I have always been fascinated by the story of Hannah Senesh, who was part of the group of 32 parachutists from Mandatory Palestine that landed in Nazi-dominated Europe to fight the Germans and attempt to save Jews. I remember my mother telling me those stories and my elementary school teachers waxing admiringly about the parachutists' courage. The passing down of this story became multi-generational when my own children attended the Hannah Senesh School in New York.

Yet one thing I hadn’t been told as a child was how little the mission actually accomplished. The parachutists didn't kill a single Nazi or save a single Jew. Most were captured by the Gestapo and killed, Senesh among them. By any military reckoning, it was an utter failure.

Or was it?

Matti Friedman refuses to call it one. In his book Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, he argues that the parachutists' action was never really about the mission but about the story.  In a moment when Jews appeared almost entirely as objects of history—deported, trapped, murdered—the parachutists enacted a radically different Jewish posture. They put on uniforms, boarded aircraft, crossed borders, and voluntarily returned to Europe to fight. They could not reverse the Holocaust, but they represented Jews returning to what Friedman calls the “world of action.” They were not merely trying to save Jews; they were demonstrating what the new Jew was supposed to do when confronted with catastrophe: not wait, petition or despair, but act. The parachutists succeeded in that they provided an example for an entire generation that would soon need to fight for the establishment of the State of Israel.

As we commemorate Tisha Be’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, the story of the parachutists becomes informative.

Tisha Be’Av asks an almost unbearable question: What does a people do when its world is collapsing?

The Temple was not merely the holiest of buildings. It was the axis around which Jewish religious, political, and national life revolved. Its destruction in the year 70 was therefore more than a military defeat. It was the collapse of an entire form of Jewish existence. Jerusalem was devastated, sovereignty was extinguished, the sacrificial service ceased, and the organizing center of Jewish life disappeared.

Out of that catastrophe emerged two very different Jewish responses. Some Jews refused to surrender and moved into Masada, an almost inaccessible desert fortress where they resisted the Romans for three years. When defeat was inevitable, they chose collective suicide over captivity. Simultaneously, as Jerusalem fell, Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakay managed to escape the city with a group of disciples and then negotiated with the Romans to establish a new Sanhedrin in the small city of Yavne.

These are two paradigmatic responses. Masada declared that there are defeats one must resist even when victory is impossible. Yavne taught that when one form of Jewish life becomes impossible, Judaism must find another.

At first glance, they appear to be opposites. Masada is heroic, militant, uncompromising. Yavne is cautious, pragmatic, conciliatory. Masada chooses dignity over survival; Yavne chooses survival despite humiliation. One ends in death on a desert mountain. The other preserves Judaism through scholarship and learning.

Many scholars have pitted Masada against Yavne, forcefully arguing for one or the other. But what if Jewish history and continuity need both, even if not necessarily in equal measure or in the same way?

The Jewish people survived because of Yavne, not Masada. But Masada, recovered and transformed into myth by later generations, ensured that survival would not become the entirety of Jewish aspiration. Yavne taught us how to live after defeat. Masada reminded us that defeat must not become our permanent condition.

On the whole, the Talmud, sides with Yohanan ben Zakkai, not with the fighters who died at Masada. It all but ignores the story of Masada, wary of glorifying a doomed rebellion and encouraging another.  And it had little reason to romanticize the rebels: many were part of the Sicarii, a group known for being violent and intransigent. But the Talmud also shows the ambiguity of the sages of the time. Rabbi Yosef, or according to another version, Rabbi Akiva, sharply criticizes Ben Zakai for being willing to compromise too much with the Romans. All the same, Yohanan ben Zakkai understood something his revolutionary contemporaries did not. When everything cannot be saved, one must decide what can still carry the whole.

Yavne was geographically insignificant. Spiritually and historically, it became a vessel into which Judaism could contract without disappearing. The Temple could no longer organize Jewish life, so Torah, prayer, law, study, memory, and communal practice would have to assume much of its burden. Judaism became more portable. Authority moved, gradually and unevenly, from priests and sacrifices toward sages and texts. To be sure, the rabbis didn’t declare Jerusalem or the Temple obsolete; they placed its absence at the center of Jewish life. They preserved Jerusalem by teaching Jews how to live without it while never accepting that its loss was meaningless. That was the genius of Yavne: adaptation without amnesia.

Yet, adaptation contains its own danger. A people can become so skilled at surviving that survival becomes its only ideal. It can learn to accommodate every ruler, endure every indignity, and explain every defeat as another opportunity for spiritual creativity. Flexibility, which begins as a strategy, can become an identity. Powerlessness can be transformed from a condition into a virtue. Yavne can teach a people to bend without breaking. But a people that bends indefinitely may eventually forget what it was trying not to break.

And that’s the importance of Masada.

While Yavne became the template of Jewish adaptation, the story of Masada wasn’t forgotten. It had, and still has, an important afterlife. Modern Zionism rediscovered it and fashioned it into a story about courage, armed resistance, and the rejection of Jewish helplessness. The Masada that animated twentieth-century Jewish imagination was therefore not simply an archaeological site or a literal retelling of Josephus. It was an inspiring moral resource, a call to defiance and a commitment to agency and dignity.

The message of Masada today is that not every compromise is wisdom. Not every accommodation is creativity. Not every form of survival is worthy of celebration. A people must possess red lines—things it will not relinquish even when relinquishing them appears prudent. Masada helped produce a new Jewish self-image: not simply the Jew who outlasts his enemies, but the Jew who resists them; not merely the Jew who survives history, but the Jew who seeks to act within it. It says, especially after the holocaust, that Jews would no longer regard catastrophe as something to be endured and interpreted only after the fact. They would, like Hannah Senesh, assume responsibility for preventing it.

And yet, Masada, too, contains a terrible danger.

Resistance can become theatrical. Purity can become more important than responsibility. Leaders may prefer a glorious defeat to an imperfect compromise because defeat preserves their moral grandeur, whereas compromise requires them to live with uncertainty and criticism.

Masada without Yavne romanticizes the last stand. It forgets that the purpose of courage is not to create beautiful deaths but to protect meaningful lives. It can turn sacrifice from a tragic necessity into a political temptation. A leader is not entitled to choose Masada for an entire people merely because he finds Yavne humiliating.

And that is why we need both traditions, each limiting the excesses of the other.

Judaism should always ask two questions: What can still be saved, and what must never be surrendered? Yavne reminds us that survival often requires flexibility, patience, institutional creativity, and the acceptance of partial victories. Masada reminds us that survival purchased at the cost of all dignity, agency, and purpose may become an empty achievement.

Facing the many challenges that the Jewish people face today, every fanatic believes that the hour of Masada has arrived, and every appeaser believes there is always another Yavne available. The rest of us need to live with an unbearable uncertainty because history does not place convenient signs to announce when compromise has become surrender or when resistance has become suicide.

But that uncertainty is not an argument for choosing one tradition and discarding the other. It’s an argument about what’s most difficult and most necessary: holding both in tension.

The story of Masada, like that of the parachutists, is important not because it succeeded, but because it enlarged the range of actions that later generations could imagine themselves performing. But Yavne teaches that courage without prudence can consume the very future it claims to defend

May this Tisha Be’Av, with its load of sorrow and tragedy, and with its renewed fear of destruction and dissolution, inspire us to act with both wisdom and determination in the face of uncertainty.

The holiday of Shavuot marks one of the pivotal events in Jewish history: the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

Whether you believe or not in the divine origin of the biblical text, one thing is incontrovertible: The book we received on Shavuot became the center of the Jewish universe, the star around which our life as a people was organized.

The land of Israel was and is a pillar of our existence, but because we had the Torah, we didn't disappear when we lost the physical relation to the land. As Heinrich Heine said, "The canonized books of Scripture became the portable homeland of the Jew." Jews became perhaps the first – and only – human group defined by texts. As Amos and Fania Oz wrote, "[Jewish identity] is not a bloodline, but a text-line."

Texts link generations to one another, create historical continuity, and serve as the locus of our people's collective visions and aspirations. They form a unique form of social contract, a covenant that includes the present, past, and future. As the Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael says: "All Jewish souls, including future generations, stood at Sinai."

In our times, the textual link between generations is being eroded to the point of disappearance. While social media has accelerated this phenomenon, it had been brewing for decades. The moniker of my generation (Gen X) represents that loss. In his novel Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland captures a generation saturated with media fragments, irony, slogans, and cultural exhaustion rather than inherited textual depth. The "X" is the void that we desperately try to fill when meaning-making textual traditions have been broken. That trend became unfathomably more acute in the digital era. When distrust of ancient texts becomes a defining feature of our civilization, something is irretrievably lost.

But before we discuss if and how to rekindle our connections with texts, we should reflect on why Jews developed that unique relationship with our foundational book. After all, on the face of it, it makes little sense that a 3,500-year-old book, full of ancient stories of not-so-obvious relevance and containing many inapplicable laws, became the thread by which Jewish life is aligned to this day. Many explanations have been advanced for that uniqueness, but for me, it all boils down to one idea: generous reading.

The term "generous reading" emerged as a reaction against overly suspicious or adversarial modes of reading in late-20th-century criticism, those "hermeneutics of suspicion" which read canonical texts with the aim of exposing ulterior motives, contradictions, or power structures. In contrast, generous reading means understanding a text (or what another person says) in the best possible light; giving it the benefit of the doubt, not reading it in "gotcha" mode, but rather assuming that the text may hide serious, well-intentioned messages that deserve our best efforts to uncover.

David Hartman wrote, "The central fact about Judaism is that it is a religion of interpretation." Indeed, even the act of reading Hebrew requires an interpretative approach, because the vowels aren't marked in the text – you can't even read without interpreting and making choices about what the text is telling you. Interpretation of the Torah is crucial because it contains obscure passages, apparent contradictions, and challenging fragments. It is, as the sages said, a text that "omer darsheni," begs to be interpreted.

Thus, the Jewish relationship to the Torah was founded on a radical act of interpretive trust. Because the text was assumed a priori to matter—to contain divine wisdom, covenantal memory, and truths deeper than any single generation could exhaust—Jews learned to read it generously, even lovingly. Contradictions were not dismissed as flaws but treated as signs that reality itself was layered and resistant to simplification. Repetitions hinted at hidden emphasis; omissions demanded commentary; apparent mistakes concealed meanings still waiting to be uncovered. The rabbis approached the text with the conviction that if something in the Torah seemed broken, the deficiency lay not necessarily in the text, but in the reader's understanding. What emerged from that posture was, rather than blind obedience, one of history's great civilizations of interpretation: a culture that believed difficult texts should be wrestled with in their strongest possible light, because truth often revealed itself precisely in the tension between incompatible verses, unresolved ambiguities, and stubborn silences.

If said "generous reading" sustained our relationship with the text and that relationship sustained the Jewish people, it follows that generous reading was a crucial element of our survival. Without it, we would have lost our relations to the Torah, and probably, to each other. Moreover, the principle of generous reading was not only applied to texts but to our fellow humans. We are commanded to use the principle of "lekaf zechut," always giving people the benefit of the doubt.

This is the exact opposite of our society's approach. We seem to have become incapable of generous reading, and such a society eventually becomes incapable of democratic life itself. When people no longer approach texts, arguments, or opponents with the assumption that there may be meaning, coherence, or good faith beneath surface imperfections, every ambiguity becomes evidence of malice and every misstatement proof of corruption. The loss of generous reading transforms interpretation into prosecution. In such a culture, citizens cease trying to understand one another in their strongest form and instead learn to create caricatures, weaponize fragments, and read every statement in the worst possible light. The result is not limited to harsher political rhetoric but leads to the erosion of the very conditions that make a pluralistic society possible: trust, patience, intellectual humility, and the willingness to inhabit a shared reality despite disagreement. A civilization built on instant outrage, decontextualized snippets, and permanent suspicion loses the capacity for nuanced judgment. Politics becomes less an argument among fellow citizens than a battle between mutually unintelligible tribes, each convinced that the other is not merely wrong, but fundamentally illegible.

To realize what a society loses when it abandons generous reading, just imagine if rabbis had said, "There are two versions of the Creation; it shows that the book can't be taken seriously!" "There are differences in the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy; we can trust this text!" Instead, thanks to generous readings, the midrashim about those textual issues became gems of meaning and ethical wisdom.

There is always a correlation between how people treat books and how they treat each other. As Heine said, "Where books are burned, people will be burned too." History proved him right.

But if we relearn how to treat books and each other generously, understanding that there are pearls of wisdom in everything, even in those whom we tend to dismiss as nonsensical, perhaps the path of healing is not foreclosed. Because we treated the Torah generously, it reciprocated – it yielded its life-sustaining messages to hundreds of generations, and it continues to do so today.

In that sense, the prayer we recite after every generous reading of the Torah makes total sense:

"She's a tree of life for those who hold her, and those who hold her are happy. Her paths are pleasant, and all her roads lead to peace."

Chag Sameach!

There is something paradoxical about Jewish history. We are, probably, the most vulnerable people to have ever existed, and yet, we are one of the most ancient.

Some see in this a supernatural hand. In a well-known anecdote attributed to Frederick the Great and his court philosopher, Jean-Baptiste d'Alembert, Frederick, skeptical and sharp-tongued, asked D’Alembert:

“Give me a proof of the existence of God, in one word.”

The philosopher answered:

“Die Juden, Majestät.”

Others have advanced sociological or historical explanations for this apparent contradiction: that Jewish continuity rests on unusually strong textual, educational, and communal mechanisms of transmission that allow identity to persist even under conditions that would dissolve most other groups.

But what’s undeniable is that both dimensions of that paradox are factually true: Jews are at the same time objectively vulnerable and unfathomably resilient. Though nothing and no one seems to be able to destroy us, we are in a permanent state of fear of oblivion. We should have relaxed by now, but we can’t; our fragility is real, not just epigenetic trauma.  

The same paradox applies to Israel. By all measures, the Jewish State is a living miracle. By most parameters it is stronger than ever, even after having survived insurmountable odds. Its economy is so robust that even two years of war couldn’t sink it; its army is so powerful and effective that it can bomb an enemy two thousand km away, ten times its size, day and night, for a month without suffering a single casualty. And yet, Israel nowadays feels more fragile than ever.

