant, “Have I not gone on seeing after He saw me!” (Genesis 16:13)

On the first day of our site visits, this text from Bereishit was ringing in my ears. In Genesis 16, Hagar the slave flees from the household of Abraham and Sarah. That idea alone is sobering for Torah readers and should give us a sense of what the Torah thinks about any delusion of “Jewish supremacy.”  The text states directly that Sarah was oppressive and Abraham was indifferent to Hagar’s suffering. She flees for her life.

In the wilderness, we can imagine how afraid and alone Hagar must be. Then G-d appears to her. (In Genesis, the distinction between “G-d” and “an angel of G-d” can be fluid; recall the angel who appears to Abraham at the climax of the Akedah in Genesis 22.) When Hannah is asked, “Where are you coming from and where are you going?” she can only muster an answer to the first question: אָנֹכִ֖י בֹּרַֽחַת she says, “I am fleeing.”

But then G-d speaks to her directly, and she responds by calling G-d by a unique name: “You are El-Ro’i!” El Ro’i:  “G-d who sees me!”

Imagine what it means to Hagar, abused and alone, to know that she is seen. If not by people, then by G-d. An affirmation of her humanity, her human dignity, and perhaps a dose empowerment to begin to answer the second question, “Where are you going?”

That’s the text that I was thinking of on our first day with the Good People Fund, a golden thread running through our visits: letting hurting people know that they are seen.

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Our first stop was Yotzrot: Turning the Tables, an extraordinary community that runs a group of workshops in Tel Aviv, protecting and saving women who have been sex workers.

The parallels to Hagar’s flight were unsettling. Virtually every one of the women there was fleeing an abusive situation. And sex workers are certainly “invisible”; their desperation and humanity is rarely spoken of, and much of society would prefer not to acknowledge their existence.

But the Yotzrot team doesn’t do judgment. “First, we listen,” we were told by the director, Lilach Tzur Ben-Moshe. And so begins a process—sometimes a very long one—of a comprehensive program of restoring dignity, ending cycles of abuse, helping where it is needed (such as eliminating a woman’s financial debts), and mentoring that can move their clients away from sex work and open new horizons (one of their clients is now in law school!).

Art and creativity are part of the process of reinvention. We went to a workshop were the women were making denim handbags for sale. The workshop is called “Hotam,” which means “sign” or “seal.” Among other things, each artisan puts her distinct hotam on the bag she creates, such as this one created by a woman who uses the eye-symbol as her distinctive brand. (“You see me!”)

And there is this painting on the wall of the studio, below, by one of the women, which haunts me:

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Later we spent time in South Tel Aviv with the indefatigable Gideon Ben Ammi, the founder of Pesia’s Kitchen. In the early 2000s, South Tel Aviv was the limbo where asylum seekers fleeing devastation from Eritrea and Sudan were placed by an indifferent Israeli government. It quickly became a place of squalor—prostitution, drugs, and general devastation.

It was here that Gideon and his cousin began serving meals in 2012. In other words: they saw them—and they saw their opportunity to change things.

They began feeding the hungry residents of the neighborhood. They named the program “Pesia’s Kitchen,” after their grandmother, who had her own refugee story, coming to Israel before World War 2 and had already established a reputation for feeding people who were hungry. Gideon’s project grew far beyond South Tel Aviv; today they are preeminent rescuers of food and they partner with 40 schools in Israel to feed children and families who are hungry—Jews, Arabs, Bedouin, Druze, immigrants; anyone in need. Tons of kilos of food are have been saved and delivered to schools for distribution.

Gideon’s son Yoni has taken over as the Director of Pesia’s Kitchen, but, in his eighties, Gideon is as busy as ever. He told us the people are always asking him, “When are you going to retire, take a break?” His reply: “I take a break every day: I do what I love to do.”

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Much more in the realm of empowering women: We meet Racheli Tadessa Malkai, the founder of Ma’atzimot, empowering Ethiopian Israeli women. We hear from Esty Shushan, the founder of Nivcharot, which advocates for women in the Haredi world, where the very idea of empowerment is new and controversial. And Shana Aaronson of Magen, supporting survivors of sexual abuse and advocating for safer Jewish communities, who tells us some heartbreaking stories and an astonishing one about bringing a particular abuser to justice.

This trip is emotionally exhausting. And there is wonder and human grandeur around every bend in the road.

One more stop: The LGBTQ Center in Tel Aviv, which also knows a thing or two about saying “You are seen” to people who are running from dangerous situations. We met with Merav Livni Keish, the co-founder of Brit Ha’Leviot (“The Pride of Lionesses”), supporting families of transgender and gender diverse children.

And we met with Linor Abergal and Jannette Tayeb of the Israeli Transgender Association, providing a supportive and safe community for transgender Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike.

Each of them have powerful and wrenching stories of being lost and then being found by a community of gentle and caring people, restoring dignity and self-worth. Each is an inspiration.

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This is an unbelievably powerful way to encounter Israel in 2026. Each day we are meeting extraordinary heroes who fight back against indifference, apathy, or outright cruelty. Each of these heroes we saw today is telling people who might otherwise be rendered invisible, “We see you.” And thus restoring human dignity and value.

Much more to come.

Sukkot Without a Sukkah

חַ֧ג הַסֻּכֹּ֛ת תַּעֲשֶׂ֥ה לְךָ֖ שִׁבְעַ֣ת יָמִ֑ים בְּאָ֨סְפְּךָ֔ מִֽגָּרְנְךָ֖ וּמִיִּקְבֶֽךָ׃
After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat,
you shall hold the Festival of Sukkot for seven days. 

וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֖ בְּחַגֶּ֑ךָ אַתָּ֨ה וּבִנְךָ֤ וּבִתֶּ֙ךָ֙ וְעַבְדְּךָ֣ וַאֲמָתֶ֔ךָ וְהַלֵּוִ֗י וְהַגֵּ֛ר וְהַיָּת֥וֹם וְהָאַלְמָנָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר בִּשְׁעָרֶֽיךָ׃
You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter,
your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the orphan,
and the widow in your communities. 

