My curiosity in our story, the Jewish people, began during the political rifts in Israel: the boiling of decades-long simmering tensions between religious and secular. Years before October 7, Israel’s leaders began to call out the fracturing Israeli society, some even saying we are on the brink of civil war.
In the diverging visions for the future of Israel and the loss of many diasporas’ Jewish families to high rates of intermarriage and secularisation, Israel was experiencing a political and social deadlock for the vision and continuation of the only Jewish nation to exist in two millennia.
The atrocities of October 7 brought a renewed wave of unity that swept across Israel and US Jewish campuses rallying around messianic flags. Hordes of volunteers flew over oceans to support IDF soldiers, Charedim suited up in IDF uniforms and seculars discovered spirituality in donning tefillin, giving rise to sincere camaraderie and mutual respect for otherness, and togetherness in facing an existential threat.
As we came together, the Jew has found himself vulnerable on the world stage and at home in the Jewish nation. We witnessed the disregard for Israel’s security needs at the United Nations to the October 7 massacre, and the resulting misinformation and media bias throughout the world, and confusion among the diaspora as to the rightness of and support for Israel.
The intergenerational Jewish consensus has led us to accept that antisemitism, pogroms and forced exiles will always be a part of the Jewish narrative. Existential threat and possibility of annihilation will always return us, in teshuvah, back to faith and unity.
I began to wonder: will my children and grandchildren suffer their own exile, pogrom or October 7 massacre? Are we bound to an ever-ending history of suffering for the continuity of the Jewish people? What is the connective tissue of our internal Jewish identity, independent of existential threats? Can we find strength and sustaining unity in anything other than vulnerability?
Until today, we are bystanders in the covenant of fate, the brit goral. As Rav Soloveitchik explains, the Jewish people are subjected to a collective history unfolding, no matter if a Jew dismisses Torah, intermarries or converts. Our collective history has been defined by a challenge to remember despite the external pressure to forget.
When we reject Torah, disunity and hardship ensue
The covenant of destiny, the brit ye’ud, is the other covenant given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. It is the eternal partnership with God to choose individual free will to shape our collective destiny – peoplehood.
When we abstain from or reject Torah, when we secularise in pursuit of material pleasures, when we become consumed by other ideologies – when we breach our covenantal belonging – disunity and ultimately hardship ensue for corrective discourse.
We may well be fated to be separated, despised and hated. However, to believe that who we are is defined by the hatred surrounding us is a choice. To believe the Jewish people must have existential threats to create peoplehood is to rely on a narrative outside ourselves.
Can our misguided conclusions from a narrative carried throughout generations of persecution and exile become cause for introspection? Because to accept that fate is to be a bystander of our own victimhood. To deny responsibility for who we are and how we got here is to be defined by what happens to us, not what we can become.
We must separate from what has happened to us and reflect on who we aspire to become. In this way, our narrative will shift from determinism to the fortitude of creation, builders of our destiny.
What requires builders has not yet been built. The acknowledgment of intergenerational wisdom, mesorah through Torah, can lead to builders of peace. If we seek a vision of the Jewish people and nation not dependent on external threat, we must build from within. We are the builders.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, recognised the dangers of decoupling timeless wisdom from religious scriptures. What replaces the principled self, one of obligations and responsibility, becomes the liberated self, one of desires and pleasures.
It is the liberated generation that gives rise to the unravelling of common ground once again as wisdom is replaced by the pursuit of happiness, too often resulting in a focus on individual needs.
We are the people of responsibility. Torah allows us to recognise our story is both created and unformed. Responsibility and obligations form cohesiveness from within rather than without.
The Jewish people, abiding by the laws of Torah, focus on values and morality that give us the ability to create a society of internalised ethereal truths and lasting unity. This is the choice given to every generation of Jewish people.
What was assumed by many to be the generation consumed with social media and self-interest, stood as the generation of IDF soldiers to defend Israel; swathes of courageous Jewish college students standing against US campus antisemitism, volunteers from around the world flying into Israel during the war and the numerous individuals who helped save countless lives on October 7 reflect the beckoning of the soul to return to a life of unity and responsibility that can vindicate and lead us towards the covenant of destiny.
I pray that these past couple of years of hardship awaken and inspire Jewish readers to this moment of the potential for what we can become together. I hope that together, as builders, we create a narrative of internal strength, not external vulnerability.
We are tasked with creating the path forward. The Jewish narrative is one of hope. According to Rabbi Sacks, “[hope] tells us that the world doesn’t have to be the way it’s been.”
Our collective narrative has the potential to create an internal voice built from within for all generations to come. The narrative is the point of hope. Changing the source of our internal fortitude we will create the world that is not the way it has always been.
Benjamin Amram is a LSJS Rabbi Sacks Fellow living in Israel
Image: post-October 7 British volunteers in Israel with the charity Sar El
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