Israel's enemies can’t destroy it with their rockets, but they can make life there feel unlivable. A full life cannot be lived in a shelter. The global wave of anti-Zionism will not eliminate the Jewish State, but it’s making our existence feel unsafe and conditional. At the same time, the dangers of internal dissolution are more real than ever.

Today, Israel has as many inhabitants as Belgium, Sweden, or Hungary; a feat that would have looked fantastic to the founders of the State. But in 2025, for the first time in its history, Israel had a negative migratory balance. Israel can indeed wipe the entire Middle East from the face of the Earth, but it seems incapable of definitively defeating a band of terrorists who have no tanks or air force. Today, Tel Aviv is a world metropolis at a scale that would have baffled Herzl. And yet, 30 miles to the east of it, creeping annexation is creating a situation in which Israel may soon become a binational state with an Arab majority. The Israeli people rose with incredible patriotism and selflessness during the war, but Israeli society today is more divided than ever. Never since 1948 was the specter of civil war more real, and never before was it stoked this deliberately by those in positions of power.

One might find comfort in saying, “Well, that’s the story of the Jewish people for you, fragility and strength intertwined. Nothing new under the sun.” We can channel Frederick and say, “God will take care of us eventually, everything will be fine.”

In his 1950s essay “Israel, the Ever-Dying People”, Simon Rawidowicz reflects on that paradox. Every generation of Jews, he writes, perceives itself on the edge of disappearing. Aren’t we then exaggerating when we point to the dangers that Israel faces? Shouldn’t we trust Providence a bit more?

Rawidowicz doesn’t actually think so. He quotes a Talmudic passage (Makoth 24a) in which the rabbis lament the decline they see in their generation. Rav then says something that sounds presumptuous, but it’s the opposite: “Yet, I’m still here.” He doesn’t appeal to providence or historical inevitability but accepts the burden of personal responsibility. He moves from destiny to agency. In this view, Jewish continuity is not secured only by God’s promise but by a cultivated, almost visceral awareness of fragility that generates responsibility.

Each generation feels itself on the brink—not as rhetoric but as lived experience—and precisely that feeling compels action: to teach, to build, to transmit, to get involved. Jews survived because the fear of disappearance became an engine of engagement. Resilience, then, is the consequence of vulnerability, not its opposite. Jews endure not despite sensing the possibility of ending, but because they do—and because, like Rav, they answer that threat with commitment instead of resignation. This is a recurrent theme in Judaism – the idea that every person should feel as though their actions carry the potential of salvation or doom for the entire world.

As we celebrate this Yom Haatzma’ut, facing an Israel that is at the same time stronger and more fragile than ever, we need to follow Rav’s example.

Seeing the many crises that Israel faces, there are two equally dangerous positions that many Jews take: one is disengagement out of disappointment or impotence. The other is to turn a blind eye to the problems and develop a form of irrational trust that things will magically turn out ok. The Jewish people have survived because in every generation, people like Rav have said: “I am still here.”

Israel is both a miracle and a tribute to the dreams and sacrifices of millions. It’s the only collective endeavor the Jewish people have had in the last 2,000 years. It was created by people who, during tragedy, said: “I’m still here.”

The pressures facing Israel today—security, legitimacy, democratic backsliding, internal fracture—strip away the illusion that continuity is automatic. They force each of us to a stance like that of Rav: not confidence that things will endure, but sober recognition that I am still here, and therefore implicated. Crisis, in this sense, is is a summons. It sharpens attention, compelling involvement and transforming abstract belonging into personal responsibility. Faith and historical inertia are not enough to sustain resilience . What sustains us is this felt obligation—that each of us, precisely because the future is uncertain, must act as if its continuity depends on us. Because it does.

This Yom Haatzmaut, let’s feel awe and gratitude. Let’s rejoice in the undeserved privilege of being the first generation in two millennia for whom a Jewish State is a normal reality.  Let’s honor the unspeakable sacrifices that, every day, make that miracle possible; let’s offer a helping hand to all those who strive, day and night, to realize the dreams of generations. Let’s offer our loving, unbreakable embrace to those who sacrifice life, limb, and treasure so we can enjoy those blessings.

In the face of the challenges, the fear, the dangers, and the naysayers, let’s cry out loud. “I’m here.”

If there was any doubt that humans are primates, this should dispel it. We flatter ourselves that we are superior to other apes, but in truth, we have not transcended that baboonish trait; we have merely refined it. We still follow those who signal certainty, mistaking the absence of doubt for the presence of truth.

Judaism always distrusted that instinct. Perhaps that’s why our foundational myth, the story of Passover, is in fact an indictment of certainty, a devastating critique of those who act as though they possess the truth.

Pharaoh is, of course, one such figure. He claims to be a god, never wrong, endowed with the divine right to enslave and kill. Surrounded by sycophants who praise his every move, he becomes convinced of his own infallibility. The Bible tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but the rabbis suggest that it was already a block of granite, impervious even to a hairline fracture of doubt.

Opposing Pharaoh stands Moses, a man consumed by doubt: doubt about himself, about his mission, even about God. These two leaders mirror their peoples. The Egyptians obey, even in the face of plagues; they neither question nor revolt, remaining subservient to their “always-right” king. The Israelites… well, they drive Moses to exasperation: “What shall I do with this people?” The king leads sheep; the doubter leads doubters. And yet there are no questions about God’s preference: the troublesome doubters are chosen, not the obedient followers.

So central is doubt that questions, the manifestation of doubt, are the centerpiece of the Seder. Free people do not obey blindly; they demand to be told the story; they insist on explanations. From an early age, children are granted not only the right but the duty to question their parents. But free people must also doubt themselves.

To doubt is to embark on a journey, an expedition into the unknown guided by hope. In that journey, faith and doubt are intertwined; neither can exist without the other.

The story of Passover teaches that certainty, especially the boasting of certainty, is more than obnoxious. It shapes societies, corrupts values, and ultimately leads to tragedy.

Anatole France captured this powerfully:

“When we study the history of humanity, we realize that, if people massacre one another without respite, it is above all because they are unable to doubt. Doubt is gentleness; it is compassion; it is the source of all good.”

Doubt, for France, is not opposed to belief:

“We believe, but we believe doubting, and we doubt believing.”

He was right. Throughout history, it has been the certainty of possessing the truth that has made people cruel. As Bertrand Russell famously observed:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Doubt is not weakness, nor a failure of belief; it is a necessary condition of intellectual honesty. It prevents conviction from hardening into tyranny. In uncertain times, like ours, only fools and fanatics claim to be always right, to harbor no doubts.

And yet, our primate instinct proves stubborn. Generation after generation, and even now, we follow the ape that beats its chest the hardest, even when it is breaking its own ribs. If confidence is displayed with sufficient force, we will listen, and we will follow.

Perhaps that is why the questions of the Seder are a yearly ritual: to remind us that doubt is rare, and that it must be cultivated. And perhaps that is why those questions are never fully answered. The questions endure; the answers remain personal, evolving, fluid. I have answered “Why is this night different?” in many different ways throughout my life, reflecting my hopes, my fears, my frustrations, my growth, and my mistakes. The search for a single, definitive answer has been one of the most dangerous illusions in human history, and perhaps an affront to a God who cherishes doubt. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

“We are nearer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

But is permanent doubt sustainable? Can doubt itself be taken too far? Am I suggesting that those who say “I’m just asking questions” are in the right?

Doubt is not nihilism, and this is where conspiracy theorists go wrong. True doubt exists within a structure of trust. In the Seder, the child asks because he trusts his parents. He is not rejecting everything and trusting his own flawed judgment; he is questioning from within a framework of belonging. His doubts are anchored in a community that honors them.

Conspiracy theorists who claim to be “just asking questions” practice what we might call pseudo-doubt, a form of discourse that weaponizes doubt rather than using it in the search for truth. How can we tell? Because they question everything except themselves.

As Jean Birnbaum writes in Le Courage de la nuance:

“The courage of nuance is the willingness to be shaken in one’s own certainties.”

This test never fails: if you want to distinguish a true doubter from a nihilist who merely cloaks certainty in skepticism, ask whether they ever doubt themselves, whether they ever admit being wrong. The person who uses doubt to disengage from community or to assert superiority is not free, but enslaved to their own ego.

In times of uncertainty and fear, our task is to resist the siren call of those who project certainty. Instead, we must braid doubt, belief, and belonging into a triple cord, flexible, resilient, and unbreakable.

As Isaiah Berlin wrote:

“To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized person from a barbarian.”

So this Passover, we face a choice: to hold our convictions with the winning formula of passion and humility, or to continue acting like baboons.

Once again, Israel finds itself waging war on different fronts. Israeli cities are under attack, and despite the success of Israel missile defense systems, there have been casualties to deplore and the entire country is on edge, running to shelters and facing uncertainty in a rapidly evolving context.

Again, our Israeli team has been called to fulfill a critical role in liaising with the field and assessing the situation, so that we can provide JFN members with up-to-date information about needs on the ground. As always, we are in awe at the resilience and professionality of our Israeli team, who have been dealing with one emergency after another for the past two-and-a-half years.

Our team is in close contact with civil society organizations, the Home Front Command, government ministries, and local authorities. Sadly, but fortunately, over the past two-and-a-half years, we have amassed significant knowledge and experience, as well as key relationships with all relevant players. Our goal, as always, is to identify areas where philanthropy can be most impactful during these times and guide our members on how best to deploy their grantmaking.

Here are some data points about the ongoing situation:

• As of March 6, the protective guidelines have been changed from the highest level to “limited activity," allowing people to go back to work if there is safe space near by, and allowing gatherings of up to 50 people. Schools remain closed, so going back to work will be very challenging especially for parents with young kids.
• Approximately 2,841 people have been evacuated – mostly from Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh. While large, this number is manageable by the local authorities, that have relocated people to hotels. The Israeli tax authority is responsible for processing individual requests for economic assistance and repairs. The Federation of Local Authorities is working in coordination with the Ministries of Welfare, Health, Education, the Property Tax Authority, and others at all impact sites in direct response to the affected population.
• There have been 12 fatalities in Israel and ~ 1,598 injured (number as of March 6), most of them light to moderate.
• There are 133,000 Israelis stranded abroad. The government has begun repatriation flights from as of March 4 and will continue to do so.

In general, the relief situation on the ground is under control and adequately managed by the authorities, so in the realm of direct relief we don’t see (as of today) any acute philanthropic need. Of course, that may change in the next few days. However, there are several systemic issues to focus on, some of which haven’t been properly addressed since the last military confrontation. These issues are becoming more pronounced during this round of fighting and we recommend continued attention to them.

• Accessibility to bomb shelters: Approximately one third of Israeli citizens are not adequately protected from missile fire. More than 20 percent of public shelters are in poor condition or not usable. As a result, many citizens are gathering in public spaces such as light rail stations and staying there overnight. These locations are not designed for such use, leading to equipment and maintenance gaps, as well as tensions between different populations sharing these spaces. Although more than 300 mass bomb shelters have been opened across the country, if the military operation continues, we expect growing needs in these locations.
• Protection needs in Arab society: This is a sensitive issue reflected in a severe shortage of shelters in Arab communities, as well as gaps in the accessibility of emergency instructions and awareness during attacks.
• Vulnerable populations, with particular emphasis on the elderly and people with disabilities: Civil society organizations, together with representatives from the Ministry of Welfare, are working to reach elderly residents and provide food and medication. There are growing needs in those areas.
• The northern border: On March 1, that front has reignited with attacks from Hezbollah. There, the impact is cumulative, as the consequences of the previous rounds of hostilities haven’t been addressed. Some communities still lack adequate protection, and many residents are still displaced. Once again, their livelihoods and sense of security are being disrupted. If fire from Hezbollah continues, residents will be required to remain in protected areas for prolonged periods. At this time, however, evacuation of communities is not anticipated, and services will be delivered locally.
• Resilience and mental health: This ongoing challenge has accompanied us since the October 7 massacre and the Iron Swords war, and is intensifying once again. The need for emotional and psychological support is increasing among the general population and especially among those directly affected. Resilience centers and civil society organizations in the mental health field have mobilized immediately to respond on the ground.
• Reserve duty: Currently, 110,000 reservists have been called up. Once again, the same population is carrying the burden, having already served hundreds of cumulative days. Alongside disruptions to businesses and academic studies, the families of reservists are expected to face extraordinary strain in addition to the broader challenges affecting the entire population.
• Education: On Thursday, following the Purim holiday, the education system is expected to resume remotely. That is far from ideal, and to the natural difficulties of remote learning there’s the added challenge of staff shortages as many people have been called up. As a result, risk factors increase for youth who lack stable educational and social frameworks.

In light of this evolving landscape, to those funders seeking guidance we suggest the following:

• Do not rush to respond. The situation is still evolving, and at this stage, most immediate needs are being addressed by the relevant authorities. In these cases, the most serious and long-term needs emerge after the acute phase.
• As always, we recommend reaching out to the organizations you already support, your partners on the ground, to check on their well-being and that of their teams, to understand what they need, and how you can assist.
• Continue to monitor developments. Should gaps emerge between needs and responses, we will update you accordingly.

Helpful links to be aware of:

• Government Emergency Portal
• Reorganizing Together (in Hebrew)
• Interactive map of essential services (in Hebrew)
• Civil Leadership emergency command center (in Hebrew)

As always, our concierge service can direct you to relevant JFN team members who can respond to specific questions and requests. You can also contact Anat Danis, JFN Israel Director of Philanthropy for Regional Recovery.

Andrés Spokoiny
President & CEO, Jewish Funders Network

Sigal Yaniv Feller
Executive Director, JFN Israel

The heroine of Purim did not begin her story that way. She began as someone trying to survive. Taken from her home and brought into the Persian court, she did what many Jews in exile have done: she adapted.

She became so assimilated that she even cast aside her traditional Hebrew name, Hadassah, and adopted Esther, which sounds suspiciously close to the Persian goddess Ishtar.