שִׁבְעַ֣ת יָמִ֗ים תָּחֹג֙ לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ בַּמָּק֖וֹם אֲשֶׁר־יִבְחַ֣ר ה׳
כִּ֣י יְבָרֶכְךָ֞ ה׳ אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ בְּכֹ֤ל תְּבוּאָֽתְךָ֙ וּבְכֹל֙ מַעֲשֵׂ֣ה יָדֶ֔יךָ וְהָיִ֖יתָ אַ֥ךְ שָׂמֵֽחַ׃
You shall hold a festival for G-d seven days,
in the place that G0d will choose;
for the G-d will bless all your crops and all your undertakings,
and you shall have nothing but joy.

—Deuteronomy 16:13-15

Sukkot sure has started strange here in Massachusetts.

On Tuesday, the day after Yom Kippur, I put up my sukkah.

On Thursday, I took it down (the roof and the walls, but not the frame)—one day before the holiday was supposed to begin.

The reason is because of the Nor’easter that we’re currently experiencing in New England. Sixty mile-per-hour winds and up to eight inches of rain are predicted. It started Friday night (the first day of the festival) and, according to the weather app on my phone, the rain is predicted to continue through early Tuesday morning, and then sporadically throughout the rest of the week.

An email went through my community encouraging us to take down the walls and skach/roofing of our sukkot, so they don’t blow away in the gale-force winds! We’ll have to see if later in the week I’ll be able to reassemble our sukkah, to at least spend one or two days in it before the holiday is over.

This is an unprecedented situation for me. Sure, there’s almost always at least one rainy day during Sukkot when we have to go inside. But I’ve never been in the situation where I had to take down my sukkah due to the weather, and effectively don’t have one—perhaps for the entire duration of the holiday.

What does it mean to have Sukkot without a sukkah? It does prompt some observations about having to celebrate some of other Mitzvot of the holiday with even deeper intention.

First, a little background.  There are three unique Mitzvot for Sukkot:

·      Building a sukkah, and leaving our permanent housing and spending as much time in the sukkah as possible;

·      Waving the lulav and etrog; and

·      Rejoicing. More on #3 in just a moment.

Furthermore, there is a well-known principle that if the weather is awful outside, we are instructed to go inside to observe Sukkot. This begins with the Mishnah, which says:

כָּל שִׁבְעַת הַיָּמִים אָדָם עוֹשֶׂה סֻכָּתוֹ קֶבַע וּבֵיתוֹ עֲרַאי
.יָרְדוּ גְשָׁמִים, מֵאֵימָתַי מֻתָּר לְפַנּוֹת, מִשֶּׁתִּסְרַח הַמִּקְפָּה

For all seven days of the festival, our sukkah should become our primary dwelling
and our houses become temporary.

If it rains, at what point is it permitted to leave the sukkah?
If it’s raining enough to spoil a cooked dish.
—Mishnah, Sukkah 2:8

I thought the reason for doing this might be obvious, but I was surprised to find, from a cursory look at the legal codes and commentaries, no discussion about why we should leave the sukkah if the weather stinks. The Mishnah (and its commentaries), Gemara, Rambam, and Shulchan Arukh all explain when and how we should leave the sukkah and go inside—but none of them say why.

So I’m going infer a reason. I presume it has to do with the third special Mitzvah of Sukkot: the Mitzvah of rejoicing.

True, one is supposed to be joyful on all the holidays. But Sukkot is specifically designated by the Rabbis as Zman Simchateinu, “the Season of our Joy.” Even though all the holidays are occasions for joy, and about Shavuot the Torah also says, You shall rejoice before Ad-nai your G-d (Deut. 16:11), regarding Sukkot we are instructed twice to rejoice (Deut. 16:14, 15). In other words, if all the festivals call for celebration, on Sukkot we get a double dose.

So if the weather is awful, we have two Mitzvot in conflict: the commandment to dwell in the sukkah (and be miserable) versus the commandment to go indoors (and be happy).

And by telling us to go inside, the halakha determines that the double dose of simcha overrules the commandment to sit in the sukkah soaking wet!

This leads me to three observations:

(1) Sukkot is designed to connect us to the Land of Israel.

Most years, the primary behavior on Sukkot is: go outside! In Israel, this is the most beautiful time of the year: the heat of the Middle Eastern summer has abated, but the winter rains are generally still a few weeks off.  How wonderful to have a holiday that encourages to be outdoors, to see the stars and waning moon through the roof of the sukkah.

It wasn’t formulated for the climate of New England. There are years that we’ve been in our sukkot with ski jackets and space heaters. This year, we worried that the storm would blow our sukkot away. And next week, Jews around the world will start praying for rain—not because we need rain in Massachusetts, but because the very specific rainy season is about to commence in Israel.

All this demonstrates that the Jewish calendar is predicated on the climate of the Land of Israel. It’s yet another indication, as if we needed it, that no matter where our journeys have taken us, the Jewish people are indigenous to that place, our only eternal home.

(2)  How can the Torah command us to “be joyful”?

It’s an old dilemma: Who can control their emotions and feelings? How can the Torah command us what to feel?

The short answer is: we can’t and it doesn’t. The Rabbis explain that the commandment to “rejoice in your festival” means that certain behaviors, namely rituals associating with mourning, cease on the holiday. (It’s frustrating, but if one is sitting shiva and Sukkot arrives, the shiva period comes to an end.)

But there’s a longer and more spiritual answer. It has to do with what the nature of simcha/joy is really all about. The commandment is not as banal as an injunction to “just be happy.” It’s deeper than that.

Simcha is more about connecting to the Source of Life—meaning, G-dliness, why we’re put on this earth. All the holidays are about setting aside our daily concerns of work or school and connected with things that more Sublime. Sukkot is doubly so, because of its emphasis on gratitude at the harvest season.

