Our Last Chance to Act Before the Door Closes

The holiday of Sukkoth is many things: a time of joy, a time of celebrating our link to the Land of Israel, and a time of community. For a procrastinator like me, however, Sukkoth was another chance, a license to keep delaying. 

In the time when we sent physical Rosh Hashanah cards, I took comfort in the fact that it’s supposedly ok to send them until Sukkoth; and my glee was enormous when I learned that, according to many post-Talmudic sources, the final judgment of the Yamim Noraim (the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is not truly sealed until Shemini Atzeret (the last day of Sukkoth). If I didn’t repent enough during the High Holidays, I still had another chance.

Now, like all procrastinators, I simply moved the urgency from one day to another and augmented the stress, because while yes, Sukkoth is one more chance, it’s the last one for the year. Like getting an extension on a term paper but then waiting until the night before the new due date to start it. This is it; nowhere to escape now. Some people claim to work better that way, but there are big risks: If the all-nighter you were counting on pulling is derailed by, say, indigestion, you’re done for.

I can’t shake the feeling that this entire year, we’ve been living in that liminal space between Yom Kippur and Sukkot. We’ve been pushing one deadline after another, rushing past red lines and ignoring warning signs.

For many years, decades even, we have in a figurative sense been a people of procrastinators. Israel knew it had to deal with its internal conflicts, or its enemies would take advantage. The government knew that Hamas was a ticking bomb. We knew that emergency and relief services weren’t up to standard. But in all cases, the response was, “Well, maybe some other time, there are other priorities now.” 

In the Diaspora, we knew that antisemitism was a problem. Some of us have been alerting for years, if not decades, about the increasing normalization of antisemitic discourse on both the right and the left. Alas, we kept kicking the can down the road. We ignored one deadline after another, relativized, rationalized, and postponed a reckoning.

We knew that we were not instilling a sense of belonging and loyalty in many Jews, and we believed that there was time to address that problem at some point in the future. We also knew that, as a community, we were failing at making Jewish life compelling and affordable, and we kept putting that in the “to deal with someday” drawer.  We knew that the relationship of many young Jews with Israel was eroding, and we thought that there would be a time in which we would go beyond birthright to build a sense of true peoplehood on both sides of the ocean. We felt we had serious gaps in the quality of our leadership – rabbinical, professional, and lay – but we thought addressing them wasn’t an urgent priority. We sensed that conspiratorial ideologies on the right and extreme wokeism on the left would make Jewish life unsafe in the West, but we acted as though we had all the time in the world to address them.

And now here we are.

But Sukkoth tells us that there’s one last chance—one final instance of appeal. The door is closing, but we can stick our foot in the gap if we run fast enough. Antisemitism seems closer than ever to becoming normative in American culture. The train is sounding the horn, but it hasn’t left the station yet. Israel is on the verge of internal dissolution, but the heroism of its people in this long war shows that the dice aren’t cast just yet. For many Jews, the sense of loyalty and belonging to the Jewish People seems irretrievable, but the surge of Jewish interest that we’re experiencing tells us that not all is lost.

We are all rattled, exhausted, and disappointed. And yet, we must now recover the sense of urgency that we should’ve had a while back. As the Chinese proverb says – the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second-best time is now.

Yes, the door isn’t closed just yet. The same way that the doors of teshuva aren’t closed until Shemini Atzeret. But this is it. We can’t hit snooze on the alarm clock again and ask for, “just ten more minutes.”

Now, every funder needs to feel that it’s “now or never,” that there’s no time to lose, and that the time for being cagey and risk-averse has passed. We all need to work and fund as though we have just one last chance.

I know it’s not healthy to live like that. I know also that we have overused the concept of “existential crisis” for things that were nothing close. However, there are times when we truly face existential crisis; times in which we must live with urgency, feeling that everything depends on what we do next. 

If my kids are reading this, don’t have any illusions, boys. I’m not telling you that you can or should postpone your homework until you have only one last chance to present it. I think it’s clear that we should have addressed these issues long ago. But the truth is that sometimes, I’ve produced my best work “in extremis.” Adrenaline rushed through my body, making me extra focused and alert. I was suddenly motivated to do great things, things I knew I had to do but avoided. The urgency empowered me to make hard choices, change, and move out of my comfort zone because the time to do thigs later was gone.  

What does philanthropic urgency mean? First, funding boldly, going above and beyond. Now is the time to dig deeper, to make sure that new contributions don’t come at the expense of your previous ones. Second, putting ego aside and collaborating. Third, not being dogmatic. Moving across ideological and political lines to fund what works, not what provides you affirmation. Fourth, not being afraid of being assertive and vocal. This is the time to make waves, to uphold Jewish rights with strength and dignity. The antisemites say that we Jews can cause hurricanes, so let’s prove them right. And fifth, let’s prioritize our own. We are universalists to a fault, and right now we need to feel the urgency of helping our people first.

We all feel that so much is hanging by a thread. Curiously, the word for thread in Biblical Hebrew is ‘tikvah,’ the same as hope. The word is used to name the cord that Rahab ties to her house in Jericho as the signal for the attackers to spare her and her family. It’s also used to denote the rope that pulls a bucket with life-saving water from a well.

Yes, everything is hanging by a thread. And that thread, if we use properly, is our hope.

Chag Sameach,

Andrés