Her new name is suggestive in other ways. If one takes a small grammatical liberty, one notes the similarity between Esther and the word “seter”, which means secret. Differently spelled, the word “Ester” means “hiding.”

Although some later rabbis try to moderate that impression, reading the Megillah, one gets the unflattering idea that Esther was, at best, “non-affiliated”, and at worst, too fast to hide or shed her Judaism to be accepted at court.

Easy to judge, but can you blame her? Henri IV of France expressed a similar sentiment when, in 1593, he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. He famously said “Paris bien vaut une messe” (“Paris, meaning kingship, is worth a Mass”). Thus, Hadassah became Esther, a queen whose Jewish spark nearly went extinct.

And then came Haman.

With horror, Esther realized that she had engaged in a Faustian bargain, trading identity for acceptance, but that the other side never intended to fulfill its part of the deal.

Perhaps at first, Esther thought that no harm would befall her. Yet, prodded by Mordechai, she realized the sad truth. All her sacrifices wouldn’t buy her safety, and all her lavish praise of the king wouldn’t protect her. “Do not imagine that you escape in the king’s house…”

But then, Esther experiences something else – something visceral, something deep and unexplainable. She feels the pain of her fellow Jews. It’s the same feeling that Moses experienced when he “went to his brethren” after his life as a prince and saw the Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave.

When one sees Esther trembling at what’s happening to her people, I’m reminded of what we all felt on October 7. When I set out to write this piece, I attempted not to make it about that day. But how can I not? It was a moment in which, like Esther or Moses, our hearts “went out to our brethren.” Mijal Bitton captured that moment better than anyone when she wrote, “that pain you feel, that’s peoplehood.”

The similarity doesn’t end there. Much of American Judaism has been “pre-Purim Estherite.” It consisted of shedding layer after layer of Jewish specificity to be accepted in the general society. And then we realized that, despite all our efforts to “fit in,” we are still othered, and still vulnerable. Still at the mercy of the other, still accepted conditionally. We believed that by carving another and yet another pound of flesh, we were securing our seat at the “cool kids’ table.” We thought we were depositing goodwill into a metaphorical bank account, but when we tried to make a withdrawal, we found it empty.

In that light, it’s hard not to see Esther as the proverbial “October 8 Jew.” Those of us for whom it took an existential threat to shake us out of our complacency and remind us of who we are.

As Purim shows, the phenomenon of Jews “returning” in times of danger is not new. The Talmud, seeing that when Haman got the ringlet (royal authorization) to kill the Jews, Esther and her fellow Jews prayed, repented, and fasted, says caustically, “Greater was the removal of the ring than the [work of] forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses.”

But the question, for Esther and for us, is how to capitalize on that newfound commitment. How can we transform the shock into something deeper, more lasting, more meaningful?

For Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, taking ownership and responsibility is the key. In his writings, he distinguishes between “person of fate” (goral) and person of destiny (ye’ud). For him, Esther begins her story as a figure of goral. She is taken to the palace, and mostly, acted upon. The verbs that define her early life are passive: she is gathered, chosen, and crowned. Fate, for Soloveitchik, is the condition of being swept along by history, responding to circumstances without authoring them. Even when the news breaks, Esther’s first reaction is to seek stability within the given order. She has not yet claimed responsibility for shaping it.

The turning point comes when she embraces ye’ud. She decides to go to the king at the risk of her life. The sentence she pronounces at that time, “If I perish, I perish,” is not resignation but decision: she steps forward, commands Mordechai, gathers the Jews, and enters the king’s chamber unsummoned. She’s not cavalier, but she’s willing, for once, to sacrifice herself for the collective. For Soloveitchik, this is the movement from passive existence to covenantal agency.

Crucially, in the story of Purim, God doesn’t appear even once. Meaning that Esther acts without reassurance, without revealed miracles, without theological certainties. God is hidden; no voice guarantees success. Destiny here does not mean clarity, it means responsibility in the absence of clarity.

We are all October 8 Jews. Like Esther, in adversity, we rediscovered something precious about ourselves. We had to act in the face of uncertainty, face abandonment and hostility, and rely on inner resources of strength and commitment. The grammar of our identity was rearranged, and it is now seeking a new structure.

Interestingly, after the trauma, Esther doesn’t abandon the world. She stays at the palace and doesn’t break with the king. But her relationship with the world changes. She now faces it with a sense of existential security. Others still call her Esther, but she has no doubts: she knows she’s Haddasah, daughter of Avishai. For us as well, the solution is not disengagement from the world but relating to it on a different footing. Not accepting Faustian bargains that demand impossible renunciations, not making our self-worth contingent on the view of others, not submitting to litmus tests and conditional acceptance.

Post-Haman Esther acts decisively in history, even when Heaven is silent. She transforms fate into destiny and privilege into mission. Her life takes on a new meaning: serving her people and fighting for their safety and flourishing. Esther doesn’t live in fear or mourning, but she retains, every remaining day of her life, the sense of mission and destiny that it gave her.

One cherished JFN member literally had this idea engraved on a plaque. In their offices, one can read “every day is October 8^th”. They don’t mean by that that we should inhabit the trauma forever, but that, like Esther, we use the pain and shock as a lever of change.

If we succeed in doing that, we can relive the words of the Megillah, which are less a description than an expression of hope, “The month was turned for them from sorrow to joy and from mourning to a festival, they were to make them days of feasting and happiness…”

Chag Sameach!

Almost every Tu Bishvat, I leverage the tree-centered nature of the holiday to warn my patient readers about the ravages we are inflicting on our environment. To tug on our Zionist strings, I remind people that climate change is affecting Israel’s fragile ecosystem in devastating ways. All of that is true. Case in point: as I write these lines, Israel is being battered by both floods and droughts. But this year, I don’t want to convince you that Climate Change is real. You should know that by now. What interests me instead is how we think about existential threats, and what might be a Jewish way to think about them.

In the 21^st century, Climate Change is just one of the many existential risks we face. Leading scientists are predicting an AI-powered techno-apocalypse; political pundits are prophesying the imminent demise of democracy, and our streaming platforms are full of doomsday movies and shows. But the way we talk about them often follows a single pattern: catastrophism, the belief that collapse is not just possible but inevitable.

To be sure, catastrophism isn’t a modern phenomenon. There have been apocalyptic prophecies since the dawn of civilization. The flood literature, shared by many ancient cultures, the Christian “Book of Revelation,” or the millenarians who expected the imminent end of the world are but a few examples. That the predictions of doom don’t prove true doesn’t make them vanish; it simply displaces them. As my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote, “The prophecy of the end is a fear or a hope that never materializes.”

However, there’s something unique about modern catastrophism. Thinkers like Gunther Anders claim that human-made modern threats are qualitatively different, given their potential to annihilate our species and our planet. They also feel that the tools at our disposal, whether moral, imaginative, or institutional, are insufficient to address the threats we face. Above all, they believe that new technologies have a logic and a dynamic of their own that escapes human agency. Just as with Pandora’s Box, there’s no going back once we unleash these new technologies onto the world. For instance, the moment there was nuclear power utilized by humans, a nuclear bomb’s construction and detonation became inevitable.

Catastrophism starts from a real intuition: things can go very wrong, and the transition from capability to catastrophe is often a matter of time, not intention. That is especially true in the case of climate change, where reversing damage beyond a certain threshold may be impossible, and in the case of AI, which may break from human control without us even noticing. Once the future is framed as already lost, politics stops being about choosing among visions and becomes an arms race of fearmongering. Dread replaces judgment; urgency crowds out deliberation.

Instead of mobilizing people, this mindset often paralyzes them: if catastrophe is baked into the system—into technology itself or into history’s direction—then what’s left for human agency besides panic, denunciation, or nihilism? Time itself gets distorted. The future stops being an open horizon and turns into a ticking clock, a countdown that justifies sacrificing the present in the name of survival.

Looming catastrophe is always a gift to authoritarians: it provides the perfect excuse to suspend norms, concentrate power, and demand obedience in the name of saving us from disaster – be that disaster climate change or a catastrophic “invasion” of immigrants. The final irony is that by normalizing fear, emergency politics, and moral shortcuts, catastrophism can help produce the very fragility it claims to warn us about. What begins as a sober alert hardens into a script—one that erodes trust, democratic imagination, and collective responsibility, making the catastrophic prophecy a self-fulfilling one.

Perhaps because of that, Judaism was always very suspicious of catastrophism and apocalyptic thinking. Moreover, the Talmudic rabbis had seen firsthand what apocalyptic fervor had wrought upon the Jewish nation: two failed rebellions against Rome, the exile of the Jews from their homeland, and the destruction of Jerusalem. They even used the term mechavshei ketz (those that “count down towards the end”) as a term of derision. They knew that when people believe “the end is near” – either apocalyptic or utopian – they become dangerously prone to extremism and suspend moral responsibility. The excitement of the end also makes them disregard ordinary ethical obligations. Why invest in institutions, law, patience, or repair if history is about to be wiped clean?

It’s curious that a tradition that knows catastrophe all too well refuses to turn it into destiny. Between denial and surrender, Judaism offers a third way: the ethics of responsibility. Judaism stubbornly refuses to let fear become the organizing principle of history because that breeds tragedy. After all, we know that all Pharaoh had to do to convince the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites was to make them fear them.

It’s not that Judaism dismisses the dangers ahead, but rather proposes facing them with hope instead of fear. That hope is not naïve optimism but the certainty that humans have the agency and the moral resources to act responsibly. From this idea, Maimonides derives an entire view of history that became canonical in Jewish thought: progress is possible not through catastrophic upheaval but through gradual improvement in humanity, inspired by our covenantal responsibilities.

On Tu Bishvat, we are reminded that the future, like trees in the field, is fragile and entrusted to human care. It’s not guaranteed by naïve techno-optimism, nor foreclosed by doom. Time remains open, history continues, and there’s no cosmic reset button that will free us from our responsibility. The care we owe to trees is a metaphor; a reminder of the principles that should organize our relation to Creation – and to each other – restraint, kindness, reverence, and accountability. 

Maimonides would have nothing but contempt for those who deny the dangers of climate change, but he would scorn those who think that catastrophe is inevitable. Instead, he would remind us that Judaism offers something rare in our anxious age: a moral framework that takes existential risk seriously without surrendering agency, that insists on responsibility without apocalyptic despair, and that refuses to sacrifice the dignity of the present to either catastrophic fear or messianic illusion.

This approach will certainly help the trees, but above all, it will help us.

Chag Sameach!

Andrés

This time, it was Sydney, a community to which I’ve been several times and with which JFN has strong ties through our sister organization, the Australian Jewish Funders.

Brains work in strange ways under stress, and mine was no exception. My first thought, curiously, went to the Norwegian city of Tromso, a small town north of the Arctic Circle. During the Holocaust, the Nazis went all the way there, literally to the end of the world, to catch the eighteen Jews that lived in the town. There could not be a safe place for Jews, not even amid Arctic snows – and now, not even in the careless sands of Bondi Beach.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I come from Buenos Aires, a city that is equally remote and was the scene of two massacres of Jews. I remember my disbelief and shock, “It can’t be happening here.” And then my devastating realization, “Why not?”

The Sydney community now joins the long list of those that had considered themselves exceptional, and have discovered, traumatically, that they are under the same threats as Jews everywhere. It’s the same discovery that American Jews had made in Pittsburgh, and Argentinean Jews at AMIA.  But here’s a more important truth: If hatred reaches everywhere, so does our love, our defiance, and strength.

The Australian Jewish Community has felt the hate; now it’s up to us to make them feel the love. No, they aren’t exceptional; they are part of the Jewish people, and thus, exposed to hatred. But being a part of the Jewish People means also experiencing the love and support of the millions around the world who feel close to you and feel your pain.

The pain we feel when we hear of Jews attacked, that pain is peoplehood. And peoplehood is stronger than bullets and bombs. It has sustained us for four thousand years, and it will sustain us for thousands of years more. Australian Jews will wake up in the morning with a new song, a tune of mourning that they’ll sing with grief and heartbreak, but also with unprecedented strength and determination. And we, the Jewish People, need to be their chorus, the orchestra that makes their voices more powerful than ever.

Our brothers and sisters in Sydney will now discover what we had learned before, that the worst thing they can do is cower in fear. This is the moment for defiance and assertiveness, to demand justice and accountability from those in authority who willfully ignored the many warnings written on the wall.

Over the coming days, we will learn more about how we can support the Australian Jewish Community during its worst time. In the meantime, I invite you to discover what makes that community a hidden jewel in the Jewish world. Their world-class Jewish schools, their record-breaking level of affiliation, their unwavering Zionism, and innovative programs like Launchpad, an incubator of Jewish innovation with no parallel in the Jewish world, which our AJF partners lead. In philanthropy, Australian Jews punch very high above their weight, both in secular and Jewish giving, and one can’t walk into any Israeli institution without realizing the outsized contribution that Australians have made to the Jewish State.

None of that eases the pain or assuages the anger, but it may leverage the tragedy for more connection, more solidarity, and a deeper understanding of the richness of Jewish life around the world.

The Australian community is financially stable and independent, but a crisis of this magnitude can destabilize it too. JFN will monitor and communicate the needs of the Australian community as they emerge. We will be doing emergency briefings and updates. Reach out to us at concierge@jfunders.org if you have questions or want to stay informed.

In the meantime, those wanting to express support or inquire about needs can write to the CEO of the Jewish Communal Appeal of Sydney, Alain Hanson or to our partners at Australian Jewish Funders, CEO Tracie Olcha.

The blood on the beautiful streets of Bondi beach is an unspeakable tragedy. It will cry to us from the ground for all eternity. It will demand justice and defiance. But it also needs to forge an unbreakable bond, strengthening our ties to one another as Jews and to the Australian community. A bond of blood, hope and courage. The bond of Bondi.

May the Jews of Sydney, and all the House of Israel, know no further sorrow. May God grant strength to God’s people; May God bless God’s People with peace.

