In November 2024, the United States held its presidential election. That same week, I met a sweet boy in the city of Modi’in who had recently made aliyah with his family. “I really hope Harris wins!” he said excitedly.
I looked at him in surprise, and he explained: “My grandparents in New York always say that if Harris wins, that’s it, it’s the end of America, and they’re making aliyah.”
Trump won. His grandparents are probably still in the U.S. But this week I remembered that boy. What will his grandparents do now?
With all due respect, the calls of our politicians since Mamdani’s win to make aliyah immediately sound unrealistic in the current situation. Most Jews in the world have never visited Israel at all. Read that sentence again before telling them to pack up and move here tomorrow morning.
Aliyah is the end of a long process of education, connection, identity, and learning. It begins from a very young age, in a Jewish kindergarten, which most Jewish American children do not attend. This is the reason why most of the new olim from the United States in recent years tend to be very religious, very Zionist, and already deeply connected. Unfortunately, that is a relatively small group.
That said, October 7 has shaken the ship. I have written many times about the “October 8 Jews.” Recently, in an English-language podcast for Tablet Magazine with Prof. Liel Leibovitz, I gave out my personal email and asked people to send me their stories.
My inbox was filled with dozens of testimonies. If I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes, I would have thought they were invented. It seems impossible: the Jewish spark awakening, simultaneously, in so many distant brothers and sisters.
Masha, born in Moscow and now living in San Francisco, wrote that after Simchat Torah she realized she was hiding the news from her daughter – and decided to stop. As a result, the two embarked on a journey of Jewish learning. On Sundays they go to a Judaism class at Chabad. The class is meant for children, but the mother and daughter attend without shame, eager to learn everything from the beginning.
Brad from New Jersey wrote that he doesn’t even know exactly why, but in response to what was happening in Israel, he began to put on tefillin and make Kiddush for the first time in his life. He doesn’t understand the connection; he just feels deep inside that it is the right response. He also started learning Hebrew, literally from the letter Aleph.
David from Atlanta wrote that he put up a mezuzah on his front door, wears a Magen David necklace, and is thinking about visiting Israel for the first time, because his parents never took him. He’s 50.
None of these email writers know about the message that came before or after them, but together, they tell a story filled with optimism. It’s not only Israeli teenagers who are suddenly excited about Selichot and tzitzit. It’s also fifty-year-olds in California who have never heard a song by Yonatan Razel.
Last Shabbat marked the global celebration of the Shabbos Project, launched by Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein, Chief Rabbi of South Africa, and which keeps gaining momentum. Every year he succeeds in uniting millions around the world for a shared Jewish Shabbat. This past Shabbat in New York, it was especially important as large numbers of institutions, synagogues, and communities called on Jews to come together to demonstrate a strong, public Jewish identity, and to stand with Israel in the face of rising hatred and antisemitism.
Will we now see the “November 5 Jews” in the wake of Mamdani’s election? Will we see more and more awakening, clarity, and light emerging from the darkness?
That also depends on us. Please G-d, may it be so.
In Memory of Lt. Hadar Goldin
This week, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, z”l, was finally brought to burial in Israel. For 11 years, our enemies sought to desecrate his dignity, and now we will honor his memory by learning from the writings he left behind.
The young Hadar began studying the famous work Mesillat Yesharim (“Path of the Just”) by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto – a foundational book about gradually refining one’s character, step by step. He listened to lectures on the book by Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel of the Eli pre-military academy, taking handwritten notes, and those notes were later published in a remarkable volume.
At the beginning of Mesillat Yesharim, it states: “A person was created only to delight in G-d.”
What does this mean? Hadar summarized for himself the meaning of true delight: “A person delights when he experiences something that aligns perfectly with his inner world. In daily life, we mostly see the world around us, taste it, experience it – but almost never do we see our own soul. All around us are countless screens and other concealments that hide a person from his soul, his personality, his essence.
“If I sink into pleasures that constantly change and fade, I will miss the possibility of lasting delight whose meaning is self-discovery. One must delight. Delight is the revelation of the soul. A person is obligated to find himself within himself, to discover and reveal his soul.”
May we merit true inner delight, and may we continue ascending the Path of the Just, in Hadar’s memory.
From Destruction Comes New Life
Lt. Col. Asaf Hamami, who fell in battle on Simchat Torah and whose body was held for over two years in Gaza, was brought to burial last week, finally bringing closure to his family.
Geula Rabi of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom sent me pictures of him visiting the kibbutz. In those terrible days of the “conception” – the misguided belief that Hamas was deterred – the residents of Kerem Shalom lived under the constant threat of sirens, with rocket fire an almost daily occurrence.
Part of their coping mechanism was through a moving communal ritual they called “planting in place of falling.” Whenever a missile barrage led to a rocket exploding in the kibbutz and creating a crater, they’d invite the community to plant a tree inside that very hole.
If the enemy already dug the pit for us, they explained, why not use it for planting? If there is already a hole in the earth, let something good, green, and fresh grow from it, something that wasn’t here before.
During one such ceremony, Hamami appears emotional, planting a tree together with the children of the kibbutz, and thanking them for inviting him.
“Many holes were dug here,” they told me this week at the kibbutz, which is now absorbing new families. “There are many gaps to fill. So much is missing.”
But the image of Hamami planting a sapling inside the crater gave them hope this week. That, they said, is his legacy: to grow from hardship.
Words of Comfort
The 20th of Cheshvan, which this year falls on November 11, is the fifth yahrzeit of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Britain.
Here is an inspiring passage from To Be a Jew, a booklet that I was privileged to compile from Rabbi Sacks’s teachings:
“Sometimes it is when we feel most alone that we discover we are not alone. We can encounter G-d in the midst of fear or a sense of failure.
“Sometimes our deepest spiritual experiences come when we least expect them, when we are closest to despair. It is then that the masks we wear are stripped away. We are at our point of maximum vulnerability – and it is when we are most fully open to G-d that G-d is most fully open to us. ‘G-d is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit’ (Ps. 34:18).
“Rebbe Nachman of Breslov used to say: ‘A person needs to cry to his Father in heaven with a powerful voice from the depths of his heart. Then G-d will listen to his voice and turn to his cry.’
“We find G-d not only in holy or familiar places but also in the midst of a journey, alone at night. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for You are with me’ (Ps.23:4). The most profound of all spiritual experiences, the base of all others, is the knowledge that we are not alone.
“There may be times in our lives – certainly there have been in mine – when the sun disappears and we enter the cloud of black despair. You can lose faith in humanity, or in yourself, or both. At such times, the knowledge that G-d has faith in us is transformative, redemptive.
“The real religious mystery, according to Judaism, is not our faith in G-d. It is G-d’s faith in us.
“We are here because a loving G-d brought the universe and life, and us, into existence – a G-d who knows our fears, hears our prayers, believes in us more than we believe in ourselves, who forgives us when we fail, lifts us when we fall and gives us the strength to overcome despair.”
Download your copy of Sivan Rahav-Meir’s booklet with commentary from Rabbi Sacks, zt”l, To Be a Jew in English free of charge at https://sivanrahavmeir.com/to-be-a-jew/
Find the original version in Hebrew at http://bit.ly/3yxoYkf
Translated by Yehoshua Siskind and Chava Wilschanski.