(3)  The joy of Sukkot is at the heart of the whole thing.

Why were our ancestors so grateful at harvest time?

Because a harvest is fundamentally about: gratitude for promises from long ago that have come true. Many months ago, seeds were placed in the ground, with hope and faith that the rhythms of nature would work their wonders once again. Over the course of months, what was planted turned into a seedling, a plant, and ultimately bore fruit. No matter how much I learn about the biological processes involved—still, there is an element of awe and wonder as I gather it in. And that calls for gratitude—not just “happiness,” but being grateful for life and its blessings from deep within our soul.

I’m no farmer, but this metaphor for the realization of promises made long ago seems to me to be a spiritually provocative idea.

The Mitzvot of sitting in the sukkah and waving the lulav and etrog are catalysts for this kind of spiritual thinking. This year, at least for those who live near me, we’re stuck indoors. What do we do?

We have to embrace our special Sukkot challenge: to be more mindful than ever of our blessings, and to be that much more grateful.

Chag Samayach!

250 Years Old

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing![1]

So kvetched the great American-born Jewish-Buddhist poet Allen Ginsburg.  And so began one of the great litanies to and about America by one who wrestled with its conundrums and its contradictions, of a nation that takes itself so seriously and has no idea who it really is. In Ginsberg’s poem, he has a dialogue with America—he jests and jokes, he scolds and he cries, before he realizes: he’s talking to a mirror. The best lines in the poem are its author’s ultimate self-awareness:

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

“Unfulfilled promises are still promises—as long as they are aspirations for what we can be, and not lies about who we already are.”

That’s my favorite line, because it reminds us, with a comic sense of self-absurdity, that America is big and complex and fractured into a million hues. No one owns the right to a single American narrative. Who’s to say that the voice of a gay Beat Generation New York poet is any less representative of “authentic America”—as if there were such a thing—than, say, Huckleberry Finn? You are America, I am America, and our neighbor is America: no matter our place of birth, or Whom we worship, or whether we talk with an accent, or whom we love.

I know a lot of people are feeling apprehensive about the semiquincentennial. I was 6 years old at the bicentennial celebration, and my memories of that time are idyllic. I’m sure there were controversies at that time, when the shadow of Vietnam had barely receded. But it seems that the energy this time is much less, and I’m trying to figure out why. There is much to be skeptical about, of course. Just a few weeks back the President led a Christian mass prayer gathering on the National Mall, and the official 4th of July event will effectively be a MAGA political rally, and in general it's a time when American democracy feels so endangered and wobbly.

And there are many reasons, too, for Jews to be apprehensive. The surging antisemitism and Israel-hatred that we’re experiencing is making many of us wonder about our liberties and our future and what happened to the neighbors who used to have our backs. These are sure to put a damper on some people’s festivities.

We may stay away from the official celebrations—I certainly will. But we should also be considering the wondrous Jewish place in America. After all, there is much to celebrate. It’s  arguable that no other single minority group has benefited from America’s civil liberties and freedoms as much as Jews have.

Personally, I love the American saga. Not just that mythological “American Dream”—but the story of America, with all its glaring paradoxes and contradictions and conundrums. I like the secret folk history of America, found in its songs and literature and entrepreneurial spirit. I love the America of Rebecca Gratz, Walt Whitman, Moby-Dick, Emma Lazarus, The Wizard of Oz, Woody Guthrie, Louis Brandeis, Robert Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Henrietta Szold, Superman, Philip Roth, Rabbi Heschel, Jimi Hendrix, Harvey Milk, Sandy Koufax, George Lucas, and Bob Dylan—each of whom celebrated America in their own way. I’m drawn to the paradox of a place where you can leave a past behind and start anew—but also a place where you need not shed your identity or your unique heritage, because only out of many can we truly be one.

So here’s a question to consider in the week leading up to the 4th of July. Consider the grand sweep of the Jewish experience in America. What, for you, are the most pivotal moments in Jewish-American history?

There are so many, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. Here are some I’m thinking of, just as prompts to get us thinking:

·       The enormous wave of Eastern European Jews—nearly 2 million of them—who came to the country in a 25-year period at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s. (All 8 of my great-grandparents arrived in America in this wave.)

·       The 1902 Kosher Meat Boycott, led by the Jewish women of New York: perhaps the first awakening that by banding together, Jews could effectively assert ourselves against entrenched and powerful established forces.

·       The appointment in 1916 of Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court.

·       The legacy of the Jewish GIs fighting alongside their fellow citizens in World War II to liberate the world from Nazi fascism.

·       President Truman, on May 14, 1948, recognizing the independence of the State of Israel, making America the first country to do so.

·       Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching across the Pettus bridge in Selma arm-in-arm with Dr. King in 1965. I think of the Jewish role in the Black civil rights movement, as well as every other key social justice movement of the past century: women’s rights, labor, LGBTQ rights, the environmental movement, and so on. Jews have played an outsized leadership role in every one of them.

·       “Freedom Sunday,” the December 6, 1987 march for Soviet Jewry, the climax of what has been called the most successful human rights campaign in history, on the very same spot where King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered 24 years earlier.

That’s the tip of a large iceberg, and I’d be curious about your additions to that list. (Feel free to add them to the comments.) These were proud moments in American history, in Jewish history, and in American Jewish history. They are certainly a long way from the humble arrival of the first boat of 23 Sefardi refugees in New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, the first Jewish immigrants to arrive on these shores, fleeing the clutches of the Inquisition when the Portuguese showed up in  South America.

From its inception, Jewish immigrants came to America with a push and pull. The push was fleeing the pogroms, ghettos, and undiluted centuries-old antisemitism of their neighbors. The pull was America’s freedoms to identify as a Jew openly, fully, and in each person’s own way—promises that had never been offered by any government in history except our own. There is much to celebrate.