But this is far from the only paradox surrounding Hanukkah. Like every holiday, Hanukkah has its special biblical readings. And here’s what’s strange: on the only holiday we have that remembers a military victory, we read Torah portions that deal with sacrifices. Not a sword to be seen. In terms of the haftarah (the section of the later books of the Bible), there’s an obvious candidate: the book of Joshua, which deals with mighty military victories. The conquests of Saul or David could be runners-up.

But we don’t read any of those. In a slap in the martial face of Hanukkah, the haftarah culminates in a verse from the prophet Zechariah: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts” (lo bechayil, lo bekoach, ki im beruchi).

Our sages give us a clear interpretation of these three concepts: Chayil represents military force; Koach represents raw power, coercion, and dominance. And Ruach, the ultimate guarantor of victory, is spirit, endurance, moral direction, and covenantal responsibility.

Quite directly, the sages are telling us that if we read the Hanukkah story as a triumph of force, we have missed its meaning.

What’s more, the Maccabean war did not end on Hanukkah. That day, the 25^th of Kislev, marks the cleansing and re-inauguration of the Temple. The war would continue for thirty more years, and all the Maccabee brothers, except Simon, would perish before its end. Our sages make a point in celebrating a partial, tentative victory.

Why?

The miracle of the oil can shed some light – no pun intended. I have argued in the past that there’s little logic in choosing the miracle of the oil as the centerpiece of Hanukkah, but maybe it makes sense after all. The oil represents the opposite of “total victory.” It’s fragile and finite. Its light must be protected and renewed daily. And it’s time-bound; it burns longer than it should, but not forever.

The sacred, like the light of the menorah, survives because we continue to tend to it.

This is probably what the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas had in mind when he wrote his seminal book The Imperative of Responsibility. He seems to echo the prophet Zechariah in arguing that when human power expands, ethics must shift from heroism to responsibility, from triumph to preservation.

Hanukkah is already post-heroic theology, because it does something extraordinary for a victory story: it downplays military success. It centers preservation, not conquest; it ritualizes maintenance, not climax.

The Maccabees do use force. But Judaism refuses to sanctify force as the meaning of the event. The story freezes on the 25^th of Kislev, the day of restoration, not of domination.

Hans Jonas talks about “the Promethean Posture,” the glorification of power through mastery and expansion, the hubris that claims that we can fix everything later. These are claims that Hanukkah deliberately refuses.

As Israel emerges from its most prolonged and most traumatic war, we are all asking ourselves questions about the nature of power, the limits of our force, and the ethical dilemmas that the harsh realities of the Middle East present us.

Israel emerges victorious but bruised, strengthened and weakened at the same time. Like the Maccabees on the 25^th of Kislev, we fear that we have reached only a reprieve in a battle that never ends. Israel’s weapons performed superbly, but as the prophet said, it wasn’t might or power that helped Israel prevail. It was its spirit.

While politicians made improbable and self-serving claims of “total victory,” the people knew better. They knew they had to embark on a long path of sacrifice, doing their utmost to preserve the miracle that is Israel. For many of us, maintaining the light is just a metaphor; for the hostages, it was a daily epic of cyclopean proportions. For us, keeping the candle burning is just a ritual; for IDF reservists, it meant crawling in the tunnels of Gaza. But it was never about mere physical courage. The most advanced weapons won’t sustain a mother whose child has been serving in Gaza for 26 months, only ruach will. A fleet of drones won’t help a Nova survivor heal, only inner fortitude and the love of her community will.

The Maccabean victory turned into tragedy when the Hasmoneans adopted the “Promethean posture.” They fell in love with their own power and mistook mere might for genuine strength. They traded liberation for domination and law for force. Because they forgot that the key to victory was ruach, they trampled over the principles that had given birth to their revolution. Their hubris brought about their destruction – and our exile.

Now, the Israeli spirit faces another challenge. After winning the war, can we win the peace? Can the spirit that carried us through these two terrible years help us build a better future?

Like the Maccabees on that day of rededication, we face an uncertain future. Like Hans Jonas, we recognize “the fragility of being.” And, like Jonas, we need to see vulnerability as a call to responsibility and ethics. Like on Hanukkah, victory doesn’t promise eternal light; instead, it commands us to care for the threatened light.

Thank God for our military might. Without it, we probably wouldn’t be here. To minimize the importance of strength in a world that wants you dead is insane and ultimately suicidal. But relying only on that, especially as we embark on the long journey of reconstruction, will guarantee defeat.

David Ben Gurion understood that tension well. That’s why, as Israel emerged from another existential battle, he proclaimed, “The State of Israel will be judged not by its wealth or military strength nor by its technology, but by its moral worth and human values… by its fidelity … to the supreme behest: ‘and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

Let’s be clear, Ben Gurion wasn’t talking about the judgement of others. He cared little for that. After all, another of his famous phrases was, “It is not what the Gentiles will say, but what the Jews will do, that will determine our fate.”

What Ben Gurion cared for were his own values and those of his people. He didn’t seek the approval of others, but the realization of the prayer:

“And you shall bring Peace over the land, and everlasting joy to all the inhabitants therein”

Chag Urim Sameach!

Beyond the aforementioned mitzvah, many of the ancient customs of Sukkot are designed to make us feel the centrality of community. Simchat Bet Hashoeva was an event in which the people would march in a joyful procession to draw life-sustaining water from the Gihon Spring to the Temple Mount. It was, the Mishna tells us, an event in which the hierarchies of ancient Israel didn’t apply, as though to signify the intrinsic equality of every member of the people. It was a clear sign that the entire community was “in it together.”

Another ancient custom was the Hakhel (“assembly” or “ingathering”), a meeting of the entire community every seventh Sukkot, in which the king and the people were required to study the Torah together. Here too, everybody was supposed to attend, including children and foreigners, for they were also part of the community of Israel.

Since Robert Putnam wrote his classic Bowling Alone, we have come to understand how the weakening of the sense of community has been eroding American society and our capacity to live together. As Francis Fukuyama wrote, prophetically, “A nation’s prosperity and stability rest not only on laws and institutions, but on the social capital of trust — the shared values and norms of community that make cooperation possible.”

It has long been assumed that community is weakening because of the rampant individualism of our time.  Conservative thinker Patrick Deneen wrote, “Liberalism has failed because it has succeeded: it has liberated individuals from family, from community, from tradition — and left us in a wasteland of loneliness and dislocation.” Progressives, surprisingly, agree. Here’s left-leaning political philosopher Michael Sandel: “When the common good is eclipsed by individual striving, community withers. And when community withers, resentment festers, fueling the politics of anger that disfigures our public life.”

Folks like Putnam and Fukuyama warned about this before the advent of social media and its community-torching impact. Initially, it was thought that social media would disprove them – after all, it was meant to be a tool for building community. Alas, social media ultimately reinforced isolation and dislocation – replacing genuine community with online clickbait and trolling, fragmenting us further by ushering us into echo chambers and poisoning civic dialogue by rewarding outrage over empathy

However, individualism (and social media-induced unsociability) is only one part of the problem. Two additional forces of our time are destroying our idea of community. One is the universalist, multicultural paradigm; the other is neo-tribalism. These two tendencies are, perhaps, sneakier and more pernicious because they create an illusion of community. In universalism, we are supposed to shed our particularity and develop an allegiance to humanity as a whole. That is a fallacy of course, because humanity is an abstraction. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote, “The globalizing thrust of modernity dismantles the bonds of community in the name of universalism, but it offers no real substitute.” You can’t have solidarity with “humanity” if you haven’t first developed solidarity toward your own. Or to put it another way, you can’t feel true empathy for a tragedy you see on the news half a world away when you can’t do the same for the family across the street.

Neo-tribalism, on the other hand, offers another poor substitute. Matteo Maffesoli, author of The Time of the Tribes, wrote, “The decline of institutional communities has given rise to neo-tribes — emotional, fragmented, and ephemeral groupings. They provide belonging, but without responsibility, and can just as easily turn hostile.” The neo-tribalism of today consists of groups who believe the same online conspiracy theories. In the best of cases, it binds some together solely by excluding others. It is a tribe based on what it is against rather than what it is for. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, “Neo-tribalism is community without covenant… and it cannot sustain a free society.”

For Jews, as Sukkot shows, the idea of community is central. And yet, we too live in these times in which communities are disintegrating, and our community is also a victim of these three phenomena.

We are as individualistic as the next person. We have our own pseudo-universalists, who think that solidarity with our own people is anathema, and that “humanity” always takes precedence over their fellow Jews. And sadly, we have our own neo-tribals, who present a distorted view of Judaism based on hatred for the other.

The beauty of the Jewish concept of community lay in the delicate balance it offered between these elements. We are a people with a strong particular identity, but have a universalist vocation, since our patriarch Abraham was tasked with being a blessing “for all the families of the Earth.” Our particularity is necessary for us to give something unique to the world. We are indeed a tribe, but a tribe in which foreigners are loved and welcomed, and a tribe bound by a common purpose and a positive vision of the world, not just hatred for those who are different. Finally, we honor the individual, since we believe that each human being is created in the image of God and therefore has, as an individual, inalienable dignity. Yet we believe that, paraphrasing Hillel, when we exist only for ourselves, we are nothing.

For Judaism, community is the umami of living together – the element that adds depth and balances all flavors of existence: the individual, the universal, the particular, and the tribal. It harmonizes rights and obligations, freedom and responsibility, togetherness and solitude, inward looking with openness to the world.

Tragically, Sukkot will be forever linked to the memory of October 7, 2023. But that day, too, should make us reflect on the importance of community.

John Green, in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, recalls his work as a chaplain in a children’s hospital. In that role, he was present when terrible news was given to parents. He noted that some parents, upon hearing the news, collapsed into themselves, while others collapsed onto each other.

Faced with the biggest tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people since the Shoah, faced with a world that is more threatening than ever in recent memory, we will, at times, collapse. But we can choose to collapse onto each other. That’s the choice that Israeli civil society made on October 8^th. While political leaders stoked division, Israelis demonstrated the community's capacity to provide relief and hope. We have short memories, but it wasn’t the grandstanding of politicians that kept the country afloat in its darkest hour; it was the power of the community.

But what can we do, as funders and leaders, to strengthen – or perhaps save – our concept of community? That could be the subject of an entire book, but I’ll offer some headlines.

Communities need serious discussions about who is in it and who is out, because, by its very definition, communities have boundaries. Having a conversation about the boundaries of community that doesn’t descend into hatred is essential in our times of “anything goes.”

Communities need shared norms and standards, because without them, trust, the glue that holds communities together, can’t exist. 

Communities need to know their shared history and be bound by rituals, texts, and common practices; that’s why there won’t be a community without significant investments in Jewish education.

Communities need spaces of physical proximity. Yes, the virtual world can be an addition, but there’s no replacement for the power of being together.

And finally, in times of entitlement and egotism, community means rights and obligations.

In our positions of leadership – or even without them – we have enormous agency in each of these dimensions. It’s on us.

Thousands of years ago, our sources warned us against isolation, and encouraged us to build links of inter-dependency and solidarity.

For if they fall, one will lift up his companion;
but woe to the one who falls and has not another to lift him up.
Again, if two lie together, they keep warm,
but how can one keep warm alone?
And if someone might overpower one alone, two can resist him.

That text, of eternal poignancy, is from the book of Ecclesiastes. You won’t be surprised to learn that we read it during Sukkot.

Many undesirable characteristics in both individuals and societies are the result of strengths that have been overplayed. Fuimos todos can sometimes be a great attitude. But at the social level, it can be argued that the lack of individual responsibility and accountability that populism engendered is one of the things that made Argentina a failed country for decades. Case in point: the former intelligence head of Argentina wrote a book about that country’s decline, appropriately called Fuimos Todos. As it turns out, the author, Juan B. Yofre, was later accused of corruption and indicted on espionage charges. One can almost picture him standing before a judge, shrugging and saying “Fuimos todos” — as if everyone else’s guilt somehow excused his own. This imagined scene captures how the phrase, and the mindset it represents, can be misused as a license to be lawless. 

Collective responsibility is one of the key themes during the High Holidays, and to an extent, in much of Judaism. In Catholicism, confessionals start with “Bless me father, for I have sinned.” But when we confess our errors on Yom Kippur we say “Ashamnu, Bagadnu…”

“We have trespassed, we have dealt treacherously, we have robbed, we have spoken slander.
We have caused others to sin, we have caused others to do evil, we have sinned deliberately, we have acted maliciously.
We have been obstinate, we have done violence, we have framed lies.
We have given evil counsel, we have deceived, we have scoffed, we have rebelled.
We have provoked, we have turned away, we have committed iniquity, we have acted perversely.
We have transgressed, we have persecuted, we have been stiff-necked, we have done wickedly, we have corrupted, we have acted abominably, we have gone astray, we have led others astray.

The idea behind the use of the plural here is beautiful: as an individual, you’re responsible not just for your own behavior but for the entire society. The famous phrase “Kol Israel arevim ze vaze.” is often misinterpreted. It’s not, “All of Israel are responsible for one another” but, “All of Israel are guarantors for one another.” Yes, we are responsible for one another – but in the legal sense of the term. That we recite vidui (confession) in the plural helps remind us that All Israel is one body, each person is a limb. We share responsibility for the moral state of our community, even for sins committed by others or those that arise from societal patterns. Or like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “In any society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

However, lately, collective responsibility is becoming a stratagem for avoiding personal responsibility and acknowledging our own mistakes. The plural in the vidui was supposed to be an addition to personal repentance, not a replacement.

The vidui comes at the end of a long process of Teshuva, introspection, and atonement. With the plural of the vidui we’re meant to take on more responsibilities, not less.

In fact, in the Avoda, a portion of the Yom Kippur service that recalls the priestly ceremonies held in the Jerusalem Temple, the scaling up of responsibility is made very clear. The High Priest performs three different viduim: one for himself, another that includes the priests, and a third that contains the entire House of Israel. Importantly, he begins with individual responsibility before moving on to a collective one:

“O God, I have committed iniquity, transgressed, and sinned before You — I and my household. O God, please forgive the iniquities, transgressions, and sins which I have committed, transgressed, and sinned before You.”

This beautiful concept is meant to inspire deeper self-reflection, not to let us off the hook. Nowadays, however, too often we see that when bad things happen, they are blamed on others or on external forces beyond anybody’s control. We live in the golden age of inculpability, with our political leaders refusing to accept responsibility for horrific tragedies that happen on their watch and, in many cases, because of their mismanagement.

That said, it’d be facile to place all the responsibility on our political leaders. The message of the Yamim Noraim (the High Holy Days) is to look at what we have done or failed to do, not to point fingers at others.

In the past year, I've raised my hands in despair many times, hiding behind the horrific nature of our times to avoid taking action to improve them. I’ve blamed others for my own incapacity or unwillingness to improve and be better. I’ve hidden behind the cozy nihilism of detachment to feel better in the moments when it feels like everything is falling apart. The correct attitude, the Jewish attitude, would have been to ask myself, “When the collective is falling apart, what am I as an individual doing, besides complaining and smugly telling others, ‘I told you so’?”

This attitude of mine is repeated across society. Take the recent wave of political assassinations that rocked America. Not one politician or pundit said, “This is the responsibility I bear for the degradation of our politics.” The president, who should lead by example, rushed to blame his opponents instead of acknowledging the times he called for the shooting of his political rivals and leading a national reckoning towards unity. Pundits on the political left haven’t been any better, as they blamed “the Right” for our national tension while ignoring the immense role they play in the demonization of political opponents. Podcasters and social media platforms, some of whom are true polarizing machines, acted as though what happens to the American soul has nothing to do with them. These individuals and entities reflect the society in which they exist. If they don’t take responsibility, it's because they are part of a society in which taking personal responsibility has ceased to be a valued principle. They all perceive, sadly but accurately, that there’s more gain in blaming others and deflecting responsibility than in candidly and humbly accepting it.

It wasn’t always like this. On the eve of D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower had written a speech to be made public if the landings failed. In it, it was written, “The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone." Can you imagine any politician penning that message today?

In 1977, during Yitzhak Rabin’s first tenure as PM, it emerged that he had forgotten to close his wife's US bank account from the time that he was Israel’s Ambassador. The account had a mere $10,000, but holding a foreign account was illegal at the time. He took responsibility and resigned. His response would be unthinkable for a politician in power today. And what’s worse, people wouldn’t even expect it.

Harry Truman’s famous plaque, “the buck stops here,” didn’t refer only to his personal morals, but to what society expected of its leaders and of itself back then.

I know times are hard, from antisemitism, to political violence, to economic uncertainty, to attacks on freedom, to polarization. We don’t know how long this era of darkness will last. Certainly, we don’t have control over much of what’s happening around us. But we always have control of our own actions. The insanity of the world is no excuse for inaction or a pretext for avoiding responsibility. Rather, the opposite. Our sources can’t be clearer: “In a place where there are no worthy people, try to be a worthy person.” (Pirkei Avot 2:5). And we can add, “In a time when nobody takes responsibility, try to take responsibility for your deeds and words.”

If bad things are contagious, good things are too. For every vicious cycle, there’s also a virtuous one. That is the true meaning of our vidui, written and recited in the plural – the idea that collective good comes from the aggregation of individual virtues, and that the humility of recognizing one's faults creates a society in which we respond to and for others, while also benefiting from them.

This is how personal and social growth starts.

After all, fuimos todos was funny when I was 10. Now, in my middle age, it’d be pathetic.

The long road to the origin of Tisha Be’av, the day in 70 CE in which the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, started decades before, during the reign of Alexander Yannai. Yannai was the grandson of Simon Maccabee, a charismatic leader who commanded the respect of Jews and Gentiles and who seemed, for a time, to unite the different factions of the Jewish People.

Yannai started his reign on the proverbial right foot. He was from the priestly class and thus had affinity for the Sadducean faction, but he married Salome, the sister of the leader of the Sanhedrin and prominent head of the rival Pharisean faction, Simon Ben Shetach. He expanded the borders of the hitherto minuscule Judean state, occupying the coastal plain, the Galilee, and parts of Jordan. The prospect for Judea looked bright. But things started to go South quite fast. Yannai, who was not a descendant of King David and thus couldn’t claim kingship, received the title of ethnarch and high priest. That honor soon became insufficient for him. At first, he called himself “basileos” (king in Greek) and claimed that it was necessary to deal on equal footing with foreign monarchs. A year later, he did away with pretense and minted coins that said “Yehonatan Hamelekh,” Yannai the King in Hebrew.

The Sanhedrin, like the Supreme Court today, was ancient Judea‘s counterbalance to the power of the ruler. But Yannai abhorred checks and balances. In an episode recorded by both historian Josephus Flavius and the Talmud, Yannai stripped the Sanhedrin of its independence. He then established the norm that the king was to be immune from legal action.

His early military achievements gave way to drawn-out quagmires. He annexed Idumea and converted its population to Judaism by force, resulting in an internal, hostile, nominally-Jewish population inside Judea that demanded rights and benefits. Notably, what was meant to be a war to punish the city-state of Gaza for harassing Jewish shipping out of Jaffa ended up in a two-year quagmire that Yannai didn’t seem willing or able to win. Yes, that happened circa 95 BCE.

Finally, Yannai’s façade of “unifier” was revealed to be hollow. The Gaza war, perceived as aimless by the people, had been widely criticized, with the Pharisees leading the outcry. Tired of this liberal-minded and democratic-leaning faction, Yannai definitively sided with the Sadducees. During the Sukkoth ceremony, Yannai slighted the Pharisees. The people revolted, pummeling the king with the only missile they had: etrogim. Yannai brutally quashed the revolt and the ensuing civil war.

Josephus had written of mass executions, though later historians thought it to be exaggerated, not believing that a Jewish king would order the mass murder of his people. Alas in 2018, during the building of the new Betzalel Academy in Jerusalem, workers found the common graves of hundreds of Pharisees executed by Yannai. Archaeologists proved that Josephus hadn’t exaggerated one bit. One find was particularly gruesome – fetal bones, proving that pregnant women had been murdered as well. It was as Josephus told, entire families were killed together.

Yannai managed to keep his seat, and the country as a united polity, with iron and blood. But after his death and that of his wife, all hell broke loose. Yannai’s children started fighting for the throne. There were no strong institutions to arbitrate the conflict because Yannai had neutered the Sanhedrin, so both contenders had the brilliant idea of asking the superpower of the time, Rome, to intervene on their behalf.

Pompey Magnus obliged and took the whole country as payment. Jewish sovereignty had ended. Later, the Romans, trying to maintain a false semblance of Judean independence, appointed Herod, a chieftain of the Idumeans that Yannai had annexed and forced to convert, as puppet king.

Although the Temple took many decades and a great Jewish revolt to fall, the seeds of the destruction started with Yannai and his dictatorial reign. Jewish sovereignty was lost when Yannai decided to weaken the country’s social and institutional fabric to amass more personal power.

Netanyahu’s critics compare him with Yannai, but this goes beyond the policies of an individual government. This has to do with strategic challenges that are structural, and that any leader would face. It was certainly true of the Israel of 2,100 years ago, and the same four strategic challenges remain today.

1 – Governance.

The governance of Israel, its separation of power between executive and judiciary, and its institutions and norms were fragile then as they are now. Rather than bolster them, Yannai did what the current Israeli government is trying to do: deprive the courts of independent power.

2 – The management of Jewish diversity

Jews were, and are now, a fractious people. Yannai deliberately chose to exacerbate and exploit divisions instead of uniting the people and being equanimous towards all streams of Judaism. The result was civil war. As I write these lines, and even in the middle of a war, the same dynamic is at play.

3 – The relation to the non-Jews of the land.

Like now, the Land of Israel included many non-Jews. Just as now, Judea had acquired territories through defensive wars, and those territories had other peoples living in them. Yannai opted for the solution favored by many in Israel today: annexation. Like today, Yannai was left with two bad options: equal rights for the Idumean or making them of “citizenship” status. He rightfully feared that, with the latter, the Idumean would live in permanent revolt, and so granted them the former. Many warn today that, as we wound up with an Idumean king back then, we’d find ourselves with a Palestinian Prime Minister if we annex the territories.

4 – The relation to the superpower.

Rome had been the ally of the Hasmoneans since the Maccabean revolt. Judea needed Rome as an insurance policy against Egypt, Parthia, and the Seleucid kingdom to the North. But Yannai, and later his children, mismanaged that relationship in grotesque ways. First, they took that relationship for granted, attempting to take sides in internal Roman politics, earning them powerful enemies. Then, Roman legates were invited to intervene in internal Judean politics, not unlike presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, at the behest of local factions, opining on Netanyahu’s legal problems and dictating what Israel can and cannot do.

Tisha Be’av is a time of mourning; a time to lament and reflect on why and how we lost our sovereignty and suffered the longest exile in human history. It’s not controversial to state the obvious: the Israel of today, despite its magnificent achievements, is dangerously close to failing in those four strategic challenges that cost us the state back then. There’s little evidence that we’ll be any more successful than Alexander Yannai, and the “solutions” we are considering to those four challenges are ominously similar to those that brought us ruin 2,100 years ago. The astonishing success of Israeli Air Force against Iran’s genocidal tyranny removed a major threat, but they don’t erase the existential structural challenges that remain. We can’t bomb our way out of crises that are primarily internal and of our own making.

There are many days on which we celebrate the miracle of modern Israel, a small country in permanent danger that manages to be a light unto a world indifferent to its plight; to marvel at how a desert bloomed and how swamps became skyscrapers. However, there are also days like Tisha Be’av, somber and reflective, on which we strive to learn the lessons of the past.

There’s an enormous advantage to being a 4,000-year-old People. In the face of most of the things that happen to us, we can say that we’ve been there before. The only question is, will we repeat our mistakes, or will we endeavor never again to lament our folly?

This is precisely when philanthropy is most essential.

Following our recent joint webinar with JFNA, which we hope you'll watch as the needs mentioned are still valid, we want to highlight some of the key issues that remain unresolved and where funders can still make a meaningful impact:

• Housing Needs: Over 13,000 Israelis are currently without permanent housing. While local municipalities, in coordination with government ministries, are providing short-term solutions, the long-term burden is significant. NGO support is essential to ensure that vulnerable populations (low-income families, immigrants with language barriers, renters, and people with disabilities) aren’t left behind. These groups are at particular risk of being overcharged, underserved, or lost in the bureaucracy.

• Municipal Partnerships: Throughout this crisis, local municipalities have proven to be critical partners for the philanthropic sector. They continue to lead the response on the ground. If you have relationships with local authorities or municipal foundations, now is the time to deepen them.

• Infrastructure Damage: Several major institutions have sustained severe damage.

  • Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva suffered a direct hit, with rebuilding costs estimated at 1 billion NIS.

  • The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, which lost its new cancer research center, faces 2 billion NIS in recovery needs.

  • Ben Gurion University also experienced damage, with estimates ranging from 250–300 million NIS.
    
    These costs will not be fully covered by the government. Philanthropy can play a vital role in restoring these pillars of Israeli health care and academia.

• Arab Society and Emergency Preparedness: Now is the time to build long-term resilience in Arab communities. In addition to improving access to physical shelters, there is a clear need for training local emergency and rescue teams and raising awareness around civil defense practices. Preparedness saves lives.

• Mental Health and Trauma: The psychological toll of this war, layered atop the trauma of October 7, is enormous. PTSD is widespread not only among the general population, but also among first responders and residents in the North and South who have endured months of uncertainty and disruption. Mental health support is a long-term need, one we cannot afford to neglect.

This moment calls for sustained, strategic philanthropy. The most acute emergencies may be behind us, but the recovery will be long, complex, and costly. We urge you to remain engaged, connect with your grantees and municipal partners, and consult with us about where your support can have the greatest impact.

If you’d like to speak further about these needs or get connected to key efforts on the ground, please reach out to us or to our colleague Anat Danis.

Together, we can ensure that those who have already endured so much are not left behind in recovery.

Andrés and Sigal

Andrés Spokoiny
President and CEO
Jewish Funders Network

Sigal Yaniv Feller
Executive Director, JFN Israel
Jewish Funders Network

The Israeli spirit remains something to behold, as Israel’s people carry on despite mounting losses and the cumulative effects of daily attacks.

As we have since the beginning of this crisis, we remain committed to guiding our members as they respond to this new and pressing challenge in Israel.

JFN is in permanent contact with the IDF Home Front Command, local authorities, the civil sector, and relevant government offices to assess the needs on the ground. Please, refer to our previous updates as these remain relevant.

• Approximately 5000 people have so far been evacuated to hotels, which are being used as a short-term solution. The Tax Authority, acting as the insurer, is responsible for determining the level of compensation for victims once home rebuilding becomes feasible. However, there is growing anxiety about what comes next, as hotels are not intended for long-term stays. Depending on the extent of the damage, many evacuees may not be able to return home for an extended period and will require more stable housing solutions.

• The Tax Authority and local municipalities are working to assess next steps, including moving folks to temporary housing or providing rental assistance or stipends for those who will live with relatives. Municipalities are working to expedite that process. The scale is significant. As of today, the authorities have received over 25,000 demands for compensation. To put that in perspective, in just a week, this represents 50% of the claims received from October 7^th until the war with Iran began.

• Because evacuees are not whole communities (as they were in the aftermath of October 7^th), they need help navigating the bureaucratic red tape that comes with relocation and aid. Organizations that can foresee the upcoming needs of these evacuees can step in to support and make an incredible difference in their recovery.

• Several NGOs are now operating in hotels by providing assistance to families, activities for children, and mental health counseling. Please consult with us to determine which ones to support.

• In general, local municipalities have proven to be effective and resilient. Tamra, Rishon Letzion, Ramat Gan, Bat Yam, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Bnei Berak, and Beer Sheva are the most affected. If you have ongoing relationships with those cities (or the city foundations), we encourage you to contact them.