But I’m worried, too. Because I’ve just given you a litany of personal highlights of American Jewish history, as a way of inviting you to consider your own list. But I wonder, for our children and grandchildren, what the key events of Jewish life in America will be. I fear that they won’t be moments of innovation, moral inspiration, and pride. I fear that for the next generation, the key events will be the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh. Or October 7. Or the campus protests of the past two years and the constant assault on Jewish identity. Or the libels and slanders perpetrated against Zionism.

Personally, I know that both of my children carry their Jewish-American identities well. But I often wonder if America will be the home for the generations after them. Jewish history is marked by loyalty and pride for the countries in which we have made our homes. But it is also characterized by metaphorically always having one bag packed and one eye on the door.

My deepest fear is that without diligence, America’s embrace of its Jews is in the process of imploding.

The founding principle of America is that word “freedom”—which is also a watchword in Jewish life. The foundational story of the Jewish people is forged in slavery in Egypt—and then becomes fulfilled with the movement to freedom. It’s an unfinished freedom, marked by a maturation process in the wilderness, with the goal of the Promised Land around every corner and always on the horizon.

But in Judaism, of course, freedom never meant “I’ll just do whatever I want.” We left slavery to Pharaoh in order to become partners with the living G-d in bringing the potential of Creation to fulfillment. With Torah as the guidebook and Mitzvot as the terms of the arrangement, freedom has always meant responsibility. Pirkei Avot purposefully misreads the Torah: When the Torah reads, חָר֖וּת עַל־הַלֻּחֹֽת , “The writing of G-d was charut, inscribed upon the Tablets” (Ex. 32:16), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: אַל תִּקְרָא חָרוּת אֶלָּא חֵרוּת – “Don’t read charut/inscribed on the tablets, but cherut/freedom was on those tablets” (Pirkei Avot 6:2).

The commanding voice of Jewish history is never to take freedom for granted. It’s a delicate sapling that needs to be tended in order to continue to blossom. With freedom comes responsibility: responsibility to fulfill our own potential as Jews and simultaneously to protect the well-being of anyone who is vulnerable or hurting or marginalized. With freedom comes responsibility: What could be more Jewish than that?

Happy semiquincentennial America. You remain a land of unfulfilled promises—but so is Jewish history. I’m okay with that.  Unfulfilled promises are still promises—as long as they are aspirations for what we can be, and not lies about who we already are.  Here’s hoping that 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will prompt us to renew our Declaration of Interdependence, making this a home of dignity, safety, liberty, and justice for all.

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A version of this essay was delivered at Am HaYam—Cape Cod Havurah in Orleans, MA, in June 2026.

[1] “America,” Allen Ginsberg, in Howl and Other Poems, City Lights, 1956

A Century of Mel Brooks

I’m writing from a lounge in Nottinghamshire, England, which of course is making me think of all the culture and literature that emerged from the mythology of this place. Specifically, I’m thinking of how much I don’t like Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

No disrespect to the auteur, though. Like many of us, I grew up on Mel Brooks, who celebrates his 100th birthday this week. It’s just that I think what they say about Mel is like what they say about Mad Magazine: your favorite era tends to be when you first discovered him. Older fans tend to think the later stuff is crap and younger aficionados find it a little hard to relate to what their elders considered funny.

As a child of the late 1970s and 1980s (History of the World Part One was the first R-rated movie I ever saw in the movie theater), my favorite Mel has always been High Anxiety (1978), his Hitchcock homage. In that farce, Mel himself takes his first star-turn in the lead role as Dr. Richard Thorndyke, the new director of The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. When we were kids, my brother and I could recite every line – and sometimes, on long car rides, that’s exactly what we’d do.

“You’re the cocker’s daughter?” Busted eardrums. Nurse Diesel. And: no one who’s appreciated Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) will ever be able to take it seriously after seeing Mel suffer a similar, but different, avian assault in High Anxiety.

 As one of only 28 people in history who are EGOT winners, Mel Brooks certainly has left his mark on American culture.  He’s also embraced by the Jewish community as one of our own—he was even the subject of an enjoyable biography by Jeremy Dauber in the excellent Yale Jewish Lives series. So we might ask, why does Mel Brooks belong in the pantheon of great 20th century Jews? (As for the 21st century—thank G-d we still have him, but it seems like a bit of a victory lap.)

Born Melvin Kaminsky, Mel’s early c.v. follows a classic Jewish 20th century arc: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in a tenement in Brooklyn, he fell in love with theater and movies and was determined to make a career in show business. He fought the Nazis in Europe during World War II, then returned home to start a comedy career in that safe haven for post-war Jews, the borscht belt in the Catskills. Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Get Smart, and the movies followed in the 1960s.

It seems to me that Mel Brooks’s comedy was always that easy sort of “Our Crowd” humor: if you know, you know. These are familiar characters, accents, and punchlines; it was warm and comfortable to be with people who were so recognizable. I don’t think his humor ever displayed a deep knowledge about Judaism—just about Jewish-Americanism.

Take a look at History of the World Part One—or even, G-d help us, Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Spaceballs:  the belly laughs and slapstick and knowing winks to Jewish points-of-reference are all there, but they’re of the most obvious kinds. Bris jokes. Jewish American princesses. Shlemiels and shlimazels. The easiest and most obvious touchstones for belly laughs.

But there’s more going on beneath the surface.

Mel always maintained that his humor was a weapon against the antisemites. This becomes clear in Dauber’s biography and Mel’s somewhat less useful memoir, All About Me! (2021). Considering that Mel was on the ground in Europe with the U.S. army during World War II, he internalized the ghastly meaning of Jew-hatred. But instead of becoming self-righteous, or a social activist, he weaponized his humor.

His comedy wasn’t the pointed political humor that emerged in the 60s and 70s—think Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, and ultimately Richard Pryor. Instead, he turned Nazis into buffoons. We’re not afraid of you, his humor maintained; no—I’m laughing at you and your idiotic hate.

Obviously, the culmination of this is The Producers (1967), where the Nazis are a bunch of goose-stepping, effeminate, and utterly ridiculous morons. It’s before my time, but it definitely belongs in the time capsule of the American Jewish experience.

I have two reflections about The Producers that I want to share.

The first is a story that was told to me by an old friend, a generation older than me. (I’ll leave her anonymous, because she told me this story 30 years ago, and I haven’t doublechecked my recollection with her.) She told me this story about seeing the movie in the cinema when it first came out.

She told me: first remember what the Holocaust meant in the mid-1960s. It was still an open, festering wound. Twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the massacre of one-third of the Jews in the world was incomprehensible. And there were survivors—not the precious few elders telling their stories that we have today, but even people who were still young in 1967 who had been through the camps and were trying to navigate life in America after the Shoah.

People weren’t talking about the Shoah yet. Elie Wiesel’s Night was still new; there were very few other Holocaust memoirs available. There was a stunned, silent PTSD in the Jewish world.

So she and her friends went to see the new movie The Producers on Christmas Eve in New York. There were only Jewish people in the audience. And the movie commences. Kenneth Mars plays the deranged ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind who has written a musical “love letter” to Hitler. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder mount the play on Broadway, knowing that it’s the worst thing ever written. And there’s its centerpiece, “Springtime for Hitler.”

My friend described what it was like to be in that movie theater. Silence, shocked silence. Were we allowed to laugh at these things in 1967? The wounds were so fresh…

And then, at some point, a lone person in the audience starts laughing. Loudly. And it has a ripple effect. There is a great emotional release, and suddenly the whole theater is full of riotous laughter for the rest of the show. She told me that she’s never, before or since, experienced that kind of catharsis at the movies.

That’s what Mel Brooks means by “dancing on Hitler’s grave” – and I think he’d be immortal for that alone.

But I have one postscript to that story.

Because not long ago I rewatched The Producers for the first time in many years.

And I have to admit… it made me uncomfortable in the middle of the 2020s. The Shoah-humor didn’t land quite so easily; lisping Nazis didn’t seem as funny as they used to.

I think this represents a change in Jewish self-awareness. After October 7, after the Tree of Life terrorist attacks, after the constant drumbeat of antisemitic and antizionist assaults against us… Is it possible that we feel a little less secure in our place in the world? That the things at which we laughed at from a place of security a few years ago suddenly seem not so funny upon considering our vulnerabilities?  

I’m all in favor of using humor to deflate the haters. This is an old Jewish tradition going back to the Book of Esther. But humor has a way of reverberating back upon ourselves, revealing things about our collective psyche that is hidden beneath the surface.

How can it be that The Producers was a cathartic release for an audience in the 1960s—and half a century later, it suddenly makes us feel very vulnerable about a world in which the ground feels like it’s shifting beneath us?

Perhaps Dr. Richard Thorndyke (of the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous) would have a deeper analysis to share. In the meantime, a very happy birthday to Mel Brooks. May he live to 120—and beyond.

Sharing the Spirit - A Commentary on Parashat B'ha'alotekha

Here’s the guest commentary I wrote on this week’s Torah portion for Hebrew College’s “70 Faces of Torah” site:

Sharing the Spirit: The Case of Eldad and Medad

Enjoy! And Shabbat Shalom,

Neal

What I Wish the American Resistance Would Learn from Israelis Today

National Independence Days should be celebrations—but they should also be times for reflection and looking within, about what it means to belong to a nation and the relative health and stability of that society. Today, Israel’s 78th Independence Day, provides no shortage of these opportunities.

This year—and likewise anticipating the 250th Independence Day of the United States—I’m  thinking of the things I wish that Americans should learn from Israelis at this fraught moment for both of our nations.

Of course, Jews and all lovers of Israel are living at a perilous moment—surely it’s the most perilous moment of my lifetime—when surging antisemitism, often cloaked as anti-Zionism, comes at us from every ideological direction. Many Jews, myself very much included, feel more politically homeless than we ever have before.

(As for the exhausted “Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?” debate, I’m sick of it. If they aren’t quite the same thing, at least we can say: The Venn diagram of the two has an enormous amount of overlap.)

For three years at least, Yom Ha-Atzma’ut has been a day of conflicting emotions. In 2025 and 2024, we celebrated Independence amidst unspeakable heartache while hostages were still held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. In 2023, the enemy clearly was within; Independence Day was marked during the perpetual protests against the government’s antidemocratic “judicial reform.”  This year, we observe the holiday with the backdrop of the War with Iran, the constant rain of missiles upon Israel, and the seething antisemitism that is affecting all Jews everywhere.

What, exactly, is there to celebrate in the midst of so much anguish and violence?

Of course, there is plenty to celebrate when it comes to national pride, a nation’s extraordinary accomplishments against all odds, and the beauty of a society that is much better than its elected government. But there’s something else—something about the confluence of Israel’s 78th and America’s 250th.

The resistance movement in Israel has been activized now for years. Throughout the “judicial reform years” (and they’re certainly not over; just postponed), Israelis took to the streets week-in and week-out to protest their government’s antidemocratic excesses. After October 7, that movement pivoted, and the massive weekly protests refocused on bringing home the hostages, supporting grief-stricken families, and continuing to protest the excesses of a government that was more invested in politics and posturing than in the suffering of its own people (let alone the suffering of others). I was privileged to be with the demonstrators on each of my return trips to Israel in the past few years.

I believe that American society would be much healthier if it learned a few things from these Israelis.

First and most important, the Israeli demonstrations are so utterly patriotic.

The demonstrations, especially throughout 2023 and in the later days of the war against Hamas, were outright condemnations of a despised and corrupt government. Names were named.

Look at all the flags. July 2023 in Jerusalem (Photo: NG)

But simultaneously, the demonstrations were awash in the national colors of blue and white. There were Israeli flags everywhere. Every gathering paused to commence or conclude with the singing of Hatikvah. It was not lost on a single soul that the purpose of the demonstrations was to reclaim the very idea of “Israeli-ness,” to take it back from zealots who insisted that only those who conformed to their vision were the true lovers of the nation.

In the past few years, we’ve attended no shortage of demonstrations in America as well—Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, No Kings, and so on. And I have no doubt that we who oppose MAGA are patriots—but try a little thought experiment. Imagine marching at any of those with an American flag  and distributing flags to fellow demonstrators. Imagine stopping the rallies at strategic moments and saying, “Now we’re going to all sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” It would have been awkward; it would have been tone-deaf. I know; I was there.

In America, the center-left has long conceded the rhetoric of flag, nation, and putting-country-first to the political right. That is one of the right’s big strategic victories—and it’s tragic.

It’s tragic because I’ve always believed that love—and we’re talking about love, aren’t we?—is always about encouraging the loved one to be the best it can be. When I think of the love of my family, I know that my love is unconditional, but it does not mean I always approve of their decisions or choices. (And vice-versa for my family towards me. Trust me.) Love means: I want you to grow into the best version of yourself. Love means caring so much that the lover must sometimes say “No” or “The road you’re going down is destructive to you and others.”

A relationship without loving critique [in Hebrew, תוכחה] and redirection from a harmful path is certainly not the highest expression of love. It may not even be “love” at all.

“ It was not lost on a single soul that the purpose of the demonstrations was to reclaim the very idea of “Israeli-ness,” to take it back from zealots who insisted that only those who conformed to their vision were the true lovers of the nation.”

This surely applies to the love of one’s country. And that’s profoundly what I saw at every anti-government, pro-hostage-family rally in Israel over the past few years. Israelis—and, G-d knows, Palestinians—are suffering under a government that has given license to the most extremist zealots and Kahanists. PM Netanyahu has empowered Ben Gvir and Smotrich and their ilk to prop up the government with their zealotry; there is a moral rot at the heart of the ruling coalition that the demonstrators are responding to in the name of their love of country and the country’s future.

We could use more of this at home.

Second, the Israeli rallies have been inclusive, not exclusive. The demonstrations that took place week after week throughout the war clearly had a political point of view: Netanyahu’s coalition of violent ultra-nationalists and religious zealots is toxic. But the thrust of the demonstrations was not the far-left. It was a coalition of the pro-democracy center-left, center, and center-right. It was composed of neighbors and fellow citizens who probably disagreed about a wide swath of policies—but agreed that the moral health of their country was at stake, so they were able to find common ground.

No doubt compromises were made by some in order to be there. Good. Moral purity is fine for a Mussar beit midrash, but compromise is a very healthy thing for democratic societies.

“Only the people can save Israel.” February 2026. (Photo: NG)

As for me, when I attended the New York pro-immigrant march in the wake of the ICE slayings of Renee Good and then Alex Pretti in January, I couldn’t have felt more peripheral. I’m appalled by the violent excesses of ICE and want to stand with the immigrant community. But that rally was dominated by the DSA—and their severity, intolerance, and outright antisemitism couldn’t have been clearer. I couldn’t get away from these people quickly enough.

Third, the Israelis have the persistence to be in this for the long haul. The most astonishing thing about the Israeli demonstrations was their refusal to go away—for months, then for years. The judicial crisis was such that people kept showing up, week after week; hundreds of thousands of them in cities all over Israel (this, for a country whose population is only 10.2 million). For years, Saturday nights have been given over to standing up for one’s country.

Again, I think of the American resistance rallies. They demand weeks of notification, publicity, planning. And the next day? Back to business or sports or our phones, as usual. Maybe the crowds will come out again six months from now.

So Chag Samayach to the People of Israel and all who support her and love her. Celebrate our accomplishments with pride and hope and endless resilience in the face of so much heartbreak. I’d give the last word to Amos Oz ז״ל, the great Israeli novelist whose voice of peace was profound because it was so unromantic, but absolutely pragmatic.

No man is an island, said John Donne, but I humbly dare to add: No man and no woman is an island, but every one of us is a peninsula, half attached to the mainland, half facing the ocean—one half connected to family and friends and culture and tradition and nation and sex and language and many other things, and the other half wanting to be left alone to face the ocean…

The condition of peninsula is the proper human condition. That’s what we are and that’s what we deserve to remain. So, in a sense, in every house, in every family, in every human condition, in every human connection, we actually have a relationship between a number of peninsulas, and we’d better remember this before we try to shape each other and turn each other around and make the next person turn our way while he or she actually needs to face the ocean for a while.

                        —Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic [1]

[1] Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic (Princeton: 2002), pp.69-71

Shabbat Mosaic in Netanya

Netanya, the coastal Mediterranean city halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, has become one of our regular Shabbat destinations in Israel. This is thanks to the remarkable work of Rabbi Edgar Nof—more about him in a moment—and our dear friends Anita and Fred Finkelman, who bring me in as a scholar-in-residence to teach some classes. I’m so grateful, because this is one extraordinary community.

Kehillat Natan-Ya, part of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, is a mosaic of nationalities. Looking around the packed room during the Shabbat services, I saw people who came here from Africa, Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Georgia, Central and South America, the Philippines, the U.K., France, South Africa, and the U.S.—as well as the stam Israelis who were there. Part of the miracle of this place is that many of these are people who would not have found a place in a more mainstream Jewish community, for any of a variety of reasons. But Rabbi Edgar Nof brought them all home.

Here’s a photo of Rabbi Edgar Nof doing Mitzvahs in a Haifa school from two years ago. (Photo: NG)

Edgar is a whirlwind of Mitzvahs. The Kavod Tzedakah Fund, which my friends and I founded over 30 years ago, has supported Edgar’s organization Bridges for Hope (Gesharim LeTikvah) since its inception. He’s supporting impoverished families, victims of terror, new immigrants, elderly Holocaust survivors, and other people living on the fringe. He’s in a half-dozen of the poorest schools in Haifa, teaching pluralistic and open-hearted Judaism and working with administrators to get supermarket food cards to the neediest families.

Like everyone else, Edgar’s life and the life of this community was profoundly changed after October 7. He once told me about how, in the wake of the massacres, he officiated at a funeral of a family of four. And there are memorials all around the synagogue of its local heroes who were killed that day and in the aftermath.

Most indefatigably, he’s doing Jewish life-cycle events for those who may not have had any Jewish connection otherwise. Edgar must have officiated at four bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies this week alone. And conversions to Judaism: he tells Heidi and me that at this point he’s brought over 800 people to Judaism in his career. Just amazing, and we got to see some of it up close on Friday.

I arrived at Netanya to teach my class. Edgar said he couldn’t be with us beforehand—he had a memorial service earlier in the day and a bar mitzvah in the afternoon; then my class, which segues into Shabbat. (I used to think I had a busy schedule.)

The service is gloriously energetic. It’s noisy, and there are no formalities, and there aren’t enough  siddurim. Children are up and down to the bimah to help Edgar out throughout the service; so, too, are adult honorees who come up to mark joyful milestones. Half the room has been given percussion instruments to tap or shake as we sing out the Shabbat prayers; it’s Shabbat Shirah, after all. The whole thing is a whirlwind and it’s wonderful.

In the middle of the service, a boy and his father are called up to the pulpit. Edgar opens the Aron Kodesh and places the Torah in the boy’s arms. He’s been studying and preparing for conversion—his mother is not Jewish—and this moment will make it official. He processes the Torah around the room, as everyone else rains candies upon his head and sings, Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov! The boy is composed, but his father has an awestruck look in his eyes—the echo of a hundred generations of Jews before him—as if he can’t believe that this moment was actually possible.

And then the entire room—this congregation from at least five continents—erupts and cries out: Achinu Atah! Achinu Atah! Achinu Atah! (Three times: “You are our brother!”).

Excuse me a moment, there’s something in my eye.

The service continues, Edgar strumming his guitar. Singing beside him is his longtime volunteer cantor Anna—she’s a young Philippine immigrant whom Edgar also brought to Judaism.

Elisheva officially becomes part of the Jewish people (screenshot from Natan-Ya’s livestream)

And then, breaking with the idea that the sequel is never as good as the original, another woman is called to the podium. She’s originally from Guatemala; she came to Israel and married a Sefardi man. Her husband and a handful of children stand beside her; she’s the second person tonight to celebrate a conversion to Judaism. She’s taken the Hebrew name Elisheva.

Elisheva takes out her prepared notes, and starts to thank her family, and the rabbi, and this community… but she gets choked up; it takes a while for her to regain her composure. And so, too, for the rest of us. And then, in unison and resounding with unbelievable excitement:  Achoteinu At! Achoteinu At! Achoteinu At! (“You are our sister! You are our sister! You are our sister!”).

In the language of our tradition, she has been embraced “under the wings of the Shekhinah.” But she’s also just been embraced by the Jewish people, as represented by this beautiful mosaic of worshippers.

Frankly, it was one of the most joyful and loving Shabbat services I’ve been to in a long time, amidst the joyful cacophony. This is the authentic face that I wish Israel were more adept at putting forward to the world: pluralistic, joyful, and welcoming—with room for everyone.

Shadow and Light (Israel Reflections #1)

Heidi and I came to Israel this week with some particular goals. We wanted to be with as many of our friends and friends-who-are-like-family as possible, to do some volunteering and demonstrating, and to give away Tzedakah money to people and places that are making the society better. It’s not a vacation; Israel evokes deep feelings and I’ve been on shpilkes for much of my time here.

This has been a poignant week in Israel, a week of shadow and light.

First, the shadows.

I hope that by the time you read this we are not at war with Iran. This is a war-scarred and traumatized society; nearly two-and-a-half years since the terrorist massacres of October 7, it seemed as if some sort of equilibrium was, at least, within sight. Everyone seems to be going about their daily lives with some semblance of normality, but the emotions beneath the veneer are complicated.

Last July, Iranian missiles fell from the skies, sending people in the middle of the nights into their shelters and safe rooms. Everyone is geared up for that to happen again this week, as American carriers are in place in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Air Force is conducting drills, and Iran is threatening to respond in kind on Israel.

I’ll admit I’m a little nervous about all this, but my Israeli friends have told me how to take precautions and prepare for an attack that seems like it’s coming.

Beyond that, Israelis are wrestling with a parallel dilemma as Americans: the assault on democratic institutions by a corrupt administration. The horrible situation of unchecked settler violence in the West Bank — as well as surging rates of intra-Arab violence — is at a boiling point here. So we joined, with thousands of others, the pro-democracy rallies and demonstrations that have been running perpetually for years. Everyone knows that the status quo can’t hold.

So of course there are shadows in Israel. But shadows don’t exist in unrelenting darkness, and we’ve also experienced an enormous amount of light.

The biggest story in Israel this week was—finally, 843 days after that cursed Oct. 7—the retrieval and return of Ron Gvili’s body from Gaza. For the first time in 12 years, there are no Israeli hostages, alive or dead, in the dungeons and tunnels of Gaza. Every Israeli is cognizant of this; everyone was aware of his funeral that took place this week. Ron Gvili was an Israeli hero, and his family had been desperately holding on to the slimmest hope that he was perhaps still alive. This week they received the closure of at least knowing his fate.

So the yellow and blue ribbons are coming down. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum / “Bring Them Home Now” organization held its final Kabbalat Shabbat service in Tel Aviv.  Synagogues no longer recite special prayers for the hostages. And I removed “Bring Them Home” from my email signature. People are finally trying to move forward and confront the long process of healing a traumatized generation.

Considering the trauma and the healing, there were two particular points of light that I want to share with you:

Transcending Trauma: We visited with my friend Anita Shkedi this week. I’ve written about Anita before; she is an internationally recognized authority on hippotherapy, using horses for physical and emotional therapy. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Anita’s most recent book is Horses Heal PTSD, and since Oct. 7 she and her Transcending Trauma team have been caring for survivors of the massacre and the IDF soldiers who have been in Gaza and elsewhere. How clearly can I say this? She puts shattered lives and bodies back together, teaching her clients the art of grooming and caring for and bonding with horses, and then the therapy that takes place on horseback. It’s awesome to be in her presence and to hear the stories of her people; it’s a great privilege to support her work through the Kavod Tzedakah Fund.

Neal and Anita Shkedi of Transcending Trauma teaching in Netanya, January 29, 2026

 Shai Tsabari with Avner Gadasi and Yehuda Keisar: Heidi and I did some volunteer work and spent time listening to a lot of Israeli stories over the past few days. By Wednesday night we were ready for a break, and I spotted that Israeli musician Shai Tsabari was performing with two of the most renowned Jewish Yemenite musicians of the generation, Avner Gadasi and Yehuda Keisar. Tsabari is of  the generation of Israeli rock stars whose music is a mixture of western (rock, dance, psychedelia) and eastern (Jewish piyyutim, and especially the melodies of Tsabari’s ancestry in Yemen). He’s also known for his engaging and soulful personality that draws people in and gets them up and dancing.

Avner Gadasi, Shai Tsabari, Yehuda Keisar (photo: NG)

Shai Tsabari and a member of his band with a unique instrument (photo: NG)

I knew the concert would be fun—but I didn’t realize how deeply it would move me. The place was packed with Israelis, who by the second half of the show were on their feet, singing every word, and some dancing on chairs and tables. It struck me: here is a nation that has been so traumatized and so soaked in grief; a society that for the past two-and-a-half years could recite the name of every hostage. Tonight I felt a catharsis, a release, a transcendence that is reflected in the slogan “We Will Dance Again.”

It doesn’t mean that the next morning the nation won’t resume confronting its PTSD. But for one night, a few hundred of us were smiling, slapping hands, dancing to the old-new sounds of Jewish musicians, and realizing that there is an unspoken spirit that binds this people together in history and hope.

They are Home! The Simcha of This Moment

A time for mourning, and a time for dancing.
—Ecclesiastes 3:4

 There is only one thing we say to Death: “Not today.”
—Syrio Forel, Game of Thrones

 
What an extraordinary moment in history this is.

For two years—738 days—I’ve started every online class I’ve taught with a prayer for the hostages, the 251 babies, children, teenagers, and adults who were kidnapped by the Hamas death cult on Oct. 7. On Monday the last of the living hostages were brought home to their families (although as I write, only four of the bodies of those who were murdered by the terrorists have been returned).

These images, clockwise from upper left:
1.     Omri Miran reunited with his daughters (Roni, 4, and Alma, 2) and his wife Lishay Miran-Lavi (GPO)
2.     Alon Ohel reunited with his family (courtesy of the Ohel family)
3.     Matan Zanguaker reunited with his mother Einav (IDF photo)
4.     Eitan Mor reunited with his parents (IDF photo)
All photos from The Times of Israel, October 13, 2025

Emotionally, this is a complicated moment. We’ve been through so much: The death and destruction of war. The surging Jew-hatred locally and around the world. The silence or outright abandonment of friends who turned away from Jewish suffering.

“On Simchat Torah, we should dance, and we should dance like everything depends on it—because in a sense it does. ”

Yet for two years my priority has been the hostages. I’ve woken up in the morning thinking of them and gone to sleep at night thinking of them. So the outrageous (but not unmitigated) joy of seeing the survivors coming home is just staggering.

In case you haven’t seen this clip yet, this 5-minute collection of some of the hostages being reunited with their families is one of the most incredible videos I’ve ever seen. Pay attention to the father reciting Sh’ma Yisrael when he sees his son for the first time in two years; listen to the voice of the mother when she says the Shehecheyanu blessing:

There remain, of course, many things to parse about this moment—politically, socially, and religiously. But in the short term, there are some Jewish priorities to attend to. We’re on the eve of Simchat Torah, the culmination of the Sukkot holiday when it is a Mitzvah to be joyful and dance with our communities and our Torah. The past two Simchat Torahs have been so utterly ambivalent. We all asked: how dare we celebrate and dance when the reality of Simchat Torah is the Yartzeit of 1,195 people who were massacred and the date when 251 people were taken hostage? Would we ever celebrate this holiday again?

This year, we’ll dance.

The Book of Ecclesiastes—that is, Kohelet, which is traditionally read on Sukkot—knows a secret about dancing. In the famous poem at the beginning of Chapter 3 (“To everything there is a season… A time to be born and a time to die,” etc.), one of the couplets is: A time for mourning and a time for dancing.

Do you see it? For Kohelet, dancing is life; it’s the antonym of mourning!

Simcha doesn’t simply mean “be happy.” Jewish texts speak of  שִׂמְחָה שֶׁל מִצְוָה /  the simcha of being involved in a Mitzvah. But some Mitzvot are sad: burying the dead, comforting mourners, and so on. Where is the “joy” there? The answer is that “simcha” is something much deeper:  It means choosing life, connecting ourselves with the Source of Life, and turning our backs on cults of death and destruction.

“Simcha”—choosing life—feels like a countercultural value; it’s an act of spiritual resistance against the forces of nihilism that can threaten to swallow us up.

There is so much to be skeptical about; about the reliability of the bad actors involved, about the ability for cease fires to hold, and so on. But that video of families reunited tells us everything about what simcha is all about. On Simchat Torah, we should dance, and we should dance like everything depends on it—because in a sense it does.

Let’s dance on Simchat Torah because we embrace life, not annihilation. Dance with the simcha of the families that have been reunited. Dance as the Kotzker Rebbe instructed his disciples: “Imagine yourselves on a mountain peak, on a razor’s edge, and now: dance, dance, I tell you!”[1]

[1] In Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire (1972)