• There’s renewed concern for health care facilities after the direct hit on the surgical ward of Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva. Naturally, Soroka will need assistance to rebuild. Stemming from this attack, many hospitals in the country are moving operations underground, and equipment is needed. While the Minister of Health is assisting, you may want to reach out to hospitals with which you have an ongoing relationship as there may be meaningful ways for you to provide support.

• Medical professionals are under immense pressure, requiring mental health support. This is especially true at Soroka.

• Academic institutions are also suffering. In particular, the Weitzmann Institute, which received a direct hit that destroyed its new cancer research center. Rebuilding Weitzman will be critically important for the resilience of the Israeli scientific sector.

• Tens of thousands of Israelis continue to be stranded overseas, but repatriation shuttles are now operating from Cyprus and Greece. It’s estimated that foreigners who wish to leave Israel may be able to do so as early as next week. Birthright has been able to evacuate participants by sea, though the economic impact on the organization has been considerable.

• The suspension of travel has a direct impact on the American Jewish Community in several ways. Every summer, young Israelis travel abroad to staff summer programs, and now they are unable to do so. As such, there may be opportunities to engage locally with camps and other programs in America, which now need more infrastructure and staff. Contact the camps or engagement organizations you support to see if they need more help.

• In previous updates, we've mentioned the lack of adequate shelters. Organizations like IsraAID are working to provide mobile shelters approved by the IDF HFC. It’s important to fund ONLY reinforced shelters that are certified by the IDF as “miguniot.” Mobile shelters used against rockets from Gaza are ineffective.

• The burden on reservists and their families continues to be considerable. Around 100,000 are in reserve duty, which entails a loss of revenue and hardship for their families. Organizations that support those families should be a priority. Please contact us to learn more.

• The longer the crisis continues, the more mental health and trauma becomes a concern. Assisting organizations that provide trauma and resilience services, like Eran or Natal, are a safe philanthropic bet.

• The impact on the country’s economy is massive, as it is compounded by the cost of the Gaza war. The estimation is that the current war with Iran will cost 40 billion NIS (15 billion U.S. dollars). The country will probably rack up a deficit equivalent to 8% of its GDP and the public debt will skyrocket. Long term recovery will require a plan for economic rebuilding.

• The war has exposed some of the strategic vulnerabilities of the country. For example, the hit on the only oil refinery in Israel begs the question of whether a country at war can allow itself to have just one such critical facility, or if it is wise that a country like Israel has a single international airport. Private think tanks are starting to pose these questions. While the solution to these issues exceeds the capacity (and the role) of funders, philanthropy can assist in the thinking and planning phase.

• As always, remember to be proactive and check with your grantees in Israel to see what they need.

• As the current emergency unfolds, there’s a growing concern that urgent needs from before, especially those stemming from October 7, such as care for wounded reservists in the north, will be overshadowed. These ongoing issues remain unresolved and still require focused philanthropic attention and support.

• And remember, in a crisis, your local Jewish federation is a resource. Several federations are stepping up to cover emergency needs.

Once again, we must emphasize that networking and communications are essential. Our greatest resource is the knowledge and expertise of our members. Please share with us what you’re hearing and doing on the ground so that we can share emerging needs and ideas for our members and beyond.

If you need guidance, please reach out to us or to Anat Danis.

Shabbat Shalom, and wishing for quiet days.

Andrés and Sigal

Andrés Spokoiny
President and CEO
Jewish Funders Network

Sigal Yaniv Feller
Executive Director, JFN Israel
Jewish Funders Network

Four days into the unprecedented missile attacks on Israel, we wanted to give you an update of needs and developments on the ground. As of now, there are at least 24 fatalities and hundreds of injured. As horrific as these figures are, they are lower than what the authorities had estimated in this scenario. Shelters and mamadim (safe rooms) are proving highly effective in saving lives. The IDF Home Front Command has improved its alert system and now Israelis have between 15 and 30 minutes to get to the shelters. Yet, no system is perfect and, sadly, more casualties are expected.

JFN has activated the coordination mechanisms we set up after Oct 7^th and we are in constant communication with the IDF Home Front Command, the Prime Minister’s office, the Civil Society umbrella organization, the national volunteer council, and the local municipalities. Our role is to provide funders with updated information on the needs and how they can help. The IDF Home Front Command is emerging as an able and effective coordinating body in the crisis.

As always in these situations, the “fog of war” is dense and there are many open questions. However, we are able to share some specific observations and general recommendations:

• As we said in our previous update, funders need to “pace themselves.” The full scope of needs is still unclear and the duration of the crisis is a big unknown that may affect the philanthropic response. So far, it’s important to “keep a finger on the pulse” and see how needs evolve. As a funder, you can “put money aside,” but don’t rush to allocate all of it until there’s a clearer picture of the long term needs.

• As of now, there are 2,765 evacuees hosted in 8 hotels. Naturally, this figure rises after every barrage. The evacuees receive a first subsidy from the Welfare Ministry, which is distributed to them via local municipalities. There is some concern about the long-term solution for the evacuees as the government hasn’t yet decided on a mechanism to assist them beyond the immediate crisis. Most of these evacuees don’t have homes to return to and their displacement may last for months or years.

• There was concern about the lack of a “central address” for people impacted by the crisis. For example, those whose homes were hit need to turn to one office for an insurance payment, another for temporary needs, and so forth. The local municipalities are stepping as a coordinating body for folks in their catchment areas.

• In general, local municipalities are much nimbler and more effective than the central government. It also helps that many of the cities affected are not peripheral but have resources and systems in place, some of which is thanks to the joint work of philanthropy and the non-profit sector with these municipalities to set up mechanisms after October 7th. Funders are encouraged to check with those municipalities with which they have ongoing relationships.

• Many groups and programs (like Birthright and Masa) are stranded in Israel. They have worked out temporary solutions, like moving participants to low-risk areas, and they are working on plans to help those who wish to leave the country. Funders should reach out to those organizations as this will make them incur unexpected expenses.

• There are between 100,000 and 200,000 Israelis stranded overseas. EL AL and Arkia airlines have started to register folks who seek to return and adjudicating seats in flights by priority order. These flights will start operating in the next 72 hours. Still, many Israelis will remain stranded and may need assistance: places to stay, medical supplies, etc. Israeli-American organizations and Israeli consulates across the world can be of assistance.

• As said, shelters and mamadim save lives. However, 28% of Israelis (2.6 million people) don’t have access to approved shelters, and 60% don’t have a mamad, as those did not become mandatory in new buildings until 1992. While the first impulse was to provide miguniot (mobile shelters) to peripheral locations, that recommendation is now revised since only special mobile shelters are effective against ballistic missiles. Organizations are working with the IDF HFC to deploy those. Contact us for more information.

• Since a lot of Israelis depend on public shelters, it’s important to provide supplies and activities for children in those places. Several organizations are working on that. Since schools and summer activities are closed, families need help with children’s activities – organizations like IsraAID, Pitchon Lev, Latet, and Chamal Ezrachi are helping.

• Related to that, the stress on Israeli families is mounting. Families with members in reserve duty are particularly hard-hit. The effect here is cumulative as many citizens have been in and out of reserve duty for the past 620 days. The suspension of economic activity is hitting small businesses and freelance laborers particularly hard. If the crisis continues for weeks, these people will need economic support.

• First responders are stretched thin both physically and psychologically. Some are being injured in the line of duty. If the situation continues over time, this population will require special attention and support.

• Hospitals are moving a significant part of their operations underground. While building underground facilities takes time, some medical centers have improvised solutions, like moving patients to underground parking. These measures require resources that so far the government has been able to provide, but it’s foreseeable that very soon hospitals will need our support. Providing respite, childcare, and trauma counseling for the staff is particularly important at this stage.

• As we said in the previous update, please check with your grantees. The civil sector in Israel is under stress. Many organizations find it hard to operate while the spouses of their staff are on reserve duty, and with no school or childcare support. Some organizations depend on income-generating activities that are now suspended. For nonprofits, knowing that we have their backs goes a long way.

• Last, but certainly not least, mental health and trauma are big concerns. Trauma organizations (like Natal or Eran) have been building infrastructure since Oct 7^th and those efforts are now being utilized. Some, for example, offer online support for folks in shelters. Yet, the level of trauma is going to be massive, and we foresee increased needs in that area.

Again, we are in awe at the spirit of the Israeli people and we’re enormously grateful to our staff and members on the ground. JFN members have been directly impacted by this crisis—our hearts, support, and unwavering solidarity are with them.

As always in a crisis, networking and communications are essential, so please, share with us what you’re hearing and/or doing on the ground. We aim to serve as a clearinghouse of needs and ideas for our members and beyond.

If you need guidance, please reach out to us or to Anat Danis.

Stay strong and pray for swift victory and peace.

Andrés and Sigal

Andrés Spokoiny
President and CEO
Jewish Funders Network

Sigal Yaniv Feller
Executive Director, JFN Israel
Jewish Funders Network

As we write this, Israel is being attacked by massive barrages of ballistic missiles from Iran. As opposed to Israel’s surgical, targeted strikes on objectives that represent an existential danger to the state, the Iranian regime is firing indiscriminately at civilian areas. So far, there have been three deaths to deplore, dozens of injuries, and property damage. As horrific as this is, it’s important to bear in mind that Israel has the best multi-layered missile defense in the world; over 90% of the rockets have been intercepted and no vital infrastructure has been hit.

The entire JFN family stands unequivocally with our Israeli brethren at this trying time. As always, in critical situations, we strive to guide our members and provide information as they utilize the power of philanthropy for mitigation, relief, and reconstruction.

The situation is fluid and evolving as we speak – a lot will depend on the duration and severity of the crisis. However, we want to share some information and suggest initial considerations for funders.

JFN has reactivated its emergency consultations with the IDF Home Front Command and the relevant authorities in the government and civil society. These mechanisms were established in the aftermath of October 7^th and will provide us with timely information about the needs and priorities on the ground. 

• The IDF estimates that the crisis may last for weeks, so it’s important to “pace” any philanthropic response and be alert as needs emerge as the situation evolves.

• So far, the attacks have taken place over the weekend. Because of that, the economic disruption was minor. As of tomorrow, Israel will operate “vital economic activity” only, which will have a significant impact on the country’s economy. Financially, many families are already stretched thin given the long reserve call-up periods (and the expansion of the call-up in the last few days). The reduction of economic activity may impact them further and may topple some over the financial edge.

• As in every crisis, vulnerable populations are at increased risk. People with disabilities, the elderly, and the sick have trouble evacuating, running to shelters, understanding the instructions of the Home Front Command, and overcoming the stress of the situation. It’s important to support organizations that take care of those populations.

• As funders, we need to recognize that our grantees in Israel are under immense pressure – they are performing their life-sustaining work while also rushing to shelters and caring for their families. Checking on them, reassuring them of our support, and providing any immediate help that may be needed can be very valuable.

• So far, no mass evacuations have been required, but it’d be wise to pay attention to the lessons learned after Oct 7^th. We know that most basic services for evacuees in 2023/24 were conducted by our grantees and not the central government.

• In many cases since October 7^th, the local authorities in Israel have proven to have a much better understanding of the needs on the ground than the central government. If you have a relationship with municipalities, it’s a good idea to check on them and start looking for emerging needs.

• In these cases, trauma and mental health are big concerns – especially for children and elderly people. These attacks add to the cumulative stress of the last two years. Again, organizations are primed to respond after the experience of the last two years, but it’s useful to check with partners in that field about how they are responding to this crisis.

Our staff in Israel is, yet again, doing vital work while dealing with their own difficulties – partners and spouses in reserve duty, elderly parents, and children at home. Our gratitude and admiration for them is boundless.

We will keep you informed about needs as they emerge, but as always, our biggest asset is our network and our capacity to connect between funders. If you hear of specific needs, or you want to share what you’re doing with the network, please don’t hesitate to write to me, Sigal, or any member of the JFN staff. If you need tailored support and advice to craft your philanthropic response, we have the resources to help.

In the meantime, join us in prayer and solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel.

Na’avor gam et ze! (We will overcome this too!)

Andres and Sigal

Andrés Spokoiny
President and CEO
Jewish Funders Network

Sigal Yaniv Feller
Executive Director, JFN Israel
Jewish Funders Network

Like all Jewish holidays, Shavuot is a multifaceted celebration. Among its many aspects, Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah to the People of Israel at Mt. Sinai, seven weeks after the Exodus from Egypt. As I’ve written in the past, there’s a linkage in Judaism between liberation and Torah, between freedom and law, as though one doesn’t make sense without the other.

But in our rarified times, the concept of “law” has become complicated; some look at the law as something cumbersome and irritating that applies only to the “suckers and losers” who don’t advocate for lawless freedom. others think that the law has become irrational and unintelligible, the work of faceless bureaucrats without regard for the public good. And others still believe that the law is the expression of high values of justice, compassion, and goodness, the only way to live in a civilized society guided by fairness that guarantees the freedom of all.

Franz Kafka anticipated our ambivalent feelings about the law. In fact, he was prophetic about much of the turmoil of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. After all, his story “Metamorphosis” preannounced how a society can suddenly transform into something monstrous. So, for this holiday of The Law, I want to do something different: instead of writing my own message, I want to bring you another of Kafka’s iconic stories, one that is aptly called “Before the Law.”

This parable, like many of Kafka’s writings, admits many different interpretations. So here’s what I suggest: read it and reflect on it, and then, let’s make a deal – if you write me back and tell me what the story means for you, I’ll tell you what it means for me.

And here’s another suggestion: read this around the dinner table and then discuss what it means for each member of the family.

In the meantime, I wish you a meaningful holiday!

The following is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” originally published in 1915 and later included in his novel The Trial (1925), translated to English by Ian Johnston.

Before the Law.

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry to the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment.

The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later.

"It is possible," says the gatekeeper, "but not now."

Since the gate to the law stands open as always, and the gatekeeper steps to the side, the man bends over to peer through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper sees that, he laughs and says:

"If you are so drawn to it, just try to go inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers each more powerful than the last. I can’t even endure one glimpse of the third."

The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to go inside.

The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in and wearies the gatekeeper with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his home and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot enter yet.

The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”

During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this first one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the bad luck of his circumstance, and in his first years boldly and loudly. Later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his long study of the gatekeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas to help him and to persuade the gatekeeper to change his mind.

Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the door of the law. Now he has little time to live.

Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question, which he has not yet asked the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend down low to him, for the difference in size between them has changed much to the man’s disadvantage.

“What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.”

“Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”

The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him:

“No one else could gain entry here, because this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m now going to shut it.”

One of the most beautiful pieces of Jewish liturgy is one of the most modern: the Prayer for the State of Israel. But despite its beauty and poignancy, the prayer has become a locus of controversy.

In the early 1990s, a tradition of sorts emerged: whenever people disliked what the Israeli government was doing, they stopped reciting the prayer or altered its wording.

During the Oslo process, many on the Orthodox right refrained from reciting that prayer entirely, or changed its wording. And since Benjamin Netanyahu’s government took office, and especially since the war in Gaza began, many on the left have been calling for similar changes or omissions; replacing words with those they find more palatable or not saying the prayer at all.

I have no sympathy for anti-zionists and extremists of all sorts, but I can understand (and empathize with) people who truly love Israel and wrestle with what they find abhorrent in the country they cherish.

But rather than altering or abandoning the prayer when Israel falters, I believe we should preserve it as a call to meet our highest aspirations.

To say that the current government of Israel includes characters most Jews (and Israelis) find despicable is a statement of fact. To say that its failures have led to the greatest Jewish tragedy since the Holocaust is not a partisan position. To say that this government has mired Israel in an endless war from which there seems to be no way out is a plain truth.

But are those reasons to stop praying for Israel, or just the opposite?

A careful, line-by-line look at the beautiful text of the prayer for the State of Israel, as written by Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Hertzog and edited by Nobel prize winner S.Y. Agnon, will show why we not only need to keep reciting it, but that it’s the perfect prayer for this troubled time. 

“Our father in Heaven,
Rock-fortress and redeemer of Yisra’el —
bless the State of Israel,
the initial blossoming of our redemption.”

Right from the onset, the redactors of the prayer say that Israel is not a finished project. It’s a beginning; it’s not perfect, but perfectible; it’s not a destination, but the beginning of a common journey. Israel is the “initial blossom” of the redemption for which we yearned for two thousand years. The road to redemption is winding and convoluted; it has dead ends and detours. But to stop the march is to abandon the hope of realizing our dreams. Who said it would be easy? The prayer doesn’t claim it should be. What nation hasn’t endured bad governments or bad policies? The prayer doesn’t claim that Israel is immune to mistakes, failures, or wrongdoing. Zionism still sees itself intrinsically as a work-in-progress, requiring active participation and commitment. 

“Shield her beneath the wings of your lovingkindness;
spread over her your Sukkah of peace;
send your light and your truth.
to its leaders, officers, and counselors,
and correct them with your good counsel.”

When the prayer talks about Israeli leaders, it does not claim that they’re perfect. Rather, the opposite. It begs God to send them God’s truth and correct them with God’s counsel. An assumption in the text suggests our leaders begin with misguided views that must be amended by seeing the light of truth through divine intervention. Can those shirking from the prayer today not agree that Netanyahu and his cabinet of horrors need all the light and correction that God can provide?

“Strengthen the defenders of our Holy Land;
grant them, our God, salvation
and crown them with victory.
Establish peace in the land,
and everlasting joy for her inhabitants.”

Our enemies, those that seek to destroy us, don’t care who sits in the Israeli cabinet. Their hatred and their desire to eliminate us existed before Itamar Ben-Gvir, and didn’t necessitate the “excuse” of an extreme government to unleash violence against us. The soldiers of the IDF, a true people’s army and our defenders, are guarding their homes, not their government. Through their effort and bravery, we are undeservingly privileged to live in a sovereign, free, Jewish state if we so choose. Their victory simply means that Israelis — Jews and non-Jews alike — won’t die. Not praying for the IDF to be victorious is no different than sitting idly by and allowing a Hamas victory or an Iranian takeover. We know what would happen to Jews (and to all Israelis) if that were to come to pass. 

And when we pray for victory, the prayer is very clear about what it wants victory to bring: not conquest, domination, riches, or power, but “peace and everlasting joy for her inhabitants.” The prayer doesn’t say “joy for Jews,” but for all of the land’s inhabitants—Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others. The text is a slap in the face to the dystopic, discriminatory dreams of Bezazel Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. 

“Remember our brethren, the whole house of Yisra’el,
in all the lands of their dispersion.
Speedily bring them to Tsiyon, your city,”

The prayer asks for all of us, the house of Israel, wherever we are, to be remembered. It hopes for a harmonious relationship, a sacred covenant between all Jews—those living in Israel and those in the Diaspora. It’s an admonition to those both in Israel and the Diaspora who seek to ignore the concerns and aspirations of the other half of the Jewish people.

The prayer closes with a message of universal harmony.

“Shine forth in your glorious majesty
over all the inhabitants of your world.”

The realization of our national aspirations doesn’t only seek to benefit the Jews. It’s a step in the process of universal redemption; something that, we hope, will make all of humanity better, more peaceful, and just. From the beginning of our existence as a people, our fate was linked with that of the entire human race. Abraham’s journey aims not only to serve his family, but to, “bless all the families of the Earth.” Israel is part of the dialectic of particularism and universalism that Judaism bequeathed the world.

This prayer is my prayer; it’s what gives me strength and hope while the Israel is threatened by Hamas, Iran, antisemites, and our own extremists.

Saying or not saying this prayer is a metaphor for whether we view Israel as a common Jewish project or as a country on probation that we can only love as long as it satisfies us. Ceasing to recite this prayer is a symbol of disengagement, and I can’t — and won’t — disengage from Israel. Israel is not a foreign entity; it’s part of me. You don’t walk away from yourself. Israel is not for me a consumer good that I replace with another; a service that I abandon when it’s not up to my standards. And how facile and cowardly it would be to abandon the fight from the comfort of my armchair while Israelis fight in Gaza and Lebanon for our security; how easy it would be to admonish from afar while hostage families take to the streets and defend their loved ones, their democracy and their country of compassion and justice.

I’m not abandoning the double fight that animates me always: the internal one for the character of my homeland and the external one against those who seek to destroy it. Our enemies will always use the actions of this or that government as an excuse to claim that Israel is intrinsically illegitimate. We shouldn’t let them. We shouldn’t do the same.

On this Yom Haatzma’ut, my call to those who are flirting with hopelessness is to move from despair to engagement and to say this prayer with renewed fervor. But don’t stop at prayer; reach out to Israelis that need you. Commit and double down on your engagement with the Israel you love. Don’t let the extremists there and antisemites here own the field. Don’t judge Israel from a perch of moral self-righteousness, but from the messiness of our shared space.

As the prayer says, Israel is not a destination, but a journey in which we all participate. It’s beauty and its glory lie in being a beginning that doesn't end.

Chag Haatzma’ut Sameach!

Andrés

The story of the Exodus begins with conspiracy theories.

More precisely, with a ruler who believes and then spreads conspiracy theories.

This is what the Bible tells us:

“A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war, they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.”

Israelites had been living in Egypt as loyal subjects of Pharaoh. Moreover, Joseph had saved the country from famine by preparing it for the upcoming “seven lean years.” There was no indication that the Israelites would rise against a country that had treated them so generously, and in whose prosperity and stability they were invested. The very idea was preposterous.

And yet, Pharaoh probably had access to what we’d today call an influencer, who late at night in the palace wormed their way into his head, suggesting that the Israelites were plotting to overthrow Egypt.

Once you believe a conspiracy, there’s no escaping from its circular logic. Evidence against the conspiracy becomes more proof of the conspiracy. “But Sire,” one brave Egyptian advisor may have said, “the Hebrews have been loyal; this makes no sense!” The king would then reply, “Of course, if you plan to overthrow us, you’d pretend to be loyal to surprise us!”

Like all conspiracy theories, this one led to policies that, in addition to being cruel, were nonsensical. For example, Pharaoh ordered the killing of all Hebrew male firstborns because the Israelites were becoming “much too numerous.” If the idea was to decrease the number of Israelites fit for fighting, doesn’t it make more sense to kill the girls instead of the boys and erase the possibility of the population growing at all? When the problem you’re trying to solve is an invented one, the “solution” is bound to be both malicious and idiotic.

Did Pharaoh believe the Hebrew uprising conspiracy, or did he cynically use it to accrue power and wealth? The evidence points to the latter.

Ramses II had a vast, self-serving project: the construction of a new capital named for himself, Pi-Ramesses (the massive city, mentioned in the Bible and lost to history for millennia, was discovered by archaeologists in the 1960s.) For his pharaonic project, he needed cheap labor. What’s easier for acquiring a labor force than enslaving a large population that is already within your borders? But how would Pharoah turn the Egyptians against the Israelites? After all, these two peoples knew each other; many of them probably did remember Joseph. The whole idea of enslaving the Israelites would have sounded ludicrous. So how do you make them accept the unacceptable?

Enter the conspiracy. The Torah tells us that Pharaoh “said to his people” what he claimed were the Israelites’ supposed plans. This wasn’t information that the concerned Egyptians brought to their leader. He used his unique position of power to shape the beliefs of his subjects.

The conspiracy caused terrible pain to the Hebrews, but what we suffered is nothing compared to what the Egyptians suffered for the “fake news” of the Pharoah. Their country lay in ruins, every firstborn dead, crops ruined, and the survivors decimated by plague and famine.

Policies based on conspiratorial beliefs and lies often cause suffering to those accused of conspiring, but they also inflict greater harm on the nations that implement them.

Nazi ideology was, above all, a conspiracy theory based on lies. Germans paid for their gullibility with the complete destruction of their country. Hamas sold to – or imposed upon – the Palestinians the lie that Jews are not indigenous to Israel. But it was the Palestinians who paid for that with thousands of deaths and the destruction of Gaza.

If you go through history, you’ll see that all antisemitic policies ever enacted were based on conspiracies of some form. And they all harmed their enactors. For example, the expulsion from Spain was based on the false idea that Jews were “corrupting” the conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity through the efforts of the Spanish Inquisition). This too harmed Spain, which hasn’t recovered the intellectual and cultural glory that it boasted 500 years ago when three religions coexisted there in peace.

Sometimes autocrats truly believe in conspiracies; other times, they know that their conspiracy-based policy will produce a self-serving crisis. Autocrats tend to struggle with genuine crises because they often exceed their control; that’s why they generate crises and then claim credit for resolving them.

As the epistemic chaos of our time accelerates and post-truth becomes the dominant feature of our mediascape, we’ll see more and more policies derived from conspiratorial beliefs cooked up in the dark recesses of the internet. Like in Egypt, they will have catastrophic results because nothing based on lies can succeed in the long term. As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

The Torah warns us, "You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt…” meaning that the society that we build as free people should be the opposite of the one we saw during our long bondage. We should base it on right, not on might; on law, not on caprice; on freedom, not on slavery; on truth and not on lies. The text is speaking to us, warning us not to believe the Pharaohs of the world —the purveyors of conspiracies and lies, the sellers of smoke, those who blame others for our woes, and those who claim to have a magical solution to all our problems.

I am sure that as darkness descended over Egypt, Ramses’ toadies told an anxious population, “Just trust Pharaoh, he knows what he’s doing.” And I’m sure that many in Egypt believed him. After all, with Berlin in ruins and the Soviet soldiers inside the Reichstag, many Germans believed that Hitler would still deliver them victory. Once you buy a conspiracy theory, you’re trapped. The alternative is to say something that no human can stand to say: “I was a fool, and I was duped.” So you hold on to illusions and magical thinking. You’ll believe the lie to death – in many cases, quite literally, like those people who, while dying of COVID-19, kept repeating that the virus was nothing to worry about.

Freedom is hard and reality is complex, so the allure of sweet surrender to simply “trusting the leader” will always be powerful. We, however, know how that ends.

Humanity will always produce Pharaohs. But it also produces us, a people that has always resisted the mermaid calls of simplistic falsehoods; a people that, having suffered from conspiracies and lies all its existence, understands how dangerous they are. Now, more than ever, we must be the negative image of Egypt.

“It can’t happen here,” thought the Jews of Susa on the eve of their planned extermination, “not here; this is the country of Cyrus the Great!”

They were right to be shocked. Persia’s emperor Cyrus had allowed – and helped – the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple after the Babylonian Exile. We sing to that glorious moment every time we recite Psalm 126.

“When the Lord made us return of Zion, were like dreamers.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.”

The Persians had not only reversed our first exile, but also created a uniquely pluralistic empire. Archeologists have found Cyrus’ decree, mentioned in the Book of Ezrah, proving both the veracity of the Biblical account of the “return to Zion” and the tolerance by the Persian Empire. In it, he takes pride in the fact that,

My vast army moved about Babylon in peace; I did not permit anyone to terrorize the people of Sumer and Akkad.I also collected all the people who had been scattered and returned them to their homes."

The peaceful coexistence of Jews and Persians can be seen in the Hebrew language to this day. The word “pardes” (orchard), comes from the Persian parai-daeza (walled garden). When we call a treasurer “gizbar,” we are using a deformation of the Persian “ganzabara”. When we argue about religion, we use the word “dat”, picked from the Persian word for “law.” 

Our religion was also greatly influenced by the Persians. The Book of Daniel, written in the Persian period, is the first explicit mention of resurrection and final judgment (Daniel 12:2), a theme strongly present in Zoroastrianism. And if you have the ketubah from your marriage, you should know it follows Persian legal traditions.

The incredulity of Persian Jews when Haman the Wicked so easily convinced King Assuerus to massacre the Jews is understandable. If the fact itself was shocking, the ease with which Assuerus’ acquiesce to betray his ancient allies was outstanding. He had no animosity towards Jews. He was just a frivolous monarch, interested in hunts and parties, akin to a modern politician who spends his tenure golfing. The extermination of the Jews would be for him another excuse for a feast, another way to keep his people, and himself, entertained. Mass murder for fun; ancient Persia’s version of reality TV.

Though the Persian kings had been extremely benevolent toward Jews, our ancestors missed a key element: the Persian kings were, well, kings after all. A king has absolute power, and by definition you are subjected to his whims. Arbitrariness and impulsivity are not bugs but features in an absolute monarchy. Yes, a king may choose to bound himself to norms, but he’s not obliged to. Even if by temperament or convenience, the king decides to be bound by laws, there’s no guarantee. Once the system invests unchecked power on a single person, it’s only a matter of time until they use it against you.

The Purim story would have been impossible in a modern liberal democracy. There could be a Haman, but the free press would have denounced him, the courts would have intervened, the army would be bound by laws not to execute his illegal orders, and the parliament could have impeached Assuerus.

Today, exhausted by antisemitism and crushed by the betrayal of our allies, we feel the temptation of putting our lives in the hands of autocrats who seem to like us and would protect us from harm. It’s not totally crazy to hope for that. After all, antisemitism is pervasive, and convincing millions of people not to hate us seems impossible. So isn’t it more efficient to back a single “strong man”? We know that there may be a trade-off in the form of some personal liberties, but maybe it’s worth it for our security.

The other temptation is, of course, to just give up on one’s identity, as Haman wanted the Jews of Persia to do. Today, the far left is demanding just that. Jews are welcome, as long as they betray their own and submit to the dogmas of Critical Race Theory. Both of our modern  authoritarianisms, left and right, demand fealty—one to an ideology, the other to an individual.

Purim shows us that a tradeoff that bestows unchecked power in a man or an ideology is not worth it. It will always come back to bite us. The Jews of ancient Persia should have known that. The history of our slavery in Egypt happened for the exact same reason. “A Pharao that did not know Joseph,” arbitrarily changed the kingdom’s policy towards the Israelites.

Democracy doesn’t eliminate antisemitism. The last few years have proven that, but that’s not new. Take the infamous Dreyfuss Affair. In 1894, in democratic France, the birthplace of human rights, a Jewish officer was falsely accused of treason and condemned to life imprisonment on the aptly-named Devil’s Island. Many use this event as an example of democracy’s inability to protect Jews. Alas, the case proves just the opposite. Because free press existed, Emile Zola published his famous “J’accuse,” forcing a public debate that led the government to re-open the case. The parliamentary opposition forced the appointment of an impartial prosecutor, and the debates exposed the bias lurking in the French army. Dreyfussards and Anti-Dreyfussards fought in the open, and the former won. Dreyfuss was cleared and indemnified, and the leader of the pro-Dreyfuss faction, George Clemenceau, eventually became president. Had Louis XVI condemned Dreyfuss on a fit of whim or political expedience, poor Alfred would have rot in Devil’s Island for life. 

Autocracies – either ideological or based on personality cults – may offer temporary respite, but it’s fleeting. In the first decade of the Soviet Revolution, Jews experienced a dramatic decrease in antisemitism. We know how that ended. The Jews that had backed the revolution were murdered by the paranoiac delusions of a Stalin with unchecked power.

Many Jews embraced Mussolini – one of them, Margherite Zarfati, quite literally, as she became his lover. They thought he would provide order after the chaos of the Great War and protect them. The elimination of constitutional guarantees was the proverbial egg one had to break to make the omelet of security. But when Il Duce betrayed the Italian Jews, sent them to camps, and allied with Hitler, there were no courts or parliaments to prevent it.

The truth is stubborn: not a single liberal democracy ever persecuted Jews, and virtually all autocracies did at some point or other.

The Jews of Persia had no choice; that’s how the world operated in their times. But we have a choice. For them, autocracy was a given; for us, it’s a choice that many are deliberately making. Democracy isn’t perfect, but that’s why it protects us. It’s the only system that admits its own imperfections, providing checks, balances, and fail-safes. Yes, that makes the system clunky and slow, but every “perfect” system, every infallible leader, ended up causing indescribable tragedy.

Neo-Marxism and Far-Right Populism have always threatened the best system we have ever had. What has changed in recent years is that many of us seem to be captivated by these new pied pipers, following them blindly to our oblivion. We seem tired of the messiness of freedom and want the bliss of submission.

But the warning of Purim couldn’t be more prescient. The story ends well because frivolous Assuerus, susceptible to flattery, pretty women, and good banquets, reversed his extermination decree with the same triviality as he had established it. But do you want to risk it all on the whims of a dictator? Are we willing to roll the dice?

One of the most frequently-cited quotes around the holiday of Tu Bishvat – the “New Year of the trees” – is the prohibition against the wanton destruction of trees in wartime, found in Deuteronomy 20:19:

"When you besiege a city for many days, waging war against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you must not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a human to withdraw before you in the siege?"

Let’s face it: if you are in the middle of a war, forbidding you to cut the trees seems a little extreme, like shooting your own foot. What if you need the trees to create siege engines? What if you need to produce arrows or light fires?

It appears that this is about more than just trees. Indeed, later commentaries derive from this quote the commandment of Bal Tashchit, the prohibition of unnecessary destruction and wastefulness. Maimonides codified this principle in quite stark terms:

"Not only trees, but whoever deliberately destroys household goods, garments, buildings, springs, or food in a destructive manner violates the commandment of Bal Tashchit."

And so this passage triggers a debate. The cutting of trees is a means to the end of winning the war, but by forbidding it, the Torah seems to say that the end doesn’t justify the means.

This idea seems fine in principle, but let’s face it, few people truly believe it. Many of history’s evil men have espoused Nicolo Machiavelli’s maxim, “The end justifies the means.” 

Leon Trotsky complicated the idea when he said, "The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end." In other words, the means should be commensurate with the goodness of the end we seek to achieve. The size of the omelet we want to  make should dictate the number of eggs we’re willing to break. But what if I promised you not just a soggy, bland egg-wrap, but the greatest omelet ever made–the omelet to end all omelets? One so delicious that it satisfies your hunger forever, eliminates dandruff, cures hemorrhoids, and provides everlasting bliss? Wouldn’t that be worth breaking more eggs?

Throughout the horrors of the 20^th century, those caused by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, negative human emotions like greed, hatred, jealousy, and the lust for power played important roles but were not the primary determinants. The defining factor of the worst tragedies in human history was that they were all caused by the pursuit of some utopic vision based on lofty ideas. An inquisitor who truly believes that a Jew will burn in hell for all eternity if he doesn’t recant his heresy or Judaism, then shouldn’t the inquisitor consider torture not only justifiable but compassionate? After all, he’s inflicting a few hours of suffering, but dolling out eternal bliss.

That is to say, if you believed that there was one solution to all human problems, that there’s an ideal society of complete happiness and prosperity that we can achieve if only people would do what is necessary to attain it, any price would be justified in the pursuit of that around-the-corner paradise.

And with that, all the things that you could have considered horrific become meritorious. 

As Isaiah Berlin puts it, “There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of those who are certain that perfection can be reached.” For those people, “Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion and violence will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror and slaughter.”

At the root of this is a flattening of complexity: the belief that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer that can be discovered. This answer can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word must be law.

Then, the passionate idealist, the one whose head is filled with lofty ideals, from universal justice to the thousand-year Reich to making his country great again, finds himself deporting families, shooting babies, or sending people to the Gulags. Because what’s a bit of suffering compared to the magnificence of the goal.

Judaism offers two responses. One is halachic, legal. No, the end doesn’t justify the means. The Talmud (Sukkah 30) can’t be more precise: "A mitzvah that comes through a transgression is not a mitzvah." You may, under particular circumstances, sacrifice one of them when two mitzvoth are in conflict (Talmud Yoma 58): "One may override the Sabbath to save a life, but one may not sin to bring about a mitzvah."

But the other answer is more profound. It manifests itself in a distrust of absolutes, a distrust of simplistic solutions, and a skepticism toward utopias. Yes, the utopic messianic belief is core to Judaism, but we are not allowed to violate a single mitzvah to hasten his arrival. Rather, God will bring about the messianic era when He finds us worthy, and the only thing we can do is be pious and wait for His reward.

Judaism is a religion of greys. The Talmud spends countless pages trying to discourage zealotry. There’s debate, compromise, and rejection of absolutes. No human has a “THE” truth, only pale approximations. This keeps us from ever being so confident of the justness of our goals to allow a compromising of other values. Instead, like Rabbi Samsom Raphael Hirsch said in the 19th century when utopic visions were raging, "The worth of a goal is measured by the means used to achieve it." Rabbi Hirsch’s rule of thumb: if you need to apply immoral ends to achieve your vision, your vision is probably immoral.

"The refusal to see shades of grey leads to fanaticism,” said Polish dissident Adam Michnik. Every time you believe in absolutes, every time you flatten complexity to adjudicate all the ills of the world to one cause, invariably, coercion and violence will follow.

And here’s the biggest tragedy. When your humanity is compromised, there’s no turning back. Lenin might have genuinely thought of the socialist paradise when he sent the first person to Siberia because while the Gulags were temporary, the idea was eternal. But soon after, the lofty idea disappeared, the socialist utopia was forgotten, and the Gulags remained. When the first deportation didn’t bring about the desired goal, the conclusion wasn’t that the goal could be wrong, but that more deportations were needed to achieve it. Eventually, deportations became a goal in and of themselves. Absolute idealists will always continue to break eggs long after the omelet is forgotten. Always.

In this light, the biblical prohibition of cutting trees down during a siege makes more sense. It’s an imprecation against absolutism and certainty, a celebration of greys, and a reminder that you can never be so affirmed in your goals so as to allow yourself to attain them by unjust means. It forces you to pause, reconsider, and  reality check your utopian ideals.

This message contains nothing new. The Talmudic quotes we saw above are 2,000 years old. Alas, it seems that our times badly need a reminder.

Chag Sameach,

Andrés

The list could go on forever, and it wouldn’t even begin to encompass all that losing your home to fire means. There is also the devastating material loss, being unsafe and unsheltered, and in some tragic cases, the loss of limb and life.

There is losing your home, and then there’s losing your home to fire. It’s sudden, relentless, dangerous, unstoppable, unpredictable. As any fire survivor will tell you, it’s one of the most horrific experiences a person can undergo.

The fires in California are equal opportunity destroyers, and they’ve hit close to home. Many JFN members lost their homes, and our staff in Los Angeles is affected. For many of us, this is not a tragedy one reads in the papers and moves on to the next item. It’s personal and heart-wrenching.

The Jewish Community in the area has been devastated. Synagogues and homes burned, communities in disarray, and relief services overstretched.

Let’s face it: After this past terrible year, many of us are experiencing compassion fatigue, that state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion resulting from prolonged exposure to suffering. Our elected leaders, trading accusations instead of showing empathy, aren’t helping. As funders, we don’t have that luxury. Our tired hearts need to open again and find room for the people of LA.

Simply put, money is needed, as it is during and after every disaster. As always, the best way to help is to work with established organizations that have infrastructure and presence in the ground, folks who know the area, and a network of local agencies to distribute help fast and seamlessly. As always, there’s the need to balance immediate help—which is sorely needed—with the need for long-term reconstruction, which will be enormous.

For those wanting to help, JFN is recommending the following:

Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles Wildfire Crisis Relief Fund - Give Help or Get Help.  In response to the devastating fires impacting Los Angeles, the Jewish community has mobilized to provide essential resources, including mental health support, warm meals, shelter, and space for displaced individuals, families, and institutions.  

Jewish Free Loan of Los Angeles. Emergency Housing aid, as well as interest free-loans for individuals, families and small businesses. For those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires, the Jewish Free Loan Association (JFLA) can help with zero-interest and zero-fee loans up to $15,000 for temporary housing (including hotels and short-term rentals), purchase of clothing, medication, and other essential supplies, and other emergency needs.

Jewish Family Service. Food Resources, Mental Health Support, and Support for those experiencing Domestic Violence.

Bet Tzedek Legal Services. Bet Tzedek provides person-centered legal services, completely gratis, that integrate with social support services, educate community members with the powerful knowledge of their legal rights, and use their expertise to aid people in accesing help.

As in other emergency situations, JFN will support our members and advise as to the best ways to help within the Jewish Community and beyond.

If you know of specific needs or if you are using specific grantees who are doing good work on the ground, please let us know. In crises like this one, the network produces and holds vast quantities of valuable information, and our role is to gather and circulate it.

Members and funders interested in learning more can contact our JFN West Director, Tzivia Schwartz Getzug (mailto:Tzivia@jfunders.org) or our concierge service (mailto:concierge@jfunders.org).

We’re praying for all those affected and we hold them all in our hearts,

Andrés

We at the Jewish Funders Network mourn the passing of Bernard (Bernie) Marcus, a visionary philanthropist and co-founder of The Home Depot, who dedicated his life to transforming lives through his profound generosity. A long-time JFN member and supporter, Bernie’s commitment to health, education, Jewish causes, and veterans' initiatives left an indelible mark on communities worldwide. His philanthropic legacy, rooted in the values of resilience, community support, and giving back, reflects the core principles that guided both The Home Depot and The Marcus Foundation.

Born to immigrant parents in Newark, New Jersey, Bernie’s life story is one of extraordinary perseverance and innovation. With The Marcus Foundation, he championed Jewish and Israeli causes, advanced medical research, and supported veterans. We join with all who were inspired by his dedication to a better world, and we extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones. May his memory serve as a lasting blessing and inspiration to us all.

In lieu of gifts or flowers, the Marcus Foundation and Marcus family asks that you consider a donation to one of the following groups. Bernie would have also been very happy for donations in his honor to go to any other organizations meaningful to the donor that impactfully advance these causes.

• RootOne
  
• Avalon Action Alliance
  
• Marcus Autism Center
  
• Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center at Grady
  
• Marcus Neuroscience Institute at Boca Raton Regional Hospital
  
• Israel Democracy Institute
  
• Marcus National Blood Services Center
  
  

If you wish to send physical mail, please direct it to the below address:
Marcus Foundation
1266 West Paces Ferry Rd. #615
Atlanta, GA 30327

Information on public memorial services and other events honoring Bernie’s life and legacy will be posted as it is known